RESPECTing the Best Teachers with Larger Classes
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Sara Mosle, a charter corps member from TFA (Class of 1990), has written a propaganda piece in the NYTimes hailing the latest bad idea by corporate reform schoolers: larger classes for the teachers who do best raising test scores. If you were without mind enough to believe Mosle, this revival of an old idea of industrial-size classes spontaneously coalesced from the collective unconscious of individuals otherwise unrelated and occupying different sectors of the universe, rather than the intertwined manipulators and marionettes of the same puppet theatre:
Diverse figures including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Bill Gates have coalesced around a new idea: why not increase class sizes for the best teachers and use the resulting budgetary savings to pay these best teachers more and to help train educators who need improvement? Yes, each class might be bigger on average but at least each child would stand a better chance of having a great teacher, which would-be reformers say is more important.
The other bit of misleading rhetoric here involves Mosle’s sudden inclusion of Gates, Bloomberg, and Duncan in the category of “would-be reformers,” as if
Bragging about our students. We have to sometimes.
Bragging about our students. We have to sometimes.
I have a former student with whom I worked during student teaching who made the local news for starting a garden at her middle school. This is great. A couple of years ago, I taught a social studies methods course that consisted of a curricular core of food related issues, urban agriculture, our food system, all [...]
Fear: How Not to Be Seen
Fear: How Not to Be Seen
This, however, is a place to offer a few words about the intersections that may at first not seem like intersections at all: Jason Collins coming out of the closet, the Boston Marathon bombing, Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and other “no excuses” schools.