In this post, Jonathan Pelto combines two excellent articles by a retired principal in Connecticut.
The veil is lifting over the misappropriation of the honorable word “reform.” Across the nation, it has become a synonym for more testing, more privatization, and dependence on inexperienced “teachers” who will almost all be gone within three or four years.
This principal has the wisdom of experience.
Will we be the first nation in history to mock experience and turn education over to non-educators?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And I love her closing. I met her once. Great lady. She spoke about her experiences with TFA and how they couldn’t even walk a group of children from point a to point b. Once they started to make progress, after two or three years, most of them left teaching.
Read her closing of part two:
On the other hand, teachers must access the minds and hearts of their students. Learning can only happen when children are met where they are and led to where they need to be. That type of teaching can only be achieved when all educators, including the leaders, truly believe there is something worthwhile inside the mind of every child and that the experiences they have had — some horrible, some anti-social, some loving and some wonderful — are worth accessing and using in furtherance of education. If we do not know and accept our students for who they are and for what they know and for what they’ve done, we cannot educate them.
The charge, then, for those who are hired and paid handsomely for “school reform efforts” and for those who are funding such attempts to colonize our public schools, is to enter into the neighborhoods they preach about, meet the parents they claim to want to engage, know the children whose lives they play with and truly understand the system they presume to wish to reform.
LikeLike
My favorite sentence:
” Maybe the answers to such questions can be decided at one of the endless meetings and seminars where political, corporate and education-reform leaders wring their hands about the achievement gap, apparently unaware that they created it, they benefit from it, and they perpetuate it as part of a national sin.”
LikeLike
Yes, can that be on a billboard heading into Hartford, so Malloy can read it everyday?
LikeLike
Let’s make it four billboards: on I-84 east and west as well as I-91 north and south. He’s a bit obtuse: I doubt even that many billboards would be enough.
LikeLike
Ann Evans de Bernard, great letter, telling it like it is.
LikeLike
Thanks for calling it a sin, which it is.
Maybe the answers to such questions can be decided at one of the endless meetings and seminars where political, corporate and education-reform leaders wring their hands about the achievement gap, apparently unaware that they created it, they benefit from it, and they perpetuate it as part of a national sin.”
LikeLike
Both parts of this letter are fantastic. It may be the best short summary of the fix we are in and why we are in it that I’ve read. Her comparisons to yesterday should make at least some of the ‘what’s wrong with kids today?’ crowd rethink their support of education’s confederacy of dunces.
LikeLike
Wonderful read! Thank you! I especially love the paragraph about first grade reading texts; so true!
LikeLike
This question was posed, “Will we be the first nation in history to mock experience and turn education over to non-educators?”.. I think regrettably it is too late for this question as education has been turned over to non-educators for some time already. Principals are not in charge of education in their schools. Superintendents follow dictates from the “grand master education expert” Arne Duncan. Testing which includes a wide swath of content drowning in a sea of bubble in possibilities… just serves to dictate what and how a teacher teaches in the classroom as his/her very professional survival depends on it. No teacher in their right “professional mind” would race through a pacing calendar knowing their students needed the luxury of time to actually practice what they learned if not under threat and mandate. So many students do not know how to measure because they haven’t been able to practice enough, don’t know their math facts but a teacher must go on because the “pacing calendar” says if it is Ocober 4th.. I must be doing “X” not “Y”. Mastery comes from practice and the non educators forcing their curriculum on teachers do not realize this???? Really! Title one students have it hard enough already without racing though a curriculum as if the student were not even in the class but then again teachers do not teach – they follow RTTT dictates.
LikeLike
I think it’s now clear that we are dealing with a fairly ordinary, garden variety brand of repressive education.
LikeLike
Turn education over to non educators? It is of course already being done. Tragic, stupid – so what else is new?
LikeLike