Teachers Using What They Know
It happened again last week. I posted a comment on a Detroit Free Press article on the Common Core, and the first thing that popped up under my comment was this (and I'm paraphrasing): Pay no attention to anything Nancy Flanagan says. She's a teacher. Therefore, she's a Democrat and an MEA member. And therefore, her opinions are predetermined, controlled by others and invalid.
The irony? I was trying to inject a little nuance into a what had turned into a vicious battle resembling the Hatfields and the McCoys, if most of the combatants couldn't tell a Hatfield from a McCoy but were seriously interested in shooting somebody, anybody. Right now. Over academic standards. Fire, ready, aim.
The level of take-sides aggression over education policy has come to an interesting place. You can't tell the players without a scorecard, in spite of partisan affiliation, union membership or aversion, the spokesperson's genuine level of expertise and experience around the policy in question--or whether someone is paying for their "opinion."
There's also this: Teachers (contrary to popular opinion) are not monolithic. About a third of them identify as Republicans and vote that way in national elections. A whole lot of them, especially those who were raised with the idea that unions were for people who work in factories, find rough-and-tumble union politics distasteful.
We read all the time about teachers who claim to have "no time" to sift through, read and discuss the very policies that control their daily work. As a long-time practitioner, I recognize some validity in this claim. Teaching well is incredibly time-consuming and stressful. If you're paying dues, you may well decide to out-source your policy thinking to an advocacy group that has the time and expertise to deconstruct the ed-policy du jour and predict how it will impact your work, and your students.
However. Once you've lived with a decade of time-sucking, high-stakes, grade-by-grade Teachers Using What They Know - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher: