The Gates/ Walton/ Broad Fix for That Nagging Teacher Problem
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A cheery little reverie by special guest blogger Michael Fiorillo
- Proclaim austerity for the public schools, while continuing to expand charters.
- Put non-educators in positions of power, from Assistant Principal on up.
- Maintain a climate of scapegoating and witch hunting for “bad teachers,” who are posited as the cause of poverty and student failure, doing everything possible to keep debate from addressing systemic inequities.
- Neutralize and eventually eliminate teacher unions (the former largely accomplished in the case of the AFT). As part of that process, eliminate tenure, seniority and defined benefit pensions.
- Create and maintain a climate of constant disruption and destabilization, with cascading mandates that are impossible to keep up or comply with.
- Create teacher evaluations based on Common Core-related high stakes tests for which no curriculum has been developed. Arbitrarily impose cut scores on those exams that cast students, teachers and schools as failing, as was done by NYS Education Commissioner John King and Regent Meryl Tisch.
- Get teachers and administrators, whether through extortion (see RttT funding) threats or non-stop propaganda, to accept the premises of “data-driven” everything, NYC Educator: The Gates/ Walton/ Broad Fix for That Nagging Teacher Problem: