{"id":11649,"date":"2010-11-10T08:01:50","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T15:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11649"},"modified":"2010-11-10T08:01:50","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T15:01:50","slug":"cathleen-p-black-is-new-schools-chancellor-in-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11649","title":{"rendered":"Cathleen P. Black Is New Schools Chancellor in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the article on NYTimes.com<\/a>: “\ufeffMs. Black, at the news conference on Tuesday where she was introduced, made no pretense of having any experience in education.”<\/p>\n

I really do understand the value of having a schools chancellor with a strong business management background. I do think, however, that anyone chosen to be schools chancellor who has no experience in education should be required, if he or she wants the job, to spend a year in the classroom first. The school system might be an organization that can be run like a business in many ways; the classroom, however, is not–if only because learning is not a business transaction–and the outgoing chancellor, Joel Klein, it seems to me, very clearly did not understand that. My wife, who teaches in one of the toughest school districts in New York City, tells me that she and her colleagues are demoralized by this appointment because they feel like, yet again, they will be led by someone who doesn’t really understand not simply the nature of education, but the actual work of being a teacher.<\/p>\n

In higher education, at least at the community college level where I teach, this tendency to treat the process of education as a business transaction finds expression in an increasingly common metaphor that frames students in the classroom as customers and teachers as customer service representatives. The wrongheadedness of this way of thinking astounds me, not because I think I should not be accountable to both my students and the people who employ me for the quality of the work I do as a teacher, and not because I think there is anything wrong with measuring that accountability in ways that are as formal and rigorous as those used to measure a business’ success–though that does not mean I think the same methods are appropriate to both situations–but because if I have to think of my students as my customers, if I have to think of myself as a customer service representative, then, frankly, the incentive I have is to make sure they are happy and satisfied with the results they receive, which is not the same thing as making sure they have learned something.<\/p>\n

Cross posted on The Politics in The Poetry and The Poetry in The Politics<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the article on NYTimes.com: “\ufeffMs. Black, at the news conference on Tuesday where she was introduced, made no pretense of having any experience in education.” I really do understand the value of having a schools chancellor with a strong … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}