That Sinking Feeling: The Way We Are Thinking About Teachers Is All Wrong
Occasionally I wake in the night with the sinking feeling that maybe I’ve been living my life by all the wrong rules and making bad choices that hurt those I love. It’s a terrible feeling that makes it hard to go back to sleep, but usually in the morning with some light and reason I can calm down, readjust a bit and move on. With public policy, the sinking feeling usually comes with the news, as it gets clearer that we are moving in the wrong direction. Then the challenge is to get more information and figure out how to help change the public will. It isn’t always so easy.
This month important information has been published about the punitive policies our federal government and states are using to evaluate public school teachers and to determine whether they are qualified. Have we been operating by the wrong rules and making bad choices that hurt those we depend on? But first a little history…
The public education policies of President Barack Obama’s administration have featured “holding teachers accountable” for their students’ accomplishments at school. The policies of Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants have required that states impose prescribed turnaround plans for schools with low test scores, including one called “reconstitution” that fires the principal and at least half the staff.
Then in 2012, when it became clear that Congress was unlikely to agree on any kind of reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the omnibus (and very punitive) 2002 federal law on public education, Obama’s Department of Education began offering states waiversfrom some of NCLB’s deeply flawed and onerous consequences. The law had set utopian and unrealistic benchmarks by which all schools would bring their students to tested proficiency That Sinking Feeling: The Way We Are Thinking About Teachers Is All Wrong | janresseger: