Reply to Teacher retention rate hits 90% benchmark

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]From the meeting, it sounded like there were two incidents of foreign teachers not having the necessary English fluency. But they didn’t explain those incidents so they were talking amongst themselves. Overall seems like the program has been successful and they are going to expand it,[/quote]

I attended one of Reid's community conversations in the fall.

Half the parents there were from one of the elementary schools that had one of those teachers.

I think the problems went beyond language issues.  My impression was that the teacher had zero teaching experience in their own country, and behaved in ways that were completely unacceptable in and incompatible with US school culture.  I didn't take notes on that topic, but I seem to recall some discussion about issues with the background checks of the foreign teachers came up in the discussion.  The parents did not share specifics, but every single one of them was horrified by the experience.

The parents there were very reasonable people, but their concerns really alarmed me.

The meeting was over a month into the school year and the teacher had just been removed.  The fact FCPS left the teacher in the classroom for at least a month with no mentorship or real oversight was also alarming.[/quote]

This is not at all surprising.  When I saw that they were hiring foreign teachers, my first thought was how bad it would be when those teachers behaved in ways that are normal in their countries, but the exact opposite of what is OK here.  I studied in a foreign country, and it's worlds apart.  For example, it was common in that foreign country for teachers to have blatant favoritism toward boys and to make overtly sexist and racist comments.  It was also common for teachers to announce student grades aloud and to publicly chastise a student who did poorly, even calling them stupid.  When I took college classes related to that country, and the college had wanted to hire a "native speaker," I often found myself in a US classroom with a similar type of teacher.  Until someone complained, of course, and then they'd be fired, but in fact anyone with knowledge of that country could have predicted it.  Shows how stupidly and ignorantly FCPS blunders into things it knows nothing about.[/quote]

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