Joanna Jacobs blog - So much for merit pay
John Kerry favors merit pay for teachers only if the teachers' union approves, reports Education Intelligence Agency.
It also appears the Kerry campaign has squared the circle regarding its stated support for performance pay in the face of NEA opposition. Kerry education adviser Robert Gordon told the Cleveland Plain Dealer the performance pay plan would be voluntary and subject to collective bargaining with local teachers' unions. "No one would be forced to do it," Gordon said.
Progressives vs. progress
Erin O'Connor is reading Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform. The book starts with the progressive education movement, which had some regressive ideas, O'Connor points out. Progressives favored tracking most students into vocational studies with academics reserved for the elite.
Learning for its own sake was considered impractical and elitist even as the rationale for not teaching academic subjects was itself elitist: The subjects taught in the traditional academic curriculum -- Latin, Greek, algebra, and so on -- were felt to be well beyond the abilities of most people, who could neither reason nor remember well enough to master them. Progressive education as it was initially conceived and implemented by educationists across the country was thus in many ways profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in its conception of human potential and in its correspondingly rigid notion of school not as preparation for life as a thinking citizen but as preparation for specific manual jobs.
Now schools don't try to prepare students for responsible citizenship or gainful employment; college is the magic transformation agent that will turn slackers into thinking, working adults.
joannejacobs.com
YOUR CHILD IS AN ILLITERATE CABBAGE
chasemeladies.blogspot.com
Writing their reports at the moment. Revenge! That will wipe the smiles off their nasty little faces! A lot of teachers give everyone top marks for everything, but I see it as my duty to say quite clearly "Your child is an illiterate cabbage," if this is the case. "He is in the advanced class because no one has ever failed him. Nevertheless, he speaks English like a dog."
In Hong Kong a school report is simply a fire-and-forget missile: you send it to the parents, and that is the end of it. In Italy I had to give everyone the highest grades possible, just to keep their appalling pushy mammas off my back; otherwise I’d have them turning up in person to hound and badger me. Some of them were actually aggressive, convinced that anyone who dissented from the view that their child was a genius must be motivated by malice. Very often I was motivated by malice, but that is not the point. In these reports I can say only that their whelp turns up late and acts the goat, spilling things and irritating me greatly. I cannot ask them to justify how they can possibly feel affection for such a creature, nor can I request that they please stop polluting the earth with these mewling consumers.
There is nothing wrong with most of these kids that a prolonged and merciless beating wouldn’t put right. This new human rights legislation has really taken the fun out of teaching. |
