Dive Brief:

• Time Magazine's Nov. 3 cover headline, "Rotten Apples: It’s Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad Teacher. Some Tech Millionaires May Have Found a Way to Change," is rubbing some educators the wrong way.
• New York University education historian Diane Ravitch calls the cover "malicious" and is asking teachers to write letters to Time, and a whole slew of teachers are taking to Twitter and other forms of social media to make their voices heard.
• The American Federation of Teachers' Randi Weingarten also wants an apology, saying that while the inside content is much more balanced, it's unfortunately obscured by the controversial cover.

Dive Insight:

"The cover is particularly disappointing because the articles inside the magazine present a much more balanced view of the issue. But for millions of Americans, all they’ll see is the cover and a misleading attack on teachers," writes Weingarten.

While the article is tough on teacher tenure laws, according to Weingarten, the piece "also questions the testing industry’s connections to Silicon Valley and the motives of these players." 

Ravitch is less concerned with the rest of the content and more focused on the message the cover spreads. She argues that the bigger issue is not teacher tenure but rather retention. With all the teacher bashing, enrollment at teacher colleges is declining and teachers are retiring earlier. Why would anyone want to go into a field when they are automatically viewed as the enemy? Ravitch is also quick to argue that this trend of teacher-hating is not random, but rather "funded by millionaires and billionaires, by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and even by the U.S. Department of Education." 

Recommended Reading

Diane Ravitch : TIME Magazine Attacks America’s Teachers: Write a Letter to TIME 
Time: The War on Teacher Tenure