But I can't help the feeling that Arne Duncan's speech to the Teaching and Learning Conference on Friday, March 14 (after the press corps has packed up and gone home for the weekend) was designed to mollify a group of increasingly loud teachers.
He called, in effect, for a meeting where teacher leadership would be discussed. (There. That should keep them happy for awhile as we continue with down the road in our mission that already has wheels and full gas tank.)
And he promised money for the meetings. (For airfare? Snacks?)
It reminded me of my first hopeful foray into teacher leadership way back in 2001.
I sat in Richmond, along with other Nationally Board Certified teachers and teachers-of-the-year and teachers-of-the-building, district, state along with other fresh-faced-Milken-gosh-we-just-love-our-underpaid-teacher-prize winners to hear an alternative career plan for successful teachers.
On the last day a statewide education committee which reported to the DOE said they had been meeting for ten years to decide what a teacher does that can be named. They decided that there was no way to identify accomplished teaching so they had determined to......wait for it.......have some more meetings.
What?! More meetings? Hadn't the National Board for Professional Standards already defined the standards and evaluated teachers? What is the next meeting for?
At the end of an exciting weekend of discussion about changes to the teaching profession, I got a sinking feeling. Oh. I get it. Delay on a politically sticky wicket. There's a lot of pushback from somewhere. After that meeting, no more movement statewide. It's been thirteen years.
So Duncan has called for more meetings. A delay. Sticky wickets (lots of $$ around the current system of evaluation and punishment.)
And then he left the Teaching and Learning meeting to urge state education leaders not to back away from testing and fudged on a question about assessing teachers by using the, still questionable, scores from the current blizzard of tests as evidence of teacher effectiveness.
But Duncan did make a comment that makes sense by acknowledging that Congress is dead in the water: change will come from outside Washington. States will have to make the reforms needed (and he says, to support the untested experiment in the Common Core that is currently underway.)
So, only one thing left to do my teacher friends. Waken the Sleeping Giant and be the change you want to see in the world.
No way around it. It is time to get rude, get some sharp elbows and start making sure that accomplished, successful educators are leading the charge in your district and your state.
Don't sit down for yet ANOTHER meeting.
Stand up for what you believe in and make sure every policy maker knows that what is being done in the name of reform will ultimately improve teaching and learning for every child in the United States.
Demand:
- Universal preschool
- Support for underserved students in the form of nutrition and health care
- A new school day where teacher development and collaborative learning is built into the day
- New pre-service models that involve a clinical phase
- Identification of teacher leaders accompanied by responsibilities and income to match
- Teachers on EVERY task force from the district to the national level
- A transformation of teacher unions to self-regulating enterprises with the goal of improved student learning
Would you sit back and let your own child suffer through these nationwide experiments?
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