Just now, when I reviewed our reading of Tyack &Lawrence, I found I added a comment besides the sentence “teachers have their own ‘wisdom’ of practice”, which is “I am wondering whether you rely too much on teachers”.
Suddenly did I remember that after reading Karlo’s short paper draft, I noticed one of his opinion, which is “Our society is leaving important decisions about education to politicians and businesspeople who have not spent one day as a teacher”. Then I added a comment beside that: “I want to mention that Louis Gerstner, an absolute outlier of the field of computer science, helped IBM out of being death as IBM’s CEO. It might not matter whether education administrators are or were teacher, but it does matter whether the administrators know education, know social development, know how to change the educational system according to the social development.”
Karlo, Tyack and Lawrence all believe that it is teachers, rather than politicians, who should determine what to teach, how to teach them and how to shape educational reform. While I thought politicians who stand outside the field of education and can get acquaintance of social development should make decision on education.
At this point, now I think we should combine thoughts from both teachers and politicians together. Teachers are closer to children and to schools than politicians, which indicates they know what schools or kids really need and whether the proposed plan could be accomplished better than politicians. Consequently when politicians make policy decisions, it is necessary to cooperate with teachers. That is also one reason why NCLB is failed, Bush must have no idea how kids grow up, what they need to grow up and in what speed kids study new things, so he issued NCLB only by some suggestion, international comparison and what is most important, by imagination. Imagination can never produce practical policies, that is why politicians should cooperate with practitioners.
Additionally, we can not rely too much on teachers to make policy decisions either. After all, most teachers are working only inside schools, and it might be too difficult to ask them to realize “American is tend to fall behind with other countries technically” which is realized by National Center of Education and the Economy ( Tough Choices, Tough Times. The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. 2006.) Consequently we still need politicians to direct the main development of education and society.
Karlo, I am sorry, my comment is too absolute. We need both teachers and politicians.
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I completely agree. As someone who has run political campaigns for some years and who will, in all likelihood, be an elected official at some point during my life, I know the importance of politics in education. Too often educators are naive in believing that policymakers will follow the advice of the Jal Mehtas of the world when trying to create education policy instead of the Christian Coalition or local teachers union. My point in that paper, and I stand by it, is that we as a society do not trust educators to make decisions instead choosing to over-regulate schools. By both professionalizing teaching and working within the political arena more, maybe we can get something done.
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