It seems like at least once a month, a long-time teacher’s retirement or resignation a letter gets picked up by national media. The letters thank students, parents, and colleagues, but they typically end on a sobering note about the state of our public education system and the demise of the teaching profession.
The Washington Post recently printed a letter from Gerald Conti, a social studies teacher from the Westhill Central School District in neighboring Syracuse.
Data-driven education is only interested in conformity, standardization, and zombie-like adherence to testing standards, Conti writes. Creativity, academic freedom, and innovation are not rewarded, he writes.
Like many former teachers, Conti blames politicians who, he says, have traded education for state and federal funds. But he also blames the New York State United Teachers union for taking membership money and not mounting an effective campaign against politicians and politicians’ underwriters in the private sector.
In fairness, Conti should be equally critical of the union for making it too cumbersome for administrators to fire incompetent and misbehaving teachers; it’s served as the reformers’ messaging salvo.
Most education reform efforts are aimed at low-performing urban school districts. We seldom hear from suburban teachers who are quitting out of frustration with the profession. And we seldom read letters from teachers still in the classroom and singing the praises of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind or President Obama’s Race to the Top legislation.
Despite the money and political power directed at education reform, more teachers, including some local educators, are challenging group think on everything from teacher evaluations to standardized testing.
For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent roughly $50 million to come up with a teacher evaluation system, but the calculations used to develop the evaluation appear to be wrong.
A blog by Gary Rubenstein, a New York City math teacher, says the Gates Foundation’s numbers don’t add up. And he’s not the only teacher to draw the same conclusion. In other industries, people like Conti and Rubenstein would be praised as whistleblowers.
The closing line in Conti’s letter says, “I realize that I am not leaving my profession. In truth, it has left me. It no longer exists.”
This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2013.
I blogged about this a number of days ago (http://askingquestionsblog.blogspot.com/20…); a lot of us (teachers, that is) have been saying this for some time, but Mr. Conti’s letter maybe will finally get some people to take the complaints seriously. Thank you, Mr. Conti.
Conti’s letter is full of empty self-pitying blather about freedom and autonomy — for himself and his ilk, of course, but not for you or your children, or for the taxpayers who pay the freight. It is the teacher unions and allied ideologues who fight tooth and nail to deny students and families the slightest degree of freedom or autonomy or self-determination. You have to laugh at their whining about the perils of conformity and “one size fits all” when they fight savagely to preserve an archaic and unproductive government monopoly.
Now they’re going to quit rather than be held accountable? Pardon me, but that sounds like a solution, not a problem.
They don’t have teachers unions in Texas and they still have tons of incompetent teachers. If you want to attract a better class of people into the teaching profession, you have to compensate teachers at a level that is on par with other professions. Conservatives call this throwing money at the problem but ignore the fact that they think money is the answer as long as it’s confined to the private sector. Witness the obscene CEO compensation.