Class Action: Jacobin Activist Teacher's Handbook. Are Teachers Professionals? Analysis of the Professional Status of US Teachers by Jason T. Hilton. Slippery Rock UniversitySeptember 20, 2013 Abstract: In the United States, those who teach currently face opposition from a variety of sources that seek to weaken the professional status of teachers. This article seeks to better understand what it means to be professional and analyzes the teaching occupation for indicators of professional status. This analysis finds that even though teachers exhibit many qualities of professionals, their inability to claim specialized knowledge in a language that separates them from the lay public results in a weakening of their professional status that opens teachers to interference from education outsiders. Number of Pages in PDF File: 15 Keywords: Professional, professional status, teacher, education policy-making JEL Classification: I21 working papers series.
A video that shows why teachers are going out of their minds. The video below is not a parody. It shows Chicago Public School teachers in a professional development session that will make you understand why teachers are going out of their minds and to what extent administrators have infantilized teachers. Here is the video’s description on YouTube: This presenter was one of several consultants flown in from California and the United Kingdom for the Chicago Public Schools’ Office of Strategic School Support Services’ special network. This is a professional development for teachers of Saturday ISAT [Illinois Standards Achievement Test] preparation classes.
As educator Larry Ferlazzo says on his Web site about this video: Yes, you can make a lot of things look bad taken out of context, but I don’t think a case can be made that this is appropriate for any professional development, or classroom, context…. Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewish called it “sick” in this tweet: This is what PD looks like in Chicago. Chicago Teacher Explains the Infamous Viral PD Video She Shot - Living in Dialogue.
About two weeks ago I saw a video of a Chicago "professional development" session posted on Facebook. Shortly thereafter, it appeared here in Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet blog, and has been viewed more than 126,000 times since then. Today, for the first time, I share the firsthand account of the teacher who recorded this session. Due to the tense environment in Chicago, she has asked to remain anonymous, but was connected to me by a trusted source who has worked for years in the Chicago schools. I have verified her identity. Guest post by an anonymous Chicago teacher. This now viral video shows a consultant modeling a lesson to be taught to 5th and 6th graders. The professional development is part of Chicago Public Schools' OS4 network. Some have defended the video, saying that it may be out of context. Please stop for a moment and recite the script above in the style of the video.
To learn more about the Chicago Community's struggle around the ISAT, please check out these resources: Should the U.S. Follow South Korea's Education System? Advances in education: How to teach. Education standards: Best and brightest. A dozen basic guidelines for educators. D.C. teacher Vanessa Ford and student (By Amanda Voisard / The Washington Post) Do we really need education policies and practices to cover everything that goes on in the classroom?
Author Alfie Kohn says “no” and, below, offers basic guidelines that can really help teachers. Kohn is the author of 12 books about education and human behavior, including “The Schools Our Children Deserve,” “The Homework Myth,” and “Feel-Bad Education… And Other Contrarian Essays on Children & Schooling.” He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org. By Alfie Kohn To create the schools our children deserve, it’s probably not necessary to devise specific policies and practices for every occasion. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Teacher Training's Low Grade. Want to Ruin Teaching? Give Ratings. Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, and Value Added Measures. D Pink Eight brief points about “merit pay” for teachers. The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries. A Very Mean (But Maybe Brilliant) Way to Pay Teachers - Jordan Weissmann.
A Freakonomics author and a 'Genius Grant' winner suggest that giving teachers bonuses, then threatening to yank them away, might be the key to classroom success (Reuters) One of the great, early insights from the field of behavioral economics was that when it comes to handling money, most people are driven much more by fear than they are by greed. The concept is called "loss aversion. " Faced with a financial choice -- say, whether to sell a stock or hold onto it -- the majority of us are more likely to worry about blundering away what we already have than get excited about the prospect of adding to our bank accounts. We simply feel the sting of losing a buck more strongly than we do the joy of making one. In a new working paper, a group of high-profile academics have taken that well-worn principle and applied it to one of the most contentious topics in school reform: teacher pay.
Sound a bit harsh? But Levitt, Fryer and Co. argue that there's a serious problem with merit pay. Principal: Why our new educator evaluation system is unethical. Here’s a new post from award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York about the state’s controversial new educator evaluation system. Burris has for more than a year chronicled on this blog (she calls it Star Wars here , and other things here and here and here , for example) the implementation of the system, which ignores research by using student standardized test scores to assess teachers and which has already started to negatively impact young people. Burris was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.
She is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. By Carol Burris We take great pride in our Regents Diploma rate. Things educators could say but don’t. With reform policies based more on hope than data, you might think educators would speak up more than do. Why don’t they? Here’s some thoughts about why most stay quiet, from Robert Bligh, former general counsel of the Nebraska Association of School Boards. Bligh’s research interest involves the efficacy of the school reform efforts promoted by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act since its original adoption in 1965. He served as assistant professor at Doane College and was editor and publisher of the Nebraska School Law Reporter.
By Robert Bligh Many public policies – especially those established at the federal level – seem to be riddled with “reasons” that are based more on hope than data. Federal statutes governing public education have been based more on hope than data since at least 1965. I have long been surprised that these irrational policies have been adopted and readopted without serious objection by most education practitioners. 1. 2. 3. Education: The Invisible Profession. “I am an invisible man,” announces the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, adding: I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me….When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, of figments of their imaginations—indeed, everything and anything except me….That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact….you often doubt if you really exist….It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump back.
And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful. I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in….So I took to the cellar; I hibernated. I got away from it all. Teachers - Will We Ever Learn? Why Great Teachers Are Fleeing the Profession. Why Do Teachers Quit? - Liz Riggs. Richard Ingersoll taught high-school social studies and algebra in both public and private schools for nearly six years before leaving the profession and getting a Ph.D. in sociology. Now a professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s education school, he’s spent his career in higher ed searching for answers to one of teaching’s most significant problems: teacher turnover.
Teaching, Ingersoll says, “was originally built as this temporary line of work for women before they got their real job—which was raising families, or temporary for men until they moved out of the classroom and became administrators. That was sort of the historical set-up.” Ingersoll extrapolated and then later confirmed that anywhere between 40 and 50 percent of teachers will leave the classroom within their first five years (that includes the nine and a half percent that leave before the end of their first year.)
“One of the big reasons I quit was sort of intangible,” Ingersoll says. The 6 Ways Teachers Want To Change Schools. The results of the recently released MetLife Survey of the American Teacher weren’t surprising to many teachers, as it chronicled a steep decline in teacher job satisfaction. In fact, teachers’ job satisfaction is at its lowest level since 1987. Of the 1,000 teachers polled, only 39 percent claimed they were “very satisfied” with their profession. It is clear from the survey that American teachers are concerned with the state of their profession but more troubling to us, they are not being given a voice in school reform or educational initiatives–decisions usually made by people far removed from local school districts.
So, what do teachers want? We set out to conduct our own poll of educators and we asked only a single simple question: How would you improve the educational experience of your students? Smaller Class Sizes A desire for smaller class sizes dominated the responses we received. Unfortunately, we know that in many school districts class sizes continue to get larger. More Books. Teacher: How my job went from great to infuriating. (By Linda Davidson – The Washington Post) Here’s a call for the end of high-stakes standardized tests from a teacher who chronicles how he approached his job before and after No Child Left Behind. David Patten is an award-winning history teacher, college lecturer, and the author of eighteen articles published in various magazines, including “History Today,” “Military History,” “Man at Arms,” “Arms Collecting,” “Medal News,” and, most recently, the Journal of the Orders and Medals Society of America. A version of this appeared on George Mason University’s History News Network website.
By David Patten From the moment I was hired to teach history and government at a public high school to the moment, years later, when I walked away, I had the audacity to believe that I had been hired for my expertise. And why not? It did not stop there. My school system’s finest superintendent was the one who refused to micromanage. Under that system, virtually nothing was off limits. With apologies to T.S. Why Not Ask Teachers How They Would Improve Our Schools? We were sitting in a Starbucks in Arlington, Va.
It was our first meeting. Previously, Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and I had talked by phone and exchanged blog posts on education. His campaign staff had reached out to a number of educational bloggers, as he was seriously considering running for president and thought education was a good issue for him. Since he was going to be in my neighborhood, we agreed to get together. At one point I mentioned that the governors had just had a meeting on education, and he nodded. I remarked that each had brought a business leader to the meeting. The governor was surprised, and acknowledged he had never thought of it. That was in 2005. That was not unusual, and would not be unusual today. I come to this subject from an unusual perspective.
But mine is only one voice. But being included at the table may not matter if the voice is not listened to. Teachers are being left out of the process of designing national standards and this is a recipe for disaster. Chicago school day: A teacher responds. By Xian Barrett, Special to CNN Editor’s note: Xian Barrett teaches law and Chicago history at Gage Park High School in Chicago, Illinois.
In 2009, he was selected one of ten Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellows by the U.S. Department of Education. This article is in response to comments on a previous story about Chicago teacher work days. Educators will often observe with some frustration that our profession is one of the few that people from all walks of life feel comfortable commenting on and often criticizing. If some people’s perceptions of what we do with our workdays does not match up with the reality, we have an obligation to inform them of that reality.
Much has been made of the shortness of our school day, especially here in Chicago. I can understand how that sounds like a short day. However, to count a teacher’s working minutes by looking at the time we are directly teaching students is like only counting the minutes that a dentist has the drill in your mouth. Teachers' Views on Elevating the Teaching Profession. The Best Teachers in the World. Favor experience over credentials, hire the most qualified, and let principals lead. By John E. Chubb. For all the talk among political leaders about being first in the world in math and science or otherwise having the best schools and highest achievement in the world, there is little talk about having the best teachers.
Yet research is increasingly clear that that is exactly what the aim of top achievement requires. Consider: the United States is now in the process of trying to establish high common academic standards for public school students. Today’s teachers, however, do not come close to meeting the academic standards being set for students. Today’s teachers don’t even meet the academic standards set for their own students. U.S. education policy shows no serious intent to reduce this gap. Once on the job, teachers are rarely held accountable for student achievement, even though their schools have been held to account since NCLB was adopted in 2002. The list goes on. John E. The Mystery of Good Teaching. Who should be recruited to fill the two to three million K-12 teaching positions projected to come open during the next decade? What kinds of knowledge and training should these new recruits have? These are the questions confronting policymakers as a generation of teachers retires at the same time that the so-called baby boom echo is making its way through the education system.
Key to answering these questions is knowing how much influence teachers have over student achievement and what specific teacher attributes lead to higher student achievement. For instance, does holding a master’s degree make one a better teacher? Do the best teachers hail from elite universities? Did they earn high GPAs in college? Did they major in the subject they are teaching? These questions are particularly relevant given that researchers have raised concerns about the overall quality of today’s teaching workforce. Overall Impact Which Attributes? Not all studies reach the same conclusion. Little Guidance. The 7-lesson schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto. Is the Lecture Dead? - Richard Gunderman. Why School Should Focus on Engagement Instead of Lectures. Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem « Isegoria. Teachers’ Most Powerful Role? Adding Context. Rethink Teacher Appreciation Week. What teachers don’t need (but are getting anyway) - The Answer Sheet.
5 simple ways to help your child's teacher. Crazy things people say to teachers – and how to respond. The Learning Pyramid: Does It Point Teachers in the Right Direction? Power of Art: Can painting improve your grades? Why Teach and Study English? Number of the Week: U.S. Teachers’ Hours Among World’s Longest - Real Time Economics. What teachers need and reformers ignore: time to collaborate. The End of Teachers Unions. Why I’m Getting Arrested: A North Carolina Teacher Speaks Out. How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us by Gail Collins. Chicago's teachers could strike a blow for organised labour globally | Richard Seymour. ChicagoNow. Seattle’s Teacher Uprising: High School Faculty Faces Censure for Boycotting Standardized MAP Tests.
System Failure: The Collapse of Public Education - Page 1 - News. WAR ON EDUCATION AND STUDENTS. Michigan school district lays off all its teachers | The Lookout. At Occupy the DOE, A Push for Democratic, Not Corporate, Education Reform. “Indescribably insane”: A public school system from hell. Why Arne Duncan is threatening to withhold funds for poor kids. Predicting success in football and teaching.
Atlanta Cheating Scandal Lesson: We Must Return to Real Teaching and Learning | Education on GOOD. Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’ Confusion in Atlanta as Educators Are Set to Be Jailed. How teacher turnover harms student achievement | Center for Education Policy Analysis. San Diego Charter Teachers: Bullying Contributed to Death of Colleague - Living in Dialogue.