Scary reading in charter school bill
A bill in the North Carolina Senate is highly revealing about how much concern its Republican sponsors really have for accountability in education.
Short answer: apparently none.
Longer answer: A bill titled “NC Public Charter School Board,” introduced by two Republicans, calls for a new board to approve and oversee charters. The State Board of Education would no longer have the job of overseeing charter schools, and charter school applicants would no longer have to get permission to open from local school boards or local education agencies. They could go straight to the new board, whose members would be appointed by the governor.
If anyone is worried that members of the new board might have conflicts of interest with the schools they are overseeing, the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Jerry Tillman and Sen. Dan Soucek, are not; their legislation doesn’t have any language ensuring that there are no conflicts.
What’s more, local school boards would be forced to lease open buildings or land to charter
Former TFAer: Teach For America didn’t prepare me for troubled kids
Here’s a video from a former Teach For America corps member named John Bilby, who taught in the South Bronx from 2009 to 2010 after going through TFA’s five-week summer training and finding it totally inadequate to prepare him for what he faced.
TFA famously recruits new college graduates who aren’t looking for a teaching career, trains them briefly and then places them in high-poverty schools in urban and rural areas, expecting them to know how to deal with needy students. Some recruits do just fine, but the overall premise that five weeks of summer training makes a teacher for the most needy students is, well, preposterous, or, would be seen that way if we were talking about any other profession other than teaching.
In the video, which he made for the Teachers Talk Back Project, Bilby says the training left him unprepared to meet the needs of the children who came to his South Bronx classroom suffering from conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder from seeing parents shot.
Here are some of the things he says in the video, but take a few minutes and watch it. From Bilby, who has a bachelor’s degree in history from Rutgers University and is now
Former TFAer: Teach For America didn’t prepare me for troubled kids
Here’s a video from a former Teach For America corps member named John Bilby, who taught in the South Bronx from 2009 to 2010 after going through TFA’s five-week summer training and finding it totally inadequate to prepare him for what he faced.
TFA famously recruits new college graduates who aren’t looking for a teaching career, trains them briefly and then places them in high-poverty schools in urban and rural areas, expecting them to know how to deal with needy students. Some recruits do just fine, but the overall premise that five weeks of summer training makes a teacher for the most needy students is, well, preposterous, or, would be seen that way if we were talking about any other profession other than teaching.
In the video, which he made for the Teachers Talk Back Project, Bilby says the training left him unprepared to meet the needs of the children who came to his South Bronx classroom suffering from conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder from seeing parents shot.
Here are some of the things he says in the video, but take a few minutes and watch it. From Bilby, who has a bachelor’s degree in history from Rutgers University and is now