Bob Kerr: The teacher, the dentist, and the numbers
01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, March 3, 2010
... There is damage being done here. In this eagerness to support the wholesale firing of veteran teachers, people are not thinking about what comes next. Will good teachers want to go near schools that have been set up as free-fire zones for zealous reformers? And will teachers who are willing to take jobs in schools that are being forced to fit into federal guidelines have any understanding of the community they’re in or the particular needs of its students? ...
One of the strange things among many strange things that have occurred in the swift and dizzying effort to turn Central Falls High School into a national test case was the appearance of students two weeks ago from something called Young Voices. They demonstrated in support of Supt. Frances Gallo’s plan to fire the teachers at the high school. The trouble is, none of the students was from the high school. They appeared badly used in an increasingly distant and disconnected campaign to dump a heaping load of collective failure entirely on the teachers ...
One of the best comments I have seen on the whole tangled debate over school reform comes from John Taylor, a retired South Carolina school superintendent. Taylor wrote a parody called “No Dentist Left Behind” in which a dentist is informed of new guidelines that will rate dentists by the number of cavities their patients have at the ages of 10, 14 and 18.
The dentist argues that the guidelines are unfair because he works in a rural area with a high percentage of patients from deprived homes who aren’t brought to see him until there is a problem. Many of his colleagues, he points out, work in upper-middle class neighborhoods where parents take preventive measures ...
http://www.projo.com/news/bobkerr/kerr_column_03_03-03-10_RDHKFBE_v19.38ae4f8.html
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