Old Teacher, New Teacher

Change is endemic. This summer, after a decade in my current position, I chose to move to a new school and district. Attending "new" teacher orientation is novel for a veteran teacher, and being surrounded by first year teachers, enthusiastic and still blushing with naivete and an overpowering excitement to get started energizes the environment.

New teacher orientation is an effect of the local control of education. Each district has its own policies, values, curricula, expectations and unspoken assumptions. We could do away with a lot of this orientation time if we had some set of standardized, national expectations and procedures for education. For example, a national application form (even statewide wouldn't be too utopian). And, in one of the only professions, or, for that matter businesses, the more skill and experience overall that you have, the more income you lose when changing districts--more on that in a later post.

Some of the messages from the district administration that I heard today seem like voices in the wilderness, but resonate well with me. For example, that test scores have their importance, but that we must be unwilling to sacrifice authentic education for the sake of test scores. If every district took that as a foundation for thinking about a quality education, we could begin to dig ourselves out of the politicized hole that the "accountability" myths have dug.