Friday 30 January 2009

Woo! We rock!

Woo! Go us! We're not dead last in teacher retention! So long as we keep Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont in the United States, we'll look slightly less worse!

AK's got some problems in teacher retention. Especially in the bush. The average life expectancy of a teacher out there is somewhere between twenty seconds and a year, as too many teachers go out there from the lower-48, lured by reasonable salaries and a somewhat misplaced sense of adventure, only to find out they're god-awful in over their heads. Most don't hack it. There's rarely anything that passes remotely for continuity in education.

NCLB is just plain stupid to begin with, but is even worse for these sorts of situations. Imagine this: A school fails to make adaquet yearly progress for one too-many years in a row. It now faces having the staff booted to the curb. But of the staff, only a tiiiiny handful have been there the whole time - maybe one, two max. What the heck good is getting rid of an already transient staff? Hint: squat all.

So I, like a frat who crammed all night for a test in a subject they never went to class - feel great about our D- in teacher retention.

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