CURMUDGUCATION: Evil L.A. Teacher Unions

CURMUDGUCATION: Evil L.A. Teacher Unions:

Evil L.A. Teacher Unions

The Center for Education Reform is a charter promotion group, perhaps one of the most cynical and self-serving of the reformster groups. Search their website for information or ideas about education-- the actual pedagogy and instruction in a classroom-- and you will find nothing, because the Center has no actual interest in education.

Check out their board of directors-- you will find a combination of money managers and charter school operators. That is where the Center's interest lies-- in getting more money into more charters.

And what stands in the way of these corporate interests making a better, bigger buck? Well, those damn unions, of course. The Center may not have any section devoted to actually educating children, but they have a whole tab devoted to those damn unions, and here's What They Believe:

We believe that the special interests that draw funds from the tax dollars funding public education, and that have become an intransient [sic-- pretty sure they mean "intransigent," though "intransient" as in "won't move away to some other place" might suit them as well] force in political and policy circles, have outlived the usefulness of the associations they once had and have become obstacles to programs and activities that can best and most judiciously serve children. Such groups—from teachers unions, to the associations of administrators, principals, school boards and hybrids of all (e.g., “The Blob”)—should be free to organize but without access to the dollars that are spent to fund schools and should be free to recruit but not mandate members, but they should not have a CURMUDGUCATION: Evil L.A. Teacher Unions:


Gates Takes Aim at Teacher Education

As noted today at Education Week, the Gates Foundation has fastened its aim on teacher preparation programs. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is ready to drop $34 million cool ones on "cooperative initiatives designed to improve teacher-preparation programs' overall effectiveness."

So what does that mean? Good news? Bad news?

The three year grants are based on four principles:

* developing strong partnerships with school districts
* giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills
* using data for improvement and accountability
* ensuring that faculty mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession

The first sounds great. The second sounds... well, I don't know. Exactly what specific set are we talking about, and what does that even mean? Becoming an interrogatory specialist? Learning to excellent at teaching fractions? I'm worried that the Gates tendency to believe that all complex activities can be broken down in to disconnected, context-free skills is at play here, in which case I'm doubting this will be useful.

Third? Well, if I thought "data" meant what I mean by "data, I'd think this was fine. I use data every minute of every day. But since this is Gates, I'm afraid that "data" means "results from a computer-based bunch of competency-based-baloney" or even "more of the useless data from those dreadful 

Gates Takes Aim at Teacher Education