You know the end of that, right? “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Except for the fact that over-worked, under-funded, highly devoted, under-paid people have to try to fulfill the idiocy. Or be penalized. Quoting from this site:
Not a single state will have a highly qualified teacher in every core class this school year as promised by President Bush’s education law.
Really? Are they all just defiant? Lazy? Or could it be the man didn’t know a damn thing about education when he put his package together?
…some states face the loss of federal aid because they didn’t make enough effort to comply on time, officials said.
Now that makes sense. Let’s penalize the kids in those states further, shall we? Because, hello, it’s the nature of bureacracy–the funding cuts will not be balanced by paying district officials less. It will result in cutting sports and music and textbook purchases.
The 4-year-old No Child Left Behind law says teachers must have a bachelor’s degree, a state license and proven competency in every subject they teach by this year. The first federal order of its kind, it applies to teachers of math, history and any other core class.
That’s it, we’ll demand more education teachers have to pay for, yet continue to pay them barely enough re-pay their student loans, let alone enough to support a family.
What the agency wants to see most, Johnson said, is what states are doing to get experienced teachers into classrooms with large numbers of poor and minority children.
Experienced teachers? Now that’s a problem. Quoting from here:
Jessica Jentis fit the profile of a typical American teacher: She was white, held a masters degree and quit two and a half years after starting her career.
According to a new study from teachers’ union the National Education Association, half of new U.S. teachers are likely to quit within the first five years because of poor working conditions and low salaries.
Jentis, now a stay-at-home mother of three, says that she couldn’t make enough money teaching in Manhattan to pay for her student loans and that dealing [with] school bureaucracy was too difficult.
Hey, Mr. President sir, why don’t you do something about that? Like, hmm…go back in time, not disastrously invade Iraq to make yourself look good, and put that money towards paying teachers? Cancel the tax cuts for the richest people in the nation, and put that money towards paying teachers? Any successful CEO can tell you–if you want the best people in a position, you have to pay what they’re worth.
And when you’ve ‘fixed’ education in America you could–now here’s a thought–develop a test to make sure the President of the United States of America is “highly qualified.”