Relay “Graduate School of Education” is not a real graduate school of any kind. It has been accredited in a few states to award “master’s degrees” even though it has no one on its faculty with a doctorate, engages in no research, has no library, and has no relationship to the advancement of knowledge in education. It was created by charter operators to teach future charter teachers how to control classes and how to raise test scores. Its “faculty” consists of charter teachers, mostly from Teach for America, some of whom claim that they raised test scores more than anyone else in their city. Its deans do not have doctorates in any field of study, although a few say they are working towards earning a doctorate. I admit my own bias; I earned my Ph.D. at Teachers College, where my mentor was Lawrence A. Cremin, the greatest historian of his generation, and where every faculty member had a doctorate. Research and the advancement of knowledge was one of the goals of graduate education. Then. It was expected that graduate students would learn about the sociology, economics, history, and politics of education. Then. They would conduct research and earn a degree based on the quality of their research. Then.
Here is Laura Chapman’s observation:
Here is another sad thing about Relay. NY state was the first to accredit the program and President Obama/Arne Duncan approved of it as a model for other to follow.
A colleague once attended McDonald University in order to show the public exactly what the training methods were. He did not last long. They kicked him out, but not before he got some insight into the cult of standardization and cost-cutting.
Relay is the educational equivilent of McDonald University. It is a franchise operation for charter schools that want fully standardized cost effective education achieved by processing children through a mental meatgrinder to have the same puppet-like response to the teachers questions, on time, and with the right posture, gait, hand placement. Before McDonald and Relay the guru of this version of training was B.F. Skinner.
from novemoore http://ift.tt/1UBX6Ac
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