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Chicago Mayor Praises Google For Buying Kids Microsoft Surfaces
theodp (442580) writes "Google earned kudos from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week for teaming up with Staples to fund the projects of 367 of the city's 22,519 public school teachers on "begfunding" site DonorsChoose.org. "Everything that you asked for...every project that the teachers put on to help their students learn, exceed and excel here in the city of Chicago, you now have fully funded," Mayor Emanuel said. "Chicago's hardworking public school teachers are doing all that they can-and more-to support their students, but they need more help," said Rob Biederman, head of Chicago Public Affairs at Google. "We jumped at the chance to join with DonorsChoose.org and Staples to make Chicago's local classroom wishes come true." So what kind of dreams did Google make possible? Ironically, a look at Google Chicago's Giving Page shows that the biggest project funded by Google was to outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531, or about 6.5% of the $190,091 Google award. Other big ticket projects funded by Google included $5,931 for a personal home biodiesel kit and $5,552 for a marimba (in the middle of the spectrum was $748 for "Mindfulness Education"). In addition to similar "flash-funding" projects in Atlanta (paper towels!) and the Bay Area, Google and DonorsChoose have also teamed up this year to reward teachers with $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code (part of Google's $50 million Made With Code initiative) and an unknown amount for AP STEM teachers who passed Google muster (part of Google's $5 million AP STEM Access grant)."
Surface sales must have just doubled!
The summary could use some more hyperlinks.
This $190K expense will buy google an awful lot of free press.
It's nice that Google did this, but let's be clear - the Chicago Public School system has a staggering number of problems, and a marimba and a classroom full of MS Surface laptop/tablets won't really make a difference outside of the handful of children that will be able to actually touch/use these items.
Ken
Chicago Public School teachers are paid between $50-97K, based on education and time in job, plus pension and healthcare benefits.
http://www.ctunet.com/for-memb...
Ken
How can a Marimba (which from a look at Google is similar to a Xylophone) cost so much money?
The marimba is good .... and maybe the home bio-diesel kit.
And then there's
$400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code
Because doubling the workforce without doubling the jobs has worked out so great for every other sector of the economy since 1970 or so when it took off.
This isn't an ipad? Crap this sucks.
Just wondering ... but why didn't public schools need to engage in constant fundraising and beg-a-thons in the good old days, for basics? Governments weren't spending more on them then, proportionately.
We are spending a river now. Where is it going?
outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531 [...] $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code
How do these fit together? Since when were programming tools ported to Windows RT?
What schools should be teaching is basic entrepreneur skills so that people can create their own jobs after they graduate.
How likely are kids to carry bad associations formed on a Surface through to, say, Xbox products?
Chicago Public School teachers are paid between $50-97K, based on education and time in job, plus pension and healthcare benefits.
http://www.ctunet.com/for-memb...
Yep. Teachers in general are not underpaid. But there's a taboo against saying so.
Last research I heard, a few years back, was that computers in the classroom actually harmed academic performance except in the sole case that the point was to learn about computers, because they were a distraction and also students didn't tend to take longhand notes, which is an important part of learning.
And if the class is a computer class, tablets seem like the worst possible choice.
Ya, because a bunch of toys that will distract from coursework and be broken in 2 months are "needed equipment".
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If I read this right, the amount give is peanuts and will not have any significant impact whatsoever. If you play it right, apparently positive press can be have for cheap trinkets these days.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
not bad for working only 9 months a year
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Whenever I point this out to a teacher (like my spouse), that they get pay on par with year-round workers, they give the boilerplate response "But we only get paid for the days we work! Not the entire year!".
Which means given an 8 hour workday, instead of making $24 an hour(for a 52 week year), they are actually making $32 an hour. This is under "underpaid" at all.
TLDR; Teachers make much more per-hour than people assume, and they do not like it at all when this is pointed out.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
I would argue the reverse, they are in GENERAL underpaid, but there are definitely some who are NOT underpaid: see Chicago.
Here is a list of median and starting salaries for teachers. In my state, California, the median is $67k. In my county, Santa Clara, it is $79k. They also receive generous benefits, and summers off. Teachers are paid fairly well compared to other non-technical college graduates.
Well, then your spouse dosen't know how to account for their time very well.
When I was teaching, I topped out at $52k a year. This was in the midwest, and the top-paid teacher in the district I think made near $60k.
We were required to be in the classroom for 990 hours. IF you just count that, 52,000 / 990 = $52/hr.
But I was required to be in school more than just the kids. This averaged to be 1 hour before they arrived, and 3 after. (4hrs*5days*39weeks) = 780 + 990 = 1770 hours required to be in school. Now, the per-hour figure goes down to just under $30/hr.
Oh, and if I don't get my grading, lesson plans, meetings, and everything else done in those four hours (I rarely did), then I had to do that as well. Lets be really conservative and say that was only 6 hours a week. 6*39 = 2,004 hours. $25/hr.
Oddly enough, ~2000 hours is what an average blue-collar worker gets paid for per year, including vacations. $52k is pretty good, but I was also at top-pay. That is what was worked-up to.
Totally true. Human brains haven't evolved (sadly) and what got us to where we are today is a tiny group of scientists and some inventors who did exceptionally well with what we had and did in the past. Realistically, we need to focus on THOSE people and what made them possible instead of attempting to to a 1 size fits all solution with the silly dream of making everybody into an Einstein. (If you want to try doing that, you are going to have to leave Einsteins alone with 1900s education and place the rest into your human experiments.... until you end up with hundreds of education models where then the biggest problem will be inventing the Sorting Hat.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Chicago Public School teachers are paid between $50-97K, based on education and time in job, plus pension and healthcare benefits.
Since the average income of full-time workers with a master's degree is $62,000 http://www.census.gov/prod/200... , that doesn't seem unreasonable. I'm not one of those conservatives who wants to reduce everybody in the country except themselves to Wallmart wages. I want to live in a country in which I'm getting a good salary for a job well done and everybody else is getting a good salary for a job well done.
There seem to be different kinds of teachers -- some of them work hard to keep up in their field, and give their students the attention they need, and some of them don't.
I think good teachers deserve the money. The bad teachers don't. If they're bad teachers, they should be trained to improve. If they can't be trained to improve, they should be fired.
Take a science teacher. I know a lot of science teachers who read Science magazine every week to keep current with the field. I read Science magazine (most) every week just to keep current with biology, and it's a tough job. Imagine if I also had to keep up with physics. They go to science conferences and teaching conferences. They keep ahead of their kids with computers (no easy task). They help their students do science fair projects. Every so often, they have to learn an entirely new curriculum. That's a big job and they may need the summer just to catch up with their work.
Somebody is going to say, "Why do science teachers have to spend so much time preparing their courses? It's all done. They can just recite the textbook." That's a complete misunderstanding of what science teachers do. Teaching science isn't teaching revealed truth, like the Bible. Science teachers have to understand what's going on in the entire world of science, and then select the subset which is most appropriate for their students. When the Higgs boson was discovered, and kids were interested in it, science teachers had to prepare to teach what the Higgs boson was and its significance (I couldn't).
Just as important, teachers have to learn how to teach.
For example, there are certain topics that kids can understand at a certain age. If you go beyond what they can understand, they won't learn anything, and you'll bore them or confuse them and they'll be turned off on science completely.
For example, according to the science curriculum, molecules are too abstract for most middle-school kids. I was surprised at that, but it makes sense. Suppose you tell an 11-year-old kid, "There are things called molecules, that you can't see, that you can't verify experimentally, and you'll have to trust me that they exist, and here's an artist's impression of what they look like." That's not teaching science. That's memorization. You could say exactly the same thing about angels. You can't verify them experimentally either.
Understanding what and how to teach about science is a tough job. If a science teacher were doing a good job of educating my kids, I wouldn't resent him or her for getting $100,000 a year. How much is it worth to you to have a kid who understands science?
Some people are going to say, "My wife is a teacher and she works seven hours a day and gets the summer off, and forgets about work once she's outside the school door."
Sure, there are bad teachers, but how many? Look at the Vergara case, where the anti-union, anti-tenure and charter school advocates got their chance to argue that the schools were filled with incompetent tenured union-protected teachers. What was the best evidence they could come up with, and based on that, how many incompetent teachers were there?
A guess from an expert who, when pressed, said that there were 1-3% "at maximum" who were, not incompetent, but gave "cause for concern" http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Because private schools are not full of retarded children.
You could never pay me enough for me to want to be a teacher. I'm glad other people are prepared to do it though.....
why not just fund the schools well in the first place instead of making them create beggar projects? Oh that's right, we'd have to tax corporations properly in order to afford to do that - instead we have a system that lets corps off on taxes and makes them look like good guys if they step up to help out anywhere at all. FEH!
What I don't get is what's wrong with _desktops_ in a school lab. They can't be broken or lost as easily. They are more powerful. Each desktop can be shared between several pupils. They're also cheaper, even with larger monitors, have better input devices (real keyboards and mice), and since they're not mobile, they can be set up to boot from the network with zero maintenance.
Why burn perfectly good money on shit kids don't need, especially when research shows it does nothing for their academic achievement?
Ironically we have a "good news" item here which highlights the problems with school funding and companies avoiding taxes. If google, M$ and apple paid their fair share, like most other American corporations, then perhaps the schools could have bought those surfaces without having to go to an official begging site to beg for help from those tax avoiders. And only $200k at that. I wish I could pay no taxes like they do!
In my county, Santa Clara, it is $79k. They also receive generous benefits, and summers off. Teachers are paid fairly well compared to other non-technical college graduates.
I have to cry foul on this one. $79K is lot more than minimum wage but not high considering responsibility they have (future adults are children) especially this is Silicon Valley (one million dollars is not a lot of money). Yes, they get benefits as compared to other jobs that used to have benefits like pension plans but there is a jihad to eliminate those. Others not in the profession from billionaires to working stiffs don't believe teachers should have these.
You don't know teachers. Many have to use their earnings to buy supplies because politicos are too cheap to provide much of basic stuff they used to provide. Many teachers spend a lot of time after class and at home preparing lesson plans, etc. They don't have teachers aides like back in the days.
I don't want to hear this about there's not enough money, we find plenty to spend on countries, prisons, spying on citizens, etc.
mfwright@batnet.com
Private schools get to be selective about which students they accept, they can get rid of students who do not perform well, parents who are dropping five figures (or more) a year are going to make damn sure that their children are not slacking off, and finally those families that can afford private school tend to recognize the value of education in leading to success. It is not always about big gov vs private industry as you ignorantly assume.
1) It's not Google's job to fix said issues, nor are they going to get into/win that mess. 2) What's your better alternative? Don't fund it?
I totally agree, I work in the k-12 education field (support staff, not a teacher). I see the crap they have to take every day from incorrigible kids to useless parents, yet it seems everyone wants to take pot shots at them. They take care of a precious commodity and should earn a decent wage.
I'm a Senior Software Developer in the Twin Cities area. I'd think myself underpaid at $32/hour, and teachers have a lot of requirements I don't have. I don't think it's inherently harder to sling code than keep the attention of a class.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There's something I know about a private school student that I don't know about a public school student: the parents actually made a choice about the child's education, and were prepared to back it up with money (either theirs or by seeking out a grant or scholarship). These kids then have parents who have demonstrated interest in their child's education, and that's a big factor in K-12 success.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Teachers are also expected to ride the never-ending cycle of student debt themselves, as a Master's degree -- which they should be pursuing in the evenings on top of teaching during the day - is essential to advancement from starting salaries.
Except you're not doing blue-collar work, and white collar workers would *love* to only work 2080 hours a year.
the fix? Hard reboot, remove and reinstall the keyboard driver, do a factory reset and reinstall all apps and data -- all pretty extreme. And gestures? Well, sometimes they work but mostly no.
On an RT?
The myth is that a technology like Surface will help in education. It doesn't. From palm pilots, educational software, computers, they don't work with kids. I know, I threw away tens of thousands of bucks on technology. I should have spent it on a hell of a good night in Vegas for as much good as it did. Good old fasioned learning works. Looking at subjects, actually doing them to the point that you can teach them does work. Problems, problems, problems to get the brain to work on it. This is the very thing that they - DON'T - teach in school. How to learn. At least not intentionally. Sometimes you come across a real teacher instead of an educator who will actually teach you.
And what's "technical" about Wall Streeters pushing buttons on a computer and raking in $300,000/yr? Long hours? Teachers work long hours grading papers, doing lesson plans, attending after school activities, attending graduate classes for their Masters degree (as mandated by most states), etc. Not only that, their jobs often require they not only teach certain subject matter but also teach children proper social behavior, right and wrong, responsibility and other skills many modern parents fail to teach their kids in order to maintain a learning environment. It's not anything like sitting in a plush office with a panoramic view having peons bring your coffee, fetch you shrimp before sucking your dick under their mahogany desk like many CEO's do. All the while getting tips from corporate lawyers on how to avoid paying taxes. Instilling knowledge and teaching social mores to children is far more responsible an activity than what the "elite" think of themselves.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire