A must read: teacher accountability?
A long article, but well-worth the read. As Joel Klein and New York City struggles to improve the city’s schools, they face an uphill battle (to say the least) with the teachers union.
From The New Yorker: The Rubber Room: The battle over New York City’s worst teachers.
A few highlights (or should we say low-lights?):
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”
“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” Scheiner said. “There was no need to push anyone out.”
And:
I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: “If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
“That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,” she responded. “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, “Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.”
It’s definitely an eye-opening read. There are so many wonderful teachers out there, and they too should reject a system that tolerates incompetence and rejects consequences for failure.
Not so surprising news: Transparency in education helps parents
As leaders look at ways improve education in Australia, education the Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard met with Joel Klein, Chancellor of NY City public schools (and co-chair of the Education Equality Project).
They agree that transparency and providing parents with detailed information about schools (including results!) is a good thing, and will help parents to make better informed decisions about their children’s education.
In “School choice is ‘guesswork’: Julia Gillard,” The Weekend Australian interviews Ms. Gillard, who admits, “I do think transparency of information in and of itself will spur people to do better and they will all want to be seen to be doing better.”
Ms Gillard called on the states and territories to agree to greater transparency of school results and features. Inspired by the changes made in New York City by the education chancellor Joel Klein, Ms Gillard is proposing schools make public as much information as they can, from the qualifications of their teachers to comparing their students’ performance and improvement against groups of similar schools.
One of the features of the New York system is that schools consistently failing to meet benchmarks are closed, giving parents confidence that their child’s school is meeting expected standards.
Asked whether parents could have the same confidence in Australian schools, Ms Gillard agreed they could not. “I’m not sure that is the case at the moment. Perhaps as worrying as that statement is, from the point of view of being the federal Education Minister, I couldn’t tell because the amount of information that’s available doesn’t enable me to make that judgment in a meaningful way,” she said.
