Teach Strong: More of the Same, But with a Game Board
A group of 40 organizations, including many that are chiefly test-score-driven, corporate-reform- bent, is launching an effort to prompt the 2016 presidential contenders who are saying little about educational issues (as though they all met together and agreed, “Let’s just not talk much at all about American public education”) to agree to a nine-point plan to supposedly improve the teaching profession.
The campaign is called Teach Strong (#teachstrong) and is led by Center for American Progress (CAP). Amazingly, the teacher temp agency, Teach for America (TFA), is also in on this nine-point push, even though TFA president Elisa Villanueva Beard told Washington Post that TFA has no plans to modify its instant-oatmeal, five-week “great, very rigorous pretraining” of its turnstile teachers.
This coalition is a real corporate reform nest (e.g., Education Trust, Council of Chief State School Officers, National Council on Teacher Quality, Relay Graduate School of Education, The New Teacher Project, Education Post) plus education groups that have origins outside of corporate reform but who want (ahem) “a seat at the table” bad enough to go along with corporate reform, including both national teachers unions. (Click image to enlarge):
So, what is focus of the Teach Strong campaign? Why, its that same global competitiveness that gave us untested Common Core, but instead of focusing on Teach Strong: More of the Same, But with a Game Board | deutsch29: