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Hi. I’m Arne Duncan and I wanted to respond to a blog posting on Facebook. The writer
was concerned about teachers across the country being blamed too much, concerned about teacher
evaluation, and those are absolutely real concerns that all of us share. I’ve said
repeatedly that great teachers are the unsung heroes in our society. We can’t do enough
to recognize and reward them. We have to help them as we have the baby boomer generation
move towards retirement. We have to help recruit and attract the next generation of great teachers
who can take public education in our country to an entirely different level. And anyone
who thinks teachers are the problem, they fundamentally don’t understand education.
Teachers are absolutely part of the solution. We have to listen to teachers, we have to
respect them, we have to better build career ladders, give them the mentoring and the induction,
support and professional development they need to become the masters of their craft.
And everything we can do to support teachers, we want to continue to do that. He was concerned
about teacher evaluation. In many places, I’ve said this repeatedly – teacher evaluation
is fundamentally broken. We have a handful of districts that are doing some really creative
things: unions, management and school boards working together. And we’re actually going
to host a labor management conference in Denver, Colorado, in February and invite districts
from around the country to come, who want to really challenge the status quo, who want
to do some things differently. Teachers are asking for this, superintendents are asking
for this, unions are asking for this, school board members are asking for this. We have
a relatively small number who have fundamentally broken though and are doing some really creative
things that I think are moving the country in the right direction. We would love to see
30-40-50 districts follow in their footsteps. The goal is to have meaningful evaluations.
Evaluations that -- like in other professions -- that really help teachers grow and develop,
and help them build upon their strengths, and help them where they have areas of weakness.
And where we have great examples of success, we want to make that the norm, rather than
the exception. Finally, there was some concern about a narrowing, the narrowing of the curriculum.
As I’ve said repeatedly, that’s a concern we’ve heard around the country. We have
to do more than reading and math. We have to give our children access to a well-rounded
education, and when we do that, I think we give teachers much more room to innovate and
to be creative. In our budget proposal, we are asking for a billion dollars to invest,
not just and reading and math, but in science, and social studies, and English, and foreign
languages, and dance, and drama, and art, and music and physical education. And when
we do that, it is not only a much better learning environment for children, I think it is a
much better teaching environment for our teachers.