Here's A Problem With School Reform Efforts...

Colorado takes bold move in education reform....who are we kidding....nothing bold, nothing earth-shattering, nothing will change, except the amount of government expenditures as high quality teachers leave the classrooms, and are replaced with entry-level government automatons.

Teachers, like any profession, are comprised of great ones, good ones, temporarily unproductive ones, and incompetent ones. I have no problem with saying that.  It's true of lawyers, doctors, politicians, salespeople, athletes, etc.

Here's my problem with all the garbage in reform talk for schools.

For years teachers have no say in what they can teach and decreasing say in how they can teach, and it will get much worse before anyone realizes it's mediocrity the current reformers are aiming to achieve.

A modest, yet serious proposal.

Give me a say in what I (the trained professional teacher, who is serious about teaching and learning, and hasn't run away from the job) think is important for my students to learn.  By "give me a say" I do not mean gather a hand-selected representation (which usually does not represent me anyway) to develop wimpy, underclassed standards. 

Let me provide the state with what I will teach.  Let me decide the most appropriate form of assessment for my students.  Then stay out of my way while I prove that my kids can learn, will learn, and will be motivated to do things way beyond the silliness of the weak standards (sometimes even incorrect ones) and election-gimmick test scores.

For teachers who are learning the craft of teaching, give them some government-provided, indoctrination-driven curriculum until the new teachers decide if the career of teaching is even something they care about doing for more than the three-year average.  Once they prove they can teach that junk, then allow tenure to mean that they can write their own curriculum, complete with assessment tools, for approval.

For teachers who do not want to work on their own, and have no problem with government drivel, they can continue to use the standardized approach to education.

For those of us with the gumption to disagree publicly with where our country is headed in the arena of education, let us prove that we can take public education students and make them as competitive as the private-school politicians and their kids.  Competitive is the correct word, right? It is a race, right?

Oh, wait...perhaps that's why our government is trying to ruin public education...it is a race, and we provide too big a threat to our politicians' and big business' children and grandchildren in the mart of competitive commerce and politics. 

Can you tell I'm getting tired of it all?

Posted via email from Murry's World