NANCY BAILEY: CDC Recommendations Are Clearer, But Teachers Face the Same Problems and New Ones

CDC Recommendations Are Clearer, But Teachers Face the Same Problems and New Ones

CDC Recommendations Are Clearer, But Teachers Face the Same Problems and New Ones

Just because school opening isn’t causing higher levels of community transmission doesn’t mean that there isn’t individual risk to teachers and staff. If we had wanted schools to safely reopen, we should have worked hard as a society to keep transmission rates down and to invest resources in schools.

~Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and a visiting professor of health policy at George Washington University.

The CDC’s recommendations about school reopenings are better than previous guidelines and teacher union leaders seem to approve. They say they have a road map based on science, but teachers still have concerns. Here’s a description.

What about the Red Zones?

According to the new color-coded zones, the CDC identifies counties by Covid-19 risk, blue, yellow, orange, and red. Each zone is supposed to follow specific mitigation steps, with the red zone being the most concerning.

Dr. Walensky says: If we get to a point where we are beyond the red zone here, really high levels of community spread related to the variants or related to just more transmission, we may need to revisit this again. 

CNN reports that most zones are red zones.  CONTINUE READING: CDC Recommendations Are Clearer, But Teachers Face the Same Problems and New Ones

Fewer than 100,000 children in the US live in a county considered “low” or “moderate CONTINUE READING: CDC Recommendations Are Clearer, But Teachers Face the Same Problems and New Ones

CURMUDGUCATION: About Teachers4OpenSchools

CURMUDGUCATION: About Teachers4OpenSchools

About Teachers4OpenSchools

You may have run across a shiny new group on line that is agitating for teachers to be back in the classroom-- Teachers4OpenSchools.

The arguments are the usual ones, from the legitimate concern about mental health to the learning loss baloney. There's not much of anything new here, and not the kind of balance we find in a piece like this one.  But I'm always curious about these little pop-up goups, and the website is pretty opaque about who, exactly, is happening here. But poking around the site, I found two teachers who are apparently acting at least as spokespersons for the group.

One is NYC teacher Stephanie Edmonds, who runs the Youtube channel Class Disruption, where you can find vidcasts like this one, in which she explains what Ibram X. Kendi gets wrong about equity issues and also describes how lefties like emotional language "that may not exactly align with reality" while righties prefer reason and statistics and things that reflect reality (though she "doesn't subscribe" to the whole left-right thing). Power. Vibe. She's a little rambly. She was the president of her college's Libertarian Club. She wants unity and the media is hurting it. She's a history teacher who uses the 1776 unites materials. She has a very distinctive voice, sometimes. She's been a teacher since the fall of 2016.

Her compatriot is Catherine Barrett. We've encountered Barrett before, as a teacher voice on the CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: About Teachers4OpenSchools

Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher | Diane Ravitch's blog

Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher | Diane Ravitch's blog

Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher

Rebekah Ray responded to another Florida teacher who complained the changes by the State Legislature has destroyed the promises made to him when he became a teacher. It’s method of evaluating teachers is one of the worst in the nation. If they don’t teach reading or math in grades 3-8, they are assigned ratings for students they never taught in subjects they never taught.

Ray writes:

I would not sign that evaluation. The first year Florida started its detrimental evaluation system I taught all 11th grade classes. I was asked to meet with the principal and the AP of curriculum (my evaluator) and was told I was a “Needs Improvement Teacher”. I was devastated because prior to that year, I had always received outstanding evaluations. I was also an NBCT teacher. Additionally, for that first year of the insane evaluation system, all teachers on campus who did not teach 9th and 10th grade were supposed to receive the school-wide VAM. I pointed out that I should have received the SW VAM scores because I taught all 11th grade students. The AP looked at me and said, “No, you have one 10th grade class.” At that point, my devil horns came out, and I CONTINUE READING: Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher | Diane Ravitch's blog