Tuesday, September 2, 2014

In the US " Improving Teacher Quality" really means Humiliating and Firing Veteran Teachers

All over the nation, the imperative to "improve teacher quality" has morphed into a campaign to marginalize, humiliate and force out veteran teachers. Not only has this caused tremendous distress to the individuals thus targeted, it has deprived our public schools of a priceless source of knowledge and cultural capital and has contributed to huge turnover among new teachers who are deprived of the mentoring and support the need to do their jobs well. It has also made public ...schools in low income neighborhoods easy prey for those who seek to replace public schools with charters and has contributed to the "whitening" of the nation's teaching force. There is something truly Orwellion about School Reform when the legitimate goal of recruiting and retaining better teachers gets transformed into a witch hunt that drives the best veteran teachers out of our public schools.