On Serving The Wrong Masters
Recently, I've been caught in a real bind. No matter where I turn, I'm being told what a lousy educator I am. As a college professor (one of my jobs), I am being told by the Holmes Group that my courses aren't "authentic'' enough. As a grade school teacher (another job I hold), I've recently been informed by the U.S. Education Department in a report titled "National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent'' that any students I teach whose abilities are above average are bored beyond tears in my 5th-grade class. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards keeps telling me that if I was a really good teacher I'd want a credential from them that attests to that, and a veteran player in the game, the Educational Testing Service, has a new idea called Praxis, which is supposed to eliminate incompetent teachers from our ranks. Through Praxis, a first-year teacher will have to spend $1,000 or so to be assessed as competent (or not) by someone they've most likely never met before and shall probably never see again. Now, there's a good way to spend some of those big bucks my undergraduates will make as beginning teachers.
The bind I'm in is this: Even though I think I'm helping a heck of a lot more students than I am hurting, one panel of "experts'' after another is telling me that that's not true.
Working from deficiency models that assume incompetence, one "blue ribbon'' commission after another is trying to convince the American public that our entire educational system is a shambles. At first, this message was a hard sell to John Q. Public; survey after survey found that Americans ranked their neighborhood schools as "good,'' even if they weren't so laudatory about schools somewhere else. But now, the tide is turning. Thanks to many "reformers,'' American education is being treated as an international laughingstock. Akin to the snake\oil salesman of a bygone era, Holmes, the N.B.P.T.S., the E.T.S., the Education Department, and others are offering magic elixirs that will cure all our woes. Unlike the snake-oil savants, though, no money-back guarantees are being offered if we're...
This article is available to subscribers only.
To keep reading this article and more, subscribe now or purchase this article.
Subscribe to Education Week and Save
Get a full year and save up to 45%!
Viewed
Emailed
Recommended
Commented
- Elementary School Teacher
- Success Academy Charter Schools, New York, NY
- Superintendent
- Pinellas County Schools, Pinellas County, FL
- Program Coordinator
- Institute for Educational Advancement, South Pasadena, CA
- Middle School Language Arts Teacher
- TEAM Schools, Newark, NJ
- Project Manager- (Hawaii)
- Pearson Education, HI
