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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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
What I love about /. People publicly admitting to illegal behavior and encouraging others to copy their behavior. I am sure the officers let go from the military with dishonorable discharges would agree no harm was done, their lives went on fine as if you had not done anything. ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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."
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).