POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
The recent record of teachers’ high absenteeism, including
many 3-day weekends, demonstrates serious irresponsibility.
The generous terms of their employment - high salaries, big
pensions, generous benefits, 6-hour days, and 8-month years - aren't enough for
them.
And when a teacher is absent for no good reason, the public
is required to pay two salaries each day.
During labor negotiations we always hear the teachers’ special-interest
plea about kids’ education needs, but teachers behaving this way really care
about kids, don't they? Or for that
matter, care about anyone else?
Of course, the real problem is, and always has been, that
teachers pretty much answer to no one once they are hired into a school.
And the problem is made worse by the fact that the entire
system - from principals and superintendents to directors - is run by teachers,
actually teachers who’ve left the class room and don't want to teach any more.
And what is the genuine competence of the average teacher
with his or her general BA and a few months at an academically-meaningless
teachers' college? Not much.
If the public doesn't demand more for public education,
we'll never get it. Remember - setting aside former-Premier McGuinty’s years of
empty rhetoric - Ontario in no way stands out in the world of education.
And now we have another premier, a former teacher as it
happens, who will give and give and demand nothing in return – a formula for
labor peace and political advantage but having nothing to do with genuine
education.
We need an entirely new way of hiring and training teachers
if we are to have reform.
Any motivated university graduate with an academic major or
at least two minors or any motivated middle-aged professional should be able to
spend two years in the class room as a substitute under supervision.
Eliminate the academically-meaningless teachers' colleges.
And forget the overblown and inaccurate notion of teaching
as a profession.
It is not, it is an avocation, an art, a skill, and sadly
not enough of our current teachers, despite the formal qualification of
teachers’ college, possess it.
And you must have something you know thoroughly - music,
math, English – in order to teach effectively, which is not the case for so
many general BAs. Indeed teachers’ colleges promote the fatuous notion of
teachers as some kind of vaguely-defined facilitators who needn’t be expert in
the subjects they teach.
Making teachers' college a 2-year proposition – as our
McGuintyesque Premier Wynne has done - is a guaranteed waste of resources and
no route to improving education.
And we badly need real management of our schools – people
who understand the effective management of human and physical resources - not
the money-wasting system of boards and principles we have now.
_______________________________
From a reader:
"Those who can,
TEACH. Those who can't, CRITICIZE. (I'm neither a teacher nor a critic of
teachers.)"
You've got the quote wrong, and your error is revealing.
Shaw said:
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."
A criticism of teachers from a wry, inveterate critic.
A world without serious critics would be an impoverished one
indeed.
Some of the greats included Shaw, Voltaire, Johnson, Orwell,
and Swift.
People like this writer want the same tired band to march in
the same tired parade, playing the same tired tunes.
So, according to this writer, we don't want critics, but
hacks like the last director of TDSB are okay? He managed to weasel through a
system which has no effective protections and no competent management. Indeed
that fact is the most important lesson that should have been learned by those
shameful events.
The "managers" at TDSB clearly never checked into
his background. I am aware that he was a
failure in Hamilton and, most importantly, a very big and wasteful spender, but
none of Toronto’s "experts" were aware of the facts nor did they recognize
serial plagiarism when they saw it.
