If you want better schools, rural or otherwise, improve motivation and discipline of students | Get Schooled

If you want better schools, rural or otherwise, improve motivation and discipline of students | Get Schooled:

If you want better schools, rural or otherwise, improve motivation and discipline of students

by Maureen Downey

My blog entry on rural schools, prompted by an AJC Sunday story on rural education in Georgia, spurred a lot of comments, including this email from retired educator and school head Dennis Brown of Villa Rica. (I have shared other responses by Brown on teacher quality.)
Here is his latest:

There is always a need for more great teachers in the classroom. But the title of your article this morning, “How do we entice great teachers to move to remote rural schools,” suggests there are none there today. That’s just not the case.
There are some great teachers already in place. But their effectiveness is muted and often their  hands tied by pedagogy and lack of equipment. Let’s first attack the real problem – and while I hesitate to use it to identify what that real problem is, the saying “If you want to improve the