Readers answer the question, “who was your favorite teacher and why?”
It is fun to read the responses.
People write about teachers who were strict and demanding; they write about teachers who were passionate about their subject; they write about teachers who were inspiring; they write about teachers who were fun and pulled pranks; they write about their physics teacher, their German teacher, their music teacher.
I couldn’t find anyone who wrote about the teacher who raised their test scores.
This teacher is tired of getting instructions from inexperienced policymakers and politicians.
He writes:
“Really! We always seem to pay the price for self proclaimed “know-it-alls” when it comes to Schools. Why is it those who have never stepped foot in a school since the day they (dropped out) or graduated seem to think they can do better than those who have invested in a higher education as well as time, blood/sweat/tears working to change the tide?
“I agree, we should focus on other BAD people. How about BAD Politicians, BAD Doctors, BAD Nurses BAD (fill in the blank). For example lets make Doctors accountable for their patients recovery rate! Surely, there are lots of tests and measures to determine “adequate yearly progress” for Doctors! But, lets be fair… why don’t we pay everyone based on the “test scores” of the recipients of goods and services they provide?”
North Carolina legislators, ever on the hunt for ways to demoralize teachers, decided there would be no extra pay for masters’ degrees.
This is their way of showing their contempt for education. They don’t see the return on investment for a masters’ degree in history or science or special education.
Teachers with existing masters are grandfathered in, and those enrolled in masters programs now may be out if luck.
Expect the education level of teachers in NC to decline. A victory for ignorance.
A reader from North Carolina explains how the legislatures so-called reforms will affect her:
“I have been teaching in NC for 13 years now. To be honest, having to sign a new contract each year or not getting a raise yet again doesn’t concern me as much as having 25+ 7 year olds with no assistant. I’ve had to share an assistant with 3 other teachers for the past few years, and that is better than having no one. The idea that teachers can meet the individual needs of all children with less time and resources is insane. During a classroom emergency (sick or violent behaving student) how am I supposed to take care of the student needing help plus keep teaching the others? I’d like to see how some of these politicians would function without their secretaries and personal assistants. Instead of trying to help public schools, they are setting us up for failure. It’s like giving a carpenter a hammer, a handsaw, a couple of boards, and a box of nails then calling him incompetent when the house isn’t built in 3 weeks.”
Here is good advice for the Gates Foundation:
Mr. Gates,
I have been working on this letter for days now. I just can’t seem to get my thoughts down before my anger gets the best of me. Then it turns into a letter of rant which helps no one, least of all my students.
I am a 10 year veteran teacher. I have earned my BA and my MAT. I also have received National Board Certification. I am sick over this testing and evaluation mess that you sir created. It’s time that you clarify and clean up what you have caused.
You and your buddies The Walton’s and Broady’s need to finally understand that you have accomplished nothing to further education. You have caused a chasm, a divide. You have made matters worse. Because it suits your agenda you have fueled the ‘everything is the teachers fault’ fire. We know it and you know it. If you truly care about students and their success and not about dollars and data points, then you will put your resources behind proven policies.
Here are some ideas that you can research, study and then support. These are changes that have actually been proven to be successful.
1. No for-profit schools. No one should make a dime off of students.
2. No standardized tests until high school. PreK-8th grade should be the time to instill curiosity, a drive to learn and to find what excites them.
3. Schools of Education should be extremely selective. Only the best and brightest should be accepted.
4. Educators should be held in high esteem as the professionals they are and paid accordingly.
5. End the competition between public schools. Support collaboration and cooperation.
6. Teachers should be expected to teach 4 classes (approximately 4 hours) per day.
7. Teachers should be expected to collaborate during the school day.
8. School meals should be free.
9. Health care should be accessible. Nurses at all prek-8th grade schools.
10. Individualized guidance for all students.
You finally agree that teachers should be at the table for policy discussions. Here I am. Hear me now: We are mad and we are NOT going to take it anymore. STOP this testing craze. STOP the school to prison pipeline. STOP closing schools. STOP making money off our children!
We won’t back down,
One of many BATs
Nancy Flanagan taught music in Michigan for many years. She now blogs at Edweek.
In this post, she dissects a new reformy idea called “the opportunity culture.” The bottom line is that if you are in the top 25% of teachers, determined by test scores, then you should teach larger classes and get paid more. This is Bill Gates’ and Michael Bloomberg’s dream.
Nancy is at her best in this column. You deserve a break today. Read it and enjoy the absurdity of this latest gambit.
Here is a small sample of Nancy’s post:
“How did this exciting window of opportunity emerge? Public Impact explains:
“Only 25 percent of classes are taught by excellent teachers. With an excellent teacher versus an average teacher, students make about an extra half-year of progress every year–closing achievement gaps fast, leaping ahead to become honors students, and surging forward like top international peers.”
“That’s a whole lot of leaping and surging. Unfortunately, it’s based on a faux statistic, sitting triumphantly on a pyramid of dubious research, prettied up with some post-modern infographics. Like other overhyped blah-blah of “reform”–the “three great teachers in a row” myth, for example, or nearly every “fact” in Waiting for Superman–it’s a triumph of slick media slogans over substance. A quick look at the Opportunity Culture Advisory Team tells you what the real purpose of the OC is: cutting teachers, privatizing services, plugging charters and cultivating a little astroturf to cover the scars.
“The Opportunity Culture’s bold plan begins with a policy recommendation: Schools should be required by law to identify the top 25% of their teachers. Then, once that simple task is completed, OC suggests ten exciting new models for staffing schools, beginning with giving these excellent teachers a lot more students (plus a merit pay carrot) and ending with enlisting “accountable remote teachers down the street or across the nation” who would “provide live, but not in-person instruction while on-site teammates manage administrative duties and develop the whole child.”
Amanda Shaw writes here about what happened when students were allowed to write without the threat of a test hanging over them. She is a full-time elementary school teacher of music, who also helps students learn to write. In this post, she describes an experience that reminded her why she loves teaching. Imagine giving students the freedom to be creative!
Joy Resmovits, the education reporter for Huffington Post, is usually a sharp and thoughtful reporter, but she had a bad day today.
Today she posted an article blaming “bad” teachers for the achievement gap between black and white students.
Along the way, she makes some factual errors. For example, she states that the achievement gap in ninth grade reading narrowed from 1994-2012, from 33 points to 13.
But that is wrong, for two reasons.
First, NAEP doesn’t test ninth grade. It tests fourth and eighth grades.
Second, the achievement gap for eighth grade shrank during that period from 30 points to 25 points.
She says the achievement gap persists because black students get less experienced teachers (Teach for America?) and have less success in raising test scores (tautology, anyone?).
Joy should know that the achievement gap exists before the first day of school in kindergarten.
It is nourished by large socioeconomic differences.
The achievement gap is an opportunity gap.
Black students are far likelier than white students to live in poverty, to miss school because of illness, to live in bad housing, to be homeless, to have less access to medical care, to live with tremendous economic insecurity.
Their families have fewer resources to invest in them.
The fact that there is an achievement gap is not prima facie evidence that those who teach black students are not good teachers.
Frankly, it is not like Joy to sound like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Arne Duncan.
Joy Resmovits owes an apology to the many thousands of urban teachers who are hard-working, dedicated to their students, and determined to educate them despite the insults hurled their way by politicians and the media.
I wrote a blog critical of the race-based, ethnicity-based, income-based targets for student achievement in Alabama’s Plan 2020, which many other states have adopted.
I received the following critique from Melissa Shields, who teaches in Alabama:
As a nationally board certified teacher in Alabama of more than 20 years, I have long admired Dr. Diane Ravitch and read her blog regularly. She often says what I’m thinking and seems to “get” what’s really happening in education. However, my admiration took a jolt when I read the recent post, “Alabama Sets Un-American Goals for Students.”
She was referring to our Alabama PLAN 2020. Unfortunately she relied on one newspaper article that focused on one narrow area of this plan. Since she is one of the country’s best-known education researchers, it is regretful she didn’t try to learn more. She would have discovered that rather than being vilified as a race biased effort to set lower expectations for certain groups of students, PLAN 2020 should be applauded (and I wonder why Dr. Ravitch ignored comments in the article by a local superintendent and the dean of the College of Education at the University of Alabama defending PLAN 2020).
Plan 2020 looks at individual students and groups of students, determines baselines as to where they are functioning, acknowledging the fact that some students and groups of students are not on a positive trajectory for success and follows with an individualized and differentiated trajectory of improvement to address those gaps. The entire system is based on a goal of ALL students reaching 100% proficiency while at the same time understanding that everyone may not get there on the same day at the same time which was perceived as failure under NCLB.
Dr. Ravitch states in her piece about Alabama using subgroups to better determine how instruction should be individualized, “the state of Alabama should ditch the race-based, economic-based, disability-based goals and focus on one center American idea” equality of educational opportunity for every child.”
But I would remind her that this is not the fantasy world of Lake Wobegon where “all the children are above average.” Instead, the real world is one where at-risk and poor children often do not perform as was as their wealthier and/or gifted counterparts. I have been fortunate to have taught in a thriving Christian private school, affluent public schools, and rural lower-income public schools. I know what it takes to help children believe in themselves, often when no one else does. I also know it takes to help our “at-risk” students find academic success, even surpassing the successes of their wealthier grade-level peers. If the truth be known, those successes are my proudest moments in the classroom. Teaching children who want to learn is easy; teaching those who don’t think they do is a challenge, one we teachers embrace with vigor. It didn’t matter if these students were black, white, or purple (or what NCLB projected their success rate should be), I wanted to help each of them find growth in my classroom…..and they did.
As a side note, I’m an English teacher. I taught 150-170 students a day (6 classes). Boys do not typically perform as well in English as the girls. I often wished I could receive more data on how well my male students were doing in relation to the females. Because I did not have that data, I gathered it myself, reflecting on how I might better meet the boys’ needs and interests to improve their performance in language arts disciplines. My point is, if we don’t follow students’ progress per subgroup, how can we ensure growth? The percentages in PLAN 2020 are actually higher than we’ve had before, which of course means we’re trying to raise the bar of expectation for them—not lower it.
The fact that we have publicly owned the fact that black/EL/poverty students (as a whole) are achieving at a lesser level than many their peers is the first and most important step to change this unacceptable reality. Regretfully sharing these facts and acknowledging that a HIGHER expectation must be put in place to remove this gap is being portrayed as racist. Would Dr. Ravitch prefer that we have this knowledge and not aggressively address it? I find it hard to believe that she would. </em
This is my response to Melissa:
I am sorry for singling out Alabama since many other states, encouraged by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, are doing the very same things.
But I do not withdraw my distaste for setting goals by race, ethnicity, and income.
I wrote to Melissa that this approach represents stale NCLB thinking. Every child is a unique individual, and knowing his or her skin color or heritage or parental income should not be the basis for goal-setting.
There is a reason that Moses spent 40 years wandering in the desert before he was able to bring his people to the promised land. They had to learn to think like free men, not slaves.
We have to learn to think again like educators, not data hounds or accountants meeting arbitrary targets.
A reader wrote to complain that many teachers have an easy job, don’t work hard, and are paid too much for the little they do.
This teacher responds:
“I am one of those assistants in that classroom, a special education classroom. I would like to see you do it. I want you to change a teenager’s diaper while keeping them from tearing up the changing area and watch two other children and keep them safe from each other. I love these kids but they have no sense of danger. They think something a do it…please Dan…do something before you knock it. Do you know how hard it is to be a special ed teacher…well look up the job postings for a special ed teacher…yea there are jobs for them everywhere…they are always in demand cause its the hardest job in the school. These teachers make lesson plans that don’t reach all of their children cause they don’t have the resources to reach all of them and they constantly have interruptions. I worked in a classroom that had slightly behind students and completely not there students. There was also one who like to scream at the top of their lungs constantly. I love my job but I know I won’t have it forever cause I don’t think my nerves could take it for 30 years.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 