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As teacher resignation letters increasingly go public -- and viral -- new research indicates teachers are not leaving solely due to low pay and retirement, but also because of what they see as a broken education system.
In a trio of studies, Michigan State University education expert Alyssa Hadley Dunn and colleagues examined the relatively new phenomenon of teachers posting their resignation letters online. Their findings, which come as many teachers are signing next year's contacts, suggest educators at all grade and experience levels are frustrated and disheartened by a nationwide focus on standardized tests, scripted curriculum and punitive teacher-evaluation systems.
Teacher turnover costs more than $2.2 billion in the U.S. each year and has been shown to decrease student achievement in the form of reading and math test scores.
"The reasons teachers are leaving the profession has little to do with the reasons most frequently touted by education reformers, such as pay or student behavior," said Dunn, assistant professor of teacher education. "Rather, teachers are leaving largely because oppressive policies and practices are affecting their working conditions and beliefs about themselves and education."
The study quoted a teacher in Boston: "I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @05:52PM
That statement that you are attacking is not absolute; it has a very particular meaning withing the context of the whole comment. "School" should be an organization that a person wants to attend in order to help him gain the benefits of proving that he's competent in some field of inquiry, whether that be reading comprehension or machine shop work, etc.
The voluntary nature of attending school is meant to be taken in the context of a system of societal organization that supports individual incentive for learning the requisite material; obviously, our current system doesn't do a very good job of revealing this individual incentive, so obviously the notion of voluntary schooling looks absurd when taken out of the context in which it was stated.
Please, please! Try to keep everything in your head at the same time; you have not actually contributed to the discussion; you've only made it necessary to have a discussion about the discussion. You would do well just to keep quiet, instead.
As for minimizing incompetent, useless fools, it's pretty clear that the current system has done a terrible job. We're discussing ways that can change this outcome: In this subthread in particular, it is being pointed out that there is no such thing as "teaching"; there is only "learning"—it is an individual act of the will on the part of the student, so that must be cultivated in as many ways as possible, the best way of which is producing some kind of individual incentive (especially one that makes a child feel like he's falling behind his peers).