An educator’s list of what’s really hard in public education today
Melinda and Bill Gates recently said that attempting to reform the public education system in the United States has been the hardest philanthropic work they’ve ever done. The Seattle Times reported on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored event last month:
He [Gates] said he’s been surprised that education work can actually “go backward,” saying that if teachers don’t trust new evaluation systems, then they might opt for saying they don’t want any feedback at all.That’s quite different from the foundation’s global-health work, where there’s been steady progress.“If we come up with a new malaria drug, a new malaria vaccine, nobody votes to uninvent our malaria vaccine,” said Gates, to laughter from the audience.
That caught the attention of Nancy E. Bailey, a longtime special education teacher who left the classroom because of standardized test-based school reforms that she thinks hurt children. Bailey, who has a doctorate in educational leadership and bachelors and master’s degrees in special education, wrote a post on her blog about the remarks by Gates, listing what she considers really hard in education from the point of view of students, parents and teachers.
Bailey, who wrote the 2013 book “Misguided Education Reform: Debating the Impact on Students,” challenged Melinda and Bill Gates to spend “some serious time in poor public schools” to learn what is really hard in education for teachers and students — and to “spend time with the many moms of students with disabilities who home-school not because they want to, but because schools have cut special education services.”
Here is a shortened version of her admittedly incomplete list of what’s really hard in education (and you can see the full blog post and list here):An educator’s list of what’s really hard in public education today - The Washington Post:
