The Trouble With Tenure – NYTimes.com.
In addition to a previous comment on this topic, I added this.
If we truly “revere” teachers, we will do something about COLLEGE education. Without a decent college education (something that most college degrees do not equate to), how can we expect our high school teachers to be able to pass on understandings that they themselves never got?
The educational mission of most colleges has morphed into a catering mission. It caters to student “wants” (A’s, thinking they are learning, little anxiety, time to have fun), not student “needs” (education).
This newspaper reported that Mayor Bloomberg’s office found that even Columbia wasn’t doing a good job of preparing teachers.
(This was not a surprise to me. I had already seen indications (in their 3-2 engineering program) that they have a “bottom line” oriented administration. See my blog for that.)
We need to learn what colleges aren’t really colleges when it comes to education. Until then, other “reforms” will do little. Here is my suggestion.
We should test beginning high school teachers for subject knowledge, keep their identity private, and make public a database of the results by college. That would hit some schools’ “bottom line” hard. And it would be much fairer to teachers
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