Contributor
Jackie Bennett, Executive Board Member, United Federation of Teachers
Biography provided by participant
Jackie Bennett taught high school English in New York City for eighteen years. When she joined the staff of a K-12 school she became interested in educational issues from the early grades up, and found in the UFT a venue for pushing for school improvement. She is committed to bringing the voice of ordinary teachers to the school reform movement, and has been active in many areas of education policy in New York, including as a member of NY City Council's task force for middle school improvement. More recently, Ms. Bennett served as a member of the accountability committee of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign.
Recent Responses
October 25, 2009 06:41 PM
How should teacher effectiveness be assessed? The answer to that is simple, and it is the same answer now as it was 10 years ago and 50 years ago: teachers need to be assessed on whether or not their students are learning. Simple to answer, perhaps, but much harder to do. Or is it? Walk into any classroom and what do you see? Are hands eagerly up eagerly, or are heads resignedly down? Are answers and suppositions flying back and forth, or only spitballs? And is the little girl scribbling furiously in her notebook there in the corner responding…
Read moreSeptember 14, 2009 10:31 AM
College requires the sophisticated reading of sophisticated texts, and to ensure success students need to be able to do that when they arrive. In addition, they need to be able to afford to continue their education. That doesn’t just mean paying tuition. Students drop out when they come from families whose web of financial security – the fallback wealth – is not sufficient to sustain the family when crisis hits. In other words, their parents need their help to meet the rent. The declining wealth of the middle class has exacerbated that problem, and has probably hit black students especially hard. Read Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick…
Read moreSeptember 12, 2009 10:58 AM
P21 is a curriculum initiative, and as such success would be defined by how well it addresses the question of what students need to know. By that definition, P21 has not been successful. Its standards give short shrift to something that is of great concern to many teachers: broadening student knowledge. P21’s standards make passing reference to the nine core subjects outlined in NCLB, but the thrust of their work really lies elsewhere. Let’s see how P21 defines success: 21st century skills represent the necessary student outcomes for the 21st century, i.e. students need to obtain Learning…
Read moreSeptember 5, 2009 11:20 AM
Yes. We can improve schools, and we can scale up. Improving schools takes this: a bottom-up approach to creating coherent, inspiring school cultures that are guided by a supportive accountability system that includes a school review. Coherent and inspiring school cultures are those where everyone values knowledge and values the people around them. Bottom-up implies that districts cannot simply impose their will on schools, principals cannot simply impose their will on teachers, and teachers cannot simply impose their will on kids. Every school is different. But if that’s the case, then how can we create successful models and scale…
Read moreAugust 10, 2009 08:06 AM
There is at least one good thing to be said about paying kids to learn and it is this: it grows out of a recognition that student motivation is a key – if not the key – to improving student achievement. Of course we need good teachers and good schools. Just as important, however, are the students themselves and their attitude toward education. If kids come to class motivated; if kids actually value what is happening in class, then all the rest of our efforts cannot fail. And that is what fascinates me about programs that are giving cash to…
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