Word: teachers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...runs down from Hanover, NH to Boston, MA, we have our own Dean Wormer in the form of Governor A. Paul Cellucci, who seems to think the teachers of Massachusetts are no better than the Delta frat boys. He has been holding teachers and teacher candidates on double-secret probation since the institution of a competency exam last spring, blasting away on his ceremonial, Silber-plated whistle...
...despite the lack of access to the exam questions, education writer Anne Wheelock, Boston College Professor Walter Haney and Salem State College Professor Clarke Fowler managed to find enough discrepancies in the scores themselves (coupled with interviews of test-takers) to declare the test an unfair indicator of teacher preparation...
...This is a smokescreen because they don't like teacher testing. These are the same people who would say, 'Well, we're going to pass Johnny to the fourth grade because we don't want to give him a failing grade because it might affect his self-esteem.' So then you put Johnny in the fourth grade and promote him to the fifth grade, and then he gets socially promoted to the teacher college. And then when he gets his teaching degree, he can't pass a literacy test. I don't go along with that. That...
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...