Professional Teachers—Click, Click! Poof! You’re Gone!
The attack on teacher education is fast and furious. Privatizing America’s public schools means getting rid of career teachers who support instruction geared to a child’s needs. A way to purge the country of real teachers is to extinguish their teacher education programs and make teaching look like a regimented practice that any drill sergeant can learn.
Some (not all) Colleges of Education (COEs) have been cash cows in the past and were in need of a face lift. But getting rid of the COEs altogether in order to allow novices to run schools like sweatshops, where teachers bark rigid orders at students and point clickers at them to get their attention, is not only abusive to poor children, but it is now going to be the law of the land!
Opt Out leader, reading specialist and activist Peggy Robertson describes here, well, the kind of boxed-in, high-stakes testing style teaching being foisted on teachers around the country. The program is from a book called Teach Like a Champion 2.0 written by Doug Lemov, who never studied child development or teaching, but who seems to know how to manage children. Lemov must be feeling like a champion himself, because his book is being used around the country to train teachers.
This kind of teaching is not student-centered. It is group think. Get all children to fit Professional Teachers—Click, Click! Poof! You’re Gone!:
