Interesting Lesson Plan Article

In class, one of our minor topics of discussion has been lesson plans and whether they can either restrict a teacher or help a teacher be more organized. I thought this article was very interesting in this sense. It talks about how bad teachers in Chicago Public Schools became nearly impossible to fire because of unions and legal ties, so their new solution to the problem was to implement really strict lesson plans.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-10-10/news/9910100324_1_teachers-hands-curriculum-central-office-dictates (It's a bit old but I think it is clearly still a topic relevant today, given all of our new teacher evaluations and such.)

And these strict lesson plans were required for ALL teachers, not just the "bad" ones. 

In my eyes and the eyes of many teachers who are undergoing this change, it will not be beneficial and will not give them the outcomes that they expect.

While I do think that lesson plans help keep a teacher organized and can help the day run more smoothly, I think that strict or government run lesson plans are absolutely detrimental to teacher expression, flexibility, and originality. As I think many of us have agreed and proven, teaching is in fact an art. There need to be some guidelines most definitely, but when it comes to the core goal of teaching, which is to change student's lives, it simply cannot be put into a science. Restricting teachers, especially the great and experienced ones, will only hurt their expression, which ultimately affects student expression, creativity, and growth. So, all in all, I do not believe that these changes will be helpful in the long run. It would be much more beneficial to either talk with "bad" teachers and give them constructive criticism, or if ridding of them is the only option, then that can be done as well.

I think that Susan Davenport, director of the group Designs for Change, brings up a good point: "It won't be long before Central Office dictates everything. They want our best teachers to follow some script to teach our kids. It doesn't make any sense."

While Jane Hannaway, director of the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center, seems to have a more passive take on the matter: "There's just not a real reliable way to measure whether they work. You'll find people who love them, and others who say this will stifle the system's most creative teachers. This kind of thing raises its head every few years in the educational community, then it goes away."

But even over ten years later isn't this still a problem? Should we be drastically worried? Or is this something that will pass with time?