Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Thoughts on teachers — from Socrates to Lady Gaga - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

Thoughts on teachers — from Socrates to Lady Gaga - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post:


Thoughts on teachers — from Socrates to Lady Gaga

Today is National Teacher Day, part of Teacher Appreciation Week, an annual moment to heap praise on teachers in a country that has spent the rest of the past year doing pretty much the opposite.
Morale has been plummeted in recent years among most of the approximate 3,232,800 teachers in K-12 public schools, according to recent polls. This is a result in large part of the actions of state legislatures that have passed laws end teacher tenure, to make teacher evaluation partly dependent on student standardized test scores, and to take other actions that many teachers see as an assault on their profession.
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Teacher on flawed tests: ‘We can ill-afford to be silent while our very jobs are at stake’

I received the following email from a New York State math teacher. The message reveals a previously unreported problem with the New York State 7th Grade Math exam recently given to students, this on top of the now famous English Language Arts test questions about a talking pineapple and other problems with these tests that have been cited by principals and others.
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