The edublogs have been brimming with advice for the President-elect in the last few days, but teacher blogger Bill Ferriter’s stands out. ”I’m a teacher and I’m tired,” he writes. More than the relentless demands of the job, he’s exhausted by the crisis mentality that attends teaching. Educating all of our children requires “something more than sounding warning bells and asking teachers to pull up their boot straps time and again,” he writes.
Subtly, the message is being sent that if teachers would work harder, America’s “educational crisis” could be solved. If only all teachers were “highly qualified,” we’d lead the world again. If only all teachers held “advanced degrees in the subjects they were teaching,” we wouldn’t fall behind China, Japan and India in engineers and scientists. If only we could recruit “our best and our brightest” to our nation’s classrooms, no child would be left behind. The responsibility for addressing each of these issues inevitably ends up on the shoulders of teachers.
While I may not agree with every one of Ferriter’s prescriptions, it’s hard to disagree with his broader theme. We’re not going to get anywhere as long as teachers are expected to bear the load alone.
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