Two of the main ideas that really stuck with me in the first two chapters was first the idea of teacher's working in "isolation", and also the idea of "standards" for teachers and also for curriculum and how both of these ideas affect how we do our job. I found an article in Education Week that addressed the idea of Nationwide education standards.
As it stands right now each state has their own set of standards for almost every subject if not EVERY subject and each grade has its own version of these standards. As a teacher in 7th-12th grade teaching Language Arts/English I have been charged with educating my students and teaching them based on the North Dakota English/Language Arts standards for those grades in North Dakota. While every teacher in North Dakota teaching in my grade and subject area is using this same set of standards--it is extremely likely we each have a different way of doing that, now multiply that times 50 states and while standards might have some overlap you have thousands of teachers teaching the same subject to the same grade in extremely different ways. While I don't believe that having nationwide standards will completely bring us all together and relieve some of the isolation and make as all one big happy English teaching family I do feel it facilitates some interesting interaction.
If I now have the same standards as English teacher's across the nation, I now have a much wider group to go to when I need lesson plan ideas, or when my school is struggling in an area I can put out a quarry nationwide for help. It creates a common language which by itself brings us all a little closer.
The second affect I feel this has is allowing students from across the nation to be on a more even playing field. Now you can think this is good or bad, but if all students in all 9th grade English classes across the nation are being taught from the same set of standards, this has to lead toward some equality. I believe this equality will also lead to my students in small rural North Dakota being more able to compete with the student from large urban New York City.
I am aware that some teacher's would prefer less government "intrusion" in their classroom but I personally welcome this change and look forward to feeling part of a greater community of English teachers across America.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/06/01/33standards.h28.html
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I probably would have come down on the side of not wanting to have government intervention in my classroom, but you brought up some interesting points. The idea of having national networking possibilities would be a great idea that would help teachers all over the country. Teachers who are struggling with a teaching concept could simply talk with another teacher to get the best teaching strategies. A national set of standards would be a massive undertaking in order to get teachers to agree on everything. It is hard to get teachers in the same building to agree on how to teach subject let alone the entire countries worth of educators. For this reason alone it might be difficult to create a set of national standards, however, the networking and collaboration possibilities make this issue worth considering.
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