Have you ever wondered why some kids just cannot perform as well as their peers when it comes to school? Well, if you have, chances are that you have blamed this even just partly on a teacher being unable to properly teach the child in question. However, this may not seem to be the case, with an educational expert claiming that shifting the blame too much on the school and not enough to the community is just plain absurd.
Alexander Wiseman's article was recently published on the Washington Post and it made some pretty valid points. We have become too distracted with the issue of teacher tenure and the vast majority making it seem hard to fire teachers, creating an imbalance between the distribution of good quality teachers. This leaves the unflavored high-poverty schools deployed with sub-par instructors. The LA Times reports that bringing back a third year of teacher tenure has people divided.
The first point that Wiseman's musings made was that it is unfair too measure the success of a teacher's performance largely on his or her students' test scores. This is because he believes that test scores only reveal a small portion of the entire picture. A teacher's performance should be graded based on how inspiring he or she is or by how much real world-applicable knowledge students learn during class, among others.
The teacher's background should be taken into proper consideration as well as that of the students. It should also be looked at whether the teachers are instructing in the field in which they were originally trained. A science teacher may not be as effective teaching an arts class and vice versa.
Second, we must also be able to admit that the school and the community are both at fault in the failure to provide quality education. If these two points are headed and used as guides for change, then maybe the quality of education will be equally high across the entire nation.
