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Kids To Get the Best CS Teachers $15/Hr Can Buy
theodp (442580) writes "Billionaire-backed Code.org, enthusiastically tweets U.S. Dept. of Education Chief Arne Duncan, is 'providing tremendous leadership in bringing coding & computer science to our nation's schools.' Including bringing kids in Broward County Public Schools the best computer science teachers $15.00-an-hour can buy, according to a document on the school district's website. One wonders how the Broward teachers feel about Code.org apparently coughing up $38.33-an-hour for Chicago teachers who attend the required Code.org professional development, which ironically covers equity issues. Duncan's shout-out comes days after Code.org claimed in its Senate testimony that 'our students have voted with their actions [participating in an hour-long, Angry Birds-themed Blockly tutorial starring Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates]: that learning computer science is this generation's Sputnik moment, that it's part of the new American Dream, and that it should be available to every student, in every school, as part of the standard curriculum.'"
For those who don't feel like clicking on the linked documents, they aren't talking about teacher salaries, what they earn teaching. The pay also isn't set by code.org.
When a Chicago teacher spends a couple of hours doing professional development (taking a class or seminar), Chicago pays their teachers $38/hour for the time they spend at the seminar or wwhatever professional development they choose to do. Boward pays their teachers $15/hour for professional development. Those rates are for time doing prof dev, NOT teaching students, and it doesn't have squat to do with code.org - the districts pay for prof dev is the same for any class the teacher wants to take. (Of course it needs to be approved as professional development, a skydiving class probably wouldn't be approved for payment.)
You get what you pay for.
Money talks and bullshit walks.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We are in times where someone who makes a billion developing a social app or game is considered to have done something important.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Hey, that's cynical and wrong. It's people looking to lower wages of software developers as well as justify immediate requests for more H1Bs, all while taking away the focus on improving our nation's weak skills in the basics of reading, math, and science.
(Note that cynicism is orthogonal of correctness.)
Broward county teachers who have a bachelor's degree average $41,000 salary for the nine-month school year.
Are you sure they are able to teach with only a BS? I don't know about your area but where I live new teachers can only teach with a master's degree in education. Oddly enough we are even rejecting people who have a PhD in the field they would like to teach, and telling them only a master's in education will do.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Here is what Education Hell looks like
well with seatle setting min wage at 15 an hour, If these people are in seatle, they are saying that coders are worth the same amount as a mcdonalds cashier...
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
... why not look at what Code.org has to offer?
This is not a sampling, and it is free to all.
K-8 Intro To Computer Science Course (15-25 hours)
If you can teach coding, you can get a job making more than 15 an hour. You're only going to get awful teachers at that salary.
THIS is how you really do addition in hardware.
It sounds like a perfectly reasonable requirement to me. Having a Ph.D. doesn't qualify you to be a plumber or auto mechanic, so what makes you think it qualifies you to be a teacher?
Things are somewhat different at the university level because you're assuming that the students are basically adults that have already learned how to educate themselves, and the instructor is there simply as a guide. Plus there are grad students and a tutors around specifically to help them when your guidance is so piss-poor that they can't follow it. There's no shortage of absolutely brilliant researchers doing an utterly incompetent job of teaching at the university level. And that's okay - they can offer their students other things: windows into what makes the field vibrant. The prestige of having taken a class with X, etc.
When you're talking about educating children though it's a completely different ball of wax. Children aren't just miniature adults, they're inherently different creatures, important aspects of their brain have still only begun to develop, and you can't expect them to educate themselves with minimal guidance as you would an adult.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you do the math that works out to over $30k a year. Not shabby at all, especially for a teacher.
We are talking about Broward County, FL. A place with a population exceeding 1 million, and an above average cost of living; fair market rents exceeding $13000 a year, for a 1-Bedroom apartment.
At $30k a year.. you can just about cover taxes, shelter, food and water, for one adult and some basic necessities.
You've been asked twice already to say where this policy supposedly exists. What states are you talking about? I don't want to call BS on your post if some stupid state where liberals don't think about the consequences of their policies actually did something so dumb.
Since the commenter won't answer your question, here goes: Google points me to the National Council on Teacher Quality's 2013 State Teacher Quality Yearbook, which says that: "Connecticut, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New York and Oregon all require a master’s degree or coursework equivalent to a master’s degree" (p. 87).
As I mentioned in another post, at least one of the states has actually faced reductions in state funding for education, which has resulted in fewer people staffing the dept of education to evaluate teachers for licensing. That doesn't sound like a particularly liberal ideal to me, being as liberals are associated with throwing money at problems with wild abandon.
When I think of government throwing money at problems with wild abandon, the first image that comes to mind is the Bush Administration sending $12 billion to Iraq in pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills and handing them out to contractors and others that nobody can identify. http://www.theguardian.com/wor... I've heard GWB called a lot of things but not a liberal. Maybe wars don't count, but I can think of a lot of other dubious programs that conservatives have thrown money at with wild abandon, like chastity-based sex education, Homeland Security, the war on drugs, the prison system and charter schools.
I don't consider myself exactly a liberal, but I will defend them (or anybody else) when they're unfairly attacked. I'll also criticize them when they do something stupid.
The sign that somebody is thinking critically is that he criticizes his own side.