Good Teachers vs. Bad Teachers

One of the things I like about using Twitter now is that I feel very much well-informed about what is going on in education around the nation right now (even though that can be kind of depressing). I don't usually watch the Colbert Report (more a Jon Stewart fan myself)-however I did catch Campbell Brown's appearance. If you didn't see it:

The Colbert Report
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Now I am not particularly an advocate of tenure I'm not against it either. I don't have it here. We sign a probationary contract every year. However, I don't understand this focus on it. So many Southern states do not have active unions or teacher tenure and they are way down on the list of states ranked for educational efficacy. Doesn't that prove all this money spent battling tenure is being wasted? That it won't really fix anything. It makes me wonder what the real motivation behind this fight is.

But I digress. What I really wanted to write about was the prevalence in the media of discussing the huge number of bad teachers out there. We initiate more stringent evaluations (and let me tell you ours is very, very stringent!) and they are still not happy that only a small percentage of teachers are deemed ineffective. I wish these people could see what I see. I don't know if there's a statistic on how many teachers are on Twitter sharing ideas, but I can tell you I follow over 1,000 of them and I just started :). I participated in a summer learning series online where almost 2,000 educators signed up to get homework every week learning about new uses for technology. I attended 9 days of professional development this summer (unpaid) and every single class was full, some had people show up on waiting lists hoping to get in. Look at all the blogs, Pinterest pages, Facebook posts--all about sharing ideas on how to make us better teachers. And that's what they do in their free time, don't even get me started on all the innovation and joy they bring to their classrooms! I have read several posts just this week of teachers so excited to get into their rooms and get started preparing for their new classes.

Sure, maybe there are ineffective teachers out there. But I can tell you unequivocally, that a majority of teachers put their whole hearts and souls into what they do and making things better for their students. I wish we could afford spokespeople who would report more of the positives of what we do--because it's out there if people would just open their eyes!