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"Shark Tank" Competition Used To Select Education Tech
theodp writes "With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the tech billionaire-backed NewSchools Venture Fund, the Silicon Valley Education Foundation used a competition based on the reality show Shark Tank to determine which educational technology entrepreneurs would win the right to have teachers test their technology on students for the rest of the year. 'Ten companies, selected from 80 original applicants,' reports Mercury News columnist Mike Cassidy, 'had three minutes to convince a panel of educators and then a panel of business brains that their ideas would be a difference maker in middle school math classes.' The winners? Blendspace, which helps teachers create digital lessons using Web-based content; Front Row Education, which generates individual quizzes for students and tracks their progress as they work through problems; LearnBop, which offers an automated tutoring system with content written by math teachers; and Zaption, which lets teachers use existing online videos as lessons by adding quizzes, discussion sections, images and text."
but the simple method of firing 10% of the worst teachers and reassigning their students to the rest does more to improve schools than anything else.
If such a simple method always worked then you could apply it recursively to improve results further. Clearly, many schools need more than 9 teachers therefore the reality must be more complex than you claim.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
All the winners are things that let teachers shit out more auto-generated homework, quizzes/tests, lessons, and tutoring.
Here's a solution: Hire teachers who know the subject and are willing to teach children. Pay them decently, and fire the teachers who can't teach. Tell the unions to fuck right on off.
While you're at it, fire the students who screw over other kids because they can't behave like a human being for a few hours a day. Tell their parents to fuck right on off, too. "You're child was expelled for being a fucking nuisance. Correct the behavior or have fun homeschooling the little shit yourself." And hold all the stupid kids back, too. "Your child failed to learn anything and will not advance to the next grade."
It's fucking simple and it'll fucking work, so it'll never fucking happen.
If union rules...
Ah, yes, because in a field where most of the workers are barely scraping by on $30 - 40K a year, not to mention spending a fair amount of their own money on school supplies that their employer should be buying, obviously unions are the problem.
Dude, get real - this ain't the AFL-CIO, protecting the $75/hr rate of guys who rivet 1 body panel into a Chevy. Maybe if folks such as yourself spent more time trying to help teachers, rather than bitching about the fact that "OMG they have a union," education wouldn't be in such a piss-poor state.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Hey the fact is union contracts do prevent VERY bad teachers from being fired. And the net result can be very GOOD teachers get let go instead. Just because one teacher has worked for 20 years doesn't mean they should be automatically kept instead of the 2nd year teacher. Especially if the 20 year teacher is TERRIBLE.
If eating 10% of a box of cereal with make me full and content
That's the thing though it won't. Not always. If you're already full, eating that won't work. If you're really hungry you'll need to repeat several times.
That's the whole point.
The OP claimed it was simple. It's not because blind application of the rule does not work. In your restating of the rule, you've implicitly introduced two more conditions: that you are hungry before and theat you are not after. You understand the more complex reality so deeply that you've not even realised that you've taken it into account.
Translating what you said back would yield "if the school has 10% bad teachers, remove 10% of the worst ones".
TL;DR reality is too complex for a simple rule as proposed by the OP.
SJW n. One who posts facts.