Jay Mathews: Fired for Teaching Too Much?
Joe Enge, an 11th grade U.S. history teacher at Carson High School in Carson City, Nev., says his district is trying to get rid of him because he disobeyed orders to stop teaching most of what happened in his country before 1865.
Mary Pierczynski, superintendent of the Carson City schools, says that is nonsense. She says she is treating Enge as she would any teacher with a series of unsatisfactory classroom evaluations. She says her district prefers a relatively quick review of America through the Civil War at the beginning of 11th grade, and it covers that period more extensively in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades....
Have you figured out yet what is missing from this debate? To me, it is a measure of how well Enge's students are learning history and how that compares to students who have been taught the district's way. Some states, such as Virginia, have standardized U.S. history tests, the work of hundreds of teachers who decide which themes and issues are most important. But Nevada doesn't have anything like that, and only students who choose to take the AP or SAT subject tests have an independent check of how well they have been taught.
Thankfully, at least one person in Carson City has raised this issue. Eric Robinson, a parent who is director of information technology for a local medical management group, read about the controversy and got a call from Pierczynski after he complained to several officials about how Enge was being treated.
When Pierczynski told him she was only trying to uphold state teaching standards, Robinson said in an e-mail to Muth, he told her he thought that was a reasonable point. "So is there any information available about how Joe Enge's students perform on standardized tests?" he asked. Pierczynski says her response was that Nevada did not have a standardized U.S. history test for 11th graders. If Enge's students had taken the AP U.S. history test, written and graded by outside experts, at the end of their course, we would have had some useful data to judge the dispute. Half of the AP test is multiple-choice questions full of content to please the traditionalists. The other half is essay questions, some based on documents presented to the students, which require the kind of critical thinking that progressives endorse.
But most states, including Nevada, have nothing comparable for most students. So in the long argument over whether standardized tests have any use, let us add the case of Carson High.
I personally don't have much patience with the insults and politics that often arise when teachers and administrators go after each other. American history was my favorite subject in high school, and I would prefer the focus in Carson City be on what students are actually learning, rather than which methods and schedules of teaching the educators find most congenial.
I don't have much hope this is going to happen, in Nevada or most anywhere else, but we have come a long way since 1865, and maybe in another 140 years, we can get this right.
Read entire article at Wa Po
Mary Pierczynski, superintendent of the Carson City schools, says that is nonsense. She says she is treating Enge as she would any teacher with a series of unsatisfactory classroom evaluations. She says her district prefers a relatively quick review of America through the Civil War at the beginning of 11th grade, and it covers that period more extensively in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades....
Have you figured out yet what is missing from this debate? To me, it is a measure of how well Enge's students are learning history and how that compares to students who have been taught the district's way. Some states, such as Virginia, have standardized U.S. history tests, the work of hundreds of teachers who decide which themes and issues are most important. But Nevada doesn't have anything like that, and only students who choose to take the AP or SAT subject tests have an independent check of how well they have been taught.
Thankfully, at least one person in Carson City has raised this issue. Eric Robinson, a parent who is director of information technology for a local medical management group, read about the controversy and got a call from Pierczynski after he complained to several officials about how Enge was being treated.
When Pierczynski told him she was only trying to uphold state teaching standards, Robinson said in an e-mail to Muth, he told her he thought that was a reasonable point. "So is there any information available about how Joe Enge's students perform on standardized tests?" he asked. Pierczynski says her response was that Nevada did not have a standardized U.S. history test for 11th graders. If Enge's students had taken the AP U.S. history test, written and graded by outside experts, at the end of their course, we would have had some useful data to judge the dispute. Half of the AP test is multiple-choice questions full of content to please the traditionalists. The other half is essay questions, some based on documents presented to the students, which require the kind of critical thinking that progressives endorse.
But most states, including Nevada, have nothing comparable for most students. So in the long argument over whether standardized tests have any use, let us add the case of Carson High.
I personally don't have much patience with the insults and politics that often arise when teachers and administrators go after each other. American history was my favorite subject in high school, and I would prefer the focus in Carson City be on what students are actually learning, rather than which methods and schedules of teaching the educators find most congenial.
I don't have much hope this is going to happen, in Nevada or most anywhere else, but we have come a long way since 1865, and maybe in another 140 years, we can get this right.