Re:”Colorado’s crawl to mediocrity” April 29 Mike Rosen column.
Mike Rosen asks, “What profession has less personal accountability and less of a connection between individual performance and compensation” than the teaching profession? How about newspaper columnists?
Attorneys, doctors and dentists have “unions,” too. They are the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, and the American Dental Association, respectively. There are many differences between these associations and the National Education Association. The most significant is that the NEA alone does not have the power to evaluate its own professionals, as the ABA, AMA and ADA do. Since Rosen asserts that they offer more accountability than the teaching profession, where is his proposal that the NEA evaluate its own teachers?
He then asserts that a comparison to other professions (specifically dentists) are a “shop-worn, lame attempt to absolve teachers and shift the blame to bad parents.” Which is it? Do we compare professions or not? You can’t have it both ways.
In his tired, unprofessional attack upon the teachers’ unions, Rosen completely absolves parents and students of any responsibility toward performance in education. This simply reveals how far Rosen is from the reality of learning, which requires all members of a learning community to participate.
Kathy McKittrick of Castle Rock is a high school social studies teacher.
