Still preparing review of Charles Payne’s new book, but I found this statement that I think would be a great litmus test to see where someone stands on the political spectrum and how close they are to the daily life of urban schools:
“The basic picture of life in inner-city schools has not changed much in several decades.”
There’s a bunch of articles out there describing President Obama’s advocacy of merit pay for teachers; here’s a transcript of his March 10th speech on education. He alludes several times to this issue, albeit indirectly.
Today’s Inquirer takes it further, enlisting always quotable Ted Hershberg and new Superintendent Arlene Ackerman as foils to dry, conflict averse Jerry Jordan. Incentives are one thing — finding a middle school math teacher is nearly impossible — but systems of pay based on merit…
I wish anyone pushing for merit pay would read Charles Payne’s exceptional new book — So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. His description of many troubled urban schools as demoralized, as essentially irrational places where reforms cannot penetrate is not only accurate but a sound explanation for why these sorts of merit pay plans cannot work in Philly. For such a system to function would require multiple parts that simply do not exist and cannot be created overnight: thoughtful administrators who know instruction, motivated teachers who haven’t been burned again and again, and a reasonably efficient administrative system.
“Historians become controversial when they do not perpetuate myths, when they do not transmit the received and conventional wisdom, when they challenge the comforting presence of a stabilized past. Members of a society, and its politicians in particular, prefer that historians be quietly ironic rather than polemical, conservators rather than innovators.”
cited in Linenthal, Edward Tabor, and Tom Engelhardt. History Wars : The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 1996), 60.
