Post @ InSide Ed No appointment to the Baltimore school board yet.

Rules of the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners

ARTICLE 1
BOARD OF SCHOOL COMMISSIONERS

Section 101 MEMBERSHIP

101.05 Vacancies
The Mayor and the Governor shall appoint a Board member to fill any vacancy on the Board within 60 days of the date of the vacancy from a list of qualified individuals submitted to the Mayor and Governor by the State Board. After June 30, 2002, the Mayor and the Governor shall appoint a Board member to fill any vacancy within 60 days of the date of the vacancy. The voting member who is appointed after a term has begun serves only for the remainder of the term and until a successor is appointed and qualifies.

They should just get a big wooden bobblehead.

It seems to me the requirements for this appointment are:
- thorough investigation of past (financial, personal, professional), with an applicant that is willing to have their privacy invaded to this level
- Deep interest in City Schools as a whole, not just your specific school or area of expertise
- Willingness to work significant hours for no compensations
- Willingness to be trashed in the media/web for any vocal opinion that disagrees with Alonso
- Willingness to be trashed in the media/web for any vocal opinion that agrees with Alonso
- Willingness to be trashed in the media/web for not having any vocal opinions (e.g. "wooden bobblehead")

Is anyone surprised that this person hasn't been found in the required 60 days?

Baltimore County has a few board members I would love to see leave. Perhaps then, a few could be carefully vetted that would serve the public rather than a few individuals. My greatest hope is that the newest board member will serve with integrity. Good luck, Baltimore City.

@ a parent

Your observation is incisive and eminently true. It seems to me that the people we need to be on the board are former teachers who have been in the system for more than just a couple of years. Tragically there are fewer and fewer of these people. Alonso himself has actually made public the notion that teaching is no longer a viable career for bright young people. Teach for America has something to do with this in spite of its noble intentions. And so does Alonso because the pressure he has put on teachers to take unnecessary standardized tests. Should someone who teaches sixth graders language arts have to know who is more of a realist: Mark Twain, Stephan Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allen Poe? It may be commonsensical to cross off Poe, but no writer really tries to avoid realism. But some hack test-maker at ETS knows his wikipedia entries a little too well. Good teachers are losing their jobs because of such shallow-mindedness. (This was actually a question on my content knowledge test.) The school board should have been completely replaced after the Brian Morris scandal. In their place we need teachers with a pension and little to lose and a small good thing to gain. Let's call it private satisfaction.

@teacher. Yes, a sixth grade language arts teacher should know their content. The notion that teachers should be generalist is why our students lack the skills necessary to be proficient/advanced on the MSAs or pass the HSAs. As a former English teacher who was an English major, I believe that teachers need to know the content. I see many teachers who are jacks of all trades and masters of none. I expect my doctor to know the most minute detail then why not a language arts teacher, or a social studies teacher. I took the test when it was called the NTE and passed the content portion with flying colors because I knew the content. I then decided to take the content portion of the PRAXIS because I wanted to know how the test had changed. I passed that too with flying colors. Teachers need to know their content, it's just that simple!!!

@ Kris

You miss the intended nuance of my point. Of course a teacher should know her content. But the content used in a sixth grade classroom is tremendously different from the content used in a twelfth grade classroom. Sadly, ETS is giving both teachers the same test, and many of the questions are perilously subjective (such as the realism question). It's awfully impressive that you can pass these tests, trend after merciless trend, with flying colors. With your ETS-approved literary credibility, will you please explain who of the four writers I mentioned in my first post is more of a realist than the others? When ETS takes flimsy literary terms too much at face value, why should teachers have to as well? In the very textbooks the city has issued us, realism is dealt with in a single entry--for "realistic fiction." And all that definition says is that realistic fiction depicts events that could literally take place in our world. Okay, so we can scratch of Poe. But the other three writers' most famous works are all unerringly "realistic fiction" according to that definition. (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Scarlet Letter.) But no, you say. One should know more about what realism is than what a middle school textbook says. Let's invite some winners of the Nobel Prize to discuss this with Baltimore City teachers and students. But of course those writers would have a hard time coming to an agreement on this matter. And the students are of course impatient with such questions in the first place. Why shouldn't they be? I know I am.