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Khan Academy: the Teachers Strike Back
theodp writes "With his Khan Academy: The Hype and the Reality screed in the Washington Post, Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani — a former middle school teacher and math coach — throws some cold water on the Summer of Khan Love hippies, starting with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. From the article: 'When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it's because they're jealous. "It'd piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world's teacher." Of course, teachers aren't "pissed off" because Sal Khan is the world's teacher. They're concerned that he's a bad teacher who people think is great; that the guy who's delivered over 170 million lessons to students around the world openly brags about being unprepared and considers the precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere "nitpicking." Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it's a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it's a "revolution."'"
I thought they just had an aversion to him. Apparently things are more serious than I'd understood!
Online education is in its infancy. This is an area where many ideas are being tried. Some will work better than others. Probably nothing currently available is "the answer", but rather all are those little baby steps toward what will eventually emerge. It's a normal and pretty universally unavoidable process.
WALSTIB!
Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it's a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it's a "revolution."'"
The "revolution" in sex ed will now commence.
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.
If Kahn and a unionized teacher are both bad, for Kahn the solution is for someone to upload a new lesson that's better. For the teacher, the solution is to suck it up because teacher unions demand that seniority trumps all other considerations.
I have no idea if Kahn or classroom teachers are ultimately the better choice. But the teachers unions better cobble together some damn good arguments for why they deserve the compensation and job protections they get, if Kahn offers way better bang for the buck.
Given the state of schooling in many countries. Post secondary school, especially, has the nasty habit of being massively bloated and wasteful in terms of resources, as well as teachers pushing their own books as courseware at insane prices, then not even referencing them in the course. At least with Khan, the price is right and you don't feel ripped off, or pressured into continuing education in a broken system with more administrative holes than swiss cheese.
My personal thought is, who cares? You get what you pay for, right? Services like Khan Academy are great if they're helping people learn things they wouldn't otherwise take an interest in learning about, or if it enables learning they were interested in but couldn't afford traditional methods of education.
If you're already IN a traditional classroom environment, then no - I'm not sure Khan Academy lessons are so great. I mean, you have to ask, as a paying student, why you're paying your hard-earned money to get a personal classroom experience with supposed educational professionals, who turn around and ask you to sit through canned Khan presentations instead of presenting the material themselves.
As for the "precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere nitpicking"? Maybe it is, really? By that, I mean, most people are really only interested in learning math as long as it allows them to accomplish something. The minority who find the theory itself fascinating and want to learn more math for the sake of learning it are the ones who will probably move beyond whatever Khan Academy teaches, and consult other sources.
If you know enough math to get correct answers to the problem you encounter as part of your daily life or job, then that's likely ALL the math you really need to know.
I for one salute our bad e-teacher overlords. That'll give me the time I need to repurpose all the college kids currently being recruited into obsolete analog teaching positions for my growing army of disaffected warriors. We'll play the long game, and wait as humanity embraces non-nitpicky math, jesus-science, and non offensive literature. As the idiocracy grows in ignorance, so shall we grow in power and hunger... Soon the great feast shall commence! Bwahahahahaha.
I mean... errrr... gosh I'm excited about new technology improving education, why do teachers need to be such party poopers with facts. Its probably all some union's fault.
Although I haven't watched any of the Khan Academy videos, I suspect they're sort of a crash-course, designed to bring the viewer up to speed about topics fast, and give them a working knowledge. University education, on the other hand, aims to give the student in-depth knowledge to enable him/her to do scientifically rigorous, groundbreaking work in their field.
The two are on fundamentally different levels, while both are teaching, and equally legitimate. Just for different purposes ("emergency" knowledge VS. scientific knowledge).
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
What the hell are you talking about? Teachers in America are some of the worst paid in the industrialized nations.
Show me a teacher who's willing to give me a random, informative, 5-minute lecture, for free, with a 30-second lead time in my own bathroom and we can talk.
This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I always looked at it as a great way to explain the process to kids.
When my kids are frustrated with a problem, I will bring up an example in the Khan academy. It helps them, or at the very least helps them tell me precisely where they are confused.
And any parent knows, when A kid is frustrated, getting a lesson from a parent can exacerbate the problem.
That said, if you only went to the Khan Academy to learn math, you will miss out on the finer details that are important with more advanced math. It doesn't help people THINK about what the math is doing. Subtle, but important distinction. I wan't my kids to know where and when to apply Algebra and Geometry in the real world. I do it often enough where the see it, but extra is good.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If the complaint about how "rise of run isn't a formal definition of slope" is indicative of the kinds of errors in his lectures, then I'd say Khan is right that the naysayers are just being picky. Yah, it's not perfectly accurate or a formal definition, but it's an excellent start to understanding a deeper understanding.
An educators job should be to get people excited about a subject, not to present the most perfect, gods honest truth answers to everything. Anyone interested in a subject will go on to learn more, and find out the more nuanced and correct answers. If you've ever become an expert in any field, you know that everyone (including the best teachers) don't always have time or knowledge to give the best possible answers. That's OK, since education doesn't stop once the class stops.
If your ultimate (and final) response when asked why you believe something is "because my teacher told me", then you really don't understand the subject matter very well at all.
AccountKiller
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour. It's only when one factors in the months they aren't teaching as lost wages does the rate seem to be lower. I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
Encourage their students to watch it and get the general idea as homework one night, teach a follow up lesson the next day and then give a homework on that topic that evening. The more exposure to the material the better.
One of my best math teachers in college used to encourage us to watch these types of videos, once he gave us an assignment where the guy in the video was doing something wrong. Our assignment was to find out what he was doing wrong and write up what he should have done that would make it correct.
Modern teachers always bitch about not enough resources or time to do things... well here's your resource, it's often free and accessible, take advantage of it.
If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn [sic] costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.
I think I should point out that I haven't found any place where Khan suggests that his youtube videos replace public education.
Khan's made a few mistakes. The first that is the worst is that the article mentions he was corrected about multiplying negative numbers and instead of praising the people for making a new video correcting him, he apparently just took his video down and replaced it. And then made some little remark about why people put up such a big fuss about this concept. His second and less grievous mistake was to engage talking heads and accept praise from politicians. I think if he had just focused on making videos, ignored the praise and let Bill Gates or some other public figure pitch the video, he wouldn't find himself the target in this back and forth. We need to stop looking at online education as a replacement and instead as an augmenting force in our children's learning.
My work here is dung.
yep... because they all put in carbonite for those two months off and don't have to eat...right?
I don't think you appreciate how much teachers really make, especially if they've been there for a while. Teachers get some of the most generous automatic raises you'll ever see, can get all kinds of salary bonuses for becoming nationally certified, etc. I used to work for a school district in an area where the average income is around $35,000/yr and some of the senior teachers in my district were making very close to six figures. The principals even more. They're hardly the poor street urchins the unions sell them as.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
So your solution would be to pay abysmally bad teachers more?
I think the OP's point was that most teachers fucking suck ass here in the USA, and if your teaching is going to be a bad one, a free bad teacher is unarguably better than a tax-funded bad teacher.
The proof is in the metrics. American students suck because they're not taught fundamentals when its time to learn fundamentals. Instead they are taught social agendas and happy thoughts. The teachers should've been pissed 30-40 years ago when this started happening, not waiting until idiocracy dominates the system output.
Those traditional teachers say that as though they take an actual interest in their students and take the time to fully answer their questions in a thorough, instructive manner. Lemme save the younglings here the costly journey through higher education now and say, they don't! Traditional teachers have canned lectures they give over and over for 30 years. What do they care if they make no sense? They have non-English speaking TA's for that. Or if they don't, who cares? At the end of the day they're the ones issuing the grades so if you don't like it you can take a hike. Seriously.
Then you take somebody like Khan who wants to explain the concepts in an accessible way, and take no money for it. It seems the only ones who have a problem with that are the ones who have been doing it wrong for generations and charging a premium for it, as gatekeepers to ineffable knowledge.
Well, friends, this is the sound of chickens coming home to roost. Rip enough people off for long enough, and they will route around your damage. Watch, and beware, ye (teachers|bankers|politicians|oilmen|1%)
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Khan Academy is the greatest supplemental education resource I have ever seen. But, one thing it can't do is force you to sit down, block off an hour a day, and learn a subject. Let's face is, 95% of us do not have that motivation, especially where one tab away awaits an entire internet of distractions.
Having a physical obligation, to an in-face person in a physical location to show up and learn something is an exceptionally powerful psychological motivational force and something that online education simply can't replace.
But man, would have I killed to have Khan available when it came to exam time in high school and college.
But bad teachers who have been around forever are very highly paid. Good teachers that have not been there for 20 years are the under paid ones. And that is the problem.
So basically some guy who now has his own teaching web-site is trashing another guy who currently has the more popular teaching web-site.
Does that about sum it up?
There is so much of accessible math theory locked behind the wall of algebra. Mathematics is BORING until you can show people WHY they are learning this. Most math classes i have taken are just total wrote calculation with no rhyme or reason. Its 'do it this way, you'll figure why out later'. When the 'later' is 2 years of math classes down the road, Khan's kinda got a point.
Good-bye
Automatic pay raises based on seniority, and not merit... I am all for paying good teachers a lot more.
I should make clear that I meant $35,000 is the average pay for the AREA, not the teachers. Average teacher pay is WAY more.
Back in the '80s, cable TV was inundated by infomercials for a home workout gadget called Health Rider. It was a gadget where one slowly rocked back and forth (usually with a big smile on one's face), and after 15 minutes (three in the commercial), it was folded up and stowed under the bed. Sure, it didn't come cheap, but a gym membership was much more expensive, and the costs of being permanently out of shape could be catastrophic.
The problem wasn't that the gadget didn't deliver a workout. It did, but the workout wasn't very good. Customers had to find out for themselves that getting in shape required time, effort, and dedication. They're finding out the same thing about Sal's videos. The problem isn't Sal, just like the problem wasn't Health Rider. The problem is that shortcuts fail.
I don't think you appreciate how much teachers really make, especially if they've been there for a while. Teachers get some of the most generous automatic raises you'll ever see, can get all kinds of salary bonuses for becoming nationally certified, etc. I used to work for a school district in an area where the average income is around $35,000/yr and some of the senior teachers in my district were making very close to six figures. The principals even more. They're hardly the poor street urchins the unions sell them as.
Close to 6 figure as in less than $100,000. That terrible for someone with a masters degree in a senior position. Also Principals are basically management what is effectively a pretty sizable company. How much does management make in the private sector?
I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
So a working professional with a Masters degree should have to get a "summer job" as a lifeguard or in retail in order to survive the summer? Does any other line of work that requires a college degree require a summer job like they are a high school student? Give me break!
How about this from wikipedia:
Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:
This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.[9]
Sounds like he is advocating a replacement to public education ...
We need to be wary of Kahn Academy, but we have to be wary of "experts" that are condemning Kahn Academy as well.
A lot of times the "experts" doing on the complaining in popular media are just as worthless as listening to your fat neighbor who is bitching over his beer on his porch. Most of the talking heads on TV are like this and more and more even the people that are high ranking in governmental and professional organizations are well is well. It's because they're better at bullshit then their "expert" subject.
So.. as far as Kahn Academy, it's likely a little bit of both sides are right and both sides are wrong. You have "educators" that don't want to absorb different ideas and you have Kahn who is also a bit of an ass himself.
I read the article criticizing a few particular lessons, but by comparison the education in public schools can be much worse. Yes there's some amazing teachers out there that will blow Khan's Academy out of the water covering the same material, but for every great teacher there's dozens of mediocore ones and a handful of really bad ones that you probably would never want your child hanging around, much less be subjugated to.
I wonder if Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cares about that?
Look at this like Wikipedia. There are obvious quality problems, but Wikipedia keeps improving and getting larger, and if you're Microsoft Encarta, there's just no market for you any longer (thus, the first MS product actually killed by Open Source).
The guild apprenticeship system really hated book-learning. Copyists really hated printing. Both of these were previous means to commoditize education. This is just more of the same.
There will be tremendous economic repercussions from the further commoditization of education.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
cried KHAAAAAN.... khaaaaan
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
Because they are getting paid an average salary (median, according to some quick Googling, is $50,000 or about the same as the median for US household income) for working 8-9 months or so of the year (factoring in summer/Christmas/spring vacation, and sure that isn't completely time off but it's a lot more than most people get), and doing an absolutely shitty job, judging by the results (US high school eduction being considered one of the worst in the world).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
People decrying this are the teachers who are in fear of change. Nobody said his solution has to be the final one but guess what - do you see any of these teachers who are complaining doing anything to create online teaching methods?
If anything, Khan should be commended for apparently doing what some teachers have not - and for free, no less.
I don't think you appreciate how much teachers really make, especially if they've been there for a while. Teachers get some of the most generous automatic raises you'll ever see, can get all kinds of salary bonuses for becoming nationally certified, etc. I used to work for a school district in an area where the average income is around $35,000/yr and some of the senior teachers in my district were making very close to six figures. The principals even more. They're hardly the poor street urchins the unions sell them as.
This is only if your school district does not have a freeze on raises like every single school district within 40 miles of where I live. With the budget crunch in education teachers are not getting their automatic raises for time spent teaching or advancing their education.
This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.
That sounds like an ad hominem. Motives aside, is the argument valid? One part of the article stood out to me:
As a result, experienced educators have begun to push back against what they see as fundamental problems with Khan’s approach to teaching. In June, two professors from Grand Valley State University created their own video in which they pointed out errors in Khan’s lesson on negative numbers: not things they disagreed with, but things he got plain wrong. To his credit, Khan did replace the video. However, instead of using this as an opportunity to engage educators and improve his teaching, he dismissed the criticism.
“It’s kind of weird,” Khan explained, “when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”
When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it’s because they’re jealous. “It’d piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world’s teacher.”
Why isn't Khan embracing criticism and review/removal/replacement of his videos by knowledgeable folks? I would be rewarding people proofing my many videos and trying to get more people doing that instead of dismissing it as "nitpicking."
My work here is dung.
Classic republican tactic. Attack the facts and use ad hom attacks. Then their people just repeat the lie on blogs. Pretty soon teachers are villinized and cutting funding for schools becomes easier.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And they can usually get a job that pays something approaching real, professional wages during the summer.
And we don't often require them to have a degree that's specific to teaching and isn't terribly useful (aside from "any degree will do" situations) outside of teaching.
Yeah, we totally don't owe them anything for those months school isn't in session since they could, theoretically, in some fantasy land make real money doing something else in the summer and aren't effectively giving up a giant percentage of their earning potential during the off months so they can be available to teach the rest of the year.
Care to back this up with facts rather than us having to take your word for it?
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
So your solution would be to pay abysmally bad teachers more?
I think the OP's point was that most teachers fucking suck ass here in the USA, and if your teaching is going to be a bad one, a free bad teacher is unarguably better than a tax-funded bad teacher.
That is a very broad brush you are painting EVERY teacher in the entire country with. Of course there are bad teachers out there. There are also bad lawyers, bad doctors, bad engineers, bad businessmen etc. There are people who suck at their job in every field whether or not it requires a college degree. I would dare say that at any given school there are far more good teachers then bad teachers, it is just the bad teachers who get all the press.
KHANNNN!!
There should be exactly one goal in online education: to improve the quality of education. There is nothing else to discuss until that matter is settled, and it is nowhere near settled. "Transforming education" is only good if the transformation yields better education.
Here in the USA, education has become almost exclusively a matter of vocational training. That has been extremely destructive to education and to the society that education serves (and make no mistake, what is bad for education is bad for society). We spend all our time teaching people formulaic approaches to problems, and almost never take the time to help students develop their intellect or their ability to develop new approaches to the problems they need to solve. If the Kahn academy is not addressing that problem, then it is not addressing the most important issue that faces education here.
To put it another way, look at the state of computer education in schools. Students are taught how to use the prepackaged solutions that their school districts buy, and those students who dare to go beyond "here is how you make the font bigger" are often punished (you know, because they are dangerous hackers who know how to get a terminal opened on a system that is programmed to stop them from writing their own software). Even when we do bother to teach people to write software, we give them formulaic approaches to solving programming problems -- when I TA'd a CS101 course, the students were required to have their programs formatted in a specific way, to write their programs in a specific language, and my personal favorite rule, they were forbidden to use language features that they had not been taught about.
I do not want to discredit online education, since it may very well enable a better approach in some topics (I doubt all -- one cannot really judge a sculpture without being able to see it first hand). However, given that I have not heard anyone express any alternative philosophy on education (it's purpose or how best to carry it out), I have doubts. If someone believes that education is about training people for a job, they are not likely to develop anything other than a vocational training program.
Palm trees and 8
Funny because in many states due to budget shortfalls there have been years of salary freezes fo teachers.
Does any other line of work that can be performed with a masters degree get the summer off?
Give *me* a break! No seriously, I'd love the summer off for 70 percent of my annual pay.
~Working Stiff :)
By all means include teachers in the process, particularly passionate teachers with amazing results because they have something to say, something to share, and they can shape this thing into a better tool to serve humanity. To those who are concerned that its threatening your turf, get over it, technology hasn't even begun to threaten your turf. You want to shape the future, ride the wave, become a meaningful part of the change. Those of you just putting in time, because its your job, sorry, it may not be your job much longer. There are a ton of great teachers out there who will find a way to use this technology to improve their educational process, and teachers aren't going away any time soon. People like people to people interaction in educating their children, its how human beings are designed.
That said, the only way to transform the vast majority of poor and suffering human beings on the planet is to bring enlightenment, and that takes education. What Khan is doing will change the world. Who cares if someone else designs the curriculum, and another person delivers the classes. The point is that anyone anywhere with an inexpensive tablet will soon be able to take their child from early grade school to college, at their own pace. Can anything be more important on the planet today. Hell, I'd love to have a few folks in D.C. sit through a few of those classes. We might get some sanity.
They don't get the summer off. They just don't get paid for the summer. Does any other job only pay you for 9 months out of the year.
..."I know exactly what I’m going to say, because that’s what teaching means."
So, teaching means either you're a psychic who knows exactly how quick the students will be on the uptake and what questions they will ask in class, or you're teaching your stuff like a tape recorder, without looking into the classroom and gauging whether they are following you and without allowing them to ask questions? *shudder*
I think a debate about Khan's specific videos is beside the point. For years, people have been talking about online education and we got these dreadful videos of a professor lecturing, shot from the back of the room. Khan shows us a realistic vision of how online education can happen at reasonable cost. It will not necessarily replace the teachers, but it will replace a teacher who repeats the same material multiple times a day. And it will help to level the playing field.
People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom. This model is most obviously applicable to STEM classes, and if you haven't been following the developments, this site at NC State offers an overview of what's going on with one kind of flipped classroom and where it's happening. The University of Minnesota has recently made a huge investment in this kind of classroom.
Whatever happens with Khan specifically, he's energized a process of transformation that everyone knew had to happen eventually. Kudos to him.
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour.
Isn't that something to work towards though, instead of something to deride?
Why does it always have to be a race to the bottom?
Not when you factor in the fact that they have to spend significant parts of those summers preparing updated curricula based on new test criteria, new versions of the books, etc. Not when you realize that they need to rework their tests over the summer, or else the students cheat. And so on.
Besides, $25 per hour is not being "paid pretty well". It's three times minimum wage, but a pharmacist makes double that with only about two more years of education. A tech sector employee makes double that on a bachelor's degree. Supervisors in Ford factories make double that, often with no degree at all. And for this, the teachers attended four years of college, plus at least a couple of years to get their teaching credentials, plus additional classes (CPE/CPD) every few years to maintain those credentials.
Teachers have what is, without a doubt, one of the most important jobs in the world. Without education, society would not move forward. Yet somehow we as a society feel that they deserve no more pay (on average) than a 7-11 store manager or a construction worker. And those same people wonder why our education system has problems. Please tell me you don't seriously consider such low salaries to be reasonable.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I've used Khan Academy in the classroom a few times for Algebra 1 when doing my student teaching. While the video was playing my mentor says to me "it's so boring" and I said "I know, but they're addicted to TV so they're watching it." For one lesson I came up with what I thought was a great way to teach multiplying polynomials and I said to myself, if Khan doesn't teach it this was, I'm not showing the video. Turns out, he had the same idea so I showed the video. The students got it. But not without me running through a few examples and reiterating the prior knowledge that makes it "nothing new" to them. The video is nice way to introduce the material the first time, but it needs to be repeated by the teacher to make sure everyone in the class gets it.
At one point the video says "I'm going to use magenta because it shows up well." The students in the room were about to yell out "NO STOP IT!" because magenta does not show up when using a video projector in a classroom. Khan also makes jokes to which I pointed out "as a teacher I'm responding to you and making adjustments in response to your feedback, Khan is talking to himself and has no idea what's going on."
I now do tutoring and for my student I have him using Khan Academy. I can see what the site can't. For example, the student is decent at math but his handwriting sucks which is normal. Khan Academy can't see that. I can, so now I have the student work problems using 1/2" grid paper with one number per box. His handwriting is improving and silly mistakes are going down dramatically.
At best, Khan is a supplement to the classroom. It's not a replacement. My goal as a tutor is to get students to understand how to use it to improve their remedial math skills so I can focus on teaching them the new things. When school gets back in session I'll be tutoring a lot more students and working with them using Khan Academy to guide the material as well as working with their current material assigned by their teachers when available.
When I start teaching full time, most likely next fall, I'll be pushing Khan Academy but will not use it in the classroom. It's great for remedial work. It's not for classrooms. And it's certainly no substitute for a teacher.
Work Safe Porn
Does any other job where one only works 9 months out of the year pay for the other 3 months?
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour. It's only when one factors in the months they aren't teaching as lost wages does the rate seem to be lower. I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
I know- $25/hour for a job that requires a bachelors, a ton of certifications and increasingly a masters degree. I mean, who are these folks to demand middle class wages? I mean, they're only responsible for educating our kids. We need to cut their pay to something reasonable like $10/hour. We'll save a ton of tax money that way, and I'm sure the kids will never notice. (At least those unfortunate enough to have to go to public school, that is. The deserving wealthy can use their tax cuts to pay for private school tuitions.)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Bullshit. Ever seen the requirements to stay certified as a teachers? 9, sometimes 12 hours of study per year that they have to shell out and attend for college courses just to "stay certified." It's a small wonder most of them eventually get multiple Masters degrees or a Doctorate, there's no point in not for the amount of "continuing education" courses they are required to take just to stay employed.
And when do you think they're taking those courses, hmmm?
I hate right wing shitbag morons like you who misrepresent teachers and think they're "doing nothing" all summer.
Most, if not all, teaching/research professorships at universities do. As a result, typically, for the remaining three months, they have to supplement their salary with research grant money, if there is enough available.
You forget that the average teacher puts in more than 40hours a week during the school year. They're at the school for 7-9 hours, then they have to grade papers, work up lesson plans, etc. And there are a number of in-service days during the summer they still have to work.
If teachers were really living it up, the teacher's parking lot would not have the kinds of cars in it that they do ... they don't exactly drive around a bunch of Lexus'
I can sum up why Khan Academy is so popular in two words: mandatory attendance. To use the age old comparison, broccoli sucks when you are force fed it as a kid, but it can be quite good when you try it voluntarily as an adult. I haven't seen the recent vids, but when it was Khan by himself it was the same old chalk-and-talk you see in so many traditional classrooms, only with less precise terminology and no admitting you don't know the answer in front of the class. There's something to be said for what Khan is doing. It's rather like peer tutoring. It's a great supplement to teachers, but its no replacement. Much like Harry Potter is a great gateway to Lord of the Rings but not a replacement thereof.
Repeat after me. Teachers do not get paid in the summer. They get paid for nine months. Nine mouth pay is either paid at the full rate for nine months. Or they get paid at a reduced rate for 12 months.
You don't live near me. Teachers around here regularly make six figures. Once tenured, they can't be fired for performance. Its a nice gig, if you can get it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It's not about teacher pay. It's about tenure and seniority. Here's my modest proposal:
1. Double the pay available for teacher salaries.
2. Reduce administration:staff to levels comparable to private industry, in cases where it is exceeded.
3. Grant the remaining administrators the ability to evaluate and fire at will, and to distribute the payroll funds at will according to what they deem fit--just as it is in private industry.
Now that gets to the heart of the matter. In the real world, older workers are valued for their experience, not simply because they are old. You can just hear the unions screaming that bad admins will fire the wrong people, and evaluate them unfairly. Well, howdy-do! Welcome to the world the rest of us live in!
You know what? If the admin keeps doing that, the board will figure out he's an idiot. He'll get fired. Will you have to move to a different district? Maybe 2 or 3 times? Yes. Once again, welcome to the real world.
What if you move 10 times? What if you can't get hired as a teacher after the 10th move? Pretty good chance you're a sucky teacher. Maybe there's a 1:10,000,000 chance it's not your fault. Guess what? It's not worth the tenure and seniority crapfest we have now just to prevent a bizarre corner case.
That Apple computer you're probably typing on at your union job? It was made under conditions that are not even 1:100th as good as yours; but nevermind that. The working conditions at Apple HQ are the envy of the world but guess what? They can be fired. They get paid based on evals from managers. The evals are (I have no idea, just guessing) based on corporate policy only loosely, and probably involve a lot of discression on the part of the individual manager. Apple is a success. You are a failure. Are there any questions?
You call that good pay for a white collar job?
These same teachers are making my kid write a report with WIKIPEDIA AS A SOURCE.
Meanwhile, I just encountered a teacher who believes that "word-shape-recognition" is the same thing as "reading". And none of her class can sound out words they've not been taught.
Riiiggghttt.
Can you link to a "9" credit hour requirement in any public school system in the US? Otherwise, I find your assertion extremely difficult to swallow.
You mad! You mad! You mad!
Classic democrat tactic. Ignore the facts and use ad hom attacks. Then their people just repeat the lie on blogs. Pretty soon people are blind to the fact that teachers are quite well paid in most places if you include the value of the pension plan, and balancing state and local budgets becomes harder.
Fixed benefit pension plans need to go. If a 401K is good enough for us peons, it's good enough for the privileged few in government jobs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And? To be a teacher you need to have a bachelors degree. I train computer scientists for a living, 12 months after graduation (or if they did a co-op, straight out of graduation) they are in the 70-90k a year range with a BSc. If they were teaching they wouldn't get to that point for at least 15 years. Starting teacher salaries are more like 25-40k and creep up from there.
Teachers do get good benefits, government jobs are like that, they get actual pension plans, which is more an indication that everyone else is getting fucked than one that teachers are getting an unfairly awesome deal, and they get health care. They also get the benefit of all of the right time off (march break, summers, chrismas etc. ) so they don't have to pay babysitters for those times like everyone else. But it's not really better paying than any decent job for someone with a bachelors. In fact it's far far far worse pay to be a teacher than to go into the private sector if you are trained in any of the 'STEM' areas.
Now I'll be up front and say I think the biggest problem with teaching salaries (and professor salaries most places) is that everyone is in the same pay bracket regardless of what you were trained in. The market for BA's in English is a LOT worse than the market for BSc's in Computer science, but you get paid the same in both teaching and professorship.
Having standardized teacher pay for a large area is really important because you don't want all of the good teachers to go to big cities in rich neighbourhoods and all of the bad teachers in the poor neighbourhoods and so on.
http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/ actually gives a good look at teacher salaries in the US. The highest are just under 60k average, and I hate to break it to you, but finding someone with a BSc in math/chemistry/physics/comp sci/engineering who will get out of bed for you at 60k with 15 years experience is going to be tough in a lot of places.
It's not like teachers who can get full time gigs are destitute, nor should they be, but it's not some spectacular awesome paying job either. If your area happens to be full of people who scrape by on minimum wage well then maybe you need some better teachers so people will be capable of doing work that warrants more than 35k a year? Maybe you need something to attract people to the area that have decent incomes, so they could have a worthwhile lifestyle and attract and retain more people like that?
Oh and if you compare the link I just gave to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income, on average teachers are paid about well, average, and actually a little less than average. Admittedly, that doesn't count the benefits package, which is nice, but well, you'd think teachers are supposed to be in the top half of wage earners considering they're required to be in the top 40% of education attainment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States).
And yes, teachers get summers off. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to plan lessons for 5 hours a day for 10 months, but that takes a LOT of work the first few times you do it. During those 10 months you are marking and adjusting and improvising and trying to actually get the shit together for the class, so you have time 'off' where you're expected to independently figure out how to manage things for the 10 months you are at the front of the room, and that is your vacation time, baring some exceptional circumstances you don't get any other time off for a holiday (which is a fair tradeoff, but one should be clear that teachers don't get 4 weeks paid leave on top of the time they already get).
You know what looks like Ad Hominem but isn't a logical fallacy?
Appeal to Authority.
Meaning we are to take this person's word on an education matter because she is an educator.
1. She has an opinion on free online education
2. She is an expert on online education
3. Her opinion appears valid
4. She has a monetary interest to deride free online education
So, 5. Her opinion on online education cannot be trusted.
Also notice the equivocation in 1, 2.
Do those salary freezes actually block senority-based raises? Or just increases in the definitions of the pay grades? I've found it hard to get the details there, and I'm curious.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Okay, I have to interject here . . . I am currently teacher. Yes, my annual salary is $50,000. During the school year, I arrive at my building at 6:00 am and I do not leave until 4:30 pm. On a good day (all of my students are caught up on their work lol), I get a thirty minute lunch. I get exactly three 5 minute breaks throughout the day to use the bathroom, etc. I am told that at some of the other schools in my district that teachers are expected to be at their door monitoring/greeting students. They are only allowed to use the restroom if an administrator comes to fill in for them. Unfortunately, I am not able to accomplish all that is expected of me at school, so I spend an additional 5 to 10 hours working in the evenings or over the weekend. I do not get the summer off, but I do have a great deal of flexibility from mid-June to mid-August. I get to choose which workshops and trainings to attend during those two months in addition to all of the preparation I am expected to do for the year's upcoming classes. Oh, and of that $50,000 salary, I easily spend $2000 or more of that purchasing supplies that the district hasn't approved or hasn't approved in a timely manner. As far as teachers doing a "shitty" job, just like any other profession there are good teachers and bad teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of good teachers are discouraged by all of the stupid policies put in place to prevent the shitty teachers from doing too much harm. Anybody know of any entry level Software Development jobs in java looking to hire a slightly rusty Software Engineer!?
Automatic pay raises based on seniority, and not merit... I am all for paying good teachers a lot more.
How do you propose you quantify 'good' teachers exactly? Parent or student recommendations? Doesn't that create and awkward incentive for hot_starting_teacher_01 to give a blow job to little johnny's daddy to make sure she gets a good recommendation?
Teachers and schools do have automatic raises, and they have teacher evaluations and disciplinary procedures, but you have to be very careful with disciplining teachers. If you don't file your daily lesson plans (something my mother was notoriously bad at back when that was supposed to happen) and you discipline them it's very different than accused of throwing a kid in a garbage can (which happened at my school). But parents don't like teachers who've had any disciplinary action against them, even if they are otherwise good teachers, and you have to be careful with dealing with an excitable public that you don't make a fuss about things which really aren't that important.
Teachers who can't handle a classroom usually have to leave anyway, and those are the worst teachers of all. Firing them gets you less than letting them flee on their own.
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour. It's only when one factors in the months they aren't teaching as lost wages does the rate seem to be lower. I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
teachers aren't idle and away from school during the summer. My brother & sister-in-law were teachers and it takes a lot of work in summer to prepare for the school year, there are also mandatory teaching recerts/classes that have to be taken, lesson plans to put together, etc. Most teachers also have other school roles they prepare for (coaches for sports, school band etc).
Also... school days often start at 7am for teachers and often extend beyond 6pm because of being part of some extra-curricular program for the kids.
Today there are also many year-round schools in many cities.
I try to remember that until I've walked in someone else's shoes its best not to criticize what they do.
Teaching is a hard job and a harder job to do well.
Wah! Wah! Wah! I destroy your kid's future and you don't pay me enough to do it. Wah! Wah! Wah!
I think people in the tech sector have a skewed perception of a decent pay. Perhaps because the cost of living in areas with a high concentration of tech jobs tends to be high, I'm not sure. Wages of $25 per hour ($50,000 yearly assuming 40h work weeks) are well over the median US income, (around $37,000), so I'd say that this is in fact, "paid pretty well". Your examples of earning over $50 per hour would put you in the top 10% earners in the USA, so that's not merely "paid pretty well", but exceptional.
Religion is the best example of mass psychosis
Does any other line of work that can be performed with a masters degree get the summer off?
Give *me* a break! No seriously, I'd love the summer off for 70 percent of my annual pay.
~Working Stiff :)
Let’s talk real world. My school district in Arizona is one of the highest paying in the state (Mesa Public Schools). Straight out of college I would make $36352 a year with a bachelors. With a masters it goes up to $39289 and with a PhD/EdD it is $44322. Remember these amounts are all before Uncle Sam takes out his cut for taxes, social security, etc.
So if we say the average teacher works only 9 months out of the year that equals out to the following: $4039/month with a BA, $4365/month with a MA and $4925/month for a PhD/EdD. An average teacher I would say works between 40-60 hours a week between grading, writing lesson plans, parent teacher conferences and all the other work outside of teaching time. That seems like a decent amount of pay, at least livable (granted what I view as decent pay is a lot lower than most).
Now let’s look at that same salary divided out to 12 months assuming they get “summers off” as you say. Those values go to $3029/month with a BA, $3274/month with a MA and $3694/month with a PhD/EdD. Remember once again those values are BEFORE TAXES. That might give you a better view at how little teachers really make compared to other working professionals with the same level of education.
Oh and FYI those “summers off” usually consist of taking development courses that the teachers pay for out of pocket. The source of these figures is on the Mesa Public School district website http://www.mpsaz.org/hr/general/salary/
Yes, yes they do get the summer off. I just so happen to have an elementary school outside my window. Not one car in the parking lot, save for the janitor's truck. The teachers in my district get paid 80k after just five years and then level out forever.
So what is your point? The same as all the public school teachers? They don't get paid enough? Hah. right.
for saying you were not prepared for class at a public school.
I went through public schools through 12th grade and I know for a fact that there were days, weeks even, when some teachers were clearly mailing it in. They would spend most of their time talking with students on those days, or just showing a movie.
Don't give me this nonsense that the average public school teacher is either prepared for class, or they get fired, that just aint so. In fact it is so so so far away from being realistic it's scary.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
My mother and most of my extended family are teachers. So I say this with every bit of sympathy I can muster... teachers, on average, are paid really goddamn well. Starting out as a teacher, on the other hand, is shitty.
This is a good overview:
http://pointsandfigures.com/2010/10/05/how-much-does-a-teacher-really-make/
I don't agree with the writers point that they're drastically overpaid. And not all of them are taking health benefits for four, so they're not all making $120/hr, but knowing what they make can cause some heated arguments when they whine.
The rest of us put in way more hours, for way less money, doing equally difficult work, with equivalent school history and training.
So it's not that we want them paid less. It's that we don't want to hear them bitch about how bad they've got it.
Not knowing in advance what one is going to say is not the same thing as being unprepared.
Telling an interviewer that one often does not know in advance what one is going to say is not the same thing as braging about being unprepared.
News presenters to little more than read tele-prompters. Are they unprepared?
Many politicians read prepared speeches. Does this mean they are prepared?
Maybe being prepared means having memorized a script, regardless of what it means or whether it is understood?
Most teachers don't deserve more than minimum wage and if you want to complain, complain to the government and ask them to get rid of public funded schools and have people pay for their kids to go to private schools. It costs just about the same per child, the only difference is that most private schools are far superior than public education. Public education is broken -- all of it is broken.
Many professions will become redundant or be radically transformed in the next decade, you can waste time fighting it, or learn to grown with the flow.
Farticus.
"when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it's a crisis" Well, in my opinion, about 90 % of teachers and therefore education is "bad". Even here in Finland, where the politicians brag with our PISA-results. Is there a school where bad teacher is fired for bad teaching? The best thing with Khan Academy is that it is public on the internet, and can be criticised, if necessary. When bad teaching happens in classroom, no one is concerned. Vesa Linja-aho Senior Lecturer
Don't forget that $25 per hour figure does not add up to $50000 yearly because they do not work 12 months a year. It actually adds up to around $36000 a year which is below the median US income.
Wrong. Classroom PLUS Khan
Yes, and there are examples that the Classroom + Khan is an effective model. The Economist has an article describing how the Los Altos school district is using Khan's videos to provide the "dry lecture" which is assigned for homework while classroom time is used for supervised problem solving with the teacher roving about helping any struggling students. That model makes complete sense to me especially since we keep hearing stories about how parent's can't do their kids homework (I've been called in to help my little cousin with her math homework at times when her parents were thoroughly confused).
Like all the other seasonal jobs like wildland firefighters are paid for not working?
Elementary Education, which is basically a bachelors degree in making cute cutouts and self esteem, is a joke. Most teachers I've known while doing IT in a school district lacked any real knowledge of any topic and could only teach by script.
A teacher might not start out making great money, but with a few endorsements like ESL (which you don't actually have to speak another language to get), and a masters degree (which is just a few more easy classes) you will make more tax payer dollars than you can shake a stick at. And you can get intellectually lazy and morbidly obese, and the union and the district will protect YOU over the young up-and-coming sharp teachers that graduate every year because of "seniority" or tenure.
THL phish sticks
And the unions are pissed because high pay for bad teaching is their territory!
Talk to a teacher. Ask them how long their working day is. Ask them how many vacation days are taken up with meetings/marking/planning. Ask them about how much time and money they need to spend to maintain their creditation. Then work out how much they get payed per hour. Then ask them about their legal responsibilities.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
Being a teacher isn't a senior position. The students aren't your staff, they are your product. As a teacher you are producing graduates in an assembly line fashion.
all the time, and nobody cares. They're just concerned about money and feeling empowered. Mostly feeling empowered.
I would dare say that at any given school there are far more good teachers then bad teachers, it is just the bad teachers who get all the press.
Anecdotal to be sure, but my kid has had three teachers (for five grades). One was great, one seems decent (but my kid is struggling vs being a superstar before), and one was absolutely terrible. I really wonder how many people who scream for the teachers have kids, have seen the teachers in action, and think "Oh yeah, let's pay them ALL more money." Not me. I want some fired, some warned, some left alone, and some given huge, huge raises. Not possible, though, and it's not because of the press.
IMHO, the unions are a bad deal for good teachers. Even schools flush with money often spend it on technology. I don't blame them. If you can't reward your star performers without rewarding the bad apples, why bother? It'll only make things worse.
How about equal pay for equal work... I work 12 months, so I get paid for 12 months (and I'm barely making ends meet). If you work for 9 months, you get paid for 9 months. If they want to be paid for those 3 months, then they need to do something for those 3 months. This is pretty simple.
You don't get paid for "being" something... you get paid for "doing" something. If during those 3 months, they don't "do", why should they be paid? If they are "doing", then they should get paid.
They chose a career that lays them off for 3 months every year, they knew it going into the job. Why the fuss?
Spoken by someone that has never taught anyone a day in their life.
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
In some places, teacher pay is far out of line. But in most cases, it's not teacher pay that's the problem, it's teacher attitudes. In most states, teachers unions have essentially become guilds that exist to shut out alternatives to public schools. They openly try to ban homeschooling, as well as web-based education alternatives and innovation. Their concerns are not "the children". Nothing so pure. The aim of their union is to guarantee jobs for their members, and if that means screwing others, so be it. We famously spend far more per pupil than any nation on Earth, and yet the stats don't show any kind of achievement for it. All together now, money.... pay for teachers and tax funds for education as a whole alike... are the not the cause of our education problems. The more money we shovel, the less things change.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Does any other job force you to accept pay for only 9 months out of the year, and starve or live on savings the other 3?
You get back to study!
But see, this cannot happen in the "free" market: choosing more pay vs more free time is not in fact an available option to you because the employers always prefer employees who pick the "more pay" branch of the alternative. Thus a minority of workaholics can force everyone to woork extra long hours.
In Europe, people get more holidays because these are mandated by the government. And this improves hourly productivity because not-completely-burnt-out people do work better (no shit). This is how the French, with their incredible number of days of holidays get to be nearly as productive as the 60-hours-a-week Americans.
This is a case were collective preference (most people would prefer more free time even at the cost of some salary) can only be obtained through regulation, or alternatively powerful unions.
Besides, $25 per hour is not being "paid pretty well". It's three times minimum wage, but a pharmacist makes double that with only about two more years of education. A tech sector employee makes double that on a bachelor's degree. Supervisors in Ford factories make double that, often with no degree at all. And for this, the teachers attended four years of college, plus at least a couple of years to get their teaching credentials, plus additional classes (CPE/CPD) every few years to maintain those credentials.
I think you're going to have to provide some documentation to back up your claims. First and foremost, I find it unlikely that supervisors at ford are clearing $100k, and even if they are, manufacturing jobs are hard damn work. The only thing harder is supervising or managing manufacturers, as the stress level is absolutely unreal, and often times they end up doing the manufacturing job anyway. I also find it disingenuous to compare tech sector salaries (which are driven largely by silicon valley and The Tech northeast high cost of living). In those places, teachers make more too, but those tech jobs don't exist in the places where teachers make less, so direct salary comparison is very misleading.
Teachers have what is, without a doubt, one of the most important jobs in the world. Without education, society would not move forward. Yet somehow we as a society feel that they deserve no more pay (on average) than a 7-11 store manager or a construction worker. And those same people wonder why our education system has problems. Please tell me you don't seriously consider such low salaries to be reasonable.
I have to agree that teaching is very important, and I recommend two things to help correct the problem. First, make kids go to school year round. That will fix so many of the problems with public schools now, including the lack of (or outright loss) of educational progress during the summer for students, pay the teachers 1/3 higher salaries (should be offset by higher household revenues with not having to pay for three months of babysitting every year. Eliminate one of the biggest seasonal variations in our economy. There are tons of benefits and very few negatives. It makes me wonder why we don't do it already. The second thing is to extend the school day, and help working parents out a little better. The savings from not having to pay for as much daycare, will largely offset the increase in school costs, and the benefits of a longer school day will make a significant difference in the performance of the students.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Why is there, then, such overwhelming, crushing, queues lined up to Mars demand for such jobs?
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
yep... because they all put in carbonite for those two months off and don't have to eat...right?
I have several family members that are teachers, and I don't know what state you live in, but where they are, they get a paycheck 12 months per year. Most school systems offer the option to spread their pay throughout the whole year, rather than just the school months. In some school systems, year-round pay is mandatory.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
If a 401K is good enough for us peons, it's good enough for the privileged few in government jobs.
Except they aren't good enough.
...If a 401K is good enough for us peons, it's good enough for the privileged few in government jobs.
Maybe one of the problems is that a 401K (I assume that's a retirement benefit?) ISN'T good enough? Not a US resident, but asking for information.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
In my area there are no raises what-so-ever. Old friend of mine is a teacher, he started 6 years ago, he is still making starting salary. Then to top it all off they are cutting his other benefits right out from underneath him.
The Reagan Administration.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's not hard to Google something. Of course parent had is almost right, to renew your teaching certification you do have to have 12 college hours or 180 hours of professional development activities. The certificate is good for 6 years in Arizona although this varies from state to state.
Many teachers will also tutor in the summer months, this is also why a lot of teachers starting out are also in the service industry. I don't understand all the hate towards teachers. They aren't paid a lot for all the bullshit they have to deal with. I have to deal with a lot of bullshit too but I'm paid in relation to how much I have to deal with.
I'm hoping you're being sarcastic and don't really have the idea that there are just all these "real" professional-wage paying jobs that are available for just three months that are being held open for teachers.
Who would rather have teach you physics, someone with a degree in Education or someone with a degree in Physics?
I'm going with "sarcastic".
You are welcome on my lawn.
As a couple of others have noted, there is no reason to posit a false dichotomy - that one must use either Kahn Academy (or similar) or a "live" teacher. Short lessons like Kahn does are useful to review concepts/unit operations where a student is rusty. My wife teaches physics, statistics, and calculus at a small high school and is an adjunct at a local community college, teaching the CC classes in the high school. The best bang for the buck for college credits around. Anyway, her biggest complaint is that too many of her students have been coddled in lower level classes and have either never mastered the pre-requisites or simply not retained them. Kahn's videos are one of many helpful resources for such students. The goal is to transform students into self-directed, life-long learners. This is really the only path to success, because the half-life to obsolescence of any technical course of study is so short.
Prof. Jean-Claude Bradly at Drexel discovered that students actually preferred pod/vodcasts of lectures (they could pause and watch on their schedule) and it freed up class time to work problems and answer questions. I see Kahn Academy videos in this same light. Are they perfect? No. can they be improved? Yes. Will polite, constructive criticism be better received than snarky comments? Absolutely! In this regard, the cliche "everything i needed to know, i learned in kindergarten" has some merit - things are a lot better when everybody is polite and plays nice in the sandbox.
“...learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
So first we had "ohh, wikipedia is evil because anyone can edit it" and now we have "Khan Academy is evil because his teaching style is to relaxed". Ever thought that a lot of students relate to that relaxed style? It's kind of like listening to one of their friends talk rather than listening to a teacher.
I have used Khan in my classrooms of students at academic risk for more than 2 years now and it has been the best thing that anyone could have possibly done for them. Finally they have a place where they can go to learn the stuff that they should have done years ago, but where to lazy to do so. They don't have to ask anyone for help most of the time, and so they can still look cool in front of everyone else.
These attacks on things like Khan Academy and Wikipedia are simply started as traditional for profit companies take a hit in their earnings. They don't like that, so they just make up rubbish, start spreading it around, and all of a sudden we have all the dumb little sheep saying the same thing. By going around saying Khan academy is crap, the only thing that is going to happen is that some principal will look at what I do, and might question why I'm using it, and then my students will suffer just so that someone can make a bit more profit.
Bugger off. Khan Academy has saved the academic life of at least 60 of my students, and continues to do so. When my students are feeling better about them self, and more optimistic about their future, they are not stealing your car, breaking in to your house, or assaulting your children.
So if there aren't any fires, firefighters shouldn't be paid? And if there aren't any crimes, police shouldn't be paid?
Wow, are you off-base. You don't really know anything about it do you?
...and still be elected governor of New Jersey?
You're getting all your information about teachers and teaching from talk radio, aren't you? That statement is not true, even here in Chicago, which is ground zero for the "thugs in the teachers' union.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What is this based on? As someone that has many many familiy members who went on to become teachers, none of them have more money than they can shake a stick at, many also have their masters degree. My mother was a teacher for 30 years, 25 of them with a masters degree. Within 3 years of being an IT professional I was making more than she was by a long shot. I don't know any teachers driving Mercedes unless they are at the university level.
There are some seriously screwed up districts out their but they are not the only possible outcome. Teachers are also not allowed to become intellectually lazy as you say given that they need to either take additional classes or do 180 hours of professional development to get recertified to teach. This is an ongoing process.
My wife is a teacher and keeps calling me to get the real answers because the IT folk in her school district lacked any real knowledge of any topic and could only fix/implement things by script. (well, that's not really true, but one or two instances lead to easy generalizations, don't they)
If teaching was really so easy and so well paid, then you (yes - YOU) could use your superior skills and abilities to make a real difference in the world and a substantial contribution to society by quitting your bit-twiddling, script-reading, Windoze-hating, printer cartridge-changing job and start teaching. So why don't you?
Teachers are becoming the targets of the new skinheads, with pogroms just around the corner. Wisconsin and Florida are leading the way.
Don't waste your breath, Zrako. You can't have a serious discussion about teachers and teaching and education here.
You've got to remember that most of the people reading Slashdot have been watching their rations get cut by their corporate lairds who tell them it's all the fault of those fat and rich public school teachers. They've been trained to be angry at the wrong people.
This is a topic that brings out the libertarian thumbsuckers who want government to get their goddamn hands off our interstate highway system. What do you think they're going to say about public education?
You are welcome on my lawn.
If educators are getting their panties in a bunch over what some ex-hedge manager is doing on Youtube, then can I kindly suggest... THAT THEY DO SOMETHING ON YOUTUBE!?!?!?!?!? I have a tremendous amount of respect for individual educators but little respect for the K-12 establishment. If you're a teacher and the best thing you can think to do with your time is tear down what you perceive as underqualified competition, then I have no time for you. If you want me to check out your Youtube video, call me. I got a couple 14yr olds who are about to run headlong into Algebra this fall If you can hold their attention better than Kahn can, I'll be right there pimping your stuff on "teh interwebs."
Does any other line of work that can be performed with a masters degree get the summer off?
Give *me* a break! No seriously, I'd love the summer off for 70 percent of my annual pay.
~Working Stiff :)
Let’s talk real world. My school district in Arizona is one of the highest paying in the state (Mesa Public Schools). Straight out of college I would make $36352 a year with a bachelors. With a masters it goes up to $39289 and with a PhD/EdD it is $44322. Remember these amounts are all before Uncle Sam takes out his cut for taxes, social security, etc.
So if we say the average teacher works only 9 months out of the year that equals out to the following: $4039/month with a BA, $4365/month with a MA and $4925/month for a PhD/EdD. An average teacher I would say works between 40-60 hours a week between grading, writing lesson plans, parent teacher conferences and all the other work outside of teaching time. That seems like a decent amount of pay, at least livable (granted what I view as decent pay is a lot lower than most).
Now let’s look at that same salary divided out to 12 months assuming they get “summers off” as you say. Those values go to $3029/month with a BA, $3274/month with a MA and $3694/month with a PhD/EdD. Remember once again those values are BEFORE TAXES. That might give you a better view at how little teachers really make compared to other working professionals with the same level of education.
Oh and FYI those “summers off” usually consist of taking development courses that the teachers pay for out of pocket. The source of these figures is on the Mesa Public School district website http://www.mpsaz.org/hr/general/salary/
It's more than just taxes, you have to take out. Out of thet monthly pay comes your contributions to health insurance, life insurance and retirement as well.
And I think you have a skewed perception of a real teacher's work day and a skewed perception of actual pay rates.
11.5 hours/day is the norm.
(http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full_noapp.pdf)
The school year for students is 180 days. Teachers must be there a week early and leave a week later. They also have work days throughout the year that the students are not there for. This gives about 200 days per year of work.
200 days * 11.5 hours/day = 2300 hours per year.
The 40-hour work week gives 2088 hours per year.
The pay schedule for teachers in my area ranges from $30,943 for a BA, first year to $60250 for a BA+100 (or MA+60; A JD from George Mason requires a BA+89 hours) and 22 years experience.
$30,943/2300 = $13.45 per hour.
$60250/2300 = $25.56 per hour.
These include benefits, so the take-home is significantly less than this.
Spoken like someone who has no idea what an actual teacher does
It's even worse than that. You are paid for 9 months, but your benefits, health insurance, retirement, life insurance, etc... get charged for 12 months.
You don't live near me. Teachers around here regularly make six figures. Once tenured, they can't be fired for performance. Its a nice gig, if you can get it.
Man I'd love to know where you live so I know where to find a job teaching. That definitely isn't the national average.
http://mat.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-infographic/
I know a teacher, a good friend and a hell of a teacher, who is spending the summer digging and picking pototoes just to have enough income to pay the rent!!! When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers and, oh yeah, throw in the "Turd Blossom" too!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
Don't confuse them with facts. The United States is well on its way to destroying what is perhaps its greatest achievement: universal public schooling of at least minimal and often excellent quality [1]. We would not want to interrupt that march by providing mere truth about "government schools".
sPh
[1] Look at the list of distinguished graduates of the New York Public Schools (1820 forward) some time.
Like there needs to be more trades like Education.
We need more people teaching who have done the real work and are not lifers in academia AKA apprenticeships / tech schools.
Higher edu needs to be in smaller chunks and in not so tied to a college time table.
Some needs to be done about sports (maybe even offer sports only degree / plans)
Some of Junk degrees in college like underwater basket weaving need to go or be cut down or maybe even become stuff for the football team at sports colleges.
There should be something along the lines of a GED for the college level or some kind of way to gap real work skills to college with out there being a big time sink.
More skills based classes and stuff like this.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/suburbs/palatine/ct-tl-harper-manufacturing-congress-20120719,0,690738.story
Oh finally a topic I have real-world experience with! :)
:P ) and it's all thanks to Khan! I would say the biggest difference for me when learning at the Khan Academy is Khan has a very robust understanding of the math concepts and even history. I can't learn by having some teacher hand-out a sheet with 10 formulas on it and just be expected to memorize them... I need to understand why and how or I'll never remember. Khan always does a great job of explain WHY and HOW things work even throwing in some history at times to make things much more interesting ( I.E: Pythagoras feeding his apprentice to sharks for showing that 2^(1/2) is an example of an irrational number, which could not be expressed in a nice and neat fraction... Heck my teacher doesn't even know who Pythagoras was :| )
Let me start by pointing out that the biggest criticism against Khan Academy is a strawman-argument. Khan Academy is NOT meant to replace the classroom. In fact Khan himself has explained this. Khan started it all with a few simple videos he posted to YouTube to help tutor his Niece who was being tracked into the lower tier math class'.
Now for my personal experience... There's a LOT of bad Math teachers in Canada. In my country, you don't have choice. If your teacher is crap, oh well. He's protected by one of the nation's largest and most powerful unions and he's not going anywhere. In fact my current Grade 12 math teacher is a prime example. He visibly does not care.. If you don't get a concept, oh well. At the end of the day the entire class moves onto the next concept whether you're ready or not. In a few days you'll be so far behind it can seem pretty hopeless.
For me, Khan Academy got me from the low 60s and 70s up to the high 90s and the top of my class'. Now I'm helping the other students in class and I'm being tracked at the Academic-level ( The highest tier in our school system, which opens up the door to any College & University I want
Wait, people CAN pay to have their kids go to private schools. I know lots that do. Maybe you want to complain that they'd be paying twice, once with taxes and once in private school tuition. But it's not twice. Their school taxes are probably only about 10% of private school tuition.
So, offer your average parent a $1000 tax savings v. $10K per child tuition bill.
>most private schools are far superior than public education
Provide proof please. Scientific proof. Proof that factors in the student's total learning environment. Proof that controls for the fact that private school kids have parents that value education enough to fork over an extra $10k/yr/kids, and maybe pay attention to their kids. Proof, please, or STFU.
I know a lot of teachers and don't have anything against them, they do a great job and a great service that I would never want to do.
The main problem we have is as I see it is
a) High cost of education materials
b) Tenure
c) Lack of merit based pay
Working in schools can frequently be demoralizing because while you do get extremely intelligent, motivated people who are driven by the cause (and certainly not by the pay, which is of course primarily abysmal), you also get the burnouts and hangerons that work the system and can stay for years doing nothing and literally ruining kids lives with a shitty education. That number is low - like single digit percentage points. But its high enough that those individuals can demoralize the rest of the hardworking ones and burn them out (bad teacher zombie effect?), or more likely make them leave the profession. You also get the "lemon dance", where smart managers (aka principles) work the system on their end and get the bad teachers out of their school. They can't fire them, but the good managers will get them moved. These teachers tend to pool at the bottom onto the bad or inexperienced managers, who are at what typically end up being the schools all the poor & minority kids go to.
It shouldn't take two years to fire a shitty teacher, and places like the "rubber room" shouldn't exist. On the flip side, we should treat teaching like the professional job that it is and increase spending on merit based salaries for the excellent teachers out there. Keep them engaged, keep them employed.
On topic, I think leveraging technology like Khan academy is how we progress forward. Use tech to foster a 1:1 lesson plan for students so they can progress at the same rate. The teacher answers questions, directs learning, assesses the students progress etc. The content could probably use improvement, but 30 bored kids getting the same lecture when they didn't understand yesterday's lesson is probably not the answer either.
Very few K-12 districts in the United States have any concept of "tenure", and even in those that do it isn't any type of ironclad lock on a job that most imagine. Besides various for-cause dismissal reasons, those few with tenure can also be laid off for financial reasons (whole-district layoffs).
What is true is that in those few districts that have a scrap of "tenure" left teachers cannot be arbitrarily fired at the whim of administrators and school board officials. For some reason that drives the libs (that is, the gilibertarians) nuts.
sPh
the parent post's claim that the pay is pretty good when you ignore the months when they aren't working. Shoot, my school job of working at a convenience store would have been great if I could take all of my paychecks and combine them into a single month. Unfortunately, I'd starve the other 11.
CS is not IT and border line programming (varies by school / program) But it is not for your helpdesk, desktop, sever, web, ect side of stuff.
Some college as part of a CS / programming class load tech real skills that are needed to do the job and others it's more about the high level theory.
Provide some links with percentages, please. You are essentially describing the New York City United Federal of Teachers of 1972 [1] and projecting onto the entire United States of 2012. Not even the UFT is anything like that today (although they were quite justified in many of their contract demands in the 1960s and 1970s).
sPh
[1] Source of the quote in "Sleeper": 'the world ended when a man named Albert Shanker got the bomb'
and who would complain bitterly that all his "raw materials" weren't standardized.
New teacher with zest for the profession does a great job her first five years and gets "merit raise" after "merit raise". At the end of five years her efforts and capability are rewarded by assigning here the most behavior-disordered students in the school, those with no home life, can't read, belligerence problems, hatred of school, etc. What is going to happen to her "merit evaluation" scores (not to mention the holy standardized test scores)? Why? Who evaluates her "merit" and how?
sPh
that realize that they will never amount to anything. In order to not feel too bad about themselves they constantly try to drag others down to their level, feeling that as long as they have company, they aren't total failures.
I teach AP Chemistry and I know several of my students need all the help they can get. I created a class website, making sure to include several pages to the best quality chemistry podcast-type videos I could find. While Khan isn't perfect by any means, I find his videos to be an excellent backup explanation to the topics we discuss in class. I separated his videos into categories that reflect the different units we cover so its was easier for the kids to find a link that meets their needs. I know one of my seniors last year found his website invaluable to pass a college algebra class that switched teachers mid-year, leaving the kids without the best instructor. Sometimes it's nice to have a second voice explaining a topic (we even swap students for tutoring between teachers for this reason), so I think his efforts are on the right track. There are three sets which are of very good quality for AP Chem - the NMSI AP Chem videos, Khan, and a site called Chemguy.com. Even college students in their 100 and 200 level classes would benefit from his offerings.
One huge thing I have concerns about is the concept of the "flipped classroom" where kids are expected to go home and watch some online video and then expected to go into to class tomorrow well-versed on the topic and ready for some activity. Many higher-order topics need that interactive teacher-student discourse to full understand the topic. I've spent entire periods just covering a single free-response question, making sure to cover a number of tangential topics and showing the full spectrum of the question. Two guys named Bergmann and Sams are pushing the flipped classroom in the sciences, but haven't ponied up the numbers to show progress.
In an nutshell, Khan and anyone else who produces quality educational chemistry videos is a resource I will encourage my kids to use. I want it to help support discussion and learning in the classroom, but not replace it.
"Remember,no matter where you go... there you are." - Buckaroo Banzai
Let's do that, then!
Teachers work about 200 days per year.
Teachers work about 11.5 hours/day (http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full_noapp.pdf)
200 days * 11.5 hours/day = 2300 hours per year.
A typical job with a 40-hour/week nets 2088 hours/year.
So, already your myth is busted, but let's continue.
The pay schedule for teachers in my area ranges from:
$30,943 for a BA first year teacher
to
$60250 for a BA+100 and 22 years experience.
(or MA+60; A JD from George Mason requires a BA+89 hours)
$30,943/2300 = $13.45 per hour.
$60250/2300 = $25.56 per hour.
These include benefits, and is before taxes, so the take-home is significantly less than this.
So, let's talk about equal pay for equal work.
In my area, A Senior Software Engineer with a BS+5 can expect to make between $65k and $131k/year.
65,000/2088 = $31.13/hour
131,000/2088= $62.74/hour
And this software engineer isn't at a gaming company with 80-hour work weeks, this is a 9-5+occasional hours job.
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour.
Isn't that something to work towards though, instead of something to deride?
Why does it always have to be a race to the bottom?
In a word? Unions.
In the movie waiting for superman, they covered this pretty well. Because of the unions, it's impossible to fire the bad teachers, so they play the lemon dance.
They even had one case where a teacher was reading a magazine while a bunch of his students were playing craps. Another student recorded it, and it made its way to the principle. The principle fired the teacher. The union then sued the school and not only got the teacher his job back, but also got him awarded back pay for the year that he wasn't working.
A while back, slashdot covered a story where the unions were fighting to prevent online education.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/13/2214254/teacher-union-tries-to-block-online-courses
Once even a teacher's union boss himself said this:
"It is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baM8N24K8kE
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
That's a problem everywhere.
My manager makes twice what I make and does half the work (if that.) She's not enabling--in fact, she usually prevents progress by moving the goalposts. She requires that one of her subordinates attend meetings with her because she doesn't understand the technical stuff anymore, which means that she isn't even good at protecting us from productivity-draining meetings. She gets hung up on projects that go nowhere, and wants to continue to pay for support for software we don't even use anymore.
Meanwhile, I'm figuring out ways to save us $50k annually here and there simply by not buying things we don't need, putting in 12 hour workdays to get projects done (the whole team is overworked, but I'm pretty much the only one willing to put in the extra time) etc. I don't see a raise in my future, but I'm accruing a list of projects and savings that I've directly influenced so that I can jump ship at the first good opportunity.
Pay teachers less and less until their outcome improves. I like your ideas.
"And the beatings will continue until morale improves."
You should also mention two weeks holiday at Christmas and a pretty good pension plan. And a six hour day - teachers "work" only 9-3, right? So $80K/(180 days*6 hrs/day) = $74/hr.
If it's really this good and easy, then WHY AREN'T YOU DOING IT?
Isn't that something to work towards though[?]
You mean for everyone else? No. That much wealth creation can't be permitted. It would require far more resources than the environmentalists and the comfortable part of the public that supports them are willing to tolerate. The decline is deliberately self inflicted. Certain powerful constituencies (teachers, for instance) wish to exempt themselves from this decline. They'll be among the last to go down, but they'll go down all the same.
I'm 43 so this wouldn't effect me.
Someone, however, has to speak for the kids. I guess I'll do it.
"Fuck you!"
Mine's working out quite well. Of course, I also make the hard choice to fund it fully, accepting a lower standard of living now for a higher one in retirement. Thrift is a shocking concept these days, it seems.
You would definitely need a bump in pay to accompany the switch from a pension plan to a 401K, but then compensation would be above board and open.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
you think that someone with a degree (often a masters only deserves a median income) then ignore the fact that you can't eat vacation time, I guess inherently lazy people consider it a plus, but not others. completely forget the fact that they spend an incredible amount of time after those paid hours doing more work. Then to top it off, you blame the teachers for the fact that idiots like you have failed to actually learn anything. I don't know why self-important blowhards like you think that it's some sort of privilege to do all of your work for you, but teaching isn't in the same sort of category as the ignorant grunt labor you seem to be familiar with. You can't expect to pay talented people crap, expect them to do even more work on top of what is acknowledged all for the honor of being treated like dirt by ignorant people and parents who feel that having their kids actually do something is way out of line.
how about you try to increase your standards. there was a time when pensions were the norm. unfortunately, people like you got too lazy and let it all slip away.
Online education is nothing more than a recast of the CD-ROM education industry 20 years ago and the "learn" to draw by mail things way before that. It's not real. It's not a magic bullet. It's a race to the bottom, fast-food, rubber stamp education that kills us all.
Your link is...creative. It takes the length of Illinois' school day (300 minutes) and says that this is equivalent to the length of the teacher's work day, and then multiplies this work day by the number of days in the school session (176) to get the total hours worked. Add in daily preparation time, daily after school activity supervision (how few teachers don't have a sport or activity assigned to them?), grading, calling parents about low performing/absent students, lesson development, etc. and you will double that per day number. Add in mandatory meetings that take place outside of school days, teacher development classes, additional education, and you will probably add an entire month or more to their actual days worked. The pension plan is a filthy little bit of creativeness too: teachers don't get social security (save that from hours worked outside the teaching profession) and that pension is their replacement. So by the time we cut away all of Mr. Carter's creativity he's overstated teacher compensation by a factor of two at a minimum, and a factor of three would not be surprising.
Really the only commentary worth reading on that link of yours is in the responses to Mr. Carter and I suppose the humor value of his desperate flailing.
I'm kind of confused, though, why Wall Street bankers who fail to the point of tanking the entire global economy need to be paid more and more each year to encourage them to work.
sPh
Teachers do get good benefits, government jobs are like that, they get actual pension plans, which is more an indication that everyone else is getting fucked than one that teachers are getting an unfairly awesome deal
There is some evidence to suggest that, economically speaking, the idea that a significant percentage of the population can just stop working when healthy and live off of savings for ten years is simply unworkable in the big scheme of things. You either need people to save a huge amount during your working life, or you need a huge cohort of young people who are productive to pay for the retirees to live.
This problem hit the private sector earlier, but it is beginning to hit the public sector. Public sector pensions are severely underfunded (particularly since 8% growth has been assumed, which is nothing shortly of ridiculous in this day and age.)
Automatic pay raises based on seniority, and not merit... I am all for paying good teachers a lot more.
How do you propose you quantify 'good' teachers exactly? Parent or student recommendations? Doesn't that create and awkward incentive for hot_starting_teacher_01 to give a blow job to little johnny's daddy to make sure she gets a good recommendation?
I've seen this excuse many times before. Are we saying that every single other profession is able to measure performance, except for teaching? Seriously, can we not spend a few months on identifying a way to do some type of qualitative 360 degree review?
Who would rather have teach you physics, someone with a degree in Education or someone with a degree in Physics?
Having a teacher with a degree in education is negatively correlated with student performance. Our schools could be improved if they refused to hire anyone with an education degree.
On the bright side, the damage is limited, since a teacher with a masters degree in education is no worse than someone with just a bachelors degree (but no better either).
I don't understand all the hate towards teachers.
You are correct. You don't understand it. It isn't that people hate teachers. They just hate hearing the whining that they are all in poverty when they are in the top half of earners in the country. This while the vast majority of them continuously fail miserably at their jobs and continuously attack those who want to properly educate their children.
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
Anyone else notice that while teachers are in the top 50% of earners in the country on a yearly basis, and in the top 75% in an hourly basis, we constantly hear how every teacher is in poverty?
If teaching was really so easy and so well paid, then you (yes - YOU) could use your superior skills and abilities to make a real difference in the world and a substantial contribution to society by quitting your bit-twiddling, script-reading, Windoze-hating, printer cartridge-changing job and start teaching. So why don't you?
Teachers are becoming the targets of the new skinheads, with pogroms just around the corner. Wisconsin and Florida are leading the way.
Actually, I did just that... for six years.
As an associate CompSci prof, I pulled in around 80% of what sysadmins made in the area (near Ogden, UT), not counting the massive benefits*, and the additional pay for teaching a couple of night classes each week. Out of three CompSci profs on the campus, I was the only one who set up his own in-class network, did his own imaging, ran his own servers, etc.
I originally took the job in 1999 as a means to duck out of the dot-bust, but damn... it was a fine way to do it. I finally left when budget cuts meant low faculty on the various departmental totem poles had to be laid off. By then, IT hiring in the real world was back up in a massive way, so it took very little time to find what I wanted.
I can easily admit that this is not a typical case, but I will say that it is more common than the NEA will ever let on. Take a gander at what the fine faculty in Portland, OR (my current home)'s district will pull in: http://www.patpdx.org/salary . A fresh-out-of-school BA holder with 0 CE/credit hours gets an entry-level salary of $36k, which is kinda typical for most entry-level BA/BS jobs. Now here's the fun part: It's laughably easy to rack up the hours and get the raises. Most of these courses are usually some pet project of some prof somewhere, an easy "A", and I spent most of the required ones getting real work done on the laptop (seriously - I was even required to take early childhood literacy courses in spite of teaching at a collegiate level. Welcome to the Utah State Office of Education...)
The best part of it all was, my weekends and holidays were all mine. Name me a decent IT position that has that one carved in stone...
I won't say it was all cotton candy and unicorns, but compared to being a sysadmin out here in the real world? Shit, it was a relative vacation.
* this included 95% paid healthcare in-or-out of network for $0 premium w/ no limits, a very generous 401k matching program, a metric ton of days off in spite of teaching year-round, and a pension system that allows me, even now, to draw an extra $4k/year at age 65, in spite of only being in it for six years. Oh, and then there was the customary 50-60% off of std. tuition costs for most collegiate-level courses. Oh - and at a time when most folks were lucky to get 2 weeks vacation, I accrued 5 weeks per year, with no carryover limits... on top of all those days off. When I finally left, my severance check (3 months vacation backed up) was frickin' massive.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So a working professional with a Masters degree should have to get a "summer job" as a lifeguard or in retail in order to survive the summer? Does any other line of work that requires a college degree require a summer job like they are a high school student? Give me break!
Contracting for Microsoft for your 90 day mandatory break. Of course, they usually pay well enough that some people do treat it as a three month vacation. Others look for a job once it's up and take it if they find it. While you are not guaranteed your position in your old group back, my friends that do it tell me that you usually know if you'll get in at the end of the 90 days when you leave and even if not, your contracting agency will usually find you a different spot.
I don't know where you live, but the taxes I pay for public schools are upwards of $10,000 per year. Property tax, state income tax, sales tax, it adds up, and typically local governments spend 60-70% of their income on schools, so most of what you pay goes to the schools. In Montgomery county, MD, where I used to live, public schools cost the government $7,000-8,000 per student per year (it's probably more now, that was in the 90s), and that's what the tax rates are based on.
They never seem to think that people can tell for themselves if their teacher is good or bad. No mere mortal can tell if the 170 million lessons people received from Khan Academy are any good. They have to have a proper "educator" to form their opinion for them. I am going to go and throw up.
First, we are talking about High School and lower teachers. College teachers are a different pay system. Second, since public school teachers are in the top 50% of earners based on YEARLY salaries, either A) they are incompetent with their money, B) they are lying to you about how much they make, or C) half of the nation's population fails to survive each summer.
I'm going with B.
And they still are in the top 50% of earners in the nation.
Pretty much this.
The blowhards that spout empty platitudes about teachers "being accountable" can't offer any meaningful way to rank teachers other than what exists.
Student performance? Yeah, about the very worst metric you could imagine. All it does is provide incentive to shove students around classrooms/districts/whatever in order to dilute their effect on totals, or shove them on to the new teachers. In any case it does nothing disenfranchises the students that need the most help.
Same goes for students on the opposit end of the spectrum- The gifted students that similarly need special attention to enable their gifts. They don't fit in to the mold of average student performance metrics, so they get nothing. Worse, gifted students often have deficiencies in one subject that may land them in the "shit pile" of students anyway. Sorry billy! You may understand math at a post-doc level but your handwriting is bad so you get on the remedial track to shore up your metrics so we don't lose funding and get fired!
So are garbage men. So are programmers.
Being in the "top 50%" of earners really doesn't mean shit any more. It just means their rations haven't been cut as much as yours.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Tenure's disappearing. Let's see how much that improves education.
Now that we're starting to see just how corrupt the charter school industry is, I'm sure that's an indication that more charter schools will be opening.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because some people have other interests. There is this thing about civilization. Everyone can't do the same job. Asking why the AC isn't a teacher makes about as much sense as asking every teacher why they don't have some other job.
Correct-o. Teacher unions are the problem. Don't believe it? Ask your kid about their oldest teacher that clearly doesn't give a fuck anymore. They've got a tough job? Sure they do, but when you can't hack it you've got to go. That doesn't happen with teachers.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Depends on the context.
Sure, if you're advocating the use of open source software vs. commercial alternatives, you might just be able to make a strong case that 'You get what you pay for!" is a lie.
But like most sayings, it's not meant to cover all situations. It's just a general piece of commentary. On the whole, I think there's truth to it, to a point, and then it decreases. Statistically, from looking at many, many product reviews from such sources as Consumer Reports, it's said that *generally*, the best value is found somewhere in the middle. For example, if your local Home Depot sells 3 different models of shovels -- the mid-priced one is probably the smartest buy. (Chances are, the high-end one is similar to the mid-grade one in overall quality. The justifications for paying more tend to be such things as offering a more comfortable handle or some small ergonomic benefit. And if you look at those improvements objectively, they probably cost very little to add to the product, vs. its actual markup, which may be a good 50% more than the mid-priced option.)
So if you're addressing someone looking for the "cheapest option" (as so many Americans do), it's not a bad slogan to try to get them to move up a notch in quality.
That's my point. Education is the worst academic discipline after Economics. Even psychology degrees require more rigor than Econ.
The university where I taught closed it's Education department several years ago, much to my delight. It's one of the top 3 schools in the US. They wouldn't listen to me and close the Econ school though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, teacher pay IS out of control in a lot of places, with constant demands for raises and benefits that exceed those of the average population. In my county, the average teacher salary for public schools is about $60,000 per year, and it goes up to about $100K. In the District of Columbia, one of the worst school systems in the country, the MINIMUM public school teacher salary is upwards of $50,000, and the scale goes up above $100K. In Montgomery County, MD, the average is about $67,000 per year and goes upwards of $110K.
I'm tired of constant tax increases because of this ongoing attitude that the world owes teachers a living. The idea that teachers receive abysmally low pay isn't always accurate, but even where it isn't, teachers still play off it like they're struggling to stay alive.
And a couple more: http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4f0b5867eab8ea4c24000033/spending-per-pupil-by-country.jpg http://www.supportingevidence.com/sitebuilder/images/PISA_Test_Scores_vs_cumm_edu_spend_by_country-820x565.jpg
Does any other line of work that requires a college degree require a summer job like they are a high school student? Give me break!
I have an accounting (informally degree required but not a CPA position) job in a national park in the US. It's seasonal, so I have to fill up the rest of the time with something. So I do security at the same park in the winter which doesn't require a degree. Works pretty well for me and I get plenty of exercise.
But to answer your question, yes, there are other jobs that require a degree and don't employ you all year.
You do realize that link is to a propaganda piece right? Teachers do not average 11.5 hours a day. I have known plenty of teachers personally, and 11.5 hours a day is complete BS. About the only teachers that work any significant about beyond the 6-7 hour school day are teachers that must grade essays. So, your myth is already busted.
You point out 1st year pay. That shows a complete lack of integrety on your part. Some jobs have pay front loaded, and some have them back loaded. Again, your myth is busted.
You point out that the pay you list is "is before taxes, so the take-home is significantly less than this". Again, total lack of integrity. ALL salaries get discussed in pre-tax amounts.
Finally, The point about a Senior Software Engineer... So what if someone else can make more money. There is no reason that public school teacher should be the single highest paid job on the planet. Thinking it should be is just stupid. Not to mention you are comparing a 1st year salary with someone who has been in their field for many years.
Obviously you are fully aware that teachers are well paid, or you wouldn't have to resort to deceit to try and make your point.
The problem is that pensions have to last for more like 20 years than 10. If you're going to live to 85, however that happens, you have to basically save enough money to sustain you indefinitely. Which is what rich people have, enough yearly gains from investments to live indefinitely, and to keep their savings growing consistent with inflation.
You either need people to save a huge amount during your working life, or you need a huge cohort of young people who are productive to pay for the retirees to live.
the latter, not the former. One of the major problems in the labour market right now is that old people aren't leaving. We've done away with mandatory retirement (in canada at least) and because everyones investments tanked old people aren't getting out of the work force, leaving less jobs for new people.
Either you're stuck bailing out mum and dad when they're 75 and you're working, or you me, and everyone else spread the risk and responsibility of bailing out mum and dad around, but the net effect is the same, and bigger pools of risk are always preferable to smaller ones.
This problem hit the private sector earlier
other way around, this problem created by the private sector getting rid of pensions is now hitting the public sector, and it's a disaster. Unfortunately there's no such thing as a safe investment that will pay a return, except theoretically government bonds if you aren't in greece or spain or ireland or portugal or... you get the idea. But old people need stable incomes, because otherwise their spending fluctuates like the rest of us, and that would make existing economic shocks even worse. If it wasn't for social security still paying the same amount florida would have gone bankrupt already essentially (add in medicare to that too since that covers a lot of expenses for older persons).
When retirement was on average 5 - 10 years you didn't have this problem. But now, with medicare being so successful at keeping people alive who make it to 65 that if you make it to 65 odds are you'll make it to 80 or so, and that's going to get older and older, but the amount needed to sustain that is significant. Raising the retirement age to 67 or 70 or whatever could be seriously counter productive because you're forcing people to work who aren't capable of it. Where I am in canada you can't force someone to leave when they get old, the problem is that for years we banked on mandatory retirement to get rid of people who were counter productive, but you don't really want to fire a jovial 63 year old who put in 35 good years, and 3 terrible ones, but now those people cling on and suck jobs away from young people and productivity away from everyone else.
Oh, as point of interest, in canada we've been having the same discussion as you're having, and the recommendation here has been to actually increase the benefit paid to retirees from taxes, to provide more economic stability and to get old people out of the work force faster, despite the conservative government planning to do what you are essentially advocating (raise the retirement age).
Or when we stop spending more money on administration and pointless toys like "Smart Boards" than on teachers.
Abysmally low compared to a doctor maybe, but compared to what they manage to deliver, highly overpaid.
Funny you mention garbage men. They are my example to counter the "Teachers are the most important job." tripe. I can tell you if I had to choose between getting rid of all professional teachers and getting rid of all professional garbage men, the garbage men would still be working. Professional teachers wouldn't even make the top 20 most important jobs.
I like that we have public education, but it is vastly over rated, and it won't improve until we stop seeing it as an untouchable paragon of virtue.
e. Are we saying that every single other profession is able to measure performance, except for teaching? Seriously, can we not spend a few months on identifying a way to do some type of qualitative 360 degree review?
No, I mean seriously, how do you evaluate good teachers? Suggesting there *should* be a measure of a good teacher, and knowing what it one actually is is the problem - this is a problem people have been wondering about for decades, and a few months long study isn't likely to solve it. Philosophically there should be some way to gauge teacher effectiveness that isn't easy to game, but unfortunately, no one has come up with one yet. So we're kind of stuck with trying the common approach of ask kids, ask parents, have the principle sit in on classes, that sort of thing. Whether or not my mother filed her lesson plans properly doesn't make her a good or bad teacher, I'm not sure which she was - but using things like that to benchmark doesn't help.
You *could* have a situation where classrooms are bigger but you have multiple teachers, when I was a graduate student teaching assistant we had labs with 100 or so students and 3 or 4 TA's and everyone just went wherever, there wasn't a 'Sir_sri's rows' so when we had 1 really good TA (we used to call him "The Egyptian" until we discovered that was Al Zawahiri's nickname, so this is a while ago) and one really bad TA (a chinese guy who didn't ever seem to actually try and help anyone) you kind of mitigated the damage. But that format would require significantly changing how schools are laid out, and I'm not sure it doesn't tend to just reduce everyone to 'well at least you're not that chinese guy'.
The latest theory is to use standardized testing every year, and then you identify good teachers by when their students perform better than they did in the past (so if every year they score an average of 70 on standardized tests, and then after this teacher they start scoring 80 while the average of everyone else is still 70 then you're onto something), and that's not bad, but you waste a huge amount of time on standardized testing, and you're showing the teacher is good at prepping kids for standardized tests, not necessarily good at teaching connections beyond standardized tests.
every single other profession is able to measure performance,
How do you measure the performance of a programmer? Quantitatively, and accurately. Lines of code is notoriously bad. It's not like teaching is the only profession to have the problem of 'there are metrics we use that aren't really very good', every other profession has the same problem, just teaching is relatively rare in that you are mostly alone and unobserved when working.
In other words he's jealous.
I should add, the goal is education, if time taken to test teachers is detracting from education then you're sacrificing education in one area in the hopes that you can improve it in another. There's nothing wrong with that particularly, but you don't want teaching to end up like government accounting where you spend as much time accounting for what you were doing as actually doing your job.
A teacher's goal is to best teach the student, using all available resources. Khan's videos can be used as a resource by teachers. Rather than worry about competition from Khan's videos, why can't a teacher provide some of Khan's videos as part of class assignment, so that on the next class, the teacher can assume the students have already watched those videos, and therefore, classroom time is much more productive and only geared towards class discussion, answering students' questions? If the teacher finds some mistakes in Khan's videos, the teacher can add as errata during class (or even ask which students spotted the mistakes). In that case, the mistakes become a documented bug (aka "feature") of Khan's videos... for all you know, those mistakes by Khan turns out to be the points that are most "well-learned" by the students, because those mistakes are especially pointed-out during class time.
Seems Khan Academy poses more a threat to paid tutoring services than formal education. I view Khan as a free, anytime, anywhere tutor rather than a replacement for earning a BS from an accredited institution.
Maybe they should goto Khan Academy and do little basic math review.
Like this example. As a teacher you get paid 9 paycheckes, one for every month you work during the year. You multiply 9 times the monthly paycheck and then divide by 12 to find out your actual monthly pay that you can spend so you don't go hungry during the summer.
If you have job that doesn't pay the bills, it's not a job it's called a "hobbie" and no one owes you a damn paycheck to do a hobbie.
The United States is well on its way to destroying what is perhaps its greatest achievement: universal public schooling of at least minimal and often excellent quality [1]. We would not want to interrupt that march by providing mere truth about "government schools".
There seems to be some uncertainty on "How" this is happening. I gather the grandparent thinks it's just a money problem. But they described a very generous wage and benefit package for nine months of work which is to be expected given that the school is high tier in terms of pay. It's not a good example.
My view is that there are deep structural problems with the institution of public education in the US. I think it's been taken over by ideological interests, forces teachers to take up education credentials of dubious value, and has a pathological workplace. More money could help, but without addressing these structural issues, it's more likely to be wasted "throwing good money after bad" as they say.
This documentary pretty much summed all that up: Waiting for Superman
One of the major problems in the labour market right now is that old people aren't leaving. We've done away with mandatory retirement (in canada at least) and because everyones investments tanked old people aren't getting out of the work force, leaving less jobs for new people.
That's a job creation problem not a "too many old folks are working" problem.
Quality and reach.
They've tried it many times and famously in the documentary Waiting for Superman
Sadly it doesn't change even with large incentives as the Teachers unions blocked it.
Oh I'm not deriding at all. Just pointing out that teachers make damn good money for the hours they actually work.
It's also not a race to the bottom. It's an perception of imbalance of output versus payment.
Many feel the quality of teachers is sorely lacking, yet the demand for funding constantly increases.
Teacher Unions in a lot of states prevent the removal of substandard teachers that further devalues the perception that the citizen's tax money is well spent.
Said unions also put up any roadblock they can towards any form of measurable accountability of teachers, or from the privatization of the school system.
Totally understandable as a union exists only to protect the jobs and interests of it's members, not the tax payers or the students.
You might start by providing some evidence about the presumed failure and "deep structural problems". As I noted in another comment below, projecting the City of Detroit Public Schools onto the entire range of public schools in the United States - most of them doing quite well academically - is not appropriate. The vast majority of US children attend locally-controlled public schools that are quite good.
But yes, money is an issue. Others have demolished the "9 months work" fallacy, so I'll offer another perspective. Our district takes each year a certain percentage of transfer students from a failed big-city district similar to Detroit. A very limited percentage of our total student body. We are generally able to get them up to somewhere near grade level if they stay through high school, but the cost is very very high in both money and resources; perhaps 5x that of our local kids. That's OK, we have the money and I think our teachers and staff enjoy the challenge (although it does affect our No Public School Left Undestroyed scores). But Detroit and its equivalents don't have that money or extra resources - in fact they have less than we do. But yeah, you're right: money and resources couldn't possibly be the problem. In Galt's Gulch.
sPh
Do you have kids?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Except that $100K isn't terrible for someone with a masters in a moderately senior position. My wife works in the tech industry at the top rung pay scale for software QA engineers in her company and makes somewhat around $120K, with close to 18 years experience and a masters' degree, in a County where the median income is quite high. In comparison, teachers in our area make an average of $67,000, and go up past what my wife makes in the IT industry (higher still for assistant/vice principals and principals).
In contrast, my mother has taught high school french, italian, and spanish for at least a decade now. Her workload is insane. Not only does she have the normal hours of the day where she has to be on campus directly dealing with kids, she then gets to spend time reading and grading papers, as well as evaluate how well her lesson plans worked, and update them for the next time she teaches (or to adjust for faster/slower class progress). The net result is that she works at least twelve hours a day, often more, and regularly gets about four hours of sleep.
If you're teaching a class that requires grading of papers or has handouts. you get to create the material, make enough copies, teach it in class, read/grade all of the responses, and then repeat. God help you if you want to actually challenge your students with more than multiple choice, and have them write real sentences or prose. 30 students times 5 classes is 150 students' worth of papers to READ every day. How long would you spend on each? My teachers in high school, like my mother now, read their students' papers closely enough to be able to write corrections, and even write feedback on them. I imagine it's more than a minute per student spent correcting, and more than ten minutes spent per class evaluating the effectiveness of your curriculum and planning how best to ensure your students actually _learn_. So, that's another four hours on top of your "eight hour" day right there.
So, while teachers bring in some decent sounding dough, the amount of time they put into it depends a lot on the subject matter they teach and the degree to which they invest themselves in teaching well. (It's probably still a lot easier than being a sysadmin, though.)
Let's try an experiment: pay teachers $50 million year, plus the opportunity to earn a $25 million merit bonus, and pay the executives of Wall Street banks whatever a teacher with equal years experience at the school where they attended first grade is paid.
sPh
You're all viewing this incorrectly.
This isn't for college students.
This isn't for educators.
This isn't for review.
Khan is for kids or idiot college students like me who've forgone math and now are desperate to understand basic concepts. I love it, it's bootstrapping. You understand a concept and feel great about it. Do you want to learn more? Then buy a book, enroll in a higher level class.
It's amazing that you curmudgeons are complaining that he's too slow or doesn't teach advanced subjects. Get over yourselves. Stop expecting the entire world to be interested in what you like, or to instantly understand a subject. At least students learn, if you want to whine about everything, go start your own online platform and create your own video.
First, median teacher salary is only $40k, not 50k. Second, median production supervisor salary is just shy of $80k. Source: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Ford-Motor-Production-Supervisor-Salaries-E263_D_KO11,32.htm. As for your comment that manufacturing is hard work, sure it is. Digging ditches is also hard work. Does that mean we should pay people more to dig ditches than to educate our children? That's just plain nuts.
That's actually a terrible idea. Kids need time to be kids, too. Most of them don't get that time while school is in session. You'll end up with kids that are very well educated, sure, but they won't be well-adjusted. Further, studies show no benefits to year-round schooling.
Also, the argument that you would reduce seasonal variation in the economy by switching to year-round schooling is disingenuous at best. The reason people take vacations during the summer is that unless you're traveling to the southern hemisphere, this is the best time to enjoy yourself outdoors. That will not change. What will change is that parents will take their kids out of school more often, which is disruptive to the education process. And to the extent that people take fewer vacations during the summer because of year-round schooling, they are unlikely to take additional vacations during the winter because the weather sucks anywhere that ordinary Americans can realistically afford to go. In short, it will reduce the seasonal variation in the economy by decreasing the number of people taking vacations during the summer, which will result in fewer seasonal jobs, but will result in no additional year-round jobs.
Worse, parents whose kids go to different schools may find that their kids' vacations are not at the same time. Those parents will have no choice but to take one or more kids out of school when they should be in class. Think of it as taking the problems caused by staggered spring breaks and multiplying them across every vacation your family takes.
No, there is nothing good about year-round schooling.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I understand, but the AC that I replied to was saying 9 to 12 hours per year! Not over the course of 6 years. Thats a big difference when compared to 12 semester hours over 6 years or 180 hours of professional development activities. Most professional careers (accountants, pharmacists, engineers) require at least that level of continuing education, if not more.
They just hate hearing the whining that they are all in poverty when they are in the top half of earners in the country.
This says more about how bad things are in the U.S. than how overcompensated teachers are.
I can think of many reasons to pay teachers a quality wage and no reason not to. Here's a list:
- The summers off are a perfect opportunity to study and travel. Studying is important for obvious reasons. Traveling often amounts to studying - especially for those history and foreign language teachers. This isn't possible if a summer job is required to make a decent wage.
- Those most able to teach are less likely to if the compensation isn't competitive with other potential careers. The main reason there are so many incompetent teachers is the same reason there are so many incompetent fast food workers: it doesn't matter if you hire the best applicants if the best applicants aren't very impressive. Jobs that don't pay very much don't attract high quality applicants. An assistant manager at a restaurant makes about as much as a teacher. A general manager at a restaurant usually makes more than a teacher. By paying teachers their current wages, we devalue them below the expected income level of a person of their education.
- Paying teachers a high wage is good for the economy. This is basic economics - if teacher's have more to spend then they likely will. It will also require tax increases, which helps to curb inflation (this is probably the main reason no one wants to pay teachers more, because of the 'greed is good/taxes are evil' mantra that's so popular). Teaching is a job that's not in danger of being outsourced or marginalized by technology.
- Teachers are worth more to society than what we pay them. This is possible for a number of reasons. The most common is that most people don't become teachers because they want to get rich, it's something they do because they want to devote their life to doing something positive for society. This is much different from military, police, or firemen because most teachers have abilities/certifications/potential that are worth more than their current wages/benefits on the free market whereas the bad haircut crews get paid much more, especially considering their benefits, than they could on the free market. Even if your average cop could top his current wage on a construction crew, he'd lose a lot in the way of benefits and he'd have to actually do hard work and wouldn't be able to steal my pot.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Only when you count their time as six to eight hours a day. My father was a teacher. He got to the school around eight because teachers had to be there in case kids showed up early, and to prepare lessons. He left around five thirty on days he wasn't doing computer club, extra help sessions, science fair, science olympics or something else. Later on those other days. Then he marked and prepared most of Saturday, and took Sunday off (usually). All together, probably sixty hours plus a week. This for someone who has an MSc and wrote one of the first word processors for a personal computer.
I realize not all teachers do that, particularly (it seems) in the US's broken public education system, but certainly some do. Most of them here.
Khan and co are for children who want to (read 90% forced into) learning more. School is for children where 90% do not want to be there. But laws force them to be there. I went to private shcool. They are for forcing children to do things they do not want to do themselves. And it works. We cannot all be geniuses, as Mr Bond once said.
Khan is for the top end of the market. It cannot help where 90% of teachers work. If he is pretending this, he is a liar. But I bet he carefully does not make such claims. I bet he keeps right away from teaching those who do not want to be there. In teaching, he would be a coward deserting his responsibility. Teachers have to wear the (in) ability of their students. Khan method untested.
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which? You can't survey the kids - they'll assess a teacher's ability based on how much they like the teacher, not on how good a teacher they are. I think most people are well aware of the folly of rating a teacher by test scores - things just get worse when you teach to the test.
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I rather take his work for free than piss poor job from a bad teacher or college professor. People that decry Khan is a bad teacher should shut the fuck up, or do what he's doing better and (like Khan) for free. Society pays a ton for education, and in general we get shit in return (unless you live in a well-to-do zip code with excellent school ratings.) So screw them, screw them with a cactus. Either that, or they should put their money where their mouths are and show Khan how to do it.
It's called a salary.
Actually, if you get paid a salary you do get paid for being someone.
If you get paid hourly you get paid for being somewhere (on the clock).
If you're a contractor/freelancer you get paid for doing something.
But most wealth isn't acquired by any of these means. It's acquired by owning things that increase in value over time.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I've always been disappointed in my math skills; I barely passed calc II. After a lot of Khan videos (and a better attitude), I could derive my own trig identities. I'm sure a lot of people can do that in their sleep, but for me, it was a big deal. Khan really brought math down to earth and made it obtainable to me. I think a lot of people who've written themselves off as bad at math would be surprised how far they can go with a good teacher.
The people complaining want an 87 step process to learning. Sometimes 10 minutes is enough.
And of course, those professions you reference make more in return for the further education required. That's why I said the parent had it almost right. But of course the discussion is different when we're talking about good teachers versus bad teachers. Good teachers are doing a lot during the summer and use their own money to augment school supplies. Most people are so blinded by the bad teachers that they royally screw over the good teachers who genuinely want to provide a good education to their students. I've seen so many teachers get beat down trying to do the right thing that its no wonder there is no shortage of bad teachers. There is no reward for being a good one! Either way you get demonized.
My position is obviously biased though, much of my family are teachers. They work a lot of hours outside the class room.
About the only teachers that work any significant about beyond the 6-7 hour school day are teachers that must grade essays. So, your myth is already busted.
I teach physics. There are some problems with the statement I put in italics above. I recognize that the facts vary from district to district, but I have also never met a teacher in any district that had a regular 6 or 7 hour day.
Our contracted day is 8.5 hours long, which includes one 22 minute lunch. Technically, I'm finished at 3:45. Almost every day of the week, I am there at least one hour late, often two. There are labs to plan and setup, students who need help, and meetings to attend. If I average an hour and a half of extra time at school, that's already 10 hours per day. I also take work home if I can't get it done after school because, for example, students come in needing help or reassessment. Perhaps on average an extra half hour per night.
If I average 10 hours a day at work and a half hour a day at home, that's about 1880 hours per academic year. That's 90% of the 2080 hours a normal 8 hr/day full time job.
There are also the other professional activities and duties I participate in, such as continuing education, networking with other science teachers and scientists, and keeping current on research in physics and education. I take classes and attend workshops and conferences during the summers. For example, I have spent about four hours per week researching and planning, plus five full days on-site at workshops this summer.
I'm not complaining, I just prefer that people take a more factual look at teaching careers, not the mythical "6 hour day part time job" that many people would have you believe.
Whats great about Khan might not be the content but the overall concept. There are some crappy wikipedia pages but noone would argue Wikipedia isn't one of the most revolutionary concepts in human history.
We need to stop looking at online education as a replacement
Why? As long as the videos are well-made, it could very well be a replacement for some intelligent people. School doesn't have a monopoly on information. It has the advantage that you can learn much more (but you'll only learn if you're determined, and I have to question whether most of the people using Khan Academy really learn anything from the videos or if they're just memorizing formulas and claiming to understand) in a short amount of time. For mathematics, anyway. I suspect something like chemistry would be far more difficult to replace.
Did you see the "correction" about his multiplying negative numbers video? It was a couple of morons nit-picking about largely irrelevant shit, like explaining how multiplying two negative numbers works before explaining how multiplying two positive numbers work, and also complaining that he was explaining this using negative and positive one instead of other numbers, as if there were some chance that might lead to confusion. They even complained that he said "positive one" instead of "plus one" which I can't even begin to imagine as being a valid criticism. ...but apparently he saw some value in their comments, and so he recreated his video. However, that he gave no credit is of little surprise to me. The two were clearly assholes simply looking to criticize rather than provide any worthwhile feedback. That he could find anything worthwhile in their video to justify recreating his own video clearly speaks more of his own insight than of any assistance provided by those two morons. I wouldn't have given them credit either. I would have left the video as it was.
You might start by providing some evidence about the presumed failure and "deep structural problems".
1) Progressively worsening educational outcome over the past few decades. I can't provide numbers but it's something that gets talked about at the college level. The top level of students just aren't as prepared for college as they used to be.
2) Inability of a number of schools to maintain a learning environment. A number of schools are unable to keep bad elements of society out of the classroom or to discipline their students.
I've been in a few urban schools (in the 80s) in the North Carolina and South Carolina area. They all seem the same. Overcrowded, noisy, and no control. That likely is partly due to funding. A big school (sometimes looking like a prison, I might add) is cheaper than a number of more manageable smaller schools. But I think it's also simply that the administrators didn't know any better.
3) New teachers get the toughest cases. I'm sure some schools do it differently, but it was common also in the area above for new teachers to "pay their dues" by taking on the hardest classes in the school.
4) Grotesquely misplaced priorities. I heard the story numerous times over the years. A school dumps lot of money on its athletics program and skimps, sometimes to absurdity on its science classes. There was the Alaska high school that had an Olympic sized indoor swimming pool (and several other large athletics related buildings), but the chemistry teacher had to buy the lab gear with their own money. The South is notorious for its worship of football and its not uncommon to see far more spent on that sort of thing than on science or technology.
5) Ideology in the classroom. I don't have hard evidence, but there seems to be a lot of teachers using the classroom for sermons, particularly for stuff generally pidgeonholed as liberal or leftist. This ranges from the self esteem thing that was a big fad a couple of decades ago to the enduring academic ideals such as multiculturalism and environmentalism. Nowadays multiculturalism permeates society so much that we really don't notice any more that every group portrayed in a child's book always consists of a mix of ethnicities and both sexes. That's a pretty disturbing level of conformity, if you ask me.
6) The textbooks are decided by the crazies in California and Texas. And that's a pretty unhealthy market for a variety of reasons.
But Detroit and its equivalents don't have that money or extra resources - in fact they have less than we do. But yeah, you're right: money and resources couldn't possibly be the problem.
Wikipedia says the Detroit Public Schools board has been suspended from 1999 to 2005 by the Michigan legislature for mismanagement (I see the replacement reform board had their own problems as well). What good is it to throw money in that sort of situation?
Yes.
The university where I taught closed it's Education department several years ago
Looks like it closed its English department as well.
"too many old folks are working" problem.
No, but it's a very serious economic problem, and too many old people working is presenting real problems to getting jobs for young people. Of course old people are working because they need the money too.
But I thought that the standard /. line was to teach to the highest student and pull the rest along. . . . .
Actually, that's the standard teachers union line, where the fast learning kids get to teach the slower kids instead of learning farther ahead themselves. This makes them more manageable, and keeps everything on a nice grade-level basis so the teacher can read the lesson plan a week ahead of having to teach the lesson, instead of knowing the material cold. This is why it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion.
I think the standard /. line, if there was one, would be: let the faster learning kids learn at their own pace, and let the slower learning kids learn to say "would you like fries with that?" to the faster learning kids.
My wife works in the tech industry at the top rung pay scale for software QA engineers in her company and makes somewhat around $120K, with close to 18 years experience and a masters' degree,
You wife makes greater than $100k. The phase
close to six figures
mean that the teachers are earning less than $100k. Another way of saying this is that, teachers are making high five figure salaries. $90,000 is "close to" 6 figures however it is still only 3/4 of your wife's salary.
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
I think that happened about the same time as the career ladder for teachers was redefined so that "up the ladder" meant moving from teaching into administration, coupled with the huge amount of money that should be going to teachers, schools, and school supplies going to the administrators instead, while the whole system becomes more and more administration top-heavy.
A friend of mine is seriously considering starting a non-profit for the schools which "can not even afford minimal school supplies" in order to shame the state into getting rid of one administrator per school, which would be enough to keep every student supplied with pencils, paper, crayons, rulers, and so on for the entire year. I keep telling her that they have no shame, so it's probably not going to work.
One of the most disappointing aspects of my college career has been running into professors who just don't give a damn about their students. It's painfully clear with certain professors that they don't want to be teaching a class when they come completely unprepared, improvise a terrible lecture, and have no understanding of what students have taken away from their class. I'm a UC Berkeley student, and it's shocking to me the number of professors that treat their undergraduate teaching responsibilities with such distain. I can understand that undergraduates are not necessarily the most respectful students, but when regular lecture attendance is below 20% some blame must be placed on the professor. I took linear algebra at Berkeley, and stopped going to lecture after about the month when I realized that the professor wasn't getting any better. In fact, our grad student instructors would tell us that lecture was a waste of time because the professor clearly didn't give a crap. Instead they would hold their office hours at the same time because they knew that's when people would be free to attend them. Khan Academy was a life saver when it came to linear algebra. It wasn't perfect, but it was a great learning resource that provided the basics and allowed me to understand more rigorous resources for linear algebra (like my textbook).
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Now who's spouting bumper-sticker logic?
The inevitable result of more people wanting to go into teaching is additional certification requirements for teachers so as to keep the labor pool the same size, otherwise the per-teacher salary would go down when the supply of teachers increased relative to the demand curve.
I personally know a PhD in physics who is a college professor, and a PhD in history who is an author, and they both found out that they were "unqualified" to teach middle school science and history, respectively.
People are different. They are not machines and educated students are NOT like products. MBA's beliefs must be dismissed as the baseless belief it is. They have a fancy hammer and view everything as a nail.
Some people benefit with Khan and I frankly do not care if they are a little wrong or skip some things if it prepares students for further advancement when or if it is needed. Math in the USA is one of the worst topics there is where it is all explained and taught the same methodical way everywhere with varying degrees of quality that does little for somebody who's mind is not prepped for that specific learning process.
Good education should be rooted in the brain sciences; and this does mean to some degree profiling is required. Motivation is a HUGE MASSIVE problem and even if Khan was horrible if he made a few % more people succeed in Math it would be worthwhile. I wouldn't care if you had some bimbo strippers going around saying they like men who know math -- it works for selling a lot of stupid products. Yes, I just gave the basis for a controversial PSA campaign by the Dept of Education! (it would be the most successful one in history but nobody cares about reality if it touches their emotions. Remember, a lot of great scientists got started because of inspirational fiction and fantasies; the ones who did not lacked the right trigger...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You have kids and believe professional teachers are unnecessary?
Man, no wonder.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Teachers Fight Back" should have read "Founder of Company Trying To Sell Content Khan Gives Out For Free Strikes Back" and a poor hatchet job it was too.
Of course if you'd let teachers curse, drink, whore, smoke on the job, you'd thin out the retirees some. Teachers work hard, but they don't typically have to pull the 60+ hour week/no lunch marches that other professional industries do.
Because they work with kids, we expect clean living. Because kids learn best in structured environments, with regular times, breaks,and lunches I allows teachers to be fairly healthy... Which sucks when they retire and help all those healthy habits and push 90 on a regular basis.
Like another poster said, teachers quality of life for their pay scale is fairly good. Their work hours, benefits, time off, lifestyle choices all reinforce the traditional American Dream.... Which is why business wants them OUT! Teachers are one of the last unions left holding on to the level of benefits and raises EVERYBODY expected from a good job 40 years ago... Can't have that, can we?
Except they are SUPPOSED to work until 70 now just to make Social Security work. The problem is that when we had pensions, we got used to people leaving WAY early. And companies were footing the bill. Companies have stopped flat pensions for 401k, and basically cut employees off from medical insurance when retire or they hit 65, even if they are still working.
Companies are pushing early retirement in record numbers to get employees ofv the books without being charged layoff fees, trying to prune off the top end while not hiring at the bottom. Most companies, even VERY PROFITABLE ones have been operating in "Decimation mode" my whole adult working career. We are reaching the point they are all about to implode because their own employees don't know the business. Eventually the Indians, Brazilians, and Chinese will pick up that knowledge... Expect another ten years though.
Given that home-schooled kids consistently outperform their public school counterparts, it is clear that professional teachers are not all they are cracked up to be. The public schooled kids that do the best are the ones who's parents end up home schooling them at night even though they go to the public school during the day. Garbage men on the other hand... Do you know what happens in cites when the garbage stops getting collected? Even in a best case scenario for the teachers, it is better to have an uneducated child than one that is dead from disease. Of course, it isn't a best case scenario for public schools. So, if you chose the teachers over the garbage men, you would end up with uneducated kids AND disease.
The problem isn't that having public school teachers is bad. The problem is that the system has failed, and no one is willing to admit that the problem runs from the parent to the president, and that includes teachers.
No, but it's a very serious economic problem, and too many old people working is presenting real problems to getting jobs for young people. Of course old people are working because they need the money too.
Let me explain. If no new jobs are created, then it's a zero-sum game. If in addition there aren't enough job to go around, then old people would be taking jobs away from young people and vice versa. It would be as you say.
If OTOH the job market grows to embrace the new larger employment pool then that competition is much lessened (or even eliminated) and the problem doesn't exist. That's why I said it was a "job creation" problem not a "too many old folks working" problem.
I'll just add that I haven't been impressed by the recent developed world attempts to create new jobs. There's some US-side attempts that claim to have created a number of jobs of unknown value for around $200k per job. Sounds to me like it would have been more effective at job creation, if it hadn't been taxed or borrowed in the first place. There's probably a few programs with better bang for the buck, but obviously I haven't heard of them.
Oh Snap! We consume so much time fucking with smart-boards and other toys that get ruined. Don't even get me started on the mobile labs!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
No rigor in Econ, WTF top 3 school is this because the Econ program I've been considering has me nervous.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Is it more important that we learn the book definitions for everything, or is it more important to do the actual problems? Some of us can't afford to go to school and Kahn is a welcome resource. Because of Kahn, after struggling with probability and statistics on my own, I'm able to calculate total probability given one or more conditions. The few calc videos I've watched have help there as well. Personally, I don't think Kahn is boring -- he's more interesting than my geometry teacher in high school who would give a lecture in front of an overhead projector.
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which? You can't survey the kids - they'll assess a teacher's ability based on how much they like the teacher, not on how good a teacher they are. I think most people are well aware of the folly of rating a teacher by test scores - things just get worse when you teach to the test.
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Don't leave out the parents.
Education is an involved process, which is not solely the duty of the school or teachers - it requires participation, thoughtfulness and input from parents as well.
No amount of good teaching is going to help a student who comes from an abusive or poverty stricken home life. Not to mention the tendency of the entitled middle class parent to assume that they're child couldn't possibly be doing badly on their own merits either.
The whole process is complicated, involved, and yet apparently the problem is clearly the "overpaid" teachers - I guess that's why people are just rushing to hop on that gravy train.
So, your anecdote about "teachers you know" is science? And a poll is propaganda?
I point out 1st year and 22nd year salaries.
I'm comparing the salaries between a teacher in their 22nd year with 100+ credit hours of education beyond a BS/BA and a programmer in their 5th year with 0 credit hours beyond a BS.
From your inability to distinguish between reality and your own warped biases, your inability to read, and your ad hominem attacks, it's clear you aren't actually interested in a conversation, just in attacking teachers and their supporters.
Funny you mention garbage men. They are my example to counter the "Teachers are the most important job." tripe. I can tell you if I had to choose between getting rid of all professional teachers and getting rid of all professional garbage men, the garbage men would still be working. Professional teachers wouldn't even make the top 20 most important jobs.
You do realize that the education system is literally the most important thing to the continuance of modern human civilization? Technology doesn't just happen - it's built and maintained on the backs of knowledge transfer down to the next generation.
But sure, get rid of public education. I'm sure there could be absolutely no negative consequences to reducing the US to third world literacy rates, limited mathematical ability, and ensuring that the only people who trickle into important industries are those who could afford private education. Meanwhile the middle class can be hollowed out entirely and then the 1% can safely move to Europe, Australia, Canada, China - you know - basically anywhere in the world which is going to continue having a functional civilization after this.
And of course...a military force that's utterly dependent on high-tech precision weaponry couldn't possibly suffer if most of the recruitment age population can't read, write or basic numeracy...
...you also get the burnouts and hangerons that work the system and can stay for years doing nothing...
So it's not just my college......
On a side note, just noticed that about half of our classes (265 of about 600) were cancelled for the Fall semester. The stream of students has dried up and FinAid just changed to prevent students from taking any classes outside their major. It WAS very common for students to maintain full-time status taking extra classes (because some req classes are usually unavailable), but no more. The revenue is drying up and staff are starting to "disappear." The party is winding down or it may even be over. Oh yeah, and were dropping 10 million on a new campus, and sitting on two very underutilized campuses as it is! Should be interesting to watch, I hope I get let go.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Bzzzzt.
Well, at least you show as much intelligence as Alex the talking parrot in your ability to parrot talking points, but aside from that you prove that you are a moron if you think that comparing a self-selected sample with essentially a random sample proves anything.
In fact, thanks to the existence of self-selected samples of higher achievers, it is quite possible that the public school population isn't even random, but skewed in the other direction.
But of course in your ideologically tinted fog of moronicity, that thought never came to you, now did it?
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Well how about hiring teachers. Since you can, from the links I gave, pay them 60k a year + ~20% in benefits? Or at least not lay them off. 200k per job is, by the way, not far off. A front line employee that gets 75K a year probably costs about 200K total, between salary, benefits, office space/equipment, potentially sub contracted personnel etc.
I'll just add that I haven't been impressed by the recent developed world attempts to create new jobs.
the developed world hasn't made any serious attempt at creating new jobs. that's the problem. Corporations are sitting on large piles of cash, they aren't spending it because there's no demand. Governments that can borrow (which is everyone not in the Eurozone, and Germany and France and a couple of others within the Eurozone) at next to nothing rates, and aren't. Right now the developed world has been cutting jobs like crazy, largely at sub national levels, which is dragging down employment.
If OTOH the job market grows
except that it won't grow to accommodate 65+ workers. Far too many people in that age group (even 60+) have lost their connection to modern technology/practices etc and they have much more limited capacity to learn, try teaching a 67 year old to use their TV remote, unless you can also improve mental capabilities they aren't going to be a useful part of the workforce.
The paradox of more productivity is that you need less people for more stuff, and people who aren't as productive simply aren't as valuable, and as you get older your productivity drops off significantly. The US especially is at the point where they can afford to start offering more vacation times and earlier retirements, and they should follow the Franco/German model and do so.
Teachers work hard, but they don't typically have to pull the 60+ hour week/no lunch marches that other professional industries do.
yes. They do. The young ones anyway, once you've taught the same class for a couple of years it's a lot less work. Well, other than the no lunch part, because kids need lunches so teachers get lunches, but a lot of them are spending lunches stuffing their faces and prepping for the second half of the day.
Which is why business wants them OUT! Teachers are one of the last unions left holding on to the level of benefits and raises EVERYBODY expected from a good job 40 years ago... Can't have that, can we?
that seems to be the running theory. Ironically teacher and healthcare pay are two of the things buffeting the US economy from worse downturns because they're hard to cut. If you contracted the public sector to match revenue you'd be even worse off. People are (probably rightfully) a bit jealous of the fact that teachers have job security in a relatively uncertain world.
This is a lie.
All teachers I know grade papers and do lesson plans at home, not at school. Empty parking lot means nothing.
That just drives home even more how little teachers are valued.
How sure are you of the statistics behind that factoid? I've heard that among majors of students taking the MCAT, philosophy is often at the top of the list, with "pre-med" being average. That doesn't imply though that a philosophy degree will prepare you for med school better. It's more likely that only very exceptional people major in philosophy and then decide to take the MCAT, while the average or below people who want to go med school major in pre-med.
I'd guess a similar thing is going on there. The people who have no greater interest than teaching take the safe approach, while people who may be more interested in physics but decide to abandon it and go into teaching are more likely to be interesting people with active brains on their necks.
I guess the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, there could be some indoctrination in education degrees that encourages thinking inside the box too.
But see, this cannot happen in the "free" market: choosing more pay vs more free time is not in fact an available option to you because the employers always prefer employees who pick the "more pay" branch of the alternative.
No they don't. Employers might very well chose someone who'll work for less and get more time off. I only work 4 days/week at my job - and it's worth the 20% paycut. If I my boss wanted me to work more hours permanently I'd say no - but he likes his employees having another day off because it helps a hell of a lot to reduce workplace stress.
I don't understand all the hate towards teachers.
... They just hate hearing the whining that they are all in poverty when they are in the top half of earners in the country.
Well, they're not in the top half of earners, so maybe you should quit being such a douche and whining about lies about imaginary whining. Do you learn about the world from AM radio or something?
People who are "concerned" are fucking pathetic. Why not instead of being concerned, do it the way they think it should be done? Nobody is keeping them from putting up math lessons the way they think is right.
But they won't do that because they are lazy incapable snobs who really cannot get anything done except "being concerned".
You've got a million posts on this story spewing talking points you must have got from AM radio, and you ignore what are typicaly reports from actual teachers and their loved ones. "What a maroon."
C. You lied about how much they earn and every category of teacher in K-12 has a lower median pay than the nation.
Yeah we can always just have immigrants teach the kids, if they can pass a basic English test. Then we can probably push it below $10 and not worry about the benefits.
Um, yes they (we) are. I teach in a low income school district currently, and as a single guy I make roughly double the median family income in the area. That's as a first year teacher (and before counting insurance benefits/student loan forgiveness programs). Pay in our district tops out at 5 times the median family income. Granted, it's a very poor area, but I'm still better off than almost all of my friends from college right now (who can't find any work thanks to the awful economy).
In some places, teacher pay is far out of line.
Yeah, for example, on AM radio teachers make a bazillion dollars and only have to work part time.
They also get free ponies from the Socialist Party.
"Merit" based pay is a trick/lie so that teachers of rich students will get paid more than teachers of poor students. There is no realistic way to measure performance so precisely that you could base pay on it and not be totally full of shit. It is hard enough even to come up with performance metrics to identify the best and worse teachers, much less attach some sort of numeric value to each one.
Congratulations on having a sane boss. Somehow in the last 40 years MBA types have collectively forgotten what was learned in the first half of this century by every factory-owner/manager in the country: making employees work longer hours (past 40) results in less total production. They somehow think they get better value from 60-hour weeks, when in reality they're losing money on it.
You do realize that link is to a propaganda piece right? Teachers do not average 11.5 hours a day. I have known plenty of teachers personally, and 11.5 hours a day is complete BS. About the only teachers that work any significant about beyond the 6-7 hour school day are teachers that must grade essays. So, your myth is already busted.
As a teacher I rarely work less than 12 hour days. From mid-February to the graduation ceremony in June I didn't have a single day off (a few short days on weekends, but never a full day off). I'm not really complaining, because I do take advantage of summer/christmas/thanksgiving, but, in general, I work from 6 am to 10 pm minus a few hours in the middle, 5 days a week in the fall and 6-7 days a week in the spring (though you're right about one thing, grading essays is a lot of that). All told, I worked somewhere around 2500 during the 9 months of last school year including every thing: class time, prep time, grading time, supervising/organizing extracurriculars (which is why I worked more days/week in the spring, without extra pay), and professional education.
Your really going to compare a grade school/high school teacher B.A. to a Pharm.D? GTFO you don't what the hell you are talking about. 99.9% of teachers couldn't hack the 1st semester of a Pharm.D program. Oh that's right, that's why they took up teaching. They tried Computer Science, EE, ME, etc. and failed and now we are to the root of the problem. Getting a teacher's degree isn't nearly hard enough. It shouldn't be used as a fall-back program for failed or poor students.
Those extra classes you talk about are 1-2 day events, break every 15-20 minutes for smoke breaks, BS sessions, lunch breaks, only to be finished by 2-3pm just like school, and in the end are just excuses to get drunk that that night.
I'm willing to pay more when they actually motivate the students and actually teach them something without adjusting all the grades to a lame bell curve. But it is well known the people working towards a teaching certificate are mostly drop-outs from other academic programs or are unsure of themselves so they take the easy route. Maybe they are smart enough(probably) but were unable to even motivate themselves to properly try the field they truly desired. This is not a good role model for our students.
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which?
So you're saying it's impossible to separate good teachers from bad ones? BS. It is hard (if not impossible) to set up a quantitative, objective metric for teacher (or programmer, or manager, or ....) ability which is valid for all cases, but that doesn't mean they should all be paid the same. Paying them the same removes a very effective incentive for a) high performers to stay high performers, b) low performers to improve or get out.
The main difference between your mother and Penguinisto is that there are zero consequences for being a 'low impact' teacher in college. ie: if you want to show up for lectures, grade tests, and otherwise ignore the students, that's just fine. College students are generally in class by choice, and their parents are a lot less likely to show up complaining to the principal. College professors lecture, but they don't have anything resembling the teaching responsibilities of K-12 teachers. The only accountability for most professors is "Student reviews," and those are often overlooked in favor of out-of-classroom performance.
It's really not fair to compare college teaching to K-12 teaching.
That's mostly because college professors, even at state-run schools, are insulated from taxpayers by more levels of bureaucracy and administration. The more direct input you give taxpayers into public sector employment, the closer they all get to minimum wage slave jobs. Taxpayer advocacy groups are organized by volunteer armchair-managers.
"Qualitative 360 degree review." Seriously?
First you pretend that other professions can measure performance. And then you suggest we spend a few months on a committee.
Are you a Dlibert character?
Their annual salary (12 months) is 60,000. But they only work 9, so despite their headline pay of 60K, they only get paid 40K.
Kahn demonstrably doesn't want to improve his educational courses. Whether or not your assertion otherwise is correct (it has not been tested), this is a fact.
Therefore why bother with his course if he's not willing to find out for himself whether his courses are correct?
A lot of stories and anecdotes; no statistics. Many people have the "perception" that public schools are failing but the numbers don't back that up.
And pointing to South Carolina as an example? When a region deliberately sets out to destroy its own state and local governments - including but not limited to public schools - as a matter of ideology then it should not be surprising that the end result is a damaged public environment.
sPh
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which? ....
With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Although, I generally agree with your intuitive sentiment (better pay -> better pool of applicants -> better teachers), there seems to be an inconsistency in your argument (if it's hard to evaluate teachers, then how do we know better pay yields better teachers?).
We still need an evaluation system, even if it's not perfect. Expanding the pool without an evaluation system only bets on marginally increasing the average quality. This, itself, is not an efficient way to improve quality.
passetspike!
Some of my students don't have reliable running water or power. I don't think bugging their parents for donations is going to work...
After reading the shit you've posted so far all I have to say is: "You're a real dick." I'm not a teacher...
I see no point in striking at someone that is trying to help better the world. Come on! Let's be FAIR!
People watch those videos if they find them useful. What opinions traditional teachers hold of them shouldn't matter to anyone, in particular since I suspect that most people who watch Khan videos are people who were failed by traditional schools in one way or another. If Khan Academy ever turns into a charter school, it will again be up to parents and students to decide whether they like the format and find it useful. In education, it's ultimately only results that count, and parents and students are smart enough to figure that out themselves.
Well how about hiring teachers. Since you can, from the links I gave, pay them 60k a year + ~20% in benefits?
Sure, but that's pretty much a young person's game especially with what one has to deal with in the classroom these days.
the developed world hasn't made any serious attempt at creating new jobs. that's the problem. Corporations are sitting on large piles of cash, they aren't spending it because there's no demand. Governments that can borrow (which is everyone not in the Eurozone, and Germany and France and a couple of others within the Eurozone) at next to nothing rates, and aren't. Right now the developed world has been cutting jobs like crazy, largely at sub national levels, which is dragging down employment.
Right symptoms wrong causes. Those governments have been spending, or printing money massively for the past few years. The US in particular with quantitative easing. It just hasn't worked.
In part, that's because they've failed hard to follow the Keynesian playbook and didn't put the money into things that generate local economic activity (for example, in the US buying treasuries and other bonds with Fed created money, spending on things that create jobs outside the US, or dumping money into failing companies).
And it's partly because Keynesian tactics don't really work. It's worth remembering that efforts to fix recessions suffer from the solar eclipse effect. Supposedly some historical cultures would make lots of noise (banging pots and yelling or whatever) when a solar eclipse happened. Then the eclipse ended. Obviously, they scared away, once again, the dragon that was trying to eat the Sun.
For recessions, the big thing is to remember that recessions naturally end on their own and rather quickly at that, if one doesn't mess with the economy. Keynesian efforts can potentially speed that up a little, but at the cost of weakening the economy.
This all should have been figured out after the Japanese "lost decade" of the 90s. They had a really bad recession in 1990-1991 where they saw a massive decline in an overpriced real estate market. They followed with a classic Keynesian response, massive borrowing and spending on infrastructure building. It simply hasn't worked. The famed Japanese economy didn't come back like it should have and they now have debt that's just over twice their annual GDP.
And then there's the economic uncertainty. In the US, why hire someone now, when that's an enormous risk? If they turn out bad, you have to pay for them for a while even if you immediately fire them, assuming you're allowed to do so. The Obama administration in particular has been remarkably inadequate to the task. He also is rather dangerous for business (Which really matters to people, witness the hubbub over his "You didn't build that" remark. Ayn Rand couldn't have scripted a more cliched phrase for the villains of her novels.). I foresee a global revival in the economy once he leaves office just because whoever replaces he will generate less uncertainty. Spending results.
Second, there's the uncertainty in Europe. Greece is the current problem, but it's followed by a number of other countries that have shaky finances and bad structural problems. I don't see that they have a solution. European companies aren't going to spend until they know what's going to happen to their money.
And that's pretty much why we don't have job creation going on. Old people might not be as valuable as young, but one would pay them less in that case. Nothing magical to it. Once all this uncertainty goes away (such as how much is it really going to cost to hire someone?), then everyone will be hired in greater frequency.
It's the one that's usually considered the most prestigious US economics school.
It's not the school that's the problem. If you're going to study Econ, and you should not, this is the place you want to be, but don't waste your life.
Unless you're really loaded, you're probably not considering this expensive private school that I don't want to name.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nor will Salman Khan's idea that he is going to build Charter schools where students watch and hour of his videos a day to learn all the math they need to know and spend the rest of the day playing guitar or making paintings.
You completely missed the point of Khan Academy. The point is not to reduce education to watching an hour of videos and it's not to remove teachers from educational process. To the contrary - it's to use the teachers more effectively.
Here are the important points:
1)Teacher's time
At the moment, teachers spend 50% or more of their classroom time delivering a lecture. This is a complete waste of their talent. Instead, kids can look at the lecture themselves online - they cannot interrupt the teacher to ask a question, but they don't do that during a lesson anyway - with a video they can at least rewind it and listen to it again. Then, they can spend the time in the classes doing creative work, discussions and exercises with the teacher's assistance.
2)Student's speed
At the moment we require that all students go through the material at the same speed. This is terribly inefficient as it results with most students either underachieving and getting bored or moving on through the material without learning what's needed. With Khan's approach you can let students go through the material at their own speed. You can still challenge them to do better but you don't need to abandon the slower students because the class has to move on
3)Tracking
The teacher can track each student's development in a comprehensive way - he'll be able to easier identify who has what kind of problems or strengths and use this information to develop the kids to their best possibilities.
Yes, the education process has been developing a long time but if Khan's approach catches on, it will be a pretty big step forward.
>Sure, if you're advocating the use of open source software vs. commercial alternatives, you might just be able to make a strong case that 'You get what you pay for!" is a lie.
It's an outright lie in many (if not most) instances and every culture prior to present-day has known this. I always find you can learn a lot of how past generations thought from etymology.
Today the word "amateur" is generally said with scorn, because only "professional" is capable of producing quality - but that is not a true reflection of reality. The latin root of "amateur" is "amo" - meaning love. He who does it because he loves to do it.
In fact - the truth is the exact opposite: the people who do something because they love doing it will usually provide better quality work than those who it to get paid. Even if the amateur is making money doing it, the fact that he is not doing it IN ORDER to make money, but because he loves doing it means he'll put in more effort, he'll have gone above and beyond requirements and educated himself further.
You get what you pay for implies that quality is measured in price - but this is outright false. The measurement of value can in fact be stated as quality / price. That suggests the exact opposite to be true in ANY economics: that you get more quality bang for your buck if you pay less, and the quality of that which is free is nearly infinite.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No, their paycheck is split into 12 months from the yearly wage. Don't write from ignorance. The average teacher's pay beats the national average handily.
My daughter is a teacher with a Masters in education. What you wrote is wrong. The courses they take are more for increasing their wage than retaining their job.
I hate left wing shitbag morons who misrepresent facts and hide behind Anonymous Coward.
He is using his witchcraft to deprive working teacher out of a job and a pension. He should be burned at the stake for this sorcery!
I think we should send some teamsters after his sorry little Pakistani arse and make him learn the same lesson Jimmy Hoffa learnt.
It's interesting to note those shoving this (and other) stupid assertions are predominately AC. This indicates to me they know damn good and well they're lying.
Yet again - they're paid for a year and can *OPT* to receive it in 9 month pieces or 12 month pieces.
And you went to public school where they didn't teach you that your last sentence contradicted your second (primary assertion).
Stay AC.
It's good to see that teachers can master posting (and responding to self) as AC.
What you wrote is a lie, pure and simple.
I taught college in the late 90's and used to put my lessons and plans online for general access also...reason being why not spread knowledge? College students should mature enough to be able to largely teach themselves or they shouldn't be in college...you don't spoon feed college students, you put the knowledge out there so they can add it to what they know to date, then associate it to ask their own questions, and form opinions/implications (lib arts, trad sciences) or form plans (engineering). In grad school, students should be prepared to stand up and teach others.
Too many kids enter college unprepared to take on the mantle.
Khan is simply doing the same thing...he just needs help from experts in the fields to bring the vision forward...
I am math certified in multiple states and have three children. My children use Khan Academy every day and I LOVE IT. All of my children score well beyond their peers - typically at the 99th percentile level.
Thanks Sal!
Teachers are paid what they are largely because there are plenty of people who want to do it. If there weren't we'd have to pay them more. It is a fairly safe career choice choice (low unemployment rates, sackings unlikely, etc), and widely considered to be an easier route through undergrad than science, engineering, most ology's, etc. Conversely, no one wants to be a geek so most of us here on slashdot make the big bucks. Even bigger if you understand business concepts and are personable.
Is your friend's problem a lack of annual pay or a lack of budgeting skills? Without knowing where you live I can't comment on your friend's income, but the district in my home town pays teachers quite well. Judging by some other responses, it's not the only one.
As far as good teachers go, the teacher's unions are really big on paying more for credentials, which is just a worse form of merit pay than all the other merit pay proposals they do their best to squash. Highly educated idiots just aren't that rare, so paying more just for having a master's degree doesn't mean paying more for good teachers. A good teacher is worth quite a bit, but the union doesn't want districts to identify and reward good teachers, because it would exclude a large section of their base from extra funds.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
The cost of one starting teacher for one year can get you 2 mobile labs that last 4-5 years. It's still a better return on investment in many cases, barring incompetent IT or unsually bad luck with hardware. I personally prefer static labs, but some schools just don't have the space to spare.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
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Rating teachers based on student test scores, with all it's flaws, is still more effective at measuring teacher quality than going by years of service, degree held, and other continuing education. Teaching just to the test is a feature of bad teachers, regardless. Good teachers cover the subject matter, of which the tested material just happens to be part, meaning that if they do their job test scores will be fine anyways.
There is a surplus of applicants for teaching positions in my area. There would be even more, but the unions have done a great job piling teacher certifications requirements on by influencing the state legislature and otherwise protecting their current members from competition. Schools can be selective in new hires, but most of their criteria are set in cooperation with the union, and current tenured teachers are nearly immune to this competition. Burnt out teachers that the district can't easily get rid of are common
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
just as Bryan said I'm shocked that any one can earn $5316 in four weeks on the computer. have you read this site http://goo.gl/UUZFR
Why do people insist on thinking there's a shortage of people who could teach various subjects? Even with government licensing requirements that do little to actually improve teacher quality, there is a surplus for some teaching positions. Of course, there is a shortage of teachers for actual hard subjects, but districts can't pay more by subject taught. So in part, I'd be perfectly happy with more pay for math teacher for instance. Unfortunately, understanding math also lets you realize how ridiculous it is to pay a 4th grade teacher the same as an AP calculus teacher, given the surplus of applicants for one and a dearth of applicants for the other.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Oh, forgot to add: I love how bad teachers will universally blame the parents, even when other teachers with the same kids do a much better job.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Actually, I would disagree with this. I know there's the stereotype of incompetent teachers and they do exist, but...
People who tend to teach a topic learn a lot more than their students about it by virtue of *teaching it*. At least that's always been my experience with teaching. This is true even if you go into the topic knowing nothing about it but starting teaching it.
Being a bad teacher (which puts people off from a topic) is it's own disaster but has nothing to do with Khan academy.
They do get summers off. All your conversions do is treat it as paid time off instead of unpaid leave, and of course you leave out extra pay teachers get for things like Driver's ed, summer school, curriculum development, etc. (that's somwhat reasonable, since most teachers don't do that, but it should be factored into averages) I'd love to make a starting teacher's salary (and I work for a school district, so I know what it is) while only working their hours. Instead I work 12 months, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for roughly the same annual pay and only 3 weeks of vacation time. However, I know I'm bad at teaching, so I'll decline to inflict myself on students. If only the burnt out teachers who hang around until retirement would do the same.
Maybe the problem is that I recognize 40k per year as decent annual pay for a 12-month full time job. Back when there was a major pay dispute in my area, teachers loved to trot out their pay versus national average, without looking at local average pay versus national average pay. My idea of comparing the ratio of teacher pay to average pay to that same ratio elsewhere was not popular.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
This is a bad economy, lets see how your wage stacks up when employment recovers and your friends get 10% or more salary increases to change companies. Meanwhile you are grinding away with that 3% COL increase.
Gov jobs look great when the economy is tanking, but they are not high wage jobs. They are just stable jobs.
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Free public education only seem vastly over rated because you take it for granted. Take a long look at countries that don't provide it. Better yet, think of how ignorant many of the people around you are, now imagine they are the only ones educating their children, is that the world you want to live in?
We decided long ago it was not, but there will always be ultra-conservatives who want to kick us back to the amish age because they can't wrap their heads around the notion of progress.
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I'm sure every parent can or wants to home school. Getting rid of public education would condemn hundreds or thousands of genius's to a life of ignorance, not to mention the non-genius's. It would throw us into a dark hole of ignorance and cronyism.
Meanwhile getting rid of garbage men would require every American to deliver their own bags of trash to the dump. This is still common practice in many parts of the US.
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Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to note that your inability to imagine a trash management system that involves more then sticking some receptacles at the end of your driveway says much about you. I hope you are not home schooling your children because they need to be exposed to people with better thought processes and problem solving skills. If you are home schooling please make sure your children have access to another more intelligent adult role model.
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I see two things.
1. At home I have a maths book for elementary teachers. It's alright, not terrible, but I work at an community college with an education route and most of those students dislike math and believe they are no good at it. So, the 200 level elementary maths despite being a tad easier than algebra, just gives them another year to despise little bits of math theory and problem solving in general. I had brought up the idea of mental math with one of the instructors and he latched on to it, however in frustration he seemed to want to push the higher theory of combinatorics whereas I thought a little confidence might go a long way.
2. Often times children don't need that much special attention. Most will learn physics from a physics instructor quite well. Children are little naive people, but they are just little people and they will latch on and learn things that interest them, so they will learn more about a subject from an expert than an expert in education. The expert in education however should be able to teach the child a little more about something they don't want to learn.
Economics is no more useful then studying rain dance.
Well that might be an exaggeration.. it looks a little better on your resume.
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Your post has less to do with how great teachers have it and more to do with how much other industries have abused their workes.
Let me refer you to an interesting discussion on this very subject: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/07/24/199238/gadget-addiction-or-work-intrusion
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My wife is actually testing this approach with some of her classes. She records herself giving the lectures and makes them available to students to watch as homework. It makes a lot of sense to me, especially given the number of times she's mentioned assignments being turned in that have obviously been completed by the parents.
I'm unfamiliar with the multiplying negative numbers mistake (a very quick Google search revealed nothing), but I'll assume somewhere he said negative times a negative is negative. If he did (or really, if any other sign convention was violated), he could still be correct!
It is convention that neg*neg=pos much like the "right hand rule." That is, you COULD do a left hand rule and stay consistent in your own world. Similarly with sign conventions, though the implications are relatively far reaching, e.g. (IIRC) the associative property does not apply universally and the distributive property over multiplication goes away, but the distributive property over addition is created.
I learned this from one of the most enlightening books about the foundations/philosophy of mathematics called "Negative Math" by Alberto A. Martínez (http://www.amazon.com/Negative-Math-Mathematical-Rules-Positively/dp/0691123098/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343232257&sr=8-1&keywords=negative+math [amazon.com]) In it, he basically creates a new type of algebra with different sign conventions! Very cool and finally "explained" the physical meaning of neg*neg=pos in the sense that one doesn't exist. IN YOUR FACE SNARKY TEACHERS! :o)
The teachers are not the problem, the politicians and administrators (the real problem) are using them as a smoke screen.
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So you are unclear on the difference between an hourly job and a salaried job? Here is some light reading: http://www.ehow.com/about_5045862_definition-salaried-worker.html
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Charter schools are great! (opportunities for every charlatan and carpetbagger who wants to make a buck at the expense of our children)
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What you're missing is that with the exception of the precious few who are truly motivated to shape the future of our society, the best and the brightest generally avoid teaching because the pay sucks. We don't pay teachers poorly because a lot of them can't teach. We get a lot of teachers who can't teach because we pay teachers so poorly that almost everyone who can do something else chooses to do something else. You have the cause and effect backwards.
As a rule, industries that pay poorly almost invariably suffer from a deteriorating workforce. I can pretty much guarantee that if you started paying pharmacists half as much, within twenty years, you would have Pharm.D graduates who would wash out if they entered that program today. Or, if the Pharm.D graduation standards didn't fall to match the pool of applicants, you would eventually be forced to pay more money to steal employees from other stores, because the alternative would be to close your own pharmacies for lack of employees. By contrast, you can continue to cram more students per classroom almost indefinitely, with lower and lower quality of education.
Of course, this spotlights one big difference between education and private industry. Educators are not particularly mobile. You might have a dozen pharmacies in a small city, but you'll only have one school district. To the extent that private schools compete for teachers, there is some competition to drive wages up, but that only goes so far. The larger the school districts become, the bigger the problem gets.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Teachers are also generally exempt from social security taxes so you can add 6% to their income vs someone in the private sector.
This isn't true.
There are 14 states that exempt teachers from social security. That's hardly "generally."
And those teachers that are exempted from SS do not receive the benefits of SS (for their teaching job) once they retire from teaching.
To get a teaching certificate in Kentucky, you must have a bachelor's degree and successfully complete your internship year (first year of teaching). Your certificate is good for 5 years. In order to renew it after 5 years, you must have completed 15 graduate hours. To renew after another 5 years, you must have completed a master's degree. Further graduate work can earn you a Rank I. (Teachers do get pay increases for getting master's and Rank I.)
See specific details at http://www.kyepsb.net/certification/renewal.asp
You note that information is one of the required elements of self-education, and the other key element is practice. I think for many fields a third key element may also be reflection (though you may be implying this within 'practice'?).
My daughter's just finished kindergarten, so I've had my first experience with the "smart boards" (for those who don't know: projector + touch screen), and the teacher had a good reason for it - not only are you getting around the dust of chalk (and the kids who are allergic to everything), but the practical point of having a room full of kids to which a computer isn't a fancy toy; it's standard issue. This is the generation that will grow up to expect videoconferencing as a routine thing, for instance. The schools are simply using the tools that the kids are used to. (My daughter's been playing on my iPad for years now - a touch screen is nothing fancy).
It also has the benefit of letting the teacher write out her lessons in advance (less time with back to class writing), the ability to easily put multimedia in, etc etc. Basically, all the bells and whistles from our generation (wheeling in the TV or overhead projector) are just standard issue.
Ironically, chalk is now a "bell and whistle", because a lot of kids have never used it until they get to school.
The funny thing is that Mr Plow can file for unemployment during the winter, teachers cannot during the summer.
Given that home-schooled kids consistently outperform their public school counterparts
Source? My siblings are home-schooled, and while they turned out OK, we knew a lot of home-schoolers who were getting an indoctrination rather than an education.
(And yes, there's a lot of kids going through the motions at public school too - but I would be surprised to see a consistent outperforming.)
But they described a very generous wage and benefit package for nine months of work which is to be expected given that the school is high tier in terms of pay.
Actually, let's break the "generous wage" talk down for a minute.
Let's compare to the other job that involves "dropping your kid off for the day" - a day care.
In my neck of the woods (Alberta), it costs about $700 a month for full-day care of a child. Using this month as an arbitrary example, that's for 22 weekdays of care, or just over $30 a day. If you're lucky enough to live close to your daycare, figure a nine-hour day watching your kid. So, about $3.50 per hour, per kid.
(Let's all take a moment to remember that while you can complain about the cost of child care, you really are trusting your child's life and health to someone for about a third of minimum wage here.)
In basic terms, a teacher is just higher-level day care. (We'll ignore the actual "education" angle for the moment). If you're very lucky, your kid will be in a smaller class - say 20 kids. The average here in Alberta is in the mid-to-high 20s right now, but again, let's lowball. That means your teacher should be making 3.50 x 20 = $70/hour to watch that classroom of kids. Oh, and not just watch them - teach them a variety of subjects, be a mentor, disciplinarian, supply the odd snack and juicebox to kids who don't have a lunch that day, etc, etc, etc.
The post above listed $4K a month (ignoring the summers) as the entry wage. Again, 20 kids in the class means that the teacher is actually charging you $200/month, per kid. (Or, about a third of what you'd have to pay someone to just *watch* them all day).
And we consider teachers over-paid, why?
Meanwhile getting rid of garbage men would require every American to deliver their own bags of trash to the dump. This is still common practice in many parts of the US.
Garbage men also manage the dump. Instead of an organized system that manages waste and prevents problems with run off, you'd just have people who were willing to throw garbage somewhere on their property for cash.
How many people would bother taking their trash to the dump instead of somewhere closer? (illegal dumping is already a problem now with pickup).
Yes, professional teachers do a very important job, but there's a reason our society did just fine without mandatory school laws for so long. Yes, there would be horrible consequences for not having public education, but it's a hierarchy of needs. Health trumps education. Sick kids don't learn well even with great teachers.
(and if you want an even better example, use sewage treatment workers....)
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
Let’s talk real world. My school district in Arizona is one of the highest paying in the state (Mesa Public Schools). Straight out of college I would make $36352 a year with a bachelors.
In other words, slightly more than what I made coming out of college working 12 months a year.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
Many people have the "perception" that public schools are failing but the numbers don't back that up.
Then what was all the gab about funding, if there's no problem? I think perception matches reality here.
And pointing to South Carolina as an example? When a region deliberately sets out to destroy its own state and local governments - including but not limited to public schools - as a matter of ideology then it should not be surprising that the end result is a damaged public environment.
Needless to say, that never happened. South Carolina has always been backwards. Maybe you ought to get some numbers yourself.
Are you saying that smart people don't use the public school system? Go figure.
Actually, the "Self Selecting" tripe is a feeble attempt to contradict the facts. Kids don't choose whether they are home schooled or not. The parents do. Parents don't look at their children and say "They are smart, so I am going to pull them out of public school". In fact, a very common reason for pulling kids out of public school is due to poor performance on the part of the kid.
You won't find any post where I say that we shouldn't have free public education. The closest you will find is a statement that if I had to choose between sanitation and free public education, I would take sanitation. Perhaps you should think about how disgustingly unsanitary many of the people around you are, and consider what it would be like if there was even less. What it would be like with the dirty diapers piling up in the streets. Take a look at countries that don't have sanitation systems.
It is the complete unwillingness of people to objectively look at education that has lead to our free public education failure. Most people are leaving school with no better than a 6th or 7th grade education. This is after 13 years. All of those ignorant people you are refering to... The vast majority of them were educated in the public school system. Refusing to acknowledge problems in your system so that you can fix them isn't progress.
As for how bad it is in countries that don't provide free public education... That is a BS standard. Countries that have lots of money are going to be more likely to offer the luxury of free public education. Those without money are more likely to put that money into other things. The free public education follows the good standard of living. Not the other way around. Maybe you think that Mexico with their free public education is the standard of living we should strive for. I do not.
No. Most parents don't want to home school. Most can if they want to. Public education has condemned hundreds or thousands of genius's to a life of ignorance, not to mention non-genius's. In sparsely populated areas piling up garbage until you can go to the dump can work. In densly populated areas it doesn't.
It is great that we can afford to have both garbage and free public schools, but the untouchable status of our schools and belief that they are the "single most important job in America" is both BS, and self destructive.
Honestly, do we honestly give a shit what an American teacher has to say. In 40 years they drove the USA from the top 5 in education in the world to the bottom 40% of Planet Earth? That's akin to taking advice from a homeless man on investing.
What planet do you live on that public schools are not an indoctrination. What do you think "socialization" means when people say it is a reason kids should be sent to public school? In fact, it is all but impossible for a child to grow up in any environment where they have contact with other humans and not get an "indoctrination". Unless of course, you want to use the term "indoctrination" to mean "political or religious views different than my own".
I think some students can benefit from the flipped classroom method that websites like Khan or MathTV.com embrace.
The Washington Post Company is hardly acting as an unbiased reporter in this article. I do have great respect for their investigative reporting.
In this case writer/reporter founded Mathalicious. The for profit company is an online pay-for-education division of The Washington Post Company.
The Washington Post "Company" page is headed with their motto: "Informing People Through Education and Media". The first sentence of the text begins: "The Washington Post Company delivers quality products to today’s students..."
It must have stung the Post management badly when they realized the income they had expected would no longer flow in. Their lost or potential customers don't need to pay. Instead about anyone can now obtain free high quality lessons from the Khan Academy.
I see the Post's issues as reminiscent of the old music industry paradigm. I am disappointed in The Washington Post for publishing this article. It appears they lambasted the Khan Academy strictly for profit's sake . In my mind it tarnishes their stellar reputation.
I have no affiliation with the Khan Academy nor with other related institution. I am a retired scientist who has enjoyed viewing some of the Kahn Academy lessons. FossilsFriend
When someone calls your intelligence into question, it is usually not smart to confirm that you are that stupid. Of course, you being stupid, do exactly that.
It is irrelevant that the parents make the choice for the kids whether or not home-schooled (and private schooled, for that matter) children are a self-selected sample or not.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Can you link a study for this assertion?
Khan is a phenomena. I hold a post-grad degree but still feel if I had some teachers like Khan I would have done much better in my career.Teaching is an art and Sal is a master at it.A guy spending hours teaching courses in such a simplistic way with no remuneration should be awarded whatever is equivalent to Nobel in Education instead of being pilloried for a few construed faults
The Internet is only a supplement. Why do teacher's feel threatened? Even if 95% of visitors do not like the site, 5% like and have found it useful.. That is great enough.
Yes, professional teachers do a very important job, but there's a reason our society did just fine without mandatory school laws for so long.
Our society did not do just fine, it got by, but things have improved at an increasingly accelerated rate since public education was introduced. I can see how that is problematic for Luddites and conservatives.
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Have you seen how many children are growing up with both parents working, or a single parent? How can these people home school? My wife is a stay at home mom and we choose to send our children to an excellent public school even though the rent in our area is high compared to nearby areas with worse schools. We volunteer in the schools and know our children's teachers and schoolmates. We are greeted by name when we step into the office.
Public schooling has given us the standard of living we take for granted and it gives opportunity to children across the US. The only reason public schools measure up poorly against private and charter schools is they are required to take all comers. They often end up pouring resources into high needs students. These can be disabled students, or just disruptive students. I have myself seen teachers forced to dedicate a substantial amount of time to a handful of students whose parents have lax discipline. I don't begrudge the disabled, but I do begrudge the unruly.
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The US has a 99% literacy rate. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. That doesn't mean you should take away the water and leave him in a desert.
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You declaring "Self Selection" in no way makes me stupid. You probably don't get the irony in you thinking it does.
Have you seen how many children are growing up with both parents working, or a single parent? How can these people home school?
The same way all of the other home schooling families where both parents work, or they are a single parent. There are lots of ways this gets done. For younger kids, there are family or friends that babysit during the day (just like what is done for kids not old enough for public school) and schooling in the evenings and weekends. For older kids, they can watch themselves during the day. School work can be done during the day by responsible kids, and can still be done in the evening and weekends. In grade school, it only takes an hour or two to vastly outpace what can be taught in a full public school day. For middle and high school, it only takes an hour or two of instruction, and the rest of the time is (just like public school) self study.
Don't construe the statement that "Most" parents could homeschool with "All" parents can homeschool. I am fully aware that sometimes it just cannot be done. Most of the time, when people say they "Can't" homeschool, what they really mean is that other things are more important. How many people do you really know that require both parents to work? I am not asking about how many require both parents to work to keep their current standard of living. I asking how many actually would be on the street, unable to eat or rent an apartment if they both didn't work. Honestly, in a many two earner households, one of the spouses is paying to work. Between extra work clothes, child care (which goes down a lot when the free public school child care kicks in), car expenses, lunches out, etc., etc, etc. many people would find that there is little to no income from one of their salaries.
My wife is a stay at home mom and we choose to send our children to an excellent public school even though the rent in our area is high compared to nearby areas with worse schools. We volunteer in the schools and know our children's teachers and schoolmates. We are greeted by name when we step into the office.
None of this has anything to do with quality of public schooling, or in any way compares it to private school. Volunteering at the school, being greeted by name and knowing your children's teachers and schoolmates is a given with homeschooling. It is the exception at public schools. Even then, things like being greeted by name does not imply quality education. My local Safeway greets me by name. That doesn't mean I would want to use it as his primary source of education.
Public schooling has given us the standard of living we take for granted and it gives opportunity to children across the US.
This is a myth. Public schooling followed wealth. It didn't lead it.
The only reason public schools measure up poorly against private and charter schools is they are required to take all comers. They often end up pouring resources into high needs students. These can be disabled students, or just disruptive students. I have myself seen teachers forced to dedicate a substantial amount of time to a handful of students whose parents have lax discipline. I don't begrudge the disabled, but I do begrudge the unruly.
That is an argument for not sending your kid to public school if they have potential. It is an explanation for one of the reasons homeschooled kids generally get a better education. Pointing out a failing doesn't mean it isn't a failing.
In theory public school should be cheap and more effective than homeschooling. In practice, it is more expensive and less effective. There are a lot of reasons that public school is failing. Plugging our ears and repeating "Public school is good...Public school is good..." isn't going to fix it.
Interestingly enough, 'Unschoolers' people that think kids will just pick up what they want and need to know have just as high of litaracy as those in the public school system. I will grant that they tend to learn to read a bit later. They usually seem to learn to read between 8 and 10, but they do learn to read. One piece that generally gets missed when comparing low literacy rate countries with the US is that in the US, the path of least resistance is to learn to read. Just driving around, kids are going to see a giant 'M' and that 'M' is going to stand for "McDonalds". They will see a giant 'KFC' and that giant 'KFC' will stand for 'Kentucky Fried Chicken'. They will see signs with the letters 'S', 'T', 'O', 'P' on them, and it will be discussed with them that the sign is a 'STOP' sign. In low literacy rate countries, reading is not expected, so written words are not everywhere. In the US, children are bombarded with the written word all day every day. Children simply cannot escape the written word in the US. There is so much writing that not only do we have it everywhere we look, it is even ubiquitous in the places we don't look. Knock a whole in your walls, and you will find writing all over the inside of the walls. Smash open your television set and there will be writing all over the inside of that too.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. That doesn't mean you should take away the water and leave him in a desert.
Since this is a discussion of which is more important sanitation or education, I will point out that leading a horse to a poison well is as bad or worse than leaving him in a desert.
No, it shows that you know jack shit about statistics.
Here's a cracker 'top 50% income'-Polly.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
And yet you offer nothing of value to the conversation...
I got my stat from wikipedia and it does appear to be incorrect, I apologize. I still think education trumps sanitation. You can have a bunch of clean morons, or you can teach people to clean up. Kind of like the old give a man a fish, or teach a man to fish parable.
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I have nothing against home schooling, when it is not used to box your child into a belief system. Children need to be taught values by their parents, but they don't need to be over sheltered.
Public schools did not follow wealth, it was an important aspect of colonial life in most places. It was often one of the first things established in new towns. Granted there were places that had to be dragged into it, and the were mostly places of poverty.
Public schools give kds more opportunity then they will ever get being home schooled. These are the people they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives, why shelter them from the truth. Every parent should be adding to what their kids get in a public school, it should be a base, not the sum of their education. Pawning their "home schooling" off on siblings or babysitters is the biggest cop out I have ever heard. Providing them self study opportunity is great, but not as a replacement for schooling.
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...was also published in WP.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/sal-khan-responds-to-critic/2012/07/25/gJQA83rW9W_blog.html.
He may not be a trained teacher, but he did graduate from the premier technical college in the US in math. Perhaps it is the middle school math teacher who is possibly wrong.
Before anyone asks for a citation, www.rushlimbaughsass.com
Delight? More like relief.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They spend the extra hours breaking the things they made during the regular week, do they?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The problem with sanitation is that it isn't a matter of 'Teaching' them to be clean. You can teach people all you want, but when you pack 8 million people into New York City and don't have sanitation services, you have a problem that can't be educated away. That is just with garbage collection. If you look at things like sewage and water sanitation, the issue is dramatically worse. No matter how educated the population is, you simply cannot get 8 million people to personally deliver their chamber pots to a central location. Unless you are talking about rural areas, it is simply not a matter of education. Wells need to be a certain distance from septic. If they are not, disease becomes a problem.
Kind of like the twist of that parable. Give a man a fire and he will be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
I will give me regular disclaimer on these kinds of discussions.... I am not against public education. As it is currently structure, it is a crappy money sinking resource, but it is a resource. What I am against is that it is held up on a pedestal over far more important resources, and it is considered a sacred cow that cannot be criticized. When people choose to use better resources, they are attacked and derided.
Public schools did not follow wealth, it was an important aspect of colonial life in most places. It was often one of the first things established in new towns.
When they had the wealth to do so.
Public schools give kds more opportunity then they will ever get being home schooled.
Of course this is an unsubstantiated myth.
These are the people they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives, why shelter them from the truth.
When was the last time you were in a room with thirty people exactly the same age as you and that you had no choice in associating with? Me? It was my last day of public school. My guess is that it is the same for you. How many people from your public school do you deal with on any regular basis? For me it is 1, and 2 or three more that I deal with every few years. These are not the people your kids will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
Every parent should be adding to what their kids get in a public school, it should be a base, not the sum of their education.
Except that isn't how public education works. If a parent is taking on the role of educating their child, their child will far outpace the public school. Thus the only thing left for the public school to offer is a belief system. Using the public school as the 'base' of your child's education is setting the bar extremely low.
Pawning their "home schooling" off on siblings or babysitters is the biggest cop out I have ever heard.
You do realize that this is done in public schools all the time, right? Having a student tutor another student is a learning process in itself. You know those oral reports you did in school? The ones where you instructed other students on a subject? Those were not a bad thing. The familial relationship should have no bearing on your opinion of that subject. If your implying that homeschool entails parents dumping their children off on their siblings even a majority of the time, you are horribly confused. As for dumping the kids and responsibility off on a babysitter, that is the very premise of modern public school. Every single time you hear someone say that they "Can't afford to homeschool", that is an open admission that they are using the public school system as a babysitter and dumping their kids education off on the free babysitter. With that complaint you are projecting your disdain for public school onto those that don't do what you hate.
Providing them self study opportunity is great, but not as a replacement for schooling.
Sure. I agree, and there is a small subset of homeschoolers that basically rely on self study as the primary method. They are a very small subset, and the sad thing is that their kids tend to be at least as well educated as those that attend public school. Group faux study is also not a replacement for schooling either.
Agreed. Eighty per cent of my students benefit from the free or reduced lunch program. Their families are hardly candidates for bilking money out of.
. . . and to be clear, the district will provide a lot, but often, time is the real cost. Either you spend precious hours filling out forms for twelve dollars worth of supplies that can be purchased at a grocery store, or you have to wait three months for the supplies to arrive from an approved vendor. Government bureaucracy at ti's best!
We will have to agree to disagree. You can educate away filth, it has happened multiple times historically, that's were our current sanitation systems come from. If Sanitation in New York disappeared overnight the city would empty to a more sustainable level. Changes don't happen in a vacuum.
I also have no problem with home schooling or private schooling. I do think charter schools are a money/power grab although they do address a real issue. I also think the only reason home schooling is viable for most people is the strength of their public school education.
Cheap storage VM.
When was the last time you were in a room with thirty people exactly the same age as you and that you had no choice in associating with?
Not exactly the same age, but you just described going to work, which I did yesterday.
I actually talk to no one I went to public school with. I was an Army brat. I would also like to know how your home school babysitter stacks up against a professional teacher who has years of experience. There are bad apples, but many, most in my area, are excellent. I know because I stay involved.
Of course I know about children co-learning. That is a major benefit of public schools as well as the clubs and exposure to other ideas (more opportunity).
Cheap storage VM.
Yes. I think it is safe to assume that neither of us are going to convince the other here on slashdot.
While it might be possible for America to reverse it's trend towards urbanization, you would be looking a incident that dwarfs the Great Irish Potato Famine, and that would be just for New York. Not counting the rest of the country.
I also have no problem with public schooling (In theory). It is the way that it is practiced that I have some problems with, and I wouldn't call for it to be shut down even in it's current incarnation. I think the public schools themselves are just as much of a money/power grab as charter schools.
If you want to see some more money grab. Look at the homeschool "Umbrella" programs. This is where the public schools pay homeschoolers a couple of hundred dollars so that they can put the kids names on their enrollment forms and collect money for having the kid "enrolled" at their school. Look also at what some schools are doing now where they are calling kids that miss too many days "homeschooled" under the "umbrella" program and collecting money for them being in the classroom.
Trivia that most people don't know about homeschooling: In most states (all?) every child needs to be enrolled in a public or private school. Thus, "homeschooling" isn't "not enrolled in school" as most people believe. Here in CA, and I believe it is the same nation wide, to "homeschool" you must either be enrolled in a tradition public/private school and given permission to hold classes in your home (e.g. the umbrella programs). Or you open a private school of your own that just happens to be in your home. That is what I did. My son attends an extremely exclusive private school in California. It is so exclusive that it has a student population of 1, and a teacher to student ration of 2:1.
Nobody deals with the kids they were in school with. They don't deal with them as specific individuals. They don't deal with them as abstractions. A group of 8 year olds is not the same as a group of adults that range in age form 18 to 60. There is simply no correlation other than the very weak argument that you will sometimes have to deal with people you don't like, and since homeschooled kids learn those same situations that doesn't apply. Of course, homeschooled kids learn about dealing with people that they don't like in a more realistic way than public school kids. As an adult, you decide every day if dealing with the people is worth the benefit of being where you are. You don't HAVE to be at work with those people. If the environment is bad enough, you can leave. If other individuals are abusive enough, they will get fired. Kids in a public school classroom do not learn that. They learn that if they don't stay in a bad environment then cops will come and arrest them. They learn that they have no choice in where they will spend their time.
You seem to be stuck on the idea that babysitters act as teachers. I never said that, and it is not the way things would typically work. I said, that if you are a single parent and want to home school, you use a baby sitter for kids that can't be left alone, for the purpose of babysitting. You do your schooling when you get home from work. And, the abilities of "a professional teacher who has years of experience" is vastly over rated. We SHOULD be able to expect professional teachers to be vastly better than your average Joe. The fact that they are not better, and frequently a lot worse is one of my big problems with our public school system. Our public school system is to education what the Geek Squad is to the computer industry. Having years of "professional experience" is not evidence of skill in the trade. There is no excuse for my child to be blazing through 5th grade curriculum at 8 year of age when 10 year olds are just getting started on it. Even if both my son and I were genetic freaks giving us vastly superior intellectual capabilities compared to normal humans, there is no excuse for "professional teachers with years of experience" to fail at keeping up.
You also seem to be confused about exposure to other ideas. Why would you think homeschooled kids do not join clubs and are not exposed to other ideas? Perhaps you just made it up? Perhaps you saw a tv show that used it as a plot device? I can tell you that it isn't the homeschooled kids that are sheltered from other ideas. It is the public schooled kids. The public schools are homogenous places. The kids are all pulled from the same communities, so the belief that they are a diverse set of people is a fiction. Then when they get the kids in the public school, there is a massive and open push to turn each school into a tribe. To give up individuality and be a cog in the machine. Even within the school, there are sub-tribes that kids are heavily discouraged from crossing between.
I don't know if you have school aged kids of your own, if you do, consider how geographically wide their friend pool is. For most public school kids, it tends to be in the range of a couple of miles. For home schooled kids having friends all over the state is common. Even all over the country. Our nation is a very diverse place, and limiting their friends to a couple of miles around their home is not exposing them to other ideas.
The idea of public school isn't really the problem. The implementation is.
My state is extremely home schooler friendly. My wife and I have discussed it at length.
Cheap storage VM.
Your final point was another reason why only the relatively wealthy and well educated can home school. Try trekking a kid across the state to meet friends if you use public transportation or have a crushing workload. These kids are also meeting a self selecting a self selecting group. There may be diversity, but I guarantee it is not the same as a vibrant community, maybe it is more diverse then a small town.
Cheap storage VM.