Are You Feeling RESPECT?
Dear California Teachers,
While you were in the classroom or eating lunch, or supervising lunch, or sponsoring a club, or helping students or attending an IEP meeting this past Wednesday afternoon, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was talking about transforming our profession, launching Project RESPECT – which stands for Recognizing Education Success, Professional Excellence, Collaborative Teaching. It took from 2009 to 2012 for the administration to come around to the idea of respect, I suppose, and their groundbreaking initiatives were pretty much what Linda Darling-Hammond would have proposed three years ago.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (photo by the author)
It was a typical Arne Duncan performance – full of sound bytes and ideas that most teachers would agree with, and utterly failing to recognize how difficult it is to separate the message from the messenger. While I credit the