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Paying for Better Math and Science Teachers
Coryoth writes "While California is suffering from critical shortage of mathematics and science teachers, Kentucky is considering two bills that would give explicit financial incentives to math and science students and teachers. The first bill would provide cash incentives to schools to run AP math and science classes, and cash scholarships to students who did well on AP math and science exams. The second bill provides salary bumps for any teachers with degrees in math or science, or who score well in teacher-certification tests in math, chemistry and physics. Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry, or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?"
>...or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?
Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Either that, or enslave post-grads for a few years and FORCE them to work at public school wages. That'll work... Yeah.I hate "IS/OR" questions like this. The answer to both is YES. Pay which is competative with industry will attract science grads to teach. It will also cause "discontent among teachers" who somehow feel that all teachers should earn the same -- regardless of education/demand for certain skillsets.
Queue the teachers union to strike/protest.
This proposed system to get better math and science educators and educations sounds like a meritocracy approach, which may be a foreign concept to some in the heavily union-controlled teacher community. It would seem that something as important as the education of our children the most important goal would be to fund and organize the most effective educational system possible.
While I don't know the intricacies of the teachers' unions, I've had enough discussions with my sister, a teacher, to suspect the best interests of the children are rarely in play in decsions around who should teach and how much those who teach should be paid. If this is really true, it is probably the wrong approach.
A central tenet of the school pay system appears to be their main stumbling block: FTA:
There's a certain insanity to the notion that different demand-disciplines (in the market workplace) should not help guide salary distribution in the teaching systems. High-demand, high-pay disciplines should drive high-pay teaching positions. If an English teacher's 50% cut to a Physics teacher's pay bothers the English teacher, he (she) need only get the necessary background to qualify to teach physics. It seems like a simple equation... it's kind of (not exactly) how it works in the job market.
I'm all for a meritocracy for teachers, and not just in the math and sciences. Unfortunately, from past observations, as long as government runs educational systems, and unions govern teacher selection, the "finest education" for the children is likely the last result we'll see.
Want to place odds on whether Kentucky pulls off getting these bills passed? And, if passed, want to double down on the teachers' unions' resistance? That said, good luck to Kentucky... I hope they pull it off.
(it's on the welcome signs as you enter the state)
IMHO, this is a good way of doing it. My wife's district is doing something similar in order to hire Speech Language Pathologists (another in demand education field). In order to do this it had to get approved by the union membership. A high majority of teachers supported this move.
Depending on how this is funded, it may backfire. If the state is paying the salary difference directly, that may work, but otherwise school districts will avoid hiring teachers who qualify for the extra pay to keep within budget. The system already makes it quite difficult for experienced teachers to get jobs; my wife was once told by a principal that he would love to hire her, but the superintendent said he would only approve up to three years of experience.
Even better, why dont we stop comparing our entire populations abilities to the abilities of only the best of other countries.
Heck even better, why dont we just accept the fact that a lot of people are just not cut out to being college grads and help them better themselves in a industrial field like other countries do.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry, or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?
Why can't it be both?
Teachers face the same hurdles that you may experience in the IT field. Most of us have been in the position where you ae looking to take on a job that you are more than qualified for. You get the "We think you are overqualified for this position", which translates to "You are bound to want too much money". The same applies to teachers.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry, or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?
I most certainly believe so. In the general workforce, this is generally the case. Those with degrees in English, who sit typing manuals all day generally don't get paid as well as engineers do. So, the schools would have to compete with the differing pay scales accordingly.
In general, I do believe teachers are vastly underpaid. However, a Math teacher should be paid more than an English teacher, unless of course, said English teacher happens to have published material, printed books et al.
How about basing teacher pay on performance?
I mean, having a degree certainly doesn't mean you can teach anything.
Now that I've done the heavy lifting someone reply with the performance metrics.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
We already spend a shit load of money on education and the results are poor at best. So what do we do? Spend more money of course! I think the US needs to look at other cultures to see how its done. We're obviously missing something and it definitely isn't money.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry, or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?
More competitive pay may attract science grads who could make more elsewhere, but I'd argue that it's worthwhile to avoid breeding discontent by giving all teachers that same raise. They certainly deserve it for all the extra hours a teacher puts in grading, preparing lessons, and other "homework." Counting all that, my teacher friends put in more hours in a nine-month school year than I do in a twelve-month sysadmin's year, but they make half the money. Besides, if extra money will improve the applicant pool for science teachers, won't it do the same for english or history teachers too?
I'd like to be a teacher. Some of the greatest influences on my life have been teachers. I like teaching kids science and computers, and I've got a talent for it.
But I'll never be a teacher under current systems.
I'm not patient with kids who don't get it and insist on me walking them through everything. None of my favorite teachers were either. I'm not respectful of authority either, unless it's earned that respect. None of my favorite teachers were either. And if parents insist that little Taylor or Brittany didn't earn the C they got on the test, I'll tell them where they can shove their complaints. And I'm not about to waste my time teaching kids for a test. Some of the best lessons in life can't be tested. I'd reward kids for creativity, an inquisitive nature, the questioning of current thinking, and for making me look dumb. All the kinds of things my favorite teachers rewarded me for.
I feel that, in this current climate, I wouldn't last a year as that kind of teacher. In fact, two of my favorite teachers got fired after I had them because of complaints and friction with the administration. And they were replaced with robots designed to make more robots. Indeed, most of the teachers I remember fondly only lasted as long as they did because they produced results despite friction with the administration and parents.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
There is too little in the way of accountability that the school administration can control. Heck, accountability is practically non-existent in schools beyond whatever accountability is necessary to support the educational beauracracy.
When you give school principals the authority to run their schools like they would a business, where the principals have total autonomy over staff hiring and classroom goals, you will see significant improvements across the board. Either the principal will get the right staff in place (big win) or the principal will be exposed as underqualified to lead and you replace them with someone more qualified (big win).
Tie this to a voucher system that allows parents to direct their education dollars wherever they deem is best for their child and the US will have a vastly superior education system in only a few years.
Pay is a serious issue with teaching (I won't even get started on the rest of the issues).
"Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry, or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?"
Science and Math are good starting points. But don't stop there!
The entire United States Educational System needs a complete overhaul.
Teachers should teach because they enjoy it. Being "attracted" into it isn't going to make them be good teachers. In fact, it may turn out like college where you get the really bright mathematicians and scientists teaching, but they can't relate worth a darn to the students.
Money is also a good start. Really talented people end up leaving the profession because they simply can't pay the bills. Making the pay more competitive will keep more of the good teachers. Fixing some of the other problems will also retain teachers, but getting the teachers in, paying them better and teaching (or allowing) them to be good teachers is what needs to happen, nation-wide, not just Kentucky or California.
The overhaul must start somewhere, and if they look at pay first, that's great. You can eventually weed out the poor teachers, keep the good teachers and our children will finally have an education they deserve!! (Without having to move overseas to truly educate them well.)
So, it's a start. But it can't stop there. Yes, there will be discontent among teachers but once the ball starts rolling and things improve for one and all, then everyone wins.
My thoughts as an ex-teacher,
Kris
Remember when Windows were washed, mice were trapped and UNIX guarded the harem?
This is not, of course, to say that the majority of teachers aren't apt. They probably are. But give them 16-18 students instead of 30-34 students in a room, and some results might show up. And I don't just mean test results. I mean having a far more intelligent, competitive, nicer-to-live-with country.
Most teachers would also find having substantially smaller classes a huge quality of life improvement, which will also lead to better teachers entering and staying in the field. Would this be expensive? Yes. Will it be an investment that will pay for itself in a stronger economy, less crime & prisons, --just counting the economics of it? I would not be surprised. If our lawmakers can find a trillion dollars for a questionably needed war, I think we can find a fraction of that for this.
Well I got more worked up there than I planned on.
We are in a similar situation across the pond in the UK. There is a great shortage of a physics and chemistry teachers and the government is providing payment incentives to encourage graduates to take on the role of teaching... And why not? There is a shortage of an important commodity, and the market is willing to pay more for it. Those teacher unions should shut their traps!
... that we need stronger math and science programs in schools. I'm sure English or history teachers will be bummed about not getting a bonus - but if they're the kind of people we want teaching our kids in the first place, they'll understand.
Would not this bias towards science and math create a society of technocrats ? after all science and math are not the only things children need to be useful Why is there a bias against teachers who teach social sciences or language skills they are as important to education as science and math teachers are ? Rather increase the complexity of the curriculum and do not address the lowest common denominator allow students who show an aptitude for a certain subject move on to more complex problems. Why do we hold these kids back because the dumbest guy in class cannot catch up
The US NEEDs more math and science teachers, especially good ones. The rest of the world exceeds in these fields more than our younger generation can. With politics messing things up in the science classroom about creationism over evolution, it is a huge step backward and will definitely damage our country's reputation for being the mecca of new technology research.
I do know of some math teachers who used to work for Lockheed Martin and they were really focused on making sure every teen in their classroom. The state I live in gives teachers tax breaks and other incentives in living here. Pretty much every state is doing what they can. Fact of the matter is, states cannot do much under the current system. It is a matter of what kind of public education system you want. Do you want a state controlled system or a federal government controlled system?
Previewing comments are for sissies!
There's a program in my home state of Delaware to provide full/near full scholarships to anyone who goes to college and becomes a teacher, provided they sign a contract saying they'll teach 5 (?) years in the state.
Why not do it for math/science? "No money for college? Just teach some kids for a few years after you're done and we'll foot the bill". Seems like a nice win/win situation.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
One of the problems this will encourage is that these days parents *expect* their kids to be in AP classes even if they're not qualified to be there. I recently judged a high school science fair, and it was pretty plain that most students didn't even do the minimum, a few just checked off the boxes, and very, very few really tried to do the work required for science.
The first thing that needs to happen is that AP classes need to not be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator because of political reasons, and everyone shouldn't get a pony- we have to get back to having kids *lose* if they don't make the cut.
http://www.pauldrobertson.com
Won't it create shortages in other states potentially? They have to be attracted from somewhere? If you waited for the teachers presently in the state to upgrade, it would probably take too long. Sounds to me like the recipe for cannibalization of the school system.
Honestly, you should see what it takes to become a teacher, it isn't much. Most of the people teaching math and science in schools today majored in "education" where they sit around imitating classroom environments. The teachers are college-level but learning math at the same level as they will teach their students. Often the teachers are just one lesson ahead of these kids up to the point where they've taught it so long they just have it memorized. Even then they are good at one subject but to call them competent in math or science might be a stretch. Then you have the fact that this is really the best you can attract because the pay is rather low. If you actually paid higher for somebody with a specific degree in these fields, or even better a graduate degree, then maybe you'd get higher quality education. You don't see people getting PhDs in Mathematics and teaching 2nd grade, they go off and teach graduate classes at universities. (Sure, some people do that but they have to really love teaching and that is rare). Add in the fact that so many kids are total shitheads who are allowed to run over their teachers and the teachers cannot discipline them (and the parents don't care either) and you haven't got much of an environment for excellence.
Why not go after mid-career professionals looking for a lifestyle change. It's taken me a couple years to get my work/life priorities straight, and now I'd totally take a pay cut for short days and summers off.
But in most places they still have the lifetime career progression model... And even if I wanted to start at the bottom with entry-level wages, I'd have to go back to school and get certified. Not going to happen, I'm afraid.
I think a lot of math and science people are not that well-suited (introverts, aspergers, etc..) for teaching to begin with, and a lot of these people have no desire to teach no matter what the pay is. The shortage may not just be about pay.
As far as I've been able to determine from friends and family in the teaching profession, the problem isn't so much compensation as it is walnut-brained administrators and parents.
If you make schools immune to civil lawsuits, put teachers ahead of parents and stop appointing the retarded friends and family of politicians as school administrators, you will have a functioning school system again. Parents that don't like that situation can take their kids to private school or home school them.
Stupid kids need to get left behind. Advanced kids need to get advanced placement. If you cater to the lowest common denominator, you get ignorant, bored, unchallenged kids that are disciplinary problems.
Is this really that hard to understand?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
(One stray thought let to another. =))
> he (she) need only get the necessary background to qualify to teach physics.
The requirements go down when there's a shortage, of course, so this isn't as hard as it sounds. Of course, to be honest, with the exception of a few particular courses--some AP stuff, advanced language stuff, and I suppose music--an intelligent person should be able to teach any high school course. (Based on the difficulty of high school courses at my school in the late 90s, and given at least a week or two of lead-time.) High school classes disseminate information at a rate which is much slower than the rate at which a reasonably intelligent person can learn.
That doesn't mean being a good teacher is easy--it isn't. It also isn't strongly encouraged or supported by the system, in most cases. One guy I met taught at a school where, one day, the students beat up a cop in front of the school. At the same school that fellow had had to physically pull a male student off the leg of a female teacher--a leg the student was humping. Someone else I know couldn't be reviewed for her teaching evaluation purposes the days the evaluator came because the students were too out-of-control--despite her best efforts, and this isn't someone who would be a bad teacher. Someone else I know had a team of students lie about being allowed out of class, and the parents came in furious about the idea of the students being written up for it... and the principal was upset, too, but didn't know how to properly interact with the (clueless) disciplinarian involved with the school. A student who was tutored by my sister for a while got a note on one of her essays saying her work was "Much mo better" from her teacher.
It's not a question of money. It's a question of worldview. What are our responsibilities in every day? How do we demand responsibility of ourselves and our teachers and our children in a way that teaches the children, but lets them explore?
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Will binding pay to the desireability of a course increase the politicization of being a teacher? Of course. But that's not what distresses me.
See, here's the real question -- why are math and science more desireable than history or literature? Seriously, wouldn't more-qualified history teachers been able to keep us from repeating the Spanish-American war that resulted in us occupying the Philippines? Or the 1980s that had the Neocons mucking about in the Middle East? Wouldn't a more concerned reading of 1984 in a literature class caused us to be more distressed by Our Friend George's "trust me" reassurances? How many billions of dollars would those lessons have been worth? How many lives of people aspiring to learn math and science might have been saved?
Don't be so quick to shower love and money on math and science -- they gave us The Bomb over 60 years ago and have yet to invent an irresponsibility inhibitor to go with it.
My wife teaches middle school science in Northern Kentucky. Just consider the following a general complaint. We're pretty disappointed with the district she works for, to the point of considering private school for our kids. A couple of reasons: The district is cutting out AP courses. Maybe it was to qualify for the cash to start a program. They are also cutting teacher positions (including science) because of a budget shortfall. Lastly, she may get shifted from science to special-ed. Why? Because she has two masters degrees and is certified in Science, Language Arts, and Special-Ed. So even though she loves teaching science, has students that write poems about what a great teacher she is, she may not get to decide what subject she teaches. If there's a shortage of teachers in any subject, it's special ed.
Oh, and she probably won't get the bonus.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It's really simple, if you want more of something you've got a shortage of, try paying more for it.
In this case there is a shortage of qualified math and science teachers.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Without the bomb there is no way the cold war would not have turned very hot. WWII was plenty destructive.
The simple fact is there is a shortage of qualified math and science teachers, not so for history.
Also in the full light of Machiavellian hindsight, we did damn well in the Spanish-American war.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have to make this short and brief...
I am a middle school science teacher and I have to say that I am very disappointed with the quality of science education and science teachers in general. Most science teachers I know are not science oriented people or come from non-science backgrounds and it really bothers me. I honestly believe that if you are going to teach science you should be passionate about what you teach, you should know the subject, even eat and breathe it. It disappoints me when teachers do not have a passion for their subject. In addition to teaching, I run an after school robotics program, a rocketry club, and a strategy board game club. I don't expect every teacher to stay after school but it looks bad when the official work day is 8-4 and you get to work at 8:00am and you are running kids over getting out of the building at 4:00pm.
In addition, a large percentage of teachers LIKE the fact that every single teacher (or close to it) that has been working the same number of years earns the same amount of money. It really pains me sometimes but I didn't do this for the money but it still bothers me to know that the people who barely scrape by in the classroom and run kids down in the parking lot trying to get to their car at 4:00 make the same salary as me.
...expecting the vacuum that is the teachers unions, to implode into much noise, rumbling and muttering in...3...2...1...
(They certainly won't stay silent about this)
And part of the problem are teacher's unions. Most force a system were all new teachers are paid the same, with the same tenure requirements and the same raise/bonus requirements. There is little if no incentive to become a teacher of "hard" subjects like math and science when you can get the same salary and job security in one of the "soft" subjects like social science, art, music or gym. This is why most schools have a glut of "soft" subject teachers and why there are so many bad math and science teachers.
What happens is the shortage of math and science teachers forces the school to make a "soft" subject teacher teach those subjects. They end up doing a terrible job because they aren't trained in it, don't have an excitement about the subject and generally feel that they will only being doing the job temporarily. This maybe the case but only because they are sacked (not likely given our tenure system) or quit when they reach a certain level of dissatisfaction. Otherwise a school is stuck with a crappy math or science teacher until they retire.
If the research was done I bet a good causal relationship of bad math and science teachers and lower student interest/performance in those subjects could be made. Getting rid of the ridiculous parts of the union system and creating a Milwaukee, WI style school choice program will go a long way to better teachers, better schools and students that will be able to compete globally again.
And yes, Coach James and Mrs Johnson the social studies teacher would probably complain about how much the math and science teachers get paid.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Teachers perform one of the most important functions in our society. They spend more time and often have greater influence with our children than parents. Since achieving intellectual adolescence, I have never completely understood why they are not more respected and better paid.
Perhaps the entire premise is incorrect. Could it be true that "teachers are underpaid" is a fable to begin with?
w -with-Jay-P-Greene-About-Teacher-Salaries/Page1.ht ml ) with Jay P. Greene who co-authored a report called "How much are teachers paid"( http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm )
Here is question one from an interview ( http://www.ednews.org/articles/7535/1/An-Intervie
1. You have recently released a report about teacher salaries. What was your MAIN finding?
There are two main findings. The first simply repeats a finding from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) - that public school teachers on average made $34.06 per hour in 2005. This is 36% more than the average non-sales white collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker, which are the categories in which teachers are placed by the BLS.
The second finding is that there does not appear to be a relationship between higher relative pay for teachers and higher student achievement.That is, areas with higher public teacher pay relative to white collar and professional workers do graduate a higher percentage of their students.This suggests that simply raising teacher pay across the board is not a promising strategy for raising student achievement.It doesn't mean that we shouldn't want to raise teacher pay for some other reason or that we couldn't use additional pay in more clever ways that actually would be more likely to contribute to student achievement.
My girlfriend is 23 and graduated with a BS in astronomy last year. Shes now the only science teacher at a small private middle/grade school in CA. She doesn't have a teaching credential (not mandatory for private schools) and thus gets paid less than a starting teacher at public school, something like 24K.
:D), there is something wrong in the role we think the school system plays.
There is just too much accountablity and effort on the teachers part and not enough on the parents. A kids performance is almost always a reflection of how involved the parents are with their education. Plain and simple. There is nothing wrong with the American school system (except teacher pay
Oh no, more effort on our part?!?! does not compute, abort, abort, initaite no child left behind act, hold teachers MORE accountable, yayyy now it looks like were making progres!!!!!!!!!!
She is applying to graduate schools next year.
what you pay for. Well unless the unions get in the act then you get over paid shit. OOPS did I say that out load?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I agree that the system should look at a teachers contributions, not just in education but to the world. However, I disagree that you can equalize a math teacher and an English teacher.
Levels of education. Yes. That should be looked at.
Experience OTHER than teaching. Definitely. That should be looked at.
Actual teaching skills and relating and speaking to the students is a definite must.
But an author may not know grammar. (There are a lot of successful books where grammar isn't always correct.)
A math teacher must be able to teach to different levels of kids. (All in the same classroom unfortunately).
Bits and pieces won't make a whole. We were required to have a "well-rounded" education in Secondary school and college, our teachers should also be well-rounded.
But I agree on the overall plan. Pay scales should reflect how well the teacher "fits" as a teacher.
Thanks for listening,
Kris
Remember when Windows were washed, mice were trapped and UNIX guarded the harem?
The proposed system doesn't sound like a meritocracy at all. It proposes to pay people by *what they are*, not by *how well/poorly they perform*, the latter being a meritocracy in my books.
This sort of simple formula (where a certain degree or discipline is more heavily weighted in pay band determination) doesn't work. Most arms-length public institutions in Canada use a market differential component in a more complex formula that includes education (disciplines sometimes weighted differently), experience, preparation time, class size, and possibly a performance measure, etc.
The market differential allows the institution to recognise the difficulty in attracting certain disciplines in a particular market, without a long-term bias. Note that it was hard to get CS-trained folks during the dot.com boom - now, not so hard. The associated market differential should be down for CS folks (sorry, dudes).
At any rate, instead of being anxious to get some anti-union vitriol out there, why not think about what a word like 'meritocracy' means first?
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
We already spend a shit load of money on education
_ percap-expenditures-dollar-figure-per-capita
Oh really? #39 on % of GDP spent on education. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_exp_dol_fig
We're obviously missing something and it definitely isn't money.
What most people (four "insightful" moderators) that follow this easy path to self righteous indignation about the poor state of educational affairs utterly fail to realize that, among other things, a super-educated population does not magically make a thriving utopia.
Spending less on education does not lead to certain nation-state collapse just as making education your number one spending priority does not ensure above-average GDP growth. Spend less? Spend more! It doesn't seem to help either way.
The "something missing" you allude to most likely has little to do with education because we, the voters who fund public education, are okay with the systems we have. We have been for decades.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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News flash! I can't afford to live in California anymore because of oppressive taxation and high housing costs. I can't afford to be a teacher because they make less the garbage men in that state. Our household income is "upper middle class" and there's no way we could afford the modest house I grew up in in California. Last I checked it was almost $700,000. Same house is only $450,000 in Scottsdale, Arizona where we live now.
So I ask this: Why would I want to live in California let alone teach? If I wanted to be chronically poor and practically homeless, I guess it would be okay.
The problem is *not* tough to understand!
Fresh horses and more whiskey for my men.
The majority of teachers are perfectly well qualified to to teach internationally competitive math and science programs, the problem is that they are too busy dealing with behavior disorders and literally changing diapers.
Teachers need to be re-empowered. Special needs students should get the special attention they need, and gifted students should not be held back by them. While the socialisation of special needs students is a noble goal, the cost is just too high.
Corporal punishment should also be allowed again. Used judiciously, it is very beneficial to the educational environment.
Students are taught by their parents and society in general to not respect their teachers. Teachers are powerless and without respect. No amount of pay will fix that. This is a social issue, not an economic one. (though here are economic factors) In my day we respected our teachers (though we didn't necessarily like them all) and that was not very long ago. Public school teachers need to be re-empowered by the legislators and parents that have stripped them of their power, respect and ability to teach.
Parents need to realise that not every child is a genius. Streaming is good for the quality of education, mainstreaming is extremely detrimental to it.
It really is very simple.
There are definitely two types of teacher in the Scientific fields.
There are certainly plenty of "those who can't", but there are a small subset who believe in the importance of what they are doing to forgo industry and take the lower pay. I was lucky enough to have a few of them in my high school and it probably encouraged me to head into the field i'm in now. One of our math teachers taught us advanced courses that covered things like Number Theory and Abtract Math; he had us demonstrate how to implement and break RSA encryption and why it could be done in a reasonable time. Our two man chemistry department was entirely staffed with Ph. D's, my favorite Physics teacher could at least explain the basics of quantum theory.
I'm not convinced that salary is everything. It'll certainly solve the "we need more science teachers" problem, but it'll probably entice people who were otherwise going to become teachers to specialize in a different field. You'd have to increase teacher's pay 3-fold before i'd be likely to consider it, and while a 25% bump is significant, it won't lure the great people from industry or "real" academia.
It's been painfully obvious to me, an engineer who's wife is an elementary ed gifted and talented teacher, that school systems as a whole simply do not pay enough to attract qualified staff.
My wife got a pay raise for getting her master's degree, but the raise was so minor it will take her 9 years to pay off her 18 months of education, not to mention her student loans for college in the first place.
Most schools in South Carolina are paying starting teachers at or below $25,000. I made more bartending part time in college!
To have a level of special education to do her job, the patience to deal with other peoples children, patience to deal with a failing political system, and the willingness to work 11 hour days five days a week deserves more. Sure she gets her summer off, right? Yea, a whole 9 weeks of which she spends most of taking extra classes, preparing new lesson plans, and attending required teacher meetings. The students get 11-12 weeks off, but not staff. She could teach summer school for more money, but then she wouldn't get any time off.
Our school district is so short on staff that they have 24-26 kids per class even though district policy states it should be 18 max for 4th grade rooms.
4 years in school for a technical profession, and you're being told up front there's no real room for promotion (only 1 in 100 can be principal, and that's a different major anyway), the salaries are fixed, it's a pain in the ass job with little thanks (and occasional legal threats the district won't back you up on). No wonder no one wants to teach.
Also, since staffing is hard to come by, any slacker with a degree is practically guaranteed a job, and has nearly perfect job security. Short of molesting a child and there actually being proof of it, it's almost impossible to fire a teacher. This means half the staff could really give a shit. This makes my wife a department head (which by the way does NOT come with a pay raise) because no one else wants to be.
Oh, and did I mention, as school scores decline, they can cut teacher pay. Exactly how am I supposed to react to a pay cut when it only happened because we had crap teachers in the building who can't be fired, because there are no replacements, because the pay scale sucks.
I can get a job painting cutting grass for the state freeway system for more money, better benefits, and I wouldn't even have to go to college.
Time to rethink the school system. Pay teachers more now, or pay for it later....
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
... breed discontent among teachers.
It will blow up into a big ol' envy-fest
The teachers' unions will make sure of that.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Did anyone else read "PRAYING for better math and science teachers"? ;)
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
That Kentucky (or any state in the U.S.) applies the same logic to education is no surprise, but why do Slashdotters acquiesce to determining teachers' salary by central planning and government mandate? The free market should determine teachers' salaries. The prerequisite, of course, would be to eliminate government-run schools and let private schools compete for tuition money from parents.
Yes, I am one of the tens of thousands of signatories to the Proclamation for the Separation of School and State
The core curriculum should get paid more. Stop treating politically correct, touchy-feely crap on par with Math, Science, and Language skills. I'm much rather my kids learn the skills needed to earn a living than learn that Timmy gets his feelings hurt and Sally doesn't feel pretty.
I work for public education, and get to visit many a classroom and the thought of putting my kid in a public school scares the crap out of me so much, that my kids don't go to public school, they attend a homestudy charter school. Both will graduate High School with upto two years of college credits, something not even offered in public schools.
.....
I've seen good and bad teachers in the schools I work in, and quite frankly, there aren't enough good teachers. Period. Like the teacher who was teaching life lessons from the master "Rikki Lake" (No kidding). Or the Social Science Teacher teaching made up crap and opinions as "fact". Or the Math teacher who didn't know the formula for the area of a circle (No kidding), Or the teacher that has four computers on his desk and that is all he does all day, instead of teaching the special education kids in his charge, or
It is pretty scary stuff, if you ask me. The scariest part is that NONE of the teachers I mentioned could be fired, because the Union says so. It is clear that the Union doesn't really care about their profession, or it would be EMBARRASSED of many of its members.
I feel really sorry about those teachers that are actually good. However, they cannot overcome the crap coming from the worst of them. Sad, but true.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is the line of logic. How true is it?
I attended a public elementary school in Africa. The teachers got paid crap, but it was based on the old British system.
It provided an excellent basis for mathematics and science to the point that when I moved to Canada, I didn't have to learn anything new in these subjects for several years.
Maybe learning has very little to do with the teacher.
Maybe learning has more to do with the curriculum.
Maybe learning has more to do with caring about your education.
Maybe learning has more to do with classroom obedience (at least in the early years).
Maybe learning has more to do with your home environment.
I've commented on this before. For math and science in elementary/highschool, you don't need an expert in the field to teach it. You're not designing or creating anything new. Sure, all kids are unique, but as a class, they're the same year after year. You just need someone to present the material that the class should learn.
Spend the money on social programs and teaching assistants.
It breeds discontent with us trashmen that them doctors get more pay. Was up with that?
My mother is a teacher, a lot of my friends are teachers, and I worked IT at a high school. I've never seen another profession that whines and complains as much as teachers. It's engrained in their culture. It's how they socialize. They will complain about anything and everything.
Let me be the first to point out the obvious..
"or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?"
It doesn't matter if you're teaching, slinging garbage, or building rockets, there is always going to be discontent between those that get paid X amount and those that get paid Y amount. There is no way around it. Joe, the burger-flipper, is going to harbor some discontent for his neighbor, Bob, the pediatrician. You can't get rid of that discontent. Bob makes more money most likely because he's smarter and worked harder in his field. If you're 'discontent' that you're not making as much because you're not as intelligent, there isn't much you can do besides study more or kick your parents' asses. This is going to sound arrogant, but people are always going to harbor some discontent for those that are smarter and make more money. Unfortunately, I am smarter than the average person. I make more money the average person with my skills and experience. There is going to be discontent. Unless you can find a way to pay CEOs the same amount as gas station clerks, there will always be discontent.
There. I've just used the word 'discontent' eight times in one post. Make that nine.
While you're over there sitting on your ass, put some flowers on Algernon's grave for me.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
California is a prime example. As the dollar investment goes up over time, student performance has declined in the state.
I would love to teach. There are at least three problems with it, however.
1. The pay. I made more money starting out with a B.S. than my mother makes after 10+ years teaching with a Master's degree. Anyone halfway competent can make more money than a teacher.
2. The students are awful. Except for the advanced math & science courses, 90% of your students don't care about the material, and 95% would rather be elsewhere than in your class. And all the good courses are being taught by the teachers who have been there for 10+ years- starting out as a teacher you'll be stuck teaching the classes that no one else wants to take, such as remedial addition.
3. The bureaucracy is ridiculous. You have minimal control over your own curriculum, you aren't allowed to discipline children, you have no real authority or respect.
Fix any one of those and I would consider it. Fix two and I would be willing to be a teacher. Fix them all and many people would be willing to be one.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Teachers teach for free. Only certified educators need high paying jobs. The American education system is a social experiment which has capitalized by dumbing us down. They want us to think that Only certified experts can cause learning. The mind control machine should be destroyed and our dollars returned. "Public" schools are not in the least public. Plato said, "the most fundamental political question is, who gets to school the children?" Fuck the public education system, return to us the choice our powerful, influential country had before the civil war. Fucking idiots, gah.
you want good science education? it's not going to agree with your religious superstitions.
you want good math education? you'd better be prepared to have children that come home in tears because they can't understand something the teacher talked about in school.
I've sometimes considered teaching, but after seeing what a relative went through when earning her teaching certificate, there's no way in hell I'd do it under the current system.
At least in her classes, the students were apathetic and disrespectful. In her assessment, basically zero learning occurred.
Contrast that to what I get when I teach my kids at home. We snuggle up and read a homeschooling book about astronomy, and they actually learn. We pop in a "Magic Schoolbus" DVD rental, and even I learn stuff about human physiology, etc. My 6 year old knows multiplication table up through 7's, and reads at a 3rd-grade level.
Seeing the heartbreaking gap between what most kids can learn, and what most kids do learn in public school, keeps me from ever wanting to perpetuate that environment. I'm considering working with small groups of kids and possibly even doing some math teaching to home-schooled kids. But public schools - no way. It's mostly a waste.
I'm a teacher. I work with err... uh teachers. The biggest problem I have with the concept of differential pay is that Great Education != Great Teachers. There I said it. It's true. Frankly I've had PhD professors that couldn't explain ice to an Eskimo, and I've read some posts even on /. that were so well articulated I grasped even the most foreign concepts.
You must be good at what you teach but you must absolutely be excellent at teaching if you are going to make any impact. Differential pay is okay as long as it's based on success in the field of teaching and not based on the number of quadratic equations you can do in fifteen seconds. All teachers are theoretically bi-vocational in that they must be proficient in two fields. The sad thing is, most of them really do suck at teaching but they are really good at understanding calculus.
load "$",8,1
In the 1997-98 school year, Washington DC spent $7,138 per pupil in primary and secondary school. This was, of course, 10 years ago--estimates these days go from $9,500 to $13,000 per student, depending on where you look. This is not only sufficient for a quite decent private education, but even (in some places) a quite decent private college education. And yet this is still primary/secondary school we're talking about.
Regardless of where our education expenditures rank against other categories in the GDP, this could still be considered excessive spending, even if the results were acceptable (which, arguably, they aren't). It would be difficult to argue that increased spending would improve the results. If the increase continues, it would simply be cheaper to send all schoolkids--at least, the ones in DC--to one of the cheaper Ivy Leagues to learn their letters and numbers.
What would be nice is if you could convince industry to 'give up' an employee for a few hours a week. Even if they only taught one class per semester it would allow for students interested in the math and science fields to have an AP class from someone who is a professional in that field. They wouldn't be a full-time teacher so the school wouldn't have to worry about discontent among the teachers and the school wouldn't have to pay out that much extra per year. I know that if I had the option to work in the industrial setting and teach a class on the side I would love it.
Here is an rough idea. Calculate the average pay someone gets for a particular degree gets for particular degree:
$x BS in math/science
$X MS in math/science
$y BA english
$Y MS in english
$z BS in liberal arts...etc.
Based on the idea that the last person you want teaching a particular subject is the least qualified in the particular field, scale the teachers pay
by some constant factor r. So teachers in the above fields will make
$r*x BS in math/science
$r*X MS in math/science
$r*y BA english
$r*Y MS in english
$r*z BS in liberal arts...etc.
Of course this will be hard to explain to the ys and zs but that is only because the r factor for the math and science teachers they had in elementary school education was so low.
That link goes to military expenditures. I think you meant this link.
While it is true that the US ties for 37th, note that it is being beaten badly by most metrics by countries that spend a lot less in education (both in absolute and %GDP values).
Just because we don't spend more than anyone else, does not mean that we spend too much for how little we get.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
H1B for teachers anyone? That'll show the unions.
That's great, but it's hard for a teacher to close the annual income gap by working the summer. It is what it is. You get more per hour but less overall. I've been wanting to look closer at exactly what the tradeoff is. I loved working as a math tutor in my uni days.
I'm a teacher, and I love money, but here's the problem:
No one gets into this for the money, and no one stays for the money -- not math teachers, anyway. I did something before this that paid twice as much, as many of us do, but then I got bored and decided to try this.
So the issue is, if people aren't in teaching for the money, why do we suspect that we'll be able to attract more people to teaching with more money?
Now, there's the reasonable argument that there's some segment of the population that would like to teach, but can't because the pay is so low, but there's two things wrong with this argument:
1. teachers are never going to make as much as, say, modelers or programmers, and
2. i have some reason to believe that the sort of people who are just waiting for teaching kids to be really, really profitable might not be the crowd that we want to attract, anyway.
People get into teaching because they like teaching. People leave teaching because it's annoying a lot of the time. Here's how you attract people, in my personal fake expert opinion:
1. make it interesting. don't assign people to courses just because they're what's open, and don't make them wait for someone to die to get to try teaching calculus.
2. give them support, and help them develop. put time into schedules for conferences and bring in real lecturers, provide journals and during the day time to discuss, and fund coursework into anything.
3. throw out the textbooks. they're all shit (with the exception of harold jacobs).
4. demand real expertise and professionalism. make math teacher a job that it's hard to get. if i quit tomorrow, i could work anywhere in Maine by next week. this isn't good, rather it tells me that i don't need to be very good -- and if that's true, how good am i, really?
It's a great job, and you can't fix the shortage with money because things are so bad in terms of available teachers that you're just going to drag the good ones to rich districts and force poor schools to take whoever's left -- and you would be pretty surprised if i were to tell you exactly how bad things are in terms of expertise. The right answer is to make it a job that is attractive in all its aspects, and one that's admirable and challenging. That's all we geeks want, anyway, isn't it? A challenge, and some acknowledgement that we've got giant freaking brains?
god is just pretend.
It will blow up into a big ol' envy-fest
The teachers' unions will make sure of that.
Hits the nail on the head!
My mother was a teacher, so I knew all the teachers in town. She spent plenty of extra time on lesson plans, etc. and I don't remember her getting home before around 5PM on any given day.
As for the "time off" during the summer, usually they need to attend classes and such. There are also plenty of meetings and such. And I know she did lots of lesson plans and things like preparing materials for class. Heck, even I ended up being a part of it. Usually, I'd have to do things like look on all the local milkweed so as to find some Monarch caterpillars so that they could be raised during the first few weeks of class and allow the kids to see an example of complete metamorphosis. I also prepared a bunch of insect collections, among other things (hey, I wanted to be an entomologist when I grew up... at least until I found out that the only demand for them was in killing roaches).
Anyhow, they're not making large amounts of money here. I don't know that they're underpaid, but they're certainly not cashing in by any standard, especially when you consider that all the teachers I knew did it because they loved the kids and would spend their own money on class materials all the time because they had no budget. But that's why our town had one of the best school districts around--because there were mostly nice people who cared (yeah, there was one or two teachers I really couldn't stand, but even they weren't that bad, looking back).
Somehow, I'm reminded of when the kids on the Simpsons calculate that Skinner has been making $25,000 per year and that he's 40 years old, so they conclude that he must be a millionaire.
Skinner: "I wasn't a principal when I was one!"
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach gym.
Denver Public Schools has had a similar system instituted for 3 years now (the first one in the country). It rewards teachers with higher pay not only for certifications and degrees but also for the performance of their students...to the tune of $25 million a year.
I think the jury is still out on the effectiveness of this; but it does highlight that although the story about the bills for consideration is interesting, the ball has been rolling for quite some time now.
An arts degree does not set you up for any useful function beyond teaching. They can pay art teachers squat and the only competition comes from McDonalds burger-flipping jobs.
A degreed scientist/math person has far better prospects and the schools will have to compete to attract them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How about making sure kids who "graduate" from school can construct and semi-coherent complete English sentence? Effective communication can further facilitate the learning of many more subjects and topics.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
> Pay should be based on qualifications and performance, not experience.
One might think that being experienced is a form of qualification, no?
Here's why:
1) Teaching is not a big money profession. Never was, probably never will be. If somebody wants big money, do something else. Teaching should almost be a calling. Why do people go into teaching, then bitch about their wages? What did they expect?
2) This article stinks of a teacher's union lobbying for more money. Teachers always argue that more money for teachers, and smaller class size, will mean better education. This arguement has more holes than swiss cheese. When the USA had the best education in the world, teachers were paid even less. The best schools are in Korea, where class size is much larger.
3) Although teaching is not a big money profession there are substantial perks. Teaching is an extremely secure job, with tons of time off. And the pay is not that bad.
From the Wall Street Journal (Friday, February 2, 2007), teachers actually make on average $34.06 an hour. That's a bit more than I make as a Software Engineer in the private sector. The whole reason teacher's salaries look low is that no one counts the massive amounts of time off teachers get (or all the civil servant benefits) that private sector workers can only dream about. The full article is available here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.ht ml?id=110009612
Here's how I think education will work 10 years from now:
This would required significant investment in software, but that investment could be shared nationwide. Physical infrastructure investments could be reduced. Teachers could be paid much more and elevated to a professional level (it takes special skills to manage so many kids and that investment in training should be rewarded).
I don't know, but if there really is a lack of a certain sort of teachers, your 'substantial perks' does not really seem to be so compelling. And if you like it or not, but the usual way to get people to do what you want it to pay them.
Tests are a good way to measure how well the child has actually learned the material at hand.
You tend to forget that much of little Johnny's Straight-A homework is actually done not by
little Johnny, but by little Johnny's parents. When little Johnny makes Straight-A grades on
his homework, but miserably fails the test covering the same material, do we simply blame it
on little Johnny's inability to take tests ? ( the usual excuse ) Or is it simply a reflection
of over-ambitious parents trying to ' help ' their kiddo through school. . . . . or maybe just
a slight ' push ' from a certain ( football / basketball / insert your sport here ) coach to
make sure his star player doesn't fail so he can continue to play ball ?
Granted, the TAKS and their ilk are somewhat of a bad idea since we now ' teach ' the test
instead of teaching the material. I know teachers who absolutely refuse to consider teaching
any grades that are TAKS tested. Way too much red-tape to try and deal with.
Teacher salaries really aren't all that far off the mark. No they're not going to become
millionaires, but it's a decent salary. If you break down how many days they work per year
vs their pay you'll see it a bit clearer. Try it with your salary. Convert it to an hourly
pay scale then do the math on ~180 working days a year. All the teachers I know ( given a
choice ) would prefer to keep their number of days worked right where it is vs working more
days for a larger salary. . . .
Now, the issue at hand is should we pay certain fields more / less money than the others ?
Personally, I don't think it will help in the long run. All this will do ( especially in
a money driven society like the good ol U.S. of A ) is shift folks into field X or Y for a
certain amount of time. You will then have a shortage of teachers who want to teach fields
that do not currently enjoy the salary bonus. So reward Science and Math today, deal with
English / History / Art / Economics shortages tomorrow. Wash / rinse / repeat every few
years as the shortages work their way through the various subjects.
Are teacher overpaid or underpaid, or have we gotten it just right? Easy enough!
Just look at the supply of teachers - are there enough qualified applicants for an open position at the salary you are offering? If I were an administrator, I would want at least twenty serious applications for a position, of which I could interview five or six and then pick the one who fit best. Are schools getting this many serious applicants?
In most cases, yes. In some cases, they are getting far more applicants than is necessary, indicating that the salary offered is too high. A suburban school posting a job for an elementary position in any decent district will be flooded with applications, normally hundreds and sometimes exceeding a thousand. On the other hand, there are not enough qualified math, science, and special education teachers, as well as teachers willing to teach in troubled rural or urban schools. It is clear from this that any employer besides a public school would cut the pay of elementary teachers and boost the pay of math teachers until qualified people for both positions could be found.
The reason I am not a secondary science teacher today is the poor pay. I make twice as much working as a researcher at a major corporation, and have a job that shuts off at 5pm each day without all the headaches. On the other hand, few elementary or English teachers could make double their teachers' pay. Indeed, few of them could even match it in the private sector.
Colleges and universities do not pay all professors the same. They know how to do it, and prove it can be done. Public schools need to move beyond the silly "all teachers are equal" mindset they have been stuck in for decades. It is killing education.
Kentucky is considering two bills that would give explicit financial incentives to math and science students and teachers. The first bill would provide cash incentives to schools to run AP math and science classes, and cash scholarships to students who did well on AP math and science exams.
Cash to amateurs?
Tsk, tsk, tsk - the NCAA ain't gonna like this.
I used to be very gung-ho about holding teachers accountable for the performance of their students.
Until I talked with a teacher.
Then I came to realize this simple truth: Kids need to be motivated in order to learn. If they are not motivated to learn, it does not matter how good the teacher is, the child will not learn. You could cross Albert Einstein with Mother Theresa and it would not matter - the child will not learn.
And while teachers can be a source of motivation for students, for most children the NUMBER ONE source of motivation comes from their PARENTS. And if the parents do not motivate the child to learn, the teacher is all but helpless. The threat of lawsuits has effectively neutered the teacher, and there is very little they can do TO a child to motivate them. Daddy can whoop your ass, but Mr. Teacher can't do a thing.
And the problem is most parents "send" their kids to school "to be taught". They do not want to be involved in the processes - they just want to send their child off to be educated. Unfortunately unless they get involved and motivate their child to DO THE WORK, most of them, except the rare few who are self-motivated, won't do the work. You can't blame the teacher for this.
So it is not as simple as saying, "Hold the teacher accountable for student performance", because the teacher cannot force the student to put forth the effort to learn.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
...through life, son! Unfortunately, a large portion of my fellow citizens are doing their best to pack on the fat, reduce the quality of education, and push their religion into government.
*shrug*
They can always join the military! With Lil'Bush making noise about Iran, we'll have a deep need for people to die in the desert for Haliburton and Exxon!
(only partially serious)
Blar.
- Industry. Lots of money, but that isn't everything. In my field, just having a B.S. really limits ones upward mobility.
- Getting the PhD. This leaves me free to go back to option 1 later, but with even bigger money and all the room to grow I could want. Plus, they pay you to be a TA in grad school. For chemists, grad school pays a living wage.
- Teach. This would mean making the world a better place. Hooray! But it would also mean things like making nearly the same amount of money that I now make in grad school. That is pathetic. Add to that little chance for significant improvement in wages or conditions. Ridiculous bureaucracy to insure that no child is ever left behind. All sorts of certification to deal with. Filthy children and no room for discipline.
So I am in grad school now. And, honestly, who would ever choose to go with option 3? This is why I think most talented chemists will rarely choose to go teach (I admit I know nothing about math or physics people)....and force all public schools to teach it. Without a curriculum designed by people who understand psychology of learning, can analyze experience of other countries, have resources to keep that research running for years, and can mandate the use of textbooks based on their recommendations (surprisingly, everyone but US seems to have that) curriculum will be up to a bunch of stupid rednecks in school boards and huge number of overworked teachers.
"State rights" are for things like slavery, gay marriage bans, and who-gets-earlier-primary drama, you morans.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
A lot of people are saying that higher pay is a way to attract better teachers... but someone also pointed out that pay is a way to keep teachers in the profession who would leave it otherwise. And what professions are teachers leaving for? I think people with degrees/experience in math/science probably search out jobs in IT, making innovations in CS and materials, or building critical infrastructure, or researching and developing new drugs, or, I don't know, launching satellites. Note that this is opposed to history teachers (or whatever), in which teaching is definitely a much more obvious option.
Personally I'd rather have these potential math/science teachers in a lab finding the cure for cancer instead of teaching 4th graders the area of a circle (as another poster pointed out). If this is heresy ("think of the children!") I can't help it. I think better math and science education would be better served by investing in training for the teachers, getting rid of unnecessary qualifications like a BS in mathematics for a 4th grade math teacher, and better motivations for the students themselves.
I misread the headline as "Praying for Better Math and Science Teachers," which sadly seemed like it could be an actual headline.
I can see it now: "Education Officials Tell Parents: Pray, and God Will Deliver Math and Science Teachers to Our District!" Thankfully things haven't become that bad yet. Or at least, it's not being reported on just yet.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've veered OT but I'm going to post anyway.
It's just very expensive to accommodate every student from every culture speaking different languages and having different needs.
But really in the end it's all about the money and frankly it's a lot more money than the taxpayers are willing to pay.
California funnels an enormous amount of state tax dollars into the education system and our schools are generally terrible in the poor urban areas. This is primarily because the parent body simply doesn't care about education or isn't in a position to care. By "care" I mean donate extra money to the school functions to keep it running, and actually show up to school sponsored events and volunteer their time.
You get none of that in the inner city for one reason or another.
My wife worked at an inner-city school for 2 years. The funding was there from the district and state. There were books in the classrooms and the facility had all of the basics. Unfortunately the parents never showed up for conferences either because they didn't care or they were working 16 hours a day at 3 part-time jobs. There were constant disciplinary issues with the students because the parents didn't parent. A large portion of the student body couldn't read or speak english. The school was constantly robbed and vandalized by the locals. Forget trying to get a bake sale together to raise extra money for special programs, nobody would bother showing up.
Contrast this with her current school. Less money coming in from the state because it's a charter. The school has it's own independent circ. Despite this the place is teeming with cash. The parent body is ridiculously wealthy. All the students are already groomed to learn. Need more cash to improve the learning center? Have a fund raiser like a bake-sale or an auction and watch the cash roll in. Students need special attention? Have a conference with both parents who will always show up on time and discipline their child if needed. Want to improve the play yard? Lobby local businesses to give donations (Home Depot built an entire play area on the grounds).
Is it any wonder why there is an education disparity in this country? Public funding is both being mismanaged and then only accounting for 50% of the actual cost to run a school. My wife's school is dead in the water without a wealthy parent-body giving donations. It is no wonder why the schools who have poor students don't succeed.
It's important to realize that this is a case of low supply/high demand and not a measure of worth. For example, my wife is an elementary school teacher, and I consider her job more worthy than my own. However, I make well over twice her salary. The district is in the unpleasant position of having to offer higher pay to less experienced teachers because they possess a particular skillset that is in greater demand.
In that regard, I wish the district the best of luck in their endeavor, because it will meet substantial resistance:
The educational system, for the most part, is responding to this crisis as would any gargantuan corporation: wait for the flood of baby-boom retirees to leave the rolls, then hire two graduates for every retiree. It doesn't matter that half of the newbies will quit within 3 years -- they'll just hire more. There's also a steady stream of wash-ups, burnouts, soon-to-be-moms, and anyone else who can find the spare change to buy enough credit hours to get temporary accreditation. Once you're in, you've got a few years to complete a masters program in night school, (somewhat) publicly funded, of course.
Like that gargantuan corporation (I've worked at a few), some of the newbies will be enthusiastic and talented, and some will suck. Some will discover a lifelong passion for their work; still others will burn out. Some will brownout and become dead weight. It's not a cube farm, but there are plenty of corporate parallels.
You know there's dead weight in every sector, anyway. It's uncomfortable to think that your kids will be taught by some retired-in-place flake, but RIPs are involved in designing your cars, building your roads, keeping your tap water potable, running your government, etc. You have to take it upon yourself as a parent to make sure your child isn't lost to the dead weight. Then again, some of those RIPs are parents, too. Some kids are just screwed.
In the interest of disclosure: my parents were both teachers, as is my wife. I have heard the rumblings of educational bowels my entire life. There are a ton of gifted, wonderful teachers out there. I studied under several, and I'm incredibly thankful for their gifts. There's also a ton of BS (e.g. NCLB) that drives wonderful teachers away or beats them into submission.
Not all barriers to entry are intrinsically bad -- do you want a neurosurgeon who hasn't gone to med school operating on your head? -- and the net result of your proposal might be that truly awful or unqualified teachers enter the classroom. The difficulty of firing teachers and the uniform pay scale in most districts makes this even more likely. Certificates are designed to ensure a minimum level of competence, and if you aren't impressed with the level of competence of teachers at the moment, imagine how you'd like it if even that relatively small barrier were removed.
..has got to be one of the best I've seen on /. in a long time.
Mad props for combining a classic movie line with concise tirade on the Right Wing nutjobs!
My sides hurt. I need to go stop laughing now;)
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Do we really want to encourage people who are dumb enough
to go into teaching for the money?
The U.S. educational system is currently a monopoly, so while your suggestion of allowing meritocracy is a good one, it cannot work because the current group in charge will be deciding what merit is for everyone.
Vouchers would help to break up the monopoly, but elites repeatedly refuse, because if parents had a choice they might choose what's best for their children.
Parents believe education is about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Elites believe education is about indoctrinating the next generation with their politically correct religions that will shape the future world in their image.
60 years ago, before most of you were an itch in Daddy's pants, there were schools. How did they get there? Was it magic? No, schools have existed off the tax rolls since before Rome.
At these schools parents paid teachers directly. And because of that direct payment, when their children goofed off, the parents beat the living hell out of them. Because they were losing money- directly. These were our great grandparents and perhaps grandparents. There was no federal money. It was local. And people cared because they were personally invested in the organization- but moreso their own kid and wallet.
Since the US Department of Education has told schools what they can and cannot do with funding, we have been failing miserably.
This isn't a blame the government rant. It's statically true. Never has America sucked as much as when the USDE was created. America was the most educated populous on the planet 50 years ago, before the USDE got ahold of your children.
Now we are trailing 20th on a good day. And it ain't a good day.
Now back to modern times. If you have any respect for yourself, would you work at a job that paid little and where you had no control or respect from anyone? Would you? That's government at work. Get it out of our schools. Have the community invest in education directly. They can barely pave roads for pete's sake.
And what of all the poor people? They need to learn too? You mean like President Abraham Lincoln? Yea, he didn't have a pot to piss in, and he changed the course of history. Money does not make you learn. Say this with me. MONEY DOES NOT MAKE YOU LEARN. Responsibility and Vested Interest make you learn.
Why aren't you a stardust analyzing physicist? Why aren't you a rug maker? Why aren't you a Llama farmer? Because you don't give a shit about it. If you put 500 dollars into Llama farming, you would give a shit. That's natural law. And taxing everyone and sending it into the ether does not motivate parents, children, or teachers.
Nor does it give them vested authority as shareholders in their childrens future. People have more rights over a publicly traded company than they do their own children. I'm not grasping at straws or trying to shock you- it's the truth. If the shareholders decide to fire the CEO, burn down the west wing, and kick the janitors back over the border to make taco's- they can and do it. But, not to their own schools or children.
Parents need to provide for and have control over their childrens future. Teachers, entrusted with their children, need that same authority to be given them. And Teachers, as independent contractors, need to have the right to tell the parent and kid to get the Fuck Out and don't come back. Some children don't want to or can't learn. Toss them out the window. They will value education when you see them a year later. Because education will have value. As it is now- it's the pussy that any degenerate belt buckle swinging murderous retard can get- so it is worthless.
We don't respect teachers because they have no authority. While respect is sometimes earned, authority is immediate and permanent.
Thomas Jefferson started the University of Virginia, in a little hovel called Charlottesville, Va. It has just very recently(30 years) become a State University aka fed/state funded "public" school. It's been private aka a "school" since the 1790's. This decline across the board in publicly funded holes is not a mystery.
You have no control over what happens to Teachers or Children in a Public School. Giving more money to that vacuum will not give you any more control than you already have. Because 0 times 50 Billion is still 0. No, really.. it is. I went to "private" school.
Peace to all the Parents and Teachers out there that want the best for our children. If you could change it- it would have been changed already. Get out start your own school. This message brought to you by your local, state, and federally unfunded Libertarian.
-- Mark Twain
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
This is where the problem lies...
;-)
Being knowledgeable and being a good teacher are 2 completely different things. How do I know?
Glad you asked,
I'm a PhD student in Mech. Engineering at a top 10 school working through the NSF GK-12 Fellowship program and putting in 30hrs/week at a local school. Believe me when I tell you that being smart and being a good teacher at that level are 2 completely different things and I've been decorated and distinguished as a TA from our undergrads and the department. Middle/High School is a different ball game ENTIRELY.
I've learned to keep my mouth shut when it comes to criticizing our educational system - my advise, donate your time to a local school and you'll quickly learn why you love your job so much. It's dang hard work with very little reward other than the smiles on their faces.
This was after a 3 week (50hr/week) summer intensive course on education - there are education theories out there that make a lot of sense and work. You wouldn't know this because the vast majority of my teachers haven't followed them. There is more to being a good educator then being smart in your field - it requires being knowledgeable in the theories of education also.
That said, I find that the teachers at my school to be extremely petty (maybe it's a catfighting thing) but the politics are horrible and the acknowledgements are nonexistent.
What have I learned? I love my field
If there's a supply problem with math and science teachers then economics would say pay more and the supply should increase over time. What about the over supply then of some types of teachers (i.e. PE teachers)? Do we get to apply the same logic to that field and pay them less? No, because the NEA (teachers union) won't let us. The NEA essentially says that a teacher is a teacher is a teacher... no matter if one is an AP Physics teacher and the other teaches general PE.
Whether average salaries are $49839 or $69120, neither of those salaries buys you even a closet in California. Now, I suppose you can live in the mountains somewhere and commute 2.5 hrs each way, but few people love teaching THAT much.
The Six Lesson Schoolteacher: http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
John Taylor Gatto was New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. He was a teacher for 26 years and won lots of awards, etc. but eventually the dysfunction of the system got to him and he quit, and wrote this excellent essay which expresses very clearly what is wrong with the U.S. educational system, AND how it could be fixed (which is, sadly, unlikely to happen any time soon).
"Get yourself a software engineering text book, there are many well documented metrics for assessing programmers."
Reading a text book is a good idea because you won't find any serious measurement being done in the real world. Of course that also means that these metrics haven't really been "road-tested" either.
It has been my experience that the more qualified a teachers is, the more they end up butting heads with administration rather than just going along with the status quo ( mediocrity ). These same individuals are the ones who have the option to earn considerably higher salaries in the private sector. In short, competency is a strong incentive to leave with an easy out.
I salute those of you, like Mr Toledo, who stayed for the students.
-Shawn
The legislature may be considering them, but as a former Kentucky resident, and even though I don't gamble, in this case I'd be willing to bet that the bills never pass. These bills simply make too much sense. Kentucky is the home of the $400 legislator bribe...bills that are intelligent never get passed.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
And yet in USSR, where state-sponsored education was among few properly implemented things, I have got a far better education than most of American students -- in both private and public schools.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This is the same state to bring you House Resolution 256:
http://www.lrc.state.ky.us/recarch/02rs/HR256.htm
encouraging the commandeering a nuclear sub to patrol the Ohio and sink Indiana's casino boats.
It wasn't passed, and neither are 90%+ of the bills and resolutions brought before Frankfort, the vast majority truly serious, well-intended legislation. If the teacher bill gets introduced the next four years in a row... then someone will take it seriously. You've got to lubricate the machinery of politics frequently to keep it running at all, and I hear that things will run much more smoothly if you use Federal Reserve branded paper.
There's so much truth in this thread, it's depressing.
Awww fuck it!!! Who are we kidding? Some people are destined to be ditch diggers and trash men. Why do we (as a society) keep pretending everyone can climb the ivory tower?
Hey, I'm all for compassion and giving every child a chance. But we can't force someone to be someone they don't want to be. Maybe when they get older and learn the hard lessons in life, they can come back to school for more serious educational reform.
Life is not for the lazy.
Let's be honest. Math and science are more important. Period. History is a very close second. We need kids who understand the basics of the scientific method and mathematics so that they know how to solve problems. We need kids who understand history so that the ones who become politicians don't end up fucking thing up as badly as the current crowd has. So yes, math and science teachers should be paid more than the art teachers. And football coaches should be paid less than art teachers.
But really, the problem with education isn't pay-grade differences. It's actually a situation where liberals and conservatives have both come together to fuck things up. The conservatives offer Christian fundamentalist parents to put pressure on school boards to teach creationism or similar frauds, uneducated morons sitting on education boards to decide what is and isn't science and a ridiculous philosophy that free-market capitalism actually applies to education in the form of "No Child Left Behind". Oh yeah, and they have a worrisome trust for standardized test scores as a benchmark for performance.
The liberals, on the other hand, offer hideously overpowered teacher's unions that keep shitty teachers employed, an inane attitude that no kid should ever fail and an unreasonable expectation that every kid should go to college. Really, when did becoming a plumber or electrician become something so terrible? You can make a good, honest living doing plenty of trade jobs. But not every kid belongs in college, and filling colleges with kids who don't belong there sucks resources from actual higher education and diverts it to joke majors like "park and recreation management". And since every kid has to go to college now, they have to have enough majors for everyone!
You know what? I'm tired by now of hearing yet again some clueless "unions == communism" falsehood.
I live in a country, you may have heard of it, called Germany. Yeah, the same country you're still getting war movies about. Now let me tell you what happened here _after_ 45, i.e., where those Hollywood movies leave off. Unions here in the private sector aren't just more powerful than anything in your "it's good to be shafted by a sociopathic boss" American culture, but actually a part of some companies' management. And labour laws and wellfare are still at a point you'd probably consider luxury.
Guess what? It doesn't mean tenure, it doesn't mean salaries that don't reflect performance, etc. I still negotiated a salary when getting hired, for example. And getting a pay raise was still based on my doing a good job, or at least the boss being convinced of that. And I've had co-workers which were fired for just making themselves look busy without actually producing anything. And I'm pretty sure that if anyone actually complained that Joe's working hard is making everyone else look bad, they'd find themselves unemployed very fast.
Also, contrary to clueless libertarian trolling, it did _not_ create indifference and apathy on any signifficant scale, it did _not_ ruin the industry, etc. The German economy was going very strong until it absorbed the much weaker East German economy, with an industry that was pretty much obsolete at that point. Yeah, it produced a lot of unemployment in one fell swoop, most of it in the East Germany area. Yeah, you'd get a simmilar dip if you absorbed, say, Ukraine. (No offense to the fine people of Ukraine, it's just picked for being large and less economically developped than the USA.) Also dealing with the integration in EU during most of dealing with that, e.g., unable to do much fiscal policy to peg the inflation-vs-unemployment at its own desired point on that curve, probably also didn't help much. (I'm all for the EU, btw. Just saying that in this particular aspect and in this particular situation it made dealing with it all less flexible. You can't devalue your money to stimulate exports when you're tied to the currency of the whole rest of EWurope, for example.) Nowadays Germany experiences economic growth again.
Morale and apathy are more complex factors, and you can't just make some "unions are bad, being shafted is good for morale" generalization. Because shafting's what happens when unions are not around. Having an incentive to work harder is good and indeed needed, but working in a purely arbitrary environment actually acts as a disincentive. Keeping it fair and transparent, knowing that there's someone on your side keeping an eye on it all, is actually a good thing for the morale. You'll actually work harder for the promotion if you have at least half a hope that someone's keeping it at least half-way objective, than when it's a purely arbitrary thing where being the best could just as well get you fired instead. (See the plenty of examples where someone destroyed a good company, or fired the best workers, just because the magic words "reducing costs" invariably cause the shares to spike on Wall Street, and that's so useful in a pump-and-dump scheme.)
It's also actually good for productivity and morale to know you'll be given a _fair_ pay for your work, and you're not just working to enrich the 1% richest guys even more. There's a reason why historically an economy based on serfs was better than one based on slaves, and why one based on paid workers was better than both: you're actually more motivated and productive when more of your work is for yourself, than when you're just working to make the master richer and you're doing it only because you have no choice.
As a side-effect of it all, may I also point at the much lower crime problem here? If almost no people are pushed into complete poverty and disillusionment, they also don't have as much an incentive to go mug someone. Yeah, it may not be obvious, but that's also an effect of having
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Very difficult to measure in teaching situations - how are you going to measure "performance"? - that's probably the tricky question. Your thoughts please.
The one thing it can't be is "how many students pass an exam" or how many of your students reach any other arbitary point. If you do this, you end up with a system where teachers start gaming the system to get the brightest students and dump the bad ones as fast as possible. Who wants to teach the average and slower students if their pay is based on exam passes? You don't want to create a system where a significant percentage of the kids in every discipline are treated like crap by their teachers.
I'd say if you are going to measure by performance then it is a relative measure, amount of progress made, but this is going to require a lot of work to measure and continue to monitor, and teachers are probably better of just teaching...
http://www.teachcalifornia.org/pdf/science_06.pdf
The AVERAGE salary for science teachers in California is $56K. Who the hell can live in LA or the bay area on that? When they start paying science teachers 1/4 what lawyers get, the "problem" will vanish.
Step one is to pay teachers like we give a damn. There is no competition to become a teacher. Those that do simply care about the lives they touch (shut up Butthead) and are willing to put up with the county bureaucracies to get there.
Conversely, it is extremely hard for the county to get rid of poor-performing teachers. There was one, uh, mentally unstable person at my wife's school who didn't publish her floating classroom schedule for the first few weeks of the school year, so her students could never find her. She was still on chapter 1 of the basic math textbook halfway through the year, and pretty much made up grades since she never graded howework or tests. My wife would drop in and give and grade worksheets for the students every once in a while, so they would at least get somewhere while the county sent in at least 4 waves of administrative "observers" month after month to build a case for firing^H^H^H^H^H^Htransferring the poor teacher after squatting there for some 15-20 years.
Anyway, at least there's a small tax break for the school supplies (dry erase markers, printer paper) we buy to keep her classroom running.
So what if it breeds discontent among a few teachers? That's what they get for being lazy slack-asses getting degrees in bullshit majors like Education (which at my university had a departmental mean GPA of 3.8. Gosh! Education majors are straight-A students on average! Compare with the Physics dept, which had a 1.7 mean GPA - a bunch of pot-smoking dropouts, or the hardest major in college? Given that Physics major consistently perform better on LSATs and other standardized tests than any other major, I choose the latter. I know a girl who only got a 21 on her ACT, and she's doing her master's in Education at that school, BTW).
Teachers' unions are some of the whiniest groups of special interests there are. Even Barack Obama, in "The Audacity of Hope", said (I think around chpt. 5, but I was only skimming certain sections of it) that the status quo is unacceptable, and that teachers' must held more accountable than they presently are or want to be. Using an incentive-based system of pay is exactly the right way to reward teacher performance and competence (but it still doesn't address the accountability problem).
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Paying math teachers more might be a good idea but the problem with u.s. schools, imo, is the stranglehold that the unions have on education. Union marketing says more pay for teachers would be good but that has nothing to do with education. If a small window breaks you can't just fix it instead you have to call a union glazer. If the budget is rejected by voters administration has to trim pencils from the budget while teacher salaries still increase.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
They're taking felons and gangmembers now. However this is no slur on the military, I have much respect for those who serve there. The leadership of this country is mis-using the military, and I am quite sure our men and resources will be stretched into Iran. Standards drop, and those who normally wouldn't make the cut are being welcomed in. Hence my cynical crack about the poor and dumb finally having the ability to 'contribute' to the nation...
Blar.
On to pay. I don't think that most teachers have it any worse than most other salaried employees. Yes, almost all put in more than 40 hrs/week during a full school week, that's not unusual in the real world. On the flip side, they do have a lot fewer total working days due to the summer break, winter break, and the numerous government holidays that private sector employees don't get to take. Most of us don't have Martin Luther King day off. They also have relatively stable employment and generally better than average benefits like retirement and healthcare, compared to others with a similar salary in the private sector. Of course, like any union controlled profession, the best are underpaid and the worst are overpaid. But I don't think that teachers, as a whole, are dramatically undercompensated. Especially based on the grades of incoming students into colleges of education. They tend to have some of the lower entering GPAs of any of the colleges on a University campus. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and slightly below average students may, in fact, make better teachers than highly intelligent people, since they can relate to the average student much better; but it does mean that they don't have the same options as other college students in EE or ME or Microbiology, Premed, etc. When you take that all into account, teaching looks pretty good. I'd argue that compensation is far less important to the average teacher than the lack of autonomy. The weight of bureaucracy and on teaching in a public school is positively smothering, even comparted to some of the worst of corporate america I'd wager.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
for new graduates to get started?
There are some people who have to fight for years to get a teaching job. Teachers will always say there's a a shortage, just like msft will always say there is a shortage of developers.
Just for fun, let's think the unthinkable (FWIW: I have a bachelor's degree in math myself).
The USA need top level scientists, no doubt about it. Also, people need basic math skills, no doubt about that. But how many people use trigonometry in the daily lives? How often do we use the quadratic equation? Or Euclidean geometry?
Let's face it folks, engineering is going to follow manufacturing, and software development, overseas. The USA will be a nation of lawers. That's were the money is.
I must admit, I remember very little of the physics, chemistry, or biology that I took. I don't know if I manage a difficult differential equation either. Doesn't seem to affect me much, I guess it was all for nothing anyway.
Anything that smacks of objective measurement, merit pay, alternatives to the state's skoolag, or any one of hundreds of possible remedial steps for the poor performance of the public education system is going to cause unionised teacher unrest.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most people can't expect to buy a home on one year of their gross salary. Stating that a teacher cannot buy a house in California for a years of wages means nothing. California has a higher cost of living than other places in the US. That's because it's more desirable. If you want a lower cost of living, move away from the coast.
Also remember, those high salaries are earned through seniority and continuing education. Anyone who can survive as a teacher can make really good money. Eventually. And anyone who wants to put in the extra effort (a friend of mine is a band director and she gives music lessons on the side for $50/hr because she feels uncomfortable charging more, which she easily could) can do very well. It ain't CEO pay, but it's nothing to sneeze at, and it's certainly above $30k! According to the BLS, fewer than 10% of teachers earn under $30k.
That kind of invalidates the rest of your post so I won't comment anymore. Cheers!
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
If you think it should, then riddle me this, batman: I looked up the highest-paid teacher in my state--about ready to retire, full PhD, etc. He makes a lot of money. But realize that by the time I was in my late 20s, as an entrepreneur, I was making over double what he makes now (I imagine he's in his late 50s or early 60s). So how is my state going to, through market forces alone, lure me, an Economist by training, to teach high school econ? Are they going to find enough money in the budget to pay me what they are currently paying 10 teachers?Indeed.
Anyhow, back to S&D. It's obviously not possible to lure those in private industry into teaching by matching what we earn. Fortunately, once you pass Econ 101, you learn that not everyone behaves in a perfect profit-maximizing fashion (many famous economists write about Homo economicus, or Economic Man, with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks). Real Men, as opposed to Economic Men, purchase lottery tickets, borrow money at 18% interest to buy designer clothes, take out $200,000 loans to go to college with the intention of working a low-wage job, and even become public school teachers when they could make more in the private sector. It would seem that life is not one profit-maximization function.
The real reason why more people don't go into teaching (taken with a bushel of salt, of course... the original article was grousing about only having two qualified applicants for each math and science teaching open need.. I'll let you know when I'm finished crying a river for them) is teacher morale issues. Geneticists who might otherwise be interested in teaching recoil at the idea of teaching Creationism at an equal level with Evolution. Entrepreneurs recoil at the idea of punching a time clock each day. Chemists recoil at the thought of not being able to have the students do experiments because of budget constraints or "safety" issues. In short, Professionals are not willing to be treated like tradesmen. And what do you think teaching has been reduced to?
So treat your college-educated professionals like assembly-line workers and this is what you get. You repel the very candidates you need to attract: those who are motivated by teaching and enriching the lives of others, as opposed to those who are motivated by money. After all, schools can't compete on salaries.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Ed schools have the consistently lowest SAT scoring students and the consistently highest grade point averages.
If you want to fix the teaching profession you need to start with the education schools. I suggest burning them down, firing all the profs and starting over.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
By the way, the original article was grousing about how they were only getting two qualified applicants per math and science teaching vacancy. Please excuse me while I go cry a river for them. I mean, how will they ever fill those positions?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
"The first bill would provide cash incentives to schools to run AP math and science classes, and cash scholarships to students who did well on AP math and science exams. The second bill provides salary bumps for any teachers with degrees in math or science, or who score well in teacher-certification tests in math, chemistry and physics. Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry?"
It's unpredictable. What we the American people demand is that no division of classes or other problems ragarding to salary not interfere with the education of our free-thinking, future leaders of our nation, our students. Let's teach our children about the finer, beautiful things in life.
As far as education goes, money should not be the decider of how an institution functions. Where there is money, there is greed, where there is greed, corruptin, when there's that, power and abuse.
The power is with we, the People, and that's That.
Is the US education system poor, at best? If so, why?
In your answer, please include the words, "The majority of the world's scientific, technological, cultural, and artistic creation originates in the United States of America."
Thank you for your time.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I graduated public high school with 39 college credits and I wasn't doing anything fancy-pants. Just regular AP classes that were taught in public high school. Furthermore, check out the dual-enrollment post-secondary programs where students may take courses at a local college or university for both college and high school credit. But your kids, of course, are unique. Just like everybody else's kids.
Hope the rest of your post was good. I generally stop reading when a comment presents as fact something that is blatantly false. If you don't know, say you don't know.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
"1. You cannot touch or search a kid without getting sued by the parents or the ACLU."
A middle school in my home county once strip-searched an entire class of girls, just because one girl claimed she had five dollars stolen. I was outraged when I read about this in the news. How in the hell is that reasonable? How could you possibly have probable cause to strip-search an entire class of girls, just because $5 was missing? I don't know if they were sued for this, but they damn well should have been.
After brazen operations like that, honestly, I'd prefer that the schools were skittish about searching students. School isn't a damn prison, and they have no right stripping kids naked for any reason, let alone $5.
Between union issues, playing politics both with the schoolboard and the school faculty itself, grading papers, supporting the debate team (after school, of course), she can count the hours of free time she has per-week on two hands.
Since she's become a teacher 8 years ago, they've systematically taken away her time and replaced it with pure bullshit. Since she's joined the club, they've insisted she teach more classes, taken away her administrative time slots (teacher prep time), and they've asked that she come in earlier in the day. They've also put in *mandatory* training every month that teachers have to do on their own time, training that is a complete waste of time (think "self-improvement seminar" type crap).
Meanwhile, she has to field crap from the schoolboard (braindead ideas about teaching methods and requirements), has to deal with the union and payroll (that keeps stabbing her in the back regarding her pay increases), and she has to diffuse gang violence right in her classroom because the shoolboard is unwilling to take the problem seriously.
If she didn't love the good students, there's no way in hell she'd be doing it. If you don't love to teach, you might as well not bother...not unless you like self-torture.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Why do economic principles apply to the "under supply" problem with math and science teachers but not to the "over supply" of other types of teachers?
Please explain why the NEA not allowing teachers to be paid differently according to their field is a bad thing. What that logic tells me is that all teachers are the same except for years experience and educational experience (math, science, PE, health... all interchangeable). Doesn't that make the case for them being looked at like "milk bottles"? Unfortunately I think the NEA is a major problem with our education system.
Just because I don't agree with your logic doesn't mean my attitude is "destructive". I also never said "don't" once in my post. You seem to have inferred that somehow.
You are correct... I did not offer a solution nor do I think I can. I do believe that if you want better, more qualified math and science teachers you must pay more or provide other incentives to attract them. That's just a fact of the capitalistic marketplace. I have no problem with that but you must then be able to apply the same principles to the other side of the coin otherwise it doesn't work.
Honest question. Why is it wrong to pay a math teacher teaching AP Calculus more money than a PE teacher teaching badminton if they both have the same years of experience and years of education?
He showed every one of his classes "Stand And Deliver" at the start of the year, and he had even had the chance to meet Jaime Escalante in person. He also told us all about him and his friends playing cage-rules basketball with gangbangers (and usually getting beaten up by them afterwards). Man, did he ever make class fun. Although he didn't make his neighbourhood back in LA sound particularly livable. ;)
The point? A genuinely great instructor really can inspire students to great things. They really can pass their passion for science and mathematics to even the most average of students. So if you decide to go for it, good for you. The world, and America in particular, definitely needs teachers that can impart their passion and love of the things that they study.
I think you are missing a key point of my argument. You are confusing "need" with "worth", monetarily speaking. Of course we "need" PE teachers, I just question their "worth" compared to other fields. Also, I am not advocating firing them and did not say that. I just really struggle with the fact that teachers cannot get paid according to their quality since the union will not allow that. It makes no sense to me.
I literally have at least 50% of my closest friends and family who are either teachers or administrators. Some are very good at their jobs and some literally do it so they can coach and have their summers off. So, take a guess how the "good" teachers feel about those who just want to have their summers off but still make the same amount of money as they do. Not very good. It really starts to weigh in on why they are working so hard. There are no incentives or decentives (is that a word?).
I agree with you almost completely. Teachers should absolutely be able to negotiate a contract based on their merit, etc... and I agree that in the downtimes they shouldn't be forced to take less money, etc... That happens rarely and the only time I ever really hear about it is from a major union settlement (i.e. UAW).
One thing I do believe is that if the demand is gone completely (or if the teacher is incompetent) you should be able to fire them and not just be forced to reassign them (without 2-3 years of paperwork... seriously). Now in all fairness most normal and sane employers will do their best to try and "repurpose" an employee before being forced to let them go but I don't like the fact that the union, once again, complete hamstrings the employer.
Thanks for the discussion. It's an interesting topic and fortunately I think it will have to be addressed soon, along with the entire educational problem. I'm hoping and working to make it better for my kids, I know that.
But an author may not know grammar. (There are a lot of successful books where grammar isn't always correct.)
I disagree. Writers, poets and the like, these people are the end authority of their respective language. By nature of their expertise and life long devotion, virtual infallibility follows and any one assertion or proposal can only be challenged by those of equal authority. Mark Twain can introduce a new word, an altercation of traditional grammar rules, as for you... you best reference a dictionary and writers guide by an appropriate standard.
You gonna say Beethoven or Hendrix didn't understand music just because you think you understand music theory as taught from a book? Are you saying that Geothe and Tolstoy never had the latitude to make necessary changes that would permit them in their quest of acute articulation?
One could suggest that Poetry is nothing more than Theoretical Linguistics; as Poets are allowed to break any rule and convention of any language in order to relay their emotive messages with maximum expression and accuracy. Poets are even permitted to use words based off of connotation, and in some cases, outright ignoring standard definitions... all well within context, we feel the proper meaning when they use the proper word. AKA "Word Choice", being legit and all... just like in any other fields, R&D present valuable and useful tools for everyday use.
I argue that accomplished/published Writers are aware of the rules you're forced to abide by. Furthermore, they are probably aware of their the fact they might be able to break a few.
I never called service members 'morons'. You smell like a typical right-wing war-mongering cock-throater. A felony conviction is not a 'major item'? A felony conviction means I can't vote or own a gun..but in 2006 Felons were welcomed into the armed forces via waivers.
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Felons in armed forces: http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,12522
There is no draft, but there is certainly a lack of man-power. Why else would all the contracts signed by reservists and active memebers be ignored and the men continually re-deployed with short breaks?
Yeah, whatever buddy! We were always at war with EurAsia!
Blar.
And let's just stop pandering to the "mortality rate" mentality for doctors, and stop comparing our population's mortality rate to those of other developed countries, and just accept the fact that American doctors are just not cut out to prevent death as much as those in other developed countries!
While we're at it, we should also stop comparing the abilities of our car mechanics to the best of other car mechanics, stop pandering to the "gee, I wish my car would run" mentality and just accept the fact that some car mechanics are just not cut out to fix cars as well as others.
Why are we so accepting of this blatant failure and fraud? If this happened in any other industry, we, as the people that foot the bills, are (or should be) up in arms!
The anti-testing, anti-standards crowd says that the objective standards that teachers consistently fail to improve are invalid. Well, that's really convenient. Not meeting the standards? Lower them, or declare them invalid! Problem solved!
I think it's time we faced the fact that we've been defrauded by the government, and take back the education of our children.