It gets old reading over and over again pieces where the Times Union’s editorial board shows its disdain for teachers and lack of understanding about education in general. In a recent article about Michelle Rhee they wrote: With a big city school system, where the whole point is the maintenance of comfortable jobs for adults, only bold moves will work.
Exactly what school system are they talking about? Has a Times Union editor spent one day in the shoes of a teacher at a big high school where the pressure is unimaginable or how about at a small elementary school where the teacher only gets twenty-five minuets of planning in a day? In classrooms dear editors, there are no comfortable jobs for adults.
The article then read like a press release for Mrs. Rhee and failed to acknowledge things like she spent only two years in the classroom where her claims of gains have been seriously questioned, ran nothing of note before she became chancellor of the Washington D.C. school system, loves to tell a story where she taped chidren’s mouths shut and is peddling a teacher evaluation system, follow the money friends.
The Times Union then doubled down on fly by night ideas when they gave such a glowing endorsement to Teach for America, which some people have dubbed teach for a while. Teach for America has a small niche it can fill but it is far from the savior the Times Union makes it out to be.
Wendy Kopp tells how nearly twenty thousand TFA alumni have completed their two year commitment, a third of them stayed for three years and sixty percent have remained somehow connected to the education field or basically what UNF has done alone over the past decade. Friends did you know annually America needs four million teachers? This means the Times Union dedicated a full page to a group with a questionable track record that contributes about one one hundred of one percent to the teacher pool.
The Times Union also didn’t mention that while we have local teachers looking for jobs the district pays TFA a finders fee for placing teachers here. Finally friends who would you want in your child's classroom more, a local who spent four years learning to teach including a lengthy internship or someone plucked off a college campus and given five weeks of training before being dumped into a classroom in a city they don’t know.
TFA does have a small roll to play and Michelle Rhee did shake things up but other than that the Times Union’s editorial board got it wrong… again.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
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