WPTF’s Bill LuMaye made a fascinating observation this afternoon, which I will expand on.
Since Big Education opposes teachers being paid for performance and working without a lifetime guarantee of a job — called tenure — then defenders of the entrenched status quo must really be upset about this story.
Every morning, Emily and Brian Quigley leave their Raleigh home and head to their teaching jobs on different sides of Wake County. When they get home each evening, sometimes after working second jobs, they talk a lot about school.
The Quigleys, who got married in 2010, are both among the 26 semifinalists for Wake’s Teacher of the Year award.
And they’re both second-grade teachers – Emily at Holly Springs Elementary, Brian at Lockhart Elementary in Knightdale.
When they found out they were in the running for the award, they felt a sense of good-natured competition, they said.
“Now I think we’re just happy for each other,” Emily said.
Imagine that. The Quigleys are competing against one another — and have lived to tell the tale.
Big Education fails to acknowledge that most of the working world competes for compensation and goes to work each day without the guarantee of a lifetime job. And, yes, all this occurs at the same time employees collaborate on projects despite making different amounts of money. Big Education knows this, of course, but Big Education hopes you’ll swallow its argument that teaching is the chosen profession and that the working world’s norms do not apply to teaching. Teaching is an honorable profession, not the “chosen” profession.
