A federally-funded evaluation concluded that the $3.5 Billion spent on School Improvement Grants made no difference. SIG grants were highly punitive, requiring the firing of the principal for starters as an “improvement” strategy and eventually culminating in giving the school to a charter operator or coding it down. It failed to help anyone.
This teacher from Utah wrote:
“I could have saved our country all of that money wasted, before it was even spent! But no one asked the teachers at my school.
“We are in our last year of the 3-year SIG money as a turnaround school. From the moment I knew what was going to happen under the grant, I told my colleagues that the whole thing is not going to make a difference, because it wasn’t created under any valid research or by teachers. But on the slim chance it made a difference, it would be because of the sole efforts of expert teachers at my school. We know how to take nothing and turn it into something brilliant.
“For years before we started our grant process, we had been asking, even begging, for help with our students. We have had an increasing population year to year, of immigrant and refugee students enrolled at our school. The affects of the violence they’ve been exposed to since they were born and the obstacles of poverty, has been our nemesis. We have over-crowded classrooms, pennies for a supply budget, and no resources to provide to our students who are in desperate need of interventions. The culture of our school is violent, very low English proficiency rates, and high behavior problems due to PTSD and gang influenced families. But teachers at my school persevered as our pleas fell on deaf ears and blind eyes. As the building representative for my district association (Union), I focused on advocating for our students and teachers. People can’t believe you when you share a snippet of how a normal day goes. The absenteeism rate surpasses what is considered as “chronic”, along with a 50% mobility rate. Over 40 different languages are spoken among our students, while the culture of poverty has control over everything about a student. But yes, the rewards could be great! And teachers were dedicated, stable, cohesive, and always collaborating.
“Year one of the grant timeline, we had a new principal, and about half of the faculty was new; mostly first year teachers. We all know the idea of new teachers coming into classrooms with minimal education and practical experience, would fail. Absolutely! Some of those newbies taught one year, then left the profession completely. The second year, even more of the veterans at my school decided to transfer, and another half of the teachers left as well. Now, in our last year, there are only 4 teachers left, who we consider the veterans of our school. The running joke for us is if you can teach here, you can teach anywhere! Assessment data that shows levels of mastery and benchmarks, shows that about 75% of our students rank in lower levels across the spectrum; we refer to this as our “many shades of red”, because low performing students are color-coded in red, on data spreadsheets.
But the most difficult pill to swallow in this situation, is that the majority of money is spent on the consultant groups. Really? Some expert with a Ph.D. can’t give us ideas or strategies to use with our very unique, and sometimes very volatile students and their disruptive behavior. We have an electronic program to use for documenting behavior, and it shows how much instruction time is lost due to disruptions. It’s shocking to see that the amount of time, in hours and days, is in the double digits. This is outrageous and unacceptable, but still…deaf ears and blind eyes. Despite our efforts inviting administration staff and consultants to come observe our students and see what we deal with, no individual has actually taken up our offer. I think that after they hear about it, they don’t want to see it in real time.
So as the school year is getting closer, we all know what could happen to our school if there wasn’t a high level of proficiency demonstrated among students – state takeover and turned into a charter, or simply closed down all together. Naturally, teachers are worried about what will happen, and at the point, even administration doesn’t really know what is going to happen. I also predicted that in this situation, nothing will happen. We’ll continue doing what we are doing, wondering every year if it’s the last year for our school, before being taken over. No way…no one can honestly say what will happen, but I can surely say that nothing will happen, and our school will stay open as a public K-6 school, for years to come. The building would end up being condemned before becoming a charter school. Whatever….
“One last thing…teaching social studies is not always acceptable in this situation, because only writing, math, and science are tested subjects. I had to convince my principal to allow me to teach social studies. I see what our newer generation lacks in understanding and skill levels. Haven’t we seen those late shows moments when the host asks random civic questions to people on the street, and they do not know a damn thing! That is scary for me!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Reblogged also on LWV Education Issues
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Reblogged this on LWVeducation and commented:
This is the same story we hear about in our turn around schools. Changing principals and teachers is not enough. Adding behavioral therapists, tutors, professional development, sensitivity training is not enough. We are looking for examples of what does work.
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Your school is a perfect example of a school that needs lots of interventions and support. Poor, troubled students and ELLs require more attention than middle class students. When we use the local tax base to pay for schools, we get the opposite effect. The poor and needy are short changed. Your school would benefit from smaller class sizes and a community based model that would support students and their families. “No excuses reform” is the last thing they need. Instead, teachers are rarely consulted on what is needed, as “reform” seeks simplistic one size fits all approaches that fail complex challenges and only benefit corporations.
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All of these programs concentrate on the low hanging fruit who are, of course, the teachers. If we can just give enough PD to the teachers, all will be well. This short-sighted policy is dreamed up by people who have never taught. We have students who are coming in to the system with clear deficiencies in brain functioning….but nothing that a little “coaching” of the teacher can’t cure. Not only are the responses to these challenges lazy, they are downright incompetent. The public should be up in arms over this waste of funding.
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If your school, or any school, would like to improve and upgrade your civics/social studies program, I suggest you check out The Dreyfuss Initiative. Actor Richard Dreyfuss has dedicated several millions of his own money, to assist with a revitalization of teaching civics in America’s public schools.
See:
http://www.thedreyfussinitiative.org/
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If this school is in the district in Utah that I think it is, they are not ALLOWED, by district policy, to teach anything but reading, writing, and math (and perhaps science, since that is also testing in Utah).
My students in Utah come into my 8th grade history class having NO social studies knowledge whatsoever. I have to explain the continents and oceans, basic historical information (such as when Columbus sailed, or that the U.S won the American Revolution), because most of these students have NEVER had social studies classes before.
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As the author correctly points out, so-called education reform has in practice been a full-employment program for highly-credentialed, arrogant know-nothings, extracting resources from the schools and putting forward policies that are, at best, useless, and usually punitive.
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There are no magic bullets, the entire SIG process was based on faulty premises, you cannot impose change, change is a process that requires participation from the bottom up and leadership that is respected by the entire school community. “Throwing” solutions are schools is both foolhardy and foolish. There are examples of effective interventions, sadly too many school districts simply keep re-peddling what has not worked for decades.
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I never like to hear “experts” maligned as a group–theoreticians, policy-makers, and curriculum developers have their proper PLACE and contribution to education; and we should all understand and respect these as we expect for our own.
The problem, however, (and this is from my own work with K-12 teachers and from the above descriptions, not to mention theory) is that, though most teachers in my experience are not averse to being involved in active dialogue with theoreticians and developers, etc., the later seem NOT to understand the PLACE, realm, and contribution of the teacher as DAILY IMPLEMENTERS and APPLICATION experts in their field. I think many think and write well, but don’t realize or respect the kind of expertise and professionalism that is needed to meet each child in the classroom every day.
The other “rub” that came from reading those well-written but sad descriptions of classroom life is similar to the above. It’s the very idea of blanket firing of principals as a part of reforming a school. That whole idea sounds like a form of violent rather than creative and dynamic change. It also sounds like the above–administrators administrating while avoiding going “into the weeds” of considering on-site details–it’s basically a lazy and thoughtless way to administer a grant. Nice work if you can get it? But not really–not if you are interested in excellence.
To them I would say, using Vygotsky’s term, it sounds like in both situations those involved have overlooked the “zone.” Human beings are not wholly predictable. They/we have minds and are messy in our development patterns and individual histories–and teachers are experts in THAT field, in mediating general theory and curricula into the particular. It’s more than full-time; and more like the weather, or the economy, than it is like predicting the movements of the planets. The practice of “managing” teachers or firing principals out-of-the-gate sounds more like it’s build on the model of changing parts in a car than improving a school where real people work, teach, and learn. It’s no wonder the grant didn’t “work.” They might talk about “the zone” well, but they don’t really respect it or the profession that actually works there.
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The “experts” the author refers to are fakesperts.
They are present in every profession and are often promoted by the competent people just to get them out of the way.
In companies, they can be promoted and effectively sidelined, but Unfortunately, in schools they keep doing damage no matter how many times they are promoted.
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SomeDAM Poet: Well, . . . hmmm. Are you making a distinction between (a) theory as a movement thought that has well informed our traditions and fields, including education, and (b) those that are either in error or deliberately “faked”?
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Postscript to my note to SomeDAM poet: As all teachers know, errors can occur in applications (in the classroom) in both choosing an appropriate theory for a problem or learning situation, and in applying it rightly for THIS student. And as theoreticians know, theories are constantly being refined and improved, especially in the human sciences and education where a developed and then applied theory, bad or good, changes persons, both the teacher and the student and, by extrapolation, the culture we live in (aka: the butterfly effect).
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the fakesperts to which I refer are people like John Deasy
, Michelle Rhee and Wendy kopp.
But there are others. Lots of them, many of them coming out of Reformer diploma mills but some actually coming out of what are supposedly the “best” schools (harvard and Princeton)
It’s not just — or even primarily -that these people are in error.
More critically, they simply will not recognize their errors and indeed persist in the same failed approaches.
Any real expert would recognize his or her mistakes and make an honest effort to fix them.
The fakesperts won’t. That’s actually the thing that sets them apart.
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Catherine Blanche King,
I too am uncomfortable with blanket repudiations of expertise, and in general I have a lot of respect for people who’ve devoted years to the study of a particular field.
On the other hand, I’ve also learned through years of experience that most educational research and policy has an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, is frequently of a man-bites-dog level of informativeness or is irrelevant to the issues faced by classroom teachers. Additionally, in the era of so-called reform, far too much of it is written for hire and in service of ulterior political ends.
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Extremely low signal to noise ratio is putting it kindly.
In cases like SGP’s and VAMs, it’s basically all noise, with correlations so low that they are laughable to any real scientist, but the self-styled “experts” nonetheless insist that schools base their operations on this junk.
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SomeDAM Poet: That’s why the natural or physical sciences have laboratories and do experiments. A big “duh” to that but, still, it seems the dissing of teachers has a long history and so the roots of disrespect go very, very deep. I know people in business who still say to teachers–why don’t you go up the ladder and become a PRINCIPAL? You don’t really make much money. There’s no upward movement in teaching!
How do you explain to someone with a competitive/money brain that it’s not all about hierarchy like in business or some other professions–it’s about love of teaching and of the children and other students that you are helping to understand and grow. What a concept.
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Michael Fiorillo: Nicely put: Not theory as such, but the “signal to noise ratio.” That’s exactly my point. I’ve heard various versions of this “ratio” problem for years, in and out of my teaching experience. But “theory as such” often gets the flack for the problem–and THAT’s a BIG problem since a teacher’s credentials depends on their background knowledge. In my field, there is isolated a “general bias” against theory on the part of those who deal with particulars–and I see this in teachers over and over again. and also a “particular bias” on the part of theoreticians et al who “diss” those who work in the fields. A pox on both their houses. Both arenas are respectable and essential to any field, and they all have their own kinds of problems.
The refrain is commonly: Yes! we need to understand the teacher’s realm or “zone”!. And then they go on their way forgetting about the actual parameters, time constraints, needed openings, and exigencies of the ACTUAL zone for each teacher and their need for broad expertise. I think to increase the “ration” and her call for regular visits to the classroom are ESSENTIAL for those who write theory, curricula, and most importantly, policy-makers–where they can observe when a teacher deals with THIS classroom, THIS student, and THIS set of parents or caregivers. That takes more than theory-informed expertise–it takes good character and teacher WISDOM.
You say: “Additionally, in the era of so-called reform, far too much of it is written for hire and in service of ulterior political ends.” The same thing happened and is happening in the sciences and the other fields–there is an assault on, that’s for sure; and the oligarchs are buying up the colleges and universities too. I think their money is welcome, but not their selection and omission of curricula.
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If it is such a “big duh” why do so many self-styled education “experts” persist in supporting what is effectively junk science?
Don’t get me wrong.
I have worked as both a teacher and engineer and I am well aware that the real experts are often the ones working in the trenches. I’ve also worked with plenty of people with advanced degrees Masters and phD’s who had no clue.
In my opinion, the title “expert” follows from what one has accomplished in the real world, not from some degree. And not from some theoretical mumbo jumbo that may have no Relationship to reality (VAM and SGP)
And respect has to be earned.
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SomeDAM Poet: Look around your room, in your community and in the world–little if anything is untouched and un-transformed by good theory (your computer, your phone, and on and on). On the other hand, all authentic scientists (not “fake”) know the foundational value of making mistakes and learning from them in the lab (a part of scientific method), of trying and failing, and of chasing a problem night and day in their heads until they have that Eureka! moment, and then pushing it into applications for all it’s worth.
So I don’t believe you are against theory (science) as such or authentic (though sometimes mistaken) theoreticians–who are all human, like oligarchs, regardless of what they might think of themselves.
The difference in teaching is, of course, that we are dealing with people, and children to boot, who are not well-suited for doing lab experiments on (like with non-conscious i-phone materials). Even well-meaning mistakes have sometimes-grave consequences in the classroom. They remember. And children have individual and daily histories that even statistics cannot deal with–and the teacher must–again, this is where knowledge and wisdom differ, though theory and expertise, and then teacher wisdom feed off one another. Also, if a child falls outside the statistical “norm,” THAT’s the one the teacher wants to help and often must steer around all kinds of barriers and singular problems in order to have that Eureka! moment for THIS child. Then, what might work for THIS child, is the opposite for another, or it won’t work at a different time in that child’s life.
POET: At the risk of offending (which I would take no pleasure in), all theory is by definition generalized; and so must be applied in the particular to be tested where, at any step, things can go wrong. So that when I heard my students refer to a blanket “mumbo jumbo” or other dissing as applied to theory as such, I sense that it’s one of four things: (1) wrong theory in a field where several are appropriate to the situation; (2) a bad theory; (3) a good theory wrongly applied; or (4) the speaker just didn’t understand (which is fine) but further, didn’t care to (which is fine too); but further took a bit too much pleasure in dissing theory AS SUCH, which is good indication of the presence of general bias, especially when everything within sight is a product of or is influenced by it (again, for instance, your computer and your phone).
. . . too long again. Sigh . . . but I love your other stuff.
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I subscribe e to the 10,000 hour rule for claiming to be an “expert”.
Whether it is actually 10k or 9k or 12k is not important.
What is important is that one has spent a long time practicing and honing one’s skills.
I don’t happen to believe that anyone can claim to be an expert teacher without having spent years in the classroom actually teaching.
And certainly, there is no way in hell that someone who has only taught for a couple years (TFA) — or never taught at all — can be an expert on teaching.
Not a chance.
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“Expert” is a common, not a technical term. I’ve never heard a professional use it to self-describe. And common terms are just that–common but undefined–taking on various meanings as we go.
The point is that some people study things that we haven’t studied (and vice versa); and there are so many lines of study nowadays that it’s always the intelligent thing to do to collaborate with others who have experience and training–and theoretical field knowledge–while keeping an open and critical mind. “Expert” is just a surface abbreviation of that meaning, like “specialist.” On the other end, you would consult a plumber to fix your sink, but a locksmith to fix your lock, but not your car. It’s commonly known as the intelligent thing to do and underlies the common notions of “good/better/best.”
So let’s get on with education. Theory isn’t an end all, but it’s good.
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With the caveat that the practice time is a necessary but NOT sufficient condition for being an expert.
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My definition of theoretical mumbo jumbo is theory that has no factual basis. Theory is ONly legitimate if it provides a useful model for explaining the facts and making predictions.
Otherwise, mumbo jumbo is all it is.
Theoretical Mumbo jumbo is not limited to social science by any means.
Multiverse theory and string theory are good examples from physics, with no predictions and no supporting evidence.
And VAM and SGP are examples from education.
But I think this conversation has gone far afield from the original criticism that the Utah teacher made, which was clearly directed at so-called “experts” with PhDs who won’t even come in to the class and observe in order to come up with concrete suggestions for what might be done.
Some experts.
Sorry if I sound dismissive, but I have seen too much fakery in both education and the corporate world and I have no patience for it.
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SomeDAM Poet: I’m for quitting too. But I must ask: how will you know when an authentic theoretician is talking good theory?
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it is actually very easy to tell when a theory has merit: it has to provide a coherent model to legitimately explain facts.
Like all other theories, educational theories have to show their worth BEFore they are accepted.
That means they have to be subjected to testing , but certainly not on a countrywide scale before they have even been verified on a pilot scale.
What has happened in to the schools in this country over the past two decades is actually quite pathological.
Millions of children and teachers have been subjected to Common Core, high stakes testing, SGP, VAM, firing, stress and other abuse with virtual no evidence (beforehand) that any of it would improve education and lots of evidence that it would actually hurt students, teachers, schools and communities.
Forgive me if I sound ticked off, but I am because like millions of other people in this country I have a personal stake in the so-called “experiments” that have been carried out. My niece’s and nephews have been subjected to what I would call “junk and abuse”, with Common Core, standardized testing and all the rest.
The folks who visited all this stuff on the schools ( Arne Duncan, Eric Hznushek, Raj Chetty, David Coleman, Jason Zimba et AL) might have PhDs, but they are not “experts” by any stretch of the imagination. Quacks is more like it. They don’t know the first thing about real science.
Who gave these quacks the right to try out their crackpot theories on the schools on a massive scale without ever first showing on a small scale that they had merit?
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Left out the biggest education quack of all: Bill Gates.
Please forgive the oversight.
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Catherine:
I believe you and I are talking about very different things.
I have no problem with legitimate education theories that are based on observational evidence (eg, the work of people like Piaget)
This is not at all what I am referring to — and I don’t believe it is what the Utah teacher reffered to — in reference to the so_called “education experts” who have invaded the schools in recent decades with VAM, standardized testing, “market theory of education” and other crackpot ideas that are NOT based on evidence and make use of bogus correlations and other fake statistics to supposedly “prove” their case.
That’s why I referred to them in my very first comment as “fakesperts” because they are simply masquerading as legitimate experts.
By the way, just as quack doctors are dragged into court and forced to pay fines (and maybe even face jail time) I believe that the education quacks should face the same fate. It is probably the only thing that will make them think twice about doing the same sorts of things in the future.
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SomeDam Poet: I only wanted to clarify the distinction. It’s terribly important and, in my experience, a rife problem. For educators to be biased in this regard is more than a problem, it’s a travesty and a serious drag on the entire educational project which gets its power from the movement of legitimate theoretical inquiry, as is your example of Piaget. It’s a travesty because general bias gets passed down subtly to their students, and the problem becomes exponential. And now we have made and clarified that distinction. Thanks.
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Catherine
I can certainly understand the frustration of legitimate education experts.
I suspect it is more than a little like the frustration felt by climate scientists when the public debate has been polluted by all manner of pseudoscientific nonsense perpetrated by knownothings.
People like Raj Chetty do a huge amount of damage when they act as experts (in court cases, no less) in fields that they know very little about. There is much more to it than simple statistical manipulation — and Chetty is not even good at that. He’s basically a hack.
Economists may be the worst in this regard because they believe you don’t have to know anything about a field to make what they believe to be a game changing “discovery”. Not coincidentally, economists also act as experts on climate science. The irony is that these people don’t even have a good handle on their own field of economics. In fact, their track record in the latter is abysmal.
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SomeDAM Poet: Yes–frustrating–but I did have some success with “my” teachers, so I felt I did some good there. And yes–climate scientists are a good example of how well-funded dismal politics can screw things up. Wow–those oil people–aren’t they on a tear now that Trump is in. Since this is an education blog, in that context, what’s missing in these persons is a moral education.
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Not incidentally, when I refer to people as hacks and quacks, I am not doing it lightly.
Calling Raj Chetty a hack is actually overly kind.
As pointed out by Moshe Adler in his critique of the Chetty study #2, Chetty actually played the cherry (Chetty?) picking game to arrive at his main conclusion.
http://vamboozled.com/moshe-adler-on-chetty-et-al/
I believe that if he had tried this in another context (medicine), he would have been in very deep trouble. Chetty knew that the effect at age 30 was not statistically significant, but nonetheless continued to assume for his “theory” that the relatively small effect he claimed for age 28 persisted.
But as we all know, in economics, they give prizes (even Nobel ones) for that sort of thing.
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SDP and Catherine: thanks for an interesting discussion. I would enjoy adding an anecdote about engineers and technicians.
I once had a job in which I worked with civil engineers. There was a time when I was asked to do a job which placed an expensive piece,of equipment at risk. The risk might have meant thousands of dollars spent. The information I might have supplied by taking this risk was exactly nothing. I refused to do it. I later learned that it had been done. I am sure that it was done completely on paper in order to fulfill a contractual obligation. You see, if they did not do that job, they lost money.
Since I have been teaching, self-styled experts have been ubiquitous. Most have a good deal of money to gain by a school system adopting their mehod. Often their idea is more of a vocabulary change than a paridigm shift. Sometimes their advice is good. Sometimes their advice is silly. Most ideas are good, but they are impossible to implement due to a lack of funding which causes a lack of staffing. Often it is impossible to tell whether an idea is good, for the articulation of the idea is vague and the expert wants to fly back to see her children. How often have we paid some person thousands for an inspirational story, only to return to the reality which is teaching. The consultant always has to go to the next gig. It means money.
After thirty years of this, I have become jaded.
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Roy Turrentine: Oh . . . I see–and completely understand. The cue for me, however, is your term inspirational story.” You say: “How often have we paid some person thousands for an inspirational story, only to return to the reality which is teaching. The consultant always has to go to the next gig. It means money.”
I want to say: “what’s wrong with this picture?” and “you could have watched Oprah and gotten that.” But with your help we could do some research and write a course to cover it, but of course I don’t know the details. One question about those details, however, (abbreviated) would be about the difference between critical-theoretical developments and merely “consulting” which can mean anything (as you know) from soup to nuts, or from merely giving advice or telling inspirational stories, to major theory-driven analysis with systematic follow-up based on a multiple feedback and self-correction loop. The “reality which is teaching”:should be improved (especially if someone is being paid for it?). If it’s not, then the question of WHY should be addressed. It seems everyone has to be tested for improvement except the improvers?
But none of that sully’s the basic meaning of general theory and its movement towards better understanding. If people mangle and abuse the idea (and they do, as you know) or don’t really understand the difference and the adequate relationship between general theory, common discourse, and historical details, it doesn’t take away from the basic contribution of theory and its genesis of method(s). But I’ll give you this: though the human sciences and education are moving in the right direction, they haven’t arrived there yet and education has both benefited and been hurt by those movements. That’s a long story, not appropriate for this site. But I certainly understand your story and why you are jaded about your experience.
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Thanks Catherine. You are always good for a thoughtful reply without rancor.
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Roy,
I commend you for your integrity, but I can at least understand why contractors do the job that they are contracted and paid to do.
The ones I can not understand — and for whom there is no excuse — are the people who quite put out the contracts on our schools Eg, for Common Core and VAM)
They seem to me a lot like hit men in their behavior.
Unfortunately, unlike hitmen, they are rarely forced to pay for the damage they do. And make no mistake, the damage that these people did to public schools over the past two decades is immense. These are not victimless crimes by any means.
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Maybe “hit and run men” would be an even more apt moniker, cuz that’s what they do, hit the schools with all their junk and then turn tail and run when they get called on it.
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Make that they are like the ones who contract the hitmen.
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Catherine, SomeDAMPoet, Roy,
I doubt any educator seriously debunks sound educational theory and sees all theoreticians and consultants as useless meddlers. To the contrary. I expect most teachers would agree some of their most successful methods and approaches have grown out of sound psychological and pedagogical theories supported by decades of research. I venture that they welcome the occasional consultant to bring in fresh viewpoints and information.
It strikes me that many teachers we hear from here are beset by a raft of nuts-&-bolt issues that interfere with applying even the most basic of ed theories in the classroom. The situation described in the Utah post in particular sounds rife with enormous practical problems.
Which of the issues below might best be handled by firing the principal and half the teachers without cause, bringing in inexperienced newbies, & besetting them all with consultants who they have to bring up to speed with time they don’t have?
–year to year increasing population of poverty-stricken immigrant and refugee students affected by violence since they were born
–over-crowded classrooms, pennies for a supply budget, and no resources for interventions.
–40 different languages spoken, very low Eng proficiency rates
–high behavior problems due to PTSD and gang influenced families
–absenteeism surpassing “chronic” rate
–50% mobility rate
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bethree5: You mean there’s no relationship? (ha!) The only mandate behind such violent changes is based on this general idea: Do something, even if it’s wrong, in part, because we are being paid to do so. Or as I said earlier, they are thinking on the model of changing parts in a car, rather than on understanding what is needed for, and rightly conditioning for, long term, comprehensive, and creative change.
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Right-o, the auto-parts methor inspired my post it is so spot-on
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bethree5 Also, you say: “I doubt any educator seriously debunks sound educational theory and sees all theoreticians and consultants as useless meddlers.” Well, I’ve seen the attitude many times in K-12 teachers–so much so that I wrote a section for my courses that I felt it necessary to start with, precisely because there was (what I refer to as) general bias that came up at some point in every class. The section was about general bias and the place of theory in their profession, and how teachers need to know how to move between theoretical and common discourse. I’m sure most DID use theory all of the time; but their bad attitude about theory as such came through in every class, for years. It’s “out there.”
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Well, that stinks. I’ll take your word for it, I’m just an amateur– a few yrs long-ago FT French teacher, but in a priv acad, & recently 15 yrs as a free-lance PreK enrichment teacher (Span). My pubsch viewpoint is as a hisch grad, parent (2 out of 3 w/IEP), & taxpayer. But I have met so many terrific & brainy pubsch teachers over the yrs, many among them friends who are as interested in ed theory & research as I am. Very sad that a career in pubsch can just drum that right out of people. I expect I would be the same if I had to be putting out fires daily & scrabbling for time to teach & basic supplies.
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