First, my sincere apologies for being very absent-minded lately. I will be trying to post more regularly on the blog to help create a more continuous dialogue.
Second, Tim's post about the poor teachers "feeding" the achievement gap was really interesting. The first Newsweek article was fascinating! I can begin to understand this concept and the difficulty in defining what is a bad teachers. Additionally, it is unfortunate teacher unions do not place more emphasis and/or encourage skills development for improving teaching performance. I would think, being in the business of teaching, that teachers would need to meet some union standard or participate in career development or evaluation standards. But then again, how do you implement this? How do you enforce it without inserting more government bureaucracy? Hmmm....
What has prompted changes in the teaching profession, where recruited teachers are not up to the previous standards? It was a surprise to realize that weaker teachers were often paired with weaker students. Somehow this does not seem reasonable. Teachers should be held to a high standard with strict consequences. Teachers are responsible for future generations!
Tim, what are your follow-up thoughts? What do you think about charter schools?
Well....as a parallel to the educational system, there is also a gap in the criminal justice system. I think I am going to research and find some supporting facts and data for this concept. However, for now, I will begin to explain my perspective. First, I do not believe the gap exists on the law enforcement level. This stage is simply acting upon the commission of crimes and their influence more or less ends after suspects are booked into jail and perhaps lasts into a trial. I believe the majority of the gap occurs between the court and the method for corrections.
Prison and jail are simply no longer deterrents. Recidivism is on the rise and many "repeat" offenders are continuing to commit many of the same crimes with little evidence of stopping. In the State of Washington, shorter prison terms seem to be a popular trends among courts, for example, in a particular case, a drunk driver who was travelling 50 mph in a 25 mph zone who hit a pedestrian, killing them, and left the scene only to be arrested by detectives 24 hours later, recieved seven years in prison. However, what is not often revealed is only 2/3 of the sentence is served while incarcerated. Often times, the last 3rd (or more) is servied while in community custody (probation or parole).
Since this post is beginning to ramble on....my final thought is the need for creating programs geared to changing behavior through other means than incarceration alone. I support skill development programs, labor-intensive programs, counseling, and substance abuse education. More to come....
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It's odd to think that the weakest teachers tend to be concentrated in "high-need" areas, but in my view it is a consequence of the way things work right now.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes any job attractive, for many people? Money and/or resources. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods tend to be better supported, meaning they have more resources, meaning they tend to be more attractive places to teach. As long as the school picks the best teacher that applied for the job, the whole staff will tend to be pretty good.
Furthermore, there is a dirty practice that isn't helping the "high-need" schools. Teacher unions have made it extremely difficult to fire teachers based on performance. It's much easier for a school to transfer a teacher to another one.
It's not too hard to put two and two together, and realize that a teacher is most likely to get transferred to a position that is proving difficult to fill. Where are those? The places that don't have support and resources - in other words, the places identified as "high-need."
There will always be more attractive positions than others, so I think it's unrealistic to expect perfectly equal access to quality teachers, barring a full-blown revolution. However, the reality is that the least attractive positions are occupied by many educators that probably should be fired.
A real recipe for success, isn't it?