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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
Incredibly low? TFA quoted the median salary for a teacher in their mid 30s as $74,000 a year. I'm sure many people would be happy to trade their "incredibly low" salary for that incredibly low salary.
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.)
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.
Apparently, none of those 5 were mathematics teachers, I'm guessing.
Nor were they English teachers, it'd seem ...
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.
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.
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.
...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?
You make an excellent point- item 1 touches on what is probably the biggest problem in public education: Schools are not producing productive citizens. Upon graduation from High School, anyone should be able to go out and get a job that will support him. If someone wants to enter a more complex field (and perhaps make more money), then that person should take advanced training. Right now the economy and the school system are both geared against this kind of vocational education.
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.
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Paid a salary that is pathetically poor for people of high intelligence and education.
For as long as I can remember, college students declaring their major as teaching have had horrible SAT scores. Here is a recent example: http://blogs.tampabay.com/schools/2008/09/sat-scores-of-t.html
So, there goes the theory that K-12 teachers are more intelligent than the average high school graduate, let's work on the salary theory. The average teacher salary in New York is almost $60,000. Not too bad. Teachers rank just behind computer scientists and dentists in average hourly pay. They also have great benefits and are some of the few people left in the US who can retire with a full pension while still of working age.
Summary: decent pay, great benefits, job security, dumb people.
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
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...
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
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.
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.
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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.