Journalist Charlie Mitchell in Mississippi has advice for politicians: stop telling teachers how to teach. What an idea!
He writes:
“Do members of the Legislature go over to Highway Patrol headquarters to instruct troopers on how to make a traffic stop? How about the medical center? Do you reckon our state’s elected elite scrub up, waltz into surgery and give doctors pointers on a liver transplant?
“But what began as a trickle of officious intermeddling with education has become a torrent.”
How about asking legislators. To take the tests they mandate?
Read more here: http://www.sunherald.com/2014/12/15/5970853_charlie-mitchell-if-teaching-is.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Legislators should have to take classes in ethical decision making with OPM…problem is those who would fund it would be from Wall Street…..
For those of us diagnosed with AI, what is OPM?
I’d guess “Other People’s Money”.
“If you have an hour for lunch you have a career”. “If you have thirty minutes for lunch you have a job”….. Chris Rock. So what do you have when you only have twenty minutes for lunch? Teaching hasn’t been a profession in decades. When you have micromanagers dictating every thing a teacher does down to the very second they can take a leak; then how can you call what you do a profession? When you work for twelve years straight and end up making only $1800 more than someone who just walks through the door with zero experience; how can you call that a profession? When your salary doesn’t even allow you to rent a one bedroom apartment much less buy just one suit to wear to work; how can you call it a profession? When the head custodian makes $15,000 more per year than a twelve teacher you don’t have a profession you have a job. The funny thing is I always remember my teachers telling me that if I didn’t go to college I would end up broke working as a janitor or a garbage man. Both of which today make significantly more than teachers. Irony at its best!
LUNCH? WHEN I wasTEACHING, THOSE LAST 8 YEARS at a middle school where I taught the entire 7th grade English and art curriculum, I at some yogurt as I readied my classroom and lessons for the afternoon. I barely remember sitting until I drove home, and then I sat until 1Am so I could read the writing of my students ( how else does one get kids to write well, if their work is not read.). I then slept until 5 Am and got up to drive to the city, where I arrived by 7:30 so I could ready my classroom and lessons by the time the kids arrived.
For this, I began there at 38k ( holding 2 degrees and the equivalent of 2 more by the end of my eight years, when I earned 58k.
The people of this country want talented, educated, dedicated professional who will prepare the kids ,who are not kids for long, but who are our FUTURE citizens who will run this country when we are gone. Yet, when the GOP starved the government to reduce our ‘debt’, the first thing to go were these valuable professionals, and now they are reduced to trained civil servants who must obey the mandates of top-down management, often unprincipled principals whose failure as human beings precedes their tenure as top-dog.
But what do I know… go to my resume at my author’s page, and read what I did, and know, that in the end, when I was the NY Educator of Excellence, chosen as the NYC cohort in the Harvard study for the real National Standards, they tried to charge me of incompetence, harassing me into retirement…. and what the principals at the top NYC middle school did to harass me, demonstrates that lunch-hour is the least of the missing elements in my professional practice.
Well, we keep saying it, but what’s the point? They don’t care about education. The deformers just want to make a buck. It’s that simple, isn’t it? How do we fight this fight?
Opt out. What else?
As true as this is, there’s some deeper issues going on. Teaching is an easy target. There just is no broad consensus on the practice of teaching as there is in medicine. Teachers are all over the map on what it means to teach, and certainly on how kids learn. That’s built into the history of American education. Letting legislators dictate the terms is scary.
But saying “just let them teach” is sort of simplistic and has some interesting implications.
This was not the total approach Finland took.
This is an excellent point. When teachers can’t agree on scope and sequence, when they argue about standards and curriculum, and best practices are a crapshoot we invite everyone else who thinks they know better into the discussion. However, as Finland goes, it is a country of 5.4 million mostly white, ethnically and religiously homogenous people, so comparison with the most diverse country in the world are not generally beneficial..
I agree, NY, we’re. Not Finland. But maybe the start would be a share view that teaching is a complex task that doesn’t just happen, that good lessons take hard work to create, implement, and refine, and that content actually matters.
Then at least we have an argument when we ask for the time and resources to support quality teaching.
Sadly, Ive seen too many among us who see teaching as something you can just do, not as the craft it is. And these are just the folks who go on to become administrators.
Reformers keep saying we need to find what works and try to use it. Why dismiss Finnish methods based on demographics? Compared to mediocre Norway next store, who embraced American style “reform” yet has similar demographics as Finland, you almost have a double blind, control group experiment.
I completely agree on teaching being a craft that takes time and attention. One more reason to find this current wave of time/money wasting reform so unbelievably frustrating. The havoc that this is wreaking on new teachers is immeasurable and cannot be easily undone. And yes, the belief that teaching is “just something that you do” is a damaging attitude and approach that undermines the profession. And please don’t get me going on the wave of new age, instant administrators, they are doing way more harm than good as their inexperience makes them easy targets for the reformsters.
Good points mathvale. Its just that getting 3+ million teachers/administrators, 13,500 school boards, the parents of 50 million students with very diverse needs, and the untold number of no-nothing, wannabe politicians to come to an agreement on the Finnish model seems unlikely.
“I completely agree on teaching being a craft that takes time and attention.”
Yep, being a craft just like the oldest profession in the world is a craft and not amenable to metrification.
Duane, it’s seems you’ve put your own meaning on “craft”. But I will certainly bow to your experience there.
Peter, I agree there is no broad consensus. Unions exist in present form as a reaction to decades of politicians using schools as a pawn and scapegoat. The mistrust of politicians by teachers is not misplaced. The irony is, those anti-teacher members of society who rant against teachers and unions, do not seem to realize their rants and misguided views are the reason teachers unions exist. If teachers were respected and valued in America, we would not need confrontational unions. Teachers have been ignored far too long as a voice from the classroom. The current “reforms” stifle innovation and undermine consensus.
Math, An interesting take. I’m in a right to work no-Union state ( I am an NEA member). But I wonder if the anti-teacher voices are any louder here than in Union states.
The anti-Union rhetoric, though, is pretty loud.
The antiunion rhetoric can’t get much higher than here in NJ.
I think there is some level of consensus on how teachers are expected to teach. During my tenure as a teacher, I attended numerous workshops, conferences and in-service days with the intention that the training would impact what or how I taught. My supervisor expected to see evidence of the influence of the training in observations. The major difference is that the impetus for change came from the local level, and the testing came from the state. The Common Core is very different. It is like a national vice grip on educators and contains flawed material, developmentally inappropriate expectations, a rigged cut score and a huge expense for school.districts. The outcomes of this mess are based on faux metrics and will be used to punish “non-performing” teachers. According to their formula, this group will include almost all teachers that work with children of poverty, special education, English language learners and conduct disorder students.
Easy for male dominated groups to see teachers in general as a group of women that they can bully. Can imagine this happening to nurses but not doctors. Gender bashing.
“It’s not easy to be a spouse of an elected official, you know, they’re at home, doing the laundry and doing so many things while we’re up here on the stage getting a little bit of applause.” -Republican Gov. Kasich about the wives of several politicians
Exactly why Walker excluded the predominantly male unions of police and firefighters, but targeted the majority female teaching profession. “The lil’ lady should been teachin’, not talkin’ out in public.” It is how these conservatives think. Why women vote Republican is a mystery.
Mary Pat Christie is earning $475K as director of company that holds “illiquid” portion of investment that NJ Pension fund sold before she joined firm. She exemplifies Gov Kasich statement “doing so many things.”
Int’l Bus Times has recent article.
David Sirota wrote 12-17-14 International Business Times article re MP Christie director role at Angelo Gordon.
But Cuomo is a politician of the lowest order. He merely panders to power and finds or creates ethical or unethical ways to serve it. It’s one tiny notch above organized non-violent crime.
“above”???
Infinitesimal?
Morally it’s above, but on technicality. It’s worse because it’s on such a large scale, creating rampant corruption of modern kinds and putting us just about on par with countries that have rampant overt corruption of all kinds.
I do believe that he is over estimating the degree to which parents want to see the teacher beatings continue until test scores improve. He is on the wrong side of the education reform “debate” (invasion) and I do believe that he will lose out on teacher bashing. He has run away from the Common Core and the over testing of students, so his APPR fetish cannot be logically reconciled.
The winter edition of The American Educator has many pieces on the teacher’s voice, which has been lost to the conspiracy to end democracy while monetarizing education to enrich the corporate elite,
http://www.aft.org/our-news/periodicals/american-educator
Imagine these businessmen controlling medicine, so that misinformation and bad practice replaces the practice of real professionals… oops, bad example.
Teachers represent a significant chunk of the middle class, which global hegemonists are determined to oust into the ranks of retail counter-help, as they’re successfully doing with other chunks of the middle class by whatever means. The policies which the writer bemoans are economic not educational.
What middle class? The middle class has now become the one check away from living under the bridge class.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
It seems obvious why politicians go after teachers again and again. It’s easy. It demands absolutely nothing of the general public as far as supporting public schools and it demands absolutely nothing from public school parents. In fact, public school parents are told all they have to do is demand higher standards and better teachers. I’m not at all shocked that’s met with rounds of applause. It lets everyone BUT teachers completely off the hook for the success or failure of public schools.
It really is interesting to compare health care to education. The US healthcare system is wildly inequitable, horribly expensive as far as general public health “outcomes”- bang for buck- especially when compared to that of other countries yet no politician or pundit runs around blaming physicians for it. I don’t know if that’s because health care is mostly “private sector” managed so the “competition!” angle doesn’t work or because the process to become a physician is more selective, so they can’t claim it’s because the bars to entry into the profession are too low.
Ed reformers sometimes use physicians as a comparison to public school teachers, but I don’t know where they’re going with that. The health care system isn’t at all equitable and it’s ruinously expensive, particularly when compared internationally.. I don’t know that they want to model US public schools on health care. Then again, maybe they do. Health care is a huge chunk of the private sector economy, and a LOT of it is publicly-funded 🙂
Now we have a “perfect storm” of the greedy vulture capitalists along with a conservative small government, anti-union agenda from so many politicians that teachers have a target on their backs. When people with vast resources lead the charge, they also control a lot of the message that the public receives. That’s another reason why teachers are easy targets since they don’t have vast resources at their disposal.
USDE is justifying some of its requirements for teacher education programs by comparing teaching to the work of EMTs and workers in neurodiagnostic technology. These are are among several broad claims about “professions” and the need for outcomes only evaluations. The document is riddled through with shoddy thinking and cherry picked references, some of the same reports repeated more than five times–a very small library, and with many more from a subset of economists who believe test scores in math and reading are sufficient for making generalizations about the whole of American education.
“Evaluation Instruments/Program Resources,” Committee on Accreditation of Educational Programs for the Emergency Medical Services Professions. http://coaemsp.org/Evaluations.htm.
19. “Standardized Graduate and Employer Surveys,” Committee on Accreditation for Education in Neurodiagnostic Technology. http://coa-end.org/?page_id=27.
I listed to Kasich’s speech to the C of C yesterday. It was online.
He told them the only way to address income inequality was to demand better public education.
HUGE applause. Everyone in that room was more than happy to shift blame to someone else. The politicians and business leaders are walking out, patting themselves on the back for identifying The Problem. It isn’t them! It’s YOU!
Apparently all business leaders have to do is place an order with public schools for the specific “skilled employees” they need, and it’s up to you to deliver. What an absolute crock, but boy is it politically popular! Of course it is. It absolves the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country from ALL responsibility.
So this knucklehead says income inequality is due to uneducated vs educated people? That the wealthy got theirs because they went to better schools?
Sort of ignores that the financial system is just designed to suck money upward. So if he’s right, we just need to teach em all to be bankers and security traders.
Let’s all spend January teaching credit default swaps.
Following their reasoning, they should then want to make a considerable investment in public education for poor students. Instead the current formulas favor the rich over the poor when the reverse should be the case. With the punitive charter rules, the public schools lose money when they filter off the “cream of the crop” and leave the public schools with the neediest and most expensive to educate and less money. How are they going to address this problem?
There’s nothing better than a false analogy when you don’t want to address the real culprit in the room, poverty!
AMEN!
The “deeper issue” seems to be a matter of expectations. I’m NOT endorsing coercion
in any way, but it does exist in the relation of sovereign to subjects, state to citizens,
controller to controlled. The STATE created public education. As such, is it logical to
expect public education to trump the sovereign prerogative of the establishing power?
PE is what it is, no more, no less.
Would the “joy” of teaching and autonomy exist in becoming a private tutor?
But the point was about public funding not being a license for politicians to dabble. Bridges and roads are publicly funded, but professionals design and build them.
Although some intersections look like they were designed by a legislative subcommittee.
LUNCH? WHEN I wasTEACHING, THOSE LAST 8 YEARS at a middle school where I taught the entire 7th grade English and art curriculum, I at some yogurt as I readied my classroom and lessons for the afternoon. I barely remember sitting until I drove home, and then I sat until 1Am so I could read the writing of my students ( how else does one get kids to write well, if their work is not read.). I then slept until 5 Am and got up to drive to the city, where I arrived by 7:30 so I could ready my classroom and lessons by the time the kids arrived.
For this, I began there at 38k ( holding 2 degrees and the equivalent of 2 more by the end of my eight years, when I earned 58k.
The people of this country want talented, educated, dedicated professional who will prepare the kids ,who are not kids for long, but who are our FUTURE citizens who will run this country when we are gone. Yet, when the GOP starved the government to reduce our ‘debt’, the first thing to go were these valuable professionals, and now they are reduced to trained civil servants who must obey the mandates of top-down management, often unprincipled principals whose failure as human beings precedes their tenure as top-dog.
But what do I know… go to my resume at my author’s page,
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
and read what I did, and know, that in the end, when I was the NY Educator of Excellence, chosen as the NYC cohort in the Harvard study for the real National Standards, they tried to charge me of incompetence, harassing me into retirement…. and what the principals at the top NYC middle school did to harass me, demonstrates that lunch-hour is the least of the missing elements in my professional practice.
Hi Susan:
Carla, in this thread, calls out for an action. Would you organize a group of leaders who include Dr. Ravitch, Dr. Schneiders, Dr. Peter Green, Dr. Bob Shepperd, Dr. Jennifer Berkshire of EduShyster, Lloyd Lofthouse, Rendo Robert, Laura Chapman, Dienne, Duane Swacker, 2old2teach and you and many more educators in this website, to take an action on behalf of K-12 students and their parents?
Would you agree that people are generally made of body, mind and spirit?
Your group of leaders do not need to attack bad politicians, but only educate, cultivate, and repeatedly remind public that the CCSS, NCLH, and RttT are nonsensical policies.
1) What can the rigorous CCSS be applied from handicap to world class athlete; from uneducated poor immigrant to snobbish PhD; from devil to God?
2) Is our common core about humanity: love, hope, creativity and inner peace, isn’t it? Or is it about robot tests, and controlled data on children?
3) Have people seen or experienced that feet (labourers) can do the thinking like brain (politicians or religious leaders) in order to satisfy the Race to the Top policy?
4) Last but not least, have people acknowledged that all children from the same biological parents will not achieve the same Status Quo like Doctor or scientists as demanding by No Child Left Behind policy?
We will follow and support your group of leaders to demand:
1) Elimination of all bad insiders such as union leaders and principals who are corrupted.
2) A fight for the Due Process and Tenure protection.
3) A boycott of the appointed style in superintendent position and all Board of Education members seats.
4) The legislators’ accountability.
5) An independent Supreme Court judicial system that is composed by people who must be three generation born, raised, and educated throughout American Public Education System from K-12 to Higher Education regardless of race, classes, and parental background.
Your aura image shows me that you have a very high spirit in your website. May God bless you and your loved ones with health, happiness, and success as you plan in this Christmas and throughout the New Year 2015, and many more years thereafter. Happy Hanukkah. May King. Back2basic
Wow. You have a vision, and it is wonderful. Thank you for including my voice with such a distinguished company. Thanks for the good wishes, too, May.
All your goals are worthy. Each of us work to those goals. I write at a new site where, for years, I have posted education news and the dire situation this country faces as the oligarchs work their plan to end democracy through the dumbing down of our country.
it is THAT conspiracy of wealth and power that has made it impossible to change anything. Add to this, the division that exists –15,880 districts in 50 states — so that few Americans know what is going on in the schools across town, let alone in other states, AND add to the carefully planned conspiracy to end public education, a media that offers bread and circuses to a public so that they are literally in the dark about anything and everything, and then you will understand how powerless we are.
What we can do, what we all do, the names you mention, is write and declare the truth.
The real battles are hidden…for example, in LAUSD, Lenny Isenberg is putting the blame where it belongs by suing he union for letting it happen.
Yeah, I know we need the unions, but I also experienced the corruption in the UFT that allowed the breaking of tenure and the destruction of the experienced professionals in the the NYC schools. Once they were gone, the schools failed as surely as the hospitals would fail if the most experienced practitioners were sent out the door. The charters sailed in, and the rest is history… have you seen this? Don;t miss it, because it is the process.
https://vimeo.com/4199476
Yes, May, if the parents and the teachers got together and refused to send the kids to schools that were set-ups for failure, then things would happen, but 15,880… that is the reality, and a media that keeps the locals in the dark about what is occurring elsewhere… they know they have won, and are going after the colleges now.
Thanks for demonstrating the intelligence of our readers here at this wonderful teacher’s room.
Hi Susan:
You are completely correct in your statements below:
“The hospitals would fail if the most experienced practitioners were sent out the door.
The schools failed, the charters sailed in, and the rest is history…”
And I have already lived in and experienced the situation as you described above in a larger context of communism versus capitalism in my country Vietnam.
If all middle class and Upper-middle class are gullible, we will fall into the trap of living under fascism or communism. Even Bill Gate and Warren Buffett cannot escape the trap which they initially help to set it up.
I am in the early sixty and many of my friends and acquaintances are in the seventy and eighty in our circle of meditation group. We come from very different background in class, status (Royal, Commanders, Physicists, Dean…), and education (Teacher, Doctor, Specialist, Dentist, Pharmacist, C.A. Accountant, Master in Computer, business owners…). I have learned a lot directly from the truth and experiences of their stories. Some of them moved from northern communist VN to southern communist VN, then to many different States in USA, different cities in Canada, France, Australia, and Germany.
I always follow my mother’s teaching that is based on Buddha’s four guiding Principles, and believe in Mahatma Gandhi’s 7 deadly sins, so that I cannot be easily manipulated by con artists, or blindly trusted/ submitted to authority’s rules/regulations, or enjoyed accepting what I do not work hard for.
Yes, wisdom, education + research, and experience are the result from the joy of learning, sharing, and being considerate. Now, I just realize that our inner peace and the living with compassion are the ultimate life and are worth to fight for. May King.
dear May,
I consider it a great gift to be able to communicate with you. You and I are spirit sisters and peers. I am 73 years old. Those of us who remember the way it was when education worked, cannot be fooled by the rhetoric. We belong to a greater community of minds who understand the big truths that govern our lives.
If you would like to email me, just send me a message with your email at my author’s page at Oped, and I will email you. I do not post my email here, but I do get messages there. You can also read my essays at the page.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
May you find peace and joy… but then I know you will because your soul shines through.
Yours,
Susan Lee Schwartz
Thank you Susan. I will contact you soon after Holiday break. I hope that you can write more untold stories on my behalf, because you can articulate much more effective than i do.
Our family just went for a movie “Imitation Game” that is based on a true story. I always watch a movie or read a book with a laterally thinking mind. Maybe that is how I can achieve a straight “A” in all of subjects in K-12, but not in college and university. Most of all, This special thinking helps me to survive in ocean, to adapt easily in new country, and to regain my inner peace.
I am looking forward to contacting you after New Year. Happy Hanukkah. May.