Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers

There have been countless wonderful tributes to teachers over the course of this Teacher Appreciation Week. Like many others who have given shout outs to teachers this week — I’ve thought of Mr. Swift and Ms. Gaffney — teachers who made a huge difference in my life. Teachers deserve these accolades and more.

There is nothing nobler than to be a teacher — it is an ongoing act of service that empowers our children and shapes our future. In return, the primary things teachers request are the tools, time and trust they need to do their jobs.

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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/1/occupy_education_teachers_students_resist_school

As students across the country stage a National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, we look at the nation’s largest school systems—Chicago and New York City—and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city’s unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher’s impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. “The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for these relatively narrow measures of what it is that students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system,” says Columbia University’s Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher evaluation systems. “The effects of these school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today,” says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. “The bedrock of these communities [has been] these neighborhood schools, and now they are being destroyed.” Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, says, “When you have a CEO in charge of a school system, as opposed to a superintendent, a real educator, what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue as to how to run the schools.” Lewis recounts a meeting where she says Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her that “25 percent of these kids are never going to be anything. They’re never going to amount to anything.” [includes rush transcript]
Filed under Education, Occupy Wall Street, Unions

Guests:

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Jaisal Noor, Democracy Now! education correspondent and independent journalist.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/1/occupy_education_teachers_students_resist_school

Matthew Di Carlo

A recent statement by the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) attempts to provide an empirical justification for that state’s focus on the achievement gap – the difference in testing performance between subgroups, usually defined in terms of race or income.

Achievement gaps, which receive a great deal of public attention, are very useful in that they demonstrate the differences between student subgroups at any given point in time. This is significant, policy-relevant information, as it tells us something about the inequality of educational outcomes between the groups, which does not come through when looking at overall average scores.

Although paying attention to achievement gaps is an important priority, the NJDOE statement on the issue actually speaks directly to the fact, which is well-established and quite obvious, that one must exercise caution when interpreting these gaps, particularly over time, as measures of student performance.

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