CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA: What Is a Teacher

CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA: What Is a Teacher:

ESSA: What Is a Teacher

We knew that a theme of the week would be teasing out the ugliest parts of the ESEA rewrite. Farewell, "No Child Left Behind." Hello, "Every Student Should Succeed in Serving Corporate Interests."

One element that has become evident is the ways in which ESSA works to gut the entire process of creating teachers, and consequently the profession itself. Just as reformsters have sought to redefine what it means to be an educated person (a person who performs well on standardized testing tasks), they have also sought to redefine what it means to be a teacher.

The assault on teaching has been bizarrely two-pronged. On the one hand, reformsters have tried to make it harder to become a teacher. On the state level, StudentsFirst and similar reformy astroturfers have been pushing longer and longer waiting periods for tenure, from two or three years up to three or four or five years-- and those years should be spent proving you can raise "student achievement" aka "get test scores up." And before you can even get to that point, some states want aspiring teachers to go through costly bogus licensing processes like edTPA. 

On the other hand, we've also seen a big push to make it easier to become a teacher. Reformsters have pushed for regulations that accept five weeks of Teach for America Summer Camp as perfectly CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA: What Is a Teacher: