‘The Teacher Wars’

Dana Goldstein’s new book “The Teacher Wars” is reviewed by Claudia Wallis this week in the New York Times:

“The Teacher Wars” suggests that to improve our schools, we have to help teachers do their job the way higher-achieving nations do: by providing better preservice instruction, offering newcomers more support from well-trained mentors and opening up the “black box” classroom so teachers can observe one another without fear and share ideas. Stressing accountability, with no ideas for improving teaching, Goldstein says, is “like the hope that buying a scale will result in losing weight.” Such books may be sounding the closing bell on an era when the big ideas in school reform came from economists and solutions were sought in spreadsheets of test data.

Yes, a thousand times yes. I’ve already written about the absuridty of the current testing regime.

Like hoping that buying a scale will result in losing weight, indeed.