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Obama Wants $1 Billion For "Master Teachers Corps"
theodp writes "The White House has unveiled a proposal to create a national elite teachers corps to reward the nation's best educators in science, technology, engineering and math. In the first year, as many as 2,500 teachers in those subjects would get $20,000 stipends on top of their base salaries in exchange for a multiyear commitment to the STEM Master Teacher Corps. The Obama administration plans to expand the corps to 10,000 nationwide over the next four years, with the ultimate goal that the elite group of teachers will pass their knowledge and skills on to their colleagues to help bolster the quality of teaching nationwide."
I'm tring to work out from TFA whether this is aimed at recruiting new teachers, or developing existing ones. If it's the former, then there have been various similar schemes (or perhaps it's a single often-rebranded scheme) in the UK over the last decade or so. The focus hasn't always been so narrowly on the STEM subjects, but it has tended to be on "difficult" subjects, where recruitment and retention of teachers is usually difficult (and where pupil uptake and performance has been fastest to decline).
In fact, I have a friend who works in teaching who got into it via the scheme in one of its various guises. He's fairly open about both its strengths and drawbacks.
In terms of strengths, he quite openly admits that the salary supplement (which was less than the GBP equivalent of $20,000 when he joined - closer to around $8,000 equivalent) was a very attactive consideration, given that he was graduating with a fair old pile of debt. None of the other career options he was considering would have made it possible for him to move away from the parents and live independently in London quite so quickly. He's also noted that he (and others like him) actually know his subject (maths) to the extent that they can actually field questions from students that go away from the narrow syllabus. He was horrified by how many of his older colleagues were dependant on being allowed to stick to a very narrow syllabus.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of his intake to the graduate scheme dropped out relatively quickly - within the first year in many cases. The scheme was highly focussed on underperforming schools - which largely tend to be those which have the most severe discipline problems. It's no secret that many classes in those schools are more about crowd control than education. As my friend is the oldest of 6 siblings, he came to this with a natural advantage. By contrast, those who had gotten onto the scheme on the basis of academic ability often simply couldn't cope with the levels of misbehaviour, abuse and violence that are endemic in our less impressive schools and dropped out.
The other problem revolved around the reactions of other teachers - and particularly the teaching unions - to the scheme members. This is a profession where pay and career advancement had long been (and is still largely expected to be) determined by length of service, rather than performance or potential. Having a bunch of "bright young things" on additional pay and a fast track to Department-head and other management positions went down in most staff-rooms like a cup of cold sick. At the same time, the unions (membership of which is not mandatory, but is widespread) did everything they legally could to make life unpleasant for them. If you find yourself on a "Fast Track" scheme like this, you need to be prepared to be a bit of a staff room pariah.
So yeah, it's not a bad idea in theory, but expect results in practice to be mixed.
It's so much fun spending other peoples money, isn't it?
We are 15 TRILLION dollars in debt yet they keep spending like drunken leftists. Why worry, they can print all the money they want.
And these teachers go on to brainwash the young to be good little socialists such that they vote for more and more big government spending.
We are truly in deep shit if we do not trow these tyrants out of power in November.
Vote Romney for president and conservative in all other offices on your ballot.
Wake up drones!
Yes, the whole program could fund another four days of the US presence in Iraq
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days. The point is that as teachers reach tenure, some, not all, can become complacent, and just use their job for a paycheck, while others go out of their way to create interesting, stimulating lesson plans. Who gets rewarded more? In most cases, the complacent one, as they've achieved tenure, they get greater raises and it's nigh on impossible to fire them. As a realist, I think this program is a step in the right direction, incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
Though I think it is helpful when the parents know and can help the children, its more than that. Parents who help and encourage their children and create an environment where their children can succeed is more important than anything.
You can have parents who have very little formal education who can truly be great parents and can help their children do what they didn't/couldn't.
So they oppose Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and Outcome-Based Education (OBE). The real issue for the Texas Republican Party is that these programs might lead children to question their parent's religion or politics. Personally, I think it's a sign of weakness to fear questions.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
"There is discussion". Now there is a loaded phrase. You could also say, "There is discussion that the bleeding Virgin Mary statue is a harbinger of End Times" but that doesn't mean it should be taken seriously.
That's the new way the Right is attacking anything science-based: "There is discussion" or "There is a controversy in the field...". Yeah, except the controversy is mainly on the pages of NewsMax just above the story about how eating soy products will make you gay.
If you actually look at the "critical thinking" curricula that this whole "controversy" is about, it's pretty reasonable: "Test hypotheses" is basically what it comes down to, but that's just a bridge to far for the belly-scratchers who call themselves "conservatives" these days.
It's a good thing that I took the time out to ask a teacher about this "Critical Thinking" curricula that is driving the Right crazy, or I might have thought this was some sort of post-modern education-theory drivel and moved on. It's not. It's basic, Isaac Newton-stuff. Problem is, that if you get a kid testing hypotheses and thinking about what he's told, he might end up wondering how God put all those phony dinosaur fossils in the Earth just to fool us into thinking that we revolve around the Sun instead of the other way around. Or something.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It was in the PDF available from the Texas GOP website.
They have since tried to distance themselves from it, but left it standing, because somehow they can't go back and remove it because of "rules."
The thing about the platform document is not just the critical thinking paragraph, it's the xenophobia and outright tinfoil haberdashery and millinery in the rest of the document. The opposition to critical thinking fits right in and completes the document.
I suggest you read the Texas GOP platform document itself. It's a laugh riot. You can't download it from the Texas GOP site anymore, because I guess someone figured out that actually publishing your stupid ideas and people identifying them as stupid leads to a backlash.
So let's go with this.
http://www.tfn.org/site/DocServer/2012-Platform-Final.pdf?docID=3201
Read. It doesn't disappoint. It's even more crazy than the 2008 platform.
Be fuckin' amazed that people actually think like this.
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BMO
From everything I've read about successful education systems, the best systems have one feature in common: world class teachers who are valued, and paid accordingly.
I think, given what we know right now, this stands a reasonable chance of being a stunning success.
I think it's a disgrace that teaching isn't as prestigious and hard to get into as law or medicine, given it's extreme importance to the way our societies work.
In some sense, basically all political activities(save only the occasional throwing-your-career-on-the-grenade 'giving them what they need not what they want' ones) are 'election ploys'.
However, simply by virtue of that, stating the fact becomes nearly irrelevant to evaluating any politician's suggested program(doing so would be roughly analogous with replacing all reviews of consumer products with 'this is just a ploy to make money', which is pointless; because we want to know about how good they are, not the obvious fact that the seller hopes to profit).
There are electoral ploys to get votes that also happen to be good ideas(if we are very lucky indeed, they even get votes because they are good ideas...) There are other electoral ploys to get votes that are outright terrible ideas, from essentially every perspective except vote-getting, and then some that consist of taking a side between two irreconcilable interests that have pretty clear upsides for one side and downsides for the other.
So that leaves us with the more interesting(and difficult) question of whether this program is actually a good one.
Nice try. He said "where brown people live" because that's where we are using bombs and where we most likely will use bombs next. Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb ba France? Where are we bombing non brown people? What country with non brown people could we possibly invade? We bomb brown people because the majority of American people don't think of them as people or civilized or whatever excuse they use to make killing people OK.
Just like the good ol' day of the crusades. Saracens aren't people so go get 'em boys.
In living memory, just barely, the United States has bombed or fought against multiple European countries, and several Asian countries, in more than one war. Those conflicts, like the present one, have nothing to do with racism and everything to do with the behavior of the people being bombed. Repeated attacks with the goal of mass killings of Americans isn't going to be acceptable regardless of the color of the nationals involved be they European or Arab. I will also point out, since you are apparently ignorant of the fact, than many Americans are non-white, and are fully accepted members of American society. Take the race baiting elsewhere.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Teaching is becoming a nasty job. The pay is low, and constantly under political threat. Socially teaching is looked down upon ("those who can't, teach", and "they get the summer off", "they are ruining our kids"). Teachers are under all kinds of pressures: "Teach to the test, even at the expense of your own curriculum!", "Handle larger numbers of kids at a time!", etc. Not to mention the sick urge to over-evaluate and fire teachers, sometimes on crazy-town metrics (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/nyregion/in-brooklyn-hard-working-teachers-sabotaged-when-student-test-scores-slip.html?pagewanted=all).
Becoming a teacher means embracing low pay, constant criticism, an ever increasing workload, and a political environment aching for more ways to fire you. Ask yourself this: Would you leave your job to teach? As a college student, would you risk making a career of teaching? Would a potential $20k annual bonus in exchange for a multiyear commitment to more work change your mind?
our founding fathers never envisioned that blacks and women would ever have the right to vote. times have changed.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
I don't know about your parenting style if you are a parent, but if I tell my son to do something and he asks why, that is encouraged and a reason is given, things are explained. I don't subject to the "because I said so" mentality of parenting. Sometimes you let them do stupid things to learn and see the consequences. If a parent can't give a good reason for why something can or can't be done, perhaps that isn't a rule that needs to be enforced. Now there are time and places where asking questions isn't a good idea, but those are not as common. IMO if you explain to a child the reasoning behind something, he will make better decisions when no-one is around to tell him not to do something, and while I have his best interests at heart, sometime in his life he will find an authority figure that does not, maybe a crappy boss trying to take advantage of him, maybe a teacher is actually teaching incorrect facts, maybe I'm actually wrong about something. If my son can present me a solid case for why a rule I have is unneeded or wrong I will look over what he gives discuss with him any errors in his logic and possibly adjust the rule. He's allowed to "question" whether I am right all he wants, and if he finds a reason I am not right, then things are adjusted fairly.
2) A teacher acting in self defense against a student will not be punished under the law. What crime are they supposedly being locked up for? Also, this happens to a tiny fraction of teachers. Corporal punishment is a totally different thing, but it is not what you brought up (I do not think it is what you meant, even though you did use the word "punish". wtf does it mean to "punishes a student for acting in self-defense")
3) I do not want kids to be disrupting class, but do we really want a mob of street kids who got expelled when they were 11 and now have no purpose in life? I don't think so.
4) So what do we do with people who keep failing? Clearly we need a tiered system where dummies get put with dummies, regulars get put with regulars, and geniuses get put with geniuses. Match the material accordingly so that we do not end up with blocks in the system where kids can never graduate or geniuses being spoon fed nursery rhymes in their senior year of high school. By the way, this is how practically every school in the US is already operated. Some of those high school AP classes are pretty damn difficult. If a student is really that far ahead of their peers, then they should be switched to the more difficult classes. You would have to be 3 standard deviations above average for the AP classes not to provide any challenge, and at that point you can probably graduate early and go be a Doogie Houser because you are a class A genius.
I'm sorry but if you can't help your kid in elementary school then you should be doing the homework with them. There is nothing hard or advanced in elementary school, that by the time your an adult you shouldn't know.
Pray tell how a single mom or parents who work two jobs, or parents of families under the poverty line can do that? In an ideal world, yes, every parent should be held responsible to help his children, including doing the homework with them and learn for themselves in the process.
In the real world, there are many cases (and under a certain income bracket, it is the general case) where this is not possible. And no, I'm not advocating free-wheeling welfare. But I don't advocate a dog-eat-dog system either. Someone else's failure will eventually become a social burden to me or my children. So a stable, developed sociaty needs to provide the means to lift up individuals in need to a point where they can pick themselves up.
Have you ever lived in a poor country? I have, I was born in one (hard to study and make it through with a half-filled stomach let me tell you). The cycles of poverty and uneducation are pervasive and self-perpetuating. Parents are uneducated and thus can't help their children. Such parents rarely have the means to educate themselves (ergo their children's education suffer). Options are limited, and opportunities are missed (again, due to lack of vision powered by education). Such children become adults and have children under the same conditions, perpetuating the cycle.
The wonderful thing about developed countries like the US (of which I became a citizen after climbing myself up through college while flipping burgers and driving forklifts), or Japan (which I visit frequently) or many others, is that such developed societies have infrastructures and means to lift people up and give a fighting chance (not an assurance of winning, but a chance to go for it) to anyone willing to take it.
Sadly in the last 20 years or so, that has been gradually changing in the US.
I could understand some rich disconnected latifundist in Brazil or Mexico saying "undeducated parents should go back to school" while playing with their silverware. But here in the US, the richest and most prosperous country in the world, the country that should be a paragon of progressive thinking in the industrialized world? I would never in my wildest dreams imagine such thinking to gradually become so common place.
If a parent can't assist there child in the courses there being taught then they should be going back to school.
And how is a parent going to afford going to school while working and supporting his family? Middle class people are finding it hard to put their children to college, and you expect a parent with little education (and ergo at or below the poverty line) to be able to do that? You are seriously disconnected with the realities of this country, and the consequences that will ultimately affect anyone regardless of income.
if I tell my son to do something and he asks why, that is encouraged and a reason is given, things are explained. I don't subject to the "because I said so" mentality of parenting. Sometimes you let them do stupid things to learn and see the consequences. If a parent can't give a good reason for why something can or can't be done, perhaps that isn't a rule that needs to be enforced.
I really try to do this to, but it is so hard.
Me: Get in the car. ........
Child: Why?
M: Because we have to go to school?
C: Why?
M: Because you need to learn things and play with other kids, and Daddy has to go to work?
C: Why?
M: Well, social development is important and I have to make money so we have a house and food to eat?
C: Why?
M: Why what?
C: Why we need food to eat?
M: If we don't eat we will die.
C: Why?
And this doesn't end. He will keep going until I either say, "I don't know" or "Just because. That's the way it is." I hate saying it, but I don't know how to break the cycle. I'm trying out other options such as, "I don't know, why do you think we will die if we don't eat?"
Ceci n'est pas un sig.