I agree, Mr. Teachbad

I recently discovered Mr. Teachbad's blog and immediately love its honestly and satire.  I especially enjoyed this post from last week about what "bugs [him] about education reform."  Today I was talking with my brother about school and the impending state tests.  He shook his head in disbelief when I told him that pretty much every afternoon from January to March would be devoted to test prep.  Honestly, imagine how much more I could TEACH if I didn't feel like I had the fate of the school and AYP on my shoulders...Anyways, Mr. Teachbad struck a powerful and important chord in his post:

Dishonest:

The achievement Gap is not the fault of teachers. How likely is that? Think about it. I mean, what are the chances that all the terrible teachers just randomly ended up in districts and neighborhoods with high rates of:

1) Single, young mothers;
2) Poverty;
3) Obesity;
4) Smoking;
5) Crime;
6) No books in the house;
7) Illiterate/unemployed/incarcerated/absentee parents.

I’ve been doing this for six years. Kids like this are hard to teach. It’s not like dropping into a desert and giving people water…where they are all grateful and think you are awesome. It’s more like giving cough medicine to a hysterical three-year old with a fever and diarrhea; they’ll fight it to the death and hate you afterward.

I can’t patch all these holes. I can’t make up for everything my students have so unfairly been denied. And I can’t accept responsibility for what that breeds.

Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee are dishonest for suggesting that if I do things a certain way in my classroom that I can overcome all of this. It’s just not true. And it is disingenuous and unfair to teachers to pretend otherwise.

--Mr. Teachbad, 12/15

Amen, Mr. Teachbad.  Maybe if every teacher makes their voice heard, someone from Washington will finally hear us?  Oh wait, we're just teachers.  Who cares what we think?