Where are the voices of teachers in DeKalb mess? Here is one and he’s not holding back.
A DeKalb teacher sent me this piece, noting that none of the blog commentaries on the crisis in DeKalb have come from teachers.
I suspect teachers all over the country will agree with his comments about the lack of respect for the profession. (At his request, I am not using his name because of his concerns for his job.)
This teacher is responding to a recent DeKalb commentary on the blog by Oglethorpe University President Lawrence Schall, but his essay speaks to the conditions facing teachers in many places:
I’ve seen so many commentaries over the weeks about the plight of the DeKalb School Systems – from interim superintendents to possible ex-board members to concerned politicians. The blaring omission of a teacher voice rings louder about our current state of affairs. I’ve shrugged all of them off and kept-calm-and-carried-on as has been the trickle-down mantra for years in DeKalb County.
Then, l read I read Lawrence M. Schall’s “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing” commentary.
His manifesto of conservatism and privatizing the public school arena is, I think, a huge portion of what’s wrong with education today – it comes under the guise of common-sense solutions from informed think-tanks, but it’s really just the Trojan Horse that will finally do away with public education in this country. And, as I’ve said before, democracy in America won’t be far behind.
It’s a simple fact – public education is not and should never be seen as a business.
To suggest it is or could be run like one is itself the problem with education.
The agenda that Schall suggests is double-speak for fixing a broken educational system by doing away with it in piecemeal. “Creating paths for the recognition and reward of effective teachers” is pay for performance – pitting teacher against teacher to receive pay based on student performance is ludicrous and quickly becoming a reality.
I know virtually no teachers who think this would ever turn out well. If you think there was cheating on the high-stakes tests before (which includes the suggested model StudentsFirst organization by Ms. Rhee), wait until you tie a paycheck to some ridiculous exam written by a for-profit organization.
As far as “empower[ing] parents with real choice by providing them with easily accessible and understandable data and through equitable funding of effective charter school” – this is truly one of the biggest farces within school systems today.
If I can break down what I’m reading: we’re talking about vouchers for private schools that can produce the results that the businesses are telling the parents that students need. If a student in my class misses a question on a high-stakes assessment that asks the child to find the mistake in a sentence that’s missing the Oxford comma (an example one of the many hotly debated usage rules upon which we English teachers can’t even agree that test-writers love to target), then that student hasn’t met the standard for “Conventions” and must be remediated.
Or withdrawn and taken to a school where the child will suddenly master the elusive comma – a school that works. Frankly, there are some usage rules I have to look up every time I come across the issue, or I simply revise the sentence to fix what I don’t know.
That’s what I learned as a student before we traded learning for testing – to think critically and creatively. To use my strengths in my favor. These skills have fallen by the wayside in an era of manipulated numbers telling us what’s going on instead of visiting schools to see for ourselves.
Instead of working with teachers to help the students, parents have been empowered to believe that they know education better than the educator. And why wouldn’t they think that? It’s obvious that everyone thinks they can do a better job than teachers. Organizations like Teach for America are churning them out as people leave unfulfilling careers to enter the classroom and find purpose.
All you need to be a good teacher, apparently, is a dedicated heart – the thing that’s missing from those of us who went into education from the get-go.
The-Teachers-As-a-Second-Career-Crew will save education from the current teachers who just aren’t cutting it. Check out any news story that has anything to do with education and you’ll find the teacher featured at the center of the problem.
Even Schall suggests that the teachers are more to blame than the governance when he points out “performance of the school board, and more importantly, the school district have been abysmal for far too long.”
Dr. Schall, I’m a part of that district and you’re absolutely right – it’s broken, broken, broken. But, with all due respect to you sir, it’s not because of teachers not doing their jobs. It’s because the powers-that-be have not been focusing on student success and teacher protection – they’ve been running this district like a business complete with golden parachutes, missing monies and top-heavy management.
They, like so many in education, have forgotten that it’s about the students. And I don’t mean in a “Victory in every classroom” political slogans or the “We do it for the children” false-selfless statement that six-figure administrators make. I mean the hard-fought and sometimes ugly battles that it takes when it really is about the students.
All the teachers I know accept that and are willing to fight for their students. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do what we do.
Here’s where I agree with you – we have to “spend tax dollars more efficiently by promoting better governance structures.” Those structures must involve the teachers and their protection along with students. If you want me to do right by your kids, ask for my input on their education. Protect me when I do speak out.
Don’t cut my pay or the number of days I have with your kids while adding more tests and then act shocked when the learning seems to have stalled – of course it has. The students were so busy pre-testing to show management that they didn’t know something that the teacher ran out of time to teach them something.
But it made for cool charts for the “data chats” and “war rooms.”
Instead of villainizing teacher unions, encourage them. Work with them. Teachers will be a lot more likely to fight for your kids if they know somebody’s got their back. As it stands, I can’t even sign my name to this commentary without possibly losing my job.
Now, I don’t have my own blog to fall back on or a doctoral degree in education, but even I can see that our system is patently wrong.
And I’m trying to do something about it. What I am doing is working from the inside to make things better. It’s a little more thankless than sitting on a higher perch and pointing out the mistakes that others are making, but those kinds of gigs are hard to get.
Still, in spite of my broken district, just like Dr. Schall’s two adult children, I’m also teaching at a public school that works. And it’s not because of the tests; it’s in spite of them.
Schall and I can agree on one more thing – we are focusing on the symptoms rather than the problem. The more we treat education like a business, the further away from ever fixing it we get. I’ve heard it said a million different ways (as have most of us actually in the classroom), but I’m not building the latest piece of technology or working on an assembly line of the latest mode of transportation – I’m teaching your child.
I want him or her to have imagination and creativity enough to make the future better for all of us. The more roadblocks and assessments of arbitrary questions put forth in the spirit of measuring my worth as an educator, the less likely your child is of actually being successful.
Because I have looked at them as only data and stamped the “product” with a big red label as defective.
Because my days are spent producing worthless charts and graphs for my “data notebook” so that my countless supervisors can justify their own jobs by showing that I’m not doing mine right yet.
Because there are so many corporate people whose job it is to tell what I’m doing wrong according to their business model that even I sometimes forget that teaching is my life, not just my job, and I didn’t go into it for the money.
The education system in our country is broken and we’re breaking it further with all of our uninspired solutions.
I guess if that’s our goal, then we’re “racing to the top” right on schedule.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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294 comments Add your comment
Mary Elizabeth
March 11th, 2013
3:26 pm
In my opinion, education should not be about threatening either teachers or students, but about ensuring student growth. A threatening school environment does not lend itself toward fostering student growth. Again, education should not be run like a business. They require different models for success.
OriginalProf
March 11th, 2013
3:33 pm
@ Private Citizen. LOL. Thanks.
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
3:54 pm
As a constant reader/requent poster – just an observation/comment
If your post is longer than the original post, or is so long that less than half of it fits on my decently-large screen at one time, even if broken into 2-3 paragraphs, I’m not reading it & I suspect most don’t. Although apparently if others post as long as you, & reply to you, apparently some do. I know I can get wordy, but wow. Been meaning to say that for a long time!
OK, keep up the good work . . .
why???
March 11th, 2013
4:17 pm
anonymous, why are you so hung up about mace? i have been with mace for years now and would not think about teaching without mace. on all of the mace literature, the teachers are promised that their mace membership is confidential. when you want your administrator to know that you have mace in your, trust me —- you get instant respect.
anonymous, you must be an administrator just trying to trash macs anonymously.
home-tutoring parent
March 11th, 2013
4:35 pm
Private Citizen,
Finland did a complete transform on their schools, starting ca. 35 years ago. They were following the Prussian model, which America adopted too, and their kids were in Europe’s lower half. They decided to make education-major students (future teachers) be high performers, in the realm of doctors, make them take the same university classes, and earn high grades. Completing a master’s degree is required.
Do you realize that in America today, most states’ teachers programs issue diplomas and certificates to teach to young people who have a 2.5 overall GPA, and a 2.75 GPA in education-specific and subject-area courses that grads will teach?
Finland does great on PISA. The US ties Russia, the old USSR. Look it up, it’s true. (Why can’t we beat the Russians? Is it because the Soviet scheme to communize America worked?)
Are teachers paid well enough? Personally, I think great math, physical science and computer science teachers should be paid $60k or so to start–whatever it takes to get 90th+ percentile Tech grads. Those over age 50 should be earning $100k+. If they get a promotion offer to administrate, salary-matching to keep them teaching classes is in order.
For regular teachers, LIVE RESPONSIBLY. A two-teacher-couple Georgia family age 50 earns over $100k per 9-month year. With summer employment the couple can hit $130k easily.
This is not, “Teachers are soo poor.” If teachers want to be irresponsible, and divorce, subjecting themselves and their children to the hardship of dropping from the quite-comfy upper-middle-class, to the struggling median, well, that’s their choice.
reality check
March 11th, 2013
4:46 pm
@Google “NEA” and “Union”, your repeated attempts to belittle someone because they are unemployed is disgusting.
Bootney wins this one hands down. All he had to do was let you show what a jerk you are, which you did very effectively.
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
4:49 pm
As for my own posts I would recommend reading them quickly in order to miss most of my frequent typos, but then you would miss my brilliance, so I would prefer you ignore them. The typos . . . not the posts. Well, you can ignore them too, at your own peril.
Georgia coach
March 11th, 2013
4:57 pm
@ why. Respect? Hardly . It means you let trotter separate you from $500 annually.
paulo977
March 11th, 2013
4:58 pm
Mary E “Students’ test results should not be used as a threat to teachers’ pay or to teachers’ job security, as might occur in a business climate. In education, there are many factors, beyond test results, which must be considered as to why specific students may not be functioning on par with their peers. Moreover, when students’ test results are used for punitive purposes toward teachers, the entire educational climate will change to one of tenseness and fear, and that type of educational environment will adversely effect both students and teachers”
________________________________________________________
Mary , when I worked in the school during the Clinton era that is the way we utilized tests and then came the Bush era and NCLB . That was a disaster!! . I had hoped that with the advent of the Obama administration things would go back to being EDUCATIONAL . Unfortunately I was wrong as we now have ‘races’ that threaten teachers AND kids
home-tutoring parent
March 11th, 2013
5:03 pm
Chamblee Dad,
You have to review what kind of reading instruction you received. Look-say, whole-language may be your problem. I learned phonics, much of it at home, referring to Webster’s, and Funk & Wagnalls at school. Check your kids’ classrooms. Do your kids and their peers have enough computers to enable them to go to the dictionary and see how word-pronunciation breaks down?
The English language, written alphabetically, tracing an idea first promoted in the Mediterranean, whose genius concept was that spoken sounds could be represented by symbols, is AMAZING.
Look-say, whole-language instruction, with picture cues, guarantees mass-illiteracy.
In college, I discovered the Oxford English Dictionary. Wow! My K-12 schools didn’t have it. Does your kids’ school have OED? I eventually bought the micro-print version, with a dome magnifying glass. It shows words’ usages, in sentences, going back to the Middle Ages.
My mom gave me her Webster’s Third International, two years ago. A fine dictionary. Not as good as OED. Not even close.
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
5:04 pm
@Bootney After being so lazy as to never bothering to google your name, finally did, not sure why today, right now, but I must say very clever. After reading a few of your posts I’m now feeling a little hypnotized myself. Not sure if it’s your intellect & wit, or my stupor from reading the “quantity not quality” posters.
My own name pales in comparison, I humbly bow. Until I have reason to disagree with you. Then . . . well I pity the fool . . .
Candor a
March 11th, 2013
5:13 pm
Bootney: A very low teaching salary (at GPC) is what keeps me from moving out of DeKalb County and what keeps my children in county schools. Fortune has smiled upon my family, though. Both of my children were just admitted to the magnet program, so we no longer have to suffer the constant stress of worrying about the horrible local schools.
But that’s selfish, I know.
The success of the DeKalb children lucky enough to attend academic theme elementary schools and the magnet schools should get more attention from the system. Wy aren’t these programs gradually broadened until all DeKalb schools offer the same high level of education?
home-tutoring parent
March 11th, 2013
5:22 pm
I like Dr. Trotter’s posts. But listening to him speak, I can’t follow him. Maybe he intentionally “deforms” to gutteral language, I don’t know.
http://www.theteachersadvocate.com/
Play the tape.
He just doesn’t SPEAK to enlightened peoples. If he is doing a carney-con, I get it, but I don’t think carney-con is going to advance Georgia’s interests
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
5:22 pm
@ Home “You have to review what kind of reading instruction you received.” Could be, or maybe reading long rambling posts – almost incoherent, that bring to mind an image of someone wearing an aluminium foil helmet, puts me down for the count.
That, and reading the self-aggrandizing treatise on your intellect & superior education. Please publish an autobiography & provide the link to it on Amazon so we can just all buy a copy.
Perhaps post a few links to your IQ scores while you are at it.
So you’re teling me to buy a dictonary? Does an online bookmark count?
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
5:24 pm
I keep hearing this tune in my head:
“Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I quite want to be
Your mountains so lofty
Your treetops so tall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all, Finland has it all
Candora
March 11th, 2013
5:26 pm
Also, rather than spending boatloads of money trying to develop school curricula every few years, why not just google “Massachusetts.” Evidently, they have an excellent track record for K12 education.
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
5:31 pm
@home I will say this: I think all parents should be a “home-tutoring parents”
I try to live it everyday for my 3, and I think it shows. Especially in science & social studies, as they are in elementary school, and I find the depth they cover to be lacking, mainly due to the emphasis on teaching to reading/math test dictates from the system. But it gives me an opportunity share my love of learning with them.
So if you’ve lived it throughout your life, great. Seriously. You should proud & obviously are. But the tone, well . . .
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
5:33 pm
Gotta go, my 5 year old just brought me a stack of books for bedtime like she’s Olivia the Pig . . . I’ll be back later to check your progress.
home-tutoring parent
March 11th, 2013
5:47 pm
Chamblee Dad,
Double thumbs up. Your daughter brought books home. At some point she may meet a math/science nerd guy, and then that may be where electricity happens.
Chamblee Dad
March 11th, 2013
5:53 pm
Actually she brought them down from her room, turns out we have a few books in the house, hey, where’d they come from? But then she gave me a temporary break, in the shower trying to get clean without damaging her newly painted nails – thanks grandma. She must be pretty smart, she’s using a hand-puppet as a washcloth. Problem solving for the real world.
Dr. John Trotter
March 11th, 2013
7:13 pm
@ Anonymous in DeKalb: I don’t know of any union or association which puts its membership numbers on the front page of its website. I could be wrong. I know that we don’t at MACE but it is no one’s business who the members are or how many members there are. It’s only our business. The same for other companies like Chick fil-A. I think that Truett Cathy’s income is still estimated by this newspaper and other publications because this information is held private. Does this invalidate the sumptuous broasted chicken sandwich for which he’s responsible? I don’t think so.
I said from the very beginning that we, unlike other organizations, were not going to lie about the numbers or puff the numbers. You must have forgotten that I worked six years for GAE, and I can assure that GAE “cooked the books,” so to speak, for the public. In other words, the membership number that was constantly fed to the press was never the real count…at least when I worked for GAE. We were given the real numbers at staff meetings but we saw the inflated numbers that were so often fed to the media.
One time, a reporter asked me our membership count, and I facetiously said something like 100,000…to the reporter’s instant disbelief. He knew that I was just being facetious. I said: “Well, you believe PAGE when they give you numbers like 75,000 or 80,000. Why don’t you believe me?” The point that I was making was that you don’t really know how many members that PAGE or GAE have. You are just taking their word. The difference with me is that I am not going to tell you any numbers. Therefore, you know that I am not lying.
Our membership is naturally, I am sure, lower than GAE’s and PAGE’s because we are much younger as an organization. MACE began 18 years ago. GAE has been around since 1857. Ford has been around longer in the U. S. than Mercedes. There are more Fords on the road than Mercedes. I have had both. I prefer the Mercedes. It drives better. Numbers mean nothing. What matters is quality.
The MACE membership is held in strict confidence, as someone noted earlier. There may come a time when the member wants the administrator to know that he or she is a member of MACE. When that hour comes, it is usually a rude awakening for the administrator. I have had so many teachers guffaw over the reaction of their administrator when the administrator finds out that they are members of MACE. The administrators’ harassment usually ends pretty quickly as they “get religion,” as we say at the MACE Office.
This is really why the teachers join MACE. They certainly don’t join because we do good spelling bee contests for the children. We have never put on a single spelling bee contest. We don’t give tote bags to new teachers. Never have. We don’t do the fluffy stuff or any of the useless stuff. Do you think that we give a rat’s rear end what they think of us at the Capitol? Ha! Do you actually think that they respect GAE and PAGE? So, I suppose that the ridiculous buy-in to the horrible Race to the Top program is a show of respect for GAE and PAGE. Wow. With friends like that, you don’t need enemies. Or, the onerous and stupid new evaluation program for Georgia teachers is respecting GAE’s and PAGE’s heroic lobbying efforts, eh? Ha! No, we don’t waste our time. (Don’t forget: I used to work for GAE. I know that is does no good.) We fight for the individual teachers…one member at a time.
By the way, most of our members do hail from the 28 counties in Metro Atlanta. But, for the record, I will state that our membership stretches from the border of Tennessee in the north to the border of Florida in the south and from the border of Alabama to the west all the way east to the board of South Caroline. That’s all that I will tell you. The mystic of the MACE membership is one of the things that we did right, even if we have to pat ourselves on the back. We also refused to do payroll deduction. Another stroke of brilliance, right? It’s driving people crazy like our friend Anonymous of DeKalb.
Oh, by the way, home-tutoring mom, I am sorry that my voice doesn’t sit well with you. I have had many people tell me that I sound like I am from Louisiana. Nope. Born and raised right here in Georgia. Seventh Generation Georgian. It’s not as bad as James Carville’s, is it? Ha!
Georgia coach
March 11th, 2013
7:36 pm
Mace equals money wasted by incompetents and you do not scare administrators as we are under no obligation to deal with you.
Private Citizen
March 11th, 2013
7:45 pm
Hey coach, I hope you come from farming family because you sure have to do a lot of “gathering!” hi-yoo! http://www.doe.k12.ga.us/School-Improvement/Teacher-and-Leader-Effectiveness/Documents/LAPS%20Standards%20Rubrics%209-17-2012.pdf
(I’m sorry. Really, I am.)(No one deserves getting overseen-by-rubric)
Dr. John Trotter
March 11th, 2013
8:06 pm
Georgia coach, It’s good to see you again. I guess that this is the week that disgruntled administrators come out in droves to bravely criticize MACE anonymously. I note that you use the collective “we” to identify yourself as an administrator. You are indeed obligated to deal with the teachers for whom we file grievances and whom we represent them in hearings, to read the letters that we send to you as well as to the superintendents and the school board members about your abusive and incompetent actions, and, of course, you may simply look out your window and enjoy our pickets! We use bright-colored and festive signs. The teachers never tire of seeing them.
By the way, please forgive the typos in my previous posts. Mystic should have been mystique. I just type too fast, thanks to Ms. Knight, my typing teacher, at Jordan Vocational High School in Columbus, Georgia!
bootney farnsworth
March 11th, 2013
8:14 pm
@ Candor a
sorry, your dog is not hunting. I was with GPC for several decades before Tricoli spent us out of existence and I got RIFed along with several hundred others. my reward for sticking by the school during a decade when pay was frozen and benefits skyrocketed. along with the administrative staff.
just how many VPS, AVPs, directors and assistant directors does a school need?
-how many GPC VPs does it take to secure the salaries of the custodial staff? we’ll never know.
during my years one of my kids needed to get get out of public school for awhile. I had limited resources so I did three things:
-cancelled all our fluff: eating out, Starbucks, premium cable, ect
-talked to the school I enrolled the child in about scholarships and ways to offset the costs
-took a second, and at times a third job.
yeah, I missed a lot of time with my family, worked 7 days a week for months at a time, had little sleep and zero intimacy time with Ms. Bootney. but it was what I need to tend to my child, so I cowboy’d up and did it.
since you work at GPC you should know from firsthand experience the amount of kids who came to us from desperate situations whose families laid out everything they had to send their kids to the best school possible
bootney farnsworth
March 11th, 2013
8:26 pm
@ Dr. John
nobody has a voice more annoying than Carville. not even Pee Wee Herman.
(quick disclosure)
I’m not a MACE member, but I know of it. my brief flirtation with GAE soured me on all education advocacy groups until someone shows me with deeds it can and will stand for Georgia educators.
what I find sadly funny are the criticisms thrown at MACE/you. they do a better job illustrating the problems we face in Georgia more than anything you or I could articulate.
-reveal membership? in what universe would that make sense. conditions are so bad a faculty found to be a MACE member would be on the worse bus/lunch duties in the universe.
bootney farnsworth
March 11th, 2013
8:34 pm
@ Dr. John
how to I reach you off line? I’ve got a couple questions not for public consumption
Dr. John Trotter
March 11th, 2013
8:54 pm
Bootney, just call the MACE Office and tell them that you and I are friends on Maureen’s blog and want to call my cell phone. I look forward to talking to you.
I also rather enjoy the criticisms from Anonymous in DeKalb and Georgia Coach. One administrator (good friend of mine) once observed: “John, these people just don’t realize that you are like a hearty pig…you love to wrestle in the mud!” Ha! I don’t know if that was a compliment or not.
Mary Elizabeth
March 11th, 2013
9:48 pm
@ Paulo977, 4:58 pm
Paulo, I have seen too many students fail simply because they have been misplaced instructionally that I must advocate for testing to determine correct placement. However, testing should not be done as a threat either teachers or to students. Testing of students should not be overused or misused.
All I can do is keep stating my thoughts based on my 35 years in education. I agree with you that testing is being overused and misused today.
Private Citizen
March 11th, 2013
10:53 pm
Prof, when I’m stuck in one of those computer education training “workshops” I usually just install my own software applications from the web as I can not / do not / will not / do not want anything to do with that cash cow… MS Office. No.thank.you.will.not.use.ever.forever.for.anything.ever.again.
psst, prof, there’s a world out there This is what real computing people do for fun. https://www.suse.com/success/ them and.. NASA… and aircraft carriers… and a few other things. It’s called secure architecture no problems computing ever (there is such a thing).
Private Citizen
March 11th, 2013
11:01 pm
Mary Elizabeth, your view on testing is relevant and makes me to think of assembling a collection of one-page monographs based on “best practices.” -not going to happen this week, but it can be done.
home-tutoring parent
March 11th, 2013
11:16 pm
Here’s my problem. Schools have been dumbed down. But kids they’re still taking smart kids.
I’m not seeing any comments here from 4th grade teachers that 30% of their 9 year old students should be in 5th grade, 10% should be in 6th grade, 5% in 7th grade, 1% in 8th grade.
I’m not seeing any high school teachers here who say 20% of their 15-16 year old students really should be in community college, to enable them to receive a superior pre-university education.
Why do AP, when better courses are available? IB? The UNESCO program, originally designed to enable traveling diplomatic-corp’ kids and then businessmen’s kids to get a basic college-prep education, so they could attend their home-nation universities, albeit not the best, that’s the answer for American Black and Hispanic kids? Are you serious?
It’s hard to investigate IB, because they keep a lock on their materials–for example you can’t go to Barnes and Noble to find IB-course materials, Kaplan and Princeton Review don’t have IB-test-prep courses. What a great educational experiment! Its subject matter is kept secret from the public so it must be awesome!
Private Citizen
March 12th, 2013
1:30 am
h-t parent, the government districts detest IB because it interferes with their power structure. You saw the rough treatment APS chief Davis meted out to the IB high school. IB governance actually uses sophsticated education people. Their headquarters is in Switzerland. I have a lot of respect for them, but they really grind the local power-types who insist on grinding everything down to management-by-intimidation ala you-must-work-in-fear Arne Duncan. IB does not plant the seeds of “you must work in fear.” The territorial management power players completely can not deal with it.
Private Citizen
March 12th, 2013
1:32 am
You can likely get / purchase IB materials from the IB website, although they have a sequential review process before approving a school for “IB.” It is possible that they do not support using IB materials and curriculum for home schooling and such.
Georgia Coach
March 12th, 2013
8:52 am
John, your picket in Macon was not even mentioned in the Macon Telegraph. Furthermore, you told people in Macon to get more people to join before you would help.
If only one member is from Macon, you should have helped, not just stick your hand out for more money.
When Maureen allows you to get on here and shamelessly shill for your organization, I will be around to point out that in many ways you are a fraud.
Just Wating
March 12th, 2013
8:56 am
@Bootney
The people you complain of in corporate America are simply the products of the school systems rife with the bad teachers I have spoken about. There is enough dead wood in just the DeKalb County Schools to build several humongous cruise ships. Too many teachers are uncaring, out of touch and just taking up space while continuing to collect a pay check. What other job gives you 14+ weeks of time off every year, plus every conceivable government holiday, sick time and personal time? Many of the people in the school system would not survive outside of that system. Is corporate America perfect? Certainly no, but suffice to say there are more competent people working there than in our failing “public education” sector. Are there good teachers out there? Certainly yes, but I see they are in the minority and have their hands tied by inept administrators. If a business were run like the DeKalb County Schools, it would have been closed and shuttered many years ago.
Georgia Coach
March 12th, 2013
10:56 am
@ PC the TKES is actually a huge improvement over GTOI, although that may not be saying much.
OriginalProf
March 12th, 2013
11:45 am
@ Private Citizen.
Universities certainly don’t have “computer education training workshops” for their professors. I was still happily using the typewriter in the late 1990s. Like Dr. John Trotter, I’m rather a Luddite. I mostly do my research the old-fashioned way, by reading books and articles (though computer databases can direct me to them). No problem in publishing though, for I have 5 books with reputable presses to my credit.
There’s a world out there (italics intended, for I still can’t figure out your directions to Dr. Trotter), and it’s called “the human imagination.”
Private Citizen
March 12th, 2013
12:16 pm
Coach,
GTOI “Georgia Teacher Observation Instrument” I shudder. Yes, I have to admit that maybe there is some good to TKES/LKES but it sure is tedious and I’ve been through some of that it seems that the administrator’s intent outweighs a neutral reporting. There is some much improvisation required of many teachers. Weird how there is so little example information on “how it’s done” yet plentiful demand to “invent!” and sprinkle magic pixie dust and stuff. Maybe they are moving away from requiring “essential question” and all of that garbage to be posted on the walls. It really is low and really is garbage. It is just highly distracting to doing quality concept work. From the teacher perspective there is a conflict, as in “I have my real job teaching the students” and then “I have a second job posting the required fake-information-front for the state with their required sayings and such.” This conflict leads to burn out and it is directly due to state interference and occupying the classroom with required petty ritual and literally making-people-do-things.
There so little coordination. One time I was making a lesson and I go to the state published ancillary materials to go with the standards pacing guide and the “resources” for the lesson are graduate level academic research papers, like some link they just grabbed from somewhere, and I’m supposed to use this to teach kids? I can deal with that, but not posting their “essential question” from the same folk. Basically, it is an outlier. I doubt anyone anywhere else is making people do this stuff, certainly not outside of the US system. I see it – and feel it – as nothing but harassment of teachers and meddling from offices far far away from the classroom. And then they want to use these rituals to grade you on your work?
Seriously, I do not know how you keep your sanity with the level of incoherence from the state-mandated trainings you must endure.
Mary Elizabeth
March 12th, 2013
12:24 pm
@ Private Citizen, 11:01 pm, March 11, 2013
Thank you for your words.
I can only state – and restate – the educational principles which I found successful with a wide range of students, ages 5 – 18+. It is my hope that, in the near future, these educational principles will be more fully implemented within public schools, k – 12.
John Galt
March 12th, 2013
1:00 pm
Seriously, the Oxford comma (the serial comma for those who are less pretentious or more interested in clarity) is your best example of the silliness of standardized testing? Oh, woe to be a teacher in the vile throes of accountability!
Rod Johnson
March 12th, 2013
1:49 pm
He’s right that the current model is broken but 100% wrong to “encourage teacher unions, not vilify them”. Public-sector unions result in teachers being more focused on salary and less on teaching. They result in strikes and parents scrambling to find alternatives for children.
This teacher makes a few decent points but Union Support is not one of them, nor is his disdain of parental choice. Parents know what’s best for their child, not some union member.
Fed Up
March 12th, 2013
2:56 pm
No, teacher unions are not the solution to fixing education. The last thing on the mind of a teacher’s union is educating the students. Besides, DeKalb and most of the other counties around here could not afford the benefits the union goons would be demanding. Unions were once needed in this country, but have long since outlived their usefullness. Brining unions into the mix will just make things much worse.
ColonelJack
March 12th, 2013
9:25 pm
The whole idea of posting “essential questions” and “standards” seemed silly and wasteful to me when it was proposed – or rather, ordered. I complied. I played their game. I still got shafted.
But I think I finally figured out what did me in … for most of the year I had a sign up in the classroom that read, “Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, pass laws about teaching.”
I think I offended somebody … HA!