It is rather fortuitous that one of my favorite education voices, that of John Merrow, adds his take on why innovation is so lacking in public education after I just blogged about our common prep in which we tried to get teachers to innovate by using blogs and other web 2.0 tools.
Take a look at it and let me know what you think, dear readers. (You know who you are - I see someone in RLF is reading this right now and that someone in the Winger area perused this blog a few minutes ago and people from TRF are always popping in and out. Don't be scared . . . post a comment, even it has to be anonymous).
At least check out his wonderful cartoon on there. I'm using that one when I present at the Kramer Brown Fall Drive-in in early October.
I especially like this quote -
Why bother if you aren’t going to be rewarded? As “The Widget Effect,” a new report from the New Teacher Project, makes clear, administrators don’t pay much attention to teacher effectiveness. “Evaluation systems fail to differentiate performance among teachers. As a result, teacher effectiveness is largely ignored. Excellent teachers cannot be recognized or rewarded, chronically low-performing teachers languish, and the wide majority of teachers performing at moderate levels do not get the differentiated support and development they need to improve as professionals.”
As I see it, the irony is that this is the same reason students languish. And aren't we trying to fix it for them? Don't we reward our excellent students? Don't we try to make education for middle of the road students more effective and interesting? Don't we have programs in place to address students who are consistently failing?
Yet, what do we have in place for teachers? Certainly NCLB and its wonderful line (and who thought it would have come from the Bush administration - sorry, haven't gotten in a good liberal jab there for awhile!) - 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' concerning poor and minority students. We need to have a program in place in which no teacher gets left behind. Wait. I don't know - as I think about it more - if I believe that. Let's rephrase that - we need to have a program in place in which no teacher who is committed and really wants to change the lives of students should get left behind. Now, part of that program (and this might be what Michelle Rhee's proposed contract in Washington DC is trying to do) would certainly need to be some way that we can help bad teachers and if they don't want the help or take it, then they need to be trimmed off the roster, so to speak.
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