Posted on 02/18/2017 6:45:43 PM PST by artichokegrower
Newly minted Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had a hard time getting inside the District of Columbia's Jefferson Middle School Academy last week when protesters briefly blocked her from entering. But at the end of her visit -- her first to a public school since taking office -- she stood on Jefferson's front steps and pronounced it "awesome."
A few days later, she seemed less enamored. The teachers at Jefferson were sincere, genuine and dedicated, she said; they seemed to be in "receive mode."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Yes teachers dump Common Core and become an innovator.
This is going to be interesting to watch. Teachers union very powerful.
They used to be...as did S.E.I.U....but they have outlived their usefulness...they have so abused their power that they have become virtually useless.
"Amazing" doesn't mean the same thing as "academically successful." I know Mexican ladies who are amazing, but they can just barely read and do simple math. If you can believe the D.C. schools, marginal literacy/numeracy is not what they are spending $16,000 pp/py for.
Like other snowflakes reacting to another point of view, they don't know how to deal with it so they trash the source.
Like their dedication, skills and intelligence, their union numbers are DROPPING
Libtards say everyone they like is “amazing” and “wonderful” - yet the school is sub-standard.
Awesome post on teachers/snowflakes martyrdom
Third grade: no spelling taught at all, science is a cursory overview & afterthought, principles drilled of giving but not earning, cannot be recognized for [near-]perfection...you’re either normal or way beyond.
Right on. You’ve certainly got their number.
You might want to cut this middle school some slack. I have worked in a school where high schoolers come in, even to 11th grade, with 3rd grade skills. When kids come in so far behind that they can’t even see their appropriate grade level over the horizon, it’s as much a problem for the school as it is for the student. Schools across the country are measured according to grade-level standards, so if they can’t bring such students up to grade-level right away (an almost impossible task), then the school rating takes a big hit.
Jefferson CLAIMS that they are taking in 6th graders with 2nd-grade skills and graduating kids with 8th grade skills. If true, that’s an excellent accomplishment, worthy of a commendation for growth if not absolute scores.
I don’t know what Betsy saw and I don’t know what she actually said, but it’s not good politics to walk out of the very first school she visited and badmouth the teachers (IF that’s what happened). She’s not going to get invited to many more schools if she keeps that up.
There are some bad teachers but most teachers are doing what they can in a broken system. The big problem is the system, and that’s what Betsy needs to focus on.
The Washington Teachers Union of D.C. had been in the past, from roughly 1970-80’s, in the handles of an assortment of communists, Marxists, leftists, and black incompetents.
I was unofficially aiding, at the request of my Congressman, his investigator into the WTU and its Marxist leadership of William Simon, Charlie Chang/Cheng, and one other of Simon’s key staffers (possibly Elsila, who is still a red today), plus the dominant role the members of the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” had among teachers (Martel, Adams/White, Lerch, etc).
While the final report didn’t go specifically into communism infiltration and domination of the WTU, it did mention some of the key individuals mentioned above.
Over the years the old reds have been forced out of DC or retired, but only God knows how much anti-American Marxist class hate they poisoned their students with.
An old friend of mine characterized our public schools as “failure factories” driven by idiotic administrators and teachers unions that continue to pump out kids who lack even the most fundamental abilities to read, do basic math or have skills to do anything but menial work. Even the brighter kids who go on to college are unprepared and in many colleges and universities retreat into snowflake kindergartens with coloring books and safe spaces rather that face competing ideas. They graduate with worthless degrees in peace science, radical lesbianism or similar idiocies and are useless except to become tattooed and pierced baristas, community organizers or unemployed living in parent’s basements.
Michelle Rhee made great strides in reforming some of the worst abuses in DC public schools while being called every name in the book. After she left, everything she did was completely undone by the establishment. DC is always 49th or 50th in school performance in spite of one of the highest spending per pupil.
If you criticize public schools in front of a teacher, they get hurt, because they know in their own eyes they are doing the best they can under difficult circumstances.
If you shut up and let them talk, you find out the schools are even worse than you imagined.
We need to encourage alternatives to public schools, and we need to close down the federal Department of Education completely.
Yup - and my son works in Retail part time and I have to hire H1B engineers as we don’t produce them as the kids do not have the fundamental skills to get thru Engineering school let alone get into a good college.
The colleges need to fill the seats in there class rooms, so more foreign students. This spiral continues.
The Teacher Unions are a bigger threat to American Freedom than ISIS.
When I was a kid my heroes were astronauts, now the heroes are athletes or Rappers.
Indoctrination centers for the left, clean house
Teachers CAN’T just ‘teach’. Everything is top-down. Lesson plans are dictated with minimal variation. Everything must be geared to passing the standardized tests, because, according to current education-speak, that is the only criteria for how good the student is doing. Weeks are wasted in these tests and they reflect directly on the teacher.
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