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Saturday, September 11, 2010

City of Hoplessness

When the Times Union started their ambitious City of Hope series I was very optimistic. I believe educating and preparing our children for the future is the paramount job of society. I also believer we have many problems and quite frankly we’re not doing a very good job at. Somewhere along the way we lost our path and the quick fix solutions that we have tried have often times made the problems worse. One of the biggest problems I believe we have is teachers are no longer valued and the Times Union obviously agrees with this sentiment.

They recently had a meeting of top officials and business leaders to discuss education issues. They didn’t invite one teacher. They obviously felt teachers couldn’t help come up with solutions and that’s probably because they feel teachers are part of the problem. Teacher quality has been a huge issue over the last year, from senate bill six, to Governor Crist’s Excellence in Teaching task force to the City of Hope’s leadership meeting. I sincerely doubt it dawned on any of them to consider we have a lack of quality in leadership.

Education has many problems and two of the biggest are non-teachers telling teachers how to teach and people not in the classroom coming up with solutions to fix classrooms. We’re never going to have meaningful improvement until we stop blaming the teachers for the problems in education. After all they didn’t decide to gut discipline. They didn’t vote for a one size fit’s all curriculum. They didn’t get together and decide not to adequately fund education. They didn’t develop policies and procedures that hand cuff them and rob children of hope. They didn’t do any of those things.

Finally if there were to be a panel on medical and legal issues you would probably be pretty safe betting your bottom dollar that doctors and lawyers would be invited to attend. For education issues the Times Union invites businessmen and politicians. Why do you think that was?

Chris Guerrieri

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