Quality Teachers Are Developed -- Not Found

Quality Teachers Are Developed -- Not Found:



QUALITY TEACHERS ARE DEVELOPED — NOT FOUND

 Are quality teachers found or developed? This is not just a rhetorical exercise. The answer has everything to do with how we go about the whole management of our teacher workforce. 

Born or made?

Do we think that the effort is to just keep weeding out “bad teachers” until we have only the good ones per Bill Gates’ ideas? Or do we develop good teaching by a broad spectrum of research, practice, and observation that starts in our teacher education programs and follows the teacher through a long career of constant development?

Current education “reformers” decisively side with the Gates approach seeing computers and technology as a way to multiply the effects of those few teachers who they perceive as having the necessary talent.

And for all of the noise of Teach For America‘s feverish PR work, their approach really is to find perceived talent and intelligence and couple that with a prescribed curriculum that the newly-minted teachers had little to do with developing. It’s why in that program is just six weeks, and boom! You’re out in that classroom.

Gates’ approach of finding “natural” teachers to multiply by way of technology and sending the rest out the door is a perfect fit for someone who wants to sell a lot of computers — like maybe Microsoft computers.

From professional to service worker

It is also a perfect approach for those who want to de-professionalize the teacher work force so that teachers become fully compliant service workers instead of independent thinkers who ask too many questions when bosses doesn’t know what they are talking about.

And if school raiders can just turn teachers into the current popular model of service workers who are expected to do a job and not think, then they can save investors a lot of money and convert the whole education “thing” into a big-money enterprise.

And as I pointed out in anQuality Teachers Are Developed -- Not Found: