Video of Chicago teachers being treated like children in meeting. It's humiliating.
Professional Development meetings, sometimes called In-Service, are supposed to be offering up intelligent new developments in the field of education. Looks like someone in the back of the room took this video.
Published on Feb 17, 2014
This presenter was one of several consultants flown in from California and the United Kingdom for the Chicago Public Schools' Office of Strategic School Support Services' special network. This is a professional development for teachers of Saturday ISAT preparation classes.
This woman actually gets paid for this terrible presentation.
From CBS News Chicago:
In Video, Consultant Treats CPS Teachers Like Small Children
CHICAGO (CBS) — A video posted on You Tube apparently shows a consultant running a professional development seminar and treating Chicago Public School teachers like kindergartners.
The woman running the class on several occasions in the one-minute video asks the group of teachers to repeat single-words, or short phrases, back to her.
Consultant: “So repeat after me. We will”
Class: “We will”
Consultant: “Use”
Class: “Use”
Consultant: “Accurately”
Class: “Accurately”
Consultant: “Grade appropriate”
Class: “Grade appropriate”
Consultant: “General academic”
Class: “General academic”
Consultant: “In domain specific words.”
Class: “In domain specific words.”
Consultant: “And phrases”
Class: “And phrases”
Just like little children being asked to memorize something.
Canadian Education blogger Joe Bower had a whole lot more to say. He's right.
Here is what Education Hell looks like
He makes 4 valid points.
1. Roller coaster of emotions. I experienced a roller coaster of emotions as I watched this apocalyptic video. First, I was in shock. I couldn't believe this was happening. Second, I was angry. I couldn't imagine sitting in that classroom chanting without speaking up or walking out. Third, I was profoundly sad. If this is the nature of education reform and the future of our schools then I want nothing to do with it. Lastly, I am energized and hopeful. The only thing that cancerous education policies and practices need to survive is for good teachers to say and do nothing.
2. This is not Professional Development. This is at best a very poor inservice. This is precisely why teachers need a powerful Union that has a strong Professional Association focus to make sure that teachers have control over their own professional learning.
3. Teaching or testing? Teaching to the test and excessive test preparation invalidates inferences that can be drawn from the scores – yet they are the inevitable response to pressure to produce good test scores.
Leaving out #4 to add his last paragraph, to which I think the answer is yes...unfortunately.
One last bonus horror: Is this being done to the teachers to encourage them to return to their classrooms and do exactly this to their students?
Before I retired this kind of mindless stuff was already beginning. Our last few development days were jokes. We were all stifling laughter, or perhaps tears as well.
Wasted time, wasted money to that consultant, and even worse degrading to the teachers.
That is not just Rahm's Chicago school system (yes it is his because he has mayoral control). It is happening on various scales around the country.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Beyond embarrassing...
Only I would call in sick and then come in to catch up on my work in the classroom. Someone finally pointed out that I could have stayed home, but one of the most frustrating things about this kind of PD is that you are sitting there listening to a useless high priced speaker when you desperately need time to grade papers and work in your room on planning and for me setting up and taking down experiments since I taught science.
My tactic caught on at my school with folks like me who had lots of sick leave. Luckily although our administrators knew what we were doing, they never called us on it - I think because they were sympathetic.
There was also some wonderful PD in our district and we knew which ones to make sure we did not miss and which ones were total B*%#t and appropriate for a sick day.
But surely, if even one of Obama's ardent fans would forward a clip of this to the White House, he'd immediately call Rahm and tell him to stop this practice! Well . . . . perhaps not. When the Obama family lived in Chicago, their daughters went to the elite University of Chicago laboratory school. And quelle surprise! That's where Rahm chose to send his kids as well! They don't need no stinkin' public schools where teachers' pay is tied to test scores.
The decision where to send your kids to school is a personal one, but it is worth publicly noting what public officials, who support test-based school reform (including Obama's main initiative, "Race to the Top" choose to do with their own children when given a choice.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/chicago-mayor-rahm-emanuel-chooses-private-school-for-kids/2011/07/21/gIQAzES7RI_blog.html
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel chooses private school for kids
By Valerie Strauss
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who strongly supports school reform that centers on standardized test-based accountability for students, schools and teachers, has decided to send his children to a private school that doesn’t obsess on standardized tests. Emanuel, who served in the White House as President Obama’s chief of staff for a few years, and his wife have chosen, according to a local radio station CBS News 2 in Chicago, to send their three children to the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park.
Obama and now Emanuel opted for schools that do not require teachers to spend hours a week drilling kids to pass standardized tests, and they don’t evaluate teachers by how well their students do on those assessments. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his wife send their children to Arlington public schools in Virginia.
Neither the Arlington Public School system, nor Sidwell, nor The Lab Schools, assess teachers by student standardized test grades, which is a bad idea sweeping the country, encouraged by the Obama administration.
When a veteran teacher asked Sidwell whether its ties teacher pay to test scores, he received this response from a faculty member on April 1, 2011: “We don’t tie teacher pay to test scores because we don’t believe them to be a reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness.” Sidwell knows better. The Lab Schools know better. The Arlington Public School District knows better.
Here's an article from last summer's Nation, titled:
RAHM EMANUEL'S MINORITY-BASHING SCHOOL CLOSINGS GO FORWARD
Today was the first day of school in Chicago—and a profound setback for Chicago’s forces of decency. Fifty fewer schools will be in operation this term, with 2,113 fewer staffers, a colossal injustice I’ve written about here and here and here and here. The school closings are going forward because ten days ago Federal District Judge John Z. Lee denied the attempt to get a preliminary injunction to prevent it. A week before that ruling, I spoke with one of the lawyers who brought the suit, Thomas Geoghegan, for my monthly interview series at Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park—where I and my audience deepened our sense of just how mad and malign Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools agenda truly is.[/blockquote]
http://www.thenation.com/blog/175902/school-daze-rahm-emanuels-minority-bashing-school-closings-go-forward
“When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.”
“In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.”
“They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.”
~George Orwell, 1984
- I'm still not sure if it is art imitating life, or life imitating art. It's probably a little of both......
....implementing ( with enthusiasm ) the policies of a DEMOCRATIC president.
"Republicans"?!?
Wow.
I can't imagine sitting through the whole thing.
I expected it to be horrible, but THIS??? How on earth they put up with that is beyond me.
Caught on video one can't deny.
