Akron.com

Fairlawn reader questions control over teachers



To the editor:

Public school teachers are professionals. They have received degrees from accredited institutions and are certified by the state.
Yet laws enacted by the state legislature too often determine the curricula for individual classroom instruction, which relegate teachers as assembly line workers who are not to be trusted with professional discretion.
Instead, they are required to teach pre-planned curricula promoted by entities like Pearson, a multi-billion dollar corporation based in England. In other words, qualified teachers who are forced to teach to standardized tests are not given the autonomy to decide what they teach. And now school boards feel empowered to meddle as well.
Why, for example, if a teacher has decided which text is appropriate for her class, does her decision, as the West Side Leader reported (“Copley-Fairlawn superintendent gives COVID-19 update,” Nov. 25, 2020), have to be approved by [a] school board member who has no state certification?
Should not an elected school board — one that is not credentialed by state law — determine the competency and professionalism of individual teachers who have been hired to do their jobs? Why do they micromanage teachers’ decisions?
If elected school boards do not trust the teachers they hire to exercise their professional judgment to teach their students, why should we trust these school boards or the administrations they oversee to be more competent?

Greg Brozeit, Fairlawn