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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Everybody in the debate has worked full time in a school for at least 12 years, and probably more like 16 to 20 or beyond if they are seriously participating in this debate. Sure, they were on the student side, but that's long enough to gain a breadth of experience that at least qualifies them to sit at the table. I'm really not sympathetic to "We're teachers and you aren't". Yes, you are, I value your feedback, but we're talking about a system that almost everyone is mandated to participate in for years. Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school professionals.

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The author of the post is lamenting that while these boards and panels put teachers on them, their input is completely ignored in favor of whatever is politically in vogue for the other participants. It doesn't make sense to invite a professional for their input and them ignore what they say.

> Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school professionals.

No, we haven't. Having gone to school does not make you a professional. That would be like saying anyone who has used a computer is a computer professional.

>That would be like saying anyone who has used a computer is a computer professional.

I'm pretty sure one of the major points of successfully building software is "Talk to the customer/user".

True, but we don't ask the customer/user to actually build the software.

No, the computer metaphor breaks down; programs are not a dialog between a teacher and a class, nor is there any reasonable way to translate that.

Honestly, think about what you're arguing there; 12 years or more in an environment, one ostensibly teaching critical thinking, but you still don't have enough experience to apply critical thinking to that process itself? If that's the case, why did we bother with the schooling process in the first place if it's so incapable of being applied to the thing you've spent the largest part of your life doing up to that point? That's ridiculous.

What percentage of the people involved in the debate had 12 years of education in public schools with high stakes testing? Unless you're a teacher, or a student who went through that system and have the ability to critically reflect back upon it, then no, you aren't an expert in it. And even for students: we wouldn't say that you should be telling Google how to create new products, simply because you've used their phones and search engine for 10 years.

Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here.

On another place on the Internet, I participate in discussions about military budgets, and there are a certain group of people who insist that since they are soldiers they have the ultimate call on how much funding it should receive. (Spoiler: the answer is "more.")

Yeah, or we could ask law enforcement officers and prison guards how many people should be in prison, or how many laws we should have...

To use the same analogy used in the article: A random person would not be qualified to participate in the discussion about medical procedures used in an emergency room, sure. But if I had worked in an emergency room for 12 years, even without a medical degree, I would feel like I had at least something to contribute to the discussion.

I agree with the article that we should value the teacher’s input to the debate and that it’s way easier to tell teachers they are doing their job wrong than to do it better yourself, but that doesn’t mean other people cannot have a valid, meaningful opinion on schooling.

Every teacher I've talked to gets routinely exasperated by people who think they know about teaching because they went to high school.

Whether or not the "we're professionals" card is valid, I think it should be pretty damned obvious that eating paste in kindergarten does not give you equivalent experience to teaching kindergarten.

> Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school professionals.

It's entirely different on the other side of the podium. Shockingly different, actually. Horrifically, shockingly, terrifying different.

/former freshman-level TA

This is true if you've gone to school under the recent testing regime. If you haven't, your opinion as to whether it's an effective method of evaluating teachers is not valid.

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