Gift Rap

I hope James Kelly and Allen Odden send a nice bouquet of flowers (or in the Shanker spirit a good bottle of wine) to Randi Weingarten.  She’s made their new SMHC report, which wasn’t going to get a great deal of attention, into something that people are now really paying attention to!

One Reply to “Gift Rap”

  1. This report is interesting. It’s so elementary school. Just check out the bulletin board stars on the first page!

    The problems I have with what is proposed by SMHC are many, but the principal issue is that it wants to absolve schools of responsibility for hiring good teachers and transfer that to states, the teaching schools and their processes.

    As much as I would like to see teacher’s schools changed (in ways different than those suggested by SMHC), school districts don’t have to wait. They can hire only good teachers. Period. If they can’t tell, who else could tell? If they want to impose higher standards, ask for ACT scores, look at where students were educated, they can do that today. If a large district stopped hiring students from a large teaching school because they didn’t meet the standards of the district, things would change without legislation and rules.

    Wasn’t the “National” Teacher’s Exam supposed to give the districts another gauge for hiring? How many states/districts use it anymore?

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