Maybe Students Would Learn More If Their Teachers Were Paid a Ton of Money and Always Worried They Were About to Be Fired...

Okay, this is another post about policy and not writing. Though I believe strongly that they go hand in hand. The larger narrative that we've been telling ourselves about the public schools is retarded. Literally. It has failed to grow or develop in the last twenty years. Posh, worry-free suburban schools. Urban schools in crisis staffed by union-protected burnouts. These are both idiotic tropes that need to be destroyed.

So I have my doubts about the current hot idea discussed in an article in today's New York Times about the D.C. superintendent's plan to offer teachers lots of pay in exchange for forgoing any tenure. Personally, I never think about either of those things-- my salary or my tenure-- when I think about how or what I am going to teach. I am always doing the best I can with my personal talents, the resources at hand, the students I have, and the culture I am in. I have rarely encountered any other kind of teacher.

Every fully conscious human being knows what real teaching and learning looks and feels like. Status quo conditions (class size, teacher load, rote expectations) in schools make real teaching and learning rare.

Everyone is trying the best they can. Teaching is hard. Everywhere. Why can't that be the new story?

Wordy

Reading this site by sixth grade teacher Bill Ferriter in North Carolina... and while he seems to have his head about him, his commenters highlight how wordy everybody gets when they start talking about schools. Why is this?

Trying to figure out Eduwonk

So back to thinking about the world of education policy... Policy blog Eduwonk is an encyclopedic resource, but reading a little about Andrew Rotherman helped sort out why it feels a little bit off to me. Specifically, it appears that Rotherman has never been a public school teacher. I will correct myself if I am wrong about this, but I feel this is the problem with almost everything I read about education. Teachers are always remote figures, never authoritative voices. And so it goes that conversations about school reform and school policy never become more than an annoying buzz in the teachers ear while they go about the everyday work of making their school year make sense to their students and themselves.