Blog Post 14

Teaching our children can be a profession

Joel Klein brought up some interesting points in his article Teaching our children can be a profession.

Klein started with stating that better training is needing for those people that want to be teachers. The solution would be to have the teachers trained better. I feel like Klein is right with this statement. Therefore, I do agree with him. Teachers should be trained better in my opinion so that once they start teaching they will be ready for the challenges that they may face. Too many teachers are being taught one thing and when the start teaching in the classroom, it's taught a different way than they have been taught.

Then Klein goes on to state that there needs to be a better approach to recruiting teachers. Klein's approach to solving this issue is to choose from the top third of college graduates to insure we are getting the best. While I can say that this sounds like a good idea, I can’t say that I agree with this solution. Just because a person is in the top percent of the graduating class, it does not mean that they are more capable of teaching than all of the other people who are graduating. I have seen some really intelligent teachers that are not effective with teaching students. These are just my personal opinions to the matter.

Next, he states that we need change on how we reward the teachers. Teachers should be rewarded on what they have accomplished and not seniority. I can agree with Klein on this matter because teachers should be rewarded as to their abilities. In my opinion, keeping teachers because of seniority has been a huge part of the problem in our school systems.

Lastly, he states that having seniority is an issue as well. The solution would be to get rid of just those teachers that are not performing like they should and not just keep them because they have seniority. I do agree with this solution because it should be like every other job when it comes to letting someone go. They usually let go of the weakest performing person. In my personal opinion, if we started getting rid of teachers using that method, it would force teachers to step up and do a better job. That would eliminate the problem of having so many underperforming teachers.

Most of the issues the Klein brought up does make perfectly good sense. I believe that their need to be a start somewhere and what better way than this to start. I do feel a great part of the problem lies in what these teachers are being taught in college. I also feel as if more training time is needed in the classroom of the school system to give becoming teachers a better idea of the standards that is being taught. I still say that overall teaching should be a profession, therefore, most of the problems that we have with ineffective teachers could be solved.