‘I would prefer to trust our teachers …’ - by Charles Taylor Kerchner
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| Charles Taylor Kerchner |
California’s back! Gov. Jerry Brown did himself proud in Thursday’s State of the State address, and he did California proud, too. In the details of the speech, there are prospects for boldness, greatness and innovation, not the tire patching and gridlock we’ve experienced as government.
Others will comment at great length on the wisdom of the San Joaquin delta tunnel project and whether high-speed rail is prescient or folly. And educational interests are putting the pencil to whether they win or lose under the governor’s plan for simplifying public education funding and regulation. (See David Plank’sLos Angeles Times commentary.)
Instead of joining these conversations, or commenting on the literary allusions in the governor’s speech, please zoom in on one sentence that has revolutionary importance: “I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work—lighting fires in young minds.”
Brown knows that we live in a world that profoundly distrusts teachers. Most of what passes for education reform has been crafted with the assumption that teachers are incompetent or malfeasant. Education systems, therefore, are layered with micromanagement rather than characterized by useful feedback mechanisms that make teachers smart about their work. It bends
Q&A: What do early childhood educators need to know? - by Lillian Mongeau
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| Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley. (Photo: Lillian Mongeau/EdSource Today) |
Dr. Marcy Whitebook has been part of the early education world since the early 1970s, when she graduated college and went to work as a preschool teacher. Today she’s the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley. As part of a new, occasional Question and Answer series with leaders in California education, EdSource Today’s Lillian Mongeau sat down with Whitebook...
