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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 ...'"
"The erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence .... Nothing could be further from the truth."
Not sure where that quote is from, but it's good and I had it lying around.
Do away with our corrupt tax code. Support the Fair Tax
I think it's blatantly obvious, the NEA is exceptionally powerful and won't permit it.
Brett
It's frustrating to see something like this, when we also see articles about innocent teachers being fired or prosecuted due to kids in their class sexting them. :\
Seeing the result of poor education is an easy task. It's even easy to identify poor teachers by merit and/or performance... The difficulty comes in establishing universal standards that will do that by a set of static rules. Of course there are the pandemic issues with unions and so on. My spouse is a teacher, and several friends I graduated with are in education, and the story (at least in Colorado) is the same: The Union only steps in for members of the herd that are to be culled. In more... sane... states (our state is the lowest in Higher Education funding by several orders of magnitude) your mileage may vary.
...Teacher's unions.
jdb2
Tenure. This doesn't solely apply to public schools either, it's become a problem in higher education as well. All too often there is a professor that has been around for longer than some of his students have been alive, isn't doing his job as he should, but yet the university isn't able (or willing) to do much, due to the hassle of getting rid of a tenured professor.
And we have serious shortage of teachers with ineffectual administrations, apathetic parents and disinterested communities who want someone else to fix *their* schools they don't bother to get involved with.
But, as usual, let's focus on the teachers.
Which is why I didn't go into teaching.
I think most nerds have had bad experiences with teachers in public school. Because either teachers count off for the most ridiculous things, have a personal bias against some things (and will fail you if you think otherwise), have a personal vendetta against students who (rightfully) correct them, or many other things that are wrong with our public school system.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
... but somehow we keep creating.
The problem is that we don't want to trust people in authority to make decisions, so we come up with a process or committee or something to ensure that one person can't make the hard decisions. But time and time again, it's shown that if no one can make hard decisions, no one will.
And while it's probably going to beat the hell out of my karma for it, I recommend The Death of Common Sense, by Philip K. Howard. It basically goes into examples of how our unwavering belief that a legal processes can sort through the mess impartially causes all sorts of unexpected results.
As soon as the authority to make a decision is lost, how can bad behavior be punished?
I'd say that one of the main problems is that it is close to impossible to attract competent replacements with the incredibly low salaries that we offer to teachers. Many(most) teachers in the public school system are nothing but glorified babysitters. You get what you pay for.
I'm a card carrying, gun shooting, cigarette smoking anti-liberal. I read Slashdot at least once a day, and do not feel that "Slashdot" has an agenda. Posters and contributors may, and that should be an easy thing to use your noodle to differentiate... Unless you believe everything you read.
*glare*
Give 'em a broom instead of a class. They'll get the point.
all of the union, lobbying issues notwithstanding, who exactly defines bad and how exactly do you measure results? no child left behind was an attempt at quantifying the teachers task and failed miserably. teachers taught to the test and teachers were considered good if they got more kids to pass the test than their peers. this was at the expense of educating the kids. do you leave it up to the children and parents to define who is good and who is bad? take the math teacher who makes you do math problems like a a drill instructor makes recruits do pushups. is he good or bad? when you're in high school you dread the busy work, as do your parents who are forced to do your homework for you. but when you're a freshman in an engineering program, you may look back and realize that education truly is what's left when you've forgotten everything you learned.
SCENARIO #2: Put that same teacher in a classroom of African-American kids from Oakland, California. The kids will do poorly because African-American culture rejects learning -- and rejects Western culture in general.
In scenario #2, the teacher would be fired as a "bad" teacher. In scenario #1, the same teacher would get a bonus for producing such accomplished students.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
Most important thing is to keep everyone in line. Teachers' Union ensures that every member votes for the sanctioned candidates. The politicians then make sure there's no competition for the teachers (i.e., voucers and all that are strictly verboten). You get a good teacher or someone trying to make a difference, and you've got a dangerous person on your hands. They're not part of the "system". Of course, it's not nearly so well organized. But public monopolies like the US education system do have lives of their own.
Well... They can maybe start by firing the fuckers that do not pitch up for class!
And the idea in most countries with unions that teachers should get the same wage is idiotic - the more talented you are, the higher your wage should be!
first is tenure.
second reason is unions.
Broward County schools are filled with bad teachers. The unions keep them working.
recently a broward teacher had a delusional episode in the classroom. she had a pair of scissors and was threatening a student shouting about demons.
the union not only kept her job, but she's coming back to the classroom (albeit at a different school).
Bad teachers are a bit like molesting priests. They get moved around schools when people complain about them.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Thats one of the problems, theres no real way of measuring talent. I've had teachers with many years of college who can't teach while I've learned many things from the entry level teacher thats fresh out of college.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There are too many of them. Whatever tests they have to take to become authorized to teach aren't working.
I've had maybe 5 good teachers, out of say the 7 new teachers I get each semester for the last 10 or so years. ~5/700.
Of course there were some ok teachers, some nice teachers, but only 7 or so that could actually teach.
All the rest were either teachers so they could feel smart, teachers so they could order people around, or a few were teachers just so they could get money.
I'm in highschool, and I have a teacher who doesn't attend class when she doesn't feel like it. Sometimes she hires a substitute even when she's in the room messing with the gradebook but not grading anything (or watching youtube, she seems to enjoy doing that during work hours as well). She doesn't really teach us anything. The worst part is, most people who take Spanish 2A in our highschool were not doing well in spanish (otherwise they'd have taken the faster class in middle school), so a bunch of Ds on the midterm doesn't turn any heads.
The whole class constantly complains about her to the principle, but nothing is ever done. If you walk in to "guidance" and start to say
"My teacher isn't prepar-"
The staff will quickly cut you off, as they've heard it before.
"Oh you mean Mrs. [removed name]?"
The article summary is incomplete. The title of the article is "Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task"
Well, the problem, and the solution, are right there.
Tenure is intended for university professors mainly; it intentionally makes it harder to fire a tenured person, so they can "push the boundaries" a bit in their classes.. without the fear of being fired for petty political reasons.
The universities do not just give out tenure to every new professor, they make sure they are competent first. If the California schools have *tenured* teachers that can't teach, that is the problem RIGHT THERE. Don't give tenure to a teacher until they know they can teach. Simple as that.
Let's start out by saying that there is plenty of blame to go around. How much time are we going to waste trying to figure out whose fault the broken educational systems are?
Instead, lets try to redesign the systems. This is basic problem solving:
1) What are the goals we have?
- Universal Literacy?
- Scientific awareness?
2) What resources do we have available to reach those goals?
3) Put a plan together using the resources available that includes analysis not only of desired student outcomes, but desired teacher outcomes as well.
I guess it is easier to play the blame game. Personally, I wonder what the turnaround time from good teacher to bitter burnt out husk working towards retirement is?
I'm a happy pessimist. I expect and prepare for the worst, when it doesn't happen I am pleasantly surprised.
Part of the problem is unions. Another part is the massive bureaucracy. But many times, it's to protect the good teachers from vindictive parents.
Which had, at one point, literally gotten in trouble for teaching beyond the curriculum. Apparently, Grade 9 students are "children" and cannot understand the concept of acceleration.
..it's not easy to prove that a teacher can't teach.
Where are going to base this on? Some students that can't solve math problems?
I've had my share of bad teachers, and being 20y.o. the memories are still vivid.
In my experience teachers support each other more than they should and turn their head the other way when one of them messes up.
I've seen math teachers copying the teaching books' answers from another book which has the answers.
English class was fun....it was like I were the one who was teaching.
Anyways, I can go oooon and on about this forever so I'll shut up now.
All the above refer to my Greek school but I assume the situation's kind of generic.
"I think most nerds have had bad experiences with teachers in public school. Because either teachers count off for the most ridiculous things, have a personal bias against some things (and will fail you if you think otherwise), have a personal vendetta against students who (rightfully) correct them, or many other things that are wrong with our public school system."
Well, this isn't surprising. As someone who has been in high-school and also someone who grew up in a family of teachers I can safely say that this is inevitable. Nice teachers will simply be bullied untill they give in. High-school kids are highly observant of the level of authority a teacher has and once they see a weakness they can be quite merciless.
The people who are left are either split between people who have some natural authority and dickheads(the kind you read about in this article). A lot of teachers see students correcting them as an assault on their authority and they are partly right about this. Yes, the student may be right but admitting this may weaken the position the teacher has or aspires to have and thereby he has to carefully maneuvre between admitting his faults and maitaining order in the classroom(and over the students in general).
Remember that a high-school student spends around 5 years in a high-school but a teacher needs to maintain his position many times longer and that can cause the teacher to become ridgid. Personally, I see this as in inevitability though through good planning the damage can be minimized.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Because for every bad teacher that deserves to be thrown out, there's a good teacher dedicated to such crazy concepts as teaching evolution in a science classroom, and the evangelicals aren't just going to sit there and take all those facts getting put inside their childrens' heads. So the process for removal has to be slow as possible- otherwise the highly motivated fundamentalists could push out anyone they choose whenever they want. The result is that genuinely bad teachers must be dragged through a process that can take years.
There, was that so difficult?
Wanna fire that "bad" teacher for teaching evolution? Great, make it easier to do so. I agree there are bad teachers, but the fact that you don't like them doesn't necessarily mean they are indeed bad teachers.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
This would be alleviated if they didn't insist on stuffing 30 or 40 kids into a single classroom.
As a product of the public school system who is quite happy with the education he received, let me try and add some balance to the usual slashdot anti-teacher, anti-union, right-wing libertarian groupthink.
The purpose of tenure is to protect teachers from unfair termination, not to protect bad teachers. If a teacher is underperforming there is usually a process to get rid of them, even if tenured, only most administrators are too lazy to go through it. The whole system is designed precisely so a school principal can't just terminate someone because IN THEIR JUDGMENT, the teacher is doing a lousy job. Personally I'd trust the judgment of most teachers over most school administrators.
And when it comes to education, it's hard to create metrics to accurately measure success. And don't even try to argue that those idiotic standardized tests measure much. Are we going to punish a teacher because most of their students failed a standardized English test? What if more than half of their students don't SPEAK English? What if the teacher had to teach 40 kids in one classroom? There are bad teachers, but it's not always easy to measure which ones are bad, and which ones are just either lucky or unlucky.
And by the way, anyone who thinks that some all-powerful teacher's union is preventing success is just ignorant. The teacher's unions are constantly undercut and overwhelmed by legislatures and city and state governments. If the teacher's unions were so powerful, then why do teacher's make so little?
I've worked as a computer programmer for over 20 years, and I have never seen or heard of any programmer being fired for incompetence, no matter the magnitude.
As far as I'm concerned, teachers deserve our support, and I think all of the bitching is just a smokescreen to support cutting education funding, and a mind-trick to turn people against unions.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Nonsense, we have complained about our son's teacher many times. She gives them incorrect information and punishes them for what the previous class did. Many of the parents in the community have complained and even petitioned the local school board to fire her, however she is repeatedly found to be not at fault and her job is kept. California is suffering huge losses of teachers due to budget problems this year, and out of all the ones who were fired, the one or two bad apples aren't in the list.
It seems that just being a bad teacher isn't enough to have your teaching job pulled in California. All you need is some seniority and a union to back you up and you're not going anywhere... ever.
Actually, I think the sad answer really is because you'd only need to replace the one you fire and its hard to find good teachers.
Probably there are also a lot of complaints from students who are actually not good and blame the teacher, so its a question of who judges the situation right?
what can happen is that a bad teacher can hide behind bureaucratic obstacles once that teacher has seniority, or, even worse, such a teacher can (and sometimes will) threaten to sue the school district if the district tries to fire him/her.
most school districts do not have the financial resources or expertise to fight such a battle. so they chose not to.
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
Nice teachers will simply be bullied untill they give in. High-school kids are highly observant of the level of authority a teacher has and once they see a weakness they can be quite merciless.
They don't need to be nice as in "I'm going to bake the class cookies" but rather nice as in "I'm not going to assign large amounts of meaningless work". I've had several teachers who were quite authoritative so people knew not to screw with them, but on the other hand they weren't total idiots, they admitted when they were wrong, didn't assign large amounts of meaningless work, didn't try to fail students, and were generally pleasant to learn from.
The people who are left are either split between people who have some natural authority and dickheads(the kind you read about in this article). A lot of teachers see students correcting them as an assault on their authority and they are partly right about this. Yes, the student may be right but admitting this may weaken the position the teacher has or aspires to have and thereby he has to carefully maneuvre between admitting his faults and maitaining order in the classroom(and over the students in general).
But by admitting faults you don't lose any authority and gain respect. Some of the things were such obvious mistakes that even with solid evidence they didn't believe. For example, a high school science teacher tried to tell us that blood in veins were blue. When we used evidence to prove that he was wrong, he dismissed it and kept telling us that veins were blue to spite us.
Remember that a high-school student spends around 5 years in a high-school but a teacher needs to maintain his position many times longer and that can cause the teacher to become ridgid. Personally, I see this as in inevitability though through good planning the damage can be minimized.
The one thing they can do, is treat high school students like adults. They aren't meant to be told to do this and this and this, but rather use reasoning and logic and such.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I see. So how do you propose who should determine who's right or wrong? Students hold a vote on it? There's a special commission on truth in the classroom?
Yes, teachers are wrong sometimes and they make mistakes. Yes, you may lose points because of it or be hassled over it. That's life. The same thing will happen at your job. And if you're human, you'll be doing exactly the same thing to others, including your own children.
If we insist on perfect teachers, there won't be any at all. The job pays poorly enough and is stressful enough that, frankly, schools need to be happy with who they can get.
Two words: Teachers' Unions.
I just had a conversation this weekend about a policy tried with some success in Chicago. When an entire school has an egregious record of underperforming, fire everyone in the building and start over. Make them re-apply for their jobs. (I tried searching for an article to support this story just now, but I couldn't find one.)
As a teacher I have to say I think that it is an incredibly common problem for every school to have someone that isn't being as effective of a teacher as they could be (read in some cases awful and idiotic). In my experience it tends to be the teachers that have been in the system for a long time, most likely tenured, who are protected just by the length of time they teach. Many times these 'teachers' spend their time as place holders, completely ineffective as teachers, and often times as people that pull down the morale of the whole teaching staff. Knowing that someone is a terrible teacher, but gets to continue to teach year after year, doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the schools to many people.
That being said, in my experience it's ONE teacher in the whole school (at most two in a large school). Not a problem at a level that should cause people to lose hope in the system. They're there, and we're unfortunately generally stuck with them unless they really screw up. Which happens sometimes. But, for every one case like this we get so much bad press that it causes people to make their snide comments about the rest of the school's employees. Myself, and most of the teachers I know, all give more time to these students than anyone ever acknowledges. There's no right answer right now, but the evaluation systems in education are definitely a spot that needs re-examined in many places.
That's no accident: that entry level teacher is still motivated and idealistic, and he's willing to spend a lot of extra time. Give him a few years of teaching, and he'll lose all that.
This would also be alleviated if there was a license required before people could become parents.
For all the back-and-forth that's going to take place in this article, the fundamental truth is that shitty parents generally lead to shitty students.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
The comments were from TFA - in fact, it left out this lead-in paragraph:
The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.
He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.
On the basis of the idea that the teacher decided to step off of the politically-correct, baby-em-all bus - and did decide to try to scare the kid straight - I like him too. More teachers have gotten further with a little ridicule than with nurturing, and each and every one us knows it.
Or - did the AC above simply try to get a rise by advocating death?
I elect the former.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
In my personal opinion the minute a teacher decides: "Correcting false information is less important than maintaining my own aura of authority," they stop being an educator and start down the road to becoming a tyrant in a teapot. Personally I would argue the reason high school students are so merciless is because by the time they encounter even one nice teacher they've been exposed to far too many of the "dickheads" and don't know how to interact with someone who is genuinely trying to teach them.
It's really rare to find a parent who doesn't love their kids and care deeply about their education. One of the problems I see is really bad school districting policy. I believe the people within a district ought to be able to declare on their tax forms that they want the portion of their tax dollars allocated towards public schools to be allocated towards the schools in *their* district. It makes no sense to me that an economically challenged areas should have any of their tax dollars going towards white collar school districts. That deprives them of the opportunity to improve their own situation. We owe those who have less the ability to target their own resources towards their own quality of life.
Its easy. Teachers' Unions have no incentive to do anything but gain as much money and power for the teachers as possible. They are not there for the students. Students don't vote or pay dues to the union.
Unfortunately, boards of education have been fairly powerless. There is this myth of the "Virtuous Teacher" who is perfect in all ways, makes minimum wage, and would solve all the worlds problems if only they had a little more resources. This is reinforced by the media, both in moves and TV as well as reporters. The truth is that teachers are regular people, there are good and bad ones. But if you try to stand up to the union, you are demonized as an "evil teacher hater". Nevermind the fact that test scores haven't gone up despite hundreds of billions of dollars in spending increases. Or the fact that we spend over $12,000 PER STUDENT in Atlanta and D.C., two of the lowest performing school districts in the country!
I have alot of respect for teachers. In fact, I have often thought about going into teaching High School after I retire as a way of giving back. I would not have made it to where I am without the exceptional work of many caring teachers. But I also had to put up with more than a few worthless, incompetent teachers who didn't care one bit about actually teaching. They came in with no preparation, read straight out of the book, and gave completely worthless exams. It was absolute torture having to sit there for 60-90 minutes a day, every day, with someone getting paid to waste my time. Back in High School myself and many others wondered how they could keep their jobs. Now I know.
Hopefully the tide is turning. If a paper like the LA Times is criticizing the union there maybe hope yet. We now need some boards to stand up to the unions.
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.
Why is it that I get the impression that teaching in the USA is pretty much awful? It seems like teachers are pretty much universally demonised and hated, come across as petty dictators of their classrooms.
As a teacher myself of 11 years (UK, Science) I can say that this is not the situation here. Sure, some teachers are disliked more than others - it goes with the job - but by and large (and I mean 95%) we work well with our students and they work well with us. We enjoy each others interaction in the classroom and around school, have a laugh and learn some interesting stuff.
We don't go around picking on kids and watching youtube instead of teaching. What kind of pride in your job would that give?
I don't have any experience of the US high school system but it seems to have fallen apart for the majority of kids. Is this, sadly, the case? Or have teachers been singled out as a scapegoat for the failings of US society? I genuinely can't believe that American teachers are so universally awful.
(as well as unions)
Employees are "entitled" to a paycheck, they don't earn it.
Education needs to be 100% private or we're going to continue to trail the rest of the world.
~ now you know
A lot of the replies so far today seem to hint there's only one reason when really there's a myriad of reasons. It easy to play the blame game. Then you can beat up on whatever your favorite "dead horse excuse" you want. And there's a lot of them: unions, teacher pay, uninvolved parents who expect teachers to babysit, etc.
The issue should be centered around what all people involved can do to make the situation better. I have seen many good teachers who have been worn down by the system, both from the inside and from the outside, who are shells of their former selves. Unfortunately, you can't just blame one thing here.
Who determines what makes a bad teacher?
Some silver-spoon fed, vanilla face's mother (sorry, watched Borat last night) makes a song and dance because dearest darling is brilliant and should've gotten that 'A' on that paper. Said mother decides to make real trouble by spreading lies and being a general pain in the arse. Principle doesn't want school to look bad so gets rid of the teacher.
It's all relative. Instead, people should start being responsible for their own actions and stop blaming others.
Yes, there are most likely some really bad teachers out there. Well, start paying teachers more, giving them more power in the classroom (respect) and perhaps more trained professionals who always considered teaching will go into the industry and create an abundance of talent.
.
...And so abolish tenure. Give all teachers equal chance to get laid off or fired when the next year rolls around. Mr. Grump who everyone hates but can't fire because he has been in the district 40 years, shouldn't be immune to being laid off/fired.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The article kicks off describing how a group of shrill, ignorant parents took the word of an emotionally disturbed 12 year old and decided to push for someone to be fired based soley on that.
Parents like to treat teachers as their personal governesses. Like that cheerleading coach who was crucified for playboy pictures that were not a big deal until some fat dumpy girl who didn't get picked had a tantrum and made her mum charge into the headteachers office with the pictures.
Your kid isn't special. In all likelihood, your kid is a spoilt, willfully ignorant little shit who will give the teacher hell no matter how much they try (and they do try; nobody sticks at teaching who doesn't see it as a vocation as well as a job). Your little darling is so convinced they will be a millionaire professional sportsperson/musician/actor because you've always told them how 'special' they were, that they carry this overinflated sense of entitlement into the classroom along with 30 other 'special' kids.
The result basically lord of the flies with nicer clothes. And the people who take up the under paid task of controlling the little bastards are constantly subject to demands to fire them, cut their pay, and increase their work loads.
Back off assholes.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Similar experience. 24 yo here, and even though the high school teachers I encounter these days are more likely to be my own age and friends of someone in my social circle, my gut reaction is still extremely hostile.
I imagine schools anywhere end up creating an "us vs. them" mentality among the teachers towards the students, but society will still be dealing with the consequences long after those burned-out/incompetent/power-tripping tenured teachers are dead and buried.
Just put a few drops of hashish oil into their coffee each day. The amount is so small that they won't feel stoned, and it will accumulate in their bodies.
Then after a week or so, call them in for a 'random' urine test. The test will show (horror upon horror!) molecular traces of THC in their urine and you will have NO PROBLEM firing them, denying them unemployment, getting them thrown out of public housing, getting any professional license revoked, and just generally screwing up their All-American lifestyle forever.
Works every time. Done in the USA to hundreds of people daily for twenty years now.
Seriously, it's how we got rid of the asshole gung-ho Neidermeier officers back in the 1980's when I was in the US Navy. One positive test and they were gone: no appeal, no second-test review, no $2000 gas-spectraography review confirmation, no nothing. A few drops a day and the assholes disappear. Took the JAG years to realize that we were doing this, but we were out of 'service' by then.
It's like judo. You use your opponent's fanaticism against them.
But time has passed and wounds have healed. If you were booted out of the military for failing a drug test and you are the kind of person who never did or never would get high, then it probably happened to you. Think back about who you were seriously pissing off at the time. It was probably one of us.
We're not sorry. The military is better place because we did it. There was no permanent, endless war at the time and this was the easiest way to get rid of the psychos who would have gotten us all killed when the PEW finally arrived after 9/11.
What's wrong with a teacher who admits they're not sure and looks it up later, or asks for the pupil to provide logical backing for their statement and considers whether it may be the pupil's version which is correct, or whatever?
A teacher's factual knowledge has no need to be perfect, but they should be prepared to accept some brief debate. Hell, if they're any good they should encourage it even when they know they are right - it gets the kids thinking, after all.
Is it _that_ _bad_ in the USA?
I've studied in several (admittedly pretty good) public schools in Russia and I can't remember examples of such behavior. Even though we had ~25-30 kids in one class.
They are usually fat and get stuck in the cannon mouth
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
How about increase teachers, decrease classroom size. And teach parenting courses in school?!?! Heaven forbid our children know how to raise children properly when they have them. It's mystifying how this isn't taught in school already. They have the first part taught "sex education" but they left out the next 18 or so years after the sex part.
I'm actually a high school department chair, so I know a little about this issue. The problem is not finding good teachers. There are actually a lot of good applicants whenever an opening occurs in my department. The problem is the difficulty in getting rid of bad teachers. The process even where I live, a state without unions, is tremendously difficult. It can be done, but it isn't easy.
Personally, I believe this issue is the primary one impacting our students' success. If we could fire bad teachers, we could get rid of the concept of merit pay, incentives and all the other band-aid-on-a-broken-arm solutions.
An important change for education.
This is for NYS:
How Do I Fire an Incompetent Teacher? (Flowchart)
Great, so not only can we get rid of the bad teachers, we can pay the good ones twice as much! (assuming we started out with classes of 33 1/2 students)
In all seriousness, back when I was in high school I'd have gladly traded sitting in a class of 67 to be taught by a competent and fair minded individual. I imagine many on slashdot felt similarly in their time. Bad teachers aren't just less good than good teachers, they have an actively negative impact on the students in their classes. Better to put them in bigger classes, or even shorten the school day if the only alternative is to protect terrible teachers because they "can't be spared".
Note, the above is not the normal case at the small Universities. Tim S
Does this mean that if I dropped out of school because the teachers sucked, I should sue the school system ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Oh, look, people blaming unions, without asking themselves why the unions have any power in the first place.
Why aren't there programmer unions? Why, because there are vast differences in skill and competence among programmers, and our salaries reflect that. Only the lowest dregs would ever consider forming a union, which would require us to reduce our output to undifferentiable units of work, like an assembly line. What makes sense in a factory does not make any sense in a profession that requires intelligence and creativity.
There are also vast differences in ability among teachers, but they are paid nearly the same regardless. Paid a salary that is pathetically poor for people of high intelligence and education. Their unit of work is the student, and all students are the same. Good teachers make test scores go up, and bad teachers make test scores go down. We are only willing to pay just enough to ensure that test scores don't go down. Education is expensive, after all. No sense in spending more than we have to.
We have a culture that does not value education, but does value cutting taxes, and generally has frowns upon "book learning" and intellectual pursuits. We have a profession that requires extensive education, higher than average intelligence, but pays barely above the poverty level, and considers the work output to be nearly indistinguishable.
And you blame the teachers for forming a union. Your children get the education you deserve.
Tenure and Unions
I work in a private school as an IT director, and we don't have either of those things. If you are a stellar teacher, are rewarded with more compensation, and better kit for your classroom.
If you are a, "do-just-enough-to-get-by", type of teacher, you don't get more/better stuff for your classroom (motivated teachers will make better use of the materials), and if you are bad enough, your contract won't be renewed next year.
I've been with this school about 8 years, and I can see the steady improvement in the staff. The strong ones stay, the weak ones go elsewhere.
We are a private school - typically districts send us students, and we have some private pay students. We need to have the best staff possible, or else districts and parents will send their kids somewhere else. Competition does make us better.
That's the way public schools need to be.
-ted
Welcome to more right wing union bashing. If you are asking why is it so hard to attack union members, why aren't you asking some of these questions?
Why is it so hard to fire incompetent and corrupt Wall Street managers who have nearly destroyed the world economy?
Why is it so hard to stop subsidies for agribusiness that force Americans to pay more for food? Why is the government subsidizing inefficient environmentally destructive corn based ethanol production?
Why are tax rules and subsidies going for so-called "clean coal", which is about as stupid a phrase as "safe heroin"?
Why is it impossible to end huge boondoggle weapons programs intended to fight the cold war, which has been over for 20 years? Why don't we spend money on the kind of asymmetrical combat that is the major problem in the 21st century?
Why does the government support a pharmaceutical industry that kills people for profit? Why are drug companies allowed to suppress clinical trials that show their products are useless or unsafe?
Why are overseas produced products, including food, drugs, and toys allowed to poison people?
Why are defense contractors working in the middle east completely uncountable for their behavior, including murder, rape, and killing military personal because of bad electrical wiring?
Why are corporations allowed to write legislation that guarantees they make money no matter what they do? Why are there no negative consequences for bad corporate behavior (RIAA, Microsoft, predatory lending, credit card interest/fees)?
Why are willfully ignorant religious morons making technical and scientific policy? Why are people who deny evolution and think that the universe is only 6000 years old in charge of responding to global pandemics and developing environmental crises like climate change>
Just wondering...
The teachers' union in Toledo, Ohio, has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It's called "peer review" and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.
...
union members today overwhelmingly support it.
...
The AFT endorsed peer review in 1984.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91327130 Listen to the story -- the text is a poor summary.
A few years ago I pulled my son from a class with such a teacher, She had hit him on the head on more than one occasion, once even on film. it took not only suing the school but also giving the video and doing a interview with the local news before they fired her. Sadly after the summer break was over she returned to her teaching job until every one of her students parents showed up, signed a petition and personally escorted her and the principal *who turned out to be her boyfriend off school grounds before the school board made her being fired stick.
Not to mention the simple fact that most schools, especially pre HS, simply aren't built for dealing with the smart kids. The entire design and curricula is built for the C kid that will follow their little steps and do everything their way. After being tutored for 2 years due to a bad motorcycle accident they tried to reintegrate me into junior high. After about 2 months they just sent me back home and sent my tutor back out. Why? Because I was constantly being accused of being a "cheater" or a troublemaker because I didn't think that way.
It ended when my tutor walked past the vice principal and overheard them getting ready to expel me. I of course was extremely pissed off at being treated like dirt and told them to please do. When she asked "Why on earth are you thinking about throwing out one of our brightest kids?" the math teacher spoke up "He is cheating in my class and can't even bother to show his work! And look at how he dresses, he is obviously a gang element!" after Ms. Edwards got done choking on laughter she said "He wears those military fatigues year round because they belonged to his late grandfather which he loved dearly. And as for cheating that is easy to disprove" so she walked over to the blackboard and wrote two complex math problems. She then had me had her my Casio cal watch with space invaders built in(remember those?) and told the math teacher "If he is cheating this will show us. You work the one on the left, he'll work the right" and of course I was done in 1/3 of the time and with no work shown.
After the math teacher AGAIN screamed "he must be cheating!" the vice principal rolled his eyes and after using my calc watch to see the answer was correct he asked "So how DO you do it?" and I honestly told him "I don't know, I just know it is right". Ms Edwards just smiled and said "His mother had him reading books by Asimov and Heinlein at around age ten. While the other kids are playing Atari he is writing computer programs. His brain simply works differently than ours. While you and I have to work the steps, somewhere in his brain is a little voice that just lets him 'know' the answer. If you try to fit him into the traditional mold and work the steps he is only going to get frustrated as his brain simply doesn't work like that" but after having teachers call me a cheater and saying I was a disruptive influence because I would be in the back reading Asimov because I had done the entire weeks work the first day out of sheer boredom, they simply gave up and sent me Ms Edwards.
The point is a lot of the low scoring kids I knew that were labeled troublemakers and goof offs were simply frustrated or bored to tears because their brains didn't work that way. Both of my boys are being home schooled now because they ended up with the same shit I went through. The oldest at 16 is reading medical books that frankly make even MY head hurt while at the same time teaching himself 3d computer animation, while the youngest is teaching himself 2d cell style animation on his computer. With both if you sit down and actually explain to them a concept they get it quite quickly and will be hitting you with insightful questions at a rapid pace. But putting them in front of a blackboard and spewing the crap to them simply doesn't work. Their brains simply don't work that way. So while I am sure there are plenty of shitty teachers(like my "He's cheating" because I was better than him math teacher) I wonder how much of it is because that cookie cutter straight c designed curriculum frankly sucks if you have even a little brains and creative problem solving. And sorry about the length, but some things just don't fit into a soundbyte, at least not one written by me. I'm afraid my brain just doesn't work that way ;-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are you crazy? We can't have students learning to think critically and logically--they might end up voting for third parties or worse. And encouraging debate? Do you just want to ruin our carefully constructed tapestry of political-correctness and cultural-sensitivity?
I taught high school and the only thing the Teacher's Union did for me was make my paycheck smaller by taking money out of it.
If there is some teacher's union out there with all these magical powers that people always claim they have it obviously wasn't the one that I was part of...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
What about the parents? Don't they have the final responsibility to educate their children? Sure, they send them to school, but do they make sure that they are learning? Do they read the material presented and talk about it with their children and ask questions so that they know what they have learned? Of course not, they send them off each morning and the kids come home to an empty house, maybe a blowjob, or a PS3. Mod me down, but it's the damned truth. Children are failed to be educated because of their parents. Professional educators have their faults, sure, but put blame on where it belongs, on parents that don't give a shit about their kids.
You are absolutely correct. I am a teacher and I assure you that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and there is precious little I can do about it.
load "$",8,1
In my opinion, our "education system" is really a system of judgment: the possibility of success in return for effort to receive a high mark on artificial examinations. However, it's deeply flawed because it fails to take into account original and useful ideas, potential real-world capacity of the individual, the incompetence of those making the tests, the challenges of those without money who cannot afford to study full time, and the impotence of the rich who have no incentive to study. Fall outside any of the mainstream parameters of a "successful student" and one is condemned to mediocrity, even though in the right set of circumstances the same person could have incredible intellectual output that reforms the way the world works in a useful way.
To call it an "education" system ignores the ultimate purpose of education: to control people by giving them the illusion of possible success in exchange for hard but useless academic judgment. Actual education (i.e. learning) is incidental to judgment that permits potential employers to determine the suitability of individuals for employment.
History has taught us that genius reveals itself before the age of 25. The system of judgment we know as education that is in place in the Western world inadvertently undermines the ability for genius to be recognized and utilized in any valuable way.
The inability to fire teachers is merely incidental to, and entirely compatible with, the system of judgment that employs them. If the purpose of the system was the learning of students, it'd be a different story. Sadly, I've observed that it's not even a consideration in the discourse.
Note: I do not live in the US.
In the Netherlands, where I live, we have a seperated the high-school classes based on your learning capacity. If you are smart, you will be able to visit the higher high-school classes, if you aren't you will go to the lower classes. We now have 4 distinct levels(more or less), and the highest level is split in two where people in the higher class of the two get taught greek and/or latin.
The ability to maintain control is different for the different levels of students and it is widely known and accepted that people in level 1 are much harder to control than people in level 4 although you will always have problems with teaching in every level if you can't keep order.
Thankfully, people in level 4(where I have studied) mostly take their work seriously and I learned in a mostly healthy environment partially because of that.
I have dozens of examples of teachers who had limited to no authority and without exceptions the learning process was disturbed by that. Effects ranged from taking the teacher not seriously in class to outright insulting them in public and actively trying to get them to leave by means of causing distress.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Amen! Without objective measurements, it's difficult to make a good case to get rid of somebody. And objective measurements would be expensive.
Such metrics may include rotating observers and/or testing. The problem with testing is that it turns the course-work into test-centric course-work, and it can be argued that tests are too rigid to represent the future work-place. Observers are also expensive, and the teacher may only behave when they are present.
The commercial world generally lets managers fire people almost willy-nilly, and thus by eliminating any claim of objectivity or fairness, they don't have that problem. Whether this is entirely good or not is another thing.
A compromise may be to reduce pay for each bad review. Eventually a bad teacher will be earning minimum wage, and hopefully leave, or at least won't ding the budget. But, sticking kids with such teachers is another matter. If parents find out their kid has a dud teacher, the school will be swamped with complaints.
Table-ized A.I.
My wife teaches at a public high school in Missouri. It's actually fairly easy (at least in her building) to get rid of a teacher who doesn't work out -- one guy lasted only for his contracted year before his contract wasn't renewed, and another guy who's been dragging his heels at finishing his certs is leaving at the end of May, after maybe three years.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Here's how you get rid of a teacher: make their life miserable. My IT teacher quit his job, and here's how the school board bastards got rid of him:
He was teaching his Security class, showing us how to use BackTrack, Wireshark, Nmap etc... He has been teaching this class for years. His superiors recently decided that they don't want him around anymore, so they started complaining to the school board that he is teaching students "hacking" and they will all become criminals, etc. They would make up new lies about him every week. They even threatened to call the police so he would stop teaching kids "how to commit crimes". So he decided one day that he's had enough and would quit. Interestingly, once he submitted his resignation letter all his problems went away. All the treats stopped. The school would pay his salary until the end of the school year and then he would leave. So for the rest of the semester we would just waste time and played video games in class instead of learning, because he couldn't teach the class anymore.
So there went one of my favorite teachers. Most of the teachers in my high school were incompetent fools who have never deserved their jobs, but they all stayed. None of them were fired. I feel like I was denied an education.
Way to swallow the total Teachers Union bullshit.
The Teacher's Union is the reason that teacher cannot be fired. They are also the ones feeding you bullshit about the budget hurting the schools. If you think funnelling more money into that union is the way to fix California schools the you are the problem.
If you've got a teacher who is bad at his current assignment despite counseling and training, find a position in the district he would be good at, then reassign him if possible.
If he resists, find a position he would be so bad at that he'd be easy to fire or he'd be so frustrated he'd quit, then either entice him to take the position through incentives or force him to take it by eliminating his current position or making his reassignment part of a larger shakeup.
A third option is to entice him to take a non-classroom position. If teaching is like any other profession, there are people who know the theory of teaching and can teach that theory to other teachers, but who, in the classroom, are mediocre. If you have one of these people in your classroom, "promote" them to administration as a teacher to the teachers.
If you do any of these things, you will have to be very careful with your paper trail. You'll either want this to look specifically non-punitive, in which case you won't want many black marks in the teacher's employee record immediately prior to making the move, or you'll want it to be clearly punitive, in which case you'll want it to look like the person deserved firing but you didn't want to tarnish his resume.
The sad reality is that in some districts, there are too many bad or ineffective teachers for this to make more than a small dent in the problem.
By the way, in some states, if an entire school is ineffective year after year for several years, all the teachers can be forced to reapply for their jobs and any of them can be summarily not rehired without cause. Of course, if things are that bad, the principal is probably also out of a job, so the principal is very unlikely to do this just to get rid of a few bad teachers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'd be curious to hear more. Why were they considered to be incompetent? Over what period of time was this measured? Do you think it's a correct assessment?
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
There are few examples of this which have gotten prominent media attention. One ongoing example is that of John Freshwater, an 8th grade school teacher who was found to be a) teaching creationism to his students and b) using a Tesla coil to burn crosses onto students arms. These were among other problems. The district finally got sick of it all and tried to get him fired. The result is a series of lawsuits which are still ongoing. This is getting regular coverage over that The Pandas Thumb http://pandasthumb.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=2&tag=Freshwater&limit=20 due mainly to the fact that Freshwater was promoting Young Earth Creationism. So in this case we have a teacher who was engaged in unconstitutional behavior and also engaging in what might constitute assault and the district still can't rid of him without a massive hassle.
While firing teachers may be difficult, getting them out of the classroom isn't in NYC.
I first heard about this via "This American Life" on NPR, but this site summarizes it nicely:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/32769
My father was a local teachers' union president for two years. The grievance system can be quite arduous, however many local board members and superintendents were pretty efficient at finding ways to fire teachers or make their job so miserable they quit.
All that said, for us to 'fire' teachers seems to imply that we believe that teachers cannot learn and retrain to become better teachers. Isn't that ironic?
Firing bad teachers in suburban schools might be good for inner city schools, where they have classes without teachers. In this case a bad teacher is better than no teacher. If fired teachers want to continue making a living, some may be forced to work in an inner city school where they could get a job the next day. Not exactly a win/win situation.
I've had quite a few bad teachers in my time (as in disliked), just as I've had some bad (incompetent) teachers. There's an intersection there of course, but in my experience the disliked teachers were actually very competent.
However the only ones people complained about were the disliked teachers. Like the ones who didn't care who your daddy/mommy were and would treat you like you treated them.
I'm curious about what was happening on the back end. By law administrators can't talk about personnel issues, or aren't supposed to, so in my experience, there might be some arm twisting behind the scenes. That's even more so if the teacher has seniority.
If that isn't the case in Missouri, I might just move on over!
An important change for education.
You hit on an important point that I don't think most people who have never taught really realize. Having done stints in both high school and jr. high teaching, I have this to say: Teaching jr. high or high school is the same as being in jr. high or high school, but keeping your head down and just passing through isn't an option. It can be fun, but, at least for me, it was miserable.
On the other hand, teaching university is just like being in university, which I enjoyed a great deal, and for that reason, that is where I work. I get paid a handsome salary to hang around with idealistic people and learn stuff!
I try not to press her on these questions. Both of these guys were pretty new, but so is her school.
Word of advice about Missouri: the southwestern part of the state is horrifyingly conservative. If you like more liberal, open-minded types, you may want to stick with the north or Columbia.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Because bad parents affect kids more than the teachers, and there are a /lot/ more bad parents out there.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
There is a charter school in Oakland with nearly all minority kids (mostly black) that do better than schools comprised mostly of while kids in wealthier districts. The same can be said of Catholic schools comprised of mostly inner city black kids. My point is that race really isn't the issue although there is a serious problem within popular black culture. But if the school has zero tolerance for disruptive children and they enforce a strict learning environment, you can teach children of any race to do well.
From John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
Power ÷ 22
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart--unless a culprit runs afoul of the media--an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tel
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have had a biology teacher who was a proud member of the Promise Keepers (our section on evolution was ten minutes, mostly consisting of "Now, you don't have to believe any of this."), a college algebra teacher who had trouble adding two single-digit numbers without a calculator and who let us use cheat sheets for every exam, including the final (could only be 1"x1", but in 6pt font, that's every formula for the test), a statistics and probability teacher who spent most of the class discussing the latest goings on with the various school athletic organizations (she was the cross-country coach), an AP English teacher who had a penchant for "losing" papers she didn't want to grade (and when she did grade papers, the first few submissions would have corrections and comments, the rest had nothing but a grade, rumor has it she never read them, just assigned a grade based on what she thought that student would do), a physics teacher so mind-bogglingly incompetent that my sophomore year a student organization devoted to her termination had more members than any other club (she was really, really bad, a powerpoint teacher), a German teacher who spent more time showing us slides of her various trips to Germany than teaching (we did a lot of projects in English in that class), a Spanish teach who spent an entire semester not teaching Spanish because it was more important that we learn about the cultures of South American nations (Spanish-speaking or otherwise), a seventh-grade math teacher who didn't mark off points for wrong answers because, and I quote, "Check marks lower self-esteem" (no, I am not making that up). The list goes on and on. We watched the Leo DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet, rather than reading it, I had an English teacher in middle school who thought Billy Maddison was an educational film, you name it. I attended a private Catholic school until fifth grade, and while I wouldn't have wanted to study Biology there, I was about two years' worth of curriculum ahead of my classmates when I transferred into public school.
Now, I did have a handful of good teachers. Namely, two good middle school science teachers, my sociology teacher, 20th Century History teacher, CAD teacher, art teacher (I made a bong mug), and good elementary teachers (until public school. Although they were about as friendly as Catholic school nuns are widely supposed to be). That's it. And, those teachers were the ones always getting into it with the administration. The most wildly incompetent teachers were the ones in the administration's best graces. My sociology teacher couldn't get textbooks for his class, for example.
A large part of the problem is the incompetent teachers. They have no interest in emphasizing retention. Starting College Algebra, but don't remember how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions? No problem, the first month of the class will be spent reviewing it! It is very much the case that the further you progress through the curriculum, the less you are expected to remember. Instead of booting the kids who can't handle fractions out of the College Algebra course and sending them back to a more appropriate course, the curriculum is dumbed-down to fit them (I once had to make up a test in College Algebra, along with a classmate a year ahead of me who was about to graduate valedictorian. We were sitting out in the hall, and I was breezing through the test, while my classmate looked quite perplexed, stuck on the first problem. Finally, she turned to me and asked "What does perimeter mean?" God I hate this country...). As a result, your average and above-average students not only don't learn the material they should, but they often lose confidence and interest in school in particular, and learning in general (luckily I still enjoy learning, I just chose to learn out of the state-sponsored daycare/prison).
You are one, and only one, of the following:
1)Intimately familiar with the details of the GP's situation and with the people involved in it.
2)Talking out of your ass.
I have always wanted to ask:
What is the criteria that needs to be met to fire a bad teacher.
... just try firing any state or (especially) federal government employee.
I suspect for much the same reason. It's so difficult most managers won't bother.
I'm all for employee rights but governments really take the cake. It's the rare, maybe even non-existent, bird that gets fired for incompetence.
I don't deny that there are crappy teachers but at the same time if the teachers aren't supported at home by the parents then all the work by the teachers is an exercise in futility. I always find it funny when I hear people here from good family backgrounds assuming that their background is universally applicable to all students out there.
With that being said the way which kids learn needs to be examined; English should be taught right up until the end of 7th form - focusing on the fundamentals, if they want to learn about poetry, creative writing and so forth, they can take double major English. Talk to any university professor and they'll tell you about the sorry state of writing by students who come to university. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals - I look at the crap that US schools teacher - what they hell have they got to do with fundamental skills?
Kids who aren't university inclined need to be told they aren't university material and they should go to a polytechnic - learn a trade, be a bricky, sparky, plumber or some other trade. Its time that parents pulled their head out of their ass and realise that their kids aren't vessels for them to fulfil their dreams which they failed to do in their own life - if their kid is not academically inclined then they should stop wasting tax payers money by continuing their education and get them learning a trade.
Well, in pretty much any other field it's rediculously easy to fire someone for cause.
So that brings up the pretty obvious question of "what's so special about teaching"?
Is is a generic sort of "you can't fire a government worker" problem, or is it somethings specific to teaching?
What besides a Union is going make it not trivial to fire someone for incompetence?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The right-wingers will blame unions, "tenure" and every other typical right-wing target.
They will forget the fact that in the USA, teaching & education appears to be not very well valued. Nor is it viewed as a basic right (yes, I will be branded a "leftist", or as you Yanks like to call people you consider criminally insane traitors, a "liberal"). For quite some time now, in the USA, people haven't been going in teaching for the money or because it is a well-considered profession. So the best & brightest are not generally attracted to the profession.
And then, there is the generally negative attitude towards " book learnin' " generally found in the USA, an attitude that seems to go back to the late sixties. Contrast this with the attitude that you had to go to school if you wanted to elevate yourself & better your life, attitude that seemed to be somewhat prevalent before the sixties (or is it the fifties?). What brought about this, I have no clue, but then I do not live in the USA.
For a country that likes to view itself more civilized & enlightened that the rest of the world, the USA seems to have an odd relationship with what enables that: education...
p.s.: I'm not saying there are no bad teachers in the USA, or anywhere else in the world. There are. But if "The System" is built in such a way that achievement or even just the will to learn & succeed are not correctly encouraged and rewarded, maybe you're just reaping what you sowed (sp?).
Because the students are so pampered that it's hard to prove that someone is a bad teacher?
So this poster lives in a non-unionized state and it is still hard to fire teachers. Maybe the issue is that in general it is hard to fire people (due to their ability to sue you I assume). Maybe this is a good thing. It prevents a vindictive or loony boss from firing you without a real cause, not just because you were vaguely "bad" at your job (obtained as hearsay reported by others, not a solid metric).
POLITICS.
I don't mean politics as in government, I mean politics as in social manipulation.
The only way I see to fix the system is with vouchers. This is the only way to have competition within a state-funded education system.
If a teacher's students' parents all transfer their kids to another school because the teacher is incompetent, there's no commission that can save that teacher's job: the school will have no money to pay him/her. That's the extreme case, but short of that, the schools that provide the best education will get the most students.
I realize there are some likely problems with vouchers, such as the money getting spent on religious education. That's a valid concern, but (a) I think it can be addressed to some extent and (b) compared to the ongoing train wreck we have now, I don't see it as so terrible.
Despite being a generally center-left voter, I have always thought vouchers were a stellar idea. (Think "single-payer education".) The ongoing antipathy the Democrats have to them just shows, to me, that they're in the unions' pockets. But why more parents don't demand them just mystifies me.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
If the average class score on the test is at the 40th percentile at the beginning of the term and then the 45th percentile at the end, the class had a good teacher, even though most of the students still scored low on the test. But if that same class scores at the 35th percentile at the end, the class had an underperforming teacher.
Likewise, a class that scored at the 85th percentile at the beginning of the term and then at the 80th percentile at the end had an underperforming teacher, even though the class scored well.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
It differs from system to system, but the main issues are failing to teach well. For us, there are three areas a teacher needs to have proficiency, content development, promoting engagement, and classroom management. The teacher has to be able to develop a lesson that is appropriate for the grade level, cognitive ability for the students in that classroom, and that covers the standards being taught. Most teachers can do this well.
Promoting engagement is where a lot of problems arise. Can a teacher make a lesson engaging? Do they ask relevant questions that probe a student's understanding or that prompt a student to look further for a more robust understanding? Does the teacher work with all the students in the room in ways that at least attempt to get a student involved.
Finally, teachers have to manage the classroom well. Do they spend forty minutes taking roll and asking about the students' plans for the weekend, or do they get right to the lesson? How do they deal with students who are acting appropriately, or inappropriately? Do they control the situation or let the student? Etc.
If a teacher isn't proficient in many of these areas or is egregiously negligent in one of them, you can begin the process to terminate employment.
Of course there are several steps involved.
Of course, the article is correct that it is much easier to fire someone who is negligent. Proving a teacher is bad in the classroom isn't easy.
An important change for education.
Yeah school doesn't teach a lot of life skills like managing personal finances. A lot of that has to be learned on your own but at least there's internet help and tips nowadays. I imagine in the past few decades, most people had to ask their parents. And if your parents were absent or terrible, then it really sucked for the kid.
I think there is a balance. Should teachers have recourse for being fired over hearsay? Absolutely. Should a teacher be able to manipulate a political system for years to the detriment of the students? Nope.
My hope is people much smarter than me will find an answer.
An important change for education.
If I were to ask you if an apple is past its ripest point, you would have difficulty telling if the apple I gave you was just a day past its prime. If the apple was rotten, you would just know.
The notion that you can't quantify bad teaching is somewhat of a red herring for this issue. We aren't talking about the two average teachers down the hall, we're talking about someone who is clearly bad. When I was in high school, I had a Physics teacher who didn't notice when two fellow students drew a six foot tall penis on the back wall. He spoke in half sentences, and couldn't remember how physics worked. He should have been fired. When you get into the middle of the road teachers, firing them is a whole other issue.
An important change for education.
Oops. Never type whilst trying to do your weekly chores at the same time (I should stop doing my laundry when I run out of clean underwear...).
Anyway, I should have said that whatever ails the education system in the USA (if there is "a system" instead of a hodge-podge of disjointed schooling arragements) is not the typically targeted superficial factoids favoured by the right, that the causes might be a bit deeper.
Or, like someone else pointed out, maybe the school principals (or directors or whatever you Yanks call them) are just too lazy to follow The Process to terminate those unfit for teaching. You could be a PhD in your field and yet be a abysmal teacher...
Awww, I thought the single page version was shortened. How can the product of the public school system be expected to maintain his attention span through the entire text?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I know a programmer who has been fired 5 times, but not for incompetence.. he's an alcoholic. He thinks its perfectly normal to get fired.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Check out Bill Gates' recent TED talk. He talks about how to improve our school systems in the second half, and how hard it is to fire teachers is part of it. It's really astonishing -- he mentions some teachers actually have obstacles added to their contracts that make it nearly impossible to fire a teacher for poor performance, or even to restrict judging their performance at all.
It's PARENTS. I worked in a high school for 2 years. Parents today are sending less disciplined, less respectful students to school and expecting the teachers to make up the slack.
Parents are so arrogant that when Little Johnny comes home with a story about why their teacher is so bad and mean to them, they never even stop to consider that their child could be doing what children do; lying to avoid responsibility for their own actions.
Kind of a long story, but I'll share one incident. The junior class at the school I worked at was getting into LOTS of trouble; DUIs, MIPs, bad academics, poor performance in school sports, you name it. So, the principal called an assembly where he sent out all of the teachers except for a handful of administrators. He told them quite frankly that they were screwing up and ruining their futures. He basically challenged them to turn their class around.
Well, ALL the kids ran home and told their parents what a mean, bad principal they had and that he'd called them stupid slackers, etc. Naturally, having worked with the students when I heard this story I called BS and did my own questioning of kids. What they'd all admit if you took the 30 seconds to skeptically question them was that the principal had done nothing of the sort. That they were exaggerating what he'd said and that they had gotten the precise response they wanted from their parents. The parents blamed the teachers and the administrators.
And, this wasn't some poor, troubled school. This was a obscenely wealthy school district in a college town with a lot of children of college staff and administration in attendance.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I complained about my daughter's teacher, and the Beaverton Education Association sent me a cease and desist order threatening to sue me for defamation and interfering with the teacher's business relationships! Wanna know what teacher's priorities are? Visit the teacher's union web sites sometime. Hint: They contain no content about helping students learn; all everything there is concerned with how to avoid be held accountable for your actions or for you lack of educational results.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This is why we need school choice vouchers. Those who are motivated to rescue their kids from the system should not have to fund it when they are paying for an alternative.
We cannot fix the public school system because that requires power we will never have. We should admit that and use school choice legislation so we can have some opportunity for the few. Society is led by the few achievers, not the mass of beasts. We dump millions into trying to educate retards, so why not let those motivated to opt out and improve their childrens chances do so?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
In the Polanco case, as in Daniel's, there was no shortage of documentation. The account of the history teacher's interactions with the apparently suicidal boy came primarily from his teaching assistant, who wrote a detailed letter to administrators. In addition, students submitted written statements that were introduced at Polanco's hearing.
One student wrote that Polanco had told the boy that he "should cut himself more bigger next time (cuts himself like a little wussy)." Another wrote: "Polanco tell [him] that he should cut himself with something sharper." A third wrote that "Polanco would call [him] 'the cutter kid' and would sometimes call [him] stupid."
Polanco testified at his hearing that he had not made these remarks and instead had told the boy -- who was not named in the commission documents -- that he was glad his suicide attempt had not succeeded. The documents suggest he had showed concern about the boy, asking a counselor about his well-being.
"Knowing that I caused pain, whether I did it on purpose or without knowing it, it's a weight on my shoulders because I'm responsible [for] what happened in my classroom," testified Polanco, who declined to comment for this story.
The commission accepted the accounts of the teacher's aide and students as accurate. But it did not see the statements of Polanco, an otherwise well-regarded teacher and former union representative, as goading or callous. The teacher, the panel concluded, was trying "to defuse the awkward situation."
The Times could not determine what became of the boy. As for Polanco, he now teaches at East Valley High School in North Hollywood.
People such as yourself are apparently part of the problem. Through some primitive tribal mentality, you assume people who are part of your group can do no wrong, although they are humans, just as capable of wrong as the parents and students you bash. Frankly, if your first reaction to reading about an attempt to fire a teacher for insulting a student about his suicide attempt is to stop reading and rant about how much parents and students suck, you should find another line of work, because you're either burnt out or an adversarial nutjob. I say this as someone who believes that an entitlement attitude is a problem -- but not one that is limited to parents and students.
Fortunately, I have no doubt that most teachers would be in favor of firing that asshole.
Back in highschool I had a teacher who would literally read the paper more often then he taught class. He'd been at the school for a very long time, he had to know it would be a pain to out him.
The same could be said for any position which is covered by a union. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get rid of deadwood in a local city government position, and it's strictly because of the unions and contracts.
Meanwhile, those without the seniority( but rock their jobs ) are the first up for lay offs. Unions are the cause of this insanity.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Part of the problem is, what metric are you using to judge the teacher?
If you judge by student performance, you run into two problems: stupid/unmotivated kids, and "teaching the test" issues.
If you judge by observers, what method do you use to observe?
I work in higher ed - we regularly get kids coming in that I am flabbergasted that they EVER got through high school. Unfortunately, in TexAss, the "top 10%" of each high school is automatically required to be able to enter any state College.
So since we aren't a "top tier" university, we are forced to take the "top 10%" of kids from Redneckistan, Mexishithole, ElBarrio, MiniAfrica, and NewZimbabwe High Schools - you know, the kids who "graduated with a 4.0 GPA" and yet have NO writing skills, NO speaking skills, and barely can manage 3rd-grade mathematics and english equivalence. They expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter - after all, they were socially promoted for 12 grades beforehand, their education paid for completely (and will continue to be so, even the ILLEGALS who shouldn't even be in this country might be getting tuition waivers and in-state rate soon, which is fucked up beyond belief when the kids on our military bases don't get that), the test standards constantly lowered for them, the curriculum altered, the language taught not the language they need to use in this country, and of course, the standardized tests removed because it was easier to stop testing than try to explain why there was a "racial disparity" between black/white/asian/hispanic/etc in the results every year.
You know what? We get feedback from the people we send out every year, the new teachers out there. What do they tell us?
- The parents WILL NOT help discipline the kids.
- The parents WILL NOT make sure the kids are doing the work.
- The parents will start screaming "lawsuit" if you suggest that little Tyrell, LaShawna, or Chiquita needs to go back a grade because they can't keep up with the expected standard.
- The school administrations WILL NOT back the teacher up if there is a discipline problem - let alone the drug and gang problems they are dealing with.
- The school administrations WILL NOT back up the teacher on giving a kid poor grade once the parents scream - doesn't matter if they never do a bit of work, never turn in homework, and even if they were in the bathroom doing crack during test time, the TEACHER gets blamed for the kid's performance.
I know there are "bad teachers" out there. You know what? There are EVEN SHITTIER KIDS OUT THERE.
And yet somehow all of the teachers I know live in constant fear of losing their job.
It is nearly impossible to fire a teaching for being bad at their job. But it is fairly easy to get fired for something in no way related to how good of a teacher you are (office politics, ticking off the wrong parent, bullshit accusations of sexual harassment because you patted a kid on the back, or just plain getting downsized because you don't have enough tenure). My mom is a teacher, and apparently they hear stories about this sort of thing all of the time.
I think the problem is a combination of a) union contracts meaning tenure is more important than quality and b) how the heck do you evaluate an elementary school teacher? Grades don't really work - they do the grading themselves, and most of how well kids do in school has to do with their family background than who their teacher is. Same for standardized test scores, with the added problem that you can teach the test instead of caring whether the kids are actually learning anything besides how to take a test. Parental complaints only go so far - most of the complaints I've heard about involve a child who acts up in class all of the time and doesn't do their work somehow having to repeat the grade. And most principals barely have time to come into class and evaluate a few times a year - that only tells you if someone is grossly incompetent.
The plain fact is that teachers are alone with their children for 7-8 hours a day with no one else having real insight into what goes on in the classroom. Combine that with the fact that there are no agreed upon truths of teaching (or so it seems, considering that every year they send my mom to classes that teach them entirely different ways of teaching than what they did last year) so that most "evaluations" come down to how well the teacher babysits and whether they are following the current school-wide teaching fads properly. It comes down to how good the administrations is at feeling out talent and getting rid of the teachers who aren't at least decent in the first couple years - before they are tenured enough that you can only fire them for harassment. The whole system is just fucked, and I haven't seen any possible solutions aside from the "burn it all to the ground and start over" voucher ideas.
Well those people are going to fucked up the poop chute in short order. I seriously doubt those pensions will be paid forever. There are so many states, cities, and counties that got greedy and gave away absurd pension packages for years and now don't have the revenue to support themselves.
That and just where are the pension funds? Who is managing them? What have their losses been like? Were some of them invested in Bernie Madoff like investments?
What happens when those people that are used to doing nothing productive for society at all* find themselves without any of that cushy cushy income to support themselves?
Could they even survive in a real business environment where you might live and die by your performance alone? It's not like they can all become banking and auto executives that seem to be completely immune.
I'm with you and we can take some comfort in knowing how close they are to losing their pensions.
* - before I am attacked for that little statement, keep in mind how crappy our entire education system is. My statement is harsh, but well deserved. I support paying teachers much higher salaries, but without tenure and more sensible regulations. Basically revamp the education system and I will have no problem paying my taxes and paying those people.
P.S - Yes, there are good teachers who are serious about actually educating a child. My experience is though that they are vastly outnumbered, marginalized, and generally lack the power to change anything.
[snip] one guy lasted only for his contracted year before his contract wasn't renewed, and another guy who's been dragging his heels at finishing his certs is leaving at the end of May, after maybe three years.
Probably neither of those teachers had tenure. In most states (IANAL) the school board must either fire or offer tenure after three years.
$ make available
-1, bizarre
$ make available
The union most likely negotiated your contract, the amount of in-service days you worked, the pay scale you participated in, and the benefits packaged that was offered to you (retirement, pension, healthcare, life insurance...etc).
They also, most likely, negotiated the school calendar that you worked as well.
Obviously, this varies from state to state, but teachers unions have FAR reaching influence - more so than most people realize.
-ted
My opinion is as follows: the prospect of firing "bad" teachers should not even be on the table. The educational problems of the U.S., namely our lacking in math/science compared to some eastern nations (India, China, etc.), and the fear for the United States' place as a technological leader in the world, is partly self-correcting, partly a governmental issue, and partly a non-issue. Now I'll quickly explain my nonsensical, vague statements.
It's self-correcting because the disinterest of many young people today in their education is a symptom of the media glamorizing the quick buck, and parents' naivety in how to deal with such a phenomenon. It's my belief that the next generation will see the faults in their thinking. Parents will cease to blame teachers and administration for their children's shortcomings. In the end, the youngsters are the ones doing the learning - teachers only have a few hours a day to indoctrinate them with what they can.
It's a governmental issue in that many of the problems surrounding education are interrelated with larger systemic societal and economic problems. The general state of our economy and the relative success of the workforce creates the educational expectations and demand. In this respect, it is the job of the government to promote social programs that prevent the educational breakdown in lower income areas of the nation. The important thing is that the classrooms and books are in place so the students can learn if they choose.
It's a non-issue because, in the end, people advocate for themselves. If a teacher needs to be fired, it will happen.
Lastly, I feel it necessary to give my own profession and education background: educated in public schools through middle school (NYS), went to private Jesuit high school, private engineering school. Currently an EE.
I'm not suggesting "throwing" money at education--obviously we'd like it spent wisely. Looking at districts across the US, it's clear that there's a correlation between quality of education and dollars spent.
One significant benefit of increasing education funding is that it allows a larger set of people to consider teaching as a career, as opposed to their next best alternative.
For example, I have some desire to teach, a graduate degree, and an excellent knowledge of science and technology. I'd have to cut my salary in half, though, and since I have a family, I'm not willing to do this. (In my case, I believe I'd do poorly in the classroom, so this is not much of a loss, but there are a lot of people like me who'd make excellent teachers.)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
AC. ... you don't have a brother.
May the Maths Be with you!
The purpose of tenure is to grant a level of political immunity to teachers so they can teach properly. I had several very good teachers who wouldn't have lasted a year without tenure. They were not popular with the administration because they expected ALL of their students to learn the material well and would happily deviate from the brain dead course materials as much as was necessary to accomplish that.
Unfortunately, with politics raging as they do in schools, tenure has gotten so strong that it supports bad teachers as well as good.
Take away tenure and you won't improve the faculty much, but they will as a whole be more politically correct. The low end will be out for incompetence and the high end for being politically incorrect.
Of course, one question naturally comes up. If these teachers are truly THAT bad, how in the world did they get tenure in the first place?
I know there are "bad teachers" out there. You know what? There are EVEN SHITTIER KIDS OUT THERE.
As a homeschooling parent, I'll play devil's advocate here. The law says The Children must attend school, but it can't require them to actually be good students (be it grades or, for the most part, behavior).
Since public school authority over kids has been emasculated over the years, preventing them from doing real enforcement for problem kids, the proper solution is simply to repeal compulsory education. They should still collect *some* taxes to support a system where people who want to be educated can go. Then, the schools can have a sane policy for kicking people out, since their mission will be to, you know, educate kids, as opposed to play tax-funded babysitters for shitty parents.
Yeah, yeah... an educated citizenry is a cornerstone of a healthy, productive society. How's that working out, anyway?
Method of processing duck feet
From TFA:
Among the findings:
* Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.
Showing up on time is a violation of the rules? Geez, no wonder teacher performance is so poor. They can't even set a good example for the students by coming to class on time!
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Almost every criteria you put forward is subjective, and the rest of what you propose (Conference, Observe, Remediate, Terminate) bears a strong resemblance to union contracts in many fields.
The problem is that management and parents never want to follow the rules that are laid out in the contract. Read the comments in this thread and you will see that many people are complaining about the fact that at some stage in a process similar to what you outline the teacher was found to be competent/compliant with the rules. People want to fire "bad teachers", but they want to fire them the second they themselves identify them, not wait until after there has been some verifiable non-subjective proof of wrongdoing or incompetence.
Any review or remediation will be called "bureaucratic obstacles" or "politics" by the people who think this is easy. See bad teacher=fire bad teacher, simple.
Never mind the teachers that would get fired because they tried to teach something that violated the parent's world view (e.g. evolution).
I'm sure every person in this thread who is in favor of abolishing tenure is well intentioned, but most of them have probably never found themselves unemployed at the age of 55 with a "bad teacher" reputation hung around their neck because the school board realized they could save tens of thousands in salary and retirement costs by firing a teacher that ran against them in the last election.
At least removing obstacles from the firing path will never lead to a world where teachers will be afraid to publicly complain about waste and corruption in the schools, right? Whistle blower laws are just another legal trick in the union's arsenal.
The teachers that are "bad" because they dared to tell a well connected parent that their precious little butterfly has no business being in an advanced class will sleep better knowing that they lost their job to save us from the scourge of easily identified bad teachers.
Insert pithy comment here.
Yeah, yeah... an educated citizenry is a cornerstone of a healthy, productive society. How's that working out, anyway?
As far as I know, it's working out fantastically. Do you have an example of a nation without compulsory education that has a standard of living greater than ours?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Do you have an example of a nation without compulsory education that has a standard of living greater than ours?
No, but I know of several nations with better standards of living that, not un-coincidentally, have a "compulsory" education system that properly rewards excellence and punishes failure, rather than letting the kids simply slide through and come out the other end uneducated due to their own stupidity and misbehavior.
The movie Idiocracy also comes to mind for some reason...
I think it's high time those who downmod on Slashdot ought to be required to write a minimum 50-word statement explaining what they find objectionable, especially when they're downmodding something that someone else upmodded.
I'm looking at the "reactions" to this one, and I can only assume the downmodders happen to be people who slid through the educational system and are precisely the sort of moron I'm describing!
Fucking ignorant bullshit.
Articles like this are designed to fool and manipulate the public. After reading three paragraphs into the article, everyone's bullshit detector should have gone through the roof. Read this:
The Times reviewed every case on record in the last 15 years in which a tenured employee was fired by a California school district and formally contested the decision before a review commission: 159 in all (not including about two dozen in which the records were destroyed).
So, 183 firings were contested. In 15 years. Anyone bother to think for a moment about what percentage of teachers this was?
LAUSD is the 2nd largest district in the country. This year alone, there were 46,496 teachers employed in the district. In one year. I would estimate that the average year over the last 15 years saw 43858 teachers. 183/15 = 12.2 teachers contested per year. 12.2/43858 teachers means that there were problems with .03 PERCENT of the teaching staff. That's roughly one out of every 3,600 teachers each year.
If anyone here thinks that teacher unions should be done away with because 1 out of 3,600 teachers is a bad apple in LAUSD, you are an idiot. Public schools are the greatest economic equalizer in the world today. They allow the poorest of children to still become part of the middle class. No other economic factor even comes as close to achieving this. And the more empowered teachers are to concentrate on teaching, the better the school. Unions help provide this.
Stop bashing unions, and instead bash the government officials who turn our public schools against themselves, their students, and their communities.
This is seriously a mystery for some people? It's because they work for the government. They get away with being "bad" teachers because there's no motivation not to be bad teachers.
It's not like people have a choice. What are they gonna do? Send their kids somewhere else? Stop paying the portion of their taxes that pays bad teachers? Good luck.
If the government is going to have anything to do with education (which it shouldn't) there should be a voucher system where the government pays for schooling, but the actual schooling is provided by privately run schools. It's no big surprise to anybody that the people most against voucher systems are the teachers unions, filled with bad teachers.
Maybe not
We don't "cherry-pick" geniuses- the originating school district sends them to us. If the kid is a genius, then the kid is not being placed at our school. We get the kids after they have already had problems in traditional schools.
We teach kids with learning differences. We must meet the needs specified in the IEP, and perform to the sending district's satisfaction, or the child is placed somewhere else.
We need the absolute best staff we can get to help most of these kids that come from poor school districts, or from un-supportive homes. We don't succeed with them all, but we do succeed with most.
-ted
Word of advice about Missouri: the southwestern part of the state is horrifyingly conservative. If you like more liberal, open-minded types
"Liberal" and "open-minded" are two terms that in my experience are completely contradictory. "Liberals" are people who are (at least) just as hateful and malicious towards anyone who doesn't fit their chosen groupthink, as what you probably would claim "conservatives" are like.
If you're going to be "open minded", you're willing to see the argument and the objective positive and negative points from multiple sides of any argument. Liberals, by definition, come at their argument pre-biased to the left and are therefore never "open minded."
Now, if you want to find an open minded area, you need to find someplace centrist. Given the way that both political parties have been fucking around with districts and going around trying to polarize debate whenever possible, those are becoming harder and harder to find.
But I'm guessing - based on your phrasing above - that what you really are looking is for someplace that will blindly reinforce your own groupthink, rather than challenging you to actually examine your own beliefs and ideas with, say, an open mind.
Again it comes back to correlation and causation.
Two separate teachers, both with 50% failure rates.
Is this because Teacher A has a high expectation of what the students should learn and grades accordingly? Is this because Teacher B can't teach? Or is that reversed?
There's too many variables involved with trying to rate teachers based on students' academic performance. Let's face it. There's a lot of kids out there who either can't learn or just don't want to learn. To quote Caddyshack: "The world needs ditch diggers too."
Maybe an answer is to filter them out early in the process. By middle school it's fairly obvious who is going to advance to college, who is better working with their hands, and who is just there to cause as much trouble as possible. Send them down different education paths and play to their strengths.
My father dropped out of high school and went to vocational school because his strength is working with motors and electronics. He's been very successful at that. There's no way he would have done well in a college prep situation.
Back on topic. The only real way to objectively judge a teacher's performance is based on administration. Show up on time, teach the required syllabus, etc. Any review or subjective process lends itself to personal spite and politics.
I've dealt with some bad teachers -- and in a few cases had to get pretty specific with schools to get changes made -- but generally they have been because the issues were real.
On the other hand, I know there are MANY of these so called "helicopter" parents who have made most of the teachers I know absolutely terrified of input. These parents see everything the teacher does that doesn't result in their perfect and brilliant little darling being the top recognized student as a direct threat. Every moral statement must agree, every method of teaching must match their kids' way of learning.
You've got type-a lawyers and doctors and accountants as parents who are intimidating as hell (on purpose) to these typically 20 something young women teaching fresh out of school. It isn't even a fair fight. By the time the teachers have 10 years experience, they've in full-on defense mode.
I'm not saying all teachers are good teachers. I am saying that if they didn't have pretty solid walls to stand behind they couldn't teach our kids without constantly being under threat from every parent who doesn't agree with them.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
No, but I know of several nations with better standards of living that, not un-coincidentally, have a "compulsory" education system that properly rewards excellence and punishes failure, rather than letting the kids simply slide through and come out the other end uneducated due to their own stupidity and misbehavior.
Relax pal, there's a reason why I replied to the other guy, and not to you. You were arguing against the overall culture of being afraid to give bad grades to students / have them repeat a grade lest the parents file a lawsuit. I agree with you, that's insane.
The person I was replying to was arguing against compulsory education, and that simply doesn't work. Too many fucking stupid parents would love to have their kids around as slave labor all day, doing chores while the parents watch tv (I've seen that happening in Brazil where, at the time, compulsory education was law, but not always enforced). Not sending your child to school (homeschooling is fine, if standards are set and the children are tested periodically to ensure they're learning the required subjects) is denying them the opportunity to have a successful career in the future. Anyone has to agree that's child abuse.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
The "University" you work for should grow a pair of balls. I went to a California State University college which I might add is the largest university system in the world. The Freshman dropout rate was sky high like somewhere around 50% because like you mentioned many high schools are horrible. However if you went a whole year and could not "graduate" into college algebra from remedial math then the university kicked you out. End of story. No petitions. So why can't you college do the same? Nobody is willing to stand up for some standards?
Unions and Teachers
Now try to get rid of either one
Slackers of the world unite!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Part of the problem is, what metric are you using to judge the teacher?
The metric that works best, as I am sure you are aware working in higher education, is peer review. Student performance depends too much on external factors and parents are not qualified to assess a teachers overall performance - although they certainly can alert others of a need to be reviewed.
You're not just a smart kid, you're gifted, which is a different problem. Not a problem for you of course (or maybe it was at the school you were in) but for the school to know how to handle. Gifted students have special needs that not all teachers know how to meet.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
As opposed to the closed-minded types 'round here, chum. One has only to read the loony-letters to the newspaper to wince.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Also, nice try to put words into my mouth, there.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Reason Magazine talked about this a few years ago.
The NYC version:
http://oldsite.reason.com/0610/howtofireanincompetentteacher.pdf
I am Jack's writable stack pointer.
Unions protect all the teachers, good and bad. It's administration's job to demonstrate that a given teacher is bad. If they are too lazy or can't adequately describe their grounds for firing, this is hardly the union's fault.
Or would you rather let them fire the good teacher who has just turned 40 and lost that certain je ne sais quoi she used to have? Do some research. That shit happens.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
How about "judging by complaints?" If you get complaints about the teacher from parents (that aren't about the teacher being too difficult or strict -- i.e., not unreasonable or stupid on the part of the parents) then listen to them and fire the teacher. It's really that simple!
In every single one of those cases, the teacher should just fail the student, or kick him out (to detention or elsewhere; it doesn't matter where as long as he's not disrupting class anymore), or do whatever needs to be done. It doesn't matter whether the dumbass administrators will "back up" the teacher or not, because the teacher will not get fired, no matter what (as per the article).
Either that, or the article is wrong. And if you're going to claim that, then you had better be able to prove it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Mod parent up. I've said it a million times. Once parents (a huge voting block) figure out that no politican will ever blame that voting block for anything their children do, instead casting the blame on video games, metal, rap, drugs and teachers, there's no turning back.
I'll be the first person to call out a shitty teacher or an obstructive union, but this kind of discussion cannot go ahead without factoring a huge dataset: Parents. Of course, the first person who does finds himself voted out of office pretty quickly.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
In terms of producing obedient and unquestioning assembly-line workers for the manufacturing and (increasingly) service industries? It's working great!
If you thought "educated" meant "capable of thinking critically and understanding important scientific, social, and political issues" -- well, that was never what "public education" was for, anyway.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In the USA we have, and/or had, similar systems. It tends to vary by state/district and I've been in so many it has blurred. Most schools had a concept of "gifted/regular/remedial" in some fashion. The advantages I think are obvious, but this model has always been under attack. It seems the schools prefer to mix capabilities, trying to drive mediocrity instead of excellence. Good training for the corporate world, but I digress.
The only compelling argument against the segregation approach is that teachers too wish to teach the more eager, more docile elite, than to deal with the remedial students who in many cases may be dangerous, but certainly more troublesome. As a result, remedial teachers tend to teach remedial students, making a bad situation worse. Maintaining control/authority in these levels does at times become a bigger concern than teaching.
So I went to a school filled with poor or bad teachers. The good teachers were generally an embarassment to the school board in one way or another (i.e. a gay teacher a quarter-century ago was borderline unacceptable).
Where did I go? One of the two most prestigious academic high schools in our city of 3/4 million people. You needed high marks to get in, and high marks to stay in. Music and drama were on the agenda, phys ed wasn't (at least, not beyond the one course required for grad). Thing is, the students did well. The students did well _despite_ the teachers, because they were driven.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I teach physics at a state university, and am a lowly untenured instructor. I know from personal experience that a few nut cases can make your life hell. There's the sweet young thing who out of the blue starts the "you really hurt my feelings when you said girls brains aren't as good as boy's brains." Just picture the shit that can come down on your head when this total delusion hits the administration. Total delusion! We have a zero tolerance policy against sexual discrimination of this sort, and it would be trivial to not renew my contract since I am in a state where it is against the law for public employees to be represented by a union. Then there is the guy who goes to your department chairman every two days because he isn't doing well in your class and he's got a 4.0 so it must be your fault (he got a B+ at the end of the term since he wasn't very good at physics--because you cannot memorize all the problems--and physics cost him his summa cum laude!). So you get marked down on your annual assessment even though the overwhelming majority of your student assessments come in well above departmental average, and you wind up getting counseled, etc., don't get a pay raise for the superior job you are doing.
For every bad teacher that has survived the elimination process at the outset of their teaching career (or gone bad later on), there are at least a half dozen who have had their lives screwed over by nutcase students along the lines outlined above.
You're assuming that it's impossible to be a liberal and not a centrist.
By your definition, anybody who supports any political philosophy is inherently and necessarily closed-minded.
Similarly, I wouldn't try to use the words 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' as synonyms for 'Republican' and 'Democrat.' Political philosophy is hardly two-dimensional, and the positions of the two parties have changed (and even reversed) many times over the years.
Most foreigners would laugh if you called the Democrats liberals. (Not that this is necessarily a good or a bad thing. Politics in America have always been extremely moderate; although the current Republican platform is a bit extreme compared to conservative parties in other industrialized nations, it's still a far cry from actual fascism)
Nice try, though.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So are "conservative" and "open-minded." In fact, "independents" are the only open-minded folks, by definition -- everybody else just copped out and picked a label. (At least, in modern terms -- the classic definition of "liberal" literally was "open-minded" (or "open to change"), while the classic definition of "conservative" was the opposite; nowadays they're both just names for classically-conservative people with opposite ideologies.)
Of course, that's more-or-less what you're trying to argue yourself. The trouble is that everybody reading your post -- including me -- gets halfway through your first sentence and blows you off for being partisan.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Liberals, by definition, come at their argument pre-biased to the left and are therefore never "open minded."
I love the way you write off an entire group as never being open minded in a sentence about bias.
*chuckles*
My pics.
There was a billboard from the last campaign that read "More teachers, less bureaucrats". Someone spray-painted "fewer grammar" underneath it.
I took this as a sign that the New Zealand education system was in fine shape. Even our taggers are grammar nazis.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
You think bad teachers are a problem? Look at bad administrators. At best they are useless bureaucrats who collect 6 figure salaries of taxpayer money. At worst, they are horrible martinets or anti-science bozos pushing their agenda on kids.
One of my favorite lines from "From the Earth to the Moon" was uttered by Harrison "Jack" Schmidt.
"Find a teacher who can bring out the 'scientific mind' in all of them."
Speaking as someone who wasn't the best of students in high-school, I was a lousy regurgitator of facts and a terrible test-taker. But I had a physics teach who nurtured my "experimentalist" nature. I also had a math tutor who was able to get me to understand the material far better than the regular teacher. I've also had college professors whose method of teaching only worked if you already had a background in the material from some mysterious unknown class I should have taken before.
My point is that a teacher is effective if they are able to reach the student who is having trouble yet far too many teachers are willing to write off the ones that don't "get it". In the current system, teachers' goal is to get tenure which is just a euphemism for coasting. "I got tenure. You can't fire me and I don't give a damn anymore." Executive Order #57: Tenure doesn't exist. You will be evaluated on your ability to teach with special merit given to teaching the unteachable. If you suck at it, you're gone. Demerits will be given to those who foist their own dogma on students.
Wish I had some mod points.
Public education in the US is not about education, the objective is to teach submission and to act as expected in your chosen profession.
Personally, I quit and got my GED after grade 10. Sure they offered "honors" classes, but these classes really just required more homework and were graded to a higher standard (read, no one gets an A). My choice was to work my ass off to make a B, take "regular" classes and make a A+ or quit and wash dishes, cook food and make some money.
You're completely ignorant. I'm in a leadership position in a public employees union and no such thing takes place. That's simply not how the process works.
On the flip side of that are teachers who get fired without solid reason when left without tenure. For instance, I live in Corpus Christi, TX. Here in the city named for the body of Christ, non-Christian teachers have been fired without cause when their religious preferences, or lack thereof were discovered. Yet Christian teachers who feel the need to foist their dogma on their students cannot be touched without bringing in the ACLU. History and government teachers often feel the need to refer to Fox News for their information, which anyone with a brain knows is garbage. Evolution is skimmed over at best with the option given to parents to keep their kids stupid by signing a form that keeps them out of that course. Atheist students are picked on regularly by both students and the principal. At least one teacher I know to be Atheist is forced to hide his lack of belief to keep his job. The only Atheist teachers who live without fear are the ones with tenure and even they must tread lightly. This is sad as most polls show that the more educated you are, the less likely you are to be religious.
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
Here is someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Every kid deserves to be taught by a teacher with above-average skills. That'll solve everything.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
This would also be alleviated if there was a license required before people could become parents.
Funny joke. The thought of any government handling the necessary certifications with any more aplomb than they do drivers licenses had me in stitches. You know what sort of people they'd select for.
I, for one, welcome our bureaucratic overl...oh, wait...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
"Also it is used to make them obey authority and brain wash them to cultural "moral standards"."
You might take a long, hard look at your hypothesis, as the school system is essentially a liberal enclave.
And how are his points exclusive from yours?
Moral standards are the PC world we live in today.
As for obeying authority - many of the most authoritarian states have been essentially liberal in nature.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Whereas a master's degree in business administration if often enough for a $200,000 per-year job in the private setor, a PhD in education rarely nets $80,000. We have an "industry" of low pay. When the argument is made that CEOs must be paid 10 million per year to attract the best, is it less reasonable to assume that low pay attracts lower quality educators? We have a relative shortage of teachers. If schools were flooded by applicants, bad teachers could be fired. As it is, we spend so little on education my child's kindergarten teacher asked us to donate crayons so the kids could color. No business will ever look to fire bad apples when they are already short on manpower. I worked in such an industry, and the sad fat was that the easy work was given to the incompetant, and the competant looked forward to starting their own business and getting out as soon as possible.
Come to Oregon - the lobbying by public employee unions here is well-documented and furious.
Advice: on VPS providers
Europe does not have a single education system, and the voucher thing is in Sweden.
That's totally irrelevant. In any area it's easy to fire teachers in their first year or two, or who fail to get the necessary certifications. Those are not the teachers we're talking about here.
In most schools teachers get tenure after 3-5 years, and that is when it becomes nearly impossible to fire them.
My own experience has been that new teachers are generally pretty good, though they may lack experience. That's understandable; it takes a while to get the hang of any new job. The really bad teachers I've seen have been way past tenure, and were at the point of just clocking time until retirement. Maybe they were good at one time and got burnt out, or maybe they were never more than just good enough to not get fired, I don't know. What I do know is that basically the only way they'll get fired is if they get caught having sex with a minor.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
look again.
The easiest way to turn kids into unthinking adults is to never give them a chance to learn discipline. It takes self-discipline to think.
There are two ways to do that.
One is by too much external discipline, never giving them a chance to do anything but what the teacher thinks. (That's a really hard thing to do to a whole class, but teachers can selectively do that to a few of the standouts, to cow the rest.)
The other is to never ask them to stretch, never push them at all.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Teaching is a problem because human learning isn't understood. Measurement is not understood either.
Education is NOT business. Only a fool applies business to education (and there are lots of them in recent years.) Just because you went to school doesn't make you an expert on education and just because you can procreate doesn't make you an expert in child development. I'm not a doctor because I've been sick... Politicians are especially bad when it comes to this problem.
Law of human nature: any measurement system will be hacked and exploited. The more rigid the system the more attack vectors-- "letter of the law" is a perfect example.
A few Ideas:
A HUMAN evaluation by a panel of 3 educators will beat a paper graduation exam easily.
Break up subjects MORE and try to eliminate the stigma / attachment to GRADE LEVELS. Some kids should be doing a heavy math sequence BEFORE english, etc. Why should everybody be forced to fit into the same mold?? The larger the school, the more alternatives should be provided; there is more than 1 way to teach something.
School Psychologist. Emotional issues are the #1 problem in education by far. (Lack of proper parenting aside...)
Child development and physiology. Not tradition. Being labeled BAD or SLOW does not help anymore than picking on a fat kid helps them lose weight. Young children wake up sooner; playtime IS development.
History. The modern world was created by people using OLD SCHOOL education without technology or involving the legal system. Learning math with an abacus or slide rule may be highly beneficial for a large number of people.
Parent Grading? Factor in the parents, if anything to help the system-- but it could put pressure on parents; who will have a harder time claiming their brat is perfect when they themselves rank poorly. (school psychologist??)
Dog Training. Ever try it? Big part of it is training THE OWNER. Its for dogs but not for kids?
No performance pay. It encourages exploits more than bragging your server is unhackable at defcon. Bad Apples shouldn't sour the whole bunch. There will ALWAYS be some corruption and there will ALWAYS be some bad educators (plus 1 style doesn't fit all.) Transferring teachers is already done - sometimes they shape up when moved around.
Culture. Sports team success impacts the college's state funding. I rest my case.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
There is a problem, all teachers get complaints. You get complaints if you try to teach evolution to christians, or mathematics to dumb kids, or cooking to boys, or woodwork to girls, or sports to fat kids.
Parents are basically, a complete bunch of wankers.
Or he's familiar with the way the teacher's union operates in California. They have effectively created the classic union employment situation where the only way to get fired is to do drugs at school or molest a child. I work for the largest school district in california. I am quite familiar with this.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If we could fire bad teachers, we could get rid of the concept of merit pay, incentives and all the other band-aid-on-a-broken-arm solutions.
Merit pay? So you are saying rewarding teachers for good performance is not good? Please explain. Here in Oregon, the teacher's union has the state by the balls, and a lot of critics of the system are holding up merit pay as a better idea.
Here's an article on these issues from the AFT union magazine, "American Educator", last fall:
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall2008/goldstein.pdf
A primary problem is that principals want to fire people at-will, without evidence. The union demands legitimate documented evidence, and many principals don't have the time or interest in following that up, and therefore simply drop that responsibility.
One thing that has been tried in places is putting teachers and the union on a renewal panel with the principal, including a regular review/evaluation process. Lesson: The union members are far more aggressive about removing bad teachers, so as to protect the quality of the profession (similar to doctor & lawyer bars). The example in the article saw an increase from 1% of teachers fired to 12% in the year that union-involved renewal boards were established. Principals are quoted as being enormously grateful for the confidence given by such oversight. (See article above, p. 10/37, item #6, "Increasing Accountability for Teaching Quality".)
I've taught at community colleges in two states, one with a weak union and one with a strong one. I know the strong-union institution (CUNY in New York) has far more regular, and far more rigorous observation/evaluation practices, by fellow professors. At the previous job it was entirely one assistant dean's responsibility to oversee everyone, he didn't really care for it, skipped it the majority of the time (and only sat in for 5 minutes after I begged him to give me the contract-required review), couldn't understand the proceedings in the class, etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Depends, when they set sexting as part of homework, I would question that.
Where are the mothers and fathers??? The moms in the PTA in my high school were vicious, they would have surely ripped the teachers head off if he didn't get fired and probably the principles too for letting him stay. This is out of control, it doesn't matter what the board can do and what the regional blah blah blah said and what the union defended. I had some bad teachers in my day and yes it would have been nice if they had fired them. But my bad teachers just were not good at teaching a subject or something. These teachers abusing their rights like that should be fired faster then they can add 2+2.
It would seem there is no simple answer. Coming from Russia and having a wider basis for comparison, it would seem to me schools are holding on to bad teachers for two reasons: lack of of desire to deal with teacher unions and lack of qualified replacements. The latter seems to be the bigger problem. Indeed, replacing one bumbling idiot with another hardly justifies the effort. In my humble opinion, the US education system is even more screwed up than the health care system. Just like it is not worth the effort firing bad teachers (or bad college professors, for that matter), I believe its a waste of time trying to fix the system. Just keep doing what we were doing: create conditions for more European-educated teachers and professors to come to this country. Not a very patriotic approach, but probably a more practical one.
One students best teacher is another's nightmare.
If you tie the teacher's wages to students' scores on standardized tests, the teachers end up teaching the test instead of the subject. And then you get students who are good at taking (a certain kind of) tests, instead of students who can work.
There is no way to objectively evaluate teachers.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Yeah, good points.
But showing weakness is not necessarily going to undermine your authority.
Admitting to an error is not exactly showing weakness, either.
Teaching the subject is not the primary goal of a class. It's number two, generally. But the subject is the seat of your authority as a teacher. If you are dedicated to presenting the subject in a way that makes it accessible to the students, and if your are dedicated to giving the students opportunities to gain enough experience and understanding of the subject to prepare to master the subject, and to choose whether the subject is one they want to pay the price to master, you don't have authority problems.
The subject is the authority. Lean on it.
Admittedly, you do get a few students in your classes who should not be there, and some of those will try to take it out on you and their fellow students. You may not be able to help them get into classes more suited for their needs, but you can deal with them as necessary if you know what your priorities are and act by them.
Usually. In some cases it does end up taking more than the duration of the class to solve a particular student's riddles.
Which brings us to what should be the first priority of the teacher -- keeping the students from killing each other.
Heh. Erm, maybe it would be appropriate to point out that the way to avoid unhealthy competition between the students (and between students and teachers) is to help them understand that education is not the teachers' responsibility.
The teachers can only present, explain, encourage. The actual learning is each individual student's job. No one can do that for them.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It may not be specifically liberal or specifically conservative, but /. definitely has an agenda.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Seriously, why?
That's one of the more relevant posts here. Every field has these problems:
People who don't know what their job is.
People who know too much about the other guy's job and not enough about their own.
People who know what their own job is but don't know what any one else's job is. (Or, rather, they think they know what their job is, but they don't know how it fits in with the other jobs that need to be done, so they have trouble producing results others can use.)
People who are so busy working that they forget to do the job. (And people so busy doing the job that they don't have time to work.)
People.
Imperfect people. Like you and me.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
This biggest failure of most unions is not letting their members know they're actually doing anything, and not talking to their members. They may have been doing plenty but not telling you about it.
It's like anything else -- you may opt to write code over documentation. Trouble is, both are important.
My union used to bitch about this until we started involving them appropriately...
Believe it or not, there is one easy and swift way to get a teacher fired. And fired in such a way that they'll never have another teaching job again.
A very good friend of mine spent on the order of 5 years getting a degree in education because he wanted to be a high school teacher. When we were in high school together, he had a crappy and unstable home life but always looked up to the few good teachers in our school. They were really the only decent role models he had and he decided he wanted to travel the same path because he knew, better than most, what a positive influence a really good teacher can have on a kid's life. Not long after he after had all the necessary certifications and whatnot, he landed a really good job in an upscale public school district on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area. He made quick friends with the faculty including the principal, his students loved him, he was active in the sports programs, and so on.
One Monday, during the school's lunch hour, he was keeping an eye on a group of students in a classroom for whatever reason. As is common with teens, their conversation turned--shall we say--a bit on the sexual side. Now if you knew my friend, you'd know that he's a pretty jovial, easy-going guy. He made some harmless off-hand joke relating to the existing conversation before trying to steer the banter back towards something more school-appropriate. Worst mistake in his life.
One of the girls in the room at the time had a history of disciplinary problems. Her parents were of the "my precious snowflake can do no wrong" persuasion and already had a grudge against the school. Apparently she relayed some blatantly false information about the discussion to her parents and they, in turn, threatened the school with a sexual harassment lawsuit. By Wednesday my friend was fired. The school board couldn't be bothered to hear his side of the story. They didn't confirm the story with any of the other students in the room. The teacher's union wouldn't lend a hand because they won't touch a sexual harassment claim with a ten-fool pole, legitimate or not. Just the threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit set the whole system against him. His career as a teacher was finished for good. No school would hire him after that.
All he has now is a worthless education degree and is trying to support his family on whatever random work he can find because he can't afford to go back to college now, especially with huge student loans that he never got the chance to pay off.
The U.S. public school system doesn't fail only the students it ensnares, it fails the teachers as well.
I suppose it's just my attitude, but I've learned useful things from every teacher I've had, things that were on-topic, as well as things that were extra-topical.
Somehow, early-on, I got this idea that my education was ultimately my own responsibility, that I was the one who would end up living with the education I got. So I tried to learn from what the teachers could tell me. And I have never had one teacher that couldn't teach me useful things.
I have had a few teachers whose bad influence competed with their good influence, but, while those teachers failed me, they usually met the needs of other students.
Teaching is not an easy job, and it is all to easy to criticize.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
As a libertarian I ask you to please reconsider school vouchers as a bad idea. School vouchers will give government officials an hook into private schools. Once people are used to receiving money from the gvment they find it hard to stop, and little by little they start requesting more and more requirements from private schools in order be "voucher" worthy, until private and public schools are the same.
The CA teachers' union is an excellent example of unintended consequences. When hired in any union school (basically all of elementary/high schools in CA) a teacher has to work for a few years to earn tenure, after which it becomes very difficult to fire him/her.The idea I to encourage good quality teachers by making it more paletable/desirable to be a teacher.
The reality, however, is pretty much the exact opposite.
Life circumstances are such for me that I get to see behind the scenes in K12 education in California. I've seen school administrators wring their hands over how to deal with a crappy teacher... with tenure. There really is no way to get rid of bad teachers, unless they are basically caught with their hands in the pants of a minor.
So crappy teachers with tenure are free to be jerks and not give a flying shiatte about getting along. It's terrible. Teachers who bring books to read at staff meetings because their contract requires attendance, not participation. An ugly caste system based on seniority rather than competence that simultaneously discourages positive change and encourages conformity.
I've seen much better, though. I see alternative non-union schools, and it's like night and day! Teachers are brighter, happier because the arseholes just get fired! At one school I saw, the teachers were actually picked by the parents - the crappy teachers were never fired, they were simply paid as a function of how many parents chose to work with them. Guess how long the assholes stuck around? (never more than a single semester)
Unions were formed to solve a very real problem - to deal with worker abuses - but it seems that now, the unions have become their own problem that needs to be solved!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"...No moor lieberal speelin testss!"
If high school kids can't read then I think it's a bit much to expect a sperm to be able to check the all the paperwork is in order.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
First school I pulled up (I just happen to have Portland State University bookmarked) proved you dead wrong.
"...Mathematics majors planning to teach secondary mathematics in Oregon and to be licensed through Portland State University should complete a BA/BS in mathematics to apply for the one-year postbaccalaureate Graduate Teacher Education Program through the School of Education...."
http://www.mth.pdx.edu/programs/BS-major.asp
Now, if you want to find an open minded area, you need to find someplace centrist.
Bullshit. Just because a position is midway between two others does not mean it is openminded.
There are openminded people who call themselves liberals, and (far fewer, but they're out there; see below) openminded people who call themselves conservatives. There are people who will accuse you of not being openminded if you disagree with them. There are people who have looked at a situation from many angles and formed a very well-informed opinion based on much evidence, and who are accused of closedmindedness because they're not willing to give a second chance to old anecdotes that waeren't worth anything the first time either.
Openmindedness is a willingness to evaluate new evidence, or a willingness to consider different axioms, both of which are pretty much antithetical--by definition--to everything that conservatives stand for. It is not the willingness to humour stupid people.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I must have been in 6 different school districts in elementary education. Most of my teachers were good. In the three years before a teacher makes tenure, there is ample opportunity to fire him/her. The ones that make it through this probation period are the ones who are able to tow the party line and fit in. After that, I guess that some just get lazy. While this might be true, I have seen students and parents gang up on teachers and students who did not "get along," usually for their political or religious beliefs.
Most Americans are religious bigots and political jingoist. You can talk about how evil Hitler was (and I agree), but once you compare Hitler to Andrew Jackson, you are are a traitor. You can talk about how Hitler rounded up Jews, but no one cares how the Indians were treated in OK. You can talk about 6M Jews who were killed by the Nazi's, but don't bring up the fact that 50M Africans were killed during the Slave Trade funded by the Confederacy.
Christianity as a Religion is even easier to rip apart by most pissed off Americans, but no one has the guts to do so. A simple topic is if Jesus was indeed the Messiah and preformed the miracles attributed to him, why did he chose not to perform one act in front of Pilate's court on the Friday before Passover.
But the real question is, how can you have an educational system if most graduates can't discuss these topics nor have any inclination of how to approach such an argument. I use to hate oral exams and thought I was lucky that I never had one all during my elementary school education. It was not much later on in life that I realized that most evaluations of performance in jobs was based on my oral presentation and how much of a disservice was done to me by having avoid that.
I think Pink Floyd got it right, "All in all, you are just another brick in the wall!"
I know of at least one case of where a excellent teacher was railroaded out of his job under color of school reform.
Public schooling today is NOT about educating the little ankle-biters anymore.
It's day care / kiddie-jail with the barest attempt at a facade of education.
And god forbid anyone actually have a hunger to learn!
"Well, let's just wait for everyone else to finish..."
What remains unsaid is "Wait for them to finish TWELFTH GRADE."
Public education in this country is sick. Like terminal cancer + full-blown, end-stage AIDS + hemophilia + leprosy sick.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Agreed....mostly. While teachers can improve, either through observing other teachers, guidance, etc, the issue then becomes how many student's years of learning should be ruined for it?
If your child was in the class of a horrible teacher, would you keep them in it so the teacher could practice teaching with your child? Let them get through their learning process and hope that if/when your younger children have the same teacher that they have improved? Or would you take them out and put them in a class with a better teacher?
It isn't as simple as waiting for the system to vet out poor teachers, there are individuals that suffer from poor teaching. I wouldn't want my children set back a year while waiting for a teacher to figure out what they are doing.
I think you also need to get rid of these asinine feel-good legislation like No Child Left Behind. All little laws and regulations like that do is teach the test as well as cheapen the education experience for everyone, especially those who actually want to learn and better themselves. I've gone through the New York City public education system and let me tell you that it is like playing a game of russian roulette. Some schools are excellent while others are down right shit holes. The ridiculousness of Math and Science in the High School system is terrible leaving my graduating class naked holding their balls in the higher education system. I am talking about the motivated smart students who just didn't know a lot of the things a College Freshmen should know coming in. Most all of us had to play catch up and pretty much work our asses off just to keep up for the first semester or so. I went to an engineering school and my first year was a crash course in much of the Math. You can forget about the mediocre or the poor students who coasted by. The government, local and higher, needs to stop blaming people who succeed and start preparing kids for higher education rather than to be a good little consumer or inmate number 135432. You can't blame poverty so much as a giant welfare system of entitlement that the government has provided. Why does anyone think that anyone from a shithole country of poverty comes here and excels? It's because they were given a golden gift and runs with it while our kids domestically don't give a shit because if they fuck up welfare and other programs that get abused up the ass will be their safety net. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist but our collective responsibility should be to make sure everyone has the potential and the guidance to be the most productive member of society they possibly can.
This would also be alleviated if there was a license required before people could become parents. ...and what do you do if someone gets pregnant without a license? Execute them? Force them to abort the baby? Put them in prision where they no longer can even attempt to take responsibility for the child? Perhaps a large fine (making it impossible for them to financially support the child)? ...or are you suggesting some sort of spooky large scale birth control in the water supply kind of scenario? Others are horrified at the idea of the authorities administering such a license in the first place never mind forcing people to do things they don't want to with their reproductive organs.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Thanks, but especially at school there never called me gifted, just weird and one teacher said "He must have mental problems" because I have serious body damage and didn't sit there crying "Oh poor me" like what SHE would have done. My mom just spoke up "So do YOU have mental problems? After all you are VERY fat, which is a handicap. Surely that must mean there is something wrong mentally as well."
But I was truly fortunate that I have a "weird" family that thinks outside the box. My dad figured out "there is something wrong with his joints" even though it took them another 6 years to actually figure out I have adult Arthritis(I was 5 at the time) the docs were stumped and were basically let him rot in the bed. Dad instead went out and bought me a Honda 50cc at 5 and taught me how to ride. He saw a problem and simply figured out a functional solution. He dropped out at the 8th grade because they treated him like dirt and called him dummy,and God forbid I try to teach him computers, as he just wants to launch his quickbooks and be done, yet when it comes to electricity he knows more than I could ever learn. When it comes to electricity he can make it do whatever he wants. That is just how is mind works. And while other sick kids would have been left in front of the idiot box my mom was reading me Asimov and Heinlein and having spirited discussions over whether you could could send a message from the past to the present to allow you to avoid a temporal paradox when altering time.
So the only reason my mind and body didn't sit there and rot until they could find a treatment was my "weird" parents simply wouldn't give up on me. But at the time the docs and especially the schools said there was too much wrong with me and I should be left to basically rot. funny how when they found a treatment for me that instead of taking classes in HS the football coach ended up talking all the teachers into giving me straight As so I could spend 4 years TEACHING my own class to the football stars so they could pass the tests and continue to play.
Sadly this also gave me a chance to interact with all the "loners" and "goof offs" and "troublemakers" many of whom I found were just like me, and simply didn't fit into their cookie cutter mold. I often wonder how many of the drop outs and losers out there are simply those that don't fit into the cookie cutter. My 2 boys are having to be home schooled because they didn't fit the mold. Being in the south the religious bigotry was simply too intense. The teachers didn't give a fuck if kids picked on the youngest because he is gay, and would actually get onto the older for standing up for his brother. So frankly if the public school system fell of the place of the earth I would have a party. My boys are happy to study at home, one reading Grey's Anatomy and trying to decide whether to be a doctor without borders or a 3d computer game designer, while the youngest reads Agatha Christie in his free time for "light" reading as is teaching himself cell animation. His idea of a dream job is to work at Gamestop so he'll have enough free time to write and animate a series about being gay in America
So call us freaks or gifted or weird, whatever. I personally am damned glad I'll never have to deal with the cookie cutter and that my boys are so smart. I just wish schools actually looked out for kids instead of dumping them in a corner when they don't fit the mold. There are no telling how many kids are being left behind simply because they are different. And that to me is what truly is a waste. Again sorry for the length, but some ideas I just can't fit into a single paragraph. I guess my brain just doesn't work that way :-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ah, the classic model minority argument. Tell you what, let's go back in time and have blacks enslave whites for a dozen generations, emancipate them without compensating them or providing for them amidst deep racism, and let's see how things turn out. Blacks are absolutely not summarily inferior to any other race, including Asians as you suggest. They just happen to have a huge part of our history working against them. That's speaking as one of your model minorities.
The overwhelming majority of European states did NOT implement voucher schemes.
The governments of UK, France, Italy, Spain and (afaik) Germany are constantly being lobbied by (overwhelmingly faith-based and predominantly Catholic) private schools to adopt such schemes, but it's always been refused because this would very quickly create huge disparities between rich and poor schools. You know, we already had to deal with class in our history...
-- Let's go Viridian.
I don't doubt you weren't cheating but I'm sorry but it sounds to me like:
1) You either were unable or unwilling to explain your logic in doing the problem. Even in your head there must be intermediate steps.
2) Failed the social test. You already had this teacher off side, but that could have been his fault. If you can do it your way you should take the time to learn to do the problem as it has been taught and show your work. THAT would have proved beyond a doubt that you can do the work.
It's not just getting the answer right to math problems that matters. Part of your schooling is proving you can do it. Part of your schooling is learning to get along with others and cooperate. You haven't learnt that lesson, and taking you out of an environment where you can do (school) and keeping you at home was a great disservice to you.
Someone with your intelligence (assuming you're honest about that, which I am) should be able to manipulate the social situation so that everyone likes them, and go off and do your own extended study in your spare time just for yourself.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
How is that different then the current situation where public schools ask for more and more and more money? If we must have government funded schools, I at least think we should allow people to have more choice in which ones to go to.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Not sure how it works over there, maybe you have too many whacko cops and judges, but if someone did that to my kid, they would be charged with assaulting a minor and spend at least a year been forcibly sodomised and beaten by "Bubba". Why was this guy not just charged?
Criminal activity, having the conditions of bail such that he is not allowed in contact with students is more effective than firing him. If any law enforcement officer refused to go along with the charges, say for also being a religious nut job, I make sure they their pension. Religious freedom does not give anyone the right to commit assault.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Oh of course, blame the Republicans for all the ills of the world. Can we have a discussion where it doesn't turn into a partisan "the republicans are evil" dogma. What about the no child left behind act. That really did great having the Federal Government basically derail public education because of some feel good agenda. Also if most republicans had it their way, not just your stereotype of evangelical bible thumping 'publicans, public schools would actually not exist, and not because they want everyone to be stupid, or jesus lovers, but because they believe a public education system breeds the lowest common denominator in education. Now whether you agree with that or not is your opinion. Lets also look at the Federal Government system that has seemed to gotten us into this mess in the first place. I am far from anti-welfare or trying to help our most economically distraught citizens but the abuse and massive mishandling of the system has gotten many Americans believing that it is a system of entitlement. These same Americans have children and believe that public school is nothing but a state mandated babysitter service and that if their son or daughter doesn't make anything out of their tax-payer funded education, that they can also blame their race/gender/poverty on it and collect money.
Look at it as if you paid someone $5000 a month without any incentives on your part, that person will just spend the money and continue to collect because they didn't have to earn it and you're not lighting a fire up their asses to become financially independent. I don't care if republicans or democrats support their bungling of welfare but I do think that a system of endless entitlement is what breeds laziness and incompetence. Get a poor kid from a 3rd world country and put them in the United States and watch how fast given the opportunity they will try to make something out or what is virtually non-existence in their country. We just grow fat and lazy in the United States with encouraging the ignorant to stay ignorant and the poor to stay poor.
Now getting into teacher salaries, while I agree that most people won't find the pay very attractive, you shouldn't get into teaching for the money. It should take a certain passion and self sacrifice that motivates someone to take a pay cut to make sure that the you do the best you can to foster the country's future to become the most productive members of society as their potential allows. It should be enough to allow a teacher to live comfortably but we can't pay all teachers near six figure salaries either and I honestly don't think an artificially inflated or deflated salary does the system any justice as well.
The clip is from January 2006 and is heavily biased for school vouchers (of which I'm generally in favor). They do lightly touch on how difficult it is to fire bad teachers.
The narration and choice of words are suitably dumbed down for the general population. It's sad to say, but that's a very low bar. Still, the material is good.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
You're using examples of recently hired teachers. The problem isn't them, the problem is the teachers who have managed to remain obliviously incompetent until the point that it is almost impossible to get rid of them.
"That erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence....Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its am everywhere else." - H.L Mencken, The American Mercury, April 1924
http://www.oldthinkernews.com/Articles/oldthinkernews/mandatory_public_schooling.htm
Teachers should be whipped.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I think by "open-minded" the parent probably means doesn't hate everyone who isn't exactly like them. This is Missouri we're talking about and conservative doesn't mean the same thing down there as it does up in the blue states.
We're not talking about libertarians with conservative economic views, we're talking rednecks and christian fundamentalists. Compared to that lot, the most closed minded, group thinking liberals are generally a breath of fresh air.
I know that it's fashionable to hate the liberals here on Slashdot because group think here says cut taxes and screw everyone and everything else, but remember that liberal and conservative have context, and there's a pretty good chance that wherever it is you live it isn't the deep south.
It's worse when there is a union. In the district I was in high school they had a teacher charged with having improper sexual contact with a minor and the union still wanted to keep him from being banned from teaching.
only fair that bad teachers are hard to get rid off. it is impossible to get rid of terrible students. so there ..
*disgruntled partner of a high school teacher in a social hot spot who is suffering from the behavior of kids who had received no parenting whatsoever prior to starting school.
If you thought "educated" meant "capable of thinking critically and understanding important scientific, social, and political issues" -- well, that was never what "public education" was for, anyway.
This sounds good in theory, but when thrown in practice noone actually wants to do this.
In practice this obviously means (just 2 examples) :
-> teaching data denying global warming
-> teaching data agreeing with global warming
-> teaching against evolution
-> teaching for evolution
AND tolerating, without ridicule ANY conclusion any individual kid comes to.
Can you see the greenie nuts (/religious nuts/socialist nuts/...) turn red already ? There are many issues where society currently just does not tolerate varied (and better or worse supported).
You cannot teach kids critical thinking in a society that states (or worse : teaches) it's "a crime" to deny global warming. That it's stupid to agree with OR deny evolution. Especially if one might state the trivial argument that we can't reliably predict weather 1 week out, and we're making huge claims over the weather in 100 years. 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. Combined with the observation that solar temperatures regularly vary 1% or more, it's kind of hard exclude these effects.
All such arguments, especially when referenced, would have to be unquestionably accepted by the teacher, and the teacher should make other students accept these arguments too.
You just condemned the kids after ALL of the complaints about PARENTS and ADMINISTRATORS.
You enumerated exactly what no-one in authority in this country has the courage to do: PLACE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF EDUCATION ON THE PARENTS.
After all, if a parent can be sued for lots of $$ when their child breaks things belonging to others, why are they not also held responsible for seeing to that their children are educated?
I guess that makes the parent post ignorant or, as I suspect, deceptive and self-serving.
One (of many) problems with the American medical system is that it artificially restricts the number of people who can become doctors, which in turn drives up pay. Stop the hazing (which the typical process of becoming a doctor is) and increase the number of medical schools, and you'll probably get lots more qualified candidates who will work for more reasonable rates.
Japan has lots of medical colleges and only a few law schools - and despite everything else costing twice what it does in the USA, medical care is much better AND cheaper.
(My parents have used both systems, which is how I know.)
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).
Not sending your child to school (homeschooling is fine, if standards are set and the children are tested periodically to ensure they're learning the required subjects) is denying them the opportunity to have a successful career in the future. Anyone has to agree that's child abuse. Oh? I don't agree. If you're abusing your child while keeping them at home and uneducated that's one thing, but children will learn no matter what their environment and in some areas I'd see it as protection not to send your kid to a failing, undersupported public school where they could pick up worse habits and lose motivation to learn at all. That's not to say the parents shouldn't be teaching the child some academics along with the practical skills of keeping a house (and working with them, not making the kid work by himself), but I've seen kids adamantly declare in 5th grade that they knew all they needed and were going to go learn a trade from their parents, and some of them probably could and would have done very well at it, if they'd been allowed. I know plenty of "stupid" people with rather successful careers doing electrical work, carpentry, plumbing, and factory labor and they make more than I do as a degreed child behavioral worker. You don't need a degree to succeed in this country, if you have work ethic and a good market for your skills. Formal academic education may help some of us, but it can't possibly provide jobs for all of us. Success is never a given and basing success on your level of education is aristocratic BS.
...if you paid them enough in the first place to attract people with the right talent and drive. Teaching is by far the most important, overworked, and underpaid position in the country.
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.
Are they fundamentally different ? One is totally independant of the other, right ? Oh wait ... it's not. They are different operations on (what should be) the same dataset.
Also, let's not forget that one intuition of people is exactly right : the more accurate one is predicting the weather 1 week from now, and the massively inaccurate one is the average temperature 100 years from now (the current model was predicted to add 2% per year inaccuracy. However in both 2007 and 2008 the model missed by more than 5%. In 100 years that means that the temperature would rise 6 degress +- 87% (in kelvin, of course). So what the model really predicts in 100 years, which you'll never ever hear, is "a temperature between -220 degrees celcius and 240 degrees celcius" (of course with merely 95% certainty).
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
Bzzzt *wrong*. An increase in solar radiation does NOT translate in a direct increase or decrease of earth temperatures. The temperature of the earth is determined by the balance between the energy loss, and energy gain.
If the energy gain would rise by 0.0001%, this will make the earth's temperature rise by (a bit less even than) 280 uKelvin PER SECOND until a new equilibrium is found. I need to do the calculations again, but for a completely static sun and earth this would lead to something like between half and 1 degree rise.
Mod parent up. And I rarely say that.
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
>> we have complained about our son's teacher many times
This is precisely why it is difficult to fire a "bad teacher." 99.9% of the parents who complain about a teacher are moonbats. Their noise drowns the 0.1% of signal from parents about actually incompetent teachers.
If we "corrected" this and fired all the teachers parents do not like, we'd find ourselves with no teachers.
Get over it. Your child learns something more important than 2+2=4 from a bad teacher. They learn how to deal with a bad authority figure. This is a skill that will serve them well in their adult lives.
And yes, I've got children who have had bad teachers.
Mod you up too.
I think (and I shouldn't assume but hey) the parent is saying exactly that: These labels we throw around do not mean what we think they mean. It's the latter part of the post that is critical:
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
Knowing what school was like when I was in attendance, and hearing reports from my friends who are teachers, or ex-teachers, and from my daughter who is still in the system, I know what the likelihood of anyone looking for an easy life and a well-paying career becoming a teacher is - essentially zero. You have to add in some sort of mental oddity, such as wanting to spend time with children, before you get to a reasonable chance of someone choosing to become a teacher.
Consequently, by the time that someone has slogged through the educational requirements to become a teacher, they're pretty rare. Then there is the attrition rate in the first couple of years of assessment and "supply teaching" - in the order of 30 to 50% of the people I've known who have gone through teacher training have gone off and got a job in the outside world and ditched the profession because it's too depressing (neither my mother nor my wife has any intention of going back into the teaching profession, which is not uncommon).
So, now you're a head master (chief administrator of a school), and you've got a bad teacher. Do you try to sack them (regardless of how hard that is going to be) and take the risk of simply being unable to replace them? Or do you use them for crowd-control in the pupil-pens where the sub-humans get caged during school hours, so that the more hopeful prospects can get the better teachers?
Bear in mind - the school administration have a legal obligation to provide a safe place for the children, and a safe system of work for the teachers. For many, that can be achieved by giving the teachers cattle-prods and Tasars to break up the fighting in the pens, and setting them in pairs to guard the animals. Which is where bad teachers can be much more useful than no teacher.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
In the prediction process? Yes, pretty much as different as you can get.
In 100 years that means that the temperature would rise 6 degress +- 87% (in kelvin, of course).
There's no such thing as a degree Kelvin. It's either a degree (Celsius, Fahrenheit, Rankine, take your pick), or a Kelvin.
So what the model really predicts in 100 years, which you'll never ever hear, is "a temperature between -220 degrees celcius and 240 degrees celcius" (of course with merely 95% certainty).
Not quite sure how you arrive at those numbers. Care to elaborate on that?
Bzzzt *wrong*. An increase in solar radiation does NOT translate in a direct increase or decrease of earth temperatures.
It does, in the static case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law#Temperature_of_the_Earth
If the energy gain would rise by 0.0001%
Hold on for a second - you were talking about _temperature_ of the sun first, and now you're switching to power output. Power output is function of the fourth power of the surface temperature.
I need to do the calculations again, but for a completely static sun and earth this would lead to something like between half and 1 degree rise.
See the link above. For the black-body model, Earths surface temperatue is proportional to photosphere temperature. Increase photosphere temperature by 0.0001%, and Earths surface temperature rises by 0.0001%, given that all the other conditions (radius of the sun, distance between Earth and sun) are unchanged.
I know plenty of "stupid" people with rather successful careers doing electrical work, carpentry, plumbing, and factory labor and they make more than I do as a degreed child behavioral worker. You don't need a degree to succeed in this country, if you have work ethic and a good market for your skills. Formal academic education may help some of us, but it can't possibly provide jobs for all of us. Success is never a given and basing success on your level of education is aristocratic BS.
Someone give this one a medal.
Yeah? Which country would that be?
I'm from Sweden, you know, the opposite of the US. We have the exact same problem as you: we can't fire teachers and some pupils simply should be shot in the head - yet we do nothing about it.
Then again, together with a dozen other countries with similar characetistics, we have the highest standard of living in the world by any measure.
To sum up: The system as it is isn't perfect and there is probably plenty room for improvement. But be that as it may, we must not forget that the system is frigging awesome! It has higher quality and produces better results for the most people of any system ever employed by humanity. That's gotta count for something.
Don't be crazy anymore!
Visit the teacher's union web sites sometime. Hint: They contain no content about helping students learn;
The metallurgist union web site does not have content on how to make better metal work, the car maker union does not have content on how to build better car, and my union in science does not have any hint on how to make a better diffraction experiment (or whatever else). This is actually pointless. You don't realize that union are NEVER there to help worker do their job better, they are there to enable a framework of protecting work environment/condition.
all everything there is concerned with how to avoid be held accountable for your actions or for you lack of educational results.
proper link and citation needed. The few web site I visited on teacher union had nothing on the sort. More stuff on how to avoid legal problem with pesky parents.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That's precisely where I'm coming from.
Also, I have to laugh at this:
I know that it's fashionable to hate the liberals here on Slashdot
because of how Slashdot was during the Bush years.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Your argument is that you get better quality applicants if you reduce pay? I find this a tricky concept. By extrapolation, therefore, surely you would get better quality teachers if you paid them 14K instead of 28K, or even zero?
If you increased pay, would you then not get a larger number of applicants, allowing you to choose from a higher quality pool of potential new employees?
I agree with you that levels of education do not directly equate to ability to teach. But in the UK, for example, for many years many teacher training schools required lower school grades than standard university entrance, so it became known by 18 year olds as the thing you did if you wanted a professional career but weren't good enough to be a subject specialist. If you weren't good enough to study Physics at university, you could still teach physics. I don't think that's necessarily healthy for an education system.
I've got nothing. She's one of the only two tenured people in her building, and the program her building serves has only been around for ten years, which is also as long as she's been a teacher.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Two words: Teacher's Union
Sig? No thanks. I don't smoke.
Don't be so quick to blame the Unions, or the administrators. I can think of two reasons why it is so hard. I am an adjunct teacher at a community college. I really WANT to teach full time, but it is hard getting a job, especially with the budget cuts, but I see bad teachers all over the country as well. The first reason is that the pay is crap, so who wants to teach? Most positions demand a Masters at least. I can make a lot more money in the government or private sector, twice as much in fact. The only reason to teach is because you WANT to. Most people today will choose the money. The second reason is tenure. A school has only a few years to figure out if the teacher is any good and they can get rid of them. Now I like tenure, as it does provide teachers freedom from political and other agendas from interfering with their jobs, but if you get a bad teacher in there, they become very hard to remove if they just give up. And there IS burn out in jobs like this. Many teachers simply give up trying to teach students they perceive as not really caring, and especially in high schools they get a lot of pressure to just pass kids so the school doesn't look bad and lose funding. I think if we would change our attitudes about schools and how we judge them, and paid teachers decent salaries, we will get better people in the field. Make it a place where people WANT to go, instead of a place where people have to decide between a love of teaching, and making a decent living.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
No, no. I think merit pay could be a great thing. There are issues with how you evaluate merit, but those can certainly be ironed out.
My point was, if you could fire bad teachers, teacher morale, at least among good teachers, would rise, and a lot of the performance issues would go away. More hyperbole than anything. I just see having a quality teaching staff as the primary factor in improving schools.
An important change for education.
Indeed. At a high level of mathematics it is basically all about mathematical proofs. There is little point in doing a proof unless you give your steps. Writing out non-trivial proofs such that other people can understand them can take me weeks. Still it would be nice if the teacher explained why writing out working can be so important. When I was in school I found it hard to be motivated to do things that I didn't see a real world use for. If Fermat had bothered to write out his proof we could have saved mathematicians 300 years of head scratching: http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/FermatsLastTheorem.html ;)
no such thing takes place
And I'm the Tooth Fairy. Union leadership is notoriously corrupt and by definition, self-serving. Not saying you are, but the problem is WELL documented and pervasive. Unions are a big reason why the majority of manufacturing has left the country. Unions discourage performance and forbid rewarding hard work. Why? Because no matter how good you are at your job, you are paid according to years of service / whatever based on the union contract. A bright young man can work his ass off and be enormously productive and earn half what another man with 18 years of service makes, who sits on his fat ass all day. With tenure and his union backing him, the old slob can't be fired as long as he occasionally lifts a finger and farts. Unions have nearly destroyed blue collar jobs in this country. All that's left is "Welcome to Walmart! How may I help you find Chinese made garbage?"
How about "judging by complaints?" If you get complaints about the teacher from parents (that aren't about the teacher being too difficult or strict -- i.e., not unreasonable or stupid on the part of the parents) then listen to them and fire the teacher. It's really that simple!
How do you determine whether or not the complaint is from an unreasonable parent in a non-subjective way?
My wife is a teacher, and she's had parents call her up on the war path because they made the mistake of believing their child. The kid was screwing off in class, lost a lot of points, and ended up failing for that quarter. The Mom asked junior "Why?" and he came up with a truck load of BS as to why. She called the Superintendant, Principal, and my Wife (In that order), and read them all the riot act about how bad of a teacher my wife is. After finally sitting down with my wife and going over the class work, the grade book, and note's that my wife had taken over the year up to this point, the mother finally realized that Junior deserved the grade he got. However, admitting that your child is screwing off is something that many parents won't admit no matter how much evidence.
In every single one of those cases, the teacher should just fail the student, or kick him out (to detention or elsewhere; it doesn't matter where as long as he's not disrupting class anymore), or do whatever needs to be done. It doesn't matter whether the dumbass administrators will "back up" the teacher or not, because the teacher will not get fired, no matter what (as per the article).
In many schools, failing the students that deserve to fail is not an option. My grandmother taught in the Springfield, MA school system for 20+ years and was forced to retire early because she got beaten up by one of her students (she taught elementary school if you can believe that). The student in particular had done absolutley nothing productive all year. The boy couldn't read at all, never did class work, constantly disrupted class, and my grandmother was instructed by the prinicipal to ignore the child. She was told not to kick the child out of class, and to just pass the child at the end of the year like all of the previous teachers had.
In many schools where you can fail the students that deserve to fail, you cannot kick them out of the class because the main office doesn't want to be bothered with them. I don't know about how it works in other school systems, but the principal can decide not to renew a new teachers contract just because he feels like it (with new teachers in IN being those with less than 3 consecutive years in the school corporation). My wife ran into that problem with a student that has only recently been expelled for hitting the principal. He was the kind of student that went out of his way to cause trouble, disrupt class, and make a general nusance of himself. Early in the year my wife would just send him to the office when he got too bad, but by the end of the 1st quarter she'd been instructed by the Principal that the child was her problem, not the offices, and that she was not to send him to the office anymore.
After that she started sitting him in the hall, but she was soon told that she needed to keep him in the class room so that she could keep an eye on him. Finally she would just sit him off in a corner to keep him from disrupting those around him, but was told that she shouldn't single him out like that in the middle of class, because it would embarass him. Like I said, ultimately he ended up being expelled for hitting the Principal one day when he was being lectured on appropriate behavior.
Each time my wife tried to remove this kid from the situation, so that the rest of the kids could learn, she was shot down by the administration. She had to bow to the administration becuase she was a 1st year teacher in that school corporation (4th year overall), and her job was on the line. Ultimately she was told at the end of the ye
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
And now, manufacturing takes place in countries where workers are rewarded for performance and hard work.
Don't worry, in the future parents won't have to take any responsibility for their children.
We already don't have to worry about educating kids, which is good since many parents are children themselves.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Don't keep an open mind, keep an active mind.
If you leave your mind open all the time, the brain vandals will take shits in it.
Get rid of the unions and open teaching to folks who would get paid on their performance. (GASP!)
Freshman year of high school my English teacher was crazy. My mom would always ask how school was, and I'd tell her my English teacher was wacko. Of course my mom dismissed it because most kids that age will have issues with teachers. It wasn't until the end of the school year that my mom started to believe me... my mom worked for the court of common pleas judge and there was a trial going on involving my English teacher. Apparently the teacher was too emoitionally unstable to take the stand, but she was still able to teach to 9th graders. Needless to say my mom started believing me a bit more after that happened :).
I really don't understand why bad teachers can't be fired. In my area there's no shortage of teachers. The public schools are decent and the pay starts out a bit on the low side but they can max out at a decent wage (starting at 35k and making up to 50k with experience)... Does the teacher's union hold a lot of power? Seems like baring some serious neglect you never have to worry about your job.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I got chastised on another website for stating that teachers should be proficient in their content areas. I was told that teachers shouldn't have to know everything, despite the fact that they are teaching these subjects to the kids.
I work as a teacher's aide in an elementary school. The teacher in the classroom has no idea where countries are located (she claimed Brazil was in Africa), how they are pronounced or who their leaders are. She can name Queen Elizabeth, but not Gordon Brown.
Now, I understand that she's an elementary teacher, but she has to teach social studies and science to these kids and she doesn't know the basic information. She teaches kids that have state exams in these areas, yet isn't prepared to learn the information herself. When we had testing last week, there were several questions on the exams that she never covered because she just didn't know. At least for this teacher, if it's not in the book, don't ask her about it.
I've never heard any scientist make any claims about the weather 100 years from now. Perhaps that's because they know the word "climate".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
it's clear that there's a correlation between quality of education and dollars spent
Nonsense. It's a cultural issue. Look at the DC school system, for example. One of the highest per-student expenditures in the country, and abyssmal results with high drop-out rates, persistent illiteracy in students holding diplomas, etc. At over $10,000 per student per year, it's an outrage. Private schools charging less than that per student while teaching the same kids (from the same demographic, in the same areas) have excellent results. And the current administration and congress are all about killing off the voucher programs that would allow parents to send their kids to such schools, in order to buy political support from the teacher union brigade. The supreme irony, of course, is that the children of most of the congressional and executive decision makers are themselves in private schools. The irony would be delicious if it weren't such a tragedy for the kids themselves.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm sorry I got your panties in a twist and, for the record, I didn't suggest any of your distopian "solutions" to this problem. I am only pointing out the fundamental truth is that there is one source of blame for the quality of students; the parents. You can blame society. You can blame the teachers. You can blame the unions. You can blame the politicians. You can blame TV or the internet or D&D or video games. You can blame the NIMBY neighbors that don't want new schools or new property taxes. But, in the end, the blame falls on the people who have the biological maturity but lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to be parents but decide to bring a new life into this world anyway.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
You'll never fix the school system if you keep allowing them to blame parents. It's one of the two excuses the administrators use to explain away their failings (the other being that they don't have enough funding, even though the funding keeps going up without improving results).
The fact is, kids don't all learn the same way, but they act like they should. And teachers don't like to teach, so they give the kids a bunch of materials to do on their own and expect the parents to do the actual teaching. There is certainly something to the argument that some parents, well, shouldn't be parents. But that's a much smaller percentage than the number of kids that aren't being educated in school. Teachers expect a couple of things from parents:
Ritalin (and other chemical fixes being used) are basically the school's way of making sure the quick learners sit still while the others in the class try to catch up. These kids are bored, and try to fill their time with something more challenging. It's not that ADHD doesn't exist, but most of the kids drugged into submission would actually be fine if they were challenged academically. Instead they're expected to sit quietly for 6 hours a day while never being required to think.
The worst part is when parents try to actually get active in their child's education. Guess what? The teachers always ask for this, but it's never what they want. Try to challenge what is being taught, or even ask questions about the curriculum or teaching methods, and suddenly parents are the enemy. They are "interfering" with the "educators". And of course they know what's best - they are the professionals, right? Parents just aren't "qualified".
While a kid's environment has a lot to do with their capacity to learn, the failure of the public school system has a lot more to do with the environment created by teachers and administrators in the school. The good ones can set up a school in even the worst neighborhood and succeed in education children. Unfortunately, the system is very poor at rewarding that.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You reap what you sow.
This isn't the kids fault, and I think you recognise that. Every part of the system is rotten, and the kids are being betrayed because of laziness or because people want to look better than they really are.
It's been a long time.
a good market for your skills
That's the kicker, though. I have a brother who was born with a chronic medical condition. He wants to work, he's smart and has a good work ethic, but he can't even take a job unless it offers excellent medical benefits or else all of his income will be eaten by his medical costs. No sense making $9 an hour when your monthly take home after medical expenses is less than $0.
From his life, and others, and problems I've had with my kids, I get to see first hand how socialized health care can't possibly fuck the American public worse than we get it now.
The problem is threefold:
1) tenure. It's a BITCH to fire someone with tenure in most states. Basically, they have to break the law and then the board has to agree to persue termination (which is a political nightmare depending on the person they're going after or the principal in the school, remember, these people are elected, and thus easily bought). Even if the board agrees, a court is usually still involved, plus appeals and more. In nearly all cases, firing a teacher exceeds their anual salary many fold.
2) performance analysis. All the state (or district) cares about is that the schools overall numbers are good or improving. In most states, only when the school itself falls below certain metrics do people outside get involved to find out why. It takes a couple years in a row of numbers analysis to determine which teachers are doing well and which are not. This is made even more difficult as teach unions have successfully banned nearly every attempt at classroom monitoring for teacher performance. Really, the only method a school can use is watching several years of students go through a single teacher's room and see if they improve or decline during their time with that teacher. You can't base teacher performance on 1 year of test scores as bad classrooms happen, and teachers get a mix of students each year that veries dramatically, combined with a continually changing curriculum even one class to the next is difficult to measure. In SC, the process for determining teaching ability takes 4 years... that process starts 2 years after a school is targeted for poor performance while they first look at the administration... not once in SC has this actually gone all 6 years as by that time a new state school board changes all the rules and new processes and new metrics are used instead, and the old process is never completed.
Even with all this analysis, in the end, this usually only requires the teacher to go through an education series, take some classes and change her teaching style. Then it's probationary teaching for a few years under scrutiny. If they make it through that, the whole process starts all over.
3) Teacher Shortage and funding issues. Most schools skate the line of maxumim classroom size so closely for budget reasons that firing a few teachers would cause great disruption in the school, causing classrooms on the grade level to swell when the terminated teachers students are redivided. In most cases, classrooms either can't accomodate the extra kids, or if they can the schools max class size would be exceeded (possibly costing not just state, but federal finding as well). A new teacher can't simply be brought in as a replacement without weeks of training, and substitute contracts prevent permanant installation in a classroom. Besides, the disruption to the kids in the classroom from terminating a teacher is FAR worse than that from simply a bad teacher. Heck, having a teacher out on medical leave for a few weeks can set a classroom back as much as a month! Starting over with a new teacher, especially a new teacher who is not already familiar with the kids and does not know what to expect from them is arecipie for disaster.
Teachers don't just teach their class, they're constantly talking to other teachers and learning about the kids they might get the next year. Classroom assignments are done weeks before school begins to give teachers time to understand who will be in their classes, and what issues those kids have (and the ALL have issues of some kind!). Taking a new teacher into a school is a difficult thing since that teacher comes with no experience, and I'm not talking about classroom experience, I'm talking about experience with the school, the people in it, the rules that change from one bulding to another and one district to another, and the lack of experience with the specific kids in the school.
In high school, it's a bit easier (for the school, not the teachers). Kids adapt more readily to new teachers, and classroom behaviors and styles of
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
It's ok to tolerate a well formulated idea. It's not ok to tolerate a poorly forumulated idea.
Attack an idea based on either factually incorrect information(children need to be taught not all sources are created equal)
Attack an idea that is logically unsound(children need to be taught that not all arguments can be made)
Attack a backwards rationalization of an emotional position(children need to be taught that if your idea is wrong you have to change it, so you can't get too emotionally invested)
The last one is very important. People these days seem to think scientific thought requires choosing your political preference for an outcome first, searching for any sort of information that you can rationalize proves you right, then blindly attacking any information that proves you wrong. All children should be forced to investigate their arguments until they get used to proving their own ideas wrong. "Shit, I thought the Democrats spent more than the Republicans, but the data shows the Democrats spend much less!"
It's been a long time.
I'm familiar with the concept--I just moved out of a similiar district in another large city.
Vouchers, for better or for worse, have been completely tainted by religious conservatives, who see them as a way to use taxpayer dollars to further their agenda.
Private schools are somewhat tainted by this thinking, and are also harmed by the Ayn Rand types who do not understand why (for example) private fire protection is unworkable.
As you say, it's a tragedy that the kids are held hostage to these political agendas. Unfortunately it won't end until we agree that a quality, public, secular education for every child is a fundamental right and a serious priority.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Since public school authority over kids has been emasculated over the years
Really? When was the last time the Supreme Court issued a ruling limiting the power of school authorities? Last I checked, they were extending it, even granting them the power to punish kids for things they did off of school grounds, out of school hours.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Oh? I don't agree.
Ok, I should have said, "any intelligent person who actually took the time to think this through," not just "anyone."
No, I'm not insulting your intelligence yet, but I don't think you've thought this through. Here's why:
I know plenty of "stupid" people with rather successful careers doing electrical work, carpentry, plumbing, and factory labor and they make more than I do as a degreed child behavioral worker.
They're not "stupid," they're uneducated. I didn't say "uneducated parents" would want to keep their children home doing chores, I think many of them would see the benefit in their child getting the education they lack. I said "stupid parents" were those who chose to believe an education is not important to their children.
There's no reason someone with a high school diploma, or even a college degree would be unable to also pick up the skills and have a rather successful career doing electrical work, carpentry, pumbling, and factory labor. You take someone whose parents kept them from school and now unskilled jobs are their only choice. If they want a career that requires a college education, that opportunity has been taken from them by their parents, before they were old enough to make a decision by themselves.
You don't need a degree to succeed in this country, if you have work ethic and a good market for your skills
You don't? I just did a search for the types of jobs you mentioned, and every single one of them had the same requirement, as in this example. They require a High School diploma or GED.
Sure, you could start your own business, if you're smart enough and good enough, but "Good market for your skills" is a key phrase you used there, especially in a place where you'll be competing with large amounts of immigrants who have the trade skills you mentioned, as well as outsourcing for unskilled jobs such as call centers.
No, success isn't a given with education. However, not having an education can hurt you, while having it never will.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
The problem is obvious, and you were so busy flailing about with your ad hominem attacks that you missed it.
Public schools aren't very good, private schools tend to be (at least percieved as) better.
If the Federal government uses tax money to start dictating to private schools just as they dictate to (not very good) public schools, then it's only logical that the private schools will stop being better.
It's been a long time.
Another Coward "Oh of course, blame the Republicans for all the ills of the world."
Republicans aren't to blame for the 30 people who died when a boat sank off Indonesia Saturday. Cheer up. The GOP isn't to blame for ALL the ills in the world. Just most of them.
----
You do realize that Dubya NEVER allowed the money Congress passed to fund No Child Left Behind to be spent. Dubya turned No Child Left Behind into a huge unfunded mandate for the states.
This nonsense you're ranting about...
"Lets also look at the Federal Government system that has seemed to gotten us into this mess in the first place. I am far from anti-welfare or trying to help our most economically distraught citizens but the abuse and massive mishandling of the system has gotten many Americans believing that it is a system of entitlement. These same Americans have children and believe that public school is nothing but a state mandated babysitter service and that if their son or daughter doesn't make anything out of their tax-payer funded education, that they can also blame their race/gender/poverty on it and collect money.
Look at it as if you paid someone $5000 a month without any incentives on your part, that person will just spend the money and continue to collect because they didn't have to earn it and you're not lighting a fire up their asses to become financially independent. I don't care if republicans or democrats support their bungling of welfare but I do think that a system of endless entitlement is what breeds laziness and incompetence. Get a poor kid from a 3rd world country and put them in the United States and watch how fast given the opportunity they will try to make something out or what is virtually non-existence in their country. We just grow fat and lazy in the United States with encouraging the ignorant to stay ignorant and the poor to stay poor...." ...never frackin happened in the US. I don't know what the hell you're talking about
--------
"Now getting into teacher salaries, while I agree that most people won't find the pay very attractive, you shouldn't get into teaching for the money."
Are teachers supposed to be celibate now, too? A married teacher household can't afford to bring children into world and raise them without getting food stamps. Your GOP did that teachers.
They're hard to fire because the person(s) that would have do so are the person(s) who kept them on the job, and possibly even the ones that hired them. Firing the bad teacher on their own would mean having to recognize they'd fucked up. Someone further upstairs of from outside forcing them to do so would make that public knowledge.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Get rid of the unions and open teaching to folks who would get paid on their performance. (GASP!)
Yes, Unions, the organizations responsible for you and your extended family not working in a coal mine seven days a week and dying at 35, yes, they are bad and should be gotten rid of in an expression of overt extremism.
A little perspective, please. Extremism is useless.
Paid by performance? Okay, and how does one measure performance? That question has been circled around forever and nobody has come up with a useful answer. Kids are not car parts. They are not binary bits. The question, in short, is not black and white. Some subjective imagination is required to solve the problem. --Come on, you must have heard the arguments and counter-arguments. They nearly all, on both sides, have reasonable concerns.
Extremism is never the answer, because the school system is littered with retarded people who can only see in black and white who are best treated like cogs, and it is also filled with people who know how to use their imaginations who die if they are treated like machine parts. The lizards and the monkeys need to live together and so the system needs to not be one thing or the other.
-FL
As a libertarian I ask you to please reconsider school vouchers as a good idea. The government already has it's hooks into private schools via the compulsory education laws and people are already used to receiving education services from the government & aren't going to give that up. The situation now is about as bad as it can be from a libertarian perspective. The vast majority of citizens are being educated in government schools with ALL the negatives that entails. Moving a more significant proportion of the population from government schools to private schools even at the cost of accepting another government hook into those private schools can only be a good thing.
That said, the nature of the government hook into private schools is a serious concern. I think the legislation enabling vouchers would have to be (but can be) carefully crafted to minimize further government control in private education. Making the voucher a refundable tax credit to the parent for educational expenses rather than an actual voucher would seem to be the option that affords government the least control.
Now, such a system of government transfer payments for education certainly isn't one that a libertarian would have designed from scratch. But, we aren't designing the system from scratch, we're reforming an existing system in which education is performed directly by the government itself. We won't be able to get out of that mess without some kind of transition to broad based private education & something like vouchers is the only way to get there from where we are now.
I'll preface this with the points that my experience is in the U.S. and specifically this is with K-12 in Virginia.
They don't fire people, they just don't re-up their contract for the next year. That way there is no firing.
True story. I had a high school teacher who was caught molesting a 14 year old girl. He felt her up, and also masturbated in front of her. She reported it, and an undercover police officer posing as her brother got him to admit to it on tape.
The "punishment" was that he was allowed to retire early with full pension. He wasn't fired. He later settled the criminal case. The whole thing was bizarre.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Fortunately for me the power output of the sun varies as much as 0.3% without so much as 5 minutes warning. (a "relatively large" sunspot)
Those -random, extremely short term- variations would, according to the Boltzmann law, cause short term variations of nearly 1 degree celcius, with the aforementioned 5 minute warning.
So every now and then, out of nothing, global warming gets applied to earth, and disappears a little slower (generally 3-4 days). The longer term cycles of the sun are much more powerful ...
If you look at the same idea from a conservative and a liberal and come to the same conclusion, odds are you're open-minded to the point that you consider all arguments based on their merits rather than their source.
It's been a long time.
Too much information, man, too much information.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Poverty is often self-perpetuating. If you're born to poor parents, you have one or more of three likely possibilities:
1. Your parents are too busy working extra hours at crap jobs trying to make ends meet, and whatever moral values and values in education they wanted to give you didn't happen because they couldn't be there.
2. Your parents are too uneducated or criminal to understand the value of education, and they taught you the same lack of values on purpose or by setting a bad example.
3. Your parents understand the value of a good education, but since they never got one they can't help you in school at all or even check your homework.
We should never let kids from these terrible backgrounds get away with being a disruptive influence or an awful student. But just because you do not tolerate bad behavior, does not mean you blame the kid for the poor circumstances they were born into. I'm an atheist, but a religious saying is appropriate here: hate the sin, not the sinner.
Yep, I went the long route. Tried college, tried the Military, tried college again.
Couple of guys from high school who struggled to get D's started a lawn care and snow removal business. While I was farting around in the Navy and in college, they were making a couple of hundred grand a year with a crew of workers under them.
Now I have a great job, and those guys are probably retired. Boo fricking hoo.
Education is a bunch of facts and ideas that can help you be more successful. Intelligence is the ability to cope and thrive in your environment. Neither concept is a complete subset of the other.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
If I understand the thrust of the article, it's about how difficult it is to fire incompetent tenured teachers. Well, why not move the target up a bit and ask instead how these incompetent teachers were awarded tenure in the first place? That of course turns the focus from the "evil union" towards the "incompetent school administrators".
Which part of static case do I have to explain to you? Because when we talk about climate, we're not interested in 5-minute transients.
Those -random, extremely short term- variations would, according to the Boltzmann law, cause short term variations of nearly 1 degree celcius, with the aforementioned 5 minute warning.
Once again, which part of static case do I need to explain to you? Or is it a general reading comprehension issue?
Also, your math is wrong. Temperature is proportional to fourth root of thermal radiation power. Increasing solar power output by 0.3% would therefore increase Earths surface temperature (again: static case) by 280K*(1.003)^(1/4), or about 0.2K.
So every now and then, out of nothing, global warming gets applied to earth, and disappears a little slower (generally 3-4 days). The longer term cycles of the sun are much more powerful ...
I'd like some form of evidence about the latter. But until you can at least even get basic math right, I don't think we need to continue this discussion. Frankly, I'll believe any climate change skeptic who can follow some simple rules, like getting basic math right and observing basic principles of physics. You don't fall in that category just yet, sorry.
Heed this!! He holds the purse strings holds the power.
This can be really difficult to do though. I think there are like two colleges in the entire US that do not take ANY federal money. (Hillsdale college in Mich is one, I believe.). Even their students as individuals cannot accept any federal money as that would drag the entire weight of federal regulation onto the college.
The thing that scares me about vouchers is that I don't think it would take too long before there would be regulations deciding what a school must provide in order to be voucher worthy (or tax credit worthy) from that it's not too much to assume that those regulations would be more and more onerous. What about homeschooling, would that be covered too? And if some sort of vouchers are offered the government schools will be pressured to compete which private schools, which sounds good, except for the fact that the way government competes is through force: by making voucher paid education as bad as public school education.
My kids go to private school. The school is struggling to keep the families it has as the economy pressures more and more of them into accepting public schools. Believe me, it's tempting to support vouchers.
Having said all of this I agree that there are better ways to implement vouchers than others, and a refundable tax credit sounds better than others.
Ah, I see you're a product of our public education system. ; )
Here's why you're wrong: there's a thing called the scientific method. You might have heard of it in passing; it's not really a big deal -- merely the fundamental basis of science. What it says, among other things, is that "scientific theories" make predictions, and that the validity of those predictions can be determined by observation. That, by itself, is why "teaching against evolution" (or more precisely, "teaching creationism," which is really what you meant) is not necessary, and why it's possible for the kid's conclusion to be wrong: they fail to be valid scientific theories.
That is exactly the OPPOSITE of science! What should be going on is that kids get taught to think of scientific hypotheses, evaluate all (all!) the data against those hypotheses, and then decide which hypothesis fits best (upon which the hypothesis becomes the theory).
If all this sounds new to you, well, now you know why our science curriculum is so fucked up.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
the gvment they...
I'm not sure if you are qualified to comment on the education system, since not only have you failed at basic spelling, you have also failed at installing a spell checker.
Thanks for the correction. I'm sorry about that, I had my browser set for one of the other 4 languages I speak and so missed it (btw English is not my first). And typing an hook instead of a hook was just a mistake.
until private and public schools are the same
And what is wrong with that? Surely you wouldn't deprive a fellow man access to good education, especially if it will incur no great increase in taxation?
Because the way government makes things equal is by averaging, public schools wouldn't get better, private schools would get worse.
Yes, this does mean that the students at the upper end don't get the education they could have. But they aren't the ones that need the help.They're smart. They will do just fine.
We had a bad German foreign language teacher.
The German foreign exchange students couldn't understand what she was saying.
She taught German and English.. It was nearly impossible to pass her English class unless you also took her German class. She loved her German students and refused to fail them.
She also liked to pick a student and singe them out as trouble makers.. If something happened in class and she didn't know who did it she would punish them.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
In high school (mid 1980's) I had a Grade 10 Math teacher who sat at the back of the class and played 60's music on a tape deck.
His teaching involved telling us to do the work on certain pages, as we tried to concentrate while listening to 20 year old music we all hated. Of course being teenagers none of us asked questions or didn't really think to ask and as a result not one person in the class had a final mark above 40%, we all failed - the entire class.
So for the next two years I was behind one year in Math, all my other classes were fine, and for some reason I was put in a Grade 10 home-room even though I only had one subject that wasn't in my grade level. This also was the situation when I was in Grade 12, stuck in a Grade 11 home-room while my friends were one grade up, all because of one damn subject I failed.
The part that hurt me the most but I didn't know about until years later was all the Grade 12 students went to the local University to as part of an orientation field trip, they were showed how to fill out applications, given information about and how to apply for bursaries etc.
I finished Math thanks to a very good Math teacher who "picked volunteers" (we didn't get the joke at the time) four at once to go up front and complete Math problems he wrote on the blackboard. I had two classes with him, Grade 11 and Grade 12 Math, when finished my marks were in the high 80's to low 90's for Grade 11 and 12, coming from a mark of less than 40% I'd say he was the best teacher in existence. He even held classes after school and during the Summer. Earl Foster you're the best!
btw I went to University briefly many years later and by then I felt very out of place. Maybe someday I'll go back.
>No, this is just genuine racism. There's nothing integral about being
>african-american that makes one reject learning.
It is not racist to point out a failing that is prevalent in a race of people.
You are correct in that there is nothing /intrinsically/ about being black that makes black people do poorly at school. Yet AS A GROUP they seem to do so. AS A GROUP, they do seem to reject learning.
It is not racist to point this out.
Too many people are eager to pull out the "racism" hammer and bash people like the OP with it and consequently little gets talked about concerning the root causes of problems like these.
I believe that black people do tend to have a dim view of learning and western culture. But I do not believe it has anything to do INTRINSICALLY with their race.
It has to do with expectations and opportunity.
AS A GROUP, I suspect most black people have low-paying, unskilled jobs. There are probably, for example, a lot more black janitors than black doctors. What this does is two important things:
First, it sets up a poor level of personal expectation from the children of such people. When your father or mother is a janitor or convenient store clerk this is going to be the metric by which many judge their own success in life.
Second, it sets up a feeling of despair, as when they look around for successful black roll models they find that they are very few and far between. Thus many black kids simply feel that it is not possible to achieve success and they give up or settle for less. Or worse, they harbor feels of resentment and actively reject opportunities for success.
Both of these things are reasons why I have come to grudgingly accept affirmative action. Though I abhor the idea of giving things away based on race, the simple fact is the pump needs to be primed. We need to get enough black people into positions of success until being a successful black person doesn't seem like an impossibility and in fact seems as common as any other color of successful person.
Until then, too many black youths will have no reason to aspire for better.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
>Long story short: There was a whopping 3-point difference between the two groups...
I don't know anything about IQ testing. Is 3 points really a big difference or were you being sarcastic?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Nonsense. At a community college students are more likely to be adult learners paying their own way and thus usually more motivated than the typical university student. Similarly, many universities have TAs teaching classes, while community colleges always have faculty teaching. Community colleges are dedicated to the fundamental ideals of non-profit education, which is not always the case in university settings where profit, research, sports, and other priorities can take center stage. While community colleges do not confer BA degrees, this is largely due to the lobbying groups of universities. They know full well that community colleges can provide a similar quality of instruction for *pennies on the dollar*, and they cannot compete. Thus, an ideal role for a community college is to serve students for the first two years of their BA program.
Certainly the university system has many strengths of their own, but don't mistake them for somehow all encompassing or being indicative of a loss in the community college system. While it may be easy to cast dispersions at our modern student population, the community college is uniquely situated to remediate many of the learning delays and general lack of quality education students receive in high school. Systemically teacher performance needs to become part of our education system at all levels.
Children not only need to learn material, far more imortantly, especially in younger kids, is that they learn social interaction, group discipline, experience varied environments, work in groups, experience physical activities and sports, work in teams, compete, etc. NO home schhol environment can offer this.
By educating your children at home you are stunting their social and psychological growth.
The biggest problem with American Schools is NOT the school, curriculum, or teachers, it's the PARENTS! Americans VERY INCORRECTLY assume that thgeir kid goes to school to learn and comes how with homework and that's all they need. FALSE! EVERY KID IS HOMESCHOOLED!!! When they come home, they should be LEARNING FROM YOU, and receiving the supplemental education that YOU think they should have above and beyond their lessons in school provide.
If you child is not disciplined in school, it's 90% likely it's YOUR fault. If your child is not learning what you want them to learn, it;s YOUR fault. The school curriculum is provided free as a BASE education to prepare them for the basic needs of life and for those who rise to it, preperation for college, but it IS NOT the sum of their education.
Sure, at home you can teach them math, science, writing, etc, but I seriously doubt there is a single home school parent out there who can provide a dynamic environment for education at home, who can perform all the lab expereiments required, afford to take their child on trips to experience the world outside their books, who can bring performances and programs into the house, and who can provide the social environment to allow their child to excel to more than simple smarts in life.
My wife IS a teacher. You would expect an elementary teacher would be a NATURAL resource to home school. In her decade teaching, she has taught about 30 children that were previously home schooled, and EVERY SINGLE ONE had social problems, was far behind the rest of their class in at leasdt one if not all subjects, had serious issues with authority and direction, was virtually incapable of working in teams, and had no idea how to behave in a gym or when playing sports, and had no competitive ability without a serious psychological slant to it.
Life happens OUTSIDE of books. School is designed to get them the basic education they deserve based on the effort YOU convince them to put forward. It prepares them for life and the social interactions it requires. Sometimes getting their ass kicked is PART of that learning process. Being exposed to situations and things they don't fully understand is also part of that process. When they come home, it;s YOUR JOB to help them disceminate what they EXPERIENCED, plus what they learned, and help them form an understanding and move up the ladder of life.
WAY too many parents simply think dropping their kid off at school and picking them up is good enough, and all they need to do at home is talk about drugs, sex, drinking, condoms, and AIDS and they're done, the TV can do the rest... WRONG!
If you don't like the education (knowledge) the school provides, either supplement it at home or put them in a private school or prep school whenre they teach on higher levels, but DO NOT take the rest of learning, the LIFE learning, away from a child by isolating them at home.
Home schooling with truly dedicated parents who not only educate, but also discipline their child, continually bring them to exhibitions, theatre, museums and the like, and who involve their children in social systems and team sports are a rarity, but with lots of time and money it can be successful. But the harsh reality is very few of the 1.1 million children being legally homeschooled will receive such treatment, and many enter into lives of crime or violence(reaction to isolation and strict rule, or heavily religious environments), or become socially isolated and fail to compete in the workplace. Additionally, colleges tend to frown on home-school admissions that are not accompanied by extremel
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
You see, that was what was pissing me off at the time. I would have bothered to try to show my work if it was something like algebra or trig or at least tried to give a brief explanation, but they had "dumbed down" the classes SO much to let the C kids pass that they were basically teaching how to balance a checkbook in the 9TH grade! Their idea of "hard math problems" was stuff like basic 2 and 3 digit division! WTF?
As for those who said it was upon me to "show my proofs" and be another good brick in the wall? No it wasn't. It was up to the teacher to make me give a fuck. If he would have spent a whole FIFTEEN SECONDS talking to me he would have found out that basic math like that is too easy and could have given me harder work if he wanted proofs. But because I had long hair and wore an old military jacket of my granddad's from WW2 he instantly labeled me scum and gave me shit. It is NOT my job to take shit from anyone, even a teacher. It is that same attitude that had us take my youngest out of school. They were like "He is gay. He shouldn't act like that. He is being picked on because he is different." and to them that was fine. WTF? So if his sexual orientation doesn't fit the norm its okay to treat him like shit?
No thanks, you can keep your totally shitty "brick in the wall" public school system. The only things I learned in public school was how to smoke pot, how to ditch class, and how to be bored out of my fucking skull. There I would even get in trouble for doing my work AHEAD of time because I wasn't "following along with the class". If a student does the entire week's work in a day because they are bored to tears that should tell you to give him something more challenging, NOT to castigate him in front of the class for not being a good little C student and not following your little rules. I don't know how the schools are where you are from, but here it is a combination of McSchool and training jocks to be future college football stars. Our books were always old and out of date but the gym was filled with top o' the line pro bowl equipment. So THAT should show that their priorities were NOT on education or actually giving a crap if you weren't a jock.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
For the most part this article is sensationalism, it's about tenured teachers and it's not nearly as big of a deal as the article makes it out to be. If the teacher was bad to begin with they should have *never* reached tenured status. It takes two years to tenure in California. While that's incredibly quick compared to Georgia (some counties throw out tenure entirely), it's plenty of time for the administration to notice and take care of the problem assuming they're not sleeping on the job. These schools sowed what they reaped and they are just as worthy of blame as the teachers themselves.
MD and Professional Athletes may be able to get away with not having a legible signature. However,good penmanship is a plus for pretty much everyone else.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I was speaking about the authority to enforce academic standards and curb behavior that disrupts the learning environment. That's why we have shitty teachers, grade inflation, and kids who ultimately cannot not function as anything other than consumers once they leave the public education system.
It's plain as the nose on our collective faces that schools are accumulating the power to strip search 13-year-old girls, expel kids for using chicken nuggets as toy guns, and ensure that the LBGT crowd cannot gather on campus time. Like the government in general, the schools want the power, just not the power to do good by society.
"Being minors under our charge, you have few rights afforded to any other citizen of our country. After all, you're too immature and need protection. But if you flash your tits to your iphone and email it to your boyfriend, we'll charge you as an adult and ruin your life." What kind of messed-up conflicting message is that?
Method of processing duck feet
One of the many perverse aspects of the Freshwater case is that he has the support of much of the community (Mount Vernon, Ohio). The town is also the home of Mount Vernon Nazarene University. From a quick glance though some of their on-line material, they're probably good palls of Liberty "University." That's to say they have...interesting takes on history, sociology, and science, especially evolution. Sadly many teachers in the Mount Vernon school district are graduates of that university, which explains some of the loopier details of the Freshwater case. These guys think they're in the end times and Christians are a persecuted minority. As is so often the case with fundies, lying for Jeebus is totally cool, and has come up in the hearing. Search Panda's Thumb for "John Freshwater" and bask in the whackaloonery.
There is not a single part of Choir grading that is not subjective. Therefore, there is no way to determine whether or not a choir teacher is doing her job with out making a personal judgement call. Your reasoning works for math or science, even english for the most part, but not for classes like gym, choir, band, orchestra, etc. where the grade is essentially what ever the teacher decides that the student has earned since there is little if any paperwork that the students do that can be re-evaluated by an outside observer to see if the teacher is being too harsh or too critical.
I gave the example of the stupid mother that believed her lying son as illustrative of the problems associated with letting the parents have too much say over whether or not the teacher is doing her job. They tend to listen to their children, regardless of their child's reliability. This wasn't the only example of such behavior on the part of parents, and as I indicated at the end of the paragraph. In many instances the parents will refuse to admit that their child was either too stupid, lazy, or ill-behaved to deserve passing the class. I know several kids I grew up with who's parents were able to talk the teacher or administrator into changing the child's grade even though they'd gotten what they deserved. A good example was a kid who cheated on an exam but was allowed to be on National Honor Society and graduate because his mom was active on the school board. The kid deserved to fail and possibly be expelled, but wasn't because the administration was buddy buddy with mom and pulled strings.
I agree that it's too hard to fire some teachers, but it's also too easy to fire teachers early on in their careers. As I said, any teacher in their first 3 years at a school in Indiana can fail to have their contract renewed and the union cannot do anything about it. The contract that allows them to get tenure also prevents them from having any ability to fight the letting go of a teacher in their first 3 years. The example of my wife is someone that got screwed by that opening.
Administrators have a lot of authority in schools. They may not be able to fire teachers after a certain point, but they can make things very difficult/uncomfortable for teachers. The principal's decide various secondary work schedules like who's on lunch/recess duty, who has to stay after school for which programs, whether or not teachers can spend money on various things for their classrooms or programs, reimbursement for Continuing Education Credits or attending teaching meetings, vacation time, etc. All of these can and are used by administrators to keep teachers in line. If you don't believe me, try getting your teachers license and working for an administrator that doesn't like you.
As for having the authority to discipline the students. If the office decides that you are sending too many kids to the office, they'll just start sending them back. Now you've got to waste time sending them out, and then waste more time dealing with them when they get back to the class room. Then you get the administrator stepping in and making things difficult for you when it comes to running your class. In my wife's case she was forced to get the Principals approval for purchasing of any music licenses for her choirs. Not a big deal on the surface, but when he started taking weeks to approve music she needed quickly, and then writing her up on her evaluations for using photocopies of the music instead of legal copies, you can see that everything is not as cut and dry as it appears at first glance.
AS to whether or not my wife is out of a job come August, who's better situated to know? You or Me? She was given an ultimatum at the end of the 3rd quarter. Either turn in a letter of resignation by 7am the next day, or he would file the paperwork indicating that he was not going to renew her contract because she was lax in her job. She hadn't been lax, but he'd used her 4 evaluations as a chance to create false documentation of her s
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
The summer camp I go to doesn't pay the regular counselor staff a whole lot; yet I have noticed how enthusiastic said staff are about their work; I had often thought that the workers were enthusiasic *despite* the low pay.
I have conversed with the camp's director on occasion, and once he reframed this as a positive correlation, the lower pay helps to keep out the nonenthusiastic types that he/they don't want
He also mentioned that it helps keep the camp fees down; the analogy starts to break there, as educational systems don't seem to have a zeal for cost control. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Well, my point is there are already regulations deciding what a school must provide in order to be considered "school" (licensed, accredited, etc.) and those regulations are already slowly becoming more and more onerous as the laws slowly accumulate. In my state there are regulations concerning record keeping, length of the school day & year, and curriculum(!). There's even a regulation that requires approval of the private school's curriculum by the local school board which the law says must be "substantially equal to" that of the public school, which is sometimes interpreted much more like "what I think you should be doing instead" (at least in the homeschool cases I'm more familiar with)
I don't see why not. "Educational expenses" could be tuition or it could be textbooks & lab materials.
Granted, and I think this is your strongest argument, the "perfect" policy can't get enacted because of political opposition that screws it up worse than it was before. One truth that is always forgotten by policy wonks is that policy is inseparable from politics. You *can't* build your perfect system because other political players and interests are going to try to build *their* perfect system at cross purposes to yours. To various other policy wonks and academics "perfect" is the system /they/ designed, to politicians its the one they control and can both take credit for but also aren't responsible for if it fails, to parents the *perfect* system will all too often be the one that babysits their children so they have time to pursue their own interests, the union's vision of "perfect" is going to involve a cushy sinecure. Education and the well-being of children will often by a secondary concern to any or all these groups as they seek to influence policy to achieve their own desired result. Sure, they all *think* quite sincerely that the system that best address their concerns ALSO by felicitous happenstance perfectly coincides with what's best for the kids. But that is generally just a self-serving delusion. For instance, there's research that suggests that starting institutional schooling at the youngest ages is actually detrimental in the long run & that starting formal education later than we currently do produces the optimal result (as far as actual education is concerned). BUT, we'll continue pushing younger and younger kids into institutional education under the pretense that it's for their benefit when the more obvious beneficiaries are parents (who get free daycare) and to teachers (who get more jobs).
Of course we already have such a system, a one-size-fits-all monopoly designed by a committee for whom education was often not even a secondary concern after everyone else's REAL primary concerns were addressed (though it got ALL the lip service).
I get to see first hand how socialized health care can't possibly fuck the American public worse than we get it now.
To me it sounds like we might loosen the requirements for the existing Medicare/Medicaid programs to include your brother, but I don't agree that the program should be expanded to every citizen of the nation.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
This sounds like a KIPP school. I've read some of the analyses by proponents of this kind of school setup. My conclusion is that KIPP schools demonstrate that kids who seek out a rigorous curriculum and learning environment will benefit from such. Maybe I'm biased by "romantic notions of teaching." KIPP schools have the advantage of not having to serve anyone they don't feel like, though, so the "no excuses" approach is limited to the kids who choose to go to the school.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
As it happens, I just found that book at a garage sale over the weekend.
The message is a disturbing picture, but it seems to make perfect sense based on the available information
It seems pragmatic, not arguing about the ideology of more/less government, but rather about how we could be doing it better...I like that approach.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
We lobby quite a bit too, but your description of what is gained by it is pretty misguided. In my area, it's been bills that require documentation of hospital staffing levels, require safe lift equipment so that people don't ruin their backs lifting patients, and bills to prevent workplace violence. Not sure what sort of lobbying you think can be done that will provide some sort of windfall for public employee unions, but I suspect your take on it is inaccurate at best.
Well documented, you say? Where? And what knowledge do you have of union contracts? In every union contract that I've seen, you can absolutely terminate people for cause. It may take you a good long while, but it can certainly be done (we're not even talking more than a year here). And if that's NOT in the union contract, whose fault is that? Should the union be making an effort to make sure all of the proper firing language is in there? Sounds like a management responsibility to me -- there are two sides to this.
Incidentally, you think that Walmart is doing what they're doing because of unions? Walmart would be trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of there establishment, union or no union. The only thing that could conceivably stop them is regulation.
Early 1990s I think. My sister was a HS Biology teacher. Sis thought the chem teacher was creepy. One day she went into his chemical storage room and found pools of mercury lying around the floor, bottles with leaky stoppers lying on their side on the shelves, etc., and various other obvious problems. Upon closer examination, she found he had organized the chemicals so that pairs of chemicals with the most volatile reactions were always stored next to each other. There were massive quantities of magnesium and inflammable liquids -- up to 100X more than any school would ever use. He had basically arranged his chem storage as a giant bomb, and the chemicals from the leaky bottles were gradually eroding the seals on some of the more dangerous other bottles. It took a fully-suited hazmat team almost 3 months to safely clean up that mess (during the summer months, so the school was empty). The teacher's union made it impossible to fire the dude, or even to mention his problems in public. The nature of his violations have been kept secret from the kids and their parents to this day. He was demoted to study hall monitor, where he spent his time typing single-spaced diatribes against the school, the government, the president, the pope, etc. Last I heard, he was still there, supervising kids and banging out his manifesto in study hall. He never even got a demotion or pay cut. Just a change in duties to keep him away from the chemicals.
Dude, can you GET more racist?
In practice this obviously means (just 2 examples) :
-> teaching data denying global warming
-> teaching data agreeing with global warming
-> teaching against evolution
-> teaching for evolution
AND tolerating, without ridicule ANY conclusion any individual kid comes to.
Back in the day, in my grade 11 English class, we were required to debate. This was rules-based debating, awarding points based on rebuttals, etc. However, we had a touchy-feely teacher who objected to the concept, because often the "wrong side" would win. "Wrong" of course being defined as anything the teacher disagreed with.
Due to a quirk of scheduling, I managed to get two debates on consecutive weeks. The first was debating capital punishment, and my team drew the affirmative. The second was also debating capital punishment, and I was added to the negative team, who were short a debater.
In both cases, my team won the debate, by large margins.
The teacher promptly ordered the result of the second debate overturned, and gave me a poor grade, because "obviously" I must have cheated. I escalated it all the way up to the Board of Education. In one of the more memorable memories I had of high school, I witnessed the Board members drop their jaws to the floor listening to the teacher's justification for her grading. First off, she said I was being "intellectually dishonest" by arguing both sides of the same proposition. Ignoring the fact that I didn't *choose* what debates to be part of (they were assigned to us), whether you agree with your debate topic or not is irrelevant. In fact, it's quite beneficial to argue the merits of something you personally disagree with; it helps you judge the validity of your own position from a different view. That a teacher didn't realize (or accept) this was quite a shock to the Board.
But even more damning was the teacher's second argument for my grade. She gave an impassioned speech explaining how capital punishment was immoral, with numerous (irrelevant) emotional examples of why it was bad. Again, the Board pointed out that whether capital punishment was moral or not wasn't the issue, the issue was the debate.
At this point, she basically flipped her lid, and was practically yelling at the Board members. "Don't you understand? Capital punishment is *murder*! It's *wrong*! How can I give a passing grade to a student that advocates *killing*? You're asking me to reward immoral behaviour, and I won't do it!"
She didn't have to, as the Board directly upgraded my mark, and that teacher found herself removed from the debate process the next year. However, she was still in the system, evaluating her students using her moral criteria.
Sure, I won. But only because I wouldn't back down. The teacher wouldn't budge. The vice principal wouldn't do anything. The principal wouldn't do anything. It took me (and my mother) months to escalate this up to the Board, during which time, this teacher was teaching students that debate was a popularity contest and a way to show your moral superiority.
Sadly, they don't teach formal debate any more, and I see the effects of that in many places. Students are not taught to not become emotionally involved in a debate; over the years I've seen more and more that people are trying to shout each other down rather than debate.
I'm pro-evolution and a global warming "denier", and I'm more than happy to debate those topics with people. However, I find that many of my ideological opponents tend to (a) confuse an appeal to emotion with a logical argument, and (b) become hysterical when they feel they're losing.
I've won more debates than I've lost, but I've certainly lost a few in my time. And I've learned more from those debates than from the ones I won. Winning doesn't make you challenge your assumptions.
The fuck are you talking about?
Problem about ILLEGALS who are getting government benefits? Dude, they broke the law and have no legal right to be in the country and yet demand monetary benefits from the taxpayers? Fuck them!
Tyrell is a heavily used redneck name. LaShawna is a typical black name. Chiquita is typical latina-sounding. Are you asserting I'm "racist" because I didn't write in a typical asian name to balance it out or something?
Or are you just a loser who couldn't come up with a real response, so had to throw the "racist" card? Fuck you, go godwin yourself and get it over with.
Children not only need to learn material, far more imortantly, especially in younger kids, is that they learn social interaction, group discipline, experience varied environments, work in groups, experience physical activities and sports, work in teams, compete, etc. NO home schhol environment can offer this.
By educating your children at home you are stunting their social and psychological growth.
Yeah. By not subjecting them to mental abuse, physical abuse, and the roundabout torture by the sons and daughters of shithead breeders who've had 12 kids on a 40 IQ and government handouts, you're doing "immense harm" to your kids.
Oh, wait, it doesn't sound the same when I put it like that, huh.
Sure, at home you can teach them math, science, writing, etc, but I seriously doubt there is a single home school parent out there who can provide a dynamic environment for education at home, who can perform all the lab expereiments required, afford to take their child on trips to experience the world outside their books, who can bring performances and programs into the house, and who can provide the social environment to allow their child to excel to more than simple smarts in life.
Dude, fuck you. Have you even SEEN a public school lately?
Public schools do not do ANY lab experiments any more. Most of them don't even have a gas hookup at the teacher's desk in a science classroom. Hell, bring in a couple tabs of alka-seltzer to demonstrate the process of effervesence and you're likely to get dragged off under some "zero tolerance" medications policy.
Home schooling with truly dedicated parents who not only educate, but also discipline their child, continually bring them to exhibitions, theatre, museums and the like, and who involve their children in social systems and team sports are a rarity, but with lots of time and money it can be successful. But the harsh reality is very few of the 1.1 million children being legally homeschooled will receive such treatment, and many enter into lives of crime or violence(reaction to isolation and strict rule, or heavily religious environments), or become socially isolated and fail to compete in the workplace.
Again, fuck you for being a retard. Every homeschooling parent I have known has gone FAR above and beyond the "minimums" of what they need to do, and their kids have benefited greatly as a result. They've gone the extra mile to ensure their kids get to participate in clubs and sports when the kid had a genuine interest (as opposed to forcing their kids into little league or something else merely because it's summertime and school isn't providing the free day care). They've gone out of their way to see that the kids have REAL exposure to what is going on in the world around them. They take the time to make sure the kids understand not just the "basics", but everything that goes on around them - the family budget, taking care of your house and clothes and possessions, appreciating what you have rather than thinking you have to have "the newest thing" merely because someone else does. Every one of these kids was either an Eagle Scout or Girl Scout with the Gold Award. Every one of them was polite, courteous, well-spoken, smart, and more adept in critical thinking than any product of the Edjamacashun Factery that I've ever seen.
You are doing your child a great disservice by not allowing them to have at least some experience in public schools.
They have done the best possible thing they could, by NOT inflicting the horrors of the pure shithole of American public schooling upon them.
How about "judging by complaints?" If you get complaints about the teacher from parents (that aren't about the teacher being too difficult or strict -- i.e., not unreasonable or stupid on the part of the parents) then listen to them and fire the teacher. It's really that simple!
I teach in a small community. It is really easy to start a "word of mouth" campaign to get complaints into the school board. In this small rural community, I was the only male with hair long enough to be pulled into a pony tail. (I waited until I got my tenure to grow it out). After I showed up to school with a pony tail, there were many complaints that I was a poor/unqualified/destructive/untrustworthy/etc teacher. Quite a few complaints came from community members that did not have kids in school. The gossip mill in a small community is a powerful thing. If we start using a "Complaint Standard" to dismiss teachers, it will be really easy to call up a teacher and say, "I want my little Johnny to get an A in your class. If not, all of my relatives (95% of the community) will notify the school board that you can't teach. Remember the Amazon/EA fiasco with the negative reviews over the DRM. The majority of the reviewers had not even purchased that game. Those reviews should not be credited.
Yet, I received many bad reviews from people that have no involvement (ie no kids) in my class. I invited everyone that submitted a signed complaint (I couldn't invite the anonymous complaints.) to the school board to attend any of my classes whenever they withed. Each and every time a community member sat in my class (several times) they walk away impressed with what we did. (The students published a book last year and did community education projects.) A few of the community members asked for "Adult" versions of what I taught the students as they got involved and wanted to learn more.
So in short, the idea to fire teachers because of a magic number of complaints are filed is wrong.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Parents do bear the responsibility for how their children are educated, and for this reason, they should be given the option to spend their tax dollars on the school of their choice, not be restricted to the standard government/union run schools.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
If that's the case, then what's the point of grading it to begin with?
Of course, that's not the case -- at the very least, you can still objectively grade whether the student showed up and sang (as in, whether sound was produced from his mouth). If that happened, he passed. If not, he failed. Simple. Any finer granularity in the evaluation is too subjective to be useful anyway -- at least, for a public gradeschool context (private schools specializing in the arts and professional performing company tryouts would obviously be different). And if the school insists on assigning a letter grade, make pass = A and fail = F. Still simple!
But so what? In your example, the teacher won! The teacher made his decision, was held accountable for it, and proved that it was justified. That's exactly how things should work! What's the problem?!
Fine, but that's a different issue than the one we were discussing originally.
So the teacher needs to document the administrator's discrimination.
If the student comes back without having been dealt with properly by the administrators, send them back out again! Or don't let them back in the classroom. It's not the teacher's problem, so the teacher should not allow it to become such.
Have the students sing public-domain music. If someone complains, refer them to the administrator who refused to approve purchasing requests.
What, and getting "written up" is absolute with no recourse? Bullshit! The teacher should write the administrator up for his negligent delay and aforementioned discrimination, as well as explain the concept of academic fair use. And then send that to the same authority considering what the administrator wrote.
Then either she was lax at her job, or she capitulated to the (lazy, incompetent, and unethical) administrator's bullying! That's the bottom line. Period!
Not if she had been
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
OK - Point taken. There are both Bad teachers and Bad students. The teachers have a mechanism by which they tell students and parents that there is a problem with the student. Grades. Your post points out all of the problems that teachers encounter in their job. All good points. What's missing is your suggestion on how teachers should be measured or even how most schools do it now. I would be interested to know how it's currently done and any better ways that might be out there.
A good example was a kid who cheated on an exam but was allowed to be on National Honor Society and graduate because his mom was active on the school board. The kid deserved to fail and possibly be expelled, but wasn't because the administration was buddy buddy with mom and pulled strings.
Just to point out an opposite example: in my (private) high school, there was a "mock election" held for the 1996 presidential campaign. This in itself is unsurprising - after all, the point of school is to educate, and the "current event" of a national Presidential election year is a very good time to educate the kids about the importance of being good citizens and the voting process.
Oddly enough, however, all the kids - no matter how good a candidate they were otherwise, and there were several who were better candidates than those who did get in (three Eagle Scouts, regular volunteers for local homeless shelters, high GPA, etc) - who were on the Perot and Dole "election teams" were blackballed from NHS membership that year. Un-coincidentally, the "faculty sponsor" for NHS just so happened to also be the faculty member who'd been the sponsor of the Clinton "election team."
When it came to the in-class material, she wasn't a bad teacher, but the school administration fucked up in letting her get away with influencing the NHS admittance every year. A number of good kids missed out on scholarship opportunities thanks to her behavior.
You've hit on my pet peeve here. I HATE it when people tell stories that unilaterally paint teachers as villains. All I get out of your post is a smug polemic against some teacher you had a grudge against AS A CHILD.
I think it's true that most public school curricula don't serve advanced students well. I've had a lot of experience with that; I'd been repeatedly identified as "highly gifted" as a kid, and that repeatedly resulted in absolutely nothing happening. None of my teachers were adequately prepared to instruct me. I got into petty confrontations like that with my teachers all the time, and I can say with hindsight that I instigated every single one. It's true, they didn't know how to handle me because I was "gifted", but I also tried my hardest to be an annoying little shit.
This is a complicated issue. Sometimes there's really an incompetent teacher, and sometimes there's an ignorant parent or spoiled student raising a shitstorm. Often, it's both.
You can always tell who is racist by how pissed off they get when called out on it.
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference. ...
Sure, I'd love to get paid more, but I also want kids to learn from people who LOVE teaching.
This was modded insightful? I'm glad you love teaching and are willing to jump closer to the 22K poverty line to do it, but hopefully you aren't going to teach economics.
Couple of thoughts:
1) Raising salaries expands the market for all different qualities of teachers, not just the bad teachers, as you are so fearful of. Now you can afford more good teachers to replace the bad teachers you already had (assuming you're not expanding the head count) because more good teachers are also available. Expanding the market means you, as the education system, can choose.
1a) The counter point to your logic is we should lower teacher salaries. Therefore only the best teachers who LOVE teaching would be willing to work in poverty. Clearly, that way lies madness.
Even for a passionate teacher like you, if the salary were $22,000, I doubt you'd be able to afford to be a teacher. For many, $28,000 is below their threshold.
1b) If teachers were paid $100,000 salary, I suspect you would get top-rate, passionate, teachers. People who give up being business executives and academic researchers to become teachers. Extrapolate a little farther, and pay $200,000 and you pretty much have access to the smartest, most caring, most skilled teachers in the world. Your market is pretty much everyone in the world and you can choose just the best.
So I really don't buy your argument.
2) Another fallacy is that you have to love what you do to do a good job. This is often argued in the medical field, but is argued in all fields.
The best of the best probably need that extra passion to become the best. (eg Tiger Woods probably loves what he does) But you can still be good, even excellent, without loving what you do. You could just really like it. Or you could not like it and just be really good.
Most engineers I know have found themselves stuck maintaining something they've developed only because they're really good at maintaining it, not because they enjoy it. They get their enjoyment some other way, like using the money they earn playing games or going on diving trips or buying fast cars.
I guess my point is:
Work is work. As long as you do a good job, who cares.
passetspike!
So, when exactly did you stop raping your daughter?
No, open-mindedness can exist on either the left or the right. Everyone has a bias on every topic unless they are completely ignorant about it. So does that mean no one is open-minded since they have a bias? Obviously this isn't true.
In my experience, liberal types do tend to be more open minded (of course, there are plenty of close minded ones as well). The reason I believe this is that many conservatives are extremely religious. They are close minded to other ideas because they believe the Bible is the true word of God. They are not open to ideas that run counter to the Bible because their soul is on the line.
I also see this tendency in talk radio. Take Rush Limbaugh vs. Ed Schultz. Rush is horribly divisive, close-minded, offensive, and actually holds a lot of sway over the GOP. Ed, on the other hand, actually let's people with counter opinions talk, will read the studies that others suggest, and actually engage in an intellectual conversation.
So to say all conservatives are close minded is 100% wrong. But it does seem that liberals overall tend to be more open minded and accepting of other people and ideas(i.e. gays, minorities, science, education, etc.).
The right have done a good job as making liberal a dirty word. So basically as soon as you say the word liberal it already causes all rational discussion to go out the window. I guess to a certain extent that is true of the word conservative as well.
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"Openmindedness is a willingness to evaluate new evidence, or a willingness to consider different axioms, both of which are pretty much antithetical--by definition--to everything that conservatives stand for."
Ah, no.
We Conservatives see Liberals as equating "Newer" with "Better".
And so, we want a rational look at all the data (or argument if it is a data-less subject) before we decide that: Yes, the new way is better than what we have now.
Sometimes that is perceived as being closed minded.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Liberals, by definition, come at their argument pre-biased to the left and are therefore never "open minded."
No, you mean "leftists', not Liberals.
Liberalism is the center which you can be to the left or right *of* depending on how you want to use the government to screw the rest of the citizenry.
Do you hate Blacks, Jews, commoners, or some other group and think the government should keep them in their place so you and the rest of whatever you consider the elite can profit off of their backs? You're a right wing nut. See Hitler for your archetypical hero.
Do you think "We hold this truth to be self-evident: that all men are created equal", shouldn't be restricted to equality under the law, but should be enforced by the state against the individual? You're a left wing loonie. See Stalin for your archetypical hero.
Do you reject both of these idiotic ideas? Congratulations, you're a Liberal. Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and their like are your archetypical heroes.
Declaration of Independence: Liberal
Constitution: Liberal.
Commies: Left
Fascists: Right
Those are the opposite extremes. The middle ground of not having a big powerful government screwing people around is Liberalism.
The word is often misused in America, but since no other word has the meaning that it does, claiming that isn't what it means isn't going to help your argument. You will fail to have words to describe these 3 very different cases if you try to do that.
"Liberals" are people who are (at least) just as hateful and malicious towards anyone who doesn't fit their chosen groupthink, as what you probably would claim "conservatives" are like.
That is just ridiculous. It's "conservatives" who are working very hard to enact gay-hatred laws based solely upon their bigotry. It's not a question of being close minded. They have no justification whatsoever for their position except pure ignorant bigotry and religious based hatred. These are not at all symmetric positions and your attempt to portray them as if they are is deeply dishonest.
Being hateful and malicious to such people isn't close minded, it's called being a good citizen. If they want to live in a country where things are run that way, then they are welcome to move to Iran or Saudi Arabia where things are already run that way. This country was founded specifically on the idea that religious delusion has no place in the government of a free society. If you hate the fundamental basis of a society, and actively work to undermine and destroy it, then it's expected that the people who actually do like living in a free society won't like you.
As I said, any teacher in their first 3 years at a school in Indiana can fail to have their contract renewed and the union won't do anything about it.
Fixed that for you.
The Indiana teachers union will backstab any small group they think they can get away will. Since they have compusory membership dues (or had back in the 1980's when I lived in IN) they don't have to care about anybody but the majority. If the school boards want to fire all the art teachers, the art teachers are going to get the shaft. Since young teachers are in a minority, they also have no say in the union.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I live in Columbia and trust me, people here are NOT very open-minded as a whole. They are just closed-minded leftists rather than the closed-minded religious fundamentalists you are talking about. Ditto for a lot of the people who live inside of St. Louis or Kansas City. You're probably better off living in the suburbs of St. Louis or Kansas City or in an area like Springfield if you want a more even mix of people.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
When a teacher fails to correct a paper because they fell into their own Math trap and graded the rest of the class incorrectly, they should be fired. This is the level of the complaints most people are up in arms about. We are not talking about differences of opinion, or some abstract situation, I've had teachers tell me point blank that it's not changing because it would be unfair to the rest of the class to grade the answer correctly.
That's a whole new level of failure to do one's job. Mistakes will be made, but stubborn resistance to fix them based on the democracy of wrong answers is dereliction of duty. That's probably why some of the new "fix education" initiatives coming out of Chicago start with firing everyone in the entire school. They shut it down and reopen it with a mostly new staff.
Yes, it is unfair to throw out the good with the bad, but that's the only option the Teacher's Union allows. If the Teacher's Union would be more open to dismissing their worst teachers, then you could fire only the worst teachers. If you attempt to fire the worst teachers today, you get pressure from every other employee in the school.
I say this even though I have Teacher Union employees in my family. Being an employee in the Union isn't a bed of roses either, you have to follow the Union line, even when you know it is wrong.
If the Teacher's Union was worth it's salt, they would be very quick to boot members which disgrace it so. We are not talking about the average (or even below average) members. We are talking about the worst members, that abuse the Union's bargaining power to provide a level of negligence so extreme it is disheartening.
Oh, and they're usually the first to say they can do a better job if only they received more money. The good teachers are the first to say they could do a better job if only they could write their own lesson plans and prevent the administration from diverting their class time to other subjects to boost the standardized testing scores.
Have you even SEEN a public school lately?
Public schools do not do ANY lab experiments any more. Most of them don't even have a gas hookup at the teacher's desk in a science classroom. Hell, bring in a couple tabs of alka-seltzer to demonstrate the process of effervesence and you're likely to get dragged off under some "zero tolerance" medications policy.
I'm not going to get involved in the homeschooling argument here, but this is patently untrue. My wife teaches high school chemistry in a district that's stretched so thin they're letting several hundred employees go this year, but she and the other chemistry teacher still do labs. Yes, sometimes the supplies are more limited than she would like, but the lab is an essential part of her classroom.
College professors are an entirely different matter than public school teachers. While a college professor might be a horrible teacher, our colleges and universities are based off the German model, meaning that professors are supposed to be skilled researchers. Only some of the researchers happen to be good teachers.
Public school teachers have no primary role as researchers, so if they cannot teach then it's a full failure of picking the right person for the job.
As colleges and universities drift from being research institutions, their prestige drops. It will be interesting to know if eventually undergraduate professors will be freed of their research duties, and if so freed, will have to demonstrate their skill in their was-secondary role of teaching.
Your description makes a great deal of sense. Indeed it is the very definition of "sensible". However, it seems that it is at odds with "Conservative" policy as practiced here in the United States. Where are you from?
For example, why is there such a strong link between modern forms of Christianity--one of the best possible examples of jumping to a conclusion without evidence--of and Conservatism? Why is it that the vast majority of scientists--people who carefully train for decades to understand how to interpret evidence--are Liberals? Why is it that Conservatives tend to support massive pesticide and fertiliser use despite ample evidence that these methods are extremely harmful, while Liberals are more likely to support older, proven "organic" agriculture? Why do Conservatives exploit every natural resource as fast as they possibly can, while Liberals try to study and understand the consequences of natural systems before fucking with them?
As an outsider (and, I suppose, something like a Liberal, although not by your definition), it appears that Conservatives tend to consider rights--especially the right to claim ownership of, exploit, and destroy, as long as it is profitable--while Liberals have a much deeper regard for for responsibilities. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but I claim that it is not wrong in the USA today.
Also, I am quite aware that I've described modern USA-Conservative policies, which sounds at best like a very remote cousin of what you describe. I assume you are more "conservative" with a lower-case "c"? Outside the political parties, I see how my definition ties into yours--simply a prior preference of liberals to be a little more experimental and less risk-averse than conservatives?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Yeah. By not subjecting them to mental abuse, physical abuse, and the roundabout torture by the sons and daughters of shithead breeders who've had 12 kids on a 40 IQ and government handouts, you're doing "immense harm" to your kids.
Well, yeah, pretty much. The world is full of all kinds of people. There are nice, friendly people who go out of their way to help you out. There are also assholes who will try to use you for their own gain. Isn't it better to learn about these people and how to deal with them when you're a kid and essentially it "doesn't matter?"
Public schools do not do ANY lab experiments any more. Most of them don't even have a gas hookup at the teacher's desk in a science classroom.
If that's true, that's very sad. My public school experience isn't exactly fresh (I graduated from high school 10 years ago), but we at least did all these things then.
Every homeschooling parent I have known has gone FAR above and beyond the "minimums" of what they need to do, and their kids have benefited greatly as a result.
Well, your anecdote against the parent poster's anecdote. Based on post content, I'd believe the parent over you, but really, either of you could be wrong or right (or you're both wrong AND both right).
Dude, fuck you. ... Again, fuck you for being a retard.
Dial down the douchebag attitude a bit. Might get a more useful response.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
In my wife's experience, teachers no longer have to join the union/pay dues unless they choose to. At her first school she was not a member of the union.
As to the union backstabbing, that's my impression, but my wife believes they did everything they could.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
First: torture in public schools? Physical abuse? You might want to put some numbers behind that. I don't know what public school systems you've seen, but shit like that doesn't happen here, or in any school my wife has tought in or that I've been a part of the PTA for. Also, are you a racist? "12 kids on a 40 IQ and government handouts," where the fuck do you live??? There may be some dumb fuck parents out there, but inside the public schools, little of that translates to the kids.
Have YOU been in a public school lately is the question for you... My wife has tought in 4 buildings in 3 districts, and I've been in HUNDREDS of schools in SC, CT, NY, PA, NC, and Georgia for network services. I've never been in ONE that didn't have both computer, biology, and physical labs for kids. Elementary schools no, but honestly you won't have 9 year olds running bunson burners in any safe environment. My wife is a SCIENCE TEACHER in 3rd grade, and she (and every teacher in every school she's taught in, and every school I've been in) are REQUIRED to do experiments BY LAW, and by state education requirements, for EVERY science subject. She spends about $900 a year on crap she brings to school to provide for those experiments. Even in the 2nd poorest district in SC (one of the poorest states), they're doing more experiments and working hands on with more materials that I did 20 years ago in COLLEGE...
I don'tt know what community you live in or where you come from, but in the south, and in Connecticut both, I've see 30+ "home schooled" kids come through the schools. NOT ONE has been able to function in a classroom. NOT ONE has been anything more than a walking encyclopedia, completely devoid of common sense, social skills, or the ability to work in a team. Statistics back that up. Yes, there are some smart kids that come from home schooling (on paper), but they have FAR higher per capita serious psychoological issues than kids in public schools. You're watching too much TV and listeing to too many evangelists man. Do some reasearch, look at some facts. There are a good number of home school parents who work hard, but the VAST majority are the fuckers with 12 kids you're talking about using the "home schooling" line as a weay to get more liquer money out of the government. Orphanages and battered kids homes are FULL of these kids!!!
Most kids actually ENJOY school. Sure, a few are pressured by peers, (you must have been one who was particualrly tortuered), but that's actually fairly low key at this point. The numbers of serious issues reported by parents in schools is surprisingly low. But I'll also say, exposure to that is IMPORTANT as well. How can your child cope if they've never experienced fear, never been let down by someone, never been in a fight. How can they appreciate what they have if they don;t have a chance to loose it.
A fight here, some pranklike harrasment there, it's part of life. I was not a jock, far from it. I was teased all the way through school. If not for that, I'd be the same quivvering coward I was in my youth, and not a department leader and public speaker.
True abuse? it happens inside the home FAR more frequently than in school. And in school, when true abuse happens, SOMETHIGN GETS DONE ABOUT IT. There's accountability in that building. For fuck's sake, there is armed security in that building... Your child is more likely to be beaten and abused on a public park playground than in a school playground.
I know VERY WELL what goes on in schools. My wife teaches there, I volunteer there, I am constantly in and out of school performing network upgrades, selling smartboards, selling the voice and security monitoring systems, Those buildings are more technically advanced than my own home. Cameras in the halls, sometimes even in the classroom. NOTHING gets by the administration. students harassing students is rare, and swiftly dealt with.
Teacher's harassing students is extremely rare, and actually LESS LIKELY THAN YOUR SUNDAY SCHOOL P
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
know that it's fashionable to hate the liberals here on Slashdot
Really? Shit, I thought we were still hating the conservatives. I'd better update my groupthink platform...
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
I would agree it is relatively subjective, but not entirely so. Nevertheless, subjectivity isn't a bad thing as long as there are checks against a principal's power.
Can this power be abused? Certainly, but that would be the rare exception. It's dangerous to implement an entire system that solely focuses on the rare chance of misconduct. We need a more robust system. The examples in the article are some pretty heinous situations, not examples of a principal with an axe to grind.
An important change for education.
I was the Registrar for a K-12 for two years. All I asked of my teachers was to have their grades submitted properly into the database before they went home the night before report cards. And by filled out properly, I mean "hit the enter key once you've entered a grade, otherwise the value doesn't take". So yeah, they filed union grievances against me for making them look bad. That, my fellow slashdotters, is why it is impossible to fire bad teachers.
True, but not really fair. Charter schools and Catholic schools have kids with parents who care enough to enroll them in and transport them to charter schools and Catholic schools. There is a BIG difference between a kid whose parents take an interest in them and a kid whose parent is a crackhead or a hooker who doesn't give a shit about them.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Oh boy, what a pack of lies and false alternatives.
Citation?
Socialization is the boogeyman of public school advocates, and it's completely bogus. During most of the time spent in school, teachers are insisting upon children being silent and obedient. Much of the time in homeschooling is spent talking with (not at) the pupil, and that is social. Social activity is proper for playtime after school. Museum trips and other such garbage rarely exceed 2 a year in public school, and are generally worthless excuses for a fun time replacing learning.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Put them on Ritalin if they are bored in class.
This is a pretty stupid idea. I had four years of long division in grade school. That was the entirety of my math education. I'll tell you, no matter how many times you do long division, you won't get any better at it. This made me bored beyond anything I can be bothered to articulate. Did Ritalin help me? Sure, but it didn't help me to not be bored at school. The schools don't have to be entertaining like television, but if they teach something, and the students know what it is, MOVE THE FUCK ON TO SOMETHING ELSE. Some people posting here on Slashdot have had good scholastic educational experiences, and I think this is great. Almost my entire scholastic experience was child-storage, grade-school to high-school. I get very angry when I think about it now, all that time I could have been working in a factory, or doing something of value instead of sitting there bored out of my fucking skull learning about long division, and obscure battles few people care about.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I would write a response, but you're too busy chewing on your own foot to listen.
Rationalize it all you like. I'm glad YOU'RE not serving any more. They may have been assholes, but what you did was evil. There's no code of ethics on the planet that would condone it.
The fact is, in the face of a challenge, your mission was to find a straight-up way to deal with it and overcome. You failed miserably.
- Alaska Jack
HONOR: Huge fail .. care for the safety, professional, personal and spiritual well-being of our people ... Show respect toward all people ... treat each individual with human dignity ... exhibit the highest degree of moral character" ... yep, you=fail
COURAGE: Fail
COMMITTMENT: "Demand respect up and down the chain of command
I would write a response, but you're too busy chewing on your own foot to listen.
So a meaningless non sequitor is your only response?
I suppose that's one alternative to thinking, but hardly what I'd consider a good one.
No.
The simple fact is that your "reply" was so full of half-baked lies, misinformation, and outright untruths that it needs no refutation.
Liberalism has never, not for a moment, been considered a "centrist" label. The fact that you spent that many words sticking your own foot in your mouth, lying about that premise, is proof enough of your insanity.
There have been times at which Liberalism has been connotated as "left wing" or "right wing", depending on the particular philosopher quoted, but the modern-day groups which claim to be "Liberal" are the rabid Soros-funded left-wing types like Moveon.org.
The simple fact is that your "reply" was so full of half-baked lies, misinformation, and outright untruths that it needs no refutation.
LOL. You have yet to be able to refute one single fact. Look, you're ignorant of the history of those terms in politics and you don't have the integrity to admit it, I get that.
Your lame attempt at a refutation was, in fact, nothing but a spouting of the same vitriolic nonsense and ad hominems I could hear from any of what passes for news organizations in this country. Truly, you're a credit to your beliefs, but a disgrace to this country and to thinking people everywhere.
I do not suffer fools gladly, or long.
Consider yourself no longer suffered.
As a teacher, I have no problem with seeing education as a right, however, People need to think in terms of "My kid has the right to the OPPORTUNITY for and education", and not "My kid has the right to be educated despite everything I and my kid do to sabotage the teachers' efforts.". This idea that it is the teachers' responsibility to compensate for all of society's ills and repair all the damage done to kids by the poor parenting skills of their families really has to go before we as a society can start to move forward on the education problem.
I completely agree.
This is pretty close to what I've seen in public schools here (in Australia) as well.
Part of the issue isn't simply that administrators don't want to go through the process though. It's because they don't understand all the rationale for the bureaucratic process.
They see a long difficult process, and think, "Why can't I just get it done and get on with my other responsibilities".
For an education system, there's not much focus on educating the educators, and they need to be taught why and how to use these processes.
How can such a large proportion of firings be found to be lacking compelling evidence, or the right evidence? They clearly don't know the right way to gather such requirements.
It's systematic failures at all levels; not just teachers, not just administrators.
How is this not +5 moderated?! Spot on! Disclaimer: spouse of teacher
It's fashionable on Slashdot to hate anyone who isn't a libertarian on Slashdot. If you're updating your group think just put this rule in, if the politician believes in any sort of taxation at all for any purpose then you should hate them.
bad school principles, too.
What you've got is compulsory, but it isn't necessarily education. The old proverb about being able to lead a horse to water, but not make him drink applies here.
The subjects being taught are secondary to the education we want them to be getting.
Not to say that I like teaching mediocrity, but I don't think that's what you mean, either.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
While your point about many teachers preferring the more manageable students is a valid point, I think it is not the only reasonnot to segregate.
Smart students get smarter when they teach other students, especially when they help teach students who have a hard time understanding.
Handling a classroom where students are teaching each other may not be part of the typical curriculum in courses in education, but it should be.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I don't see much difference, except that the students tend to play a better game of emotional chess.
I do admit, I would like to see more opportunities to guide research projects at the middle and high school level. I miss that part of the University environment.
But, then, I also have this idea in the back of my mind that the system sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson is correct, where public school ends at grade three, after teaching reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic. After that, the idea is that each individual should learn on the job.
In countries with large character sets, six years look to be necessary, and I guess the modern world probably requires a little more than the three "Rs", but I'd still like to give a lot of my fifth- and sixth-graders more applied subjects to study.
Which points out the other side of that, that society must change, to accept the idea of studying while we work, basically for our entire lives.
There's really no reason anyone should have to work longer than 20 hours a week, and there's no reason we should be watching TV all the rest of the time, so there's plenty of time to study, if we, as a larger society, can just quit fighting each other, both on the warfields and in the marketplace. (Boxing rings and football fields, yeah, but that is, or should be, a different kind of fighting.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Especially if one might state the trivial argument that we can't reliably predict weather 1 week out, and we're making huge claims over the weather in 100 years.
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.
No, but the fact that if you put the information from the previous century into our climate models, they cannot accurately predict the current climate is statistically significant. His example was just an observation.
The Gospel according to lolcat
I'll be the first person to call out a shitty teacher or an obstructive union, but this kind of discussion cannot go ahead without factoring a huge dataset: Parents. Of course, the first person who does finds himself voted out of office pretty quickly.
Or in the case of Obama, if you say it you still get elected, but have to worry about Jessie Jackson who said he wanted to "bite his [Obama's] nuts off" for "talking down to black people". Personally, given the choice between having my nuts chomped by a crazy guy or losing re-election, I'd have to take losing.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Parents are basically, a complete bunch of wankers.
Only on Slashdot would this comment be modded "interesting".
The Gospel according to lolcat
In fact, "independents" are the only open-minded folks, by definition -- everybody else just copped out and picked a label.
No, "independant" is just a term we use for someone who has no idea what they believe. They either have mixed views, or they simply haven't been following the issues.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Politics in America have always been extremely moderate; although the current Republican platform is a bit extreme compared to conservative parties in other industrialized nations, it's still a far cry from actual fascism.
Fascism? Fascism is a political system implemented by Mussolini after he figured out that Communism was too extreme. Not to be confused with National Socialism (which was Fascism + ideas of racial superiority mixed in). The main difference between Fascism and free-market capitalism is that under Fascism the government heavily regulates and steers the direction of the industry. Under Communist system the government exercises absolute control over the industry. Just in case you feel like starting a "but there is not difference" type of argument (because I've done this before), let me say outright that it's about modality. It's a scale. Communism on one end, free-market capitalism on the other end, and Fascism somewhere in the middle. And I am not talking about fascism as it is branded on the Internet today. I am talking about "Fascism" as Mussolini (who coined the word) defined it. Yes, there is a quote about marriage of industry and government under Fascism. But the government is the dominant partner in that marriage.
As for the Republicans being far from Fascists, they are. They are controlled by theocratic interests more than anything. In case you are wondering (as a lot of people on the left are) where in the world people got the idea that Obama is a fascist, I'll repeat: Mussolini's main platform was strong government regulation and steering of the industry but private ownership. People confuse it with Hitler's baggage of contempt that he added to the equation to create his National Socialist Worker's Party of Germany.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
No, "independant" is just a term we use for someone who has no idea what they believe. They either have mixed views, or they simply haven't been following the issues.
If only it was a royal "we". Unfortunately, you are not delusional in thinking that you have company. Fall in line or be branded and idiot is, in fact, the spirit of the day. Issues have levels of subtlety. To think that either of the two parties has the right set of stands on the issues is an almost religious view. For the rest of us, we have to balance pros and cons of one side vs pros and cons of the other. Those of us using our heads and evaluating the balances between the extremes that the two parties are now taking do "have an idea of what we believe". We are just not always sure which of the two evils we like less.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Slashdot is not libertarian. It's the technocracy party of America. We are pro-technological solutions to all problems. All other solutions get laughed out of the house here. ummm... cheese
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Sad and true.
He didn't say anything about race. He described the despicable way that some people live.
You are the one thinking "ooh! ooh! I know what race that is!". You are the one ascribing those attributes to a particular race, then covering by claiming that he is racist for making the association that you just made.
Let me guess, you're one of those dumbasses who doesn't realize it's possible to be socially liberal while also fiscally conservative (or vice-versa), and who doesn't understand that in addition to "left" and "right" there's also "up" (libertarian) and "down" (authoritarian). Am I right?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I do not suffer fools gladly, or long.
Consider yourself no longer suffered.
LOL, says the fool who proved himself entirely unable to put forward a rational position or even attempt to refute mine with anything but random screeching of meaningless epithets he heard on the idiot box. Truly you are both pathetic and laughable. You're a great example of the ever increasing level of noise in public discourse. you have no signal at all.
of course unions protect their dues-payers, and of course school districts work to subvert them...too bad they all forgot why they're there:-(kids, in case u missed the obvious;-)
reminds me of the story a co-worker told me ~25 yrs ago: he'd just graduated from a teacher's college & was recruited by a rural school system (arkansas, iowa, can't remember)
he moved there, joined the local instantiation of his parents' church for the social networking...the little old ladies were ecstatic a fine young man had moved into the area, wanting to intro him to their daughters/nieces when they came home from college on vacay, to try to get them not to move away...the midwest has continued to suffer depopulation:-(
new hires were on probation, no tenure for a year or 2...after which they were fired & a new batch brought in, a classic case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management unfortunately, the schools had no choice, with falling budgets from falling tax bases from falling population...funny how the repubs push for standards of education but not standards of funding of education...
I don't know. I'm involved in two expensive legal battles to get insurance coverage for things that should have been covered, and there's one other legal battle I dropped just because the cost of the legal fees didn't equal out to covering the fucking expense out of pocket.
I understand intellectually that insurance companies exist to make a profit, and I'm still extremely civil with correspondence and phone conversations. But at a gut level, I hate the motherfuckers with a passion.
Someone with your intelligence (assuming you're honest about that, which I am) should be able to manipulate the social situation so that everyone likes them, and go off and do your own extended study in your spare time just for yourself.
While I agree that school is at least partly about learning to deal with social situations, I don't think it's as black and white as you're making it. While it's the socially accepted thing to try to get everyone to like you, it's not necessary and can be counterproductive.
It's nice to get along with people, but think about how slowly things progress when people don't disagree with each other. Disagreements are what help society advance. For example, when a company has a monopoly on something, they tend not to introduce new products or change things very quickly, but they'll respond instantly when an innovative competitor comes along.
Certainly, it's not necessary to make a scene (which could be worse), but one shouldn't roll over and agree simply because it will make them unpopular.
He probably could have shown SOMETHING about how he solved the problem, but doing it their way just because of the social factor is counterproductive. It will slow down his progress by making him learn an alternative method (assuming his was technically valid) and will serve no purpose but to appease a teacher/administration that apparently can't adjust to a student's (different, but potentially superior) abilities (remember what I said about competition?).
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
However, not having an education can hurt you, while having it never will. Tell that to my $40k in debt.
Some kids get behind in a class and so they have to attend summer school and someone has to be there to teach.
n is the size of a statistical sample.
My children are homeschooled but I won't try to address every single one of your points. I will, however, make a few comments. (Warning: long post below)
Our kids were in public school until the oldest (Ashley) was in 3rd grade. In 1st grade, she learned a "new math" that WA state decided to test out in select classrooms. When she got to 2nd grade, the state had decided to scrap the "new math" so she had to catch up to what her classmates were doing; most of them had learned the traditional methods and so she was effectively a year behind them.
Her teacher came in early and stayed late to help tutor my daughter; she was fully aware of the situation and worked her ass off to get my daughter caught up.
Being in the Navy, I got orders to Japan. We had heard that DoD school were some of the best available, because the DoD had the money to hire the best teachers.
Ashley's 3rd grade teacher was *not* the best. We told the teacher the situation with our daughter and explained what her previous teacher had been doing with her; though Ashley had made significant progress, she still struggled with arithmetic.
Simply put, the teacher was one of the "babysitters" you hear about so often. She didn't bother to try and help my daughter; the teacher just expected her to be where the rest of the class was. When Ashley couldn't figure out her homework, the teacher would make her stay after class to finish. However, the teacher didn't do any one-on-one with her; my daughter was expected to figure it out on her own.
One day, while waiting for Ashley to come outside, my wife noticed that she seemed to be missing. Nearly 10 minutes after all the other kids had came out, Ashley came out, crying. She said she had been forced to stay after class to finish her homework but she couldn't figure it out. My wife talked to the teacher who explained it was "standard practice" for any child who didn't complete the work in class; she also felt that Ashley was just slow/lazy but had a good grasp of the concepts.
Several days later, Ashley was again late. However, this time my wife went into the school and found her sitting at her desk, crying on her homework papers. The teacher was chilling at her desk, grading papers or some such thing. My wife exploded at her, then went straight to the principal to complain.
It turns out that DoD teachers can make $50k+ a year and have the same limitations to being fired that CA teachers have, if not more because they are federal workers. The teacher had other complaints against her but the school's hands were tied.
Two days later we pulled both our children out and have been homeschooling ever since. We annually spend more than $1200 on curriculum, supplemental books, science kits, etc. We have two computers just for the kids to use. Our children go with us wherever we go, so they get real-life experiences and knowledge constantly, e.g. grocery shopping teaches health and nutrition, addition, economic buying, change counting, etc.
Our kids probably go to more zoos, aquariums, museums, etc. than public school kids go on field trips. Being in the military, we have traveled across the US and are now in Japan for the second time.
Regarding socialization, I personally think it's overrated. When you're in school, who do you hang out with? A select clique of friends. The stoners don't hang with the motorheads, the geeks don't hang with the jocks, and so on. Forced integration, multi-culturalism, and all the other politically correct crap doesn't change the fact that people will naturally gravitate to people they feel most comfortable with.
Plus, there are ways to get socialization without being in school. Churches, YMCA, youth leagues, Boy/Girl Scouts, et al. are all available. Not to mention that the Internet opens up the whole world to finding social contacts.
My children can function in society just fine. But, for the most part, they are sick of the crap that public school children bring to the table.
They don't care about popularity, fa
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Ah pity. I hope you come back to read this, I have been unable to respond until now.
Interestingly, I find that American liberals are very much about "rights" that the government owes them.
The right to free healthcare, the right to a place to live, the right to free food.
There is no responsibility for your actions, you will be taken care of no matter what. The lesson of failure is not a consideration.
Much of what you say comes from reading the papers. Fine, they are accurate to a degree, but they also don't tell the whole deal.
You don't hear about the abject poverty of people who rely on the government to supply everything. You don't hear about well intentioned "green" initiatives that end up doing more harm than good.
You also don't hear about the success of American Conservatives. You don't here the struggles of a California Representative that is trying to get funding to both save the Delta Smelt AND save the agriculture that depends on the water from the Delta.
The idea of tying conservatism and religion (not by you, specifically) is a smear job to be honest. It instantly vilifies and polarizes the issues.
The real question is, what does liberalism offer to the religious that they would want? I will give you a hint: it is not the "Anti-theists" that exist in the left wing of the political spectrum. (and that is the "conservative" smear, to claim liberals are nothing but godless heathens.)
The whole Republican == Conservative and Democrat = Liberal needle has swung a few times in American history. Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, and yet he did more than anyone to make America 'green' and Progressive. Southern Democrats bitterly opposed the desegregation of America. It is just the current label.
Disclaimer: I am a California Democrat that votes Republican in most cases. Will vote for a yellow dog before I vote for an Idiot. That means you, Arnold.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Thanks for the response!
Interestingly, I find that American liberals are very much about "rights" that the government owes them.
The right to free healthcare, the right to a place to live, the right to free food. There is no responsibility for your actions, you will be taken care of no matter what. The lesson of failure is not a consideration.
I completely agree, actually. I think that a society that provides healthcare is nice (I grew up in a country that has it; I'm still stunned at how vigorously Americans resist it), but it bugs me that so many whiny liberals couch it in terms of "rights". The place to live--I do believe that we have a right to that, but only inasmuch as land is a shared resource, and I don't consider it acceptable that people can put a fence around it and shoot people who approach. The right to housing is an odd concept, to be sure. Food? You can guess what I think of that. Other things? I regard rights as personal: if you make something, it's yours, and nobody should be able to take it away from you unwilling.
On the other hand, the "lesson of failure" can be a mixed blessing. Failures that you can recover from are wonderful--you learn and grow. Failures that destroy your life don't do anyone any good, and too easily create a hereditary underclass. I do like the idea of pushing the line a little more towards allowing people to learn from a few failures. After all, individuals who tolerate high personal risk can sometimes bring great things to society. Look at the microcosm of inventors, or those who drop out of med school to compose symphonies (ok, there aren't really any good classical composers out there right now. Bad example). And in the case of health care, responsible life choices reduce your chances of incurring bankrupting medical debt, but do not eliminate it. I'd love to see a public health care system that rewards simple self-care like staying in shape. Maybe tax people by the pound? ;)
While liberals start with individual rights and expand them towards the right to force society to take care of you, my impression is that conservatives start from the same place and wander off in the opposite direction. They support the right to exploit/destroy a public resource--minerals, air, water, land--that nobody created, and the right to screw someone else out of it. To me that is no different than the right that any bully claims: I'll take what I want, and if you don't like it, you'll have to become a bigger bully.
The idea of tying conservatism and religion (not by you, specifically) is a smear job to be honest. It instantly vilifies and polarizes the issues.
That smear job was pretty much perpetrated by Bush, wasn't it? And while religious people have been making trouble in the USA for ages, there was a time in recent history when they coexisted quite peaceably with everyone else. Many still do, but I'm sure one could make a case for politics polarising religion as easily as vice versa?
Good point about Roosevelt etc. I forgot about that. But yes, I assumed we're mostly discussing our impressions of the modern meanings of the monikers.
Anyway. I rant and procrastinate. Later!
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."