How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education le... - 16 views
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has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future
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Michael Walker on 08 Oct 10Why are district's impotent? If administrators do their job and a) mentor young teachers and b) remove them if they are ineffective the system can work!
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t jaffe-notier on 11 Oct 10Yes. In the districts where administrators work the system does work. Unfortunately these mega-district administrators think that their job consists only of firing bad teachers. The hardest work is giving the good teachers the resources they need to continue excellent work!
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District leaders also need the authority to use financial incentives to attract and retain the best teachers.
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but let's stop pretending that everyone who goes into the classroom has the ability and temperament to lift our children to excellence.
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We must equip educators with the best technology available to make instruction more effective and efficient. By better using technology to collect data on student learning and shape individualized instruction, we can help transform our classrooms and lessen the burden on teachers' time.
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Yes, the most effective way to use technology in the classroom is to gather data...NOT! What about providing the technology so the students can create meaning and learn?
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I've found that administrators aren't too interested in individualized instruction, even though they say so. What they want is higher scores on "common assessments" whether or not this benefits individual learners. Humanities teachers have always been frustrated by this, and now science teachers are frustrated too. They're not allowed to help students achieve excellence in areas that are exactly the right amount of challenge for each student. Instead, they're still forced to "cover everything" for each student, in spite of the fact that this does not benefit students who haven't mastered the material to a point of competence. Weird.
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For the wealthiest among us, the crisis in public education may still seem like someone else's problem, because those families can afford to choose something better for their kids. But it's a problem for all of us -- until we fix our schools, we will never fix the nation's broader economic problems. Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory.
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taking advantage of online lessons and other programs
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replace or substantially restructure persistently low-performing schools that continuously fail our students.
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charter schools a truly viable option