The skeptical take of The American Prospect‘s Dana Goldstein on the Obama adminstration’s promotion of individual merit pay for educators has led to a widely read exchange on a number of different blogs. Take a look at Matt Yglesias’ two posts, here and here, as well as the comments by The Quick and Ed’s Kevin Carey, the Core Knowledge blog’s Robert Pondiscio, and the conservative Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle.
What is interesting about the exchange is the commonplace conceptual slippage between the idea of individual merit pay and the broader concept of differentiated pay. More »
A teacher in Grimsby, England was recently suspended and is threatened with termination for “bringing the school into disrepute.” Her offense was that in a private conversation on Facebook she referred to a particular class as “just as bad” as another class on the grade. She said that and nothing more.
An investigation was launched after a colleague, maybe more out of ambition than conscience, ratted out the impeccably-credentialed teacher who now, despite her immaculate record, may be booted from the livelihood of her dreams.
Certainly no teacher should indulge in destructive criticism of students whether they are individuals or groups, identified or not. And the proverbial line must be drawn somewhere on the much trodden pedagogical field of scrutiny. But the human frailties of teachers tend to be tested on the job more so than is the case in most other lines of work. More »
Four high-definition closed circuit television cameras and microphones have been installed in the classrooms of each of hundreds of British schools and the authorities do not deny that they are determined to expand this surveillance on a massive scale.
They claim that the footage, of which the principal is in charge, is used primarily for the purpose of teacher training but that collateral benefits include the inhibiting of bullying and students’ false allegations against teachers.
The phrase “teacher training” is widely viewed as code for teachers’ forced acquiescence to principals’ micromanagement with the sovereign right of the principal to fire, without challenge, any teacher deemed noncompliant or incompetent for reasons that they need not articulate. More »
Learning is all about motivation. Many students will race around a track in sheets of rain and howling wind. In any chosen athletic contest or training they will wring every ounce of energy from their psyche and body. They will not wait to be driven, but will drive themselves almost to collapse and be exhilarated by team loyalty and pride in their personal self-discipline. They will revere and obey the slaphappy coach who makes Marine drill instructors seem mellow by comparison as he bulldozes his students to victory over the limitations of others and of themselves.
Why will many of these same kids despise the classroom teacher for insisting they bring a pencil to school each day? More »
The United Federation of Teachers mourns the passing of one of our own, Frank McCourt.
Before Frank became famous as the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Angela’s Ashes, Tis and Teacher Man, he was a teacher of English in New York City public high schools. For nearly thirty years, he taught writing in the classrooms of Staten Island’s McKee Vocational High School and Stuyvesant High School. He was an elected member of the UFT’s Delegate Assembly, and the 2006 winner of the union’s highest honor, the John Dewey Award. He served as the chairman of New Yorkers for Smaller Classes.
McCourt was always outspoken in his defense of New York City’s public school teachers and their union. More »
New York City recently released the results for its Learning Environment Surveys, and they tell us something interesting about students and respect. The Department of Education administers the survey annually to parents, teachers, and secondary school students. The 410,000 students who completed the survey were asked to characterize their school experience by agreeing or disagreeing (or strongly agreeing/disagreeing) with various statements. Aggregate answers were then scored from 1-10.
Students reserved the lowest scores for issues of respect. More »
It’s been sympathetically and properly noted that police officers are technically on duty 24/7. That observation should be made with equal soundness about teachers. We, too, may be off the clock but our time is never our own, try as we may to “psych” ourselves into “vacation mode.” That’s the nature of our profession. Consciously or not we are always processing our experiences and devising means to integrate them ingeniously into a lesson, regardless of subject area. More »
Today’s New York Times has an interesting feature article on teachers fired from New York City public schools during the 1950s for being real and suspected Communists. Be sure to also take a look at the slideshow on the topic.
It’s clearly time to open up the municipal archives on this subject to researchers, so that there can be a full historical accounting of this period.
It may be the second week of June, but the AFT is already looking ahead to the new school year.
Teachers: do you have a September strategy you’d like to share with your colleagues?
What teaching tip or strategy do you have for getting the new school year off to a great start? We will publish the best tips of 150 words or less in the September issue of American Teacher.
One of the great annual events on the pedagogical calendar has traditionally been the End-Term Party. Each school had one and almost every staff member attended: teachers, paras, secretaries, clinicians, supervisors, aides, food handlers, custodians. It was a school family affair and everyone was equal without poses of self-importance based on rank. There were no social distinctions among various job descriptions, because everyone realized what a crock these Department of Education-induced walls of separation are.
But the institution of the end-term party seems to have fallen on hard times. Celebration of human solidarity at school has devolved into an obscure concept in recent years, seemingly in relation to the decline in morale and the status of the profession as rendered by the DOE. The moonlight cruise around Manhattan and the catering hall dance extravaganzas are less common and more sparsely attended. Perhaps folks are afraid that the party will be like another Teachers College P.D. at which Kool-Aid will be drunk en masse. More »
Ernie Barnes died two weeks ago. He was a professional football player who became a renowned artist whose canvases and drawings of the human body, especially athletes, in motion, were commissioned by the Olympic Committee and acquired by major galleries and collectors.
With his pen or brush he captured with scientific accuracy the raw emotion of human anatomy in action. A really talented guy.
The NFL drafted him straight from college. The Washington Redskins traded him to the Baltimore Colts and he was then taken up by the New York Titans, the team that later became the Jets. But because he was far more fired up by art than by football he “traded cleats for brushes and put all the violence and power I’d felt on the field into my painting,” he said.
So why is this seemingly random biography of a guy whose dad was a clerk and whose mother kept up the house of a rich Southern lawyer so remarkable and an appropriate human interest story for this site? That’s just the point. His extraordinary inspiration is an ordinary phenomenon when you dig a little deeper and uncover the catalyst of his self-discovery. More »
Among the ranks of market fundamentalist education reformers, it is an article of faith that teacher preparation and teacher professional credentials predict nothing about the classroom effectiveness of teachers. A recent Mathematica study claimed that teachers who came to the profession through alternative routes that had little advance preparation did no worse than teachers who came out of traditional teacher preparation programs.
In a review of the Mathematica study, Sean P. Corcoran and Jennifer L. Jennings [until recently Eduwonkette] show that there is good evidence that alternatively certified teachers performed worse in math in grades 2-5, that alternatively certified teachers taking coursework performed worse in math, and that alternatively certified teachers received much lower principal evaluations and also much lower observational evaluations when their classrooms were observed by Mathematica researchers.
Re “Debate on New York Schools Pivots on One Man at the Top” (“Controlling Interests” series, front page, March 6):
I worked in the schools of New York City for 30 years as a teacher and principal. As a consultant, I visited schools all over the country and met with teachers, principals and parents. I raised two children who attended New York City public schools.
From those experiences, perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned is this: In order to create positive change in schools, the major focus must be on teaching and learning — what goes on in classrooms between teachers and students, every day and every minute of those days.
[Editor's note: John Powers is an English teacher and Chapter Leader at Liberation High School in Brooklyn, NY.]
Unlike the two-minute timeout in football or the seventh inning stretch in baseball where the players and fans get a chance to relax for a moment, run to the bathroom or stretch one’s legs, the last two minutes of a class lesson can be a time of restlessness and vexation for teachers and students, especially if the lesson is being observed by an administrator. We teachers know that even with the best planning, organization and instruction, our lessons may end a minute or two early and thus invite criticism of the need to teach “bell to bell.” To make matters worse, students will sometimes begin packing up and making their way to the door; their last class before lunch or the end of the day will sometimes exacerbate these actions. What is to be done?
What follows is a short list of strategies I have used successfully and have shared with colleagues over the years. More »
New York City is known as the capital of the world, of art, ideas, culture and learning — but for many of its children, their teacher is the only one who’s going to take them there.
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Real stories from the classrooms of new NYC public school teachers. Take a look.
