Coleman Dictates Teaching Methods
If you were an experienced pilot, engineer, architect or surgeon, whom would you look to for guidance in building your expertize and generally improving your profession? If you were an experienced pilot, do you think you could get useful tips on flying a plane from person with only a college degree in philosophy. . . . or could someone who had a degree in government and public policy help you to be a better pilot? If we wanted to improve the operating rooms of our hospitals, would we hire operating room managers whose main connection with surgery was that they had been surgical patients?
Well the examples above are very close to equivalent to what is being done to the management of public education. In the videoincluded with this article, middle school reading teachers are expected to be tutored in how to teach close reading techniques by three persons who have never set foot in a middle school classroom. The video in the article is a training video on the Engage NY website, a special website set up to help teachers learn how to teach the Common Core. The training session is a discussion of the techniques used in a reading teaching method called "close reading". The trainers are none other than David Coleman, the chair for the development of Common Core, John King the chancellor of New York state public schools, and Kate Gerson, who is now a Senior Fellow of the New York Regents Research Fund (a semi-official reform pressure group funded by Bill Gates). Of course none of them have ever actually had experience as middle school reading teachers (Gerson did work for a short time as a high school English teacher). But like the guy who stayed at the Holiday Inn Express, they have Louisiana Educator: Coleman Dictates Teaching Methods: