What Makes a Great Teacher?

[tonysam]

More hogwash about how "great" Temps for America, aka Teach for America, is for urban kids, who in fact NEED experienced, VETERAN teachers in order to succeed in school, but these teachers are either forced to retire or want to work in less stressful districts.

From the puff piece:

But we have never identified excellent teachers in any reliable, objective way. Instead, we tend to ascribe their gifts to some mystical quality that we can recognize and revere—but not replicate. The great teacher serves as a hero but never, ironically, as a lesson.

At last, though, the research about teachers’ impact has become too overwhelming to ignore. Over the past year, President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have started talking quite a lot about great teaching. They have shifted the conversation from school accountability— the rather worn theme of No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s landmark educational reform—to teacher accountability. And they have done it using one very effective conversational gambit: billions of dollars.

Thanks to the stimulus bonanza, Duncan has lucked into a budget that is more than double what a normal education secretary gets to spend. As a result, he has been able to dedicate $4.3 billion to a program he calls Race to the Top. To be fair, that’s still just a tiny fraction of the roughly $100 billion in his budget (much of which the government direct-deposits into the bank accounts of schools, whether they deserve the money or not). But especially in a year when states are projecting $16 billion in school-budget shortfalls, $4.3 billion is real money. “This is the big bang of teacher-effectiveness reform,” says Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that helps schools recruit good teachers. “It’s huge.”

link


It's an ignorant, nauseating piece.

Here are a couple of good critiques of Ripley's nonsense:

If you happened to have read this article and you have no experience teaching or with education, it would be incredibly tempting to believe that we may have found the cure to all that ails inner-city public education. You may get the impression that teaching is for those youthful, inspired, out-to-save-the-world types who, if they could just get a few of the right teacher trainings under their belt, could easily move this country into the golden age of education.

For those of you prone to believe this due to your inexperience with teaching, let me briefly (okay, probably not so briefly) explain why teaching is HARD and why there is no silver bullet when it comes to fixing our society's lack of interest in education.

Okay - so, believe it or not, teaching is not merely an act of getting in front of a classroom, telling kids some important facts, testing them to see if they got it, and then giving them grades for it. Teaching is a true profession. There are truckloads of research that have gone into it and a number of relatively well agreed upon best practices. Nobody just jumps into the classroom and automatically knows all of this information. Additionally, the time commitment that comes with the job of a teacher is truly outrageous. This is why every good teacher leaves school knowing that they have about a million things that they still need to do in order to be on top of everything their administrators (and the public) expect them to be on top of. It's why many new and energetic teachers burn out quickly after spending their first years getting to school at 5am and leaving at 8pm.

Much more

And this blogger takes a look at the study Ripley writes about in her piece:

Amanda Ripley’s recent article in The Atlantic ( http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching ) wildly exaggerates the supposed positive benefits of having a Teach for America (TFA) teacher in the classroom. After reading the article, you might come away believing that TFA teachers regularly work miracles in their classroom, just like Michelle Rhee pretends she did, while their do-nothing veteran colleagues just sit and read the newspaper in class. (Although, funny thing: the super-achieving teacher described in the article was NOT a TFA-er!)

However, if you read the published data that Ripley refers to, they show that both TFA teachers and other teachers in high-poverty schools are having a hard time getting any positive results at all.

More

[Kerrytravelers]

1. "getting to school at 5am and leaving at 8pm."

I remember those days. It still shocks me when people think we just arrive five minutes before the kids, leave five minutes after them and take three months off in the summer.

[Catshrink]

2. Not to mention two weeks off at Christmas

and fall and spring breaks. Oh yeah, and bankers' hours.

just in case --> :sarcasm:

[mzteris]

3. Based on what I've just read in this forum

you have no idea...

FWIW - I didn't know it was you. How the f'ing hell could I have? You tell me that, 'k? How?


You so-called "teachers" are why people are RUNNING IN DROVES from Public schools.