Tag: teaching

By Mike Koetting May 7,2024

I’m a religious reader of the articles published by Bob Melville in The Civic Way, a much more disciplined look at policy issues than my own scattershot set of interests. He has recently undertaken an excellent multi-part series on the challenges facing public education. It’s not a cheery read because public education is facing crises from multiple directions.

His piece on “The Public Teaching Crisis,” however, touched on a couple of my hot buttons, so I thought I would offer some suggestions as to how I would explicate and implement some of his thoughts. These proposals reflect my fundamental beliefs not only about teachers, principals, and educational quality, but also underline broader sentiments on doing the public business, which is much more complicated than people want to accept. These, however, are my own ideas and you can’t blame Bob for them.

Defining Educational Quality

Americans are generally unhappy with the direction of our educational system. However, descriptions of what is wrong vary so much by political ideology, one must assume a fair amount of this dissatisfaction is simply another refection of the broader societal malaise. People would like to imagine that education could fix whatever it is they think wrong with society—around which there is little agreement and much passion. But it will be hard to get public acceptance of education until we figure out how to address the broader disentrancement with our society.

In the meantime, this malaise combines with factors more specific to the educational environment to create a high level of teacher dissatisfaction.

Continue reading “Educational Reform and Teachers”