Teacher bashing has become the new sport of the day and nobody is better at blaming teachers than elected officials.
The latest politician to lash out at teachers is New York City’s mayor. Michael Bloomberg. He believes that only half of New York’s teachers are effective:
“Education is very much, I’ve always thought, just like the real estate business: there are three things that matter: location, location, location is the old joke. Well in education, it is: quality of teacher, quality of teacher, quality of teacher. And I would — if I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.”
If I was teaching an education course in university the quote above would be written on the board for all to see. This is what young teachers are up against. A tirade of simplistic, ill-informed, ill-considered and non sensical ideas that would, if enacted, ruin hard-working teachers’ lives without any benefit to the educational cause.
Teaching has nothing to do with real estate. Politics does. Politicians and real estate agents take it upon themselves to make the gloomy look positive and the impossible seem realistic. Teaching isn’t like that at all. Teachers know they can achieve a great deal, but are also aware that there are many factors that are involved with a child’s education.
Unlike mayor Bloomberg who thinks that education wholly rests with the teacher, teachers are aware that they are one of many stakeholders in the education system. Mr. Bloomberg should consider the following players:
1. Parents – Teachers can not achieve to their potential if parents are against them or uninvolved.
2. Administrators – If school Principals and councils are poor, then schools will be run poorly.
3. Teacher Training – If the teachers are a product of poor training, you can hardly blame them for their output.
4. School Culture – Teachers who inherit poor school cultures are bound to find it harder than otherwise.
5. School Funding – A school that is either underfunded or is a product of wasted or misallocation of funds is at a clear disadvantage.
Mayor Bloomberg’s idea of cutting jobs in half and doubling class sizes is a policy so simplistic that a ten year-old could have come up with better. His love affair with standardised tests is even more concerning.
Standardised tests cause more problems than they solve. Yet politicians love them. It’s the same reason they love to “bash” teachers – it takes the heat off them.
If Mr. Bloomberg wants to cut some thing I suggest he cut the tests.
I suggest he cut the wastage too.
I also suggest he cut the teacher bashing.
While his at it, I suggest he cut his policy advisor.
And most of all, I suggest he cut the bull!
Tags: APPR, Class Size, Education, Education Policy, evaluation system, Michael Bloomberg, MIT conference, New York City, Politics, real estate, School Funding, Teacher Training, Teachers, Teaching
Topical Teaching 
December 8, 2011 at 7:14 am |
It’s not hard to see why the administration side of education is full of morons when the political side is is full of such people as Mayor Bloomberg. I see people with no idea of what education is really about getting promoted while the really dedicated teachers are treated like dirt. One principal I worked under was waxing lyrical about his latest scheme to cut student absenteeism and fractional truancy. This was in a school where over 50% of the students would be absent on any given day. I asked him a simple question whether he had any data to explain why we had this problem and his reply was, “I have no data but this plan will fix the problem.” The data was in the test results. Our students in grade 7 were operating at grade 2 in literacy and numeracy. The school authorities insisted on running a normal high school program and on enforcing the state mandated syllabuses. Even a child can see that 7 into 2 won’t go. Our students were discouraged and accordingly school was not a very high priority in their lives. But our principal was promoted on his production of glitzy programs that accomplished nothing. Cut the tests by all means. That alone will save millions. Cut the state mandated syllabuses too. Replace them with a simple non-prescriptive outline of what students ought to be learning in each grade. Then let teachers get on with the job they are trained to do: fit teaching programs to students and not vice-versa. You have to begin with the child, not with a state mandated syllabus. You have to discern where a child is up to and work from there. Another thing that needs to happen is to get rid of political appointments. An administrator of, say, primary industry, is NOT an administrator of education. When I began teaching the director general of the state system I worked in had been a teacher and had come up through the ranks. When I retired the director general was a political appointment with a background in journalism – a spin doctor – whose behaviour as a student would have disqualified him from ever becoming a teacher. In fine: 1. Get rid of the standardised tests. 2. Get rid of state mandated syllabuses. 3. Get rid of political appointments and cronyism. It won’t solve all the problems but it would be a good place to start.