Monday, March 22, 2010

“Low-achieving” label from a teacher’s POV.

Patrick Welsh is one of the best education writers at the Washington Post. Except he is not a Post employee; he is a high school English teacher who contributes often to the paper’s Outlook section. Check out this really interesting piece on what it felt like when his school, T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va., was labeled “persistently low-achieving” a couple weeks ago.

1 comment:

  1. What your fellow journalist DIDN'T COVER about Central Falls should be the point of your concern. This school has been administered by the State of Rhode Island and the educational "establishment" of Rhode Island for 19 years---before the present students of the school were born! The state Board of Regents has appointed the district school committee and a special "Advisory Committee" for the high school itself. How these bodies have functioned, how they have administered the district, has not been scrutinized at all. How all the auxilliary players---Rhode Island College, Brown University, URI, Providence College---how all these establishment figures who have basically treated Central Falls as a laboratory and a cash-cow, plus their highly paid buddies in the world of consultation, how all of these players have functioned to produce, at last, a school that has seen 18 administrators and five principals come and go in just the last five years, this story has not been reported. Shame on the Providence Journal, and shame on their colleagues everywhere who haven't had guts or brains enough to put Superintendent Gallo, Principal Liz Legault, Board of Regents Chairman Joe Flanders, Advisory Commitee Chairwoman Donna Vigneault, all the deans of the education schools, and all the heads of the consultant organizations who have grabbed a piece of the action in Central Falls for the past nineteen years UNDER THE WHITE LIGHT. These people and organizations own chief responsibility for the mess, AND YET THEY ARE NOW GETTING AWAY WITH IT SCOTT FREE. Journalists, do your job! Journalism MA candidates, here's your thesis project! Certainly there's got to be one of you out there who understands that the beginning, middle and end of journalism is ASKING QUESTIONS.

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