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Classroom Contemplations: Education Policies From A Teacher's Perspective

Background

Miami-Dade teacher Jeremy Glazer will be writing about life in the classroom.

Jeremy Glazer

Miami-Dade teacher Jeremy Glazer will be writing about life in the classroom.

We are introducing a series taking a closer look at teaching and schools through the eyes of Jeremy Glazer, a Miami-Dade County Public Schools teacher.

Glazer will be writing about the issues he sees in the classroom, such as the unintentional message about priorities state requirements send to teachers and students. He’ll also tap the Public Insight Network to find out what other Florida teachers, parents and students are thinking.

Glazer just completed his eighth year teaching and not only has worked in a range of schools, but has also had experience in the policy-making world, serving as a legislative analyst and speechwriter for Miami-Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson.  He will be using this combination of views—a policy lens and his classroom eyes—to examine some of the complex issues confronting teachers in Florida’s classrooms.

Glazer studied anthropology at Amherst College and, after working in economic development, he went to the University of Pennsylvania for a master’s in education.

He subsequently taught for eight years in both Philadelphia and Miami in a range of schools, big to small, urban to suburban, public to private.  He took time away from the classroom to work as chief legislative analyst and speechwriter for Miami-Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson.  He will begin work on his Ph.D. in Education at Stanford in the fall.

Want to sound off on something Glazer has written? Want to suggest a topic for him? Send us an email at Florida@stateimpact.org and put “Classroom Contemplations” in the subject line.

Latest Posts

Classroom Comtemplations: Lessons After The School Day Ends

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Madame Logan is a retired high school French teacher. She was filled with stories of former students who had contacted her to tell her of the effects she had on them. Most of these effects were, at best, indirectly related to the French they had […]

Classroom Contemplations: Overlooking The Value Of Veteran Teachers

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. A student went home to complain to her mom about Mattie Williams, her social studies teacher. The mother went straight out to the school for a conference. To the mother’s surprise, she found herself sitting face-to-face with her own former teacher from a generation before […]

Classroom Contemplations: Little Books, Big Statement

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Ms. Roberts left teaching ten years ago, but she remembers very clearly a day in class that changed her and her students. It was her first year and she was teaching English to over two hundred kids a day in Room 100, also known as […]

Classroom Contemplations: When Students Recognize A Teacher’s Value

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. One of the first people I talked to about the different ways teachers add value to students’ lives was Mr. Bernard.  He is now retired and he told me a story that had happened a few weeks before. He was at a party when Mark, […]

Classroom Contemplations: The Teaching That Evaluations Ignore

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. One of the things I want to do through this series is to expand the discussion of a teacher’s value. We cannot let the worth of teachers be defined narrowly by the test scores of their students.  We need to consider all of the different […]

Classroom Contemplations: Testing Reinforces Bad Behavior

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. There are some real perils to systems which try to reduce teacher performance to a single number, such as many of our new “value-added” formulas. The first is that whatever you decide to measure — and, implicitly or explicitly reward — is what you are […]

Classroom Contemplations: The Worth of Value Added

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. The new term of art within the educational conversation about how we sort the good teachers from the bad is “value added.” We stole the phrase from economics. But in the educational context, it brings to mind the great George Orwell quote: “The slovenliness of […]

Classroom Contemplations: What Do Test Results Really Tell Us?

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Let’s take a moment to look closely at test scores, which are the basis of our new “teacher accountability” system. I just got back the test results for the students at the magnet school where I taught this year, and I honestly don’t think they […]

Classroom Contemplations: How School Grades Get It Wrong

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Professionals should be responsible for their job performance and should be evaluated and retained accordingly. Who doesn’t agree with that? My problem isn’t with accountability or evaluating teachers.  My problem is with the schemes I’ve encountered so far in my career that have been designed […]

Classroom Contemplations: The Most Important Day Of The School Year

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. A week ago Thursday — the end of the year for students — brought with it the usual catharsis of the last day. There were hugs and tears as well as exchanges of notes and cards, gifts and promises, and words of wisdom and encouragement. […]

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