It’s been fun, in a mildly twisted sense, reading the responses deconstructing the president’s disappointing education speech. Who do we suppose he was talking to when he said
…if a teacher is given a chance but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.
Tom Eley responds: “While he finds the ‘courage’ to bully public school teachers, Obama has no difficulty in rewarding the failure of the financial executives who have triggered the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
No surprises there, according to George Schmidt. Except that now it looks like the Obama administration is bracing for a backlash, and they’re “worried that it might complicate their agenda.” That’s going to be a problem for as long as it takes them to figure out where to drop the hammer.
Fred Klonsky says we should take names, and publish them. That would be a place to start, at least.
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Ahhh! It seems Mr Obama has been listening to British politicians. We have a similar agenda across the Atlantic, we have OfSTED who name and shame ‘failing schools’. After almost 20 years of spending millions on a system of inspection that promised root and branch reform, OfSTED tell us that there are still as many failing schools as ever. However, they conveniently raise the bar to ensure that schools fail and so keep themselves in a job telling everyone about failing schools! We have now developed this system to the point where inspections are based upon a review of school results and a thing called a SEF where schools are expected to highlight strengths and “Areas for Development” so that the Inspectors come in for one day and check the Self Assessment for accuracy. Because Schools have learned to play the OfSTED Data game, they have now come up with the idea of random tests with no advance warning. They justify this by saying schools get too much notice of inspection (currently 2 working days) and of course the implication is that schools somehow ‘cheat’ the system by getting this warning. It wouldn’t be so bad if the inspectors were models of good practice but in my experience most of them would end up getting fired by Mr Obama’s criteria.
It’s pathetic.
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