Developing World Class Schools and Graduates
In addition to reading about education on this website, Franklin is now a Huffington Post blogger @ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/scapegoating-educators_b_831875.html
So those of you who are interested can read Franklin’s work at the Huffington Post site as well as on Youtube.
Teacher unions are under attack from several sources. Republicans in several states have proposed legislation that would bar teacher unions from all policy decisions except negotiating compensation. In Tennessee and Wisconsin, Republicans have proposed removing teacher collective bargaining rights.
With the issuance of “Waiting for Superman” in DVD more people will see the film which depicts teacher unions as the enemy and that charter schools are the ultimate answer to all that ails education today. There are excellent charter schools and not so excellent charter schools. Just as there are excellent public schools and not so excellent public schools. Not once in the film do the producers show successful public schools. But they do state, that only 1 in 5 charter schools is performing at a high level.
If teacher unions were the problem of low performance, then states without teacher unions like Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi would be the highest performing states in the United States – and we know that they aren’t.
Teacher tenure at the university level means life-long employment. In the K-12 system it simply means due process.
Teacher unions do not hire incompetent teachers – administrators do. The same administrators have three years to get rid of poorly performing, non-tenured teachers. If anyone should be blamed for having poor teachers, it should be school administrators.
Teacher unions are a highly visible force in education. And while I do not agree with all that they do, they do perform some vital functions. The conservative Republicans and even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Obama Administration has found a high profile “enemy”. I wish they would pursue the bank, insurance and financial industries, which brought our nation to our knees, as hard as they do the teacher unions.
My friend Steve Brant wrote an article in response to a NY Times article dealing with schools. Steve has given me permission to publish it. Steve writes for the Huffington Post as well.
I agree that an education is not simply a matter of a bunch of separately measurable, mechanical skills (“reading, writing, ‘rithmetic”) and that students should be forced to learn using fear of bad grades as the motivator.
That “assembly line thinking” (which was actually portrayed in the film “Waiting for ‘Superman”) approach to teaching is obsolete. It does nothing to fire the creative, imaginative minds of students!
The creation of minds that love to learn and love to use their creative capacity to combine ideas in new and imaginative ways is what should be driving America’s educational improvement efforts. “Teaching to the test” is a recipe for a failed educational system. It may make some people feel good, because it lets us “blame someone” (usually teachers) when students don’t do well. But what we really should be doing is “blaming” the design of the educational system…. a design which is obsolete and has been for a long time… for our troubles.
The education system in America needs to be redesigned in such a way that it eliminates fear-based, mechanical (assembly line) teaching and replaces that process with aspiration-based learning in which students get to help direct their own learning process.
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Steven G. Brant
Founder and Principal
Trimtab Management Systems
Skype: stevengbrant
https://www.trimtabmanagementsystems.com
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-g-brant
https://www.facebook.com/stevengbrant
https://www.twitter.com/stevebrant
https://bit.ly/1cA8YD (memorial essay to Russ Ackoff)