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AFT President Proposes New Path Forward in Education
AFT President Randi Weingarten today proposed a “new path forward” in building quality schools in our changing world.
Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this morning, Weingarten said if America is going to thrive in the 21st century, our entire approach to education must change. She proposed specific changes in the way teachers are evaluated, disciplined and how they are allowed to do their jobs:
- Creating a fair, transparent and expedient process to evaluate teachers. States should adopt standards for what teachers should know and be able to do; teachers should be assessed through multiple measures, including student test scores that gauge individual academic progress; administrators should be held accountable for putting the standards into motion; and teachers should receive help through mentoring and professional development.
- Developing new procedures for handling allegations of teacher misconduct. She announced AFT has asked Kenneth Feinberg, special master for executive compensation for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, to help the union develop new protocols for teacher discipline.
- Ensuring teachers have the time and tools to do their jobs effectively, including establishing common academic standards. Also, she said, teachers need time to come together to resolve student issues, share lesson plans and share successes and failures.
- Creating a trusting, collaborative relationship between management and teachers. She proposed creating labor and management forums for educators similar to the federal forums created by President Obama to improve the delivery of federal services.
“If we can work together,” Weingarten said:
we can create a path to a stronger public education system that is defined by excellence, fairness, shared responsibility and mutual trust.
Read Weingarten’s entire speech here. Learn more about AFT’s efforts to improve our nation’s public schools here.
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4 Comments
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AFT Presideint Weingarten sounds like Obama’s Secretary of Education as she prepares to bow down to all of Washington’s demands and be just a broker for the teachers she is suppose to represent.
The problem with American schools is that the curriculum is designed to fit the needs of a decaying and dying capitalism as well as supporting U.S. imperialism. Since the job market has at least 6 people in line for every opening and wages going down and hours increasing the curriculum does not speak to the reality of America and the kids know that so their is apathy, unrest and failure.
What the teachers should be fighting for is the placing of eduation in the hand of the teachers, parents and students but that will take a social revolution. Meanwhile they need to demand smaller classes and more teachers plus larger support staff especially nurses, social workers and job conselors.
Instead Weingarten backs up preparing to throw teachers under the bus with outside “experts” setting discipline with her ready to kneel down at the bosses table and give them everything they ask for.
Time for the AFT members to look for some socially conscious and militant leadership.
Evaluations are only as good as workers evaluating their immediate supervisors! Most if not all “evaluations” tend to be unfair, and certainly not objective.
Teachers along with other school personnel need the universal right to organize and bargain collectively! Teacher unions need to coalesce with parents and students to pressure school boards, the states and federal government to adequateley fund schools and to provide all students equal educational opportunities! For example
here in San Antonio we have 16 separate and UNEQUAL school districts!
Teachers must fully understand that they play a vital role in the development of our children’s futures. Teachers certainly deserve better respect along with better salaries!
Let’s face it, folks; education is a low priority item in the USA, and that’s AOK with about 40% of Americans who don’t know their elbows from their assholes, and DON’T WANT TO KNOW.
That’s why education at our public schools has been systematically neglected for so long.
The demand for and public support of excellence in education is simply lacking.
Who does this benefit? Why, the psychotically greedy cocporate thugs, that’s who. Just look at all the part-time, minimum wage, no benefits, and no hope jobs out there. This is NO coincidence.
I completely agree willymack. There’s a big list of problems but I put three on the top of the list:
1) There are to many parents that have the open attitude that school issues stay at school, they don’t want to be involved in school functions or talk to the teacher because their tired and work all day,…well then don’t have children.
2) Why is it so impossible to have a national curriculum, required for all school districts in the U.S., at least as a standard. I knew someone that had to take the same class twice when he moved from one district to another because they were in different order in the two different districts that’s a complete waste of time, and only one example of the extreme disorganisation present not because of the teachers but the bureaucracy on the top.
3) The voucher system, those in favor of this garbage system say “why should I pay taxes to a school system that my children don’t go to and teaches stuff I don’t agree with or belive in”…well dito.