Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton’s statement argued that federal policy should continue to hold schools accountable for raising the achievement of poor African-American and Latino youths, which is a focus of the federal law, but should also seek to assign more effective teachers to the nation’s neediest classrooms. This is an area where the statement said the law had been weak.
[...]
The statement included a passage labeling teachers union contracts a significant obstacle to increasing the achievement of poor students.
“We must insist that our elected officials confront and address head-on crucial issues that created this crisis: teachers’ contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them,” it said.
Leaving the substance of the charge aside, you would think that such a statement - such a singled out statement - would call for a response from a representative of a teachers union. In fact, you would think that an article on groups attempting to shape education policy would call for the inclusion of a comment from someone in a teachers union.
You would think.
3 comments:
I know your post is about the shoddy Journalism practiced by the NYT, but I thought I'd ask if Klein and Sharpton, et. al. were seriously proposing that we take away the rights of employees to not being reassigned willy-nilly by their bosses? By the federal government? Because unless they're talking about higher pay for teaching in certain schools (which is possible, the fine reporter at the Times may have just pulled the most extreme quote), then I think the policy of letting administrators assign the "best" teachers to which ever schools they like would be a disaster for public education in this country. I would imagine that the "best" teachers would leave their low-paid teaching jobs in droves.
Of course this might remind teachers why they need a union in the first place. As soon as teachers start being punished by being sent to the inner city and the ones being fired are not necessarily the worst, but the ones who don't kiss administration ass, people will remember why teachers formed unions in the first place.
No idea why I capitalized "Journalism."
I'm right there with you. Without reading any more than the shoddy NYT piece, I get the feeling that the Klein/Sharpton statement is another aftershock of the conflicts over education from the 1960s in NYC.
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