Trust and Relationships in Education
The key factor in both the transmission of knowledge and the growth of a student as an individual is trust. This trust is necessary to build the relationship between a teacher and student in order to achieve these goals. To run a school effectively, there must be an atmosphere of trust between teachers and administration. This principle of trust as the mortar that holds together our education system also applies to the relationship between the DOE, the City and the members of individual schools, specifically the teachers.
The City's new initiative to fire more teachers is a betrayal of this trust. The DOE's new Teacher Performance Unit, a group of five lawyers headed by a former District Attorney, has been given the goal of helping Principals create cases against tenured teachers and getting rid of young, unsuccessful teachers before they get tenure.
The way that the DOE has handled this program reflects a pattern of disrespect that the DOE has shown to other members of the educational community. Through programs like the Cell Phone Ban, the DOE has continually antagonized students, teachers and parents. Instead of engendering the trust necessary to hold our schools together, they are creating a situation filled fear.
Students have often felt over-criminalized by policies like the Cell Phone Ban and Random Scanning. By hiring former prosecutors to fire our teachers, the DOE has, as InsideSchools.org Blog's Philissa Cramer says, made being a bad teacher a crime. The program also sets Principals against teachers, further dividing our school community.
In order for Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein's reforms to be successful, they must first end their pattern of bullying and disrespect. They must instead seek to create an atmosphere of trust: one in which the most basic relationships within the system: those between students and teachers in a classroom setting, mirror the relationship between the City and DOE and the various constituent groups within our education system. That is the only way that we can hold an education a large and complex as the one we have together.
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Education | teachers
On tenure
Submitted by Dan Jacoby on 19 November 2007 - 1:55am.
The tenure system, for those of us who don't get that protection in our jobs, may seem like a free ride. Certainly, once teachers are tenured it's extremely difficult to get rid of them, no matter how bad they are or how little they do. There is a legitimate argument that such a system is detrimental to our kids, since there is no guarantee that a tenured teacher will actually teach.
The problem is that things are never that simple.
One of the main reasons (probably the top reason) for the tenure system is that teachers are paid so little. Tenure is a "perk" that makes the low pay less onerous; once a teacher has lasted for long enough, his or her job is secure. If Michael Bloomberg and his marionette Joel Klein want to mess with the tenure system, they need to raise teachers' pay -- significantly.
In addition, the way the Bloomberg/Klein is taking the craft of teaching away from teachers, mandating specific class work, overloading standardizing testing, etc., seems to be nothing but an attempt to turn teachers into automatons. This approach is incredibly stupid on the face of it, as teaching is an art that cannot be reduced to "paint by numbers."
The overall theme seems to be based on an assumption that it is impossible to get good teachers, so they are trying to create a system where good teachers are unnecessary. It reminds me of when I worked at McDonald's while in high school -- the system there (which could be followed as "paint by numbers") was geared to work no matter how slow, unintelligent and apathetic the workers are.
The problem, of course, is that teaching is an art, and a good educational system demands good teachers. By ignoring that basic fact, there is no way the Bloomberg/Klein system can possibly be any good.
It should be noted that while B/K have been crowing over "improved test scores," the national test scores show no improvement at all -- in fact, they were improving before B/K took over, but then stopped. If B/K are going to rely on test scores as "proof" of how their system is doing, then they have been proven to be incompetent.
dead on
Unfortunately, the Bloomberg admin doesn't really care for anyone but themselves. They don't give a crap about schools. So long as they can dismantle unions, they can divest and divert all that money to private corporations. Everyone knows the hottest under-wraps companies are educational corps. With all the moves being made across the nation to crap on teachers, it's no wonder why they'd have a team of lawyers to make this happen.