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Raleigh, NC
Rebecca Fernandez is a Principal Program Manager at Red Hat, leading projects to help the company scale its open culture. She's an Open Organization Ambassador, contributed to The Open Organization book, and maintains the Open Decision Framework. She is interested in the intersection of open source principles and practices, and how they can transform organizations for the better.
Authored Comments
One of the most disturbing thing for me about many of the high stakes testing programs is that many great inner-city teachers lose their jobs when test scores won't rise enough. Yet many of these teachers are far superior to their suburban counterparts... they simply have students that need incredible amounts of help, money, and time to succeed. And the same teachers often have their hands tied to specific instruction methods that don't work all that well, and aren't seen in more affluent schools, like drilling and rote learning.
The teachers who most need the freedom to take risks and try new things have the least freedom to do so, under high stakes testing programs. Meanwhile we push for innovation in charter schools, which lack much *needed* oversight and don't even require many certified teachers, at the same time we deny our brightest and most motivated teachers the opportunity to innovate in their own classrooms.
What business-turned-education "thinkers" don't realize is that for just about every teacher, the greatest incentive is students who are engaged in the material and successfully mastering it. If we'd open our schools to more data-driven methods, let our teachers have the freedom to try new things, and provide the budget to attend conferences where other educators present "best practices" from their classrooms and schools, we might just find that we don't need to dangle carrots in front of anyone.
...because I only heard about it from a friend, in person.
What's the social media story behind it?
(And is it any better than a VitaMix? Everything she described sounded like the 1980s Mother Earth News ads for VitaMix, which I must admit that I still daydream about from time to time.)