I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor. - Chris Christie, "An Open Letter to the Teachers of NJ" October, 2009

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Quote of the Decade

I would so love to hear Bill Gates try to answer this:
“Any other profession that had that kind of turnover would look at working conditions, would look at salaries and other things surrounding the teaching environment,” said Joel Westheimer, university research chair and professor at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of education. “Instead, in education, we bring up talk about testing teachers and linking their pay to the students’ performance. I mean, can you imagine Microsoft suffering a crisis because there were not enough programmers going into the profession and leaving after the first five years? Would (the company’s) response be to increase salaries, recruit better people, change working conditions so that they could work in different places, have free soda and free lunches? Or would it test them?” [emphasis mine]
I take cold comfort in the knowledge that the Canadians are ruining the profession of teaching as badly as we Americans are.
Free soda for teachers?! We can't afford that!


(h/t @symphily on the Twitter machine)

2 comments:

NYC Educator said...

Great quote. I'm constantly amazed by the callous and preposterous atrocities regularly committed by Bill Gates and his foundation. Kind of disappointing only a handful of crazy teacher bloggers seem to notice.

windabell said...

I think of a similar comparison in relation to educators and the educated in regards to programmers, if end result of the programming was that the computers didn't function as designed( not able to to read code or compute math) they might find programmers that could produce a quality product. But computers, as well as students aren't just what you put in them, its what hardware they have to begin with.