Beth Aviv— teacher for 30 years and author of Bearing Witness: Teaching about the Holocaust– writes at Salon about losing her high school English teaching job. She sees the school’s logic for hiring the younger, stunning, lower-on-the-pay-scale, and –yes, good– teacher competing for the same spot. But it still hurts.
Mike Antonucci at HotAir reports that at the same time that the $10 billion teacher jobs (Edujobs) bailout passed the Senate—and was expected to pass the House—lots of school districts were already hiring back the teachers they had pink-slipped last spring. You may recall that many folks have predicted that the fired teachers would be [...]
I guess if you’re going to throw yourself down a flight of stairs at school and fake an injury in order to avoid a scheduled classroom observation, you should do so in a school without cameras in the stairwell. Yoav Gonen, education reporter at The New York Post reports: An untenured Brooklyn high-school teacher catapulted [...]
In his “Class Dismissed” post, Mr. Foteach–writing From the Desk of Mr. Foteah– describes the last day of school he had with his fifth grade students. It’s bittersweet—and you don’t have to be a former fifth-grade teacher like me to understand what he’s talking about. Via EdWise
Emmy Partin at Flypaper uses Ohio figures to measure the fiscal impact of increasing class size, but similar savings could be expected elsewhere. Current Ohio law caps class size at 25 kids. But with the state, which invests about 40 percent of its revenue in K-12 education, looking for ways to plug an $8 billion [...]
I always tell soon-to-be teachers that the teacher is the most important school factor in student achievement. Now comes more research data to back me up. David Leonhardt in the NYT reports on a study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers … examined the life paths of [...]
Now here’s something odd. A special education teacher in Pennsylvania faked a brain tumor so she could get days off– even eight weeks which she claimed to need for chemotherapy. She used the excuse for nine years. According to Newser: Sympathetic colleagues even submitted an application to the Make-A-Wish Foundation on behalf of Leslie Herneisey, [...]
“Every child in a District of Columbia public school has a right to a highly effective teacher — in every classroom, of every school, of every neighborhood, of every ward, in this City. That is our commitment. Today . . . we take another step toward making that commitment a reality.’’ —Michelle Rhee, D.C. Schools [...]
David Glenn at the Chronicle reports on the use of longitudinal databases to evaluate teacher preparation. Loiuisiana’s is considered one of the better ones. Using a new longitudinal database, it had analyzed the standardized-test scores of fourth- through ninth-grade students and matched those scores to the institutions that had trained their teachers. This isn’t an [...]
Now this is puzzling. Spiegel Online reports: A German teacher has lost a defamation suit Tuesday in which she claims that a 16-year-old student spread vicious rumors saying that she has a rabbit phobia. The court case, which triggered nationwide headlines, was dismissed on the grounds that the student proved the teacher’s phobia as fact. [...]