Last week, Tim Daly argued that there was no such thing as a “bash the teacher” group.
Strangely, nobody can credibly identify any members of this nefarious crowd…. Perhaps the danger lies in subversive policies, not words. Allegations of teacher bashing often surface when districts dismiss ineffective teachers…. What part of any of this could be construed as an attack on the average teacher?
Maybe Tim Daly didn’t speak with teachers from Central Falls, told they were fired though none of them had received unsatisfactory evaluations. Maybe Tim Daly didn’t speak with teachers from Florida, where Senate Bill 6 took what many (such as Rick Hess) saw as an overreaching approach and no one from the U.S. Department of Education stood up and said, “This is crazy, this is not the way to improve teacher evaluation or teacher personnel policy.” (And while I’m pointing that out, Mr. Daly, did I miss something you wrote to oppose SB 6? It would be great to know that someone who believes there ain’t no such thing as teacher-bashing is willing to stand up to point out overreaching.) Maybe Tim Daly hasn’t read the over-the-top e-mails of Whitney Tilson, who repeatedly attacks policy opponents such as teacher unions as if they were subhuman, behavior that should embarrass Tilson’s friends. Maybe Tim Daly forgot Rod Paige’s remark about the NEA being a terrorist organization.
I may be wrong in guessing Daly’s explanations for these: none of them constitute teacher bashing. The Central Falls superintendent wasn’t using the teachers as a pawn in a battle over bargaining? The advocacy of policies in Florida that weren’t paid for and where no one understood the details wasn’t a threat to teachers’ careers motivated more by policy testosterone than good sense? Tilson’s rants are just colorful expressions, no one goads him on, and it really contributes to substantive policy debate? Paige wasn’t expressing a visceral anti-union attitude in a way that tried to apply a hot-button rhetoric of existential threats to teachers?
Pardon my skepticism, but I see plenty to justify the perception that there is a bash the teacher crowd. In the past decade, I’ve seen its uglier side on a regular basis.
What do you think about this one?
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/rolldice/
So what are our chances of getting a good teacher if we hire one from Pinellas?
I still don’t really understand how any non-tenured teacher can be fired without an unsatisfactory evaluation without any explanation. How are there not lawsuits about discrimination or anything?
The system creates so much fear for new teachers.
I bash teachers at times, but not as often as I bash the principals and administrators who hired them, evaluated them for tenure, set the curriculum, and choose the textbooks.
I read the article in The New Yorker about the impossibility of firing incompetent teachers, including ones who don’t show up for work, under the NYC contract. There was plenty of teaching bashing in there, but no bashing of the people on the other side who signed that contract.
My own view of teacher evaluation based on learning gains (mostly concerning observations in the blog Bob Calder linked to) is that you must control for the bodies in the classroom. No teacher in the top quintile should be rewarded, nor one in the bottom quintile fired, until they swap classrooms for a year.