John Thompson: Would a Reformers' Code of Ethics Help End Our Educational Civil War?
Early in my career, I floated a naive idea with my union business representative. What if education embraced a school reform code of ethics?
The attacks on teachers by "reformers" who had declared war on the educational "status quo," were ramping up their attacks on teachers. I could already see that the blame game could spin out of control. And sure enough, the contemporary accountability movement eventually declared a war on teachers, who supposedly were complicit in schools' failure to overcome the legacy of generational poverty. Back then, however, I was still too trusting of the idea that we could all reason together and thus improve schools.
My rep was sympathetic with my question, but he shot me down with a reminder of the system already in place. If teachers pushed policies that they disagreed with, administrators could retaliate by enforcing the existing code for educators and teachers could lose their licenses for violating it by, say, yelling at a class.
Many non-teachers might be perplexed by the answer, as I also would have been when I first entered the classroom. I had worked in plenty of brutalizing non-union blue collar jobs, including roughnecking in the oil
The attacks on teachers by "reformers" who had declared war on the educational "status quo," were ramping up their attacks on teachers. I could already see that the blame game could spin out of control. And sure enough, the contemporary accountability movement eventually declared a war on teachers, who supposedly were complicit in schools' failure to overcome the legacy of generational poverty. Back then, however, I was still too trusting of the idea that we could all reason together and thus improve schools.
My rep was sympathetic with my question, but he shot me down with a reminder of the system already in place. If teachers pushed policies that they disagreed with, administrators could retaliate by enforcing the existing code for educators and teachers could lose their licenses for violating it by, say, yelling at a class.
Many non-teachers might be perplexed by the answer, as I also would have been when I first entered the classroom. I had worked in plenty of brutalizing non-union blue collar jobs, including roughnecking in the oil