A new group called “Women United 4 Public Education” asks the inevitable question in reality a war on women?
About 75% of those who work in public education are women. The corporate reformers want to reduce the number of teachers, replacing them with computers or with low-wage temps, both men and women, who won’t be around long enough to collect a pension and who are able to work 60-70 hour weeks, thinking of it as idealism rather than taking the job of veteran teachers.
There is no “reform” movement for police, firefighters, lawyers, doctors, or engineers. No legislatures are telling them how to do their work or meddling with their benefits.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, it is a war on women and I’m surprised that women’s groups, such as the AAUW (Association of University Women) are not taking a more active stance against it.
The short answer is yes. It’s always been about sexism.
Yes, I have said this a million times–gender-bashing and bullying at its finest! No one would dare to approach doctors or lawyers like this! The word “profession” is completely disregarded!
Agree that this is a significant dimension and that the macismo talk–rigor, targeting outcomes, impacting learning etc– is repeated as a unspoken and gendered condemnation of a majority of teachers (women) as too soft on standards, not demanding enough from students, unable to focus, and too protective of students.
Of course it’s a war on women! But it’s also a war on minorities. A large percentage of the dedicated teachers and principals who work so hard in low income schools and who are being deliberately targeted by Gates. Walton, and company are minorities “.Education Reform” Gates-style will not only create a system of segregated and inferior schools for minority children, it will rip the guts out of the Black middle class.
You nailed it. It’s a war on the middle class…it just hurts women and minorities disproportionately.
I rarely disagree with Diane R. but there is a war on engineers. Bill Gates is trying to expand visas for engineers to import cheap labor.
Engineers have gotten it for decades. Way back in the 70s there was a call for more engineers. Combine a complete lack of interest in maintaining the infrastructure and a surplus of engineers and what do you get? Cheap engineers! Then and now, it was/is an attempt to drive down wages. They have been attempting it with doctors as well. We must all worship at the altar of corporate profits.
Just a matter of time for doctors too.
http://theweek.com/article/index/273612/how-computers-will-replace-your-doctor
Its elites against the rest of us!
YEP!!!
I think this is right on target. Education–a traditionally female dominated field where the reigning values include collaboration, nurturing of human development, cooperation, and respect for individuality are having more traditionally corporate values imposed from the top down–stack ranking, motivation by competition rather than collaboration, management by quantitative “bottom line”, uniformity. Part of that, IMO, is very much a clash of values and world views with the traditionally more “feminine” values of collaboration, cooperation and nurturing being seen (wrongly) as inferior and less effective by those looking in from the corporate world. Like the world of health care, education remained a sphere left to its own for the most part until the profit became clear–you can see that in the EXPONENTIAL growth in education VC funding where education is widely acknowledged to be the new frontier for profit-making.
Yes this is true. One must only ask the question, can any other profession which requires an advanced degree be so unable to fill the role of “breadwinner” than teaching, which is dominated by women? Perhaps social workers, who are also mainly women!
Teaching does not require an advanced degree if by that you mean masters and higher.
And in, I think, in Tennessee (and a few other states), all you need is a HS GED to get a credential to substitute teach for $35 a day. Does that provide proof of how the state government of Tennessee values education?
This is a very interesting perspective and I will think more about this; it is interesting how many female administrators are pushing teachers to abide by these reforms, maybe they do not realize how damaging this is to our profession.
The vast majority of administrators where I teach are men. Is that not true elsewhere?
Maybe but in my former school of the three Assistant Principal ‘ s only one was a male and the Principal was a female. Even the prior Principal was a female.
The single most iconic image of this bullying is Chris Christie and his persistent, belligerent bullying of female teachers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/03/gov-chris-christie-yells-at-a-teacher-again/
Kate et al….I have read all the links and find that I am in agreement with Women United. Thanks to all of the teachers posts here.
This has become like the Taliban and ISIS with women to ‘hardly be seen and never be heard.’ Christie has always been a bully and his kind of crude and biased dominating and non-democratic behavior is precisely what educators try to teach students are negative and NOT to be copied. What a travesty it would be should he be elected Gov, ….or President.
Women worldwide are seen by some vicious men as chattel. Teachers in the US these days are the exemplar. As many comments demand, particularly made at the Valerie Strauss and Jersey Jazzman reports linked, teachers should be willing to work for far less (without unions and without due process) with the old saw that they only work 9 months a year, and part time. However, all teachers know that most summers are spent with continuing education and preparation for the next term. No one of these bullies mentions poverty and parental disregard for some hard to teach students, no one mentions the use of public money doled out to religious schools such those of the Imam Fetullah Gulen and others.
And then of course there is the failed process of Common Core imposed on American public schools by non-educators. And the hue and cry of these profit minded mainly men (including Obama and Arne Duncan) to use VAM and testing to destroy the careers of teachers and to show students that they are really failures, thus making them malleable to be taught never to resist their betters Like the Waltons, the Kochs, Eli Broad, and all the Wall Street thugs.
This long arm of the uninformed and the greedy now has moved into higher ed to impose this same kind of VAM with professors to be judged by how their students in schools of education rate in terms of the American student being college and job ready. It is an insane situation with the inmates having taken over the asylum. With the new Congress it can only get worse. But the Dems have done the dirty deeds as well as any Repub.
Yes…This is a long war on women, putting all women back in our place, as the servants of the rulers. It is a war to destroy the union movement so that there is no institution left to talk for the workers and to force replaceable women (faceless, in chodors) only allowed to do society’s dirty work, and the students to be only taught to be cogs in the Free Market which enriches only the masters.
The stock market is now over 18,000, so don’t let anyone tell you Wall Street is not winning.
“This has become like the Taliban and ISIS with women to ‘hardly be seen and never be heard.”
I couldn’t help thinking of what Bill Gates’ latest pick for Microsoft CEO recently said about women asking for raises
The software industry is undoubtedly among the most sexist and I don’t think it is an accident that Bill Gates has led the VAM attack on teachers.
Dear favorite Poet..Thanks for pointing this out…..this guy should be drawn and quartered.
“Superpower women have by NOT asking for raises, but counting on their good karma to get what they deserve” is an outrageous attitude. And he is the CEO of MS…this clearly shows the mindset of these Bonfire of the Vanities male greed meisters.
“male greed meisters” Good one!
I think it is a war on humanity.
It’s a war on knowledge, opportunity, advancement and status. Soon only the rich will be educated the rest will be groundlings and peasants as it once was.
And what I don’t understand is why so many people just go along with it. Many, from what I can see, don’t mind the “all hail the test score” mindset. It blows my mind. Suddenly becoming a good teacher is like being a good soldier and doing what the curriculum director and principal tell you to do. I can’t believe how many people are interested in working in that type of environment.
Amen! That attitude is prevalent at my school, and it drives me CRAZY. Why aren’t more teachers fighting this garbage?
Several of our youngest teachers fall into that category. One of our third-year teachers complained that the union was interfering with her ability to do after-school activities without compensation. (She had wanted to start a dance club.) I think her frustration with the union was misdirected. Our district’s protocol requires navigating the slow wheels of the school bureaucracy.
Lo and behold, the attitude changed after receiving her evaluation scores. She is an excellent teacher who goes out of her way to differentiate instruction and build a nurturing classroom environment. Now the union is going to bat on her behalf, and I believe she is beginning to see the necessity of union representation.
These were among the first posts I wrote when I launched K12NN almost four years ago:
“The Gender Politics of Ed Reform”: http://thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2011/01/06/the-gender-politics-of-education-reform/
(Also reposted on MomsRising.org: http://www.momsrising.org/blog/the-gender-politics-of-education-reform/)
And this one, which is also relevant: http://thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2010/12/02/frazzled-moms-frazzled-because-of-school-budget-cuts/
This is why we need more women in Congress, in state legislatures, as journalists, writing letters to editors (even in the NY Times only about 1/3 of the published letters are by women), voting, etc. And not the Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Rhee types.
You don’t get to Congress for the most part unless you sell out. More women in Congress won’t help. Hillary won’t help. Warren won’t help. It’s sad but we are close to being done. The principles that made this Country great have been reduced to memories and for the most part people sat back and watched it happen.
Elizabeth Warren has said, “If you don’t have a seat at the table, then you’re probably on the menu.” This is so true in education today!
The Real One has some good insights. Weingarten was at the table sitting on stage when Cuomo made his comments about public schools as a government monopoly and he was out to break the monopoly. And, like the Real One points out, most people – and problematically Weingarten who was on stage with Cuomo – sat back and watched it happen!”
Tom
It is not because women do not write letters to the editor….rather, it is that some editors do not choose to use the female letters.
Linda Johnson in So. California, whose comment is the first on this page, is a major letter writer, and she gets published often by the LA Times.
Only women who are willing to play by boy’s rules can be allowed into the big boy’s club.
Unfortunately there are plenty of women who will readily discredit and discard feminine values and destroy opportunity, advancement and status for other women in order to be allowed to play with the boys.
I mean think about it for just a second. How can these elected representatives, Union leaders and the like ever sympathize with the plight of a teacher? These crooks are so out of touch with reality with their exorbitant salaries and cushy do nothing positions with fancy titles that they cant even justify and as a result, they could care less about what teachers or students are going through. They will also not stick their necks out to risk losing these comforts of life for going against the status quo. What we we have is now can be described as crony educationism. The further away from the children you get, the more money and important decision making opportunities that are granted to you. In my former District, there are jobs such as Head Custodians, Painters, and Grass Cutters that all make at least fifteen to twenty thousand dollars more per year than a teacher with a Masters Degree. This is a royal slap to the face of all educators! I ask where is the Union? They are busy themselves double dipping and collecting obscene salaries regurgitating the same crap stating that they feel the pain of the teachers. Yeah right! The only way for teachers to garner the respect they deserve is to form their own Unions and remove the middle men whom play both sides all while pretending to have the backs of their teachers.
We are 3 million strong in this country. That’s a lot of votes if we could get our act together. That’s the only way we will be heard.
You mean the votes that can’t even be accounted for in a digital world? Or the votes that indicate someone else has won the election and yet somehow are ignored and candidate B becomes the POTUS. Please save me the laugh! The game is rigged people wake up and get ready for Jeb or Hillary either of which will be final nail in the coffin.
Good point The Real One!
If that’s the case, Diane, then we need women to wage a war on reforminess.
Public school teaching is one of the few professions where women are actually paid the same as their male co-workers…so yep I’d say it’s a war on women actually making a living. I just keep asking myself what jobs are out there that ‘they’ expect all these unemployed teachers to get after they lose their jobs? Heck a good number of teachers I know of in my county are the sole support for their families, as so many of their husbands are still unemployed! I’m divorced, so of course I support my 3 children. I’m putting 2 through college right now, with no child support….and I’d say that’s because the courts are also male dominated and they never seem to think my ex needs to pay up, but I digress, that would be misogyny….oh wait that is what we’re talking about isn’t it….
That said, I am very disappointed in many of my female colleagues who constantly vote against anything that might change the teaching profession for the better. Could not believe how many female teachers in TX vote tea party: so ignorant.
Too many woman still let their men, or their minister, do their thinking for them when it comes to politics.
You have no real choice in politics if you vote R or D. You are simply voting for the lesser of two evils and when you do that guess what you end up with? Suprise…….. Evil.
Betsy’s right.
“Stand by Your VAM”
Sometimes it’s hard to be a teacher
Giving all your love to just one VAM
You’ll have bad scores
And you’ll have mad scores
Doing things that you don’t understand
But if you love it you’ll forgive it
Even though it’s hard to understand
And if you love it
Oh be proud of it
‘Cause after all it’s just a VAM
Stand by your VAM
Give it two laws to cling to*
And something warm to come to
When ASA is cold and lonely
Stand by your VAM
And tell the world you love it
Keep giving all the love you can
Stand by your VAM
Stand by your VAM
And show the world you love it
Keep giving all the love you can
Stand by your VAM
*”No Reformer left behind” and “Disgrace to the Top”
oops, forgot the credit: “Stand by Your Man” (Tammy Wynette)
…and I sang it in my head as I read it, exactly so, with a Tammy Wynette “twang”
U r awesome!
Absolutely. Conservatives see woman as second class citizens meant to be seen and not heard. Neo-liberals dismiss women’s issues as proletariat and beneath them.
Women hold immense power to move social issues forward. Let’s hope education is seen as an important issue.
Eleven women and one man on a jury. The man will be chosen as the jury foreman. Seen it and witnessed the same outcome in Midwest courtrooms, for years.
It has probably always been a war on women. Then you have the types like Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown, who hate women too.
This has been discussed here from time to time.
Someone this post posed – what will happen to all the unemployed teachers? What is going to happen to all the unemployed people, period. Employers are shifting to part time workers without benefits, and no paid sick days. When “we the people” want to raise the minimum wage to $15, and give workers paid sick days, the politicians, who have cadillac benefits, paid sick days, and good salaries, vote “no”.
They are firing 30 people in the office I work in, in Newark. I might be one of them. My husband’s job also hangs by a thread. Companies don’t care about their workers – they care about profits in their own pockets – even when there are no “shareholders.”
I forecast my own future, living in squalor. its sad, really. And I am NOT a teacher; but my daughter is. And, she’s going to marry a teacher. How sad for them.
Chris Christie blames all the financial ill of NJ on teachers and their pensions. Amazing. But, DiVincenzo’s son, without proper credentials, was hired while they bitch about teachers: http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/10/joe_divincenzos_son_lands_92k_job_on_nj_payroll.html Newark would rather have teachers sit in rubber rooms than have smaller class size. but appoints this idiot as and “education program development specialist”.
The more I know, the less I want to know. It has always been a world ruled by the wealthy–only now the divide is huge, the republicans want the females dumb, barefoot, and pregnant, and they want the peasants to live in squalor. Perhaps at some point, they will wall themselves in, and we will be living the real Hunger Games for their enjoyment, and it won’t be like the movies…it will suck for us and be thrilling for them.
Anyhow, yes, it is a war on women, it is a war on the middle class. Every wonder why Viagra is covered under insurance, but they bitch about providing birth control? There ya go. Good ol’ boys at work.
Donna,
I will see you on the line.
According to a report from Education Week.org, in 2011, 84% of public school teachers were women and 16% were men.
Go to Table 1. Demographic Profile of Teachers in the U.S.
Click to access pot2011final-blog.pdf
It absolutely is a war on women. It’s apalling to me that Democrats are leading this charge, too. No surprise the media isn’t speaking to this issue. The labor movement ought to be at every turn!
Poor treatment of Teachers throughout our history has been so obvious to many of us for many years. In plain sight! Obvious!
Just in my career since the late 1960s, female teachers were not allowed to wear slacks, pregnant out of wedlock, asked about when we planned to marry or get pregnant, why I wanted to work if my husband had a good paying job, jobs went to men first ‘because they are breadwinners’, almost all administrators were male, different pay for same work, little chance to move into administration & earn more, was told I could not ride my motorcycle to school as a woman, etc. Forget about any other relationships…interracial, cohabitation, gay, Black, Jewish…or, forget about Black teachers, Jewish teachers.
Moral Turpitude was a huge common reason to fire female teachers – interpretation by administration.
We marched, demonstrated, and fought for human rights for years with some progress, but we are still not at the table. In fact, today’s CorpTakeover of education attacks all teachers & children. We have been so emotionally damaged, allowed it to get to this level, that we are not even capable of protecting the students from the abuse and malpractice mandated by USDoE, Gates, BillionairesBoysClub, Fordham Institute & millions of corperate abusers.
What are we waiting for? Death by a million paper cuts? Until men or millionaires & politicians GIVE US PERMISSION?
One last thing: remember when nurses were blamed for not following Ebola hospital procedures and the ‘Experts’ were running the show without talking to the nurses on ground zero? Remember, the nurses jumped up, spoke up in camera, risked firing, and made the male ‘Experts’ back down. That’s the way to handle this.
Enough already!
We are down to the last minutes before we are forced to drink THE Kool Aid.
Stand Up NOW!
And until the 80’s, a superintendent of schools, who happen to be a woman, was a rarity. if, in a key administrative position, more likely as Asst./Assoc. Superintendents in certain specialties, never to be considered a candidate. A sure path to general administration was to be a high school teacher, coach and preferably tall.
Yup, out principal was a coach who knows little to nothing about curriculum or SPED. He told us that we can only schedule annual reviews for our students with IEPs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, not aware that the law requires the IEP team (which includes parents) to decide on a mutually-agreed time and date.
Some contingent within the liberal community, is pushing for pay equity. They are either oblivious to the adverse wage effect, of the de-professionalization of the career that hires the most professional women. Or, they are duplicitous, trying to mask an anti-woman agenda.
It’s fashionable in business right now to have fewer employees with responsibility and agency and more “support” employees with neither.
The theory is you pay the “manager” employee more and just add more lower-wage workers to assist the “lead” employee.
Ed reformers are fad-followers. They latch onto any dumb fad the “private sector” spits out because as we all know the private sector is INFALLIBLE 🙂
I bet the goal is to have fewer teachers and more 15 dollar an hour assistants.
Think Rocketship. 100 kids, one teacher, and a whole bunch of cheap, easily replaceable low wage “assistants”.
Teachers aides do not make $15 an hour. In California, they make about $11.24 an hour with no benefits at all.
I’m not a teacher, nor do I work in a public school or in any education capacity at all and it comes through loud and clear to me.
I don’t know how you miss it, quite frankly. Willful blindness? Party loyalty?
I don’t believe I have ever seen anything quite like that California teacher trial in modern times. I thought they were going to ask those women if they were “afflicted” before they were through. I hope one of those women writes a book about that experience. It must have been surreal.
And the Atlanta cheating trial! I can’t believe we had a perp walk of cheating teachers, but have yet to see a perp walk of thieving bankers. Incredibly, the bankers are delivering patronizing, scolding lectures TO the teachers!
It’s upside down world.
Chiara: your second paragraph is spot on.
Just to be clear, I am not a member of the, er, “female persuasion.” But consider many of the women that taught in Chicago PS or those in the forsaken New Orleans public schools and elsewhere, and people act shocked and amazed that so many—and often a large proportion are black women, at that—are unceremoniously given the axe. With all due respect, sometimes I am most surprised that people are surprised and astounded.
NY CCSS-aligned tests have 70% failure rate. A feature, not a bug. Yet widespread shock and amazement.
The same for the uneven impact of self-styled “education reform” on women. A feature, not a bug. Yet widespread shock and amazement.
My most humble advice: don’t agonize, organize.
Or as a genuine American hero said:
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.” [Frederick Douglass]
😎
Look at this:
“The Obama administration has proposed yanking funding from weak-teacher training programs in an effort to improve the pipeline of rookie educators. But school districts aren’t waiting for that federal intervention.
Instead, they’re increasingly turning to consulting firms that promise to harness the power of Big Data, “Moneyball”-style, to identify the future superstar educators from among scores of hopeful applicants.
The new screening tools slice and dice aspiring teachers into dozens of data points, from their SAT scores to their appreciation for art to their ability to complete geometric patterns. All that data is then fed into an algorithm that spits out a score predicting the likelihood that each candidate will become an effective teacher — or, at least, will be able to raise students’ math and reading scores.”
It looks hugely profitable and involves loads of consultants so I’m sure it will be very popular.
I don’t blame federal and state government alone. Schools have to stop going along with this nonsense. They have to stop falling for these “fixes”.
They have to start saying “no”.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/teacher-hopefuls-go-through-big-data-wringer-113809.html#ixzz3NO1UU5WU
The focus on “data” (from tests and VAM) is just another man-ifestation of sexism.
It’s another version of “You teachers (mostly women) are too emotional but we reformers (mostly men) are eminently rational”.
About as “rational’ as a random number generator (VAM).
But of course, their approach (which is really just pseudoscience) is only “irrational” from the regard of improving education.
From the standpoint of making lots of money, it is perfectly rational — as rational as defrauding pensioners of billions, when you know the worst thing that will happen is that your mega-bank will get fined a small percent of the profits (the cost of doing business).
The war is on public education. The reason why so many teachers are women is they gravitate toward the care of children. So far most of the really bad teachers I have dealt with in the schools I have been in, or have visited are the male teachers, there to collect just a paycheck. It just so happens that it just appears to be a war on the female gender. Let whomever wants to make war against teachers and public education work in the classroom for just one year. Call it community service for politicians. Oh, and let’s find a way to do high stakes testing for these politicians with a value-added model for how they service their constituents.
Suddenly the Country wants to identify superstar teachers? Please don’t tell me you are falling for this baloney. The Country has never wanted superstar teachers hence the pathetic salaries and unrealistic demands that have been foisted upon teachers for decades. The Country wants compliant little serfs who will do as their told without whatsoever a question. The end goal is to keep the populace dumbed down so that they never realize what a virtual scam they are living in. By doing this, the powers that be will have will assured that they will remain the main beneficiaries in this paradigm of schemes. Look no further than elite. Common Core exempt; Obama Care exempt; and the list goes on and on. Yet they keep telling us how good these things will be for US but for them naw we got our own plan. Welcome to Elysium folks and don’t you dare try to get on that spaceship and come up here. Now get back to work and teach that lesson and you better make sure your data is on point because if not we will find another low wage groundling to take your place now that we purposely wrecked the economy and eliminated the few remaining decent waged jobs.
The men are just there to collect a paycheck? That’s a pretty broad stroke of the brush don’t you think? I have seen ineffective teachers of both genders and of all races. Maybe the men stick out to you more since there a fewer of them in the profession as a whole. But to say male teachers are mostly ineffective and are just going through the motions collecting paychecks is simply baseless drivel. I was an excellent teacher and am a male. Also, do not confuse caring with being effective. I have known many teachers who care and are compassionate when it comes to children but they were not good teachers. It’s takes a lot more in addition to those qualities to be a truly great teacher. Things such as planning, high expectations, classroom management, moral compass, empathy, mastery of content, diversity in pedagogical methods, and the ability to admit mistakes even as the authoritative figure in the classroom all go a long way in becoming an excellent teacher.
I have to second that: the few lame teachers I have met, have been split equally between the genders.
I am glad you address my statement about men teachers. I am wrong about that. I must be careful not to do what this post is all about which is to group teachers into a category that causes them to experience a different type of prejudice. The scary thing is that what I said about male teachers reveals my fears about what is happening to the profession in general. We as teachers are viewed as just cogs in the wheel of education and one is just as good as another or as dispensable as another from the top down management point of view.
The Real One and Titleonetexasteacher: respectfully, I agree with both of you.
As a TA, both bilingual & later SpecEd, I literally worked with dozens and dozens of teachers, regular and SpecEd, assigned and substitute. Literally all types of human beings: a broad range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, female and male, just started to just getting ready to even retired and subbing part-time, perky and low key, teaching was their first and only choice for a professional and teaching was a second or third career choice for them, etc.
Plus my job put me in contact, often direct, with school staff, from the top to the bottom.
I will simply state what I directly observed and experienced: there is no one type of genuinely involved, compassionate, hard-working and capable teacher. And that describes everyone else in the schools I worked in.
The same goes for the clunkers, although I must admit that incompetent administrators that practiced “management by fear” are the most destructive of anybody—and the opposite is true, of course, that good admins can make a wonderful difference.
An example. In my life, I have often read and heard people express the idea that students really need, and can only (or best) learn from teachers of the same race/ethnicity. I remember one SpecEd sub that was often called in to the classes in which I assisted. I learned a little about her: middle-aged black woman, well educated, did some acting on the side to supplement her income, family had teachers in it, a fairly tough but caring classroom manager that never ever lost her cool, with some real smarts. What do I mean by the last?
The HS I worked in was very diverse. Some of the students did indeed have trouble accepting guidance from teachers that weren’t “like them.” To be clear, any kind of student you can name, there would be at least a few that complained that so-and-so was “picking on them” because of their race/ethnicity. So teachers needed to have tough skins while at the same time being alert to whether or not the student was just mouthing off or was truly prejudiced against them.
I distinctly remember a Hispanic student that had picked up on the “n-word bomb” because many students [all types!] in school used it. The teacher I am referencing heard him drop one. I saw this from a slight distance: I was in the classroom doing something else so I couldn’t hear her or his exact words but this turned out to one of those teachable moments.
Later I discretely talked to the teacher as well as the student. All I could get out of either of them was that they had had an earnest and honest dialogue.
But something had changed. I never heard him drop another “n-bomb.” So I asked a few girls that knew him if he was still using it out of hearing range of us school staff. No, they told me, it was rather strange and inexplicable, but he just wouldn’t use it anymore even when his closest friends prompted him. His friends were more than a bit perplexed but there you have it—
Genuine learning. Genuine teaching.
And forgive the maudlin sentiment, but IMHO the world had just gotten a tiny bit better.
Brought to you by a profession that is being bashed from pillar to post by the leaders of the self-styled “education reform” movement aka edubullies.
Thank you both for your comments. Just the dos centavtios worth from a most assuredly KrazyTA.
😎
Everyone needs to read the articles that Chiara posted above. Wow…I had no idea. The use of data has gotten ridiculous. One place hired on the basis of how the job seeker played a video game on serving sushi to diners in a restaurant. I think all of this is so sad. The people hiring would not have wanted to be hired in this way.
I thoroughly enjoyed all of your blogs. You are all so intelligent. I think the blogger who commented that the profession of teaching wants to be like the private sector is right on the mark. My niece works for a very trendy teenage clothing store part time while she goes to college. She tells me that no one can get hours at all. My niece, who has been a loyal employee for 3-4 years, says that part time employees can only get 4 to 8 hours per week tops. She says that the trendy store constantly hires people. She said that the managers and assistant managers are the only ones who can get a good schedule of hours. There are numerous times she doesn’t know anyone she is working with…there are always large amounts of people being hired. People constantly quit because they cannot get hours. Others stay because they can get a large percentage off their trendy clothing. My niece has had to get another part time retail job to put with this job. She says the two jobs together gives her about 16 hours a week. This blows my mind, but this is happening everywhere. Of course, my niece, who is very fashionable, stays because she loves her employee discount on the trendy clothing.
This is only my opinion, of course, but I agree that teaching is headed here too. I’m afraid that we will see the day that classrooms will follow the business model that my niece described to me. You will see one master teacher supervising around 5 classrooms, while minimum wage workers oversee the students on computers. As they get the older teachers retired (like myself), I just have a bad feeling this is where it is all headed. The rich charter school people can profit so much on a business model that is already being used in the private sector. The private sector does not want to provide insurance to its workers, so the U.S. has become a country of part time workers. I sure hope I’m wrong here, but it sure looks this way.
Scary but I can see this happening. Eventually robots could replace the master teachers – they have the memory to teach subject, no degree required.
Yeah but then where are the banksters gonna get all their student loan money from? Well now to think of it they won’t have to pay for health insurance or a pension not to mention sick days so you may be right.
Reform mat be a war on women, but it is a war on education as a public entity, and it is an easier war to win since women still dominate the teaching population.
But it can be said to be a war upon them because one does not see an attack upon police and fire fighters so easily.
Women beware, and get in touch with your inner Lily Ledbetter, Phyllis Chesler, and Betty Friedan:
I think that is precisely it, Robert
Gates and the others are targeting teachers (with VAMs and the rest) because
1) teachers are the only thing that stands in the way of their ultimate goal of monetizing public education
2) they believe they can get away with it largely because teachers are women
If teaching were a male dominated profession, I seriously doubt we would see the kind of no-holds barred attacks on teachers and the teaching profession that we have seen.
I disagree they are doing the same in Medicine talk to Doctors and they will tell you the same. It’s not about gender it’s about greed and money regardless of who tries to stand in the way man or woman.
SomeDAm Poet and the RealOne
You are both right . . . .
I think you nailed it down, the real gist of this discussion. And I love the cartoon. I often think about the fact that I started teaching late in life after I didn’t have children at home to care for. I believe I wouldn’t have been able to do it with any degree of success.
Nor are they being evaluated by there successes/ failures. A doctor would only receive a excellent evaluation if they never lost a patient. A dentist – if they never had to fill a cavity. A judge of they never had to send someone to prison. It is completely idiotic.
Were you waging war on women when you were advocating for education reform?
tool.
That is why they needed Michelle Rhee, and now Campbell Brown. To portray this isn’t a war on women. Michelle Rhee would earn more in 1 speech than new teachers earn in a year. RHeeform. Good stuff; all the while complaining about teacher salaries.
Maybe the “right size” will be all outsourced or part-timed-no-benefits, everywhere. THIS is the reality in the corporate world. If you aren’t a stakeholder, you. do. not. matter. Charter schools have stakeholders to answer to, and the answer is profit above all else. Education in America will become terribly sub-par, but the reform speak will be so masterful, they will want you to believe kindergarteners will graduate elementary school with college degrees! Even college degrees these days are useless, unless you are the elite, or friends of the elite, or know someone who knows someone. I know plenty of 20-somethings working retail, reception, bar tending – cuz the jobs don’t exist, or they don’t know “the right people.”
Happy New Year all.
Is that why they needed Diane?
Is that why no one needs you?
To portray that education reform isn’t a war on women? No, that’s probably not why no one needs me.
I think it’s a legitimate question to ask whether someone who made a decent living for years by arguing in op-ed pages that huge numbers of teachers are unqualified was engaging in a kind of “war on women.” I don’t recall Dr. Ravitch writing any op-ed columns about how policemen or firemen are unqualified or should be required to take a national “bar exam.” But nobody needs me, so what do I know.
FLERP!,
“But nobody needs me, so what do I know.”
I’m not saying “nobody needs me” but I do say “Why would the powers that be listen to an old fart Spanish teacher?????
It definitely is a war on women.
And we do not have union leaders defending us. Taking our dues but doing nothing.