Debating school legislation and teachers in Delhi, again

Last week, Aug 10, I was moderating a discussion on teacher accountability through the Right to Education Act in New Dehli, India. I had done this last year many times as associate director of the School Choice Campaign at Centre for Civil Society, New Delhi's best and oldest liberal think tank. 

It was good to see friends again and the discussions were familiar matter to me. From the minutes taken by the new young SCC team: 

"Chaired by Jan Sjunnesson Rao, former Associate Director, School Choice Campaign with Surendra Nath Dubey, President of All India Awardee Teachers Association and Shashank Shukla, Teach for India Fellow, Chairman at Gurukul Education Society and member of the National Advisory Council Working Group as panelists, the discussions explored the means through which the RTE Act addresses the issue of teacher accountability and looked at possible solutions. Jan outlined the major problems in relation with teacher accountability before introducing the panelists. He summarised the principal problems in India such as the absence of teachers and the shortage of educators that the government is facing while trying to implement RTE Act. In addition he mentioned that the RTE Act is vague on the issue of teacher accountability. He commented on the lack of a direct correlation between teacher salaries and student learning outcomes in India."

Keep up the SCC spirit guys and gals  : )

Modern parenting and the philosophy of children's learning

BBCs Magazine has a piece by the great essayist cum philosopher Alain de Botton where he evokes the ways modern parenting has evolved. His point is that the cozy mollycoddling looks decadent, appalling to older generations and from the outside, but is quite rational given the demands on children of today. Modern theories of childhood such Dion Summer and Dahlberg/Moss could not agree more.
Still I withhold my scepticism. Children are not cultural, but also mammal beings whatever the social constructivists and post-modernists say. Given that base, the modern parenting is at best harmless, at worse making the human species fade out into mini shrinks who terapeut one another. But I could be wrong.  

Why some believe good teaching cannot be measured

In this blogpost from Teacherleaders Network (US) it says:
" . . .teaching is an extraordinarily complex and demanding form of professional practice whose quality is impossible to capture accurately in a simple metric".

Yes and yet no. There are ways to get around this as we all know the McKinsey reports have tried 2007 and 2010. To say it is impossible is not acceptable, it is just very hard and couragous to do for school leaders. There is no way getting around measuring and supporting the teachers and in the end the students.