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Higher Pay for Math and Science Teachers
Coryoth writes "Following up a previous story, it seems that the Kentucky effort to provide increased pay to teachers with qualifications in mathematics, physics, and chemistry has been gutted. Teachers objected to differential pay, and that portion of the bill was removed. At the same time California has just put forward a similar measure, with differential pay for teachers qualified in mathematics and science. Shockingly 40% of mathematics teachers in California are not fully qualified in the subject — a higher percentage of unqualified teachers than any other subject. Is the Californian effort any more likely to succeed, or is it destined to be similarly gutted? Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"
"Shockingly 40% of mathematics teachers in California are not fully qualified in the subject "
Wow, only 70% are fully qualified?
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
nt
Perhaps not surprisingly, California ranks almost dead last in education.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?
I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Gutt the union? They're preventing progression and have become too in control. We're letting them run the show.
Maybe we could save some of that money spent on establishing military control of nations on the other side of the globe and use it to fund our educational system.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
What's more important? A perception of equality between teachers of all subjects, or setting the salaries at the level required to attract teachers qualified to properly educate children in each subject?
Wouldn't it be great to just read a bunch of novels for college and get paid the same ammount as the person that racked their brain while trying to solve differential equations?
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/math teachers" problem, but it'll probably entice people who were otherwise going to become teachers to specialize in teaching a different field.
This kind of effort will surely cause rifts in the teaching staff, but offering slightly more money isn't going to entice any experts away from industry or tertiary academia.
Math and Science teachers getting higher pay would be a wonderful thing - but could we not also include Language teachers? I mean, being able to understand and use math and science is one thing, but the ability to take the ideas from those areas and properly communicate them seems to be a dying art. If we can't get these teachers higher pay, then can we at least give them some teeth in the classroom and the ability to enforce stricter standards of written and spoken language?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Sure, history etc are important, but they have no significant earning potential outside of teaching. It's a buyer's market. Qualified scientists have far better prospects.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"
No. Because among the Teachers' Union's membership there are 40% of mathematics teachers who would become unemployed if a solution were found. A good solution would help two groups of people: Qualified people who are not currently teachers, and students. Neither of those groups is a part of any Teachers' Union.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Its very difficult to find work teaching math or science unless you have a single subject credential in those areas. The problem California has it that they do not like hiring math and science teachers. Why? Money.
They can hire an intern for half the price and just get rid of them every year or what they do is put in a permanent sub and recycle them just to meet quotas so they don't get sued. Its disgusting.
The problem really is paying more for math and science teachers. If the schools must pay more for these teachers then they will fire them to save money and use interns.
So why should a teacher get a credential in a subject that could damage his or her career?
Also whats great about unqualified interns is that they do not have to comply with no child left behind. They can claim they could not find enough qualified teachers to fill the position and the schools will no longer have to be held accountable.
As a result she plans to teach in Texas next year. Pay is only a few thousand less a year and the bean counters do not run the schools and do borderline illegal things like what I described above or putting 50 kids to a class room and then change all the teachers in October so they can get away without paying teachers salary for 1 whole year. My jaw dropped when I heard about that.
http://saveie6.com/
I lived in Appalachian Kentucky, in one of the two or three poorest counties in the country. The problems with education didn't come down to teacher unions, it came down to political pork barrel.
In a nutshell, the way you get elected in those parts is to deliver relatively cushy government jobs to your friends and supporters*.
Since funding for schools is already pitiful, the usual strategy is to have lots of low paying teacher jobs, rather than fewer good paying positions. If you pay less per job, you create more porkbarrel positions that will bring you votes.
Kentucky really isn't interested in spending more on schools, and is just using teacher unions as a convenient excuse.
* or hand out fifths of whisky on election day. Or indulge in good old fashioned vote buying.
Three Squirrels
You can't discriminate like that. It's sexist!
Capitalism does not lead to corruption, lack of character does.
I'm sorry, it just sounds like a bad idea to me for math or science teachers to be paid more.
It's just asking for personnel issues, and it's creating a teacher economic hierarchy where none currently exists, and none needs to exist.
They would much rather prefer having sex with their students than actually receive a paycheck.
Didn't you see that teacher's ass shake on the cell phone video?
Why didn't my teacher hit on me like that when I was in middle school.
Did you see when the gym teacher who was married to the principal banged a student?
Pay these degenerate pedophile teachers what they desire! YOUNG CHILDREN!
(captcha was ladylike LOL)
The system you propose has an added bonus: If you can effectively squelch the real source of the thinking then you can take credit for the solutions to promote yourself.
Brilliant!
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Human beings are simply not equal, no matter what you wish. Pay more for people who are willing to become qualified and more will become so. Insisting that everyone receive the same... Well it doesn't exactly encourage excellence, now, does it.
Deleted
Of course not. Union's don't reward ability. Union's tend to focus on the lowest common denominator holding onto their job. Pay for performance usually increases performance. Paying someone equally for less performance usually discourages people from using their abilities. I've never understood why teacher's aren't paid for performance, especially considering the responsibility they have. So long as excellent scientists and mathematicians are paid the same as incapable football coaches, there will be no massive rush to enter high school teaching.
Mod me troll if you like, but rewards based on abilities and performance usually yield better results.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Yawn. Wake me when the UFOs land.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Before the more libertarian posters start chewing up the teachers' unions (not that I'd disagree), I'd like to ask the question: What level of respect do teachers deserve, and in what manner should we as a society ensure they get that respect?
There is a job to be done, a job some would consider a somewhat sacred task: Ensuring that an entire generation can learn and grow in the best way we know how to do it. That is not an easy task.
We currently have a very limited number of people put into that formal role, and they collectively are not doing what we would consider an acceptable job at it. What should our response be? If our response is to punish and cut resources from that role in general one way or another, then we will be left with even fewer people to fill that role, and those that are left will have an even harder job to do. More than that, the level of respect for these teachers will continue to fall. This isn't such a bad thing, if collapse of such a system is an acceptable result, except that there will be much of an entire generation of children in the lurch.
The recent response to this issue is to push for very strict testing as a way to punish the teachers with the weakest 'performance'. That does improve the measured response, but it has also changed the way we measure the result. I would assert that by doing this, we have left behind the idea that we are trying to truly teach a generation the best way we can, but instead have minimized what we teach in order to assure high scores on a system we invent for ourselves, all in an effort to find someone to punish.
So, is this the best way to get the job done? Is this the way we respect our children's need for education, and the people who are put into the role of opening doors for the children?
Ryan Fenton
Doesn't California have some of the highest taxes in the country. Even higher than Taxachusetts. Dont they also have an economy larger than a lot of countries? What do they do with all their money?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Seeing as it was the teachers unions that helped to create mazes like this when trying to remove a bad teacher, i think you might have a really good idea.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The English teacher wrote a 3-point essay against the proposal.
The History teacher did some research and cited precedent against it.
The PE teacher punched the legislators and sat on their heads.
The Art teacher committed suicide in an ironic statement.
These stories always depress the hell out of me.
#2 thing wrong with US education: Teacher's unions.
#1: Parents who don't care if their kids get an education or not.
Unfortunately from what I can find online and from a recent Economist article is seem that the Teacher's Unions are one of the bigger obstacles to educational reform.
Tenure keeps the bad teachers around and low pay, etc keep the idealists whi could make a difference from sticking with it. Any plans which would involve a premium on new teachers with specialized skills will be rejected by this group as it does not reward its current membership and goes against the rigid hierarchy promoted by the tenure system which is not based on ability, talent or dedication.
http://www.vdare.com/pb/apple.htm
-I'm just sayin'
Honestly, I am very surprised by this. I would have guessed it to be closer to 90% unqualified. The state of education in the U.S. is a shameful thing. I dont have access to the current figures but isn't the U.S. ranking someone around 20th worldwide in education quality?
I guess its time to out source our education in addition to our jobs.
I guess also its another arguement for Home based schooling, but its a shame that the Military as well as many employers frown upon such practices.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
I'm curious, what exactly are the math qualifications to teach the subject at a grade 1-8 level? Its pretty much add, subtract and some basic algrebra right?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The problem is that voters want nothing to do with the system. They love to complain, but won't do anything.
So, your fiancee goes off to (let me take a wild guess) some proto-suburb that currently is running a budget surplus on an annual basis where she can afford to live and have a few bucks left over at the end of the month. e.g. There's plenty of money to go around.
The last bit about no child left behind is a hostile jab at the school system. It probably is poorly run, but the voters clearly don't care because nothing has been done.
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While such people may exist, for the most part firms and schools operate as a cooperative effort between management and labor. Good management will set the processes, expectations, and rewards so that everyone will be required to put forth real effort, and everyone will be rewarded. In the functional firms I have worked in, everyone has had to work, and everyone gets rewarded. The people who receive the raw materials are as important as those that put the finishing touches on the product. One big problem with the Ayn Rand world is that management receives huge bonuses for production gains, while those that do the work are laid off.
This Ayn Rand philosophy has infiltrated education. Teachers now believe they alone teach the children a subject, and other teachers have no impact on the learning of the subject. Such a view is at best myopic. One teacher may teach science, but how much science is learned without reading or math? How much is science, math, social studies,or english learning improved by a student that has training in the fine arts? Are the students going to learn in a dirty school, or with lights that do not work? Perhaps some people contributions are verifiably less than others, but everyone contributes, and everyone should be rewarded.
In some states teachers of certain subjects get extra pay, not in the base salary, but in bonus pay for teaching certain subjects, or in certain areas. This is pretty common. Such pay encourages people to major in appropriate fields of study, and work towards appropriate certification. Everyone who teaches the subject, or teaches in an certain area, gets the money.
What is divisive and counterproductive is creating an atmosphere in which it is perceived that certain individuals are getting compensated at the expense of others. What would be better is for schools whose student show significant growth, and retention of students, receive additional funding. We should create schools in which students want to attend, and in which teachers work together to educate the students to the limits of the students ability.
There's one thing missing from all these news stories -- how much do teachers actually make? Because if they're looking for math and science teachers, I'm their target -- a masters in physics who is unhappy in my current job. But teaching is not something I really want to do. I could be convinced to do it if the price was right...but nobody ever states a price.
I think most teachers teach because that is what they love doing, but there are some qualified people who could be lured into it for proper compensation. If they're afraid of posting salary estimates, how will they lure people in who would not otherwise want to teach?
Isn't the root of the problem that teaching is something not many people want to do? The job comes with excessive bureaucracy, reduced personal privacy and risk of actual physical harm in some areas. Solve those problems and you'll get more teachers whatever the pay.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.
If H-1Bs are supposed to be the solution to the questionable shortage of science and technology people, maybe they could also be a solution to the real problem of a shortage of math and science teachers.
You could go even further and require that H-1B applicants that are not offered a job making over $80K or so (the real best and brightest) must spend 3-5 years teaching first before obtaining a work visa for something other than teaching.
Teachers can't quit. Almost all teachers are at their top productivity right when they start the job, and steadily lose from there. This is true both because they receive very little on-job qualification, and because teaching is an extremely stressful and unthankful job (a highly disproportionate number of people in psychological care are ex-teachers). Worse, teacher qualifications aren't good for much else - they have such a broad knowledge they will rarely be qualified for the highly-specialized professions of today. So to lose a teaching position will very frequently mean a forced career change, and a dramatic fall down the income ladder.
Any even more endangered position (such as being known to be worth less salary than others), is much too close to the low-end job market to be comfortable. So - the union isn't protesting just to spite us. It doesn't prefer inefficiency without a cause. It just has to fight for the very future of its members.
Us relatively high paid IT guys, who haven't seen the poverty line from below in most cases, and who can always train themselves something new, tend to ignore how soul-crushing the lack of a professional perspective is. You know what? The job market isn't free. There are huge barriers to entry, especially for people who are, neurologically, too old to learn a new profession. So what the union does isn't protection of assets, it is fight for survival. You need not respect that, but you'd gain insight into their actions by understanding that.
The solution? Why, on-job qualification programs for teachers, of course. But that's a long-term solution. We don't do that unless re-election is certain.
blow your mind already
If someone has a masters degree or 24 graduate hours in a particular field, pay them a bonus for each class period they spend teaching that subject.
Got 24 hours of graduate Math? If you teach 3 math classes and 3 science classes you get the bonus for your math classes.
Got 24 hours of graduate English or equivalent? You get a bonus for every English-language literature or composition class you teach.
Got a masters in education but only 6 graduate hours of math? Sorry, no bonus.
Personally, I think the qualifications for teaching AP classes should be an overlay of teaching normal 11th- and 12th-grade classes and teaching at a community college. This pretty much means at least a masters degree in the field.
"Singling out a few teachers for a salary bonus, we did not believe is fair," said Kentucky Education Association President Frances Steenbergen. "We believe that the preschool teacher on up to the 12th-grade AP physics teacher deserves huge increases in salaries."
Okay, let me get this straight. The preschool teacher is worth the same amount as the person who busts her ass to study and then teach Physics? Even if the AP Physics teacher has an advanced degree?
WTF?
Gah. Certain people need to be whacked with a cluebat. No, miss preschool teacher, you are NOT worth the same as an AP science teacher (Physics? Are they kidding???). If you want the same salary, then GO AND GET THE SAME QUALIFICATIONS and TEACH THE SAME MATERIAL. If you can't do it then you aren't worth it. People need to be paid on their merits -- otherwise there is little incentive for people to do the work to gain that expertise in the first place (and Physics IS an ass-breaker -- otherwise everyone would be doing it).
A Solution:
1) Mandate X Qualifications for Math and Science Positions (a B.S. for Example) just like you would mandate a B.A. for an English or History Teacher.
2) Mandate X number of Math and Science courses at any school taught with the above qualified credentials.
2) Attempt to hire the best possible individual at your crummy salary offering.
3) Watch as nobody who meets the qualifications take the job due to an inadequate salary.
4) Leverage the lack of suitable candidates as impetus to increase the salary offering to fill the need instead of "because they are math and science teachers".
If you treat it as any other job there is little the union can say about the matter. You pay people more money because they are in greater demand not because they are simply "better". If you mandate qualifications then you ensure you get individuals in demand and in turn their salary is going to go up since it's the only way to land these people.
And if you find qualified individuals who are willing to work for less money? Well then the school win anyway.
This needs to be approached as "we'll pay these people more money if we need to fill the positions" not "we'll pay these people more because they deserve it". It will go over a lot better that way in the eyes of the union.
I live in Kentucky, and I'm a graduate student in Mathematics. I've thought about teaching high school math after getting a Masters degree, but the biggest problem with that is certification issues. I could teach with a Masters in Math, but I would make significantly less money then the teachers who have a Masters degree in Education, and are already certified. There are alternate methods of certification, but the state doesn't seem to want to make things easy.
I, for one, would definitely like to keep control of the schools away from the federal government.
Look at the No Child Left Behind debacle? Slowly, county by county, districts are telling the Department of Education to "shove it". My county is among those who have done so, and I'm proud of that.
For now, the federal government only funds like 2% of school budgets, so schools can defy the feds relatively painlessly. But what if the federal government provided 20% of the funding? 80%? You'd get the same mess we are in with the highway funds. As it stands right now, all congress has to do is tell a state, "Change XYZ state law for us, or you can build your own damn roads." I don't want to see that happen with education.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
People that work should get paid according to their capabilities. If you have 2 math teachers and one doesn't know anything about it, and the other one has a doctorate, they should be getting paid accordingly. If I go to work, I get paid and I get a job because I have certain capabilities as a IT consultant. If another consultant comes in that doesn't know as much as I do, he either won't get the job, or will get paid much less.
I hate to see unions kill the 'free' job market for everyone and keeping our children dumb. You get paid according to your results, not according your title (although that ideology reverses itself throughout higher management). 'Think of the children', anyone, now you DO have a reason to and you don't.
And I would also like to see (more) practical mathematics in school. Currently most students get it shoved down their throats as a merely theoretical 'boring' lesson while mathematics has much more interesting and practical uses which during my time in school, I never or barely got to see (I got to see them a little in my practicum for electronics, but that's about it).
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Where I grew up, the elementary school teachers were paid less than the middle school teachers, who were paid less than the high school teachers. The additional subject matter expertise was the justification\ offered by the high school teachers.
Yes, skill-based compensation appears to be a radical concept in the halls of academia...or at least the public school variant thereof. Of course, we are talking about PUBLIC schools and teachers' UNIONS. Perhaps we are not in a dialog with a bastion of capitalists. ;-)
n /oped/articles/2006/03/29/taking_on_the_teachers_u nions/
;-)
Some are trying:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinio
Perhaps my favorite line from that article is:
Catherine Boudreau, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, predictably criticized Romney's proposals as ''inequitable, divisive, and ineffective." The MTA denounced the proposal as ''uniquely designed to destroy collegiality in a school," ignoring the fact that performance pay is routine in such other professions as medicine, law, and engineering, not to mention in the Commonwealth's first-rate universities, including those that are unionized by the MTA.
*sigh* Some folks need to leave the castle every now and again and see what life is like on the outside.
On that note, I have a couple of friends who are teachers. Yes they work hard and shape young minds. Granted. Good folks. That said, their stress level is about 1% of mine (working in a s/w dev field). Are they paid less? Yes, but their pay is not abysmal. Both make mid 50s...for a job with three months off in the summer, a holiday and spring break, a half dozen snow days, etc. Sure...they bring work home...and so do I. In general, they seem happier and more satisfied with their career choices than my friends in IT. So they make less. It's a choice.
We pay folks what we need to in this society. It's a fairly complex equation, but factors include skill sets, time to acquire those skills, desirability of the work, career potential, quality of life, and...yes...supply and demand. If we need better math and science teachers, we should pay for them. These are critical skills...and we should not let the grumbling art teacher get in the way of giving our children what they need (and deserve). Perhaps the economics and civics teachers should hold a brown bag on one of the snow days. They could discuss how autoworkers unions contributed to the quality of the American automobile industry...and how competition from the Japanese did nothing to help motivate the Americans to improve quality...and then discuss sarcasm.
BTW, I loved my art teacher.
differntial pay. So does every corporation on earth, despite plenty of jobs where it is difficult to quantify performance.
It is not a real issue to determine teacher performance. Everyone knows who the good teachers are.
Just look at any industry/company that has a union. They are dead or dying or rife with mediocrity and indifference. Ditch the unions, pay according to ability and education in the U.S. would see a new era.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Instead, I went to grad school and am now a corporate staff scientist.
I really wanted to teach, but giving up nearly half my potential income was simply too much. The kids lost out. I met plenty of other students in grad school who felt the same way.
Your comments sound like armchair parenting. Either that or you have the luxury of practically infinite privately funded choices for your child's education.
It has almost nothing to do with the Teacher's Union.
There are very few (if any) parents who specifically "don't care if their kids get an education." If they don't care then they as parents probably qualify to have their child taken away from them by the courts for other reasons.
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Rather than dream about best-sellers, I'd frame the question a different way: "Take one guy who read a lot of novels and one guy who solved a lot of differential equations. Which one is more likely to be able to feed his family?"
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I completely agree with the sentiment that we should keep the federal government out of our schools. If they are going to take the money, and if they are going to go to great lengths to squelch (or infinitely regulate) private and home-schooling, then we might as well have some say on where that money is spent.
The federal government may only directly fund 2% of the average school budget but through their control of the distribution of money they can influence the other 98%. All money (well, a vast majority) goes to DC before it comes back to the states and the money which doesn't go directly to DC is controlled by DC through any number of other systems.
Ideally, yes, we taxpayers keep our money and use it to locally decide how things are done. That was the spirit of the 9th and 10th Amendments and the restriction of the authority of the federal government. Until we can move back to that system, though, we can at least hope that the money comes back in salaries.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I guess it is time to introduce h1b visa for teaching.
Due to schedule problems i got stuck in a regular to low-level geometry class in grade 10. The teacher was the (quite successful) wrestling coach but he couldn't pull a vector outta his ass to save his life. So the teacher teaching the people that don't have the best grasp of the subject has even less of a clue himself.
:)
PS. Teachers hate it when you have to show them how to do the problem they put on the board after noone, including the teacher!!, got it right....hehe, vectors during the time i was in ground school for my pilots license
"Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach."
It's time for a reality check. Seriously.
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Why is the government trying to push more maths and science teachers?
Do we really need more maths/science students? Yes? Says who? Are they willing to pay for maths/engineering/science graduates? Are salaries in industry such that graduating in maths/engineering/science is worthwhile for students?
You see, if the government push more science teachers than are required, their salaries will actually fall, the resulting salaries of maths/engineering/science graduates will also fall in the job market as more students graduate.
Deleted
You have no respect for your teachers and you don't pay them much. You were expecting what exactly?
Higher than CEOs and CFOs who loot and destroy their companies?
... a fry cook?
Higher than someone who collects garbage?
Higher than
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Instead of spouting of about a field you appear to know nothing about, consider for a moment that teaching should be a series of interconnecting blocks of skill transfer, just like mathematical skills are taught. Mastery of each is required in order to move onto the next one.
In the scenario just described then, the preschool teacher and all the other teachers that came before the Math teacher are as valuable as the math teacher who can't do her job until the other teachers do theirs.
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I don't claim to know a whole lot about economics, but isn't that what socialism is all about?
No matter what you do, you will get the same amount of pay - immaterial of your your skills, abilities or your contributions.
What's the incentive to perform better, then?
How about if the teacher's pay per subject is based on how society actually values that subject. How much of GDP is based on science, how much on art and music, how much on athletics, etc? If, say, 40% of GDP is based on science and 50% comes from sports, and 10 % comes from art, then clearly athletics are more valuable to society than anything else and should be emphacised accordingly, with art frankly not worth that much in general. Now take a standard average teacher's salary, and add or subtract from that a bit based on subject. So athletics teachers would get 5% above the average, science teachers 1% below average, and art teachers 4% below average. The expenditure on teacher's salary is unchanged, and better teachers are drawn to the more valuable subjects.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Listen, I'm graduating this May with a BS in Mathematics. If society at large wanted me to use this degree to teach its children they'd have to inform me of such by paying me a serious wage. It's called economics. If I've got a better alternative workplace that will pay better it makes NO SENSE to get paid less for my time.
In all, I do believe teachers across the board should get paid better. Why? Because they're the ones charged with the duty of teaching our children. Teachers surve an undeniably important role in how society functions (or disfunctions) and ought to have incentive to keep the ball rolling the way we, as society, like it.
Not that that's ever going to happen. Let's face it, society at large is way too focused on American Idol to ever take serious heed to the idea school, education, and teachers are important. Until there's a Fox News spotlight on how important schools are we're never going to see it (btw that spotlight would have to be preached 24/7, for months, on all the news outlets for it to even have a hope...)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
You'll get paid just slightly above a living wage, $50,000 in a city like Los Angeles where you need $45,000 just to make ends meet.
That's if you win the Teacher's Wage Lottery.
FYI: http://www.teachinla.com/whyteach/salary.html
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I am not a CA resident, but I believe that at least some of the poor performance can be attributed to the fact that there are many foreign-born kids(whether illegal or not) in the state's K-12 schools. You can't take a third grade kid from Oaxaca and plop him down in any elementary school days, weeks, or months after crossing the border and expect him to meet the averages for the third grade. His performance at that point is going to be based on the quality of the Mexican school system, which I would guess really stinks. Plus he likely doesn't speak English at all. So this kid was getting poor to zero education in his native language, and now you expect him to learn in a new language that is notorious for being difficult to learn. Can't blame the teachers for these problems.
Just on a side note, here in Utah we have some of the lowest per capita spending on K-12 and yet somehow Utah schools consistently rank at the top in every measure of educational achievement. I wonder why that could be? How about a belief in the value of education and hard work. Granted, teacher pay needs to be adjusted upwards somewhat here and the legislature has addressed that this year, but we're still not jacking up the per capita $ just for the sake of the rankings.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Like most people, I find it hard to believe teachers are treated so poorly on many levels. For them of course, the two most important (in terms of it being a job) are money and time. You can point out some get three months off in summer, but what about having to get up 5:30am *every weekday* and leave at same time *every weekday*. Lets be honest, how many non-blue collar jobs are that strict in terms of schedule? Not many.
As for different pay scales, go with achievement bonuses or something. Now granted, it is entirely possible you have a truly disinterested student body some years, but I would think more often then not, a good teacher can get things going one way or the other.
If a teacher is not certified, how about, oh I don't know, get it for them, free of charge? If they are already in the system, get them up to snuff. You know, help each other out?
Everyone can point out how broke the system is, but like anything else, while these people are in the system, it only takes a few tweaks here and there and things could be much better off. No one can expect this to change over night.
Is this an oversimplification? Pass a bill that requires the schools to hire only fully qualified teachers. Since there appears to be a shortage of them, would that not automaticaly bring their salaries up?
In the short term, people move to California for the pay increase. Over time, California "grows" enough qualified teachers. Also, other states tend to follow suit on good ideas, so after a period of time, most states might have similar requirements, improving education across the country.
Perhaps I'm missing something.
Because most parents who complain about schools, and decide to home school, can't reliably pick their nose, never mind provide education for their own children...
Wrong.
It's not "hard" to educate your child because the methods of teaching haven't changed that much in 100 years. So the average person can get their child through high school because the curiculum(sp) are widely available as is testing to be sure your kid is retaining/learning. It's a PITA to sort it all out and very time consuming, but it can be done.
That is not to say homeschooling hasn't been abused by adults with children who hardly qualify for the term "parent." Most of it is just FUD that you have accepted without a moments consideration.
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Do teachers only get $35/hour because they're incompetent or do only incompetents apply because the pay is low? ($35/hour is not that low, considering most teachers don't even have real degrees, only education degrees.)
The only solution that I know will not work is to pay all teachers the same.
I think it's time to privatize and dismantle the whole system. Some publicly funded schools in competition will produce better results then publicly administered schools. Create a managed competition. Schools the don't meet minimum results based standards are de-funded, the rest have to compete for parents to select them.
Granted these competing schools will improve themselves by dumping the bottom performing students into a shit hole. Frankly that's where they belong. They're hopeless cases, prevent them from dragging down the rest of their classes. The world needs ditch diggers too.
Something has to be done though, the 'born ditch diggers' are working as teachers under the current system.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession.
Well that is just a small barrier to entry.
a higher percentage of unqualified teachers than any other subject.
The biggest barrier to entry is the teachers union requiring Social Studies teachers to be paid the same as science and math teachers. In short, you can't offer market wages to qualified math and science majors.
I work in R & D and make about double what the average teacher makes. It's easer to work with other professionals than to work with a bunch of unruly kids. In short, I have a less demanding job for more pay. Since a school needs X number of teachers for y number of students, they take what they can get. The can't recruit the more educated. They can't compete. This is especialy true in California with the draw of high tech jobs.
It is one reason I didn't stay in the military. I got in for the school. I got out for the employment.
The truth shall set you free!
This is the same Teacher's Union that would rather protect the employment of incompetent and even dangerous individuals rather than doing what is morally right. One of those TV news shows had a piece on this whaked union and basically showed all the hoops school officials have to go through in order to get a bad apple fired - IT WAS NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE. No wonder they are against ANY change.
One teacher roll is in plenty full supply at current prices.
The other is chronically understaffed.
Which part of market value don't you understand?
By your reasoning the ditch digger is worth as much as the civil engineer. After all they both have to do their job for the task to be done.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Education 8mar07
I think the reason American students are falling behind in subjects like math and science is not because teachers aren't getting paid enough, or is it because of a lack of funding. The problems students are facing are far more elemental. They're not being taught basic responsibilities. They're not being taught a work ethic. And they're not being taught to respect anyone or anything.
Instead educators are trying to turn education into entertainment. Lessons are reduced to wacky fun facts. Everything has to be packaged into bite-sized chunks. It isn't just the curriculum. Compare what schools do in the US compared to schools in Asia, for example.
When I was living in Taiwan I observed that school and academics virtually encompassed a student's entire life. It's not like here when kids are looking to get out of school at a nice early hour to go play. First of all, students arrive at school at 8am, if not earlier. Again, unlike the US where some schools have delayed opening until 9am to let students sleep later.
More importantly were the responsibilities Taiwanese students are given. They spend the first half hour, maybe longer, cleaning the school. They actually have them sweeping the floors and cleaning bathrooms. They didn't necessarily do a good job but rest assured that they were much more reluctant to engage in vandalism knowing that they would be cleaning up the mess the following day.
Imagine the uproar if a school tried that sort of thing in the US. I'm sure lawyers would sweep in with their claims child labor laws were violated. But the fact is that this instilled a sense of responsibility in students.
And it's something that followed them through the school day. They often got out of school late in the day, 4pm or 5pm. And many, mainly those in high school would then go to cram schools in the evening to study for graduation exams.
The problem is, if the schools aren't reinforcing the value of education nobody else will. They sure aren't going to learn anything on the streets. Kids in the suburbs can be as bad as those in the cities. And I know people who've experienced these kinds of problems first hand. It's just that wealthy communities are better at sweeping problems under the rug. But there's a very big distinction. Regardles of what those kids in the suburbs do they're constantly exposed to people who are successful. Eventually it gets drilled into most of them that they need to take school more seriously. So it's the environment outside of school that is one of the biggest factors why many more kids in the suburbs go on to college and end up doing reasonably well.
The lack of interest in some subjects comes down to a lack of work ethic. No amount of money or salary increase is going to resolve these problems. The US already spends money on education than any other developed nation and students in those countries still outperform American students.
Unions are against differential pay.
Unions want the best teachers to be paid the same as the worst teachers.
As long as we allow this, there shouldn't be any question as to why our public schools are so terribly bad.
I just read that, and wept for education.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
As a Social Studies & Computer Science teacher in Michigan, my first reaction to this had nothing to do with pay, but rather with priority. If we pay more for two of the core subject areas, what does that say about the other two core subject areas (English and Social Studies)? Jealousy over pay would definitely occur, but even worse the state government would be neglecting the other two areas. Now this might seem logical to those not familiar with our educational system (you know, one of the only non-nationalized education system of post-industrial nations), but students can't learn math or science without being able to read, write, speak and think in English. Furthermore, every student needs a solid Social Studies education so that they can actually function as productive citizens. This sounds abstract and idealistic, I know, but think about it for a second. Most of the students I work with don't even understand their own rights as a citizen of the United States or how to navigate their way across town while using a map (and these are junior and senior year high school students I'm talking about!). We have four core subject areas for a reason. They all provide information that is absolutely essential for children to know before they can become fully functional members of our society. All students should have highly qualified teachers - lets not limit it to math and science. Finally, the "highly qualified" term comes from the No Child Left Behind Act and does not necessarily reflect upon the qualifications of a teacher. For example, NCLB requires certain qualifications of teachers (this differs depending on which state you are in because for the most part, it is up to the state to decide what "highly qualified" means). I know several teachers who have been successfully teaching History and Geography or Algebra and Calculus for over two decades but now are not "highly qualified" because they did not take enough college credits in one of their subject areas. Just something to think about before we all get upset about these statistics. Remember, you can't compare them on a state-to-state basis because the definition of "highly qualified" changes.
All you'd go is politicize the process of deciding how much GDP comes from where. 100% of GDP comes from companies where people don't bite each other to resolve disputes (or throw chairs?). Therefor 100% is attributable to preschool teachers.
How about this for a formula. If you have a worker shortage in a field, you raise the pay in that field. If you have a worker surplus in a field, you cut the pay (or at least slow that rate of growth). If someone is incompetent you fire their ass.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
First, 50% of new teachers will quit in the first five years.
Second, all beliefs to the contrary, all classes are not created equal. Each 'batch' of students will vary from year to year. What some are clamoring for is 'merit pay' - the real problem is no one wants to define merit. Merit is NOT test scores, but according to the government, it seems to be. What happens when somebody brilliant opts to limit special education kids to one class (as to maximize the amount of time kids are included under the supervision of a special ed person and a regular teacher) - the average test performance drops, but it's obviously the teacher's fault, right? Cause he's the teacher.
And a final word on unions: before you start thinking about whether unions are bad, you need to understand, the administration of a school is not interested in the wellbeing or the benefits of being a teacher. The administration is there to side with parents, to prevent public outcry and lawsuits, but a principal is not on the side of a teacher. So when a teacher is accused of inappropriate activity with a student (didn't happen to me, but happened to a fellow teacher who was six feet away from the girl at the time), the administration shows you the door, and has no choice but to take the word of a juvenile delinquent over somebody with a Masters Degree. The teacher involved was eventually cleared, but he left teaching and I lost contact with him. Nobody in school will look out for a teacher except a union.
The better question is if you value education so much, why aren't you teaching?
There are loads of reds right here on /.
They will moderate my post down.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Certification and Licensure as barriers to entry get lobbied for and enacted by trade groups themselves, not employers. Want to sell Real Estate? Gotta have a license, thanks to the National Association of Realtors. Want to practice law? Gotta have a license thanks to the American Bar Association. Want to be a plumber? An electrician? Or some other tradesman? Gotta have a license. And indeed, want to be a teacher? Gotta have a teaching certificate, thanks to the NEA and AFT.
Contrast that with programmers. There is no law that says you have to be a certified programmer in order to program like there is with these other professions. Any certificate requirements are up to the individual employer. Employers, like you, know that these certificates are largely worthless and don't put a lot of stock in them. I don't, that's for sure.After all those college math courses I took, I can say I agree with you 100% here. No way a PhD mathematician could teach Jr. High.I always laugh at people who hate to pay the plumber. I am a landlord, so I know my way around home depot pretty well, but the only plumbing tool I use anymore is my cell phone. Whatever my plumbers charge, it is not possibly enough to cover the cost of digging around in my tenants' fecal matter. Plumbers earn every cent they charge and then some.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Yes, higher pay might attract more teachers who would be effective, although it would also, just as likely, attract ineffective teachers.
Another component would be to reduce class sizes to more manageable levels. As a California teacher, I have between 35 and 38 each class 12- to 14-year-olds for 50 minutes a day, trying to teach them Algebra when some do not even have two-digit multiplication skills. If we had class sizes in the 20 to 25 range, I could give more individualized attention to my students and find more ways to motivate them. In order to do this, two things would need to happen. We would need more teachers (of which there is already a shortage of) and we would need rooms to put the teachers and students in. The number of schools and classrooms being built is not on par with the population growth. Add in a growing level of apathy towards education in general (this is a learned attitude from parents in most cases), and it is small wonder why the nation's education system in general and California's specifically is performing so poorly.
Can any of our non-American readers whose education systems are ranked higher than the U.S.'s post back with some of the differences you see? I'm specifically interested in class sizes and teacher support. Thank you.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
The first 3 years are absolute hell, until the kids finally accept that you can tough it out.
I recall a company executive who created an internal (to the company) stock market for product ideas... employees could spend effort working on the project to "buy" and product sales could be attributed to those who spent the effort making the product a success)...
Now let's throw a quick twist...
split salary between minimum/required and market value...
I'd also use the stock market "values" as a percent from the whole market and would divide the Market value salary based on that percentage...
Lastly I'd base the stock market values among any of the following:
- employment opportunities for the field of study
- student and parents' interests
- dept of education interests
but then again I think the entire education system could use some attention.
Sure, some are paid more than their productivity or merit might dictate, but the vast majority are underpaid, overworked, and without sufficient resources. I have yet to meet a teacher who doesn't purchase materials for their classroom (forget reimbursement). Nobody congratulates a new teacher on their personal-finance acumen. Communities rarely have enough money to maintain manageable class sizes (i.e. 20 or fewer students per teacher). But our political leaders and experts talk endlessly about how important children and education are - our future, etc. The teachers unions have a point - once you start differentiating between academic subjects, you create subjective differences all over the place. School system budgeting will become even more difficult to understand and time consuming than it is. You can create endless rules to encourage better teaching, but that won't improve the pool of applicants for teaching jobs.
So, double their pay. Across the board. Not just math and science teachers, but everyone.
"Oh no!" you say, "then we'll just be paying the bad teachers and the good teachers!" Well, true, but so what? Teachers are retiring at record rates. Perhaps you've heard of this "baby boomer" generation? Qualified, talented young teachers leave teaching because they don't get the pay/support/supplies they need. We need more teachers, and we need better teachers. Supply, meet demand.
The myth of the underpaid teacher is a myth of the wealthy liberal. Consistently, teaching pay/hour is similar to private sector employment that has similar requirements. In fact, if you WATCH the debate about teacher pay, you will ALWAYS HERE "a first year teacher makes $XX,XXX" where the amount sounds really low to middle and upper middle class parents whose kids are being taught by them.
This ignores the fact that a first year teach is generally 22-23 years old and right out of school. If you compare their salary to a receptionist, admin assistance, or other "just out of school" jobs available to liberal arts school graduates, you'll find that teacher pay is comparable, even without normalizing that they work 2/3s of a year (summer + winter break + spring break + extra holidays comes out to 4 months off out of 12). In that other third, they can teach summer school, tutor, work another seasonal job (depending on part of the country), or just spend time with their family.
In addition, the average kindergarten parent sees that number for a first year kindergarten teacher and thinks, "I couldn't live on that." They don't think, "wow, that's about what I make 5 or 6 years ago when I was right out of school."
Teachers that have established themselves for a number of years will make, after 25 or 30 years, $80,000 - $90,000, which may not seem like good money compared to software engineering, but when you consider that most 55 year old engineers have trouble finding employment, it's NOT a bad career path. They have an AMAZING pension, like all public sector employees. If you look at their lifetime earnings, it's NOT bad pay.
The fact is, if you take two 22 year olds right out of school with degrees in English and mediocre grades, and one becomes a public school teacher and the other takes a clerical job in the private sector, the latter MIGHT make a few more dollars in the first years, but the expected lifetime earnings for the teacher is MUCH higher. In 30 years, those two people are 52 years old. The former is making $90,000, and now has a pension of $60k - $75k built up, while the latter is at the mercy of the market for their 401k, but probably doesn't have the $1.2m saved up to buy the annuity that would match the pension benefit, because even if they are now making $100k-$120k/year as HR manager, they have 13 more years of slaving away, while the teacher can call it a day whenever they want.
In fact, the teacher, who has never worked summers (or has and made more money), has had summers to write, maybe has been working on a novel, etc. Teachers have it good and are well paid... not as well paid as medicine, but certainly as well paid as administrative assistants, receptionists, and other jobs often held by people with similar qualifications in major cities. The only area where teachers are paid poorly is in relatively uneducated areas, where your support staff don't have college degrees and teachers are comparatively only slightly less educated that lawyers.
okay, fine. I have a Ph.D. in history. No, I didn't do it for the money.
But, you know what? Even a HS teacher with a BA in History is a rare thing. Hell, I went to a public HS (in the same county where public schools sought subsidies because the majority of their students spoke "Ebonics"), Math and Sciences were taught by Ph.D.s. History? That was taught by a guy known as "coach." English? We found ourselves being taught by a series of spent pieces of used jet trash who got pinned sophomore year at the sorority, engaged junior year, married at graduation, and divorced two years later. They hated students and they hated the education degree that made them deal with them.
Come to think of it, Coach deemed me unsuitable for AP History, and the sorority hags didn't want me anywhere near their honors courses. The only straight As I got were in Math and the Sciences, particularly the computer courses. So now I publish more in a year than my English teachers actually read, and I get paid to be a historian, whereas Coach didn't think I could hack Advanced Placement, and the only part of my HS education I use on a daily basis consists in foreign language education.
Now, ask yourself: how much math beyond algebra do most HS students need? Likewise for physics. Critical thinking skills are taught in history classes; effective communication in English. Foreign language courses are in themselves valuable.
You can put a dollar value on all these things, and if you did, you'd probably find out that, per student hour in the classroom, "soft skills" make more of a difference than the hard sciences.
So why should we favor math and the hard sciences? By all means, I'm for strengthening our HS system, but to pretend that we need to spend more money to attract only scientists is ridiculous. High School needs specialists in all fields, not Education Majors who can pretend to teach any course. (And on this, my hard science brethren will back me up: we've all seen what education majors can do at universities, and it sure as hell ain't learn a subject well enough to teach it.)
And, to respond to your statement, I, as a guy with a ton of history degrees, find the High School education system stacked against me. I am less qualified than someone with an education degree who got a C- in my course at the university. Heck, I am less qualified than an Athletics major who can be the Assistant Coach of the football team. Yet, because I have a demonstrated set of critical skills, I am more capable of finding a decent-paying job outside of education than Coach or an education major.
Kinda difficult. The teacher's unions seem to have a death grip on the public education system, for starters. AFAIK, there are no non-union teachers in most states' public schools.
For private schools, I suspect that the cost needed to allow that sort of teacher salary would either balloon class sizes (undesirable to most parents) or make tuition unaffordable to most parents, lacking significant subsidies. (I know that, when I graduated from a private school in 1997 that the starting teacher's salary there was below poverty level. Granted, it was one of the least expensive, accredited private schools in the area.)
Canthros
Teaching is neither ditch digging nor civil engineering.
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The solution to this problem is easy. Eliminate public schools and move to an all private education system. That way the market will determine everything, from salary's, to tuition, to other costs. This way parents can choose where their children go, increasing the school's responsibility. The school would have an incentive in hiring well qualified teachers, because if they did not, no one would send their children to that school and the school would have to close. Teachers would also have an incentive to keep up to date in their specific sphere of knowledge knowing that someone younger and fresh out of college would be able to out perform the older teacher if the older teacher did not keep their education updated.
There are several that teachers unions would likely find acceptable on their own. Among them, providing incentives for current teachers to take the courses that would give them the certifications that would make them "fully qualified" under NCLB as math or science teachers, making loan-repayment assistance available to anyone who finances their own qualification as a math/science teacher (whether new teachers in college or existing teachers), or increasing teacher pay across the board.
And differential pay they'd probably go for, if other, broader improvements in labor conditions for all teachers were linked to it.
One has to wonder if this will be an effective method of attracting not only more Science and Math teachers, but the right kind of Science/Math Teachers. Increasing the amount of money could improve the number of teachers available, but has the potential to simply increase the number of bottom feeders who simply take the jobs to make more money. Of course, one could attempt to place filters on this type of money in hopes of attracting better teachers, but then we must ask ourselves one question: Do we want a large number of teachers, regardless of thier quality, or a smaller number of teachers of a certain quality?
Why does a "teacher" need a masters in math to teach 14 year olds high school algebra? What good does it do? Same thing for chemistry or physics.
Isn't encouraging a teacher (in math/science) to get an advanced degree actually making matters worse, ie., they better themselves so they can earn even more in the private sector.
My wife taught English at an inner-city high school where most of the students had parents who didn't care. They sent their kids to school to get them out of the house while they did house cleaning, construction, sold crack, or gave $5 handjobs. Parent/Teacher conference nights had maybe one or two sets of parents attending from each 30+ student class.
Often times the parents were living in Mexico, and the kids were living with other relatives in the USA "to get an education." The problem is, those kids rarely spoke English, and many couldn't even read or write Spanish. They could stay in ESL classes for a couple years, but then they had to go to the regular classes. I don't know if it was a law or a school policy, but the teachers were not allowed to report the kids who were illegal immigrants.
My favorite story from that school was about the time when the principal had a meeting with the mother of one of her students. The principal started off by explaining to the woman that he believed her son was involved in a gang. The mother then smiled and moved her hand to cover the gang tattoo between her thumb and index finger. She didn't give a crap. It was all a joke to her.
The quick way to solve it (for a 5th grader) is compare multiples of 7 to multiples of 11, looking for a multiple of 11 (55) that is 1 less than a multiple of 7 (56). Then you add 5 to the multiple of 7 and get 61, the smallest whole number solution. Then you add 77 (7*11) n times to get all possible whole number solutions. (61, 138, 215, ...)
...)
For all Integer solutions, you can subtract 77 as well. (-93,-16, 61, 138, 215,
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
For a first year teacher (e.g. someone switching careers) the public schools in my Bay Area town pay $36K. For 10 years teaching experience plus a master's degree, it's about $56K. I made $56K in my first computer job (zero years experience and no advanced degress), and that was 1992 dollars, which is about 80-90 in today's dollars. With 15 years experience (and no advanced degree) I make $125K. I love teaching and have a talent for it, but when the principal I interviewed with (for a Math and Physics position) told me the salary structure, I laughed, and then I left.
My wife teaches at a private school and works 30 hours a week more than I do. Since it is a private school they were able to offer her the 10 years + advanced degree level, but I still out-earn her 3 to 1.
Other schools in the area pay less, and some in the white-flight suburbs pay significantly more, but still a lot less than I make. And the work is more difficult, more important, and takes more time and energy.
Was it your sig that, at one time, held a link to Article V's Repeal the 17th page? That page has my favorite link for expressing, neatly and with footnote documentation, how the legislators have slowly and carefully destroyed the power of the states. As if the Civil War didn't do enough to that end.
Although I don't agree with the underlying principle of slavery (inescapable debt is slavery, and there's plenty of that today), I have a great respect for the SCOTUS decision elaborated here. In the discussion of the SCOTUS decision from 1857 it is quite plain that, at least at that time, the Supreme Court recognized that Congress tried, on occasion, to pass laws which were outside of its legal authority. I guess they didn't have the "interstate commerce" excuse back then or, more likely, the lawyers and judges knew that the legal definition of commerce, as it applied to the Constitution, was specifically limited.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
How many times are you people going to post "just increase spending blah blah..."
OECD already ranks US per capita spending on primary education as the 2nd highest on Earth, yet results show our ranking in global standardized tests decreasing every year for three decades.
http://www.oecd.org/
The really sad part is, you know every step of that bureaucratic process was created to correct some egregious unfair teacher firing in the past. So weep for humanity, it's chock full of evil people.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
One thing i've noticed since I moved to the US, is that grading systems are structured very differently.
In high school and university in Scotland, i was pretty much told that 'no-one gets 100%'. In my entire academic career I got 100% on a piece of work maybe once or twice, yet I finished top of my class in both high school and degree program.
At university I was told that if I knew everything that was taught in the lectures and homework then I should be able to comfortably get a B, which was assessed as 60-70%. Anything you'd ever been taught (or supposed to have been taught) at any point in the degree program was fair game for an exam question.
I was astounded that some schools in the US need 90% for an A but then I discovered that it seems relatively easy to attain that sort of percentage. It's like the whole system is run like slashdot book reviews: "it was badly written, hard to follow and inaccurate in places, 9/10"
Here in Anchorage, Alaska the starting salary is around $35,000. This is about $5k-$10k/year less than the starting salary of an accountant, but do keep in mind that the accountant works 12 months/year while the teacher only works 9.
When the teachers union was whining about salaries a few years ago, there was an editorial in the paper claiming that the starting salary isn't quite sufficient to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Although I looked for the explaination as to why one person should be entitled to two bedrooms, I was unable to find it. Maybe a lot of local teachers are single parents?
Oh noes. Don't give all the military power to "the intelligent trouble makers". How long before they would stage a coup? How long do you think it would be after that before a certain GPA was required to vote?
We are all just people.
You don't have to be close to the student's skill level in to teach them well. You have to be (a) at least as good as the skill level in you want them to reach and (b) a good skill level in the subject of teaching.
Teaching is a subject to learn just like computer science, math or English. The difference is that you need to learn a second subject to be able to do anything with knowledge of this one.
(disclosure:an ex-professional ski instructor still banging my forehead switching to the more-lucrative world of software architecture)
I feel a little out of place commenting here, but I wanted to point out that the problem isn't necessarily that we don't have enough qualified teachers. Perfectly qualified teachers that just don't teach are a big part of it. I'm in high school. My science teacher, while qualified, has been with the school so long that she's taught many of her student's parents. At this point, she just doesn't care. She plays solitaire on her computer all day, does absolutely nothing to control the class, and, instead of lecturing, plays informational videos. Just today, she had no lesson plan at all for the class for over an hour. In order to keep students' grades up, she ignores cheating, and often allows students to use their textbooks on tests. The school has gotten numerous complaints about her, but they're powerless to do anything because she's been with the school so long.
I'm sure that things like this happen all over the country. I have to think that while unqualified teachers are a problem, apathetic teachers who know that unions make it impossible to fire them are even worse. We have to do something about them before we start offering any sort of incentives. Otherwise, we'd just be rewarding them for staying.
While I wouldn't mind being paid a little extra (and I would qualify under the test score requirements, etc), neither of the Kentucky bills would have addressed the real issues that keep our kids from really learning Math. One of them only planned to reward the AP teachers. This would mainly reward the teachers who teach the kids that make teaching easy (probably most Slashdotters)and the ones who teach at the "East End" schools with lots of AP classes. Easy money, no changes in teaching ability or strategies. The other would reward only math ability, not teaching ability. I'm at a high school that has seen at least one too many end-of-career engineers with plenty of math ability who thought that teaching would be an easy, stress-free way to end those last 5-10 years before retirement who wound up burning out, having heart attacks, or becoming laughingstocks to the kids because they couldn't deal with adolescent behavior. If you're going to have differentiated pay, let it be based on what your students learn from you. Not the standardized tests (otherwise we'd all gravitate to those "rich" schools), but on whether the kids know more Algebra, Geometry, whatever, at the end of the year than at the beginning.
Teachers objected to differential pay
Differential pay already exists in every school in Kentucky -- it's just that the differential is how many years you've worked instead of which subject you teach. Teachers who have been working for 20 years make 50% to 100% more than those in their first 5 years. Somehow, the Kentucky teachers' union has no problem with that kind of differential pay.
Different market values.
Exactly like ditch digging vs. civil engineering.
The fact that teachers all 'work' on the same kids doesn't mean their contributions have equal value. The ditch digger/engineer analogy works even granting their are few teachers with as easy a job as digging ditches and no teachers with a job as difficult as civil engineering.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Quite a few states have no, or at least no mandatory, teacher unions, particularly, IIRC, in the South. Does it help? Well, let me just quote the abstract of the paper "Do Teacher Unions Hinder Educational Performance? Lessons Learned from State SAT and ACT Scores", Harvard Educational Review, v70 n4 p437-66 Win 2000:
Comparison of standardized test scores and degree of teacher unionization in states found a statistically significant and positive relationship between the presence of teacher unions and stronger state performance on tests. Taking into account the percentage of students taking the tests, states with greater percentages of teachers in unions reported higher test performance.
The Unions will not rest until children learn nothing and schools are bloated with dull and useless teachers.
Oh wait, they've already won.
Why don't you just look at what type of systems works elsewhere and why, instead or resorting to your own favorite pre-conceived, and often ill informed, notions of blaming Unions, Teachers, Government, Capitalism, Communism, Liberals, Conservatives etc etc ad nauseum.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
Education schools have the consistently lowest average SAT scores among their students.
They also have the consistently highest average GPA among their graduates.
You connect the dots. I'd rate a masters in education as equal to an AA at best. I'm willing to bet many ed students start college smarter then they finish.
Lots of ed graduates are under qualified to be receptionists or administrative assistants.
The education schools are the root of the problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Correlation does not imply causation. Learned that one in college...
Repeat after me: correlation does not imply causation.
Schools in the South have been in sad shape for a long time because the states themselves are financially in bad shape. Further, states with greater percentages of teachers in unions also tend to be more liberal, and tend to vote Democrat more often. Democrats tend to spend more on education. There are plenty of other factors that more than adequately explain that statistic that are not in any way resulting from the unions.
For the unions to have an appreciable effect on the quality of education, they would have to make it so that educators are not the most poorly paid educated profession in their state. They have not done that. I've watched as unions make it harder to get rid of bad teachers, cause disruption of education via strikes, etc., producing salaries that are not significantly higher than equivalent salaries adjusted for cost of living in non-union areas, and then taking union dues off the top of that. I have watched the unions utterly fail to have any positive impact over and over again, and I'm not impressed.
Here's the math. California spends on the order of $7000 per student per year. Multiply that times 30 students in a class, and you come out with $210,000 per class per year. If only $40,000 of that goes to the teacher, where does the other $170,000 go? I would argue that most of that money is wasted, and that is the reason why despite having the highest education spending of any industrialized country, we have one of the worst education systems. Unions can't fix that, though. Unions can't throw the incompetent administrators out on their backsides or force the sorts of sweeping restructuring that is needed. That can only happen through legislation. Thus, unions are nothing more than a band-aid on a severed limb. They don't fix the problem and they cause more problems than they solve.
Want to fix our education problems? Here's how. Teacher salaries need to literally double overnight, and ideally quadruple. Anything less is going to show no real benefit. It has to be a very large change to catch the attention of young people who are considering going into education. They need to say, "I could become a lawyer, but if I become a teacher, I'll make more money." To be competitive with other fields, a K-12 teacher in the Bay Area, CA should be making $120,000 out of college, and $150,000 within five years. Instead, they make as little as $42,000 starting out. In spite of unions, they are only making about 30% more than a teacher in Tennessee, where food costs about 30% less, buying a house costs 90% less, renting probably costs about 60% less, and so on. Yes, I'm pulling those numbers out of my backside, but they're in the general ballpark. You'd be hard pressed to live on $42k a year in the Bay Area. You could live on $30,000 in Tennessee much more comfortably. You could even buy a house if you saved your money wisely.
The biggest problems our schools face are, IMHO, redundancy, wasteful spending, and obscenely poor administration. We have a cafeteria at each school in a district. To cut costs, why not mass-produce the food at one school, then send a driver out in a truck to deliver it in bulk to the others, preheated and ready to serve? To cut costs, why not lease facilities in places where leasing is cheaper than buying (e.g. the Bay Area)?
For that matter, do you know how much money we waste by pumping funds into corporations that provide textbooks? Why do we do that? So that someone can get rich off our education system? If the teachers know the material, USE THAT. Engage the teachers on a statewide basis to collectively write and electronically publish their own statewide textbooks. Each teacher could contribute an article on a subject that they are familiar with, citing primary and secondary sources. Then, pay someone to compile those and turn it into a finished textbook which the state then OWNS. Better, if you organize it in such a way that the tea
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Why waste his tax dollars educating a bunch of ungrateful Americans when other countries have more smart people than they know what to do with.
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/473893dc-ccde-11db-a938-0
My Dad reckoned there is nothing wrong with this country that a good hard depression would not cure.
> Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"
Yes, pay everyone more. That's the standard union answer for most education problems. The fact that studies have shown no correlation between general teacher compensation and student performance is something the union would rather you ignore. They'd also ask that you ignore the fact that real spending per student has increased significantly since the 60s, or that Kansas City schools showed no improvement in performance after a judge mandated huge increases in spending.
And when the pay increase doesn't work, the union's response will be "we're not paid enough!"
For those who claim Federal interference is the big problem (and yes, I'd agree that's one of the big problems), kindly note that the Department of Education was created by Jimmy Carter as a reward to the NEA for its support of Carter's candidacy, and that a large chunk of NCLB was written by Ted Kennedy (as a long-time liberal Democrat, he's pretty much guaranteed to be friendly with the NEA).
Frankly, the only real solution is real competition (i.e., school choice INCLUDING private schools), and the unions will fight that tooth and nail (as they have many times in Colorado). That's only natural, since unions depend on the enforced absence of competition in order to extort wages higher than the market rate.
The trouble with public schools, not only in the US, is that they are ... PUBLIC.
.. that's just fantasy land.
The public sector is generally not able to do anything as well as the private
sector: not education, not healthcare, not building roads and bridges, nothing.
It has to do with accountability, metrics, a free market for talent and more.
This is not to suggest that the private sector is perfect -- far from it. It's just
far less bad than the public sector.
So why is the teachers union the problem? Because they ensure that the school
system remains a public sector affair, whose main job is to employ teachers,
its *second* job is to educate students, and its *third* job is to serve parents.
If the system was privatized, for example, teachers might be hired based on
supply and demand -- you know, those exotic "market forces." If it happens that
people with math and science skills are in higher demand, because they can get
jobs outside of teaching, then maybe they should make more. That doesn't mean
that they do more or less important work -- just that they are more in demand
in the labor market, and must be paid more to be retained by any employer.
Note that this is not an argument against government *funded* education, simply
one against government *operated* schools. What many have proposed in the past,
and will never happen given the political clout of teachers unions, is that
all students receive government vouchers for educational services, which they
can then use to shop around for a school and program of their choice. Government
money in this case goes to the consumer, not the producer of the service, who
gets to use the market to make smart choices.
Schools would get better fast -- or go out of business.
School districts would disappear, and good riddance: they are just fat, lazy
and ineffectual bureaucracies.
Students would get better results, from better programs, administered
by smarter managers and more motivated teachers.
Who loses? The union, and teachers who happen to have seniority
rather than skills.
Who wins? Society.
Gonna happen? Fat chance. Teachers Unions everywhere will make damn
sure it can't and won't.
The real solution to this and similar problems is to outlaw labor unions in
industries where unemployment rates are below a certain threshold - say 5%.
They serve no useful social function -- only act against the public good.
Oh well
Welcome to CAL-EE-FORN-E-AH!
I'd suggest that a fundamental problem with this proposal is that you risk paying Math teachers more, but retaining those 40% that are under-qualified as you still can't get rid of them, and they game the pay system: then you'd have under-qualified teachers making more than their qualified peers in other subjects.
Wouldn't that be a problem?
--
$tar -xvf
To clear a few things up (from my knowledge of the teaching experience in California):
Teachers with PhDs and Master's degrees get more salary than those without. There is already differential pay based on degree. Your base pay is based on seniority, and there are additional stipends for degrees.
The skills to teach AP physics are quite different than those required to teach, say, remedial English. Remedial English is much more difficult to teach. Once you realize that your teaching plan really doesn't change much from year to year (other than to keep up with ever-tweaked federal/district requirements), the main teaching skill required is managing the classroom: teaching those that don't understand, handling behavior issues, trying to improve as many students as possible. Assuming the remedial English & AP physics teachers understand their own subjects with equal depth, it's much more difficult in remedial English in comparison.
Also, there's already a market force in that math/science teachers are in much higher demand than English teachers. Even though pay is tied to seniority (and prior education), you will be lucky to get a steady job, or a full-time position, with your degree in liberal studies. But with a math degree, you have your choice of positions.
Seeing as it was the teachers unions that helped to create mazes like this when trying to remove a bad teacher, i think you might have a really good idea.
How does an inept teacher get tenure? Were the once good, and now they are bad, or were they given tenure while being a bad teacher? That seems to be the problem to fix. But I've never been in a place with a strong teachers union. There was no concept of "tenure" for public school teachers in Texas. I believe it was also illegal for them to strike, so no one would take their demands seriously.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, I don't make much money. I've got a math degree and a master's that I'll be paying off for quite a few years to come. And my math friends who decided not to become teachers make significantly more money than I do with significantly less schooling. Should math & science teachers make more money. Sure. A shortage in applicants means you need to increase the pay. That's pretty simple.
In spite of that, it's not the low pay that bothers me. It's the hours and the working conditions. I get to school at 7:15am. I leave at 5:15pm. If I've had 20 minutes to sit down and have lunch, I'm lucky. Most days I get absolutely no break. And I take homework home every weekend.
I just want fewer students and fewer preps. I want to get to know my students. I want to be able to talk with them. I want to know what they know and what they need to learn. I want to help them when they're struggling, and lift them up when they're having a bad day. I want to get in their face and challenge them. I want them to see that failing is not okay.
I want control over my curriculum. I want my students to decide what's important to them and study math through their ideas. Any curriculum abstracted away from the individual, any curriculum standardized to what some corporate suit things is important will fail to inspire the majority of students. Give me that job. I want to inspire my students. And I have an idea how to do it. But your all-important testing is holding me back.
That's what I want. I'm okay with the money. I'm not okay with the huge number of disengaged students and marginalized teachers.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Want to fix our education problems? Here's how. Teacher salaries need to literally double overnight, and ideally quadruple.
Yeah - let's replace incompetent retards with overpaid incompetent retards. That's the ticket.
By that logic, our politicians would perform better if we paid them better...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Dear god--it's good you didn't go into teaching. Your students wouldn't respect you, because your writing skills are far below those of the average high school student. How could kids learn from you if they can't see past the flood of errors in what you write?
Honestly, I think we go about teaching incorrectly. The federal government should hire, say, the 500 best teachers in the country to spend two years writing text books and curricula wiki-style. They should open those texts to public criticism for a year or so. Then we should make the courses, texts, and tests available to every citizen for free over the internet.
Later, expand the program to include basic training for common careers. Hire economists to produce and publish salary expectations for 20-year periods.
We could turn the USA into the greatest service-based economy in the world with only a few billion invested. In doing so, we wouldn't have to choose between hiring far-below-average teachers or paying huge taxes to fund public education. We would have an informed marketplace of skills, and would have the full benefits of "The Market" driving our school system.
Everyone wins, except for the unqualified people (like the parent poster) who think they would be good at teaching.
Taxpayers just won't pay what is required to have qualified people teaching our students at the current 30:1 student:teacher ratio. We need to take advantage of economy of scale, and put information technology to work to bring the best teachers to every student!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Guess which one I'm using right now.
The irony of Bill Gates' comments about education in this country is that I'd much rather (and currently do) work for him than in a k12 environment babysitting kids who can't be kicked out for being idiots and intentionally wasting everyone else's time. I still value teachers highly, but would rather pay off my debt incurred while gaining those degrees than spend 90% of my time as a teacher doing anything but teaching.
In an effort to give kids a consequence-free environment for their precious tender little psyches, we've put the consequences on the people who deserve it least and I'm not a martyr for that cause.
Think about it this way. The number of new teachers who quit after one year is 50% of the total of all new teachers. By two years, 75% of all new teachers have quit. Anyone who doesn't see that as the #1 problem to examine is clearly ignorant of it or a legislator.
But can you apply it? Absence of correlation in the direction you want to claim does imply absence of causation. Correlation is necessary but not sufficient to establish causation. That there is a statistically significant correlation between unionization and outcomes in the opposite direction necessary to support the claim that unionization harms outcomes certainly does not prove that unionization produces good results, but it is, OTOH, strong evidence against the claim that unionization produces bad results, since establishing that requires showing both a correlation between unionization and bad results and proposing a testable hypothesis as to a mechanism which provides a causal explanation for that correlation (and then, testing that hypothesis by validating its other predictions.)
I see a lot of people on here talking about two powerful the teachers unions are. I wish you people had been around when I was teaching high school because at the two schools I taught at the only thing the union did was take dues out of my paycheck.
As someone who was an English major and a math minor, let me say that I found teaching English was a lot harder than teaching math.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
As a parent NOT living in the USA, I want to thank US politicians for the great job of killing the competitiveness of American kids! There will be less competition for MY kids in the future!
My wife is a high school Physics and Biology teacher in California. Believe me, I had similar acid opinions to those expressed in this thread, until I got to see the reality from the other side.
These teachers really work their ass off. I used to think they were all cozy working from 8 AM to 3:15 PM, but that's just the visible portion. Tutoring after school and during lunch time, parent conferences on evenings and weekends, and virtually endless papers to correct. No time to go to the bathroom (no kidding).
They have virtually no resources and many times we end up spending lots of money from our own pocket to get the right materials for the labs. All while the administrators make tons of money, BTW.
But what really doesn't fit in my head is the student population. It doesn't matter how "fun" you make the classes, they just don't care. There is no interest in science and math. As a computer engineer, I can't understand people who wouldn't be moved by the beauty of math and the sciences, but it's freaking everywhere. And I'm talking about Silicon Valley...
Parents are so busy, working 2-3 jobs, that they simply don't have control over their own kids, and kids know it and abuse it. Of course, when things don't work out, they blame the teacher.
It is interesting that it is relatively easy to compare teacher pay with the private sector based on the U.S. Government's Bureau of Labor Statistics. This article gives the comparison of teacher pay per hour relative to other professions. It is similar to the analysis where you see that airline pilots are highly compensated for the number of hours they work. The same is also true for teachers. Teachers make slightly less than physicists and geologists but more than economists per hour. http://www.manhattaninstitute.org/html/cr_50_t2.ht m [Manhattan Institute]
See the full report here. http://www.manhattaninstitute.org/html/cr_50.htm [Manhattan Institute] It is one of the best articles I have read on teacher pay.
Two of the most interesting points are that there is no correlation between teacher pay (or per pupil spending) and student performance. And, in an interesting coincidence, the article notes that the largest school district in Kentucky (Louisville Metro) has the third-highest pay per hour in the country, where the average public school teacher is paid 79% more than the average white-collar worker.
From grade school to university the question I heard most often from fellow students in various math classes was, "How can we use this in every-day life". Most math classes I took were uninspiring, boring, rote memorization with no discussion of how it was used in practice.
Sure, it's not difficult to see the use in basic math, geometry, descriptive geometry, trigonometry and even some aspects of calculus but I never did understand what the hell advanced algebra or integrated algebra/trig. were for, other than a prerequisite for calculus, which was needed to take differential equations.
I feel practical use of the particular math being taught should be major part of the class. From what I have seen of my grand children's maths homework, practical use is taught at their school but they have the benefit of being close to a major university and have student teachers that get to experiment with ideas such as yours. I don't know how other schools fare.
Also, there is not a strong correlation between money spent on schools and quality of education. Anyone doubting this should look directly at our nation's capital. Washington DC spends more per student than any other state, yet has the worst schools in the nation. Yay DC.A decent rant, but save it for another discussion where it's more relevant. No one is talking about privatizing schools. Sure, there are private schools, but this whole discussion is about public schools.The US Minimum wage is $5.15/hr and teachers work roughly 3/4 of the year which works out to roughly 1500 hours. Multiply that by 5.15 and you get a little less than $8,000. So if US teachers were paid minimum wage, they would earn roughly $8,000.00 per year. The median salary for a US middle school or high school teacher is $40,000.00 per year, or roughly 5x the US minimum wage.
So what was your point, again? It sounds like teachers in the US and Australia are similarly compensated. Why should competent US teachers get up and emigrate to Australia where everyone has a supersize chip on their shoulder?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
In other news, test score were lower in states where imbreeding is common. Like the man said correlation does not imply causation.
Teachers should be paid more period. I don't understand why a profession as integral to the success of our society is so grossly undervalued. My sister is a secondary math teacher and makes far less than half what I make as a software engineer. Thats sick. These people are important and society NEEDS them. Without better pay these very intelligent people are going to go persue other careers. I propose we do away with astronomical hollywood and pro sports salaries and give it to the people that matter. No, the next star studded la la land production doesn't matter, teachers do. Sorry for the rant, but this just makes me sick.
Tell you what, I'll consider your cost increase when teachers must:
- Completely give up unions
- Pay for benefits themselves
- Be paid according to the subject competence of their exiting students
- Compete for top students so they can get those most likely to be competent in the subject
- Hold an advanced degree in the subject they are teaching
- Be licensed by passing a state bar (something more impressive than say CBEST, which is a freakin' joke)
- Be subject to review by an ethics board with the power to pull their license
- Teach all year, most weekends and most holidays
- Work 80 hours per week upon starting falling to 60 hours after 5 years
- Carry malpractice insurance and be subject to lawsuits every time a student passes their class but doesn't learn anything
- Have the ethics board review them if they sued too often for malpractice
Let me know when you've got all that. I'm not even going to consider that kind of pay without something close to this kind of risk.To cut costs, why not eliminate busing in urban areas where city bus routes already exist?
Because then you would attract predators to ride the city bus. Busses rarely run on time. City bus drivers are not held to the same background check as School bus drivers.
To cut costs, why not build schools with lots and lots of triple-pane windows so that you can exclusively use natural lighting except on cloudy days?
Because it is really expensive to replace those when they get broken, and natural lighting tends to be very harsh and difficult to control.
To cut costs, why not build schools with INTERIOR HALLS so that you don't lose so much heat/air conditioning when the kids open the doors?
Some schools have that. It doesn't help very much. Door openings do not have a flat distribution.
Instead of photocopying handouts for the students, assign them all tablet computers, which are infinitely reusable.
They aren't infinitely reusable, they're easy to steal, they wear out after 3-4 years, their battery would be good at most for 1 year, and the cost of just one is probably less than the cost of every photocopy that kid is likely to receive during his entire career. Printed paper is also easier to read.
Cut administrative costs by grouping multiple districts under a single regional school board with a single administrative staff responsible for paying salaries, budget management, etc.
Large school districts typically waste more money than smaller ones. I was a product of the LAUSD, second largest district in the country (at the time). I can't think of a single thing that monster district had going for it that a smaller district didn't, except maybe for their couple of magnet schools (which didn't save any money, just gave them something to brag about).
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Class size really doesn't seem to be a great indicator of quality of education. Good teachers teach well, and bad teachers teach poorly. It is a great thing to do to make parents feel good and increase the number of teachers, though (and more teachers means more union dues, of course).
Canthros
Wait, wait, wait.
Taking into account the percentage of students taking the tests,
I can't access the article, but that looks like a really big caveat right there. What does the percentage of students taking the ACT or SAT do? Could be that unionised teachers turn out more and smarter students, or it might be the case that the only ones willing to bother are the best and brightest in the first place. I'm not spending $15 to find out right now, though.
In any case, I didn't actually say anything about the quality of unionised instruction, did I? I observed that the teachers unions have a pretty strong grip on the public schools. You haven't really disputed that, and your counter-example is that 'quite a few states' have no mandatory unions. (Perhaps you could offer a list? I'd actually like to be enlightened.) Unions, as I understand, are well within their power to force membership on all non-management employees at a workplace once the union is established. Unionisation is democratic, but membership is often not voluntary. In which case, the union may not be officially mandatory, even if every teacher is a union member.
I also observed that, hey, tuition is expensive, and it has to increase to cover increases in teacher salaries, which also has bupkis to do with test scores.
Look, I'll confess that this is way off my subject of expertise (and I use the word expertise with a certain amount of sarcasm), but could you at least address something I was talking about?
Canthros
People with english degrees will accept much lower pay to work in schools, since there aren't many other opportunities for them compared to the opportunities that people with math and engineering backgrounds have. This is another case where the school unions have screwed up the education system. Personally, I'd like to see them crushed, and new unionless school's put in place.
Bring in more teachers who are qualified, at a higher pay rate. In many cases, where union dues are based on a percentage of wage, this is going to mean:
a) A temporary drop in members paying lower union dues of X
b) A surge in members paying higher union dues of Y
So financially, it would actually benefit the union in that manner as well.
Face it, in the private sector as well as the public, being connected, being at the top, is a self-perpetuating thing. Once you're in, they have to pay you to leave, and they usually pay well. And this is ignoring the obvious nepotism, sexual favors, and ass-kissing that we all know is pervasive. I like capitalism too, but we need to kill the myths about capitalism. Bill Gates didn't get to be the world's richest man by making a better product, and the corporate ratrace is only nominally a meritocracy.
It should be "Higher Pay for American Math and Science Teachers". Not every Slashdot visitor is American.
Presently, I am employed as a Substitute Teacher while working on my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics (5-12) with a teaching licensure at Western Governors University @ http://www.wgu.edu/. My education at WGU will make me a highly qualified Math teacher upon graduation and I will be able to teach from Grades 5 through 12. WGU's courses are all COMPETENCY based, which means that I have to have a grade of B (3.00) or better to receive a PASS on my transcript. I don't have the luxury of sitting in a classroom to receive Cs and Ds, just for being in class like a lump on a log. Here are the Math courses I have to take (14 different subject areas in all): Mathematics Content (5-12) Part I: Precalculus, Calculus I, Calculus II, Discrete Mathematics Mathematics Content (5-12) Part II: Calculus III, Analysis, Probability, Statistics Mathematics Content (5-12) Part III: College Algebra, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra Mathematics Content (5-12) Part IV: Euclidean Geometry, Non-Euclidean Geometry, Abstract Algebra As you can see there are a lot of Math courses that I have to take to be highly qualified to teach Mathematics in middle/high school. I also have to take many Math specific teaching courses and other courses to round out my education. The end result will be a COMPETENT teacher in the classroom. I will be working as a Substitute Teacher for two years before I graduate, so I will gain some very valuable classroom experience until then. Tell me... Why shouldn't I get more pay than someone that took Basket Weaving 101 at university? I also have a degree as a Computer Analyst/Programmer. To have a Math teacher that is gifted with computer knowledge is very hard to find (from what I have seen). I do think I deserve more pay, and I am going to demand it when I graduate. In fact, I can because of the persistent Mathematics teacher shortage. I can pretty well go anywhere in the USA or Canada (where I am from) and get the position I want. After my first year of teaching, I am going to start either the Master of Arts Mathematics Education (K-6, 5-9, or 5-12) OR the Master of Education - Learning and Technology program at WGU. Most likely, I will choose to do the latter since I am an advocate of using more technology in the classroom. The biggest problems in the classroom, from my work as a Substitute Teacher, are: 1. Students thinking it is OK to disrespect a teacher 2. Parents not giving a damn about their child's education (really sad) Until you solve these two problems, nothing will ever change in the public school system. Teachers have to be shown respect or else classroom management is quite difficult at best. I have observed many things students do in class to try a teacher's patience - I am glad I am seeing all of this crap before I graduate. I was subbing in one Math class last month. In one of the Algebra 2 classes, a student pulls out a portable DVD player and proceeds to watch a movie in class. I told him to put it away - he just ignored me. He turned off the sound and put on the close captioning. Now that is a total lack of respect for me as a teacher. If I did that when I was in school, my ass would have been beaten by my parents when I got home, just for disrespecting the teacher. I just found out I have the authority to confiscate such items and send them immediately to the office if the student causes me furthter problems. One of the biggest problems in the classroom is the presence of the Apple iPod or cell phones. Students think they have the right to listen to music or play with their cell phone while I am teaching important Mathematics concepts - they want to be bloody entertained. Unbelievable! Now, I warn all of my classes at the beginning... If I see a cell phone or iPod, I take it away from the student. Simple! The most important thing I have learned so far from being a Substitute Teacher - you have to take control of the class at the very beginning or the students will proceed to walk all over you. I had one class do that to me - NEVER AGAIN. Let's just say I felt
If anything, I am quite confident that I would have been a better teacher than a scientist. The skill sets do not overlap completely but they do overlap substantially.
Also, the typical starting salary for a scientist is around 80k. I made more working as an intern for my company during a summer as an undergraduate than I would have made as a starting teacher.
Private schools pay according to qualification. So the better qualified go there more and their teachers are usually High Distinction in their specialty. Call it snobbery (somehow) but why inspire the students with a job that leaves them not proportionally better off for the effort. That poor kid wants money, not just knowledge, so offer it to them.
Mind you, I would not want to be a private school teacher, because the effort expected leaves no time for me. Many public teachers, because of the lack of interest in class, have much less work loads. Ive seen, worked next to it as the IT guy, in both systems.
and I get a pension, benefits, etc. It's hard to compare with numbers from NYC where the cost of living is so high. Teachers there start in the low fifties, which is higher than the national average for all teachers, yet 50k means you are barely at the edge of the middle-class. There are probably not a lot of science jobs in NYC itself, but if there were, they would have six-figure starting salaries. Yes, teachers can make a pretty good living, but only if they survive the job for twenty years. Most teacher pay scales are heavily back-loaded.
It's pretty simple. Most people with technical skills can make far more in the private sector than they can teaching. If we don't pay them market wages, we shouldn't expect many to show up.
Role vs. Roll Perhaps you were the victim of a lower market value English teacher.
You cannot optimise two criteria simultaneously, not without deciding on a tradeoff between them. For example, if Kentucky develops an innovative new maths program, and (a big if) if it actually helps, that will damage uniformity for decades until the innovations reach the most backward school districts. The complications don't stop there. If the new program is a success, are those teaching it permitted to make further improvements, or must they wait for other teachers to catch up? Are you for such innovation (pursuit of high quality), or are you against (serious pusuit of uniformity).
Realise also that chosing one particular goal does not uniformly promote all policies that tend towards the attainment of that goal. The choice of a particular goal tends to push society towards the policies that most easily achive the chosen goal, with forseeable and sometimes unfortunate implications for lesser objectives.
If we chose uniformity as our goal, we must expect to see uniformity being produced in the easiest way. It is hard to improve a poor education system and easy to degrade a good one, so the pursuit of uniformity is likely to result in leveling down.
Meanwhile, similar reasoning applies to chosing excellence as our goal. It is hard to see how to improve good schools, one imagines that they are good exactly because they already employ the best techniques. On the other hand one may hope to improve poor schools simply by copying what the better schools do. An explicit goal of excellence is unlikely in itself to cause an improvement in every school: there is a huge gap between chosing your goal and knowing how to achieve it. Nevertheless an explicit goal of excellence is likely to lead to a levelling up because that way of raising the average need not wait on the creation of new knowledge about how to teach.
Since we must chose between uniformity and excellence, let us chose excellence: the pursuit of excellence has a built-in bias to uniformity. And let us reject uniformity: the pursuit of uniformity has a built-in biase towards failure.
I discussed this with a teacher-friend before, but in the context of language teachers.
Different departments and subjects have different supplies and demands. Now, paying more for certain skills would work. However, that would divide their union.
The only acceptible approach, to the union, would be to pay every teacher more so that it attracts more science and language teachers.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
You can label everything the parent said as 'opinion' and then proceed to lambaste them with ad hominem's but that won't change the fact that most of what was said was true. I won't bother MST3King your post as I don't think your 'points' were sufficiently good to merit such treatment, but I will say that your post screams of the same sort of fake indignation a child might feign when denying their guilt with respect to some mischief - even after being caught red handed by their parents. The public school system is broken and very few will deny that. The solution to fixing it isn't going to come from within, either. Self-satisfied, self-entitled, self-worshiping and just generally selfish teachers and administrators are a large part of what drug the schools down to their current state. These people simply aren't qualified to lead the way out - and you know it. That's why you're so mad, and that's why you've chosen to lash out at the valid criticisms directed at your profession instead of addressing them in an adult fashion.
the point of paying math and science teachers more isn't that they "deserve" it, but that that's the market price since they have other options in industry
More importantly were the responsibilities Taiwanese students are given. They spend the first half hour, maybe longer, cleaning the school. They actually have them sweeping the floors and cleaning bathrooms. They didn't necessarily do a good job but rest assured that they were much more reluctant to engage in vandalism knowing that they would be cleaning up the mess the following day.
Imagine the uproar if a school tried that sort of thing in the US. I'm sure lawyers would sweep in with their claims child labor laws were violated. But the fact is that this instilled a sense of responsibility in students.
Which is one of the many reasons we homeschool. Dang straight the children are going to help with the chores, and certainly to clean up any mess or damage that they make. It does instill responsibility and discipline.
Switch to Spanish for formal education. There seems to be a ready supply of potential teachers just to the south who will gladly teach for half the pay of English teachers.
Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price is not really a good idea.
I think you at the very least risk hiring those absent-minded professor types who instinctively reply, "Would you like fries with that?" whenever a student asks for anything.
You know, or, "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special Orders don't upset us!"
Please stop stalking me, bro.
People who teach usually do it for intangibles. The difference for math and science is that they could find jobs doing something else, receiving a LOT more pay. We all know this. We should also realize that in the foreseeable future in the U.S. math and science teachers will never be paid anything close to what they could earn doing something else. So don't bother to pretend to compete on pay. It won't happen, can't happen. So what to do? Remove the negatives, of course! Raise all teachers' pay significantly so they won't have cost of living hardships and to help restore the respect due the vocation by society. Remove problem students from regular classes. "Mainstreaming" might be a good idea for children with some types of handicaps and problems, but it's a terrible idea for disruptive students. Remove any truly disruptive students from regular classrooms immediately. Reduce teachers' loads by having them teach classes no more than 2/3 of the day rather than 80-100%. Planning and grading takes a lot of time, or at least it should. Keep politics and religion as far away from schools, administration, and school boards as possible. Elected school boards, at least in my area, are a disaster. Appointed boards were much better when we had that. Obviously that depends on who's doing the appointing. There's a movement to use "research-based" methods in the classroom. Good idea--use things that have been observed to work, don't experiment on all the kids all the time. Expand this to administration. Use "research-based" methods in education departments at local, state, and federal level. That would put a quick end to the ridiculous amount of testing of facts and figures. Then teachers could concentrate on teaching kids how to think rather than teaching them facts and algorithms. Finally, remove the reasons for avoiding/quitting teaching, and good teachers will, over time, mostly crowd out the bad.
Being able to regurgitate what you were taught in class doesn't really demonstrate that you learned it. I feel being able to apply your knowledge from one class to build on something you learned in a prerequisite class demonstrates a much better depth of knowledge.
How many schools in America? I've lost count...
How many children going to school in America? I've lost count on that too.
Anecdotes are a nice way to form biases that ultimately harm you.
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You are most definitely an idiot in the first degree.
Completely give up unions? I have no problem with that as unions are fucking useless IMO. All they will do is take away my hard-earned money as a teacher.
Pay for benefits themselves? Hello! It's called a bloody deduction from a teacher's gross pay.
Yes, I should be paid according to some lazy-assed students' performance. They all fail because they don't want to do anything and then I don't get paid. That doesn't fly with me.
Compete for top students? What is this? A fucking contest? Welcome to the PRICE IS RIGHT!
An advanced degree? How about a bloody degree in the field you are teaching?
CBEST? Well everyone knows that California's education system is a complete joke and the laughing stock of the nation. Nothing new there.
Why should I be subject to an ethics board, when I haven't done anything wrong?
Teach all year round, including holidays and weekends? Are you fucking crazy? Don't I deserve some time with my family after a long day at work?
Work 80 hours a week? Yeah sure.
Students suing teachers? I guess that is no different than their stupid fucking parents suing schools and teachers over the stupidest shit possible.
You, Sir, are a complete 'tard.
The reason we have so many underintelligent teachers is that unless you really are devoted to educating kids, you're likely to choose a career that pays better if you are smart enough to handle it. Thus, you get two groups of people as teachers---clueless teachers and really dedicated, intelligent teachers---with very little in-between. And since there aren't enough of the latter to be able to just can the former, you're stuck hiring and putting up with a lot of the former.
With higher pay, you'd get a more continuous spectrum and a larger quantity at every level. As a result, you'd have the really dedicated teachers plus a lot of slightly less dedicated but still very intelligent teachers, and you wouldn't have to put up with the ones who couldn't teach to save their lives.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And as for our politicians, unlike teaching, most salaries in the political space are plenty high to attract smart people---way, way above the national average for members of Congress, President, and VP. Way above the state average for most members of state governments. However, unlike teaching, there are thousands of qualified people for any given position, and the competition tends to scare away a lot of qualified applicants and attract people who are in it to win rather than to do what is best for the public. That is also not true for education.
But taking the GP poster's logic one step further, we could make our government better by making it a full-time unpaid position so that only the wealthy could afford to do it. Somehow, I don't think an aristocracy was what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I'm basing that on what I've seen in a typical K-12 classroom a few years ago when I was in public schools. The ones I've been in ranged from a low of about 25 to a high of about 35. I found no appreciable difference in quality of education. In classes that are much, much smaller (10), you could see a real improvement, but I don't think our country cares enough about education to spend $18k per student....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Let me know when you've got all that. I'm not even going to consider that kind of pay without something close to this kind of risk.
See, there's the fallacy. You believe that pay should be dependent on how much risk you are taking. I feel that this is a stupid way to choose who should make money, at least as far as jobs are concerned. Pay should be based on how important your job is to the function of society. Doctors should and do make a lot of money. Lawyers? Lawyers collectively represent everything that is WRONG with our country today. Now some lawyers are good people who are really trying to make things right in the world, but the group as a whole, IMHO, have a net negative impact on our society as a whole, not a net positive impact. Thus, they are overpaid.
Teachers, by contrast are without compare the MOST important people in our society. Without an education system, our society would break down almost overnight. We would not be able to communicate, lawyers would not be able to go to law school, doctors would not be able to learn how to practice medicine, etc. They are the single group of people who has the broadest impact on our society, and thus they should be among the highest paid professions. Instead, they are among the lowest. That is wrong, pure and simple.
As for your list:
RE: triple-pane windows: Because it is really expensive to replace those when they get broken, and natural lighting tends to be very harsh and difficult to control.
Solution to the problem of control is simple. Have a single room designated as the projection room. Go there when you want to watch a video. It's hard to get a classroom dark enough or kids close enough to watch videos in classrooms anyway. It also means that you're saving money because projectors in permanent installations las
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not just a few children. Over 90% of one class. That is very unlikely to be just an isolated incident.
Did you not read my post? I didn't say it couldn't be done.... Nor did I say it was hard ....
I said most who try it do a crappy job...
Warning: anecdotal evidence is presented in the following argument.
In my experience, most grade school teachers do not like mathematics. Students first encounter teachers genuinely enthusiastic about mathematics and logical puzzles in high school. By that point, the majority have already acquired the same distaste for math that their previous teachers possessed.
I don't see an easy solution. As much as I love math, if I was to start teaching I would find it difficult to be excited about teaching addition and substraction to elementary school students.
Another issue that makes it nearly impossible to take up teaching as a second career is that schools (unlike universities) refuse to take anything other than public school teaching as experience. Imagine twenty odd years from now, when I am thinking about retirement in my late fifties. I would definitely consider teaching. Yet my 25 years of experience as a research scientist would count as NOTHING when it comes to determining my pay (nor would my great academic record, record of graduate school teaching and volunteer teaching, etc), and my PhD would be worth no more than a couple thousand dollars a year over a 22-year-old with a C- average from Directional State University.
Pay should be based on how important your job is to the function of society.
Well, go ahead and take for your lovely socialist commune in the mountains. In a capitalist society like ours, your pay is based upon market forces.
Teachers, by contrast are without compare the MOST important people in our society.
No.
That is, in fact happening, unfortunately. Lawyers aren't paid according to the innocence of their clients, so I don't see the parallel here.
Lawyers who are more successful at winning their client's cases get the higher value cases. If you're a millionaire accused of a crime, who are you going to choose: the public defender or (the late) Johnnie Cochrane? You pay a premium for top flight representation. That's the parallel I alluded to.
Why? So that we can replace one problem with another? All that would do is give us a bunch of teachers whose sole motivation is to win rather than to educate.
In this case the "win" scenario is the teacher whose students end up the most educated.
To teach in college, you do. You don't need an advanced degree in chemistry to teach elementary school science. I'm sorry.
A lawyer DOES need a doctorate degree in law. And your argument was that a teachers salary should exceed that of the lawyer.
I agree. They should be. But first, we need to get enough good teachers in place so that when half the teachers don't pass, we're still able to educate our kids.
A lofty goal indeed. So if we do start your plan, does that mean that more than half the teachers we will be giving raises to will be incompetent educators?
If a school board cans you for doing something unethical, you are unlikely to be employed anywhere around.
If a school board is even able to can you. This does not hold the same for lawyers (or doctors). If you want teachers to be the upper crust of professional society, we deserve the most pristine ethical behavior possible.
Check. If they aren't teaching, they're grading papers. They spend half their vacation doing class prep for the next school year. Despite getting the summer "vacation", they work more hours annually than people in most professions.
Also check. You've obviously never been a teacher.
No, but I've been a statistician. You know what the numbers say? Let's just say your sample size is clearly too small and heavily biased.
God forbid a lawyer ever get disbarred for being unethical....
It actually happens all the time.
My TI-82 programmable calculator still works. I bought it when I was in high school, circa 1992.
Is your TI-82 backlit? Is it color? Is the screen an active matrix LCD? How many elements does the screen have and how large are they? Does it have a touch screen? What processor is in it? Does it have any moving parts? Was it subject to heavy daily use for 10 years?
If hardware fails after three years, it was poorly made. Period.
How many pieces of hardware in your computer have a warranty that extends past three years? past five? How about the 10 years it'll take?
In the quantities we're talking about buying them, a custom-designed OLPC type device with a tablet instead of a keyboard should easily be attainable for under $100
That has got to the funniest moment in your whole post. You ignore the fact that OLPC is having a terrible time getting an even remotely usable platform for $100 (currently analysts expect it to be in the $150 range, but OLPC spokespeople are estimating $135-140), then extrapolate that to a machine that should survive continuous abuse for 10 years. You claim that a computer should only cost $100 and should be made of quality components with a 10 year lifespan. Clearly you're smoking the good stuff.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)