Why Do Americans Love to Blame Teachers? - The Atlantic - 1 views
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America hates teachers.
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anonymous on 06 Sep 14This is so true and incredibly demoralising. I saw many teachers go down because of it.
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programs like Teach for America are promoted as a kind of missionary calling, in which young fresh-faced college graduates replace lazy, stubborn, unionized teachers.
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That single class of people is then systematically demonized, as politicians and pundits present "worst of the worst" cases as emblematic of the whole.
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In fact, I think you could argue (though Goldstein does not quite) that moral panics do more than demonize a group of people. They serve in part to create a group of people—to delimit or describe a particular identity and mark it as deviant.
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Moral panics create identities in order to regulate them.
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value-added measures all have a wide margin of error, and are quite sensitive to manipulation (such as teaching to the test).
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the good teacher/bad teacher dichotomy is predicated on the idea that the bad teachers are already in place and must be driven out by the good teachers. The dream, from Beecher to today, seems to be that if only our schools could get rid of the career educators and install angels instead, the millennium would arrive.
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long-term profession
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more responsibilities
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There are bad accountants, but we don't define "accountant" as an identity to be policed in order to solve our nation’s economic woes. There are bad doctors, but even at a time when medical malpractice suits are frequent, the idea of replacing doctors isn’t at the center health care reform.