What Is Teaching All About and Why Does Experience Matter?
From our national testing law, No Child Left Behind, through programs like School Improvement Grants coming from Arne Duncan’s Department of Education, federal policy is designed these days to blame and scapegoat school teachers. The assumption under today’s policies is that if we rate and rank teachers by students’ scores, they will work harder and smarter and do more with less to make up for the fact that across many states we are spending less on public education than we did five or six years ago. And we are spending not nearly enough in the communities where children are segregated in poverty.
Our national obsession with blaming teachers is likely also wound up with the fact that we have all watched a lot of teachers work. As we sat in their classrooms, it all looked pretty easy. When one listens to Emanuel Ax play the piano, it is also easy to imagine being a concert pianist because he makes it look pretty easy. This morning in her Washington Postcolumn, Valerie Strauss features a commentary from one of today’s best writers about teaching, Mike Rose, a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and author of some of my favorite
