A teacher’s nine wishes for 2017
Peter Greene is a veteran teacher of English in a small town in Pennsylvania who write about all kinds of education-related topics on his Curmudgucation blog. He has, for example, written recently about Betsy DeVos, President-Elect Donald Trump nominee for education secretary, whom Greene called unqualified for the job, as well as about standardized testing, challenged books, teacher evaluation and a lot more. Here is his piece on his wishes for public education in 2017. See if they match yours in any way. This appeared on his blog, and he gave me permission to republish it.
By Peter Greene
When you find that you must concentrate on calling out and pushing back against the many, varied attacks on public education these days, it is easy to forget to articulate what you actually want to see occur to improve schools. So as a New Year’s palate cleanser of sorts, let me lay out what things I want to see happen in the world of public education in the year ahead.
I should note that this is an ideal wish list, and I recognize that it’s a really long journey to get from where we are to reach these goals. But even if we can’t get there, these are the stars we should steer by.
1) The end of Big Standardized Testing
We are achieving literally nothing by forcing kids to take high-stakes standardized tests, other than wasting huge amounts of time and money, and twisting the entire sense of public education’s purpose. If I could only achieve one wish on this list with a wave of my magic wand, it would be this one. Test-centric education is a poisonous acid, eating education from the inside out.
I’d settle for some sort of initiative to find systems of accountability that would give taxpayers the assurance that their money is being well-spent, to replace the test-centric system that does not actually deliver anything that it promises. Other goals that have been given by test A teacher’s nine wishes for 2017 - The Washington Post: