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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.
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.
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.
"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?
Nah. If capitalism has taught me anything, it's that it's easier to force someone else to be educated and do all the thinking for you. That way you can be ignorant of actual effort required to do a particular task and solve all problems with a whip.
See how easy that is? In mathematics it's called reducing the problem. The Americans are *behind* in education. Any attempt to catch up by improving the education system would necessarily require a period where the Americans admitted somebody else was better than them. Solution: build bigger and better bombs and enslave weak, intellectual societies.
Hmmmm. I think they need to invade smarter, more advanced countries though. Time to get out of Canada, I guess.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
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.
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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.
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?
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
Nah, keep the military control of other nations, and draft anybody who doesn't get a certain GPA. That would motivate the hell outta me!
(I'm kidding though. Horrible idea.)
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.
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
"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).
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.
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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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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.
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It's just asking for personnel issues, and it's creating a teacher economic hierarchy where none currently exists, and none needs to exist.
But It does need to exist. The problem is that the teachers union sees them all as the same thing: teachers. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it's a hell of a lot easier to teach 3rd graders to spell than it is to teach 11th graders calculus. What kind of idiot marxist do you have to be to insist that Nancy Twinkletoes with her Ba in Child Development be paid the same as Jane Poindexter with a PhD in Mathematics? They both teach children? So the fuck what! The similarity ends there. It makes as much sense as demanding equal wages for NASCAR drivers and bus drivers because they're both just drivers.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
And this is exactly the solution. Instead of only paying certain teachers more, how about paying them all what they deserve and raising the standard of eduction in all subjects?
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.
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In my country, parents do that. What do parents do in your country? Aren't your teachers most valuable when they teach things parents don't know?
blow your mind already
What do you mean by 'what they deserve'? Personally, I think a teacher who isn't certified to teach math doesn't deserve to be paid as much as one who is certified to teach math. How is it that other unions, like electricians, educate and certify their members to do specific jobs, and those with higher union certifications get paid more (like those certified to do high voltage vs. residential), but the teachers' union wants teachers who aren't qualified to do their jobs to make the same as ones who are? Seems to me that the union is completely off their nut on this one.
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.
Sure, teachers should probably make more money across the board, but the idea that you pay somebody with a highly marketable education the same as somebody who doesn't have nearly as many job prospects simply doesn't work in the real world. I'd be more than happy to consider teaching math or science as a career. I like teaching, I'm reasonably good at getting ideas across, and I have the technical background. As it stands, though, going into teaching could cost me tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost income. That's just too big of a jump to make, so I don't consider it a viable option.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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?
Teachers unions are often fine with paying teachers more for qualifications, for instance if you get a post-graduate degree many districts will put you on a higher pay scale. I suspect what they are against here is having higher pay scales for math and science than other subjects.
At the university level, this has long been the standard, each department has a different pay scale which is heavily influenced by the market for that profession. Science, engineering, and business professors make more than arts and humantities professors because that is what they have to pay to attact good people -- even so, qualified people in those fields usually have considerably higher paying options outside of the university.
I would like to pay all qualified teachers more, but I suspect that having separate pay scales is also likely to be part of a successful solution.
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.
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
So? The problem is as follows: The Ph.D in mathematics can go do a lot of other things(with higher salary) The Child development major cannot.... You pay the people with the most options the most money....or you dont have any more of the people with better options
Yes, it's hard to teach 3rd graders how to spell. In fact, there may be fewer good 3rd grade spelling teachers than there are good calculus teachers. The problem is, the people who know calculus well enough to teach it typically have degrees that could get them better pay elsewhere. If you can't offer them something competitive, they're not going to work for you. Net result: You've taken a situation where you have a larger pool of potential calculus teachers than 3rd grade teachers and cut your pool of potential calculus teachers down to where it's smaller than the pool of potential 3rd grade teachers. The policy guarantees failure.
Simply put, the set of potential calculus teachers who don't have more lucrative options (or opt not to take those options) is apparently pretty darned small. Restricting ourselves to that subset is why we have so many sub-standard math teachers.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.