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Why Is It So Difficult To Fire Bad Teachers?
Ant writes with this depressing story about how public schools sometimes work: "This six-page Los Angeles Times article shares its investigation to find 'the process [of firing poor teachers] so arduous that many school principals don't even try (One-page version), except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare ...'"
...Teacher's unions.
jdb2
Because the teachers union is WAY too powerful!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don't.
Three highschools, two elementary schools, and a middle school, all spread across three states at opposite coasts. In elementary school we got the DARE treatment about how ALL drugs were The Devil, in middle school they kept on with that and went on to abstinence bible thumping, and in all three highschools they outright lied to promote the abstinence agenda.
As a bonus in one of the highschools the principal banned all mentions of south africa because he thought we shouldn't care so much about other race's problems.
Oh and all of these, like pretty much every other school in the country, were Zero Tolerance schools. What kind of liberalism should I have looked out for because every school I've ever been to from florida to oregon has been more religious right than bleeding heart liberal.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
And the income disparity isn't caused by any cultural differences? It's pretty obvious that Asian-American families have lower tolerance for gang membership, deadbeat dads, and and most of the other hallmark problems with stereotypical African-American culture. The cultural differences that make the parents more successful (and leads to higher income) are the same ones that lead to the kids getting a better education (which eventually leads to them having higher incomes, too).
It's far from just a self-perpetuating income disparity where the rich are better educated. Just look at how over-represented people of Asian descent are compared to whites in higher education institutions, and how common entitlement beliefs are among the richer whites. Being rich certainly helps, but the cultural component is significant.
Cut the teamism. Education has been fucked up long before NCLB. In fact, it is a liberal enclave and the left has used "do it for the children" as a means of gaining power for themselves and the teachers union for 40 years.
Biased much? Did you ever stop to think that maybe the liberals actually want to help the children? Especially since the United States maintains its world position through education (though not for long). And do you realize that conservatives have favored government education mandates and control (through funding) since at least Reagan, except with the extreme right in recent years and its anti-science agenda?
We throw WAY too much money at education. Much of it doesn't go to the classroom and teachers where it should. Rather it goes to administration.
The US spends approximately 3.4% of its GDP on public primary and secondary education. That is less than Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Ireland, UK, Spain, the EU as a whole, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus, Poland, Malta, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, just to name a few. It is, however, about equal with Greece.
Leftist feel-good cirriculums dominate and as such our kids learn to either throw a ball or drop fries.
Leftist? Do you realize that our curriculum is very moderate compared to most of the world?
Science and math skills tank but we have happy little taxpayers who learn to vote in all the politically correct garbage they read in the "picture books" they were given in grade school.
Do you have any figures to back that up? No. How about this: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf
By grade eight, the United States out performed 37 of 47 countries in Math, being primarily beat by 5 Asian countries (Taipei, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Japan) and equal to European countries (Hungary, England, Russian Federation, Lithuania, Czech Republic).
Also according to this study, the US has been improving average scores since it began tracking (1995). We are behind Asian countries because Asian school systems work harder, having much longer school years (220 days average vs 180 days in the US). Asian schools are often 6 days a week, 8 hours a day.
CUT the funding, limit the course work to what matters, fire administrators, and raise teachers' pay to attract our brightest to the field. Otherwise, stop bitching about education and stop using my tax dollars to fund this toilet.
How exactly are you going to cut the funding AND raise teachers' pay? I agree that we need to raise teachers' pay, but we should do it by increasing educational spending and cutting some spending elsewhere ($16 Billion a year in farm subsidies? $613 Billion a year on Defense? $48 Billion in earmarks?)
The US has been in a slight population boom since 1992, meaning more children to educate (approximately 11% increase). The US still has the largest percentage of the population completing upper secondary education (HS) of all countries in the world except Japan, and over the past forty years it has steadily increased (81% in 1960 to 87%). The US also has the largest percentage of the population completing higher education (college/university degree) in the world at 27 percent.
The US also has one of the worst student to teacher ratios in the world, averaging out to 16, but in lower income schools averaging over 35.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003026.pdf
Please forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't you have 3 months a year to do some other work to make up a chunk of that difference? Or do teachers end up working during summer break?
The break varies, in my district it is 9-10 weeks. Most teachers are required to take continuing education to maintain their licenses, and many of those classes, workshops, and other professional activities are done in the summer to accommodate teacher schedules.
For example, I would love to get a part time job this summer--and I am looking--but I have a week-long workshop in June, and a few other job-related full-day commitments before the end of the summer. Many employers are not interested due to the swiss-cheese scheduling that is required to accommodate my professional obligations.
Schools should teach some basic statistics. This includes the difference between statistically analyzing a random variable (climate science) and trying to predict the outcome of a single instance of the random variable (weather prediction), and why the two are fundamentally different.
There are other arguments, like that the sun is a 1400 petawatt nuclear reactor, and a 0.0001% variation is solar temperatures will make a hell of a lot more difference to earth temperatures than 1000 years of coal burning.
Schools should teach the Stefan-Boltzmann law in physics class. It gives a good first approximation of the impact of a 0.0001% variation of photosphere temperature on Earths surface temperature (it's, um, 0.0001%, or about 280 uKelvin. Good luck finding a thermometer that's that accurate).