Elevating the Teaching Profession
by ARNE DUNCAN, U.S. Secretary of Education
A little more than a half-century ago, in 1958, Senator John F. Kennedy penned a piece for the NEA Journal.
In it, the future president urged a number of reforms to the teaching profession. As a longtime supporter of the NEA, Kennedy felt that higher pay and more classrooms were not enough—“more and better teachers are also needed.”
To strengthen the teaching profession, JFK wrote, “we must find better means for providing better rewards for our better teachers. We must make actual use of probationary periods to retain only those with satisfactory performance records, and we must demonstrate concretely to young beginners in the field that real opportunities for advancement await those whose contribution is of the highest caliber.”
Flash forward a quarter century, and Al Shanker, the legendary head of the American Federation of Teachers, was echoing JFK’s warning. In his 1984 address to the AFT Convention, Shanker suggested that “one possibility is that we will improve the profession ourselves and find ways of selecting and training teachers—and yes, even some ways of removing people who shouldn’t be in the profession.” Shanker recognized that change would not be easy or happen overnight.
But he declared that “the professionalization of teaching in the next 10 or 20 years is life or death for the future of public education.”
Unfortunately, JFK and Al Shanker’s calls to strengthen the teaching profession ring all too familiar today. Like President Kennedy and Al Shanker, President Obama and I believe deeply that good teachers are unsung heroes.
We know exemplary teachers toil late into the night on lesson plans, shell out of their own pocket to pay for supplies, and wake up worrying when one of their students seems headed for trouble.
People remember their favorite teacher decades later because great teachers change the course of a student’s life. They light a lifelong curiosity, teaching students to solve problems like a scientist, write like a novelist, listen like a poet, see like an artist, and observe like a journalist. It is no surprise that the single biggest influence on student growth is the quality of the teacher standing in the front of the classroom.
Teaching, in short, should be one of the nation’s most revered professions. Teachers should be amply compensated, fairly evaluated, and supported by topnotch professional development. Yet teachers today are not accorded the respect they deserve—and teaching is still not treated as a profession on par with other highly-skilled professions. The unavoidable question is, why? Why, 25 years after Al Shanker’s admonition and 50 years after JFK’s plea, are teachers still not treated like true professionals?
The answer, I believe, is that we have a broken system—a system of training, induction, evaluation, professional development, and promotion that is an artifact from an earlier era. As Al Shanker pointed out, schools today are still largely stuck in the factory model of the industrial age. Students, in classrooms that look uncannily like the classrooms of a century ago, move through 13 years of schooling beginning at age five, attending school 180 days a year, and taking five subjects a day in timed periods similar to what the Carnegie Foundation recommended in 1910.
Teacher promotion and compensation policies are based on equally outdated conceptions of K–12 education. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first tenure law, passed by New Jersey in 1909.
The single-salary pay schedule got its start in 1921, nearly 90 years ago, in Des Moines and Denver.
In the factory model of education, teachers are treated as interchangeable widgets who keep the educational assembly line moving.
Teachers today are not paid based on their skill in the classroom or the difficulty of their teaching assignments. If two teachers have comparable experience and credentials, they are paid the same—even if one teacher is the Teacher of the Year and the other instructor is the weakest teacher at her school.
As Al Shanker summed up, teachers continue to be treated “as workers in an old fashioned factory who may not exercise judgment and discretion, [and] who are supervised and directed by everyone from the state legislature down to the school principal. Our schools are organized today exactly the way they were a century ago.”
A century ago, when teachers could be fired willy-nilly, tenure protection and the single salary schedule provided teachers with vital safeguards against arbitrary dismissals by principals and school boards. Yet in 2009, while teachers still need processes that assure fair treatment, it no longer makes sense to treat teachers as widgets. The teaching profession will never receive the respect it deserves, so long as teachers are perceived as indistinguishable components of the educational assembly line.
The Obama Administration is committed to strengthening the teaching profession, from teacher preparation to induction, professional development, and retention, especially in high-poverty schools and for high-need students. In fact, much of our teacher quality agenda draws on what teachers and union leaders tell us needs to change to better support teachers and elevate the profession.
During the last year, I undertook a Listening and Learning Tour that took me to more than 30 states. During that tour, and in the seven preceding years when I was CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, I had hundreds of conversations with talented teachers. Virtually every teacher I spoke to told me the same thing, expressing a conviction borne out repeatedly in teacher surveys: Teachers want to challenge the status quo and they want to be treated as skilled professionals.
Most teachers are not content with their pre-service preparation. Novice teachers and veterans alike say they were not adequately prepared for the realities of managing a classroom of diverse learners. Once in the classroom, teachers found they lacked consistent, high-quality mentoring from an experienced teacher.
Nor do teachers get enough time to collaborate and plan with their colleagues, discuss problem students, and learn from their peers. Professional development is generally of poor quality, and often fails to develop a teacher’s skills. Drop-by evaluations by principals are superficial. Single-salary compensation policies offer few incentives to teachers to take on leadership responsibilities in their schools—and almost no encouragement to attract, reward, and recognize effective teachers in high-need schools.
Today, union leaders committed to challenging the status quo are courageously and candidly speaking out about the need to move beyond their comfort zones. For example, AFT president Randi Weingarten is an outspoken critic of current teacher evaluation systems. “For too long and in too many places,” she says, “teacher evaluation has ranged from hollow to harmful. For most teachers, the process of evaluation is a ritual in which a principal spends 15 minutes in their classroom once a year checking off a grocery list of minimum competencies—this process does not improve teaching [or] learning.”
NEA’s president Dennis Van Roekel testified recently that “we can all agree that our public schools need a wholesale transformation.” Dennis concluded that “if states and/or the federal government are to make a serious commitment to ensuring a quality teacher for every child . . . attention should be placed on how best to advance the professionalism of teaching.”
So how does the Administration plan to advance the teaching profession? As the President and I have stated, we start from the presumption that far-reaching reforms to the teaching profession can only take hold with the support and guidance of teachers and their unions. That is one reason why our teaching quality agenda adopts many of the policies that teachers themselves told us are essential to elevating the profession.
No area of the teaching profession is more plainly broken today than that of teacher evaluation and professional development. In district after district, more than 95 percent of teachers are rated as good or superior, even in schools that are chronically underperforming year after year. Worse yet, evaluations typically fail to take any account of a teacher’s impact on student learning.
The truth is that students and teachers don’t live in mythic Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. Yet we have an evaluation system today that pretends otherwise. As a result, great teachers don’t get recognized, don’t get rewarded, and don’t help their peers grow.
The teachers in the middle of the skills spectrum don’t get the support they need to improve. And the teachers at the bottom don’t get the support they need either—or failing that, get counseled out of the profession. It’s not just students who suffer—as Al Shanker pointed out, “teachers have to live with the results of other people’s bad teaching—the students who don’t know anything.” To continue tinkering around the edges of such a dysfunctional system is a waste.
All of the department’s new or redesigned programs provide powerful incentives for states and districts to make far-reaching changes to teacher evaluation and professional development—from Race to the Top, to the 2009 School Improvement Grants, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and Title I and IDEA funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Our guiding principle is simply that teachers should be treated as professionals: They should have the support, tools, and opportunities to perform at their full potential by having timely and accurate data about their students to inform instruction; they should have time to consult and collaborate with their peers; and they should be evaluated, compensated, and advanced based in part on student learning.
Student growth and gain, not absolute test scores, are what we are most interested in—how much are students improving each year, and what teachers, schools, school districts, and states are doing the most to accelerate student achievement?
The $4.3 billion Race to the Top program recognizes that strong teachers and leaders are the heart of educational improvement, and it places more weight on this factor than any other in its grant competition. The final Race to the Top application emphasizes that professional collaboration and planning time, individualized professional development plans, training and support to use assessment data, classroom observations with timely and constructive feedback, and other activities are critical to developing high-quality evaluation systems and professional development.
The Race to the Top competition also recognizes that teacher effectiveness cannot be assessed solely on student test scores. Instead, teacher effectiveness should be evaluated based on multiple measures, provided that student academic growth over the course of the year is a significant factor. I am pleased that both Dennis Van Roekel and Randi Weingarten recognized and applauded these elements of the Race to the Top guidelines.
It defies common sense to bar all consideration of student learning from teacher evaluation. But it is time to move past the over-reliance on fill-in-the-bubble tests to richer assessments of successful teaching and learning—and the department will be pursuing such reforms in its $350 million competition for a new generation of assessments when it moves forward with re-authorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2010.
Those new assessments will be aligned to common college and career-ready standards being developed by states—which the NEA and AFT have endorsed, and which, eventually, should reduce curricular turmoil and instability for teachers.
Finally, teachers need high-quality, timely information about the progress of their students. Through the State Longitudinal Data Systems program and Race to the Top, we’re providing hundreds of millions of dollars to states and districts to develop data systems that deliver this information in a timely and useful format. When teachers get better data on student growth, including results from interim assessments, they have the chance to tailor classroom instruction to the needs of their students and drive a cycle of continuous improvement.
Not all teachers have experience using data to improve instruction. But the department is asking states that apply for Race to the Top grants to develop plans for professional development to help teachers and principals get training in how to use data to inform instruction.
We want to continue working with teachers and unions to elevate the teaching profession. With that kind of collaboration, it is possible to turn battlegrounds into common ground. I am encouraged by the NEA’s new $6 million initiative to recruit more topnotch teachers in high-needs schools and hard-to-staff subjects like science and mathematics, and specialties like special education and English language acquisition.
I am heartened as well by the AFT’s support of pay-for-performance initiatives in the AFT’s Innovation Fund, and AFT’s innovative contract in New Haven, Connecticut.
As we move ahead to reform the teaching profession, we’ll have disagreements and make mistakes along the way. But we cannot let the perfect become the enemy of the good. The need for reform, both for students and teachers, is urgent.
Students cannot afford to wait another decade, while adults tinker with issues of teacher quality. It’s time to stop tweaking the system. It’s time, once and for all, to make teaching the revered profession it should be.
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Now it is your turn What do you think? Tell us!
“The need for reform, both for students and teachers, is urgent.
Students cannot afford to wait another decade, while adults tinker with issues of teacher quality.”
How do we make change happen NOW, today, in any particular classroom? Obviously, the answer depends on what’s going on right now, today, in any particular classroom.
Guess who knows what’s going on? The people IN that particular classroom. Guess what I’m about to propose: let one or two more people be IN that classroom. Let a parent observe in that classroom, right now, today. Every day. In the back of the room. Quietly. No interrupting the class. Just silently observe.
That would be a start. Right now. Today. For free.
Our children need quality instruction right now. It’s urgent, just as Secretary Duncan has stated. Every day. Right now. I want the best classroom experience possible for my child. I will do whatever I can to help the teacher be the best teacher s/he can be. How can I help? Let us help. Let a parent into the classroom. Let us help.
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As a teacher that has received many awards at the local level, I do not think that merit pay is the answer. We are not used car salesman that should be receiving bonuses for reaching our students. The playing field is not level. Where will the teachers for the inner city come from if they are not afforded the same salaries as the teachers from the suburbs?
We are not manufatoring widgets, that is the point. We must accept every student no matter their background. Buisness people can refuse to accept material for their products and reorder more appropriate material to make a product. We, rightfully so , must reach all of our diverse populations. Race to the Top is horrible punitive legislation that should be opposed by all teachers.
January 17, 2010
To: Whoever Will Listen
Last July, I sent a letter to the White House (cc: California’s two sitting senators), expressing my concern about the Race to the Top program. Recently, I wrote to the Scaramento Bee. I have received no response. Now, I am writing to you.
For over 28 years, I have been a public school classroom teacher. I remain passionate that public education is the backbone of a free, democratic society. Privatizing public schools balkanizes and divides us as a nation. Sadly, privatizing public schools is the unltimate consequence of our present federal educational policy (NCLB). Every year, more of America’s neighborhood schools succumb to the weight of increasingly unattainable criteria and are extinguished. Each year, more students must find some other place in which to learn. That which has always brought us together as one country is disappearing.
This is unfortunately for America. The net result is: less public schools, less trained teachers, less oversight and less education for our children’s children. Tearing apart public education is tearing apart a fundamental fabric of our union. This may serve a few niche businesses, but it will neither serve our democracy, nor our society at large.
Joe Palmer
Bottom line. Teacher starting salary is $25000-29000 per year. Students are graduating with a high amount of debt, would like to buy a home etc. How does this compensation meet the expertise you talk about that teachers need. I have taught for 34 years, am in favor of teacher evaluation, because I have seen the damage uncaring teachers leave behind. You fund war (43 billion per year), states are in terrible shape (I am from Michigan) and are cutting funding per student (our state $300 per student). Schools are scrambling to meet ends meet, yet the government thinks the fix for this is they hold a CONTEST for funding. No Child Left Behind was not properly funded. Give the individual schools money for their successes, not states. The money will be lost in the shuffle.Come up for a way of properly funding education and paying teachers what they deserve for what is required of them. Don’t just hold a contest for money to meet the guidelines of someone who has never taught in a poor district of broken families or in the inner city. Give me someone who understands the problems that schools are facing.(drugs, broken families, no support from home).
Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s lofty prose for “elevating the teaching profession” has great appeal, yet it should be viewed with caution as he tries to establish a causal link between student learning and teacher evaluation. He uses such language as professional collaboration and development plans, assessment data, classroom observations, and constructive feedback. In one paragraph he states that “teacher effectiveness cannot be assessed solely on student test scores.” In the following paragraph he says that “it defies common sense to bar all consideration of student learning from teacher evaluation.” Let us all be very clear—student learning will be assessed through test scores. All the programs designed to help teachers improve are noteworthy and noble, yet student growth, measured through test scores, will be the singular determining factor in assessing teachers.
Using test scores to evaluate teacher proficiency should not be the issue; it is the quality of the tests themselves that should be of more concern. Mr. Duncan talks about “a new generation of assessments,” but provides no details on such a complex problem. Once there is a systemic effort to establish standardized tests whose primary purpose is to evaluate teachers, you inevitably reach for the lowest common denominator. This will inadvertently place the teachers at the center of the education dialogue; that place should be reserved for students. The diversity of our student population in ethnicity, language, economics, and culture makes any singular standardized testing process meaningless. Are we going to subject the struggling and the advanced student to the same test? Students going to Harvard and students going to the local community college should not be subjected to the same assessment or teaching methodology. What would the results of such tests reveal about student growth or teacher proficiency?
A sliding scale of testing might make more sense. What tests students are subject to should be left to those who know the skill level of their respective students: teachers and administrators. A sliding scale of standardized tests is not simply a lowering of standards as much as a realistic assessment of the diverse needs and skills of our diverse student body. The resistance to such a plan resides in the central government’s desire to establish uniformity or a standardization on an education system filled with a diaspora of academic and cultural backgrounds. What Mr. Duncan is proposing is to establish a rigid academic system through economic incentives to state governments. Ironically, the teachers that I listen too need imagination and flexibility in order to reach students with diverse needs, skills, and cultures. It was Albert Einsten who said that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” yet academic reform through the years has always been plagued with a one size fits all mindset. When someone says that they want to raise standards for students through a singular assessment, and subsequently evaluate teacher performance, I have to remind them that standards are plural, much like our nation.
Mr. Duncan’s most salient point is that “teachers are not paid based on their skill in the classroom or the difficulty of their teaching assignment.” A system where the best and the worst get compensated equally breeds cynicism and apathy. Mr. Duncan has correctly diagnosed the problem, however, the cure will not be found in any simplistic testing mechanism that establishes a causal link between student progress and teacher proficiency. The danger of any education reform movement is the fantasy of a “silver bullet” solution to very complex problems. Once you start looking at teacher efficiency through student progress, you may have to also look at the tangential factors that affect learning—class size, drugs, gangs, divorce, sexuality, economics, health, etc. How will these and other variables be factored in to assessing and compensating teachers based on student progress?
Larry Hoffner
LaGuardia High School
100 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10023
212-473-6545
Larry,
The root of the problem is not poverty, drugs, sex or gangs. The problem is we have a whole generation of young people growing up without any concept of what a father is. If you look across the board, white, black and hispanic, you will see that children that are growing up in homes without fathers are performing at a much lower level than those children coming out of 2-parent families–even divorced families. The reason we have a racial gap instead of a 2 parent vs a 1 parent gap is because 7-10 African-American children are born into homes without a father or concept of a father, hispanics are close on their heels. As a teacher if you really want to help these children we need to start to have open dialog on the devasting results of giving birth to illegitimate children. I know it is a painful topic but we need to quit turning a blind eye to the fact that African Americans make up 12% of the population and 505 of the drop-out rates–liberals elitists want us to believe that it is simply because they are born into poverty but the facts are that even lower income children can be successful when the have a father for a role model–my husband and his 5 siblings are proof. Thank you for all that you do and spread the truth–the children that are failing are suffering from a social gap not a racial gap.
Perfectly articulated! Why aren’t you the president of the AFT or NYSUT?
WOW what a bunch of nonsense! As a “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools, I wonder if she ever set foot in a classroom! Teachers should not be held totally accountable for progress. As a teacher in an inner-city school, my students come to school lacking parental support, hungry, as well as from homeless shelters. I am required to keep up the morale, build their self-esteem, handle the discipline issues, dodge the drug dealers and shady characters that are around our school, as well as teach! It is not an easy job! The merit pay plan would penalize me for not having the “significant student gains” that other teachers in wealthier schools would show! I teach illegal immigrants from Haiti who have never been to school. As a second grade teacher, I have to get these students on grade level before the end of the year???? Teachers don’t deserve merit pay, rather they need combat pay!!
Combat pay is fitting because I believe teaching to be more like the military than the “factory” Duncan decries or the “business” that he envisions as its salvation. Teachers are grunts and it is only natural that we don’t trust the generals like Duncan that have risen apart from the ranks rather than through the ranks.
Secretary of Education: Arne Duncan
“Prisoners of Time:” the landmark research directed by my sister-in-law Cheryl M. Kane in 1994, is as true today as it was fifteen years ago. Yet; it is essential to distill the “best teaching practices” into the finite amount of “time” we have inorder to reap the cognitive benefit for our students we want.
I would like the opportunity to submit a proposal to the congressional committee working on the reauthorization of the NCLB act. The proposal, a teacher’s perspective, would address the following:
1. Inclusion of Bloom’s Taxonomy and higher order thinking skills in the everyday classroom curriculum.
2. Public/Private Funding for an extended school day utilizing a separate entity such as a “Learning Across the Spectrum Trust Fund,” with tax advantages for philanthropic contributions.
3.Fully integrating the Creative Thought Process & Academics. Moving beyond rote memorization of facts for test taking purposes toward inspiring our students to use discernment and judgment in the innovative application of that information.
The “Creative Thought Process” ignites the passion for learning; It is the centerpiece of a vibrant economy: intellectual property, innovations in engineering, scientific discoveries, biotechnology and nanoscience are all the lifeblood of our future. Testing and documenting what is already known without cultivating the skills in how to use this information, may prove to become an intellectual roadmap that lacks currency for an entire generation in todays globalized economy.
Should your congressional committee be interested in receiving specific proposals for consideration in improving the NCLB act, I would like to submit a well researched proposal.
Thank You
Lucinda Shmulsky
42 Adsit Crosby Road
New Marlborough
State of Massachusetts
As a student teacher, it is frightening to think that one day my salary, and even my career could ride on the efforts of my students. I think that is the main fear of educators regarding merit-based pay. However, those who really should be teachers will make every effort to ensure that every student shows some improvement. This may not always be possible. Kids will have family problems, money problems, social problems, and medical problems that take priority over their education. But, overall, most students should be improving most of the time. Teachers who cannot guide this change in students should not be teachers.
As Secretary Duncan states, there are strategies teachers can use to ensure student progress. Response to Intervention (RtI), is a strategy in which teachers collect assessment data for each individual student, and can then determine what needs to be done for each student to improve. For this to happen, teachers need to use sound assessments. Many classroom assessments are unreliable and invalid. The first step would be to evaluate and adjust assessments to minimize the margin for error.
Secretary Duncan also discussed the use of growth models rather than raw test scores to assess both students and teachers. This is just common sense. We should not need a Thomas Paine to tell us that students and teachers who are showing improvement should not be reprimanded, but rewarded.
I believe that Secretary Duncan has some brilliant ideas, and while they may be scary, they may also be necessary.
Reform of education must start by reform the books for elementary,middle,and high school.Math Information today for middle and high school is a building witout the first floor.There are math books in the state of Florida that are a disaster.Kudret Hankollari Math teacher at North Miami S.H.S
The federal government continues to degrade teachers and use them as a scapegoat for the crumbling public education system. NEA should be standing up for teachers and students.
On a national level there needs to be a demand for:
Improved facilities and working conditions for both teachers and student
Access to 21st century technology for teachers and students
Smaller classes sizes
Year round school that includes a significant increase in the number of days of student attendance
Longer school days
Teacher compensation for the increase in work time
These are the types of reforms public education needs. We do not need to close schools and fire teachers. We need to improve teacher and student resources. No one will be willing to make these changes unless teachers and the NEA demand it.
Mr. Duncan says one thing but does another. I find him less than desirable as the head of the education department. Teachers are still under attack through his proposals. Public education is still on the precipice of destruction because of his proposals.
I do not trust for one minute the district personel who would be in charge of my salary were it not negotiated.
I do not see real improvments to the ESEA (recently called NCLB)in any of his proposals.
I do not see money available from my state to implement improved mentoring of new teachers.
I think it’s ridiculous that money is removed from a state through federal taxes so that a portion of it can be returned in federal education programs.
When will the NEA leadership step up to the plate and protest the current direction of the Dept. of Education?
I want to protest NEATODAY for publishing the article “Elevating the Teaching Profession,” by our Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. I strongly object the leadership’s decision to publish it, for I find it improper to read his vacuous rhetoric published with NEA’s members’ dues. When I got the magazine, the last thing I expected was to see a piece by Arne Duncan, followed by a series of similar pieces by politicians like George Miller. At this time when he is withholding federal money that the states desperately need to help public school districts, NEA gives Arne Duncan’s propaganda an undeserved space in its own magazine. When leadership decided to publish this article, the hopes to reevaluate NEA’s position on privatization, RTTT, and Duncan’s decisions are therefore shattered into the three point something million pieces. Thus, this decision eliminates the possibility of NEA becoming a true defender of public education.
NEA’s explicit message of agreement with Arne Duncan’s views and actions does not come as a surprise. Nevertheless, it is awfully disappointing to see that NEA has publicly claudicated on the mission of protecting public education. It was clear that public education didn’t have stakeholders who cared enough to defend it. But now, it is evident and official: NEA will not fight for public education.
As I read the articles, I saw again the empty rhetoric that Arne Duncan had used all along. Speeches sprinkled with vague and confusing statements and generalities about how good education and teachers can and should be. When he does it on any other stage, I consider his speeches predictable; but when NEA allows him to use its magazine to promote his views, without challenging his premises and statements, I find it reprehensible. This article is mainly a public relation piece, which favors the man who has singlehandedly maintained the public education system in an economic crisis for no other reason than to impose even more destructive measures.
It is unbelievable but true: instead of challenging the reformers’ views, NEA gave even more credibility to those who have been eroding public education and weakening NEA itself. The same people who have built up this anti-public school frame, where there are no legitimate alternatives to improve education but theirs, are receiving free publicity and endorsement paid with NEA dues. To read or see Arne Duncan on any other media is one thing, but to see his messages published in NEATODAY is different – it is wrong.
This article is very revealing in many ways. Now I know why the NEA leadership has not investigated the reasons for the poor image people have of teachers and public schools. Or, why NEA has not demanded that its vision and statement for public education be respected. Or, why it has not ensured that the reforms respect the democratic system, fair, and inclusive for all that a healthy public school system demands. This article explains it: NEA has no intention of challenging the current vision and mission of the reformers, even if these have serious conflicts with NEA’s.
It is particularly worrisome to see that NEA gives a definite support to the ineffective and destructive reforms imposed by privatizers. NEA has reduced itself to a mere social club for teachers who are willing to participate in events that do not upset or challenge the reformers’ plan for privatization; NEA’s role is of an irrelevant participant in the political arena at federal level, incapable of influencing the policy makers.
Where do the NEA members in California stand on this issue? I wonder if the 2.3 million public school teachers who in the past eight years have endured an intense campaign of unfair criticism, significant salary reductions, and layoffs in the thousands, are in agreement to the reformers’ premises and outcomes of their plans. Judging by the lack of reaction from chapter presidents and state council members, I assume that CTA is okay with it. Otherwise, the NEA board members from California would have not approved the publishing of an article by Arne Duncan –a man who has never taught a day in his life, failed as a manager of Chicago’s public schools, and to make matters worse is blackmailing California’s schools using taxpayer’s money. Since CTA members have not demanded a reaction from CTA leadership, there is no other possible conclusion than to believe that the default position of the members is to accept the current situation.
As a second generation teacher, I have been exposed to the ebbs and flows of educational policy for the last 40+ years. I still enjoy my profession and have experienced a rebirth as a teacher because of a positive staff development experience through a Teaching American History grant at the University of California, Irvine.
This experience brought 8th grade teachers together for 3 years from Santa Ana Unified School District in California. The seminars were taught by historians and were facilitated by a staff that treated us as professionals. From that experience teachers worked together in collaboration for the next few years meeting sometimes monthly and throughout the summer. It did require a commitment, but it was atypical in that the professional development was not a one day feel-good workshop that would provide little use in the classroom. The TAH model propelled teachers to share and collaborate on planning that later would become a district-wide curriculum for one unit.
This is the type of professional development that Congress should invest in. It is proven to be effective and forces teachers to leave the classroom of isolation. It has propelled me as an educator to be involved in other seminars and become an instructional leader in my subject area. Because of this experience my students benefit from the collaborative model that continues at our site today.
I also strongly feel that our country has become obsessed with testing and our students suffer from these effects of constant assessment. Teachers should be assessed on their ability to teach and engage students. Teaching to a test is one of the quickest ways to disengage students who would rather be using technology to build content relevant websites, blog with students across the world, create podcast and video-conference with fellow students across the nation. It is through modes of teaching and learning that our students and our teachers should be assessed. It is also through these lens that students become problems solvers, critical thinkers and develop a passion for learning that becomes life-long.