Word: cellucci
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...report announcing the exam is an inaccurate indicator of teaching ability and should be scrapped in favor of something better. The analysts worked only with the scores of the April and June administrations of the test, since the State Board of Education, with the oversight and prompting of Cellucci, has refused to release copies of the actual test questions. (Education program heads were invited to see, but not take or study, the test under prison-like conditions earlier this fall. No writing utensils were allowed in the room, and the program leaders had to sign an oath of silence...
Instead, Gov. Wormer--er, Cellucci--has decided to press ahead with this competency exam and add to it by testing current teachers under a similar plan, firing those who don't pass. His response to the report by the three education experts was as follows...
While we can all agree that the quality of education in this state and across the country needs vast improvement--and that teacher competency exams are a necessary component of any education reform--Cellucci's comments about the teachers of this state continue to reveal a scornful and intractable attitude which would make him a terrible teacher, never mind someone overseeing an entire educational system. The knee-jerk prejorative hyperbole he uses on the topic of teacher-testing is disturbing both because of what he says and the venom with which he seems to say it. He has chosen...
...Cellucci has borrowed a line directly from Wormer's lips: "The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me." He views our state's teachers (and those training to become teachers) as little more than frat boys to be disciplined until their organization can be disbanded (I bet the Massachusetts Teacher Association has the same reputation in the governor's office that Delta did at fictional Faber College). Of course, in the movie it is Dean Wormer who says, "I'll decide what's fair and what's not fair...
...governor seems to forget that teachers are not the enemy but the answer. When trained properly, they are indispensable to the education of Massachusetts' children. Testing prospective teachers and now, possibly, current teachers with unfair exams will only drive away the best and the brightest from the profession. If Cellucci's "new way" consists of unreasonable secrecy and a constant barrage of uninformed insults, maybe we need a new dean/governor, one who remembers the not-all-that ironic motto of Faber: "Knowledge is Good." Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate...