"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

How Can Randi and Dennis Support the Chicago Teachers and Continue to Embrace the Policies They Are Rejecting

We all knew sooner or later teachers would wake up and realize they have been sold down the river by the union bosses.  That has happened in Chicago, even as Randi and Dennis continue to spin their lies that teachers support the ed deforms that are dismantling public education for the benefit of the ed industry and the social control oligarchs.

Teachers want sanity returned to schools, where teachers teach, care about their children, and school is not in a never-ending emergency crisis.  We want and demand sanity, with public control rather than corporate control.  We want real research on ways to improve learning, rather than half-baked quackery like the value-added evaluations that the National Academy of Science rejects.

A quote from Anthony Cody this morning on NPR:


SANCHEZ: The problem says Anthony Cody is that union leaders like Weingarten have made too many concessions in the name of reform. Cody is a former teacher and activist opposed to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law and President Obama's Race to the Top policies.
ANTHONY CODY: So it's up to the teachers of Chicago, it's up to the teachers of Los Angeles, New York, Oakland everywhere else to lead from the bottom and that's what teachers in Chicago were doing. And I think there's a lot of us that are really ready to follow them.
SANCHEZ: In other words, says Cody, don't look to the unions' national leaders to protect teachers from pay for performance or schemes that tie teacher evaluation to students' test scores. This internal conflict over the role of unions in school reform comes at a bad time for unions because big city mayors, regardless of party, are more willing to take them on.

2 comments:

  1. just discovered your blog. Although both my parents were teachers, I haven't been following the debate about education / testing at all. Here's my problem: your site assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader: I don't know what a lot of the jargon means, or who these people ar, or specifically why standardized tests are such a poor measure of student learning. Is there another site you can direct me (and others like me who are just now waking up to the political problems) . . . another site that contains the basic information that we need in order to understand THIS site?

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  2. They should really get Chicago's education system reset soon. The young students of illinois are getting better grades than their teachers (something I focused on in a post), which goes to show that the teaching system needs the revamp.

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