Just the author's background alone should have raised red flags:
The New York Times Magazine has a fondness for giving great swaths of paper and ink to the reform schoolers' mission to turn K12 education over to the corporations, and this week's 8,000 word piece by Spencer Foundation fellow, Elizabeth Green (former ed reporter for the right-wing New York Sun), does not disappoint in that regard. The operative metaphor of the piece, "Building a Better Teacher," follows from the ed deformer's core conceit that teachers are like mousetraps, devices that can be designed, re-designed, torn down and tinkered with to produce a more efficient way to capture and confine, er, educate.
And if you don't like the mouse trap metaphor, how about tinker toys or bricks or computer components, all of which may be assembled by curious tinkerers like charter schooler, Doug Lemov, whose quest to fabricate the best teaching tactics by the nation's champion test score producers is matched by another mission to turn his ultimate "taxonomy" for test score production into the bible for teacher training. Lemov's new bible would be composed of 49 commandments that are to be committed to memory and practiced until perfected. That, for Lemov, would be teacher training aplenty.
It is just too bad that author, Green, did not learn something about education before she landed her $75,000 grant to learn how to write about it. If she had, she would not have spent so many of her 8,000 words oohing and aahing about commonplace practices in teaching like "wait time" and "calling on non-volunteers," which she seems to think were first documented by Doug Lemov. And even though Doug has come up with 49 commandments, Green pretends that educational thinkers over the centuries have been in search of "one essential trait for good teaching:"
And there's more, of course.
2 comments:
There is not a single educator I know who has attended one of Lemov's workshops and thought he was "anti-teacher." You're full of hot air. If you want to do something useful, do some research and actually come up with an idea of your own to improve education. Until you accomplish that, try not to tear down attempts that are actually working.
Actually John, if you'd have paid attention, I was quoting another source. But the fact is the Newsweek piece was another anti-teacher screed written by people with no knowledge at all about public education or teachers. I've been there; they haven't. But thanks for the comment.
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