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demmiblue

(36,751 posts)
Thu Apr 4, 2013, 02:32 PM Apr 2013

A message to parents from your child’s teacher

Source: Christine McCartney, Teacher



<snip>

It has to do with the $500 billion dollars allocated by the United States government to children like yours. Your money. Tax-payer money intended to directly benefit students. Money that is being hijacked by for-profit educational management companies. The same people who are using their voices to belittle me and my colleagues, and our schools, and your child’s performance, in order to rationalize their hidden agenda: making money.

They are spending their own money too. They are using it to pay lobbyists who help manipulate educational policy and dictate allocation of resources towards private companies… and it is working. The $13 million dollars they had their hands on in 2005 had already risen to $389 million by 2011. Don’t mistake it: there exists big profit potential in your child. Three hundred and eighty-nine million dollars…and that was two years ago.

<snip>

My life’s work. The countless hours I spend with your child presenting new material, creating on-going formative assessments that are authentic and based on your student’s individual needs at a given moment in time, the active learning and knowledge-construction happening in my classroom on a daily basis, the time I spend creating lessons which require students to build upon and re-evaluate prior knowledge and the work that reflects the relationship that I have worked diligently to foster with your student: is it worth putting all of this hard-won expertise on the back-burner so that someone can divert money intended for your child?

The person your child is and how he/she learns and grows cannot be gauged by an answer bubbled onto a sheet of paper. Your student deserves my full expertise, not a narrowed curriculum and hours devoted to my teaching to the test. My colleagues and I deserve to be freed from the negative impact that the calculated teacher-bashing and union-bashing is having on our profession…because it is calculated, and by this point I don’t think I need to tell you by whom.


http://christinemccartney.net/
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