Ricciotti: Teachers are not the enemy
Published 5:47 pm, Monday, September 15, 2014
Fewer and fewer college graduates today are entering the teaching profession as teaching today is like working in a war zone. The war on teachers, which began when George W. Bushbecame president in 2000 and continues with the Obama administration, has taken its toll on teaching as a profession.
The Urban Teacher Education Consortium, a national consortium of teacher educators in a recently released position paper on the training of teachers described what public school teachers are experiencing in their classrooms today as a time of "encroaching dehumanization and disempowerment of both teachers and their students." What the Consortium attributes the dehumanization and disempowerment of teachers to is a "systems of accountability based on questionable testing practices" which have been used to judge teachers and their students.
The war on teachers began with the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) program when George W. Bush was president and has continued with "Race to the Top" (RTTT) with President Obama and his non-educator, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Basically both programs are what is commonly referred to by public school educators as "test and punish" testing programs that are used primarily for closing schools, ranking students, demonizing teachers and for assessing teacher effectiveness. These programs have now morphed into the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in which the federal government has, in essence, usurped local control of education in the United States.
Hence, the purpose of these so-called education reform movement with its high-stakes tests has been to rank students, not to educate them. The ranking consists of "winners"and "losers" which extends beyond the students to also include schools that are "successes" and "failures."
There is a movement in the nation against high-stakes testing and one of the leaders of the movement is Vermont's Commissioner of Education Rebecca Holcombe who persuaded the Vermont Board of Education to issue the following statement: " A compelling body of national research shows the over-emphasis on standardized testing has caused considerable collateral damage such as narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, reducing love of learning, pushing students out of school and undermining school climate."
Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama as well as the political establishment in Washington, D.C. realized that the true culprit in the achievement gap of many urban schools and their suburban counterparts was poverty. Moreover, both presidents decided that a war on teachers would be cheaper than a war on poverty. At a time when poverty of children in the country has Ricciotti: Teachers are not the enemy - Connecticut Post: