TEACHERS VERSUS THE COMMUNITY

The teachers have won

Joanne Jacobs seems to be the best-known "Edublogger" (with apologies to Brian Micklethwait and Kimberly Swygert) and she has a lot of posts about education that seem quite similar to what I put on this blog. The generally Leftist bent of educators makes the vast educational system a happy hunting ground for political correctness. Political correctness in the schools takes the form not only of oppressive and ridiculous speech codes but also the form of a "self-esteem" gospel that is used to justify the usual Leftist notion that everybody must be made equal. The tale is that kids will have their self-esteem irreparably damaged and their life ruined if anybody ever tells them they are not as good as everybody else. So telling kids that they have failed to learn anything is a big no-no from the point of view of Leftists. This does of course clash with the community demand for assessment. Lots of people want to know which kids have learnt something and which have not. So there is a fundamental clash of goals between most teachers and the community at large. So how do teachers get around that? Easy, peasy. They make the standards so low that only those students who virtually opt out of their own accord are denied some sort of diploma. No sooner do governments institute some system for enforcing standards than the teachers do all they can to undermine the system concerned. The posts on Joanne's blog are replete with examples of what a mockery most forms of assessment are these days. See for example here

There are however other ways of undermining standards and I thought this post (see particularly the comments) about the pressure on college and university Professors to give everyone good marks was an excellent case in point. Professors now are just about all subject to assessment by their students and the results of such assessments are very important in deciding whether Professors get tenure and promotion. But -- surprise, surprise -- students tend to "fail" Professors who give them low marks! So good marks all round regardless of effort is the order of the day and university qualifications become meaningless too. Once again all students are falsely presented as being more or less equal.

And since standards are just oppressive and "patriarchal" (etc.) nonsense from a Leftist point of view, teachers don't have to measure up in any way either. Teaching diplomas are a notorious joke and there are plenty of occasions on which teachers have been shown to be little better than their students. This post about what it takes to become a "Highly Qualified" teacher in California is about what you would expect of the "self-esteem" world headquarters.

Just keep reading this blog and Joanne's if you doubt any of that.