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May 5, 2007

Letters Regarding "In Search of the Master Teacher"

NYT Letters to the Editor regarding Kristoff's recent column on teachers:

To the Editor:

I retired to South Carolina in 2004 after 35 years as a teacher, administrator and superintendent in New York. I have permanent New York certification in secondary English, special education and as a school district administrator.

Thinking I might teach in South Carolina, I applied for information on certification. I learned that I would need to do the following: fill out an application; submit original college transcripts; submit teacher examination scores from the Educational Testing Service (to ensure that I was “highly qualified”); submit an F.B.I. fingerprint card; submit recommendations from the college where I completed my teacher preparation (36 years ago). There was more, along with a $75 fee.

I am enjoying my full retirement!

More here:
Several teachers argued that it’s ridiculous for someone who has never actually taught for a day in his life to offer proposals for school reform. That strikes me as a fallacy. Obviously doctors aren’t the only people who should offer views on health care reform. And reporters aren’t the only people entitled to views about the failures in the news media. Indeed, if we are going to see improvements in education, it will be only because a broader segment of society became involved. Obviously, teachers bring a special expertise to the discussion, but they have no exclusive claim to these issues.

Another common objection was that there is no way you can solve the school problems as long as parents are apathetic, or students are raised wrong, or resources are not increased. I don’t buy that either. Look, you could have said a generation ago that we’ll never solve the problem of traffic deaths as long as humans enjoy the sensations of speed and alcohol. But in fact we figured out how to engineer cars better, how to require seat belts and air bags, how to crack down on drunk drivers, how to design roads better and improve signs – and the result has been that we now save tens of thousands of lives a year. In the same way, there will always be troubled kids who fall through the cracks – and there are such kids in Singapore, which probably has the best public schools in the planet. But even if schools can’t be perfect, even if the backdrop is challenging, we can improve high school graduation rates, we can improve quantitative skills and ability to read.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 5, 2007 3:11 PM
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