Thread👉🏽 Some of you may have seen @6News tonight, for those who didn’t, they asked for my thoughts on Bill Dunn’s new gig at the State Dept of Education, so I gave them. Here they are...
It is a slap in the face of educators, students, and parents to give this position to someone who has no teaching/education background.
There are hundreds of educators across this state who could do a huge service in this position, actually helping the legislature understand what is needed in our classrooms-literacy experts with PhDs in this field.
Yet they hire someone who teachers and public school supporters feel is hostile to public education and public school teachers.
Classroom experience is required in most all of the consequential DOE jobs, yet not here? This almost feels like a lobbying position, but we all know that it isn’t legal for a legislator to lobby unless they wait a year after leaving office.
Literally $98,000 for someone with zero classroom experience, whose only “education” experience came from reading dishonest talking points from privatizer dark money groups.
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Well, it's Tuesday and another of Gov Lee's signature pieces of legislation has been stopped by the courts. That is 2 unconstitutional bills heard this week--he lost on both--again. tennesseelookout.com/2020/09/30/fed…
He sure is costing taxpayers a pretty penny defending legislation that we pointed out from the start was unconstitutional.
This particular amendment to the heartbeat bill was added in the middle of the night and I pointed out in discussion on the floor that this procedure was not medically approved...
I spoke in Ed. Committee about holding high stakes evaluations for students and teachers in the most difficult school year in modern history. Members have no idea the unbearable stress that conducting the evaluations will bring to students, parents, teachers, and principals.
Why test when there is no plan to use the scores? Why test when we have nothing to compare from the previous year? Teachers conduct testing and benchmarks throughout the year, they know where the students are and record this--this is not the year for high stakes tests.
Teachers are doing the job of social workers, custodians, nurses, and tech experts. When teachers are out and there are not enough substitutes, other teachers have to cover extra classes and in many cases principals are covering those classes along with their endless duties.
It seems the Education Committee meetings Tuesday and Wednesday were not to slap Schwinn’s hand as some thought. They asked every hand-picked speaker to weigh in on virtual versus in-person learning to set up for this, yet showed us absolutely none of this “data” they have.
They only invited rural districts with low transmission to weigh in on school reopening. Those situations are nothing like what is happening in Knox County...or the other larger counties.
I’m really eager to see this data collected in the first few weeks of a chaotic school opening during a pandemic.
In June we knew the summer slide was going to be pronounced, this is why we had the $150 million education funding amendment to give educators the resources to help students catch up. Though it was paid for, the supermajority voted it down.
Ultimately, their budget cut $70 million from education and eliminated teacher pay raises at a time when their job got 3 times as hard.
For years, my GOP colleagues have PROTECTED a taxpayer-funded virtual school run by a for-profit corporation (and campaign donor) that has consistently failed its students.
Thread: I put a post on the SPEAK Facebook page this afternoon asking for teachers who wanted to talk about what teaching during COVID is like. It was last minute, but 15-20 teachers showed up on Zoom to share their experiences at 8:30 PM.
They are exhausted, they are stressed, their load is 3 times what it has been in past years. They are doing the jobs of teacher, nurse, social worker, custodian, and IT specialist.
As the parents are learning the technology too, the kids and parents text, email, or call teachers all day until 10 pm-and they are even OK with that...and then they talked to me from 8:30-10:30 PM.
I’ve been thinking a lot today about my first couple of weeks teaching in Colorado. I was with a close knit group of high school seniors whose favorite teacher had left and they were none to happy someone was taking her place.
The reason I think about that today is because we heard there was something happening on the news and like all the other classes, we turned on the TV. We sat together as we watched the news and the attacks on 9-11.
It was sad and it was scary, but it was good to be together and be able to talk about what we were seeing. I think it was as good for me to be able to talk with the kids as it was for them.