2 posts tagged “nea”

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Who is responsible for your education?

Update--check out this post, for a bit of wisdom on precisely this issue. I guess I wasn't the only one with this on my mind last week.

I asked this to a group of students the other day. I told them to exclude themselves, since that should be a given. Among the responses: teachers, principals, superintendent, school district, the president, government, the governor--finally someone threw out "mom and dad?" 


Individuals are responsible for their own education. Until minors reach adulthood, or until they move out, parents are responsible for their child's education. Essentially, every parent is a homeschooling parent. The question is, how good of a job do they do taking advantage of educational resources available. In this country, we have resources coming out of our ears. Public schools are resources. After-school programs are resources. Teachers are resources. Principles are resources. District personell are resources. The internet, miscellaneous support groups, parents, relatives, friends, and libraries are resources. These resources are not equally available to everyone, I understand, but everyone has a degree access to some of them. Even if they aren't, parents have to find a way. 

Then I noticed this gem from the head of the National Education Association, Reg Weaver:
"Education decisions...rest in the hand of politicians."

Ahh...it's nice knowing the government is there to take care of us. Especially our young ones. I guess parents are off the hook. 

4 comments Tags: education, nea

"what hurts our kids"

According to NEA today, "inflexible 'highly qualified' teacher and education support professional provisions that hinder the recruitment and retention of qualified educators" hurts our ability to educate kids.

I'm not sure what's so bad about an inflexible "highly qualified" restriction for a "professional educator." I understand "highly qualified" is being used somewhat disparagingly in the article, but I also notice that their own "qualified educators" (parentheses mine) appear without the mocking quotation marks. So "highly qualified" restrictions keep us from getting QUALIFIED teachers, who for whatever reason avoid/can't handle/can't meet  the "highly qualified" criteria.

I'm uncomfortable with automatically assuming that the "highly qualified" provisions should be so flippantly dismissed, and I would really like to understand the criteria by which NEA is identifying those qualified educators. If NEA today were proposing that experts in a given field should be allowed to teach in public institutions even if they haven't completed a state credentialing program, then I might be interested in hearing more.

Unfortunately, I've read one too many articles bemoaning the fact that "qualified" teachers are being restricted from the teaching field because they are unable to pass basic competency exams like the CBEST (I'm not taking a crack at anyone who fails a test such as the CBEST, but I am AMAZED at the gall someone would have to have in order to FAIL the CBEST and THEN COMPLAIN that they are being restricted from the teaching  profession). Anyway, this whole "hinder(s) the recruitment" business smacks of lowering standards for professional educators. I'm not against rearranging how we assess expertise of teachers (in fact I think a good deal of qualified teachers are indeed excluded or turned off by the hoop-jumping gymnastics required to navigate credentialing programs that are ultimately lacking in academic rigor), but we cannot downplay the importance of subject matter expertise in public school teachers.

Post a comment Tags: teachers, education, nea, highly qualified