Obama Administration Sends Mixed Messages on Teachers and Testing
President Obama and 2014 National Teacher of the Year finalists applaud Sean McComb, second from right, a high school English teacher from Maryland, as the 2014 National Teacher of the Year during an event at the White House. | Photograph Credit/Susan Walsh/AP
By Ross Brenneman | Originally Published atEducation Week. May 6, 2014
Baltimore teacher Sean McComb is beginning his first full week as the newly minted National Teacher of the Year, timed conveniently to coincide with Teacher Appreciation Week.
In a ceremony held in the White House East Room last week, President Barack Obama praised McComb and other Teachers of the Year representing every state, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories as the “best of the best.”
“Students know that what teachers give them stays with them for a lifetime,” the president said. He noted that great teachers take on the role of counselor, that they become the inspiration for their students to do big things, and that they do more than “going through the motions of teaching to the test.”
That “teaching to the test” line, and similar statements, have made their way into the president’s remarks before. In this year’s State of the Union address, for instance, Obama called for “better support for teachers and new ways to measure how well our kids think, not how well they can fill in a bubble on a test.”
But while the president may have a view of teaching that involves more than test results, his administration’s policies have arguably failed to focus attention beyond that aspect.
Many of the education programs championed by the Obama administration have tended to emphasize the empathyeducates – Obama Administration Sends Mixed Messages on Teachers and Testing:
