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raffey's avatar

This professor is one of many in a long line of failures. These educational failures are real, but parents, students, teachers and professors are NOT responsible.

The responsibility lies solely with Ivy League Universities and Industry leaders who dictate curriculum and student learning standards for public schools – and – teaching programs for the nation’s colleges and universities.

In 2001, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act and decimated the public education system. Public schools had no choice; instead of educating students, they were forced to teach them.

School districts stopped budgeting Master Teachers (highly skilled and experienced teachers who mentored other teachers). The results were predictable. When teachers lack classroom management skills, students take over. When teachers lack teaching skills, learning declines. When teachers teach, students leave school without an education.

Under NCLB, teachers were held accountable for student performance. Politicians love sticks and carrots and teachers were demoted, or fired for low performing students, and financially rewarded teachers for students who met the standards.

Soon enough, good teachers most common complaint was inheriting a bad teacher’s students. To bring these students to grade level, these teachers must teach two grades in one year. Instead of losing their jobs, teachers began negotiating for students, behind the scenes.

The result was a pipeline that channeled some students from one bad teacher to another, and channeled other students from one good teacher to another. It got so bad teachers began negotiating for parents as well. Good students with two working parents would get shifted to the bad teacher’s track, in favor of a difficult student with a stay-at-home parent who volunteered in the classroom, chaperoned on field trips, and raised money for classroom supplies. School districts needed to retain good teachers who kept overall district performance scores up. To keep these teachers, they began transferring good teachers into their high-income school sites and new, inexperienced and bad teachers into their low-income schools.

In 2001, my kids were in Junior High and the impact was immediate. In the morning my husband began tutoring our kids in math. After school, we tutored them in other subjects. At the end of 10th grade, my children passed their high school exit exams and started junior college (their idea, not mine). One of them is an Ivy League graduate – that’s how good elementary school teachers were in low-income schools before NCLB.

NCLB’s greatest failure was the loss of Master Teachers who had kept the teaching staff on the same level so that every student got a good teacher and struggling students got the best teachers. Today, students spend 14 years in school (pre-K – 12) and graduate high school with the equivalent of what was an eighth-grade education before NCLB.

Most university professors are not even good teachers, let alone Master Teachers. Professors are experts in their discipline, not education. That is the reason, I suspect the professor in question has little, if any, education in education itself.

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