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Union Boycotts LA Times Over Teacher Evaluation Disclosure
Atypical Geek writes "According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: 'Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.' According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was 'an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.'"
I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged? Maybe this will motivate them to actually try harder to be better teachers instead of just griping about a paycheck. There are worse jobs out there with even worse pay, i say start firing teachers that rank the worst.
To compete with wikileaks, they must become wikileaks. Things are looking up for the media. Amazing - maybe now they'll have to do their jobs and report on the government with brutal facts, instead of placating the party line.
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.
...
Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall.
Palm trees and 8
There are hardly any fields of endeavor where the people asking to provide a service are exempt from scrutiny. Teaching is a honorable and needed service, but the teacher's union does not want their members to be subject to the same feedback every other profession endures. They are not such a special class of human beings that the consumers of their service should be shutout from performance evaluation statistics. Would you want to hire the services of a crappy plummer, mechanic, investment counselor, or doctor? Why does the consumer not have access to the data to make an informed decision on whether to accept the services for which they will have to pay for? This is just not fair.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
There are definitely problems in the U.S. educational system. This article was pretty cool, and they do state that their metrics aren't perfect, but lead to some valuable insight. I'd like to see further studies on this.
Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system. They are more concerned with teachers' benefits than they are about students. Of course, that is their job, but they give campaign contributions and students don't, they've become a bit too good at it.
I love it when teachers bitch about pay (although, sometimes warranted) and we get the following conversation:
"Haven't teachers always been underpaid?"
"Yes, and we need to fix that once and for all."
"Then why did you take the job?"
"Because I love it!"
"!??!!!?!!?"
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Test the teachers on the material they are teaching. Completely objective metric. If they know the material and yet their students do not and their peer (same grade, same school) classes are succeeding with the same criteria, then the teacher doesn't know how to teach. Either re-train them or let them go.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Usually no, except that the teachers' unions do such an amazing job at preventing any sort of information getting out, and at preventing the establishment of any merit-based pay system, that there is no way to incentivize better teaching. This is a last resort to get the ball rolling. Better teachers should get paid more, period, and we should know who they are. Once they start teaching at the correct level, then you can argue it doesn't matter which teacher you have since they are all adequate, and therefore shouldn't publish the data anymore. Clearly in this school that's not the case.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
It would be nice to hope that this was the first step in recognising that (indirectly) real people pay for and therefore employ teachers. These real people would like to think the primary role of teachers is to impart knowledge, skills and abilities to the children in their charge. If this article leads parents to question schools about why they are employing sub-standard teachers, then it can only be a good thing, that should be extended everywhere.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Of course the teachers' union is infuriated. They've taken a stand against any policy having anything to do with performance - tying it or factoring it in to tenure or salary for example, and fight tooth and nail against anything resembling competition - even between public schools - that would highlight differences in teaching effectiveness. That they're openly furious that the public is being informed about the performance of the schools they pay for and the teachers they employ and whom they entrust with their children shows how out-of-touch they are with reality. The union hack is right that it "will do nothing to improve student learning" - as long as a few years of teaching guarantees a job for life from which a person can't be fired, no matter how crappy a job s/he does.
Since when is a teacher solely responsible for students grades. Can teachers kick unruly students out of class if they choose? Can teachers turn the TV or video games off until children have done their homework? Is there a report card for parents? Can any of you say that you've always tried your best in school? When you didn't, did you blame your teacher?
Judging teachers solely by students grades is unfair.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
My God! How can you advocate unbiased, quantifiable measures of teacher performance! Teachers have magical powers that can't be measured by numbers! Teachers aren't like people in other jobs who can be fired based on their performance! And tests are a horrible way to measure learning! Teachers never use tests themselves! Tests are never used to assign advanced/remedial classes, nor to enter college, and certainly not to get Advanced Placement credits! And, certainly, by God, hide this measure from the parents! You might make them think that something can be done to improve their child's education!!!
This comparison is particularly useful because it tracks students over time so that the effect of a teacher can be separated from other preexisting conditions (like poverty). This graphic from the LA times really says it all. The image shows how on teacher greatly improves the standing of students in his class, while the other does the exact opposite. This ranking has merit.
Teachers who teach the advanced classes look much better in the test results than the teachers who have a class full of 'slower' students who need the extra attention that they can only get in a call full of their 'peers'. Lots of kids need extra help for a variety of reasons (language barriers, parents who don't do their part, learning disabilities, laziness, etc) and the best way to teach them is to have them all together so they don't get left further behind. That teacher will never look good on these standardized tests.
Seems like poor science to me. There is a bias in the data as schools in less affluent parts of town with less funding generally have less involved parents and less teaching resources. Teachers are stretched thinner and given fewer resources and in, the end, probably seem less effective. On the other side of the token, in more affluent areas parents are involved in their child's educational experience, tutor and work with their kids after school, provide some levels of financial support to the school and generally demand smaller class sizes and "special treatment" for their future President of the World. Seems like an unfair comparison to me.
Perhaps it would make sense to compare teachers on a school by school level since the resources and affluence would be fairly consistent, but not the entire district.
A caption from the article:
Over seven years, John Smith's fifth-graders have started out slightly ahead of those just down the hall but by year's end have been far behind. (Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times)
So, it's OK for everyone else to negotiate the best price except workers. Is that what you're saying? Or are you saying it should be illegal for workers to organize and collectively bargain? Should it also be illegal for CEO's to negotiate their best salary and benefits package? Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices? Under what statute or legal principle would you make the right to organize illegal?
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
You are welcome on my lawn.
My mother is a public high school Spanish teacher. She has an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from an Ivy League, a Masters in Spanish from a well-known state school, and is currently working towards her PhD. She's been teaching at the school she's at for almost 15 years, I believe. She used to work for an import/export company, then an investment banker. She speaks 7 languages with a high degree of proficiency, 5 of which she's fluent in.
In addition to the class time, there is prep time, duty (being made to come in early to watch kids on and off the bus, hang out outside bathrooms looking for smokers, etc), all the time at home grading papers, etc. If teachers were paid by the hour, most would likely make less than a fast food worker when averaged out. The argument that they get paid in the summer for not doing anything is also fallacious, as the fact of the matter is teachers have the choice, at least here in VA, to take their pay only during the school year, or to have it averaged out over 12 months so that they get less per cheque but have income during the summer.
I make almost as much as my mother does with 1 undergrad degree and just a couple years of relevant experience. I also don't have to give up nearly all my evening time grading papers, having to go to meetings about other people's kids so as not to have time to pay attention to my own (although i haven't got any yet), etc.
With my dad retired from the airline where he was a pilot for over 20 years and occasionally substitute teaching, my mother has assumed the role of primary income for them, so the fact that with all her degrees and experience she's making less money than the typical sysadmin with that much experience (who are another group of people, who if you average out their salaries over the amount of time they're required to put in are grossly underpaid) by quite a wide margin is really sort of shameful.
Then there are the parents who don't or won't take responsibility for their own children, and the children who won't take responsibility for themselves. My mother only teaches upper-level Spanish (3,4,5 and the AP prep classes). Even in those classes, usually in Spanish 3 where you have kids just hanging on long enough for the advanced diploma requirement, you get jackass kids who aren't really concerned with learning. And if they would rather smoke dope and show up late, parents want to blame the schools and the teachers for the kids poor grades.
I'm sorry, but if 90 percent of the kids in a class have a B or better, it's likely not the teacher's fault that the other 10% aren't keeping up. If we had pay-for-performance bonus rules, then my mom would make out like a bandit because she's a great teacher, the vast majority of her students love her, and they do well. This isn't the case for all the teachers. And yes, there are bad teachers. I've seen and known many in my day.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that yes, teachers are underpaid. And if they were paid more, then better people would be able to afford to go into the profession. Most of the worst teachers are the young ones who go into it because they want their summers off and basically live with a case of Senioritis for the first 10 years of their careers. If you're willing to pay enough to make it feasible for an experienced engineer or scientist to come in and teach math and still be able to make their mortgage payments, then you're on the right track. I hate math teachers who know math but can't explain how it applies to anything real.
The teacher pay argument shouldn't be that all teachers automagically deserve more money, but that you need to be willing to pay talent what talent deserves. Of course unions won't like that, but I don't live in a Union state, and being a teacher isn't like being an autoworker -- it's not a blue-collar job, even though they by and large get blue collar pay.
Their are mentally challenged individuals who have such absurd notions that schools should be run like businesses and that teachers should be paid by performance.
The fact is that that is bullshit. We have absolute proof that the price of the home in which students live is the greatest determinant of success in schools. Schools that draw from rich areas have great students whereas schools that draw from poor areas tend to have very poorly performing students.
Are you suggesting that within this school they separated the two classes based upon where they lived?
I don't think the mere existence of a teachers union is the problem. I think the problem is that the union is very often negotiating with a school board made up of union members and long time supporters. Very often the only people who stand any chance of coming out of contract negotiations with an outcome they're not happy with are the parents and taxpayers.
To compete with wikileaks, they must become wikileaks. Things are looking up for the media. Amazing - maybe now they'll have to do their jobs and report on the government with brutal facts, instead of placating the party line.
Yes, however they'll only do that if they see that there's eyeballs (and hence greater sales) in it. In this particular case, the relevance of the information is obvious to most people: if you have kids, you want to know that they're being taught competently. So people will buy the paper to find out. There are many other issues of equal or greater importance that are more complex, and it is up to the journalists to help people understand the relevance to their own lives. If they can do that, both inform and, to a degree, educate, then they'll regain my respect.
... but this kind of report is exactly what journalists are supposed to be doing. That is, informing the public about what their government and its various organs are up to: it's why the Press has such standing in the Constitution. So the Teacher's Union might like to keep their performance (or lack of it) a secret, but as public employees they should not entitled to that. Fact is, such unaccountability is at the root of our school system's problems, and I'm glad this newspaper is giving it to them good. They deserve it, and frankly the fact that they're objecting so strongly indicates that they know there's a problem here, and are self-serving enough to want to continue the cover up.
The truth is that journalism in the U.S. today is not what it used to be
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What does that mean, "pay talent what talent deserves"?
I have a real talent for jerking off, it took years to master, I should get paid for that wonderful talent. So who is interested in paying?
--
Your argument is absurd. In real world we don't pay people simply because they have talent. People get paid because someone is making money.
A talented basketball player makes money for the investors.
A talented software developer makes money for a company.
A talented thief controls High Frequency Trade transaction house.
Another talented thief controls money flow from many people to a small subset.
A talented plastic surgeon gets paid for his work and discretion.
etc.
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The REAL talent in this case is the UNION, it gets a LOT of people paid for doing very very little, sure some do more, but most do very little, that's what a union does, that's what it is all about. Used to be that a union was really built by people dying on floors of factories, that's not what today's unions are about, especially GOVERNMENT unions!
If your mother is so talented yet she feels that she is financially unappreciated, she has a choice of working in a private school, isn't that so? In fact if her talents are in high DEMAND then she can tutor people for much MORE money than she'd be making in a school, and eventually with that money that she could save, she could open her own private school, why not?
It's not that I am questioning talent of your mother, I have no idea, but the entire point is that you can have the best talents but nobody cares, and nor SHOULD they! Can she apply her talents so that people would want to give her more money, that's the question.
You can't handle the truth.
So, it's OK for everyone else to negotiate the best price except workers. Is that what you're saying? Or are you saying it should be illegal for workers to organize and collectively bargain? Should it also be illegal for CEO's to negotiate their best salary and benefits package? Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices? Under what statute or legal principle would you make the right to organize illegal?
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
Actually, it is illegal for corporations to get together to fix prices. And, yeah, it should be.
Look, I don't have anything against unions until they get so powerful that they either take the company down (auto industry), endanger safety (airline industry), or cause the industry they represent to fail (teachers' union). When they look out for the safety and fair treatment of the actual employees, (fire union, police union), I don't have a problem with them.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
While I think that teacher's unions are "part" of the problem, I'm convinced that the bigger problem is that there is a lack of discipline and kids aren't afraid of anything that a teacher or principal can currently do to them. "Time out" just doesn't motivate a teenager to change their behavior. Parents just are not supporting teachers in this area. We have a complete generation of children that "can do no wrong" in the eyes of their parents. Until parents quit thinking their child is a complete "angel" and always blindly takes their side against teachers and administrators we will continue down this path. How things have changed in the last 30 years.
No I will admit that teachers and administrators could be wrong, but parents have got to go into this with the assumption that the child is probably wrong until proven otherwise. Assuming that the children are always right hasn't and won't work. They are children after all. While there may be times when the child is right, it is extremely important that they learn to work within the power structure that exists. The real world just isn't going to change to accommodate them even if they are right, they must find a way to adapt or we are setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment. The workplace is just not going to put up with the lack of discipline that teachers are forced to endure today and it is the children that are in for a rude awakening.
In return for this support, parents should expect teachers to be accountable. Asking teachers to be accountable for their student's proficiency without discipline or any ability to modify the student's behavior can't work.
Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices?
That is illegal; there's a reason OPEC meetings aren't held in New York, and that LCD makers were fined for collusion (like here; that's from 2008, or here, for the new suit by the state of New York)
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
I'm not aware of any "free market purists" who think cartels are a good thing. After all, teachers aren't barely-literate manual laborers; they have college degrees - shouldn't they be able to negotiate a salary on their own? If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher. Instead, in most public systems, pay is determined by seniority and box-checking. (Got a master's degree? Check. Gone to summer course X? Check. Collect for each box checked.)
You do get what you pay for, and the teacher's union (NEA) are the single largest campaign contributors in the United States. They pay for politicians, and they get them. That is not the sole problem, but its intertwined with the rest of it. Schools have trouble telling good teachers from bad ones, and there aren't enough good ones to go around anyway, so they pay them all the same as if it were unskilled labor, and pay the administrators more in the hopes that overcompensated administrators can manage away incompetence in those actually doing the teaching. These incompetent teachers and overcompensated administrators like the NEA because it is job security. The really good teachers either go along knowing that most schools can't tell they are worth extra, don't care about the money anyway, and don't really have the ability to make a change. They are gifted teachers after all, not gifted politicians. I don't know if there is a way to tell a very good newly graduated teacher from a very poor one in the time allotted for an interview, or if there is any hint on a resume. The ability to terminate the employment of a teacher as soon as they show themselves to be sub par without worrying about lawsuits would be a less efficient, but more feasible solution to mind reading employment candidates. Paying more won't create a greater number of good teachers either, because they are almost never money motivated people. Using poor or untested teachers as little more than TAs and proctors while the better compensated, proven teachers instruct large numbers of students via live or recorded media would provide more students with access to good teachers, and a testing ground for new teachers to earn their credentials in a less pivotal role in the child's life.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Not even close. The biggest problem in the US educational system is shitty parenting.
By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?
There is no law that says a school system must sign a contract with the teachers' unions. There is no law that says they must agree to contracts that say shitty teachers can't be fired, just as there's no law that says CEO's can't negotiate multi-million dollar golden parachutes so when they destroy a company they get a fat benefits package (like Carly Fiorina and her successor). There was also no law that said big car companies had to give their unions ridiculous pensions and post-retirement health care packages. They did so because they didn't want to agree to the modest raise that was being requested back in the '70s. The CEOs thought they were being clever, thinking that their retirees would continue to die at age 68 and they'd pull a fast one, but when people started living a decade longer, they were fucked and cried "the unions made us do it!" And the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth and other anti-middle class organizations spent millions of dollars spreading FUD about unions so now knuckleheads spout crap like "Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system" when they ought to goddamn-well know better.
You want to improve schools? Do what I did and run for the school board. I ran as a parent when my daughter was in school, and I ran as a citizen-at-large after she graduated. I've been on and off the school board for 16 years and even in a city where there's a very powerful teachers' union, like Chicago, you'd be surprised at what can be done both to get rid of bad teachers and to improve kids' educations. The problem is that management is unwilling to assert itself, not that teachers have done what anybody could do, which is negotiate the most favorable pay package they could. It's not their fault that they're negotiating with cowards and imbeciles who themselves are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (and they are NOT in the union). The head of a school system in a medium to large size Chicago suburb is making several timesthat school district is performing below average. Who's fault is that?
The second biggest problem with the US educational system is that people think they should just send their kids to school and hope for the best. The third biggest problem is that public schools are forced to serve every single child, regardless of disability or behavioral problem, which is something so-called "private" schools don't have to deal with. One severely handicapped student can take up as much teacher time and school resources as two classrooms full of normally-abled students.
And that list of problems doesn't even include the fact that we've got growing numbers of people who are requiring public schools to teach nonsense, like is being done in South Carolina and Texas. This crap about "unions are the problem" is just a denial of the history of the US, which if you're from Texas, is to be expected because that's what the textbooks do now.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's not a free market unless union membership isn't required, and harrassment of non-union workers by union members is not permitted.
Meet those requirements, and then you can talk about a free market.
Meh to the teacher's union being the sole problem.
"You get what you pay for!"
True, I can't blame the teacher's union for your reading comprehension skills. Here is what I said:
Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system
Biggest, meaning there are others, as in not the "sole problem". I would say parental apathy being a very close second.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You don't need three advanced degrees (And the debt load that comes with it) to each ANY high school class. Period.
Home schooling is becoming more and more popular, and one of the reasons is how completely disconnected from reality Public schools are.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
There's a difference between negotiating your price as an individual, and negotiating price as a group. At that point, you're now "negotiating" at gunpoint which is a whole different animal.
I'm a software developer: I'm not a member of any "Union", and I survive simply because there's a demand for my services, and I negotiate the best price I can with my employer. Furthermore, how much I can demand is tied pretty directly with my overall competence. I'm motivated to remain good at my job because otherwise I won't have one. Explain to me why a teacher should be treated any differently than any other worker. Are they so special that they can do a crappy job, get tenure, and then retire on a really really nice pension?
Worse yet, unions have, in many cases, gone from protecting workers from exploitation to becoming the very thing they decry, and often do more damage than they're worth. All those "think of the children!" types ought to be up in arms about this.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
My mother was a book-keeper for a school district and as a result was able to get the same benefits as the teachers. She has absolutely no problems with money in her retirement, now and she isn't exactly a frugal person to put it lightly.
In my financial planning class, we were shown stats that showed that teachers are the tops when it comes to people who retire as millionaires.
If you start teaching at the age of 22 right out of college and stick with it for 30 years (retire at 52), you'll be set for life - nice comfortable life. The first couple of years suck in terms of apy, though. But after you get over that hump, you're making a nice living. Looking back now, I kind of wish I did that.
Either your mother is in a very shitty school district, or you're not telling us the whole story.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
In all of the examples of "bad unions" you cited, the unions are infact that least of their problems.
Each of those industries is dominated by dinosaurs that only linger on because they are kept on life support by government.
Each of those industries are in dire need of housecleaning and aren't getting it. Labor disputes are just the tip of the iceberg.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Hate to play devil's advocate here, but cartels are not (usually) legally protected, and legally the board of a company can hire whatever CEO they want. Unions, however, are legally protected entities. It would be a bit nuts to fire all the teachers and hire new people, but the law is there because some employers would do it if they could.
Teachers Unions are worried because true evaluation of teacher performance would create two classes of teachers for them: those that were good at their job and didn't need the union to help them, and those who were bad at their job and the union could not save. That would make the union ineffective, threatening the pay of those who run the union. It's an institution and center of power, and it has a will of its own. This shouldn't be, unions were intended to prevent employer abuse, not to stop employers from hiring the best people for the job.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
They are kept on life support by government at the behest of the unions. GM wasn't bailed out for our benefit - it was bailed out for the benefit of the UAW.
It's only "gunpoint" when people are prevented from negotiating other than as a group. Which is in fact the case with teacher's unions (and most surviving unions), but the problem isn't with group negotiation; the problem is with the force required to sustain it.
Teachers, like most government workers and academia as well, want to be free to do as they wish under the protection of tenure, unions, and like-minded administrators. I've always advocated for less spending in education. First, we're not getting a return on investment. Second, the number of administrators per student is crazy. And third, the curriculum is bloated. We're so busy teaching them the cultural changes we wish for them to adopt that they come out knowing very little about math, language, or science. There's been a lot of investigative work done on how there's been a concerted effort to dumb-down our kids. It's time to get them back to the basics. Several years ago I recall a rural West Virginian high school student blew the national curve. I bet they don't focus too much on cultural curriculum at that school.
Have any of her students who didn't already know Spanish learned to speak Spanish in her classes?
I know a lot of people who have taken high school language classes (including myself). I know exactly 0 who learned a language that way. They're a checkbox in the "well-rounded education" checklist, nothing more.
If a minimum wage fast-food worker were to work for 12 hours a day every day for 10 months a year, he or she would make about $26,500/yr. You going to tell me that most teachers work more and make less? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Yes... it's all the little proles.
The fact that the Robber Barons were going to lose their shirts had nothing to do with it.
Wasn't it the anti-labor party that did the last Detroit bailout? And the one before?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just remember, it was management's idea to give those ridiculous retirement benefits, not the unions. The union requested a modest pay raise, and management thought they'd get away cheap by giving retirement bennies instead, thinking workers would only live to 68. In hindsight, the pay raise would have been much cheaper.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The teacher's union is the largest problem with education in this country. It is virtually impossible to fire a bad educator. Almost all school jobs are union, so it's actually almost impossible to fire a bad systems administrator. I know of at least one whose job I would have as I have on two occasions been hired as a contractor to do things he should have known how to do, in fact things covered by his job description.
Unions are leeches sucking the lifeblood out of this nation. Before the invention of labor laws, they were a necessary evil. Now they are an unnecessary evil often run by the mafia or other organized criminal organizations (yes, even today) and they exist to secure special rights for some individuals when what is truly needed is labor laws which cover all employees.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher.
I think you are badly and dangerously wrong. Correct facts are a prerequisite for a robust debate, and your facts are wrong.
According to a recent study, the true economic value of an outstanding kindergarten teacher is somewhere around $320,000 per year. As in, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars. A high school teacher is not worth anywhere near as much. That's because, by the time students get into high school, they are too old for a teacher to change them very much. In order to make a significant difference in a student's life outcome, you have to get to them while they're young.
If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.
You do realize that Obama made the bond holders and other high priority creditors (according to current bankruptcy law) accept less money than a bankruptcy court would have awarded them, while the unions got basically all that they were "owed" (when in bankruptcy court they would have gotten next to nothing)? That Obama threatened said bond holders with IRS audits and investigations by other branches of government if they failed to agree? Such audits and investigations would have been very expensive for the bond holders even if they had not broken any laws or regulations. Bush made some government loans to GM and Chrysler, but the major bailout was by Obama. Bush wanted to use TARP funds, but Congress would not change the wording to allow that. Obama used those funds anyway.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I agree. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way languages are taught in the English speaking world (the UK is just as bad, if not worse, than the US). The usual thing that's said is "[British|American] people can't learn different languages", and later in life, "Adults can't learn a new language". Neither is true.
British and American people can learn a language just as well as anyone else. The problem is partly the way languages are taught in schools (mostly, it's about as fun and interesting as watching paint dry) and the other part of the problem is people (especially the less dedicated students) thinking "I speak English, which is the dominant language, why should I bother learning another language?"
I started learning Spanish in May 2008 (well into my 30s). In six months I had learned more Spanish than I had French in *seven years* of compulsory French at school. At 16, I could not describe what I had done that morning in French. But after 1 year of Spanish, I actually gave a talk in Spanish at RetroEuskal in Bilbao (OK, so I planned pretty thoroughly what I was going to say, but the main thing is - in my 30s I was learning Spanish orders of magnitude more quickly than I was learning French at school).
The difference is, learning Spanish, I have never seen a teacher. It has all been from websites, podcasts, an online subscription to Rosetta Stone for a while, talking with people in Spain on internet forums, online language exchanges - social things and fun things. Not sitting and having to rote memorise verb conjugations, but actually using the language for real. Yes, I did sit down and go through the "boring bits" like learning grammar (because it means you can learn much faster). But even learning the grammar under my own steam from various websites was more fun than being taught at school.
So when I was a kid and should have been able to soak up French like a sponge, I didn't. Why? I admit I wasn't a great student, but the teaching methods were also terrible. People learned French at school in spite of the teaching not because of it. No one I know who studied French at school, even passing the GCSE at 16, can actually really speak any worthwhile French. Even the good students at school who wanted to do well can barely order a meal in French when they are in France on vacation.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I laugh at your 'really nice pension': my dad was a career state employee
I laugh at his choice of employer. There's a guy down the block who retired at fifty from a teaching job, gets his salary plus full benefits for the rest of his life. That's pretty cushy. Hell, the garbage collectors in my area make $80,000 plus full bennies. Out of my pocket, I might add, and if that's an example of the wonderfulness of unions I'll take vanilla. I will also note that out of my real-estate taxes, 56 percent currently goes to "education". That overshadows all other local government expenditures, all of them ... police, fire department, hospitals, road repair, everything. That money is going somewhere, and a lot of it is going into pension funds. And for all that money we still have a third-rate education system: something's wrong and the Teachers Union is not going to fix it. They are, in fact, diametrically opposed to fixing it, because that would mean they would have to take a hit. And like most of us, like most union workers, they care more for themselves and their families than anyone else. Period. It's just human nature.
And I'm sorry, but your rosy view of unions is not borne out by the facts. Face it, people with power will tend to abuse that power if they are not held accountable for their use of it and union leaders are just as subject to that as corporate executives.
I agree, life is not bliss now that the "Global Economy" has reared its ugly head, however unions are not some saving grace. The reality is that if unions had not been so abusive, had not believed that the gravy train would last forever, it might have slowed the shift of our manufacturing base to China, and might have kept our remaining manufacturers competitive. Unions have done nothing but accelerate the loss of U.S. jobs in our Brave New World Order. And why is that? Because they refused to accept that they would have to take less back when it might have mattered... and now they have nothing.
So keep on believing that unions are bastions of light and goodness. There are well-managed, enlightened unions: but the Teachers Union and most industrial/manufacturing labor organizations are anything but. They're run by bloodsucking vampires that are just as corrupt and self-serving as any modern CEO, or any politician for that matter. And they are that way because their constituents, pardon me, members, want them to be. Yes, left to themselves corporations will tend to mistreat their workers, but unions are not blameless here. There is greed and selfishness on both sides of the equation.
Nobody in my family has ever had a pension: if we retired with anything it was because we took our money and planned for the future. You'll pardon me if I don't feel that people who spend themselves into oblivion and are unable to take care of themselves properly deserve to be coddled at my expense. There are plenty of ways to save for retirement, plenty of ways to invest. Use them, and don't depend upon my checkbook.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That's actually something I've been wondering about - we pay the CEOs and other executives of large companies millions of dollars a year, but we don't think it's worthwhile to pay teachers an equivalent amount? (divided by how many more teachers there are, of course) I mean, apparently the reason why we pay executives so much is that if they screw up, the company fails; if teachers screw up, on the other hand, entire generations of the workforce come out apathetic and worthless.
Teachers have a far greater impact on the economy and on the workforce than any number of CEOs, yet their pay doesn't reflect that.
I'm not sure how standardised testing works in the USA, but in the UK schools are assessed on the 'value added' measure. Children are given a test when they arrive and another one when they leave, and the league tables are based on the difference between their initial and final scores. The school where my mother taught was consistently ranked high up - they accepted anyone (a lot of their children had already been excluded from one or more other schools) and got them up to a reasonable standard. They scored a lot better than schools that accepted the top students and didn't do much to improve them.
The unfortunate side effect is of this is that it encourages teachers to focus on the students in the middle. Those who are going to do well will do well anyway. Those who are going to fail will fail anyway. You get the biggest return on investment by giving time to students on the boundaries. If you can push them from a D to a C, or a C to a B, it looks great.
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The reason we pay CEO's so much is another kind of collusion.
Wealthy people can buy their way on to the boards of various companies, and they elect other wealthy people to the executive positions of the companies they're board-members on. And of course it's a quid-pro-quo: being an executive of one company doesn't preclude you from "serving" on the board of one or more other companies.
Do you really think that you need salaries in the millions, with benefits of even greater value to attract enough people capable of running a large company? Is the labor pool really as small as they'd like you to believe?
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(though at NYC colleges, not LA K-12), release the metrics. I'd have nothing to hide, and I'd suspect any teacher that doesn't want such things made public. As far as I'm concerned, prospective students have a right to know how other students have fared in my classes, what other students thought of my teaching, and how both have changed over time. If that makes a lot of people want to avoid my classes, maybe--just maybe--I'm in the wrong field of work.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Yes, but you're not the only one that teaches in LA. Presumably if the numbers were released, you also wouldn't be at the bottom of the list and separated from the pack by an order of magnitude in performance.
It's not a witch hunt if all teachers are placed along a large spectrum of performance in which they can be compared against averages and their deviation in performance from said averages measured. And if you did happen to come up as somehow measurably worse than the vast majority of the other thousands of teachers, then you probably should be put on some sort of notice and evaluated very closely going forward.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
However, having had many protracted discussions with friends of mine who are teachers, I've found out that in many districts the principals identify the best teachers in the school themselves and assign the worst students to them. The "sampling" of sorts is most likely very unrandom and biased.
I'm certain this isn't captured in these test scores or being adjusted for. This would be difficult if not impossible to tease out but might be by looking for the expected patterns, i.e. a student's poor performance is less than it was with a previous teacher.
If you had RTFA you would have known that this is accounted for. The metric looks at a student's relative performance. A bad student, given an average teacher, will do just as poorly at the end of the year as at the start. Ditto for a good student, an average student, a corpse, a bird, a principal.
In hindsight, the original deals might have been valid: the first workers to get those bennies did only live to 68. The problem is that as health care and nutritional improvements increased the lifespan, they were unable to re-negotiate. With a union, everything gets ratcheted up. Things very, very, rarely get negotiated down.*
*partially because people don't seem to know that there is a good answer to the typical objection of "but what about all the people who were counting on those benefits." and that answer is, "pro rata." There's no reason why new people should get the benefits you can't afford just because you're committed to people who've spent their whole careers working for you.
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You don't need three advanced degrees (And the debt load that comes with it) to each ANY high school class.
Except maybe the proofreading part of English courses. (FRAGMENT)
The fact that the Robber Barons were going to lose their shirts had nothing to do with it.
Read that other reply to your post carefully. The "robber barons" lost more than they would have under a real GM bankruptcy.
The main law is the National Labor Relations Act. It spells out what employers and unions can and can't do. The company I work for is a non-union shop and is talks to be bought be a union shop so flyers about unions are all over the place.
FUCK UNIONS.
They may have been useful when corporations owned the government but it is just as bad when the unions own them.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Dear people who pay my salary. PAY ME WHAT I AM WORTH! Please though do not judge me on how well I am doing. Do not look at the results I produce. Just give me more and we will call it paying me what I am worth.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Being from Canada, I always found the SATs to be an odd thing. You go through 12 years of schooling, getting graded the whole way along, and then the only thing that counts for getting into university is a test that takes a few hours. Seems like a bad system. It's prime target for cheating, first of all. A bad student could hire someone to take the test for them. I'm sure they check IDs and stuff, but I wouldn't go so far to say it hasn't been done, or isn't done on a regular basis. In Canada, they look at your marks from high school. There's a "university application centre" that handles the applications, and they know how different schools vary from other schools, and take that into account as well when processing the applications. It's a much better system. You get into university, not just based on a single test, but on your overall performance during high school.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That calculation has already been accounted for. If you are trending one class year-to-year for the level of improvement, then the level of the students should not matter because the pool of students is the same for each sample. What they are comparing is the level of the same class at the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So yes, you will see the advanced kids getting higher scores than the special-needs kids the entire year, but if those same advanced students get a lower score at the end of the year, relative to the beginning of the year, they have regressed, despite the fact that they are still far ahead of the special-needs classes.
Mr. Jones (advanced) start year score 95 -> end year score 92 Mr. Jones' kids are high scoring, but have regressed. He might be considered a low performing teacher even though his kids are all high performing.
Ms. James (special-needs) start year score 75 -> end year score 79 Ms. James' kids are definitely below the advanced kids on average, but they have improved on their performance over the year. Ms. James might be considered a higher performing teacher, even if her students may never see the honor roll in their whole career.
That's how they worked out their ratings. They are not trying to pretend that a high performing teacher will turn special-needs kids in to advanced placement kids, they are only rating the ability of the teachers to drive improvement of any sort for the children.
Of course, if special needs kids keep getting teachers like Ms. James from elementary all the way to the end of high school, one might actually see that (statistically) a special needs kid might be able to progress to being advanced through steady progression by way of a chain of superior teachers for their entire school career. There are probably barriers to that sort of rosy kid of outcome, but we need to remember that what we learn in school, even in the more advanced classes, is not exactly esoteric knowledge. It is knowledge that is commonly known and fairly widely used. There is no reason that a student with superior instruction could not learn all of that, even if they have a rather average (or even below average) intelligence.
That so-called "true economic value" has the units right, but not much else. The market value for a kindergarten teacher is not in any way related to the present value of the additional income earned by the students of a good kindergarten teacher compared to a bad one. Market value is generally about supply and demand, and if the OP is correct, supply of high school physics teachers is far less than kindergarten teachers.
We just transferred both our boys to another school district after receiving a notice that, under the NCLBA, because our kids school was a giant bucket of fail we had the right to transfer our kids to a neighboring district. In the old "failing" school, it wasn't teachers who we perceived as being the problem; it was the administrators and, to some degree, the parents. The local school has a demographic of 15% upper middle class to wealthy households and other rest is working-poor or impoverished.
The attitude of the administrators and parents (all from the 15%) was one of "Woe is us. Most of our kids are poor. We are doomed.". The test scores reflect their attitude.
My wife tried to get involved by joining the various governance groups but she was met by a tidal wave of defeatism and eventually gave up. The first thing she asked them was why they didn't employ a grant writer. Their response was that they were expensive and grants are hard to get. As someone who attended a poor school district herself, she was floored by the short-sightedness of that statement.
Fast forward to our kids' new school: The demographics in the new school are 1% middle-class and 99% working poor or impoverished, yet the test scores are better, and when you visit the school, it was evident that the people who run it care. While the previous school is run down with dead grass and weeds abound, and the paint is faded and peeling, the new one is landscaped like a country club, the paint is fresh and vibrant and while the buildings are old, nothing is in disrepair. And of course, the new school employs a grant writer.
Whereas the old principal was never to be seen except for the mandatory meetings and would literally turn and walk a different way to avoid contact with parents, the new one stands out at the entrance of the school in the morning an enthusiastically greets the children (ALL BY NAME) and does the same when school gets out. He's like a local weatherman and that type of unbridled enthusiasm is contagious.
Anyhow, the point of my rant is that the teachers didn't seem to be the difference between the two schools. It was the leadership. We actually really liked our sons old teacher. It's too bad we couldn't take her with us.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Golly gosh it is so awful when the owners of a corporation have to actually keep their contractual promises to their employees. Boodeehoodeehooo. I'm crying so many tears for those owners that ran the company into the ground.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Since Unions are such a big problem, I assume that than non-union Mississippi has better schools than unionized Massachusetts.
I agree that the companies were very stupid and shortsighted, but nobody forced them to sign those contracts. Instead of trying to dick around the workers, they could have negotiated in good faith.
If by "re-negotiate" you mean, re-neg on a contract, well, if I buy a car from one of those companies, and my income goes down so I can't make the full payments, will they "renegotiate" the contract with me and accept less than the original terms of the contract? Maybe I borrowed $20k on the car, but now I want to pay them $12k. Are they going to go for that you think?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The system you describe sounds interesting, but is ripe for abuse in its own way. How, for example, does the "university application center" know how one school varies from another, and how do they judge it? Does it somehow mean that my 4.0 GPA is worth less to them if they think my school wasn't as good as somebody else's?
I would much prefer to have everyone take the same test and be judged on standardized criteria - that leaves it up to every student to show their knowledge on a level playing field. Sure, SATs are imperfect tests, and can easily fail to capture a student's depth or breadth of knowledge. But that's why high school transcripts, AP tests and activities play a significant role in US college admissions as well.
"95% of all Slashdot
No, they didn't get pay raises. They got the bennies in place of the pay raises.
Sorry, the best I can do is this: When I was a kid, my grandfather, who lived in the same big house with my dad and mom and sister and grandma, worked at a GM supplier on the South Side that worked under the same contract that GM had in Detroit. I remember hearing about those negotiations every single night at the dinner table.
I come from a union family. Three generations before me, from railroad-workers unions to firefighters and policeman's union to Teamsters.
If it hadn't been for those unions, I would not have grown up in a middle-class family, and I'm betting neither would you, because those gains made by organized labor did things like create the 5-day workweek, and paid vacations, and sick leave. If it wasn't for those unions, and their influence on the political system, I would never have gone to university or grad school. If it wasn't for those unions, there would be no middle-class in the US. Just an ownership class, a merchant class and a bunch of workers who lived paycheck to paycheck and owned nothing. Just look at the decades before the organized labor movement to see what I'm talking about. Women dying in shirt factories, kids working in meat packing plants instead of going to school, company stores. Starting with the Reagan administration, we've been heading back in that direction, and combined with his (and his three successors) all rewarding companies that shipped jobs overseas, we will never again have a strong manufacturing sector in the US. That's gone for good, finished. US wages are headed for China levels.
And that's going to apply to tech workers, too. Already, there are places in the US where it's cheaper to have a call center than India, because of declining pay levels. Tech workers are working longer hours, having fewer benefits, and in more and more cases they're just contract workers so they get no benefits at all, not even vacation.
Don't believe that because you're a high-flying tech worker that you're immune from the decline of the middle class. During the period from 2000-2008, your real income went down by an average of $2000. If you're still middle-class, it's largely thanks to your credit card and huge mortgage, and even those are going to be going away. The US is down to about #11 among other countries in quality of life and dropping fast. And no, it's not due to the past 19 months.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You honestly believe it was unions that sent the manufacturing jobs overseas? Do you realize that those jobs moving overseas had everything to do with "free trade" policies begun under Nixon, expanded by Reagan and then put into overdrive by Clinton. It had nothing to do with unions, because no matter how much less American workers took, they'd never take the kind of wages that are paid in the developing world.
"Globalism" and "Free Trade" are the agenda of the corporatocracy that killed Detroit, and Pittsburgh. South Korea drives the cost of American manufactured goods through the roof, but we've got to let Hyundais and Kias in for nothing. This has never been about getting elected. It's been about our politicians doing what they're paid by corporations to do. And the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court has just taken the last gate off the hinges. Now it's a cakewalk for corporate power, driving America into the Third World.
It's so short-sighted to think it's labor's fault. You've got to think a little deeper than the Rush Limbaugh party line.
Did you know that a starting UAW autoworker today is making the exact same wage as a starting US auto worker in the 1970's? And by the way, back then the car companies were profitable and a new car didn't cost the equivalent of an average family's income.
If America has any hope, you've got to stop being so easily fooled by advertising and the corporate media. After half a century, they know exactly how to play you and the vast American "middle" is singing right along, unfortunately. If that keeps up, you might as well accept that the America you grew up is gone forever and our quality of life is heading straight into the toilet.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think your argument would hold up a lot better if there banks weren't doing exactly that with credit card debt.
Further, that wasn't what I was suggesting at all. What I was suggesting was that someone at the end of their career, you give them the benefit you contraced with them. After all, they performed their end of the deal.
But your agreement with them shouldn't bind you to making the same deal with a new hire.
And further, for those in their mid-career, you ought to be able to pro-rate the benefit to the amount of service they've given and/or buy-out the benefit.
Of course, you might think it's better to just keep the bennies for everybody, until the entity that made the promises no longer exists to pay them, and no one gets anything. It's a helluva way to treat you constituents, though.
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