This monument to Civil Rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer was unveiled this week in her hometown of Rueville, Mississippi.
Glen Brown reprints this column by Jim Dey on the Constitutional Amendment you will find on the Illinois ballot November 6th. “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Vote no.
Xian Barrett doesn’t get snarky towards the corporate reform group, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) until the last paragraph. Now that’s discipline.
Can you say, “recall?”
It’s a big win for Wal-Mart workers.
Who couldn’t have predicted this? When Romney pivoted to the center in the debate it pissed off the right-wing.
Rahm keeps his budget secret. There will be no public discussion.
As you and I both know, teachers have never been viewed or treated like professionals, and the lower the status of their students, the less professionally honored they have been. Explicitly or implicitly, people of high status cannot imagine how any smart, capable, and well-educated adult would do it—especially as a career, year after year. As an “experience” akin to the Peace Corps, they can imagine and honor its attractions. As a step toward a career as an education policymaker, maybe that’s reasonable, too? But to teach year after year … 5-year-olds, or 8-year-olds, or “urban” 15-year-olds. (As our cities are becoming gentrified, Pedro, do you think we’ll have to assume new code words for “them”?) OK for nuns, spinster ladies, men who couldn’t get a college-level job, but … And it wasn’t too long ago that they were right.
So to expect their union to spend the time and resources re-inventing American public schooling seems unfair, But I agree with you. I’d like them to—if they survive.
Actually, the union has always had a social and political agenda on issues beyond 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. schooling. And they have always complained about the inadequate support and supervision system in urban public schools. For a variety of reasons, most principals of big-city schools could not and do not have time to frequently step inside classrooms. And because most schools are petty dictatorships—whether malign or benign ones—the natural tendency to distrust the judgment of principals. Department chairs in high schools have been generally held in higher esteem than principals. The way schools are organized and time allocated literally NO ONE is in a position to evaluate or judge teachers well. But if their performance is so bad as to attract the principal’s attention, believe me, there is no provision in the contract that prevents a competent supervisor from winning an appeal, even if the teacher takes it that far.
The schools where I’ve been the head teacher (principal) have found ways. Ways designed by the staff who are responsible for hiring, evaluating, supporting, and firing teachers. It was my job to make that possible. Sometimes they stretched decisions out longer than maybe they should have, but it was precisely because they cared for both the person involved and the school that they proceeded carefully. And the union in both New York City and Boston endorsed our approach. It was management that was often the stumbling block. The Pilot Schools in Boston each have a different system for evaluating the faculty; all are union-approved. There is no ONE RIGHT WAY, but the union insisted only that we design a fair way. Debbie Meier
Fred Klonsky 