Wow, this Ed Week article was interesting and pointed out many of the reasons I chose not to get my Bachelor's degree in education. America's educational system does have many flaws and I had hoped to be a part of the change mechanism, which is why I majored in public policy. It's much harder to create change when you are a teacher in the system that needs improvement. However, I have also learned that it is hard to know what changes would be most effective in the system with out having the experience of a teacher's perspective. It doesn't surprise me at all to see the statistic that only 23% of teachers come from the top third of college graduates. I think many of the top students are intelligent enough to see that teaching is a relatively low paying job, the profession is not as admired by society as it used to be, and it requires putting in many hours outside of the school day. Students entering this profession must be passionate about why they want to teach. I agree with two main statements in this article:
1) There needs to be stricter standards for students accepted into Ed programs. Teaching should not be viewed as a fall back profession that anyone can do. When you make the training for educators more competitive, you will get candidates more committed to being effective teachers.
2) I am in favor of all the "cost-effective" approaches presented out in the McKinsey report:
- subsidizing teacher preparation (cost of college)
- improving working conditions
- providing performance bonuses
My only concern is with the performance bonuses. They would have to find a way to either not make them based on assessment scores or find a way to equally distribute students in special education programs.
Often parents request the best teachers for their high achieving academic students. If districts allowed all these requests, then basing teacher performance on student assessment would not be fair. I can say from what I have observed so far this year, there are some classrooms with many high need students and some classrooms with very few. I admire and would be in favor of rewarding the teacher who worked closely with all the high need students, even though I 'm sure test scores in that room would be lower. I guess the bottom line is, there needs to be more factors to base teacher performance on besides assessment.
Some major changes in the US educational system will need to be made if we are going to keep up in the global society- both staff and students. I think open discussion is the first step in finding out what changes need to be made first and the best method to do it. I hope dialogue in these areas continues.
I enjoyed reading your response to this article. You might enjoy reading an article that was in the latest edition of the NEA Today magazine called "What we can learn from Finland’s successful school reform". It is actually an excerpt from a book by Stanford University scholar Linda Darling-Hammond that tells the Finnish story. You can find it here: http://www.nea.org/home/40991.htm
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I agree, there needs to be a fundament shift in importance of quality education. I hope that by the time we are teachers, we won't need to worry about funding issues, resources or even if we have to share a classroom. I know these are high hopes but if we don't start putting more effort into education, the nation as a whole will continue to decline.
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