Forever young: the new teaching career
“Given that the focus of so much school reform is rightly on poor kids in underserved schools, and some charter organizations and Teach For America are particularly concerned about making a difference with such children …advocacy of brief teaching careers gets perilously close to moral quicksand.” So writes Mike Rose in the following post about how the teaching profession is being redefined by reformers who don’t think much of experience. Rose is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and author of several books. His latest book is “Public Education Under Siege,” which he co-edited with Michael B. Katz.
By Mike Rose
Imagine that you are about to move to a community where every service is provided by people who have four years or less of experience doing their work, and in many cases, the only training they received was on the job—so their training is included in that four years. Your physician has a bachelors degree in biology—let’s even say a masters—and has been seeing patients for three years, learning by doing, in a clinic staffed by equally-experienced peers. Your lawyer read the law for a summer and is in her second year of