A Great Post By Anthony Cody

The great Anthony Cody has published a deadly accurate column over at Edweek, and Valerie Strauss has picked it up, too.  It's really quite devastating but you should go read it. There's this:

I do not think teachers in many states quite understand how the profession is being transformed. And our unions are, in some cases, negotiating these agreements into place. 

He's right. There's a good chance that if you're an educator, you probably belong to an association that started out as a union but now exists to promote the idea that the people in your profession (ie, you) aren't good enough at what they do.

American Public School Teacher

I've worked in one school that was eventually rubbed out because of AYP failure, and I've been paying attention to what's going on here in Chicago, so I feel like I have a bit of an idea about the great undoing of American public education that's taking place. However, half of my career has occurred in leafy suburbs, and I get the distinct impression that most of my suburban colleagues do not have any idea how much the waters around them have grown, or that they're basically polar bears, at this point.

I also work in ed tech, and my impression there is that there is very little willingness to take a critical look at what's happening. People seem to think that tech-enhanced, rich, comprehensive education, like this, is compatible with top-down national standards in a setting where test scores trump everything else. It's not. There's simply too much corporate and foundation money working against it. If you look at what Stanford has done with technology, you see that it requires a very wise, highly trained, professional teaching staff, that it's based in teacher-written curriculum, and that it costs a lot of money. If you look at where the administration's technology plan, you see that it's about "scaling up" data collection and assessment, and that it's ultimately about cost-reduction and getting more bang for the buck.  It's all very compatible with the new, teach-for-a-few years career that teaching is becoming.

Anyway, go read it and see if you don't agree.