To Draw Top Teachers to Troubled Schools, Foundation Will Offer $30,000 Stipends
20th December 2007
Read it. Let me get this straight: Our teacher-education system is crappy, so the answer is to pay people to go through more of it? I don’t see how this solves the problem.
“What we’re really trying to do is to dignify the teaching profession and give it status,” Levine said.
Which is, please note, a different thing than getting people involved in the profession who will dignify teaching and give it status. This is, in short, just putting lipstick on the pig.
The performance of high school students taught by the fellows will be tracked to gauge whether the program makes a difference.
And you can believe as much or as little of that as you care to. Prediction: Either the tracking will show that it doesn’t, in fact, help, but more money will be thrown at it anyway on the grounds that the fact that it doesn’t work proves that it’s underfunded; OR they’ll massage the numbers to show that it does work even though it doesn’t.
“It clearly calls attention to teaching as a profession in a way that accords it some prestige,” Pianta said. “What this gives us is another way to attract the best and brightest.”
Let’s face it, “the best and the brightest” don’t want to work in “high-needs schools”; no amount of money is worth your life.
Oh, and good luck trying to persuade people who are barely literate and numerate, and whose goal in life is to be the next bling-bedecked rapper, to study math and science. Yeah, that’s really going to work.