Every biennium, it seems, for more years than I've been alive, slick salesmen present their new cure-all solution for our ailing public schools.
This time the Republican-led Minnesota House promises to save us. Ignoring that the state's push for metrics decreases opportunities for classroom projects in favor of factory-like test prep regimens, we are led to believe that simply eliminating protections for our school's senior educators will cure all of our institutional ills.
Being an involved parent as well as having worked in a public school as recently as 2013, I've experienced that today's teachers are charged with administering more monotonous material while being simultaneously granted less authority within their classrooms than ever before.
Are there "bad teachers" anywhere in the system? Most certainly! (Though I do believe we tend to be more than fortunate in our smaller, rural school districts.)
Let's not forget, however, that the best thing our schools have going for them are the really good teachers. Most any fellow alumnus of the public education system can point to at least one teacher who left a positive, lasting impression.
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The commonality for all great teachers has been a passion for what they taught. Nowadays a classroom teacher is lucky if he can get to even one project a year that isn't specifically mapped out in the
prescribed math or reading test-prep curriculum.
Tying the hands of our professional educators so they cannot teach the lessons they are most passionate about does the greatest disservice to our students today.
Eliminating teacher tenure will encourage districts to administer the tests and prep through cheaper, less experienced labor and will further the top down push to standardize our students while doing a great disservice to the best and most experienced educators we have.
Dan Bye,
Pequot Lakes
