I have always been passionate about the fact that as teachers, we haven't done enough to ensure that we are guiding the discourse on what we need to do to "improve education" in our country. As a result, a bunch of "Education Experts" with little to absolutely no experience in the field of education have been given almost unbridled access to the power-that-be to effect changes that are at best untested and unsupported by research, and at worst proven to be ineffective and plain out wrong!
In this article by Joel Shatzky, a retired English teacher who taught at SUNY (State University of New York), he shows how true "Good Teachers" are often rated as bad due to their willingness to actually fight for evidence-based good teaching. I am blessed to work at a District that actually does value great teaching, but even here we are faced with the testing industrial complex that has dominated all of the education field for now. Let us hope that this, too, shall pass in favor of what used to be an innovative education that placed more prowess on critical thinking rather than fact memorizing. Or at the very least, we have to start developing richer standards and evaluation tools that examine a student's true strengths and weaknesses more regularly and through more than just a paper/pencil multiple guess test once a year.
Click Here to access the article. It is a must read for any teacher and for anyone with a vested interest in their child's education. If we don't put a stop to all the crazy policies being floated around in education right now, we will be faced with an entire generation of kids who are incapable of doing basic thinking on their own.
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