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Improving Education Through Better Teachers
theodp writes "The teaching profession gets schooled in cover stories from the big pubs this weekend, as Newsweek makes the case for Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers, and the NY Times offers the more hopeful Building a Better Teacher. For the past half-century, professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language — but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. But what they ignored was the elephant in the room — if the teacher sucks, the students suck. Or, as the Times more eloquently puts it: 'William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge.' But what makes a good teacher? When Bill Gates announced his foundation was investing $335 million in a project to improve teaching quality, he added a rueful caveat. 'Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn't have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,' Gates said. 'I'm personally very curious.'"
How about instead of spending billions on idiotic projects like high speed rail in Florida (and elsewhere I am guessing) we spend the money on Education and higher salaries so we can attract better people to teaching (and get rid of the losers too !)
What would the results look like if the two students switched places? Would the results coincide with the switch?
It's almost impossible to fire a teacher. Read up some of the "rubber rooms" operated in Los Angeles and New York.
"About 160 teachers and other staff sit idly in buildings scattered around the sprawling district, waiting for allegations of misconduct to be resolved.
The housed are accused, among other things, of sexual contact with students, harassment, theft or drug possession. Nearly all are being paid. All told, they collect about $10 million in salaries per year -- even as the district is contemplating widespread layoffs of teachers because of a financial shortfall."
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
But, you can't judge "goodness" on the basis of percentile. No matter how many teachers you fire, you will always have roughly half of your students in the bottom 50th percentile.
The best teacher can not only "teach", they can also "do"
Cue the paid teacher's union shills.
i was kind of disgusted by a recent story i read in the new york daily news
it was a story of a public school janitor who bilked his school's petty cash fund for janitorial services to the tune of $30K
to, among other frivolties, send his kid to private school (irony meter off the charts)
but that's not the real story in this story. the real story here is that this janitor made $86K a year?!
some sort of 40 year tenure you say? no, he was there for only 5 years
how does it make sense that a janitor is making $86K a year considering the average new york city school teacher's salary?
i don't understand how this makes sense to anyone in the new york city school system
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/03/04/2010-03-04_custodians_rap_cleaned_city_out_of_30g.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ben Stein on America's education crisis: High school students don't want to learn.
Ben Stein is a FUCKING GENIUS!
How about drug testing them before we go any further. Confucius say: Man standing on toilet - high on pot!
The US House subcommittee has been holding several hearings on this (as relates to America Competes and science education in general) for both the college (analysis of above) and K-12 level. It's worth a look. For both sets, it seems the consensus to give up on the current crop and focus on new teachers coming out of college / just started teaching, as the others are set in their ways and don't want to change.
The problem is those that do can't necessarily teach. More than once in college I had some CXX level guy come in to be a "professor" who probably couldn't teach his own children to drive a car. I agree that real-world experience can help in a classroom, but just because you are successful in the real world, doesn't mean you can teach others to do the same.
of State Government there is no chance for improvement in the trenches. The whole system, from soup to nuts, needs to be dredged out and rebuilt and there is zero chance that will ever happen, specially in California with it's all-powerful teacher's union.
Schwarzenegger wasn't the first to try, and he won't be the last to fail.
How about hiring some charismatic, experienced teachers who will inspire the kids on a daily basis? And they won't need higher salaries - just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace. I'd love to teach and make a real difference in our future, but the environment is just too toxic.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
And what exactly will that change? The question is what makes teachers better. Maybe paying more will attract better teachers, but if you don't know what a "better" teacher is, you're shit out of luck anyway.
How about exploring this for a bit: perhaps the student has bigger things to worry about. Like say whether or not they are going to get shot on their way to class, or if that crack dealer is going to pummel them because one of their friends owes him. You know, just sayin' that its a whole problem. Drugs in schools are a huge problem and prohibition has only made it worse, education is what is needed, ironically, of wider issues than just the "teachers" in isolation.
Shh.
In my personal experience, students are the best judge of teachers, once they reach the JR High/Middle school and are exposed to more than one teacher at a time. Grade school kids usually have nothing to compare with "She who must be obeyed".
Looking back, students can identify the best teachers they ever had, those that got them interested in subjects, who got points across, who came prepared, and who usually had a closet full of source material accumulated over the years.
In a move that would surely bring the swat team today, we were handed a Civil war rifle to examine (inert), often instructed by "The general" in full period uniform (regardless of the period being discussed), and howled in laughter as a canoe paddle and coon skin cap was produced from under the desk and he paddled his desk chair across the room.
This kind of imaginative teaching is now gone. Instead we have dumbed down books and teachers instructed to follow it to the letter.
I suspect everyone can think back on their education and immediately identify a particular teacher that made an impression. Both good and bad. And more often than not that teacher will not have been the one teaching their favorite subject.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
1 teachers should go down for treason if they can't teach but keep trying to
2 every administrator should be required to put in say 2 "credit hours" of teaching every year
(unless it can be proven they are geniuses at admin but can't teach)
3 the first 3 years of teaching should be done by folks that are a combo of MR Rogers and Judge Dred
4 most of the first 3 years should be focused on A that you can learn B respect for others C how to teach yourself
(who cares that a 5 year old only knows 1 language if said kid is able to respect the other kids long enough to learn the other languages)
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The classroom is a complicated and unconstrained environment. It is unconstrained since there are so many outside forces at work a teacher does not have control over. How do you select and train good teachers, even if you could identify them? Do you fire an bad teacher after the first year or give them time to develop?
Do you test people? How do you know they just aren't good at taking tests?
Another thing I heard (I can't find the reference) is that fewer students in the classroom make a difference. Are we willing to pay for better education or is this just another lame half-hearted attempt?
And let's not talk about charter schools. There is evidence they are no better than public schools. If we fix either charter or public schools we may be able to fix the other.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-education/2009/06/17/charter-schools-might-not-be-better.html
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Oh, that's right, he created the world's largest philanthropic foundation. Hard to forget about that when it's actually mentioned directly in the summary. Best to leave it out since we don't want to look cruel and cold to charities - only their funding sources are evil.
Yes, if we figure out the magic equation that produces competent teachers, and we'll be able to apply it all the dim drones willing to work for a teacher's wages.
Let's do the same for programmers! And doctors! And stock traders! Think of the money we'll save!
What they keep proposing in FL is not high speed rail, but light rail, which is rather more like a bus in speed, carrying capacity and cost to operate, except that the routes are typically grade-separated in some way and would require significant new construction to alter or update.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people who want to teach, but want to work a regular job as well. I'm not sure how it would work logistically, but it would be nice if they were able to sign up as a "consultant-teacher" to teach one class in their area of expertise with no long term commitment.
As free, independant thinking geeks, we like to disparage authority. I feel wierd saying it, but in my experience authority is important.
You have to understand what I mean by "authority". It doesn't mean hitting people with rulers, or being stern all the time. It's something more like leadership. You just know it when you see it.
I spent 3 years in a private school that, while it had its failings, seemed to know how to control a classroom. (note, this is a 30 year old memory from when I was a kid, so I could be wrong; but these are the impressions I got)
Teacher walks in. Students get quiet. End of story.
You can't learn when the students are running the classroom, at least not when they're running it out of their id, which is where most kids operate. Yes, I'm aware of alternative schools where kids have free reign and positive outcomes; but there's some selectivity going on there. Trying to apply that en masse would be a mistake, IMHO.
Anyway, at the private school we had a very charismatic teacher who was in a bus accident. We went through at least two replacements until we found one that could command respect and control the classroom. The other two literally got spitballed out of class! In private school, this was not tolerated, and while individual kids would get punished if they got caught, it was also recognized that the teacher couldn't command respect or attention.
Now, all of this is very squishy. That's too bad. Either you've got it or you don't. That's all we know now. Maybe in the future we'll be able to run accurate psychological profiles that will prevent non-authoritative individuals from trying to run K-12 classrooms; but for now, firing is the only thing that works; ie, trial and error.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
He's a genius at making money off his meager talents. His latest gig is pimping a bait-and-switch credit site called freescore.com.
He makes a good pixie though.
there aren't enough teachers now. How can we start firing them?
Fact of the matter is that any solution to fix failing schools will cost money they don't have (thats why their failing). Any real solution requires fixing school funding. That either means huge federal grants. (to districts full of local corruption already) or and end to localized funding with funding and control moving to the state level and that will never happen as the rich districts will never allow an even field.
There is a gender crisis in education, with boys doing worse than girls almost across the board. And there is a crisis, if anybody cared, in hiring of male teachers in elementary school. Males that do enter teaching tend to leave for administrative positions. The theory was that men preferred the higher wages, but other research has shown that men are under pressure to leave the classroom by a female-centered culture that distrusts men and their contacts with children. Men are effectively banned from touching children, hugging them, being there for them. The tendency is for men to become disillusioned with teaching.
The average male doesn't care about kids, except their own. Teaching for them is just a job among others.
Pedophiles and pederasts are genetically programmed to be interested in kids. For them teaching is their life's work.
If our society wasn't completely insane with paranoia, we could flood inner cities and impoverished areas with highly motivated teachers. I guarantee
But nobody is willing to take the risk, and women like the control they have. It may be hard to believe, but education was invented by men, and even a hundred years ago, teaching was dominated by men. Today, male teachers are getting rare, and we're wondering about why we don't have as many good teachers. 50% of the population is effectively kept out.
..Class size? As a science teacher, I fully agree with all the comments about the difficulty of firing teachers, and the effect of teachers of pupils performance, BUT in terms of my own teaching - if the school cannot afford enough teachers and class sizes are made larger - not even the best teacher in the world can make that much of a difference. On the other hand, fewer students with even a bad teacher will do better. Also, the government (UK in this case) should stop changing the sylabus or current faddy pedagogy and let teachers teach the same thing for more than 3 years. Just when you start achieving results with whatever they have decided is the 'next best thing'(TM) they change it.
because that way, no additional work or money is required by the complainer to solve the problem.
All teachers need is a high enough salary to live a decent lifestyle (I know it's relative, but I'm sure you can figure out what I mean). Most good teachers have no illusions about becoming millionaires through teaching. They're not stupid after all. Being super rich is not their goal in life.
Good teachers enjoy teaching. Most don't like dealing with loads of admin crap, or politicking.
So you spend some of the money and resources not on high salaries, but on getting most of that crap out of the way.
Where high salaries can come in handy for teachers are: subsidized/free education for their own children[1], and housing loans/allowances (and in the USA, medical/health stuff).
I suggest that it may be cheaper to provide them that than to directly provide them higher salaries.
For example: instead of paying all teachers high enough salaries so that all their children can go to university, do masters, PhD etc, you just commit to paying for any of their children that want to (and meet the grade/entry requirements), and take a gamble that not all their children will want to do so, and not all would want to go to the most expensive universities[2] (and meet the entry requirements). And so I bet you end up paying less overall.
[1] It would be sad and ironic if teachers cannot afford to provide good education for their own children. And I'm sure most good teachers place significant value on education.
[2] and only the approved ones, otherwise people will be setting up "online super expensive university courses"...
The Newsweek article is about getting rid of incompetent teachers. The NYT article is mainly about figuring out specific teaching techniques that are effective. I doubt that either of these will have any positive effect on K-12 education in the U.S. -- in fact, I'm convinced that essentially nothing that our society does as a whole can have any significant effect on average educational outcomes.
Our school system sends kids to schools near where they live. Where you live correlates with your family's income and education. By the time a kid is old enough for school, a number of extremely powerful factors have been at work in determining how well the kid will do in school. One kid grows up in a house full of books; the parents subscribe to newspapers; the adults talk about intellectual things at the dinner table. The other kid grows up in a house with no books or newspapers; the parents spend their free time watching TV.
Let's say the authors of the Newsweek article get their way, and bad teachers are fired. The problem is that (a) the school now has to hire a replacement, and (b) there's a reason why the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around. There is a job market for schoolteachers. The reason the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around was because they had a lousy pool of applicants. Why did they have a lousy pool of applicants? Most likely because this is a school where 90% of the kids qualify for the free lunch program. The best teachers generally don't want to teach in that kind of environment. They know that if they teach in that environment, they're getting the kids who have been growing up with TV and no books. They know they're going to spend more time on discipline than on academics. They know that a lot of the families are financially unstable, so they're always on the move; of the faces in the classroom on the first day of class, maybe 40% will have been replaced with new faces by the last day of the year.
The NYT article talks about improving specific skills that teachers need. But they also admit that that can't make up for lack of subject knowledge, especially in math. As one of the articles notes, teaching and nursing are no longer the only career options for smart, talented women. I'm a college professor, and when I taught classes specifically targeted at preservice K-12 teachers, they were the worst students I'd ever had. In the job market, the vast majority of people applying for K-12 teaching jobs are just not such great students. In the US, 80% of them have bachelor's degrees education, meaning that they basically got a diploma without ever having to learn a deep and specific body of knowledge in any particular subject. Sure, a few people do go to highly selective schools, get stellar grades in a real academic subject, and then move on to a career in K-12 teaching. The problem is that those people are few and far between. When they go on the job market, they have their pick of schools. Most of them are going to end up in affluent, suburban districts.
Find free books.
We are forgetting a very important part of the formula here: the parents. In many "at risk" districts teachers spend more than half their day making sure the kids aren't hungry, are behaving in class, have their homework completed, and have the supplies that they need like pencils. Why is all this happening? Because the parents are not involved in their kids lives. Either they simply don't give a shit, or they are working more than 40 hours a week just to put food on the table. No matter how good a teacher is, if the kid's home life sucks, or they are more worried about if they are going to be eating, they will never succeed.
Individuals must choose, decide their "essential" nature rather than having it given from some transcendent source.
You do realize that California's education system used to among the best in the country until Prop 13 passed.
Every bad scenario that was envisioned if it passed has come true. All the reassurances that were given by the pro-13 people have not.
No offense, but more often than not, it is the home environment that determines whether a child will succeed or not when they reach school. Having said that, I COMPLETELY agree with the concept that a teacher can, and will, turn a student off of a subject, possibly forever due to their teaching style (or lack thereof).
Sadly, from a classroom perspective, you cannot hope to inspire every student in your class, no matter how many times you watch Mr. Holland's Opus - there are some student that will NEVER succeed in either a) your subject, or in some cases, b) school (whether or not that materialized into success after school is beyond the scope of the discussion). Firing teachers is a slippery slope because how do you determine success - by the kids' grades? I could 'teach to the test' if I were in constant fear of my job, I surely wouldn't inspire anybody that way, and as far as I'm concerned, I consider my pedagogy a success if I can inspire students to like the subject, regardless of how much they've learned, depending on the metric I'd surely be fired.
You had me nodding in agreement until I got to the part about the boss. I'm not sure what relevance the boss' pay has to the teacher's pay.
If you're a super star private school and you hire a super star principal and pay him 500k a year, I'm sure you could mitigate teachers desire to unionize by paying performing teachers 200k a year.
The key seems to just be if you compensate better performers better, then they will feel less need to overpay under performers if they feel that it's coming out of their own pocket.
You do of course realize the state government has little to do with k-12 education. Thats really the problem.
School boards make all the decisions with no more qualification then getting 20 more votes then the next guy.
Poor students live in poor areas which equal poor funding which means fewer teachers and less resources for those that need the most.
Local control makes corruption easy to hide.
Some of my greatest teachers I had were at a private school I attended (I know, I know "liberal elite" and so on).
One of them changed my life by getting me interested in computers, another nourished my creative side in architecture.
Did these teachers have to go through a huge bureaucracy? Did they have to get endless "certifications"? No, they merely had to demonstrate that they were GREAT (probably to a small board of their peers or parents).
I can draw a direct line from the interest those teachers sparked in me to the computer graphics company I founded (and later ended up employing quite a few people at). I can't imagine what would have happened if I had gone to a "regular" school.
Get rid of the bureaucracy, cut the unions' power to the bare minimum needed to protect teachers' rights and give parents the right to choose their school. Ultimately there is no greater issue that will determine the success or failure of the "American Experiment". Oh, and teach real science not this creationist/climate change denialist crap.
So your point is skills can't be learned?
If we really need superstars to teach, then we're screwed. According to the BLS there are something like 3.5 million teachers in the US right now (kindergarten to high school). There are 660,000 physicians and surgeons. 1.3 million computer "engineers" and programmers. So it seems like if your strategy is to magically select exceptionally smart people, then we won't have good teachers.
I don't divide the world into "dim drones" and "brights". It doesn't have to be a "magic equation". The fact is there may be skills and techniques that make for better teachers, and those might be learnt to a certain degree. If that's true, we'll still have better and worse teachers, we'll still have to get rid of bad teachers, but we'll be in a better situation. More money would help, but it needs to be spent intelligently.
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers.
This is pretty nearly right. Of the many education systems worldwide, the finest is widely reputed (by many comparative reviews) to be that of Finland. Not necessarily because teachers there are so incredibly well paid, but because their profession commands RESPECT.
That means allowing them the space to exercise their experience and common sense rather than regulating their activities into a series of so-called "outcomes" that have to be ticked off so that petty-minded little bureaucrats can get a good night's sleep. It also means not leaving teachers exposed to be pilloried by media and politicians for their own ends.
We need to try treating teachers as valued members of society, for the fact that they are entrusted with the education of future generations, rather than treating them as political footballs. Of course, that also means that teachers need to be paid well enough that they don't feel exploited. After all, who among us really wants to give 100% when we are feeling aggrieved with our employer?
L.A. Weekly:
In the past decade, [school district] officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
[Note that, in one of nation's largest school districts, that's less than one ATTEMPTED firing per year]
We also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.
- AJ
Study after study come to the same conclusion, the single biggest factor in education bar none is the quality of the teacher. Yet we continue to put up with a system that makes firing teachers almost impossible. tenure should be illegal at any school that receives public tax dollars.
The second problem is the best teachers switch to management to almost double their salary, or simply choose a better paying career. We have allowed schools to become very top heavy, with fewer and fewer dollars actually getting to the classroom. The system needs rebalanced, more money to the teachers, less for management and other other secondary activities. We need and want healthy competition.
My wife runs an after school daycare, where she and her staff help with homework and tutoring. Math is a big problem for the kids. She finds that lots of kids are stuck on addition and subtraction when their classes are in multiplication and above. These children should not have progressed without the needed knowledge. She also sees problems given with no instruction, and very little usable information in the textbook. As an engineer, I can sometimes work out what they are trying to teach and it is usually some obtuse math principle completely irrelevant to the course. These teachers do not know their subject material, most of them don't comprehend math at all, they are just rote teaching the "method" they were given. When I was in school I thought a science lab and one summer I had a group of teachers taking my class to maintain their accreditation. They were seriously annoyed that I expected them to learn the science. The common refrain was "We don't want to learn how this works, we just want to learn how to teach it". As long as they have that mindset there will be no progress.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
1. One size Definitely DOESN'T fit all. Each classroom is not the same. They have there own personality that most experience teachers recognize immediately.
Yet,Teachers are not allowed to teach. They have to follow the script mandated by the school department of the state. Any freestyling off script is frowned upon.
New inexperienced teachers don't realize this because of the gap in teachers generations, exacerbated by firings, denial of tenure and forced retirement packages.
3.TESTS TESTS TESTS AKA Bullshyt
Some Kids excel at testing, successful at Life.
Some Kids excel at testing, FAIL at Life.
Some Kids suck at testing, FAIL at Life.
Some Kids suck at testing, sucessful at Life.
not everyone can be a fantastic teacher (in the same way that not everyone can be a concert pianist) no matter how well they are trained. and there aren't enough people with the temperament, focus, love, patience and understanding that make up a fantastic teacher to teach every child on every subject.
unless you're very wealthy (and probably even then) your children are going to have teachers that are not inspirational. and perhaps they're not even particularly well informed. or perhaps your child's teacher is truly inspirational, but it turns out that he or she is not inspirational in a way that works for your child. your child will spend day after day, hour after hour sitting through interminable lectures and stupid pointless presentations. they will get useless comments on their school work and they'll bring home ridiculous assignments. And just in case you think it's just in your imagination, your neighbor's lod will be assigned to a more capable teacher in the same subject.
well clearly, due to this terrible misfortune, your child will end up working at a gas station for the rest of his life.
it seems to me that many parents look on education as some sort of passive process (your kid goes to school for 12 years and comes out Enhanced With Knowledge® ). so when they see their child struggling in school they naturally think the school is broken. they want better teachers and better facilities to put the knowledge into their child! Well, it couldn't hurt. But real learning happens only when the student is actively involved in the process. Yes, excellent teachers know how to make subjects come alive for their students, but students need to be able to inspire themselves.
If it takes an army of miraculous teachers to get a person to graduate high school, that person is going to have serious issues when they confront a world full of people who aren't exerting every particle of effort into making them successful.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I've had 70+ teachers over the years. Maybe 4 of them were "bad". On the other hand, I've had to be in class with hundreds of lazy, disruptive, and/or stupid students who waste the entire class' time. If we got rid of the dead weight students, we could improve as a whole.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
Maybe paying more will attract better teachers, but if you don't know what a "better" teacher is, you're shit out of luck anyway.
Oh please, for most people it's easy to tell which teachers are good. Most people know a good teacher when they see one. The only "problem" (which isn't really a problem) is that there are no real objective ways to measure who is a "better" teacher; however the subjective methods work extremely well indeed. Unfortunately people for some absolutely bizarre reason think that evaluating people subjectively is somehow "wrong". It's not. It's not perfect, of course, but it's absolutely the best method we have available, i.e. use humans (e.g. principals) to judge teachers.
The thing is, we have to drop firstly the strangely egalitarian communist-like pretense that all teachers are somehow "equal" in quality if only they would be trained correctly and employ the right "methods", and secondly we have to then reward the good teachers with higher salaries, and fire the bad ones.
You don't have to worry so much then about "how to produce" competent teachers, as if their was a magic formula (there isn't), because you'd instead be using standard methods like reward and selection (like any other enterprise, in fact) that will then further help attract good teachers (who want to teach) and keep the bad ones out.
Something this entire thread has missed so far: It's not entirely up to the teachers. They're only a part, possibly even a small part, of the solution. The real change needs to start in the students' homes. The parents are usually the biggest problem. Terrible households creating terrible children that destroy classroom learning environments. Parents who (metaphorically) sledgehammer teachers faces for not picking Billy, or asking Betty to stay late for help, or daring to ask Johnny should practice more. And heaven forbid the parents actually even know, even marginally, what their children are even studying and take an active interest in their well-being. Teachers are always the fall-guys. Usually, however, they're not the problem.
Teachers can not be fairly judged by the success of their students. We know as an absolute fact that the wealth of the student's home is by far the major factor in the students success. Sadly that happens to equate with race in many areas of our nation. In the end it boils down to schools with poor testing results being filled with students drenched in deep poverty and lack of opportunities in their early years. The schools can do very little to repair these children. Kids who do not see their parents reading books in their very early years will never tend to read themselves. By first grade the permanent damage is done.
The second way to test a teacher is also not good. If you test an English teacher on his English knowledge he may test poorly but he just might be intensely skilled in the narrow knowledge needed to teach his eight grade English class and he might be the type of teacher that gets through to the students.
Compounding this problem are situations in which a school draws a small number of very poor students but has a large majority of students from affluent homes. I know a teacher right now who gives a female fifth grade student lots of attention and good grades because she knows the girl can become really violent. The girl is in the fifth grade! Before you think that is nonsense consider that these young kids are known to shoot teachers. Gifted students will not receive the attention that the troubled child gets. Yet 90% of that school comes from affluent families.
It's well-known, and also my experience, that administrators don't really care about the quality of the teaching in classrooms. To them it's just a product, and as long as the "sale" is being made, job done. Consider the same dynamics in a helpdesk, phone support situation; what is more profitable?
Consider my sig. First, I had a college teaching job where the union was non-functional and reviews were given by a dean. Result: I had to beg and plead for an assistant dean to come into my room once, ever, for the supposed required review; he stayed for 5 minutes and scribbled something utterly nonsensical about the CS lesson, "Dan's great", that's it. Now, I teach at a school where the union is strongly involved, and every semester I get a rotating series of fellow professors sitting in my classroom for a whole hour, writing a 6-page report, and having a discussion with me about my classroom management, in a very detailed and sometimes picky manner.
American Educator magazine, Fall 2008, had an issue about the effects of teacher governance and peer review. One interesting finding: When the union and teachers are involved in reviews, they are FAR MORE likely to fire teachers than administrators or principals. Teachers care about the profession, and the students, and their reputation; just like doctors or lawyers or engineers. But administrators have other priorities.
Read the article here ("Taking the Lead", p. 37): http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall2008/index.htm
Look, in the last two decades there's been a concerted Chicago-school-type program to wrest control away from teachers and corporatize schools, reducing teachers to low-paid, unskilled at-will labor. Full-time teachers have been replaced by part-time contingent faculty to save costs (example: community college instructors in 1997 were 54% tenured full-time, now just 43%). The majority of funding increases go to grow administration jobs, not in-classroom teaching (growing 41% between 1997 and 2007). Source, AFT State of Higher Education Worforce: http://www.aftface.org/storage/face/documents/ameracad_report_97-07for_web.pdf
In a software company, the PHB's tend to want to take decision-making away from the engineers, and the result is an inefficiently run company (but in the short-run, profitable for the bosses). The exact same thing is happening right now with the PHB's of the school system trying to squeeze out teacher peer review and shared governance, for the same reasons, with all available data showing the exact same end-results. The more they squeeze, the more students will slip through their fingers. But like a lot of American social issues, the evidence can't get through the wild-eyed tea-party propaganda.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Having taught middle school, run higher education outreach programs, and currently working in higher education, I say...
Bill Gates still has no clue about education.
His first attempt at "fixing" education comprised of giving tons of money to brilliant high school students so they wouldn't have to pay for college. Useless why? Because brilliant kids already get tons of money to go to college.
His second attempt was to inject massive amounts of money into certain schools, or sponsor entire schools, to bring them "up to date" with technology. Useless why? Because he was still targeting the wrong students with computers-- things that more frequently harm a student's mind and concentration in education than helps.
Now, he's going to spend a ton of money trying to find out what makes a great teacher and then try to create a method to make great teachers. Useless why? Because great teachers are few and far between. Teaching K-12 is not monetarily rewarding so the best teachers are actually there just to teach and to survive. They don't jump out and give talks or invite multi-billionaires to their classrooms (disrupting their teaching). They have a passion for the education of our youth, have a personality that resonates with the students, and they're personally brilliant themselves. You can't simply duplicate that with training! Instead, you have to make it easy for people who already have these qualities to become teachers.
I've said it once and I'll say it a billion times over and over again: When America brags about having the brightest students and the best schools in the world, they're actually talking about their *best* students and they're best schools (typically universities). When America talks about how education is "broken", they're talking about the students coming from poor socio-economic background and schools that have severely lacking facilities. It's these students, the teachers and administrators in these schools, and these buildings that need the most attention.
These students are surrounded by hopelessness (at home, around their homes, and at school), they're feared, and they're looked down upon. The society around them gives up on them at first sight. They know only poverty, struggle, and dishonesty as norms. So they give up early in life.
Because the students are of such poor quality, the various responsible governments do not see them worthy of investment. The buildings leak when it rains. The classrooms are small. What computer labs that exist for typing out papers are defunct because of the lack of proper care (because proper care is expensive!).
Now, consider being a hopeful and brilliant teacher trying to get a job with no experience. This is often the only school within your first year of applications that will give you a shot. You go in and you deal with the complete lack of student support and students that KNOW you won't be around long... so they torture you. We call that "Teach for America". You go in, you do your time, you get your better job offer in two years, and you get the fuck out of Dodge. That's the norm.
And what of the teachers that don't do a TFA program? There's two methods of becoming a teacher:
Method A: Quick, no training, cheap (here's where the bad teachers come from)
1) Be competent at baby sitting
2) Apply for "emergency credentials"
3) Do your time
4) Apply for a credential program, skip a bunch of training, do some night school, and you're a full teacher.
Method B: The right way -- Education, training
1) Apply to a 4-year university ($), get accepted
2) Complete your 4-year education ($$$$$)
3) Apply for a 2+ year Masters-Credential combination program, get accepted ($$)
4) Complete your program, receive your credentials ($$$$), and hope that by the time you complete your program some $$ debt is knocked off by *re-instated* teachers' debt forgiveness
5) Search for teaching positions (~6 months to 1 year), dodging non-full time positions because you want medical benefits
6) Fi
Former Teach For America high school computer science and math teacher here. (I also taught at a school funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's High Tech High initiative noted in the summary.)
First, some positive comments. It's great to see studies like those mentioned in the Newsweek article attracting eyeballs in academia and the popular press. The conclusions may seem to border on the tautological for most of us (great teachers are great at teaching!), but such ideas are largely verboten in the public school system. If you haven't already RTFA, I'd suggest The Atlantic's treatment of the same material.
Anecdotally, I can fully corroborate Teach For America's data. Both in my school as well as those of my TFA colleagues, teachers that continually pushed themselves to excel and improve in their craft were able to consistently produce jaw-dropping results in their students' test scores. It really is amazing. As an example, I co-taught a summer school pre-calculus class with another TFAer in Watts a few years ago. We somehow managed to march through three years worth of material in those two months; our students went from being on average two grade levels behind to slightly above grade level. I attribute this success to Teach For America's philosophy of teacher excellence (which is similar to 'kaizen' in many regards).
The summary asks "What makes a good teacher?" This is the wrong question. There is no one thing that will make a teacher great (vibrant personality, deep subject knowledge, an M.S. Ed., etc.). Rather, it is an attitude that is willing to try anything (and, conversely, promptly reject the ineffective) to make students succeed. To use a math analogy, it is the second derivative that matters, not the current value or even the slope.
Disclaimer: this post does not necessarily reflect the views of my former employers.
This is insightful?
People send their kids to particular schools because they've no choice, physical location and economic circumstance pretty much dictate where a child is going to go to school. The parents have no choice over the teachers at those schools, the vast majority have no direct say in the administration of the schools. They take what they're given because they can't afford otherwise. The administration has no incentive to perform well, the teachers have no incentive to perform well, bureaucracy and apathy abound.
By centralising authority and distribution of funding, you produce a system optimised for cost, not quality.
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I agree with your general sentiment. I will note that one of those groups who uses teachers as a "political football" in CA is none other than the teacher's union.
(Yes, I mean that as an insult to them, and to every other union that places their own political power above the well being of their victims-- I mean "members".)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
This the same 'genius' thow droned his way through a cringeworthy hatchet-job against Richard Dawkins? The same one who told people that were predicting the current financial crisis to STFU and go learn something?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I suggest the works of John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
A former teacher who won awards as Teacher-of-the-Year for both New York City and New York State, Gatto has looked into the history of education in the United States and came to the conclusion that the Education system is working exactly as it was designed.
However, the U.S. education system was designed to prepare students to be cogs in the industrial machine, and that requires workers who have some basic skills but no independence or spirit of inquiry. In short, it requires workers who are half-educated - no more, no less - and so countless reforms never work because the system is already working exactly as intended.
These little piddling changes will make no difference. Allow the money to follow the students, that might make a difference. The government monopoly on schools will just continue on its old course.
You do of course realize the state government has little to do with k-12 education.
FAIL
You do of course realize that in California the state funds the local schools, because of Prop 13. Even a school board hand picked by a genius like you would fail without sufficient funds.
I am a teacher, and former software engineer. Keep blaming teachers for problems in education. The problems in education have nothing to do with parents who don't give a damn, or send their kids to school never having read a book to their children or shared reading with them. The problems in education have nothing to do with students who have no consequences for their actions, and are passed along be administrators who don't want to look bad. The problems have nothing to do with children who come to school for free breakfast and lunch, and carry Ipods and PSPs and the latest cell phones, but not pencils or notebooks. The problems have nothing to do with administrators shoving the latest educational fads down the throats of teachers who must follow the programs, and often even the scripts they must read, to keep their jobs. The problems have nothing to do with classrooms so crowded and disruptive, because public schools must teach EVERY child, no matter how much they act out, how often they cut school or class, or how much they bully, harass or abuse their classmates. After you experts try standing in front of a group of 33 different kids, six times a day, and actually spend time in a classroom, then talk about the lousy teachers who don't give a damn. Most of us actually do care, and try our best, in spite of the lack of resources and support from the communities, the kids and the administrators. Rather than sitting on your asses complaining about the lousy teachers, go volunteer at a school as a tutor, or mentor, or a teacher's aide. Unless you have been responsible for a classroom, you sound like a bunch of jackasses talking about crap you have only read about. You know, when someone tells you how simple it is to design a control system for a Toyota, or an operating system, who has never constructed a running program. It sounds almost that stupid...
Then teachers are doing it wrong. It's their *job* to provide students the passion to learn. It's also the role of the parents as well. No amount of money can solve this because it's a social problem, not a financial one.
Life is not for the lazy.
The only people who benefit from this study would be the University of XXX, department of education.
West TN public schools (memphis) suck big, you should blame the Univ of Memphis, college of education.
Half of their profit comes from "certifying" teachers.
Why in the world do we need Ph.D's as principals like Memphis has...
Study a school, any school which has a waiting list.
I could suggest a few...
Get off your fat ass and do somethiing.
In the past 40 years we've more than doubled spending-per-student and the results are getting worse each year.
It ain't the money.
I have at home a couple books published in 1880 for ten year olds. Many of today's college students would have trouble understanding them.
The teachers at that time were frequently young women just out of high school (or the equivalent) who taught for a couple years before getting married.
It ain't the money, it ain't the techniques, it ain't even usually how smart the teachers are.
It's the system. It's designed to fail, and it's working exactly as it was intended.
Let the money follow the students, and we'll begin to see better results.
I actually think this is a great idea, but a major stumbling block would be the amount of non-class time a consultant-teacher would need to devote to preparing syllabuses, correcting tests and papers, etc.
I've been a part time teacher, and the amount of out-of-class work to be done is considerable.
I have been teaching over 10 years. Special Education. Behavior students. High School. 2nd Career.
And I'm about to quit.
Paying more money only perpetuates the bureaucracy that puts bad teachers in place. I am tired of working hard only to have more work (and restrictions) put on me because I am able to do it. I am tired of having to dodge lawsuits from parents because I can not prevent their 16 year old from failing or committing felonies. I am tired of other teachers telling me that I work too hard but that they could never do what I do.
And...I am tired of having to defend myself from people who have never spent more than an hour in a classroom telling me that I'm not smart/skilled/politically adept enough to function as a teacher. (I won't bore you with a resume proving I'm smart enough...the ACT score of 30 from 25 years ago should be sufficient).
I know who the bad teachers are. Unfortunately, they are also the most politically/socially adept. They are also the ones who are quick to remind administration that I'm not as good as they are (yet I put in 80 hour work weeks).
We are not rewarded for doing well. We are rewarded for not being a problem. Squeaky wheels get greater scrutiny as does classrooms with children whose parents threaten lawsuits. Those are the teachers who get disciplined.
Want to improve schools and/or teaching? Scrap the system and rebuild from the ground up.
Feel free to continue to blame bad teachers or nurture or poverty or whatever. Reality is that none of it will appreciably change unless enough people realize that the system that served them is no longer serving their children.
Full disclosure: I'm the son of a long-time high school English teacher who recognizes there are a lot of shitty teachers out there.
More of the blame needs to be placed at the feet of administrators and Boards of Education, IMO. They often kowtow to parents because parents hold the purse strings. Nobody has the good teachers' backs in disputes with parents and students. If a parent complains enough or is a big donor, their kid will pass on the district superintendent's or BoE's orders.
There are plenty of bad teachers that deserve blame, but we can't forget the failings of those with real power in the system.
If you can do, why on earth would you settle for a teachers salary?
And I notice that so far, the simplest rememdy, pay more, goes unexplored.
You pay peanuts, you get monkey's.
I have worked with a lot of ex-teachers, who now do things like IT-training, they make several times what they would make in front of a class-room filled with kids, so why would they do it?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Here in British Columbia, the good teachers (who actually manage to get full time work, frak you union/management collusion) generally have to work about a 60-70 hour week, plus be available for phone calls. The work load can get insane, because a good teacher is working HARD during those hours... I've put in long hours at various jobs, but there's usually way more 'down-time' or light load work in a week than a teacher gets.
This is all for a lower middle class income until your seniority gets big. Time off in the summer amounts to about 3-4 weeks or less since there's always professional development and prep.
The general public just has no idea.
On top of that, a good teacher deals with intense frustrations over curriculum, bureaucracy, feckless parents, and lack of support for special needs... most spend an inordinate time with 'classroom management', meaning discipline.
The thing is, good teachers will work for enough to live on, because they will do the work anyway, that's what makes them a good teacher. What they really want is the ability to properly teach without burning out; i.e. adequate prep time, smaller class sizes, more support staff targeted at the 10% of the class that takes 90% of the attention, and fewer overall hours. Burnout turns good teachers into indifferent, bitter staff working for that pension.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Roughly, you got the following groups involved:
And all the time, teachers see those who take their teaching talent to private industry make several times their pay, with none of the hazards of getting some parent upset or a student who desides to file charges because daddy touched them.
No, if you want to fix education, you got to make a drastic cleaning action.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because nowhere in your recommendations do you acknowledge the pay gap between private and public education.
None of the those private teachers apparently managed to touch your morals.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm not a teacher, but I've seriously considered it as a second career after the entire stateside IT industry collapses. Everyone loves to blame teachers and the teachers' unions for causing all the problems. There has been a lot of talk recently about "paying for performance." In other words, the teacher would get a different salary or a bonus based on how well the students perform on various tests, the graduation rate, etc. Others, especially around my area have gotten extremely worked up over high property taxes, citing the lazy greedy teachers and their union for "stealing their tax money."
There are some parents who really care about their kids' education. Others use school as a free babysitting service, and do nothing outside of the school day to motivate their kids to do well. If your school has tons of the second kind of kid, pay-for-performance does not work well. No matter what the teacher does, if the student decides they don't care what kind of grades they get, nothing is going to make the kid improve. The teachers in crappy schools will get crappy pay, the profession won't attract smart people, and the cycle continues.
Here's my two thoughts on the subject.
First, teachers deserve to be paid well, especially those who have put up with peoples' kids for many years. You wouldn't deny a mid-career to end-of-career corporate professional a decent salary, would you? If you don't pay your teachers well, you're not going to get good people wanting to do the job. If you've been interviewing or hiring IT folks for the last 5-7 years, you may have noticed quality issues. I think that's totally attributable to the lower salaries people are paying. If you were smart and had your choice of jobs, wouldn't you choose something more stable than IT, even if you really enjoyed it? There are still really good people making decent IT salaries, but those jobs are getting harder and harder to come by. If you set the bar too low, recruiting gets tougher. "Hey, want to work a job that's high stress, sometimes 60 hours a week, where you get no respect?" Not a good sales pitch...
Second, time-in-grade is still the fairest way to pay people. You may get some lazy hangers-on, but you see this in companies as well. I've noticed a couple people in my various corporate jobs who carved out a comfortable niche for themselves and just stopped working. Yet, these people continue to get raises while new hires with similar experience levels are paid less. This pay for performance scheme will backfire on people...instead of attracting the best and the brightest, you're going to burn them out of the profession.
The best teacher I ever had was my American History teacher at the second high school i went to. the crazy thing about it is that I already took and aced American History but because of problems with my old school none of my credits transferred and I had to start from scratch. What made him a great teacher was that he believed in what he taught. He was the only teacher I had that would take an entire class period to tell us personal stories related to the subject. Such as he was one of the main students behind the Kent State Massacre (was actually portrayed in a movie about it) he talked about how they said they were going to napalm a dog. He used to talk about how he would retire ever 5 years or so and take his pension or whatever it was and go exploring the world. Stories about the Amazon and about temples in Tibet. Even a few of when he was young backpacking through Europe and getting woke up to the sound of a hay baler when he was sleeping in someones barn. The guy had passion anytime we watched a movie or documentary on WWII he would start screaming at the TV with his fists clenched "kill those Nazi bastards" was a regular thing you could hear out of his classroom. Like I said I already took an aced the class before but that didn't stop him from teaching me new things and pointing out the very important pasts of history the things that caused all the other stuff to happen. Oh an on top of that he would smoke a joint in the parking lot with a few of the seniors. Oh and I just found this his interview about the Kent State Massacre http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4may70/oralhistory/arthrell.html
Teaching depends on the skills of the individuals doing it. No process or method can create that skill. Processes or methods can only ensure that skills that are there can be applied, but without the skilled and talented individuals, the effort is doomed.
A parallel I see is to software engineering. There are now decade long efforts to find the right process or method that you can then plug cheap, low-skill developers in and get good software. All of these have failed. Process can only help those already good to work without as little hassle as possible, but process cannot compensate for lower skill levels at all. Stupidly, management does not want to see this and still regards developers as interchangeable resources. Even when the creators of a particular process clearly say that the process is far less important than the people applying it (e.g. with Agile, see here http://agilemanifesto.org/), management does not want to listen.
I suspect that it boils down to a question of ego. Those managing software creation (or managing education) typically have a perception problem where those doing the actual work are perceived as less important than those managing it. In fact it is (rather obviously) the other way round. This may also be a principle problem of our day and age: Management that does not understand it merely has a supporting role and serves to create conditions for others to do what is really important. I fear that without radically different selection of management based on psychological profiles that prevent those seeking power from getting into management in the first place, neither problem can be solved.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
DIANE RAVITCH: “The Billionaires Boys Club” is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding... http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/5/protests
Having attended grad school to secure a teaching certificate, I can tell you that the education culture will resist any attempt to cull poor performers from the pack. The emphasis is on never criticizing and being exceptionally inclusive. When peer review was done, all reviews were A+ while performance varied considerably. The instructors and students "accommodated" the poor performers because I was told "They need jobs too and it's our job to help them.".
And I'll bring up the other elephant in the room: it's because education is, in the USA at least, a very female culture. You can see the effect of this in the entire process, much to the detriment of the students: management by consensus, emphasis on behaving "well" and being quiet, institutional enforcement of the status quo, heavy reliance on social rules, reliance on strategies like "think of the children" when engaging in discussion and so on. Sadly, this aspect has been discussed for years and since the education/female culture is threatened by it, it is never fully addressed and typically dismissed as not relevant. The female culture of caring and nurturing is wonderful for day care, but not for educating. And what is it our schools appear to have become? Institutions of babysitting where the emphasis is on "getting along", "respecting diversity", improving "self esteem" and walking quietly in a straight line down the hall. The nod to learning is achieving a good score on a standardized test, which the teachers in Norfolk, VA have been manipulating (cheating) to artificially inflate score to keep their budgets and jobs. There's nothing wrong with female culture, it's simply misapplied in education.
Given that Bill Gates is not an educator, he is not aware that the characteristics of a good teacher have long been known (but he could "Bing" that, I suppose), it's how to communicate and teach those that is still undecided (RTFA). It's just that those characteristics seems to be at odds with the moribund education culture.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Once again we want to legislate before using common sense. The problem is with the parents not being involved enough. The teachers can only do so much. If parents forced their children to learn while at home instead of watching the idiot box all day things would change. So many of our problems in the country all start with the parents. Responsibility and accountability.
...their money where their mouth is? Esp. the people complaining about how "paying more" doesn't produce better teachers. How about giving up your own high-paying job to take a 75% salary cut and join a profession where you're expected to buy supplies for your students? Hands up!
This will probably never happen because parents would be outraged if their children weren't "the brightest." Admittedly, this is just one problem. But that's how you solve larger problems-- you tackle the smaller problems and eventually you can begin making serious progress.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
I have never been part of the US education system but here is what I have learned from being part of the Canadian (Ontario) education system.
1) The most important part of a kids education is the PARENTS. Parents who felt that education was important had kids that did well in school. Parent who treated school like a daycare so they could avoid having to actually raise their kids had children who did poorly. The school has no real power over the students. Detention, being sent to "the office" means nothing. If the parents don't teach discipline to their kids, it won't happen, the school cannot do it.
2) Reading. Kids who read and are encouraged to read do much better then those who do not. What they read doesn't matter. It could be sci-fi, romance, or comic books. The more they read the more they become accustomed to it. I had a friend in high school who never read a novel before. When it came time to read books for English class he struggled. Not because he was bad student, but because reading in volume was just not something he was acclimated to.
3) Money. It may be politically incorrect but it's true, rich kids do better. I don't know if it is because they get better meals, more opportunities, or something else. But on average, rich kids have a much better chance of doing well then poor ones.
4) Culture. I don't know when it started, but today's culture is very anti-intellectual. You hear about kids wanting to be astronauts, doctors, lawyers, and scientists in the media. Perhaps it was that way during the space race, but it most certainly is not now. Many of my peers (I am in my early 20s) wanted to be athletes, media personalities, rock stars (for the money not the music), and movie stars. There seems to be almost no interest educated professions any more. No one dreams of a career where they will need an education.
You can spend all the money you want to pay for the best teacher and class rooms money can buy. But if the kids are not willing to learn, if they were not raised in an environment that encourages learning, they will not get anything from it.
There are a lot of bad teachers, but there an equal number of incompetent administrators, especially in the inner-city districts. The incompetent ones tend to oppress their teachers, making a tough job miserable. I do have a suggestion that I believe would address a number of issues by adding objectivity across the board. Teachers should be given curricula that are standardized and vertically integrated. The curricula should account for 2/3 of classroom time, so that the teachers have some flexibility. Along with the standardized curricula would be standardized tests. Not annual tests, but every test students take. Grading of students, teachers, schools would be leveled. Of course, the big challenges would be creating the curricula and getting rid of tenure.
I hate this kind of article. You know why students are getting bad grades? Administrators.
Administrators don't provide funding for school supplies which the teachers must buy. The admins get cars, phones, and bonuses instead while the campus deteriorates.
Administrators refuse to expel violent, dangerous students with criminal backgrounds that are highly disruptive. Because every head in the classroom means more money for them.
Administrators will move heaven and earth to coerce teachers with excellent performance who are at the top of the pay scale to quit so they can hire cheap college grads who can't teach.
Administrators force teachers to pass all students regardless of their performance so SENIORS have the reading and writing skill levels of ELEMENTARY STUDENTS.
Administrators will sue teachers to get the legal rights to their own lesson plans so they can turn around and sell them themselves, and fire the teacher in the process.
How to we fix education? We FUND education. We remove the hierarchy of incompetent administrators that make up school districts. We spend money on things we NEED like clean, safe campuses, working lockers, working lab rooms, textbooks, and a campus security staff. We fund ESL because like it or not, every state along the border has a huge influx of Mexican children that need to know English in order to pass the standardized tests.
How to we hurt education? We fire teachers. We pour millions into 'technology in the classrooms' like webconferencing and laptops for every child. We assume every student knows English and punish schools where test scores are low despite the huge amount of non-English speakers in attendance.
DO NOT FIRE THE TEACHERS. They are the ONLY people in the school system trying to help the students. Teachers always get the short end of the stick and still do everything they can to provide for their students. Fire the administrators that are too busy racing up the corporate ladder and shitting all over the schools, teachers, and students in their wake.
Standardize teaching so that even a retarded monkey can just follow the curriculum and teach as well as any other teacher as long as they have the proper knowledge. Up until the end of high school of course; leave colleges and universities alone; but find a way to reduce the price.
I would want to be nearly certain that pay will continue to be good for decades. I'm not going to make a career choice based on short-term pay.
There's other stuff too. Where I work now, nobody assaults me or even threatens to do so. If anyone were to do so, they would surely be fired.
Various economists have analyzed the effects of Prop 13 and pretty much agree that the effects of the fallout would have normalized within a decade. It's been more than 30 years since Prop 13, and many other taxes (such as Mello-Roos) have been installed to take place of the "lost" property revenue. And yet— the deterioration has only gotten worse. Plus when spending has gone through the roof regardless of revenue, I can't see where loss of one source of income has done more harm than the expansion of educational bureaucracy (up to 40% in some areas.)
I say this as someone who got an excellent public education in the 80s, with all the bells and whistles, and who cannot find a school that offers anything like that now.
Incidentally, remember that recent thing called the housing boom? Look to various states without the protections of Prop 13 to see what happened to homeowners whose property taxes quadrupled or worse in the course of a single year. Oh, and also recall that the property taxes are set when the house is sold— so the vast churn between 2000 and 2006 increased property taxes by astonishing amounts.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
The first factor is salary. Yes, you can persuade a more educated and more talented individual to teach by offering a higher salary so that they will do that instead of take a much higher paying job in the "private" sector, but you also attract individuals that are only teaching to make a living. The best teachers do so because they love their job and are great at doing it. Yes, teachers deserve more money than any other labor area, but to pay them so would completely destroy the educational system.
The second factor is merit pay... that doesn't quite go along with salary. The problem with merit pay is that those teachers that typically do not need to improve due to being in a more affluent area and in a better funded school will be the ones at the top of the scale for the merit pay. Those in the lower performing schools would benefit MUCH more from merit pay in attracting better teachers, but they won't end up getting anything since their students are already at the bottom of the scale in performance and are unlikely to surpass the deficit enough to warrant a pay bump for those teachers. Giving merit pay only to the low income and low performing schools gives the already higher performing schools no incentive to continue to do so either. Both ways, merit pay cannot work.
The third factor is the education system itself. Much like in Office Space, the average teacher has at least 5 bosses. They have a department head, an assistant principal over their subject area, the principal themselves, a district level coordinator for their group of schools, and the superintendent. Each of these 5 bosses has a different agenda which often conflicts with that of the others. Yes, every teacher wants to have their students do better, but the job of whoever assesses that teacher outside of just test scores is to make sure they are doing it the "proper" way. Effective teaching, especially in difficult schools, must break the rules. Whether you follow the behaviorist school of philosophy for classroom maintenance, take a more cognitive approach, or simply develop relationships with the student often no one single area will be successful, but the one that is successful is rarely the one that will allow you to keep your job. Not even the highest test scores and the best response from students will matter when one single individual chooses to make your life hell in order to get you out, especially if that single individual is the one evaluating you. Make any single one of your five bosses unhappy even on a personal level and it doesn't matter how good of a teacher you are.
I will say this though... speaking as a former teacher that has gone through the process of being transferred rather than fired, and having watched as many other teachers, GOOD teachers, went through the same thing, the problem with the entire system is that there is too much organization. Let the teachers teach, let the parents worry about the students behavior in the classroom (and let the child be kicked out), and get rid of the overpaid and unnecessary administration that prevents the system from being effective. I honestly like the idea of vouchers, but I also like the idea of letting the students choose their teacher. Maybe we should allow the teachers that the students choose to learn from be the ones that get the pay, regardless of which school they happen to be at. It would make more of a difference than most of these suggestions.
You do realize that only absolute FUCKHEADS blame Prop 13, right? I'd tell you to go look at the numbers, how the schools have more than enough funding to do their job, but FUCKHEAD ideologues like you are unreachable by facts, figures or anything modern mental health science can bring to bear.
And you think Prop 13 arose out of a vacuum? People were going bankrupt or taking out loans to pay oppressive (fascistic, some would say) property taxes, but scum level, nuclear level asshole policy wonks like you can't give a shit about anything but your precious ideology. Just fucking DIE, already. *DIE* and leave the rest of us alone. We can't solve a single damned problem anymore because of you FUCKHEAD political misery machines. For fuck's sake just FUCKING DIE!
My students are current researching this issue for a paper. My wife is also studying in the field of education. So I think I have a few things to say. First, my dad retired as a teacher, and he was barely breaking $30k when he did. That was about ten years ago. Teachers in East Tennessee, good ones, well, some are making $35k, with an MA or MS. That's too little. Then again, I have a doctorate, with publications, and I'm making $32, teaching 116 students this semester. If I quit, I could be replaced right away with some other sucker. So maybe it's the same for K-12. Next thought. The education K-12 teachers get is a joke. Worse than a joke, complete crap. I've been in the education building, listened to the courses and the professors. I don't say this lightly: these are not the people you want teaching teachers. Fire them all. Burn the building. Salt the earth. Start over. No one should teach anything above 3rd grade without a BA/BS in that field. With an education minor. No one should be allowed to teach anything, nothing, with an education degree. No one should be allowed to teach teachers who has not taught in a classroom for 5-10 years. Period. Exclamation point. Another idea: how about some respect? In America, that means, in part money, but how about we laugh at any smug jerk who says "those who can do..."? How about we teach our kids to obey and respect teachers? (Of course, this will require clearing the unrespectable deadwood first.) Also, how about being able to actually fail kids, at least at the high school level? We should also teach how to govern one's emotions, require physical education, complete nutrition, and discipline. Finally, we should decouple school funding from the individual districts. Yep. If you're rich and you want your kids to have a special school, you'd better be able to ante up at the private school. Otherwise, one big pot per state, with a fat chunk of federal money. And no money for tons of computers and AV. One class on word processing and a few other things. Beyond that, chalk or white boards. Save the money. Read books; talk. The return on the vast expense for the computers and other rapidly-obsolete tech just isn't worth it right now.
They're still looking for The One True Path and refusing the see the *real* elephant in the room; that there is no one path to education. After trying so many things, and see them work for some and fail for others, doesn't an intelligent person eventually conclude that there is no one size to fit all, no one ring to rule them all? Don't just admit what the results tell you, take a deep breath, and begin to formulate a way to teach different groups of children in different ways?
But, no, we have to have all the ideologues, with their liberal/conservative/flavorofthemonth manifestos^H^H^H^H^H manuals that *must* (MUST!!1!) be followed to the *L*E*T*T*E*R* and no dissension shall be tolerated krishna krishna rama rama! You want to solve the problem? Get Pfizer or someone to develop a pill that cures the mental illness of ideology- a political Zoloft of some sort. You'd be astonished how many problems of modern society would just evaporate.
The only thing worse than bad teachers, is bad parents. They (teachers and parents) are the two biggest influences on a child's schooling, both are equally important.
Then teachers are doing it wrong. It's their *job* to provide students the passion to learn.
I think the teachers are fighting an uphill battle on that front. If a student doesn't like school (and this is likely if school is compulsory), they're going to not like their teachers that much either, because the teachers are the school's agents, upholding the school's oppressive rules.
That's not to say that most schools have insane rules or that teachers are wrong in upholding them---it's the compulsion that screws everything up.
If kids weren't forced into anything, they'd like learning the things they did do a lot better. Heck, they're natural learners; 3-year-old kids always ask lots of questions: "why is the sky blue?", "why is water wet?", etc.
How come they stop being so eager to learn once they have to learn on someone else's schedule?
Why is it when Johnny can't read we never hold to the fire the feet of the people who have these poor performers in their custody, what, 128 out of 168 hours per week (that's 76% for those of you who can read but not do math)? Or, roughly, 7130/8736 =82% of the hours per year? Who are these people who never get the blame in spite of the fact that they have far greater influence than a (generally) poorly paid babysitter? The parents. When is something going to be done to hold the parents accountable for children who come to school unprepared, emotionally and physically bankrupt and who do nothing but cause trouble when they are there? I'm not a teacher but I surely are am not the only one to notice that when kids underperform, it's never entirely the teachers' fault. Not that I mean to say there aren't some bad teachers out there who need to be fired. But not before a clear pattern is proven that a given teacher has failed to teach rather than the kid fails to learn.
"I fear that without radically different selection of management based on psychological profiles that prevent those seeking power from getting into management in the first place, neither problem can be solved."
Speaking of which I had an interview last week that was going fairly well. He then asked me why I got my degree in Business rather than Computer Science. I told him I wanted to become a manager and learn business processes and understand the ROI on what I do so I can fulfill a company's needs better. The manager got nervous and mentioned there is no place to move up in a medium sized business like this one and a manager is as far as anyone could possible go. The interview went downhill after that and he quickly thanked me for my time and set me on my way.
I figured I either blew smoke from quoting common knowledge that I read on forums such as Slashdot or he got nervous that I would challenge him for his job.
I found this quite bizarre as I would assume a good manager would want someone with both skillsets who knows about business processes and understanding customer problems. After all I work for a business. If a great engineer can not provide value to his employer then whats the point? Maybe I am too naive thinking that managers with great salaries would be more loyal to their employer needs. I guess not. I could not live with myself and go to work each day if I were in it only for me.
Maybe the best managers do not have an ego like what you mentioned.
http://saveie6.com/
Sure, there are terrible kids from terrible families. This isn't an excuse for bad teaching.
No reasonable policy change will fix the problem of bad kids. It's not considered acceptable to kick them out, euthanize them, or whatever.
It is possible to do something about the law regarding how we manage schools. We can make it easy to get rid of bad teachers. We can offer better pay to better teachers.
You'd rather focus on something that can't reasonably be changed, distracting us from the problems that can be fixed. That's unhelpful, to say the least.
That's pretty much how it is in the States as well.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
In order to improve the educational standards of America we need to clean up the mess we've made of the system.
The first step is to repeal idiotic laws like "No Child Left Behind." This is merely an example, but it is a good one because it has direct impact on the effectiveness of our schools. I worked at an educational agency (which is why I'm posting anonymously), and I have direct knowledge of a school that had no computer lab because of NCLB. Because of a single student, one who was essentially - but not literally - brain dead, they had to use up an entire classroom and a highly paid teacher (highly paid because they require a huge number of certifications) for that one student. Prior to NCLB, they could have refused to provide free babysitting, or at least dropped the boy into a room shared with study halls. I don't mean this specifically as an attack on NCLB; it is merely an example of what these kinds of programs do. You cannot speed up the slow kids, you can only hold the faster kids back; if no one falls behind, no one gets ahead.
The second step is to empower the administrators. We've taken the ability to make judgments out of the hands of prinicals and superintendents, and forced them to adopt unthinking policies without the flexibility to adapt to specific circumstances. This leads to "no tolerance" policies, where little girls get in trouble for carrying nail files, instead of letting the administrators decide what's okay on a case-by-case basis. Why has this happened? Fear. Fear that sometimes a decision might not be completely fair (which is a pipe dream, anyway), but moreover a fear, by the administrators, that they'll lose their jobs if they make one overbearing parent upset, no matter how good a job they've done for the rest of the students. We need to start backing the administrators, and the teachers along with them, and supporting their ability to make judgments. And we need to do this not by making laws, but by defending them when they need it.
The third step is to eliminate home schooling. I know this isn't going to be popular with many people, but I don't care. Home schooling takes the few parents who give a crap, and removes them from the community. If those parents would just lend a hand with the schools instead, maybe their schools wouldn't have all the problems that the home schoolers claim they do.
The fourth step is to improve teachers. Contrary to what people seem to think, this CAN be done. In fact, this is the purpose of standardized testing (eg. CAT tests). Sure, they can be used to determine what classes a given student might be placed in, but the real reason to use standardized tests it to determine how well a teacher has done. A well-written question tells you not just whether the students generally learned a subject, but also in what way they got it wrong. For example, if they can't identify what makes something a poem, are they getting it confused with a short story, or with a play? This information can allow a teacher to improve their teaching methods and examples for the next class. The problem is that so few of them make use of this information. So we need to help them with this. And of course, as mentioned by the article, we need to get rid of teachers who consistently do poorly.
while in Finland it's considered so valuable to society that it actually pays you to get it.
I'm guessing they severely limit the number of philosophy & english (Finnish?) majors, and don't have 'victim group x studies' majors at all.
In the United States there are a significant number of majors that add no value whatsoever to society, and more often than not produce a strain of 'educated' people who have nothing but grievances against productive people.
I'd say the following applies to a good third to half of the useless twits America gives bachelor's degrees:
-Theodore Dalrymple
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
That being individualism and the idea that J. Random knows (or can easily teach themselves) just as well how to do a thing as a trained, experienced professional.
You see that in education with parents who are dead certain they can tell teachers how to do their jobs. Also with jackasses in Texas who want to dictate what's in schoolbooks based on their political agendas, despite having no degree in education or in the subjects they're trying to modify in the curricula.
You see that in the debates about evolution and anthropogenic global warming.
You see it in politics every goddamn day.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Kick them out of school at the beginning of the year, then what do you have. Happy Harry Hardon on the air Pumping up the Volume to tell the school board what's happening.
The big problem I see with education in the US, is that say 20% of the parents want a school that basically acts as day care. However, they cannot admit this becuase that would make them bad parents.
The other 80% all want the same thing, one of a few very limited seats at the elite universities in the country. This results in two major problems. Arms races between school districts that actually place kids here with huge wastes of resources that aren't necessary except to keep up/ahead of other districts, and b strong desire to prevent other school districts from improving (and creating a new arms race competitor). Tying school funding to local house prices is a one of the causes of this fundamental problem.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I read about "Directed Teaching" (also called "Directed Instruction") in the book "Supercrunchers" by Ian Ayers and have done a little research since. Here is a good article: http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml . I went to Catholic schools (over 50 years ago) and the experience of directed teaching read as similar to how I was instructed by all those nuns. In the last year, every single time I've brought up the subject to a public school teacher I've been met with anger, fear, and VERY strong resistance. They hate my argument that, "If teachers were really concerned about being the best, they would adopt what works." (Forgive the rhetorical fallacy in that statement. Reason is usually not a prominent feature of these conversations by that point.)
I'm not a teacher, but over the last 40-some years I've never had a 4th-grader (or older) that I couldn't teach to do Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division and Square Roots in their head in less than two months. There is no excuse for people graduating from school without those skills. (I teach them the Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics. Teachers hate that because they don't know what the student is doing, but they know it works better than what they are teaching.)
Another interesting read is "The Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ . This book disturbs me for its lack of citations and the fact that it reads as if it were constructed on the same blueprint as a Dan Brown novel, but if you are concerned about the "school-as-prison" mentality, it is a good place to start. One of his other books, "Dumbing us Down" is very thought-provoking. He claims it takes about 200 hours to teach English Reading and Writing. If that's so, how can people spend 12 years in school and graduate without the ability to read and write?
As an interesting side note: The new head of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) is removing the barbed wire around his schools so they don't look so much like prisons. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6886238.html
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
First. "There are no such things as kids who can't learn, just teachers that can't teach" Every teacher hears that in teachers college. Some kids learn differently but they all learn, the teacher just needs to put the effort in finding out how each kid learns. Second you should do a survey, 2-3 years after the kid has graduated, to both the parent and the student. Ask who are the best teachers you (or your child) had while in high school, and tell us why. And who are the worst teachers you (or your child) had while in high school. As a parent we know the bad teachers, the lazy ones that put no effort into teaching. The ones where our kids come home every day. Oh what did you learn? oh we just sat and watched movies. Ya what one. Oh The Terminator (ya that has English class potential LOL) the ones you meet at meet the teacher night and you can see that disinterested glazed over look in their eyes. Plus a few years after the kid is out of high school, a percentage of the questionnaires just won't come back because neither the child or parent cares. And yes some will come back gushing with hate, because of personality conflicts. But I guarantee you will see a trend a large percentage will show the worst teachers over and over and over again. And over and over you will hear how that one teacher changed the students life and turned them around in a subject. You could easily throw away maybe the bottom 5% of the survey to get rid of just personality conflicts, but if 50% of a survey comes back 2 - 3 years out of high school saying teacher so and so was the absolute worst i have ever had. Likely, one would hope, the kid and parents have been through quite a few teachers, hopefully more as the kid went to college, or university and experienced an array of teaching styles. And still that one bad teacher sticks out in both the student and parents minds. The one that didn't try and teach, or worse was the anti teacher that made your kid turn away from an interest in the subject. Then that teacher needs to be scrutinized, evaluated and probably fired. And those ones that changed kids and inspired them they need to be paid more and commended and kept for their good work.
My wife was a 5th grade teacher, an excellent one at that, for two years in Texas at an exemplary rated school. There are many problems with education, but I will mention a few in her day to day.
1. No control over discipline in the classroom. Only positive reinforcement crap was allowed. If a child was acting out, she wasn't even allowed to move the child to a different part of the room. Her school ran with a "card" program. If a child was disrupting a class, the only thing she was allowed to do was "pull their card." This consisted of her having to take the time to fill out paperwork log the incident, and force the child to have the card signed by their parents. There was no sending the child to the principal, in fact there was virtually no administrative support of any kind when it came to discipline. Problem children were babied and forgiven. Even if the child brought their card home to get signed, often the parents signed it and offered no discipline at home, which is probably the intent of the card system to begin with. This leads to the next issue, Parents.
2. Parents are just as much a part of the education process as the child and the teacher. We have developed a culture where people, especially children, are weakly held accountable to their actions. I cannot tell you how many times my wife had a problem child, and the parents threw their hands up in the air. Either they didn't have the time to discipline their children, or they throw their hands up in the air professing to her that they don't know what to do! We don't let teachers discipline the defiant children, administrators attempt to defer it to the parents, the parents don't do anything because their little angle is innocent and the child continues to be disruptive to the education process.
3. I can't say this for all schools, but at my wife's school, she had zero creative freedom on how to present material. All material was to be presented exactly the same way in every class to every child, and that presentation is created by some company off on the other side of the country. My wife was required to tutor children [that were failing] outside of classroom hours, uncompensated. Even if she did have the freedom to develop curriculum, she wouldnt have the time. Her school organized 3-4 meetings daily [mostly due to bureaucratic bs], and she had 15 min to eat lunch if she wasn't on lunch duty. If she wasn't on lunch duty she was on recess duty.
4. This leads to the hours. Most everyone here is a techie, and most techies have experienced crunch. In order to be an okay teacher you were expected 12 hour days. To be considered a good teacher it was closer to 16 hour days. "But teachers get a whole summer off... blah... blah... blah". You try working 9 months straight of 16 hour days. If you broke down the hours worked against her salary, she was making less than minimum wage. Tell me you are going to be on top of your game when you crunch that much. Oh and in those summers there are mandatory workshops and more meetings.
5. The standardized tests. This is another politicians brain child. First we pack the classrooms full (25-30 kids) of wide aptitudes. My wife's school had 1 specialist for all the children in her grade level that had a learning disability or behavioral disability. Then we tell all these schools that they have to hit such and such a mark on these standardized tests (which are not all that standardized by the way). The school then tells the teacher if their classroom doesn't hit a specific average, then they are put onto probation or will be fired (in Texas there was no teachers union). Teachers are forced to teach to the test.
This is just a handful of the issues going on in the school, but let's sum up what we have so far. We pack the classrooms to overflowing levels with students. We expect teachers to handle all learning disabilities and behavioral issues, and we give them little to no support to do their job. They have little creative freedom in developing the curriculu
Unfortunately, the parents get five formative years before the teacher ever meets the student.
Haha are you kidding me? I and half the people on Slashdot do that for free everyday!
With a laptop and the Internet I can entertain myself for pretty much an unlimited amount of time.
Teach For America have collected statistics on all their teachers and have tried and tested theories about what makes a good teacher. They have found only two variables that matter, and matter a great deal, and by focusing on these two features have improved the performance of their scheme.
Their best teachers:
1. Are enthusiastic and engage the class room
2. They ask the students questions to check they have learnt something and then adapt their approach till until the kids gets it.
Experience, background, race, education, master's degrees and class size etc. are all totally irrelevant.
The thing is, it is much easier to blame the teacher than to question the entire system itself. To question the meritocracy means questioning our own privilege within it, and who wants to do that? Better to just ignore those nagging doubts that maybe, just maybe, there is something seriously wrong with the whole thing. I mean, how many studies have to show the strong correlation between income and high test scores. Are those rich people just that much smarter than the rest of us, or is there a system (including the makeup of the "standard" tests) that actually strives to pass on privilege to their young ones under the banner of legitimacy.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/
Let's be honest, the bad teacher argument is really a proxy for firing experienced teachers and hiring cheaper (not better) ones. And vouchers and charter schools are simply attempts to divert attention from, rather than actually fix, the massive disparity that is public education. Education is used to sort people in society and therefore no one is talking about real equality.
Report explains declining school performance in Sweden Let me summarize the article for you. Sweden's standard of education (still very high, much higher than the US) has been in decline. The reasons are as follows. 1) Schools only to a limited degree compensate for socioeconomic differences. (as you have stated) 2)The most important resource factor is teacher competence. 3)The level of segregation in the school system has increased. Widespread housing segregation and the right to choose which school to attend have resulted in more homogenous student bodies, which affects learning negatively (All the poor kids in one school, and all the rich kids in another is bad for everyone). 4) Less direction on learning outcomes and methods has led to less teacher-led instruction and this negatively affects children's performance. I don't know how you improve on these things (apart from point 2 and 4), but it seems to me that this is a great list to work from.
Since students are obviously identical nails (or else pathologically distorted and in need of rearrangement and/or medication) all that needs to be done is find the right kind of hammer. At one time, and several times since, the standard flat face claw hammer sufficed. Then some education educators decided, or more likely wanted to find out just in case they guessed right, that a different configuration was better. So for a time every hammer had to be a 10 inch adjustable crescent hammer, a dual temperature pistol type soldering hammer, a self-amplifying coherent beam of kinetic impact quanta, and an occasional reversion to absolute basics using an absolute basic hunk of granite ('urgh') tied to a stick (a 'rurgha') with a piece of vine ('garugh') or some such. And when perfection proved unattainable, blame was placed (only for purposes of development of the next hypothesis) and a new paradigm with an entirely new hammer design was proposed to deal with all those still identical nails.
Different students have different learning styles. Teachers have the same, which results in their being better at some teaching styles. Different subjects have different classroom logistic requirements. Education has a sub-field, educational psychology, with which to develop hammer designs and test them for efficacy. Sadly, it is underutilized as an investigative science and instead serves as a source of rationalizations as to why the current up and coming hammer design is obviously superior.
Being educators rather than scientists, they typically cripple their research by considering averages without variances, and so miss the opportunities afforded by these differences. And being educators with their distinctive adherence to monolithic, industrial strength teaching styles, rather than aiming for similar outcomes via different paths, they restrict their style to a single path and require both teachers and students to perform optimally to the style du jour.
If by chance they should choose to investigate their subject in terms of differences of needs and styles, they might just happen to figure out that students and teachers can be arranged into different groupings according to needs, preferred styles and methods best suited to certain topics. Not only could they employ variables instead of dictum, they could maintain the variables dynamically, changing the groupings as necessary, and using the inevitable testing to check on how well the method is working for each individual, rather than using testing as a means to maximize similarity of outcome, and allow them to blame the students for failures.
To what extent can changing teaching styles, environments, and even making different learning styles permissible, improve the outcome? My favorite instance was one of my students who, having been diagnosed as ADD as a child was 'treated' by removal from a an environment requiring identical behavior even if medication were necessary, and placed in a Montessori school that not only tolerated but encouraged his "problem" of liking to switch back and forth between subjects/items/ideas according to his desires and interest rather than a clock face. He was one of my best students because he was allowed to become a good student according to his strengths, by teachers who'd been trained to adapt to the needs of their students, find their strengths, and emphasize them.
The current educational paradigm seeks to provide the greatest good to the greatest number. Unfortunately their assumption that a single teaching style enforced on all provides the most effective method of reaching the most is as fucked up as a football bat. That may be efficient for delivery, but is not so efficient when it comes to bringing all to an adequately similar outcome. Rather than adapting themselves at this point, educators tend to shift the blame and call their own failure to do their job the students' 'failure'. Of course they have a tradition of many years to use as justification, and they use the history itself as justification rather than exami
How come I can't manage to post under my own name and instead have it posted as anonymous coward?
No need to answer, it was a rhetorical question. One of the best things I did while in school as spending a year in Rhetoria learning the language so I could ask these questions without accidentally getting an answer.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Real world example: I have a an engineering degree and a law degree in engineering from a small, private university.* 5 + 3 years came to roughly $248,000 billed (for tuition, housing, room & board, etc.)
Most of that was covered by scholarships, assistantships, grants, etc, but I also paid a large chunk from summer jobs and still owe > $100,000 in loans ($22,000 of which was from engineering).
I'd be in okay/passable shape if not for this crappy economy; I'm unemployed again and can't find a full time minimum-wage job, let along one in law or engineering. As it is, I've used up my savings and my loan deferments and will be hitting the wall shortly. Don't know what's going to happen yet, but it's not a good place for anyone to be in.
*as to the public vs. private school pricetag argument... I TA'd and taught at two large state schools and, frankly, of the juniors/seniors I worked with, a full 30% of them would have been kicked out of my university's engineering program, yet they "excelled" at the state school. It gave me a whole new perspective for the future, when I'm doing the hiring. "Student A has a 'C' average from MyPrivateU...I'll definitely hire them over this 'B+' student from StateU. Hands down/"
If you found this such a good thing, then what made you step away from teaching? Could you have coped with your Watts experience year after year? Do you think you'd have coped, got better, or got worse, or just plain burnt out?
And another thing: kids have absolutely nothing worthy to express, so a "demeaning", "dreary", or "oppressive" school environment is not only acceptable, but it's ideal. What we need are knowledge factories, where educated graduates are the product. We're supposed to be taking the ideas of people who have worthy things to express and forcing kids to read and listen to them until they understand them. Once they've reached the state of the art, they can begin presuming to make some contribution.
I worked, until recently, as a "Student Affairs Administrator" and I see a very similar problem in my own field. Much like Education, Student Affairs/Higher Ed Admin seems to attract those individuals who we might all call "nice but not very bright." They're not, by any means dumb, but they're not the most analytical minds on the planet either. A big part of their job involves thinking through problems, which they are often not equipped to do by the education they've received.
Like K-12 teaching programs, their graduate program does not actually prepare them by teaching them things relevant to actually doing their jobs. Many Student Affairs Administrators spend a great deal of time supervising students, and yet they never take a class on supervision or discuss the best methods for supervising their population, much like many education programs do not focus on strategies that actually improve classroom management.
Both fields share similar philosophies (frakking Dewey and his sloppy Positivism). I've given some consideration to becoming a teacher. I enrolled in a teacher preparation program only to be disgusted by the curriculum and the "push everyone through" attitude displayed by many in my cohort. Only one of the professors I took a course with actually had any experience as a classroom teacher.
Much like in Student Affairs, it's not the money. It's not even necessarily the pool of talent; it's the philosophical underpinnings of the field. "Caring and sharing" and "Everybody's a winner" are the mantras that these fields live by.
why not do something really usefull and have the government or microsoft sponcer a VIRTUAL ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT! huge gain for the doller,, want to learn french? teleport to a virtual france (or have a traditional virtual university setting) go learn about mars by virtually walking on its surface for literaly pennies the tech has been available since year 2000 for a realistic enough world, and people can log into it from almost anywhere and they can learn about nearly anything biology? shrink to the size of a microb,, chemestry do virtual experiments there is nearly no limit. I proposed this on the obama website and the DOE site but fell on deaf ears guess it doesnt spend enough taxpayer money.
Now call me a suspicious old man, but somehow I think this decision to give up the money was a LOT easier because you still got a real salary coming in?
How would it have been if hers was the only salary?
No, some people indeed don't do it for the money. They are rare, not enough to teach a nation.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
See: "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/0865714487
The primary reason school was created was to dumb people down as a form of social control to create factory workers (and soldiers) for a 19th century factory-based economy, according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
"""
Or:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""
So, that's why pouring more money into schools does not work, because they just do this dumbing down process better. Oh, you may get kids stuffed with more facts, you may get kids with better grades, you may get kids who are better are regurgitating state doctrine, but you won't get good human beings who can have a happy whole life. A whole person comes from an engagement with the whole of life, not from doing paperwork all day in a minimum security day-prison from ages four to eighteen. The entire system must be changed from assumptions through practices, and school is so resistant to fundamental change that the best approach is probably just to shut it down entirely and start over in new ways using the same resources in entirely different ways.
For example, the central pillar of most schooling, grading, is harmful to children and communities in all sorts of ways: ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
"From Degrading to De-Grading"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"""
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
5. Grades distort the curriculum.
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
7. Grades encourage cheating.
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What other job do you get to have a lawyer defend you when they try to fire you? I'm not talking about suing a company for wrongful termination after getting fired, but actually stopping you from getting fired. Does one exist?
Are there any other careers out there with a 1% or lower chance of getting fired?
Have you noticed how they always make the idea of there being someone who controls your working conditions and employment sound ridiculous, while nearly everyone else in the world with a job has a boss? Why are unions always given a pass on this argument? Why doesn't every reporter call them out on this nonsense? How about "You must be incredibly ignorant to act as though the working relationship shared by the vast, vast majority of people on this planet is unconscionable at it's core. Is this due to some mental defect or are you required to spew idiocy by the person who controls your working conditions and employment?"
You have a job. You can lose that job if you don't do it, or do it poorly enough. Someone has to make the decision to fire you, it doesn't congeal out of phlogiston, a person must be involved (even if they just told the computer to fire thousands.) Although the teachers' union have shown us a vastly different way of doing things by making a process that takes minutes and costs nearly nothing for everyone else into a multi-year legal battle costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cash strapped educational system, it has only proven to be a much larger clusterfuck.
I love good teachers, there are teachers in my family, but why their jobs should be protected the way they are is just insane. A guaranteed job for life after working 3 years? Are there even any other jobs for life anymore? Can anyone say they're sure to be even in the same industry, let alone the same job, 10 years from now?
This sentence no verb.
That's insightful, to see schools from a different viewpoint, like any business. Schools exist primarily for other reasons than to educate. See John Taylor Gatto or John Holt. From Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
And schools generally can't be fixed because none of the major players in the school system are rewarded for children becoming whole human beings capable of healthy participation in a healthy society:
"Power ÷ 22"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than prin
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
On: "The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. "
There may be some truth to that, but the deeper problem is more like this, from John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"""
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior."
"""
Schools *intentionally* dumb people down. Schools may stuff people with facts, but that does not make a whole intelligent person able to think and act -- it generally creates quite the opposite, someone unable to think for themselves. And that is actually the point, as a form of social control to implement a vision of a pyramidal society, as John Taylor Gatto suggests here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. Fi
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will:
"""
For more on the history of schooling in the USA:
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
For more on the history of schooling globally: ..."
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance "
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
"The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists.
The bottom line: schooling and education have very little to do with each other... Schooling was designed to dumb people down to produce mindless factory workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. Education helps a person grow into someone who can be part of or help create a healthy society while also creating joy and health for themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.
I agree with you on the vouchers part to some extent; the better solution may be to just give all the money directly to the parents, as I suggest here: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"""
Really good teachers would have nothing to fear from such a plan, because their would be enough money floating around so they could have flexible
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Various economists have analyzed the effects of Prop 13 and pretty much agree that the effects of the fallout would have normalized within a decade."
I don't know who these "various economists" are, but they are obviously not very competent. In California thanks to Prop 13 it takes a 2/3 majority to raise taxes. How can the effects be normalized when this minority veto power still exists?
The fundamental problem with bad teachers isn't the administrators, the unions, or a lack of money.
The real problem is that the vast majority of people on the West wouldn't dream of letting politicians get away with setting up state-run newspapers with compulsory subscription laws, but have no problem handing their own kids over to centrally-controlled schools that have the same perverse incentive structure behind them that state-run newspapers do. A podcast that I listen to called School Sucks lays it all out: influence over young minds through a state-run school system is an absolute pre-requisite for a large and powerful government bureaucracy.
That's the incentive reformers will be forever beating their heads against. Government schools have not evolved over the last 150 years to encourage good teaching methods and reward good teachers - they've evolved to encourage dependency on government services.
As long as you - as a parent - are handing your kids over to them, there's no force on earth that's going to reform those schools. You need to look elsewhere for learning opportunities that will help your kids thrive in the 21st century, because they're not going to get them there. Exciting technologies are evolving that promise to help kids and adults alike learn cutting-edge job skills and life skills, (and I happen to be working on one) but they're not going to be developed by the establishment.
Both my folks were lifelong senior teachers (now retired). Quite a few years ago, when my IT career had consisted of "a short while doing tech support" and nothing else, I was offered a teaching job at a private company which did brand-name IT certification.
My starting salary, had I taken the job, would have been thirty percent more than my parents' combined salaries - and they'd been in teaching for over 25 years apiece.
So by your logic if a teacher doubles their class size their salary should be doubled. Somehow I don't think you thought your argument through. I suspect that you care a lot more about lowering your taxes than improving education.
No amount of time or money or advocacy will fix the system in a timeframe useful to my own children, so the only reasonable solution for me is to opt-out. I plan on homeschooling.
So long as the government has its tendrils in schooling, schooling will continue to work contrary to the goal of educating.
If I retain the freedoms of homeschooling and firearms ownership, you people can ruin society for yourselves. We'll, to borrow a popularism, route around the defects.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Better teachers and better education is a problem that has lots of factors of which I'll only address the ones that I care about. This mostly pertains to elementary education majors.
1. The average education major is less academically capable than your average college student.
I'm sort of bending the findings of a study from about 15 years ago:
The Academic Quality of Prospective Teachers: The Impact of Admissions and Licensure Testing (warning this is a link to a pdf).
There are exceptions, those going into to teaching science or math have just as good a scores as math or science major. If you start off with poor talent it won't get much better no matter how good the training.
2. We pay teachers not nearly enough money.
If we really value education we need to pay them more. We need to be willing to pay the taxes to support the important job they do. Every good engineer, scientist or mathematician probably had a good teacher some time in their life. Too bad there aren't more.
3. We need better metrics to define what a good teacher is.
Don't get me started with the fiasco that is No Child Left Behind. Poor testing, poor accountability and poor funding.
How about to test a teacher's effectiveness we compare apples to apples. Let a teacher stay with a group of students for 2 to 3 years. They we can better tell if it's the student or teacher. If that doesn't work how about comparing the student's progress instead of the group's progress (which my wife thinks is a suggested change for NCLB), you will also need to control for similar groups (smart kids vs. smart kids).
4. Get rid of bad people earlier in the cycle (mostly at the college level).
I think this applies to all majors. Weed-out courses earlier. My major back in school (aero engineering) had to take an electrical engineering weed out course our sophomore year (don't ask me why). It will make you think twice if you want to pursue a major.
I think for teachers they need to take a public speaking course early on. If you can't talk in front of a class of 20-30 peers you certainly can't do that in front of a bunch of unruly kids. I get this idea mostly from my wife's experience as an instructor in a school of education (teaching teachers how to teach basically). Most of the kids have a horrible time teaching a lesson and this is as juniors/seniors.
Hell, even better give them a taste of teaching no later than their sophomore year. Most don't get that until their junior year. By then it's too late for them to do anything but finish their degree. This means they either will go into the system as a lousy teacher or flail around with a degree they don't like or can't use.
Extra bonus crazy idea.
Treat teachers like doctors/trade crafts. Extra training and lots of practical experience before we unleash them by themselves. Basically after they get their initial degree/license they will need to work with another teacher (like a residency/apprenticeship) before they get to pass another examination and get to teach on their own. The downside this would be rather pricey. Depends if you think education is important or not.
Extra bonus rant:
I think students, college students at least since I work on a university, are less capable than 15-20 years ago. The top 10% are amazing probably better than the top 10% of 15-20 years ago. The bottom 10% are the bottom 10% and it doesn't matter too much if they are better or worse. The middle 80% just seem less able to do the work and understand the content of most college level degrees. I've asked many people about this observation (from professors that have been doing this for decades to students themselves) and their answer has generally been yes. I do submit the caveat that the plural of anecdote is not data. So take all of this with a block of salt.
Indeed. But, as you just discoverd, the best managers have trouble getting manager positions in the first place because all the bad ones feel threatened and want to keep them out. I did not mean to imply all managers are bad. But my impression is that most are at best mediocre and a lot are really bad and doing much, much more harm than good both to their company and to society as a whole. These are often also those rising to the top, because they focus on that. Then there are a few that are really good and respected an cherished by those they manage. Incidentially that is my experience with teachers as well, most mediocre, a lot really bad and very few exceptionally good.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
At that point I can take a low paying, rewarding job.
But I am a man, and there's no way I'm ever going near your kids. No man will, 95% who would be interested in teaching are too scared. My parents good friend took early retirement due to this very issue. There was a claim of abuse, 25 witnesses exonerated the fellow, but he threw up his hands and said "screw it."
There you go, you just eliminated up to 49% of your pool of potential "good teachers."
I realize few soccer moms read slashdot, but oh well.
Part of this "improving teachers" problem is that there's no good definition of what a "good" teacher does. Do they know their material? Are they effective communicators? Are they empathetic? Do they help their students pass the state tests (and each state has their own state tests)?
As a teacher, I try to emulate my favorite teachers: the 8th grade geography teacher who, through his personal stories of growing up in our small town, taught us how to be good human beings, as well as the most amazing acrostics to memorize nations and capitols; the 12th grade English teacher who taught us everything from Sir Gwain and the Green Knight to "Death of a Salesman" and the occasional university class, and had a collection of stuffed plushie sheep, the 12th grade physics teacher who showed Penn and Teller movies to debunk magic, measured the speed of light from the exit sign, and created the legends of lab-destroying pixies. Two of these teachers are gone, one frustrated by the administration, one frustrated by fellow teachers (who didn't have her teaching abilities and sued the district to make her share her classes).
As amazing as these teachers are/were, I don't know if I would have passed a state test (which hadn't yet been created) with that material. Would the teachers have been thrown out for my poor performance?
Additionally, having students be responsible for whether a teacher remains/gets higher pay is insane. The student has no incentive to pass most state tests (most states still don't require passing scores to graduate), so effort isn't rewarded. Evaluations of teachers should be done by teachers who have no direct influence on each other (the NYTimes opinions mention a system in Indiana that sounds good).
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein