Coffee with Arne

On this wonderful day off from school in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I just spent a few moments with my coffee and some thoughts of Mr. Arne Duncan, Education Secretary for this here US of A. Said thoughts are about the teaching profession, a subject I have just a little bit of passion for.

Here's the whole piece, worth a gander I think.

http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter09_10/duncan.pdf

And here are some things from the piece that make me go hmmmmm.....

"In the factory model of education, teachers are interchangeable widgets who keep the educational assembly line moving. Teachers today are not paid based on their skill in the classroom or the difficulty of their teaching assignments."

"No area of the teaching profession is more plainly broken today than that of teacher evaluation and professional development...The truth is that students and teachers don't live in mythic Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. Yet we have an evaluation system that pretends otherwise. As a result, great teachers don't get recognized, don't get rewarded, and don't help their peers grow."

"It's not just the students who suffer....teachers have to live with the results of other people's bad teaching - the students who don't know anything."

Hmmmm.