September 2, 2010
This Month's Executive Briefing
Jerry Jennings's Blog
DRAFT Audio Education Online Blog ProbeSubmitted by Jerry Jennings
August 26, 2010
Diane Ravitch has a lot to say: Superintendents and other school leaders will find this interview thought provoking
This interview is worth a couple of listening sessions. So the many topics she addresses can be seen as part of the fabric of the whole current situation in American education. By listening twice, you can then think deeply about what your reactions are. You may want to buy the book, I did!
Here are a few quotes from the interview:
" . . . we need to strengthen the profession's leadership and not by bringing in newcomers or inexperienced people and then we need to recognize that superintendents ought to be highly skilled educators and not businessmen and lawyers because it's the businessmen and lawyers who think the data is everything and that they can use these punitive accountability policies to achieve big results."
"If we learned from the example of the high performing nations in the world, then we will begin to develop a plan which we don't have now about recruiting very high quality teachers, supporting them, giving them the colleagueship and also the leadership that they need to feel that they should stay in the profession."
"Right now, in the teaching profession the single biggest problem is the fact that within five years 50% of the people who are into teaching leave. They are discouraged; they feel that there is a lack of support, a lack of resources, bad working conditions. We have to change that. We have to make teaching a highly desirable profession where we are attracting right people and I don't think that Teach for America is an answer to that because Teach for America by definition recruits young people who stay in the job for two or three years."
"So, that's not a profession, that's a kind of a way station for young people on their way to their real career. We need to have a real teaching profession that is valued, that is honored, that is respected and that is admired and then we need to develop, we need to recognize that principals should be master teachers themselves."
". . . then they are principals but they have don't have the skills or the knowledge to evaluate teachers or to help them."
"Right now we have been through a decade of the narrowing of the curriculum. . ." "We should aim to have a strong, balanced, rich curriculum in every school in the country for every child and third, we need to change our assessment. Basing so many decisions on these multiple choice standardized tests where kids learn to make good guesses, this is not education. This is really stupid and we need to have assessments that really look at whether kids understand what they were taught and assessments that encourage them to learn more because they are going to be as per demonstrations of their learning and not just the tricks they have learned about how to tick the right one of four bubbles."
Join in the discussion by responding to any or many of these probes:
- As a result of listening to or reading the interview with Diane Ravitch, what do you want to share with others about her thinking? Who would those others be?
- Please write about your reaction to the fact that this "darling of the right" (my words) seems to have made a dramatic reversal in her thinking and her advocacy.
- Do we need to "change our assessment" practices? If so, what would you suggest as the guiding focus for assessment?
- Write about the challenge that Diane Ravitch has made related to the need for teaching to become a profession.
- Diane Ravitch makes a case for the need to have principals who are better teachers than many or most of the staff they serve and that superintendents need to be highly skilled educators. What are your thoughts about her challenge to have principals and superintendents be the 'best educators'?
- Listening to or reading the interview with Diane Ravitch may have caused a certain tenseness to seep into your being. Write about your reactions while listening or reading the interview. And if you can, connect those reactions to what motivates you as an educator.
- Should our country work toward having a wide, balanced curriculum, as opposed to the narrow curriculum that seems to be forming in pursuit of improved test scores?
