Monday, March 16, 2009
Taking On Education
I found the Obama speech on education....on the White House website. Doh!
It's about 30 minutes long if you're interested in watching it. The title suggests a certain confrontational tack. I found it to be somewhat confrontational, but not offensive. And I found it to lack quite a bit of detail. But I s'pose that's not what Obama does best. He's best at the bigger picture, the longer view, the eyes on the prize type thing. I can accept that about him.
Certain things, because of the lack of specific detail, left me wondering how the heck he thinks those things are going to happen. He was very good at acknowledging that good education is based on "out of the box" type thinking. It's not about how well you can take the test, it's about creative problem solving, higher reasoning, and, more often than not, cooperative skills...learning and problem solving with your peers. So, if this is his big picture (as it is with most teachers regardless of content area)how will he measure this for teacher merit pay? How do you measure non-linear progress? How do you measure those leaps in cognition and understanding that all teacher's strive to facilitate?
You know what? I really don't think most teachers give a rat's ass about bonuses. Just give us a decent salary and let us work.
But I'm very, very glad he addressed all concerned parties and their respective responsibilities. Teachers, administrators, the larger community, students and parents. Parents are and always will be the child's first and best...or worst...teacher. The best teacher in the world doesn't hold a candle to whatever the child goes home to every day. If the parents are caring and do whatever they can, the best teacher in the world pales in comparison. If the parents are neglectful or abusive, the best teacher in the world won't even make a dent. Children learn what they live. My parents had this poem in our dining room when we were growing up. 'Nuff said.
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3 comments:
I didn't watch the video. One thing that I've always wondered about is tenure. Do you think it's a good thing as it's implemented? Sometimes I think of poor teachers I've had in the past that retained their jobs even though they weren't very effective.
Ah...good question Grasshopper.
Tenure, like anything else, can be abused. And it certainly is. All tenure means, legally, is that you can't fire me without clear documentation of my bad teaching and a fair trial. That's it. There's no hocus-pocus or mystical quality there.
Any ineffective tenured teachers are the result of administrators not doing their jobs. I have informal evaluations every year and formal evaluations every three years. With very specific goals and benchmarks I'm s'posed to be meeting. Luckily, spelling isn't one of them. If I fall below in any of these, I'm s'posed to be given a professional corrective plan to put me back on course. If I don't do that, I'm given more serious reprimands and so on and so forth. Then, if my principal still wanted to fire me, I have right to defend myself to the school board. Non-tenured teachers can just be told bu-bye.
Probably your best and worst teachers are all tenured. The worst are just phoning it in, not being bad enough to warrant all the hoop-la a principal has to go through to get rid of them.
The best, having the security to not be looking over their shoulder at every little thing they do thinking it'll get them fired. They have both the experience and position of safety to be one of the ones you still remember.
Like everything else in public education, it could certainly use a re-invention and an update for the 21st century. I still believe experienced teachers need some sort of protection from budget cuts (let's fire the good teachers who've been here for 20 years and hire the cheaper, 1st year teachers), from the capricious nature of principals (she didn't laugh at my jokes or go out with me for drinks, I think I'll fire her), and from ignorant, enabling parents (she gave My Precious a D+ when obviously My Precious deserves an A! Fire her!).
I'll be glad to forward your solution to this situation to the NEA.
My solution is to make you in charge of public education in this country. Okay, that's done... what's next?
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