EduShyster has gotten to the root cause of all our education problems, most especially those in the inner cities of the action. The answer, she has discovered, is missionaries. Yes, there are too many teachers from the local communities. They lack the youth, the vigor, energy, and the sheer excellence of missionaries.
As she explains:
“If you are a member of the fastest (and best funded) congregation in the nation, the First Church of Education Reform, it will come as no surprise to you that the crisis of low expectations and skill-less-ness that once afflicted our failed and failing public schools has been solved. It turns out that the solution is as obvious as the golden plates that once presented themselves to Joseph: replace the native, homegrown teachers, also known as LIFO-lifers or “non believers,” with fresh young missionaries.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Missionary zeal will not overcome ignorance about how children learn. This is a sign that your postings are becoming too frequent.
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Uh … Joseph? It’s a satire. But maybe it is becoming too frequent, and your comment has merit.
It just isn’t possible to characterize a TFA recruit with one stroke, so your more dynamic formulation might be applied to the young teachers themselves. The minder-mentors their mother church supplies aren’t very helpful in addressing the developmental needs of the young teachers, let alone the live children being taught, and their “support” when teachers encounter trouble is often downright toxic.
“Missionary zeal will not overcome ignorance about how children learn. ” also has a flavor of the real colonialist threat of TFA ideology. Thet have little regard for the rights of the children they’ve been told to teach.
Some TFA recruits are the nice, bright kids the PR leads us to expect, but sometimes they’re horrid little snots to begin with. It’s a patronage agency for the well-connected, and many of the offspring selected would be otherwise unemployable. The worst of those become TFA mentors, as soon as they can, because they don’t know how children learn, either.
They’re developing a bizarre culture among themselves, and then going off to take administrative control of the actual teachers in places like North Carolina. Think Lord of the Flies, with fancy catered political functions.
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“Places like North Carolina. . .” Exactly what type of place is that?
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While there is some truth to the youth with vigor and idealism mantra and to the fact that as we age, many of us aren’t as innovative, the real truth is that much of this is about “cutting spending” and taking the taxpayers “off the hook” by finding people to teach for less. Less security, less income, less benefits, and less dedication.
The school from which I retired in June 2012 has a staff that is almost all under 45. Most of those are under 35. There are only 3 teachers over 50 out of a staff of about 40.
The younger teachers are more apt to “listen” to the “wisdom” of the district administrators or at least implement it, so they do what they can to keep themselves employed. The older ones who know where it is all headed can’t fight the system from within any longer.
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I agree with you Deb. Younger teachers “just follow orders”
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Well, I am not putting down youner teachers. What I mean is that those of us who have been through the “cycles” are less prone to believe that things are going to change for the better. We’ve been through this frequently. However, in the last 6-7 years, the changes our district put us through were too frequent, had too much time to be invested knowing it would change again, and no reason for those ready to retire to revamp every single thing they did in order to put it into some data base for later use. Heck, even the notion that lesson plans could be pulled up to use again in following years is a joke. Our commands kept changing. The younger ones are more flexible, eager to learn, and not jaded. I wasn’t saying they were just “lemmings”. They have great ideas and a lot to contribute.
Bottom line is, the districts wanted to get rid of those than cost them more money and who were stubborn towards changes. And, the younger ones, with children, new houses, beginning their lives during this recession, need to hold on to their jobs. I don’t fault them for being young, but I do fault the districts and the “reformers” for shoving the career teachers out the door.
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*younger
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I remember my first year as a teacher as though it were yesterday. I was hard working, dedicated, caring, committed, and CLUELESS.
Fortunately, I had sympathetic colleagues–career teachers who, in those days of site-based management, had MADE THEIR OWN DECISIONS, for years, about what to teach, how, and to whom–people who had experimented a lot over the course of their careers and had learned much that they could share with me. Their teaching styles and techniques varied enormously, and I quickly learned that there were many, many ways in which to be a great teacher and that no set of generalizations about teaching would cover them all. I also figured out, early on, that it would take me years to become as good at the job as they were, though I had some successes and even some tricks up my sleeve that they had never thought of.
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I am a teacher, I love this blog, and I am a Mormon. That said, I think there are plenty of legitimate ways to criticize corporate education reform, and expose it for the fraud it is, without maligning someone else’s religious beliefs.
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