No. It's actually quite common for the same teacher to be given lower-performing students year after year.
Since people can't seem to get this through their skulls: Students are not randomly assigned to classes.
My wife teaches history. Starting this year, her scores are going to go down and stay lower than all of the rest of the teachers. Is it because she suddenly started sucking this year? Or is it because she volunteered to take on a class of students who only learned to speak English in the last couple years? While the students are probably smarter on average than the rest of the school (as their parents worked very hard to live in an area with good schools), their test scores are invariably lower. They know how to speak English, but don't recognize all the vocabulary used on tests, and lack the cultural framework to understand other things. She can't even show improvement with them because they don't have any previous tests to compare to.
Also, a few years ago, a new history teacher was hired. She turned in the highest scores for the grade. Is it because she was the best teacher? Was it just luck? Or was it that the administration decided to give the majority of the students on special education plans to the other two teachers? I know people think that was wrong, and that she should have been held accountable for the fact that she couldn't handle it. That's fantastic, as yet again, we've lost sight of the actual goal here. Those students were moved in order to ensure they got a better education. Yes, the other teachers could have complained about the fact that their scores were going to go down, but they didn't because unlike the majority of people pushing for test scores as evaluation metrics, they actually care about the students.
And I can already see the argument: "Well, those shouldn't be considered for the metric..." Maybe not, but federal laws say that those students' scores cannot be treated any differently than any other student. This, in the end, is the biggest difference in quality between private schools and public schools: private schools hide the scores of their special education students -- or simply expel or refuse to admit them. Most of the charter schools and private schools in this area simply won't take special needs students. When they do, they put them in special programs, which basically means: The same classes but with a tutor paid for by the parents and a stipulation that the student's scores aren't part of the rest of the school's statistics. Oh, and they usually make the county pay for the psych and disability evaluations (~$40K a kid, if I remember right)... because they can do that.
You see, when you have zero experience in this, it's easy to say "Well, a mediocre system is better than nothing", but that's just because you don't know what you're talking about and you can't see that the variance in scores among groups of students is greater than the variance produced by the quality of teacher. This means that no matter how you try to do it, if you base your metric on student performance, what you are measuring is trends in student grouping, not teacher quality.
Sure, my employer can fire me tomorrow. But I can also leave tomorrow.
Teacher's can't. They are on contracts, contracts which say they cannot leave without penalties, but they can be fired at any time for either misconduct or performance, with only the need for documentation.
Furthermore, as a taxpayer, I don't want my local school administration firing a bunch of teachers because (s)he doesn't like them, making me foot the bill to hire a bunch of new teachers.
Scores are arbitrary. At the very least, you can't accept the scores set by the teacher. Bad teachers would simply pad their scores with easier work/questions. If you try to standardize the scores, you're left with standardized tests. That means that you ignore any students who take tests well, regardless of what concepts they might be missing. You instead focus on the lowest students because its easier to raise a student from 60 to 70 than 90 to 100. Instead of teaching kids to understand, you focus on pointless facts, talking points, and simple word triggers because those are the only things that standardized tests are good at measuring.
And that's just the start. Let me blow your world: Teachers don't know what's on the test. Not in any of the states I've been in, anyway. All they know is that the test is taken from the curriculum. As a result, they focus on teaching the curriculum, intensely.
I won't hide the fact that my wife is a history teacher. Her yearly test scores are in the area of 94%. That means that if more than twelve students fail the test, her scores drop and she gets labeled a "sucky teacher". So, how is she supposed to justify teaching her students about the Harlem Renaissance when its not part of the curriculum? That's a day spent on a topic that isn't going to be on the test, and those twelve kids need as much time to study the stuff that will be one the test. How about the Homestead Act and how it shaped the western part of the country? Nope. Not on the curriculum. The Red Scare? Nope. The Korean War? Nope. The effect of atomic weapons on the culture of the late twentieth century? Nope. Not on the test. Don't waste time talking about it.
That is what the idiots pushing for numerical evaluations have given us. In their desire to find someone to blame for the US not being able to pretend like we are the only country that ever succeeds, they have latched onto the idea that learning can be quantified. They then claim that teachers should be judged by these quantified measurements, completely ignoring things like variance, bias, and simple statistical relevance. And in response, teachers are forced to teach only knowledge that can be quantified.
To her credit, she ignores the curriculum and tries to shove all of those things into the class anyway because both of us absolutely despise the fact that ordinary students are being robbed of actual knowledge just so some politician can spout percentages to a bunch of idiots who think that any of it matters.
Let me be more blunt: If you honestly think that test scores of any sort are an accurate reflection of the quality of a teacher, then you are either willfully ignorant or in need of an actual education.
Quit making the education system suck. You're the problem.
You do know that the majority of teachers "unions" are barred from striking, and about half are barred from collective bargaining.
You see, this is the big problem with all the people who want to blame teachers. They use terminology but have no idea what it means.
Teachers Union: Often just a rough union-like organization that offers group rates on legal counsel and representation to the local school boards. Most unions cannot strike, cannot take part in salary bargaining, and have no right to intervene or even take part in either the hiring or firing process. The majority of teachers unions are so weak and toothless that they can barely be called unions.
Teacher Tenure: I have not seen a state that has the tenure that people talk about here. At best, teachers are granted long term contracts which state that the contract cannot be terminated without documented reasons. These "tenured" teachers can absolutely be fired and I've seen over a dozen teachers with over 15 years of experience fired for various failures. Half of the point of "tenure" is to give some incentive to enter into a contract that is as lopsided as those offered to teachers: The school can fire you at any time with monetary recourse on your end based on your performance, but if the school fails to support a teacher (ie: administration are jerks to them, or otherwise harass or abuse them), they cannot leave without triggering a penalty clause in their contract. The other half, shockingly enough, is a protection for the local citizens, ensuring them that the school board or administration won't frivolously fire teachers and force taxpayers to continually pay the costs of searching for and hiring new teachers.
Three Months of Vacation: This has to be the funniest idea. Teachers don't get summer vacation, they get a mandatory furlough every year, and the kicker is that the majority of them are still expected to do some amount of work during that time. Of course, that doesn't fit a political agenda or make you feel better about that teacher in 10th grade that gave you a B after you slacked off in her class because you were a selfish jerk and wanted her to cater to your every whim. I used to live in a coal mining town, and I don't remember anyone ever talking about how lucky the plant maintenance workers were when they got a "two month" vacation every winter. They seemed to think that it sucked that they didn't get paid for two months and had no real ability to find another job to fill the time.
Are you not using even an ounce of common sense?
Are you under the (frankly, ignorant) impression that class membership is based on random distribution? Do you have any experience at all with how a school operates?
As soon as some teacher is labeled "good", they become desirable, often regardless of any later results. Parents buy into this, because, to be completely honest, they don't have a damn clue what makes a teacher good, so they just accept someone else's opinion. Then, the parents who care, request --often forcefully-- that Super-Special Jimmy is placed in the "good" teacher's class, while the parents who don't care are semi-randomly distributed elsewhere.
You see, the "good teacher" label is a feedback loop once you attach idiotic metrics like multiple choice test scores based on unrelated statistical samples of a biased group.
So, who do we blame for this? Teachers? Why? All they did was get attention for doing a good job. Administrators, for bowing to pressure from overbearing parents? I guess, but parents file lawsuits which eat money from the budget. Better to just cave than to give up an extra art teacher for the year. So, the parents, then? Sure. They're jerks. But jerks exist everywhere.
The real people we need to blame are all the passive sheep who don't call out the jerk parents for their behaviors, and all the idiots who have drank the koolaid that says that a multiple choice test given to 30 individuals is a totally accurate measure of a intensely qualitative, multi-faceted phenomena (ie: learning).
And yet, ND is one of the biggest tax sponges in the country.
While it might have the oil and coal reserves to keep itself afloat, it would still fail because the stingy populous would refuse to pay higher taxes (despite having one of the lowest tax rates in the country). Maybe we could save money by privatizing North Dakota.
I think we're actually teaching minorities and disadvantaged students... which we weren't so good at in the fifties and sixties. We've had compulsory education in every state since the early twentieth century (which is a lot shorter than many people believe), but for the first half of that century, the schools weren't so good at actually providing equal quality to all students. One of the things the DoEd is supposed to be working on is leveling that out. The apparent decline in educational quality is due in large part to the fact that we're no longer hiding the fact that we don't do so well with immigrants, minorities, and other disadvantaged students. Of course, this is also why private schools look so good. They're allowed to simply not report those scores/statistics... or simply deny admittance to the students.
Even then, I'm still on the fence about the DoEd. These days it looks more like some zombified department, serving only as the host to the parasite that is No Child Left Behind and forcing all the states to pay for standardized tests that mean absolutely nothing (Seriously: I can't imagine a more depressing achievement than having children with the greatest ability at filling out multiple choice tests). I'm fine with it going away, so long as we don't revert to pre-Civil Rights schools or move to a privatized (serve the rich, screw the poor) school system.
What are you talking about? The parents are the one's demanding them. No Child Left Behind? That was pushed by parents and politicians. "No Failure" systems? Those are pushed by parents? Grade Inflation? Parents. Only after bureaucrats started punishing schools for not following these policies did you see the sort of official support they receive now. Now, not only do you get Jimmy's parents threatening to sue you for failing him, you get the government telling you that you're going to be paid less for being honest about his abilities.
If people are looking for who to blame here, we're going to need a lot of mirrors.
...and that train of thought seems to be one of the biggest problems.
"If you don't teach to the test, then what are you teaching to?"
Obligatory Car Analogy:
"If you're not fixing the car with duck tape, then what are you fixing it with?"
Try to understand this: Teaching to the Test is a horrible way of teaching. Not only does it stifle creativity, but it prevents children from learning critical thinking, abstract understanding, and that thing we normally call "common sense". Leaving a history class with the order of every president memorized is worthless. Leaving a geography class with the capitals of every country in Europe memorized is pointless. Leaving a chemistry class with every element's atomic number memorized is a waste of everyone's time. Knowing why the president exists, and how the role has changed over time is very useful. Understanding the differences and similarities between cultures in Europe is valuable. Being able to predict how an element will behave based on its location in the periodic table is far more practical than knowing its exact atomic number.
Saying: "If you're not doing something in a known, horrible manner, then who knows how it's being done" is a pointless statement. Do we know what quality is being taught without standardized tests? Nope. Do we know what quality is being taught with standardized tests? Nope. Do we know what quality is being taught when teachers are Teaching-to-the-Test? Yes! Bad quality. As bad or worse than what it was before. And in far too many cases, really good schools are being forced to switch to Teaching-to-the-Test because idiots can only comprehend numbers and memorized facts.
If it wasn't our future we were talking about, I'd gladly accept the idiocy and then laugh at all of the people who fought for No Child Left Behind as our children become the world's best multiple-choice question answerers... and worthless at actually understanding any subject.
But then you say: No, that's not what I said. I said we should punish the people with low-achievement.
And this is where intelligent people point out that you have proposed a policy that would continue to ensure that poor people receive fewer opportunities to improve themselves to improve their path in life and to help make sure that as many immigrants as possible are funneled into that "poor people" bracket regardless of their actual intelligence. Sure, it's not targeted directly at those people, but it includes them far more often than other groups. It's subtle, but you're blind if you can't see it.
So yeah... that's a great plan for furthering the dominance of rich, white, corporate America. And thank God (just the Christian one, of course), because those rich, white, corporate Americans need help right now.
I seriously heard some "sales associate" at Best Buy tell someone that documents would print faster if they bought a parallel cable with gold connectors. While it wasn't the first time I'd heard Best Buy's sales people spouting blatant lies (1998: "You'll want the best CPU you can buy if you want to run Word", 1999: "Sound cards fail all the time. I'd never buy one without the extra warranty." 2000: "WindowsME is way faster than Windows98, and if you don't upgrade now, you'll never be able to.") it is still the winner for sheer absurdity and blatant attempt to bilk another $10 from a customer.
I was just passing by on my way to find a new printer, but when the guy said it, I couldn't help myself. I broke out laughing. Pretty loud. The guy and his two gullible customers looked at me. I was in an odd mood, so I asked the guy how fast electricity traveled in gold. Then I asked how fast it traveled in copper. He didn't know either. I told the customers that he was lying to them. Pointed at one of the cheapest cables on the shelf, and told them that was the one they wanted. The sales guy looked pissed. A few other people nearby were watching. As I walked away, some manager-looking guy asked if I needed help. I told him that I came to buy a printer, but that Office Max was only a few blocks away and their sales staff didn't lie to their customers.
Since then, I probably spent only a couple hundred dollars in Best Buy, almost entirely on DVDs. When given the choice, for any piece of hardware (even cables) I'll go to any other store. While I'm sure that in the long run, Best Buy makes decent money off lying to customers, I'd easily estimate that its lost a few thousand dollars of sales just off me. At the very least, it lost about $160 ($150 printer + $10 for uselessly-upgraded cable) that day for that guy's stupid attempt.
Not if you ask a fundamentalist (even the Literalists): It's about God's love for you... or your love for God... or God's love for the world. Considering what's actually in SoS, I find any of the options a bit creepy. Trust me, whack-job fundamentalists have an answer for everything, and any questions or challenges of inconsistency fall to "The Bible is the Word of God and the Bible says that the Word of God is never wrong".
Needless to say, few fundamentalists are familiar with circular reasoning.
The hate for steam most likely comes from the fact that Steam the service is tied to Steam the store. It's rapidly becoming a monopoly on the PC and that reflects in the stupid prices it commands for titles.
Right. Why let knowledge and research ruin a good argument.
You do know that prices on Steam are set by the publisher not Valve, right? At best, Valve picks times for sales. They don't set prices. Want to complain about high prices? Throw those complaints at the publishers.
While I agree for the most part, I would add that I've talked to a few people who work for the DoEd and none of them liked NCLB. In fact, they all hated it. Even worse, they hated the humiliating schoolhouse-style entrance placed on their office building with "No Child Left Behind" emblazoned across it, implying that it was something other than a stupid law shoved down their throats.
Since NCLB, the DoEd has doubled in size (by the estimates I've seen), yet none of that has accomplished more than forcing students to take standardized tests that show nothing, prove nothing, and are only used by people who don't understand statistics to justify their love of vouchers and private schooling.
I won't say that the DoEd was all that useful before NCLB, but it did help organize some national programs to help out struggling schools. Now it just buries all schools under pointless tests and additional costs. And convinces a generation of ignorant people that there is some shred of value in them. I know that when NCLB started enforcement, some of the local schools were seriously trying to see if they could just refuse federal funds and ignore the law. It would have been cheaper, as NCLB costs them far, far more than the federal government supplies.
Funny that NCLB seems to be so popular with neo-cons and FOX who are supposed to like small government and local independence. Of course, neo-cons and FOX also love rich white people and NCLB is well designed to help them save a buck by encouraging vouchers. They get an extra thousand a year (income: 201,000 now, thank god...) while inner city and rural schools choke and die. Welcome to America.
Perhaps you don't realise that for most people in the REAL world, the private sector, that is people who don't live their lives off of other peoples taxes,
That is the point of taxes. Taxes are levied to pay for local public services. Or are you going to lump firefighters and police officers into that same bin of layabouts who suckle at the teat of public taxes? Firefighters aren't any less respected because they are paid by taxes. Why teachers? Because someone on FOX told you they were the problem? Or because you have some grudge from your school days where your teachers didn't cater to your needs (probably because, like me, you didn't need special treatment)?
aren't members of any union
My local teachers aren't members of any union, either. Well, you'd call it a union, but that's a pretty weak application of the term. The ACM is more of a union than the local teachers "union". Its got no teeth or power: No striking, by law. No collective bargaining, by law. No benefits, by law. No protections, by law. It is essentially a weak lobbying group which supplies cheap (not free) legal support for the times when some parent decides to sue a teacher because their child isn't getting good enough grades. It can't even be called a union because unions are specifically outlawed.
get fired for looking the wrong way at their boss after 20 years of service (what the hell is tenure?)
This still describes teachers. Fired for being gay. Fired for not winning enough games. Fired for not being married. Fired for getting divorced. Fired for being married to the wrong person. Fired for worshiping the wrong god. Fired for not worshiping any god. I don't know what fantasy people live in where they believe that teachers have bulletproof tenure. In all of the states I've lived, it simply does not exist. But don't let that stop you. Heaven forbid you do some research before lashing out against those teachers you hated when you were 14.
They MIGHT get 2 weeks vacation.
Teachers in my district get 4 days of vacation. And when taking those days, they are expected to arrange for their own subs (there's a sub system to help them track one down) and provide teaching materials and lesson plans. On average, for each day of vacation taken, it takes about 4 hours of work... done at home, of course.
They MIGHT actually get all government holidays off.
Teachers in my district get six or seven government holidays off. Many of those days that students get off are actually full work days for teachers. As a developer, I get six government holidays. Banks/financial institutions get something like fourteen.
They not only haven't gotten a raise in 10 YEARS they probably took a 10-20% pay CUT at LEAST once in the last 2-3 years
As I said: Locally, salaries have continued to climb. I still get my cost-of-living adjustments. Not the teachers.
This is a good time to note that the majority of teachers are far above the median for the amount of college and post-college education. All of them are required to have a degree and certification, about half have masters degrees. Comparing them to non-degree labor jobs is unfair (to put it kindly). Most teachers in my district have more schooling than I do. Most of them are way smarter than the average MBA I've met. Why do salaries for general office-workers climb while teachers don't?
Because people like to blame teachers. It's an easy target. Everyone went to school so they pretend they know what it's like on the other side. You don't.
if you complain about it they tell you to pound sand and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
So... just like teaching then.
Heres MY plan for ALL teachers. You work 12 months out of the year. Every year your percentage of students grades
The most powerful group opposing vouchers is the NEA. Not only is the National Education Association the largest union in the USA, it's also the most powerful and most politically well-connected. They say "jump", the politicians ask "how high" and are careful to ask that nicely.
I don't think that--- BWAAA HA HA HA HA HA... HA... Ha ha. Heh.
Sorry, but I thought you were-- BWAAAAAHAHAHA.
You're serious? Really? The NEA? A union that is legally barred from striking or even officially existing in most states? A union that is non-mandatory in all states? A union that vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind (aka: No Child Gets Ahead, No Rich Child Left Behind, or perhaps No Statistic Left Behind) and had it rammed down their throat despite the fact that even an intro to statistics or a moderate amount of common sense shows it to be patently stupid? They're so powerful that they couldn't even stop a piece of legislation that was designed to reduce the quality of education in public schools? They're so powerful that they couldn't stop a state governor from ripping rights away from teachers that were given to them to protect them from abuse by the government and the public.
The NEA is one of the weakest unions in the nation.
Vouchers would make private schools more accessible to more upper-middle-class families
You missed a couple words.
Whenever unfettered competition is allowed, the state schools do poorly both academically and in terms of expense.
I wonder why that is? How many private schools accept students who don't speak English? Around here, its pretty much none. Even the charter and magnet schools turn them away. How many of them take kids who are emotionally or mentally handicapped? Yeah, those kids get turned away, too. How about kids who need special accommodations? Sorry, charter/magnet/private schools aren't really set up to handle those. And so, public schools get all of these kids and then tools jump up from the crowd and complain that public schools spend more and have lower scores. Great. Nice to see that you don't understand statistics, either.
Vouchers and "unfettered competition" is a mechanism used to stratify schools and ensure that children of upper-class parents get the best schooling, while everyone else is supplied with a sub-standard version. More often than not, it walks hand-in-hand with racism as lots of politicians and ordinary parents would much rather send their child to a school without so many "brown" kids. Educational stratification is really nothing more than the classist/racist vehicle of the 2000's. When you equalize across racial and socioeconomic classes, then remove all special needs kids, you find that private schools don't do any better job of teaching than public schools. In many cases, they do worse, as they're more likely to be chained by religious dogma or inflating grades based on the desire to retain paying customers....of course, those things aren't reported in testing statistics... because its illegal to separate them out.... unless you're a private school, then you can admit the dumb rich kid, claim he's in a special program and not report his abyssmal scores in your marketing report.
You need to wake up to the reality. The teachers in the district that I live in are legally barred from striking. They are barred from collective bargaining. The do not have "tenure". In their first three years they can be fired for no reason other than "We don't want you anymore". Past that, it only takes some form of documented failure, where that failure can simply be a verbal report by a supervisor. They don't have three months of vacation. They have eight weeks of mandatory furlough. They've had their salaries frozen for three years now (despite the fact that the average person's salary continues to rise) and have zero recourse to complain about it. They have more and more of their time was
Gays shouldn't be fired because they're gay. Men shouldn't be fired because they have sex with strippers. Women shouldn't be fired because go to fetish bars on the weekend. People shouldn't be fired for getting speeding tickets. I shouldn't be fired for going to a Colbert Report taping and you shouldn't be fired for going to a Glenn Beck taping.
None of that has any impact on your work. In fact, many states already have protections on many of those things.
Giving gays that same protection isn't a "special privilege" it's "equality" and "providing basic human rights".
The only reason why giving homosexual couples the right to visit each other in hospitals where unmarried heterosexual couples cannot is due entirely to the fact that in most states it's illegal for homosexuals to marry.. Homophobic legislatures (such as my wonderful home state of Virginia) passed laws explicitly prohibiting it. This was, in many cases, expressly done to prohibit homosexual couples from enjoying the rights and protections offered to married heterosexuals.
So, much like my solution to your previous argument, the answer seems clear to me: Let homosexuals marry. Then all you have to do is say: married couples have hospital visitation rights. Voila! Everyone is equal again!
You don't have much background in genetics, do you?
I don't mean to insult you. I don't expect most people to understand genetics. However, I would hope they understand how much they don't don't know about genetics.
Sequencing an organism is a long, complicated process even with modern sequencing technology. Sequencers don't give you answers, they give you decent guesses. For eukaryotic organisms like the castor bean, its very difficult to even sort out which copy of which chromosome you're looking at. Then you need to find the genes that produce ricin. There's almost certainly more than one coding region, and you do know that they're not labeled, right?
If after a few years you managed to complete your sequencing of the castor bean and if you managed to isolate the collection of genes responsible for producing ricin, you still wouldn't have reached the really hard part of the process: Integrating it into the corn plant. If you were really lucky, you'd be able to get a hold of a corn specimen that had already been sequenced for you, then it might only take millions of dollars and years of research to find a way to integrate those genes into the correct part of the corn genome.
To think that you'd be able to do this with a sequencer off of ebay and some spare test tubes is humorously naive. Jurassic Park wasn't real. We don't do gene splicing with VR displays.
There is a reason why huge corporations do this work. Hundreds of trained geneticists spend years working on getting things like this done, and even they fail repeatedly.
Are spot checks advisable? Sure, why not? Are they advisable because someone might have created an apple that releases sarin gas? No. Sorry, we don't live in fantasy land. The chances of someone pulling that off are miniscule compared to the chance that you're struck by a meteor within the next year.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's actually quite common for the same teacher to be given lower-performing students year after year.
Since people can't seem to get this through their skulls: Students are not randomly assigned to classes.
My wife teaches history. Starting this year, her scores are going to go down and stay lower than all of the rest of the teachers. Is it because she suddenly started sucking this year? Or is it because she volunteered to take on a class of students who only learned to speak English in the last couple years? While the students are probably smarter on average than the rest of the school (as their parents worked very hard to live in an area with good schools), their test scores are invariably lower. They know how to speak English, but don't recognize all the vocabulary used on tests, and lack the cultural framework to understand other things. She can't even show improvement with them because they don't have any previous tests to compare to.
Also, a few years ago, a new history teacher was hired. She turned in the highest scores for the grade. Is it because she was the best teacher? Was it just luck? Or was it that the administration decided to give the majority of the students on special education plans to the other two teachers? I know people think that was wrong, and that she should have been held accountable for the fact that she couldn't handle it. That's fantastic, as yet again, we've lost sight of the actual goal here. Those students were moved in order to ensure they got a better education. Yes, the other teachers could have complained about the fact that their scores were going to go down, but they didn't because unlike the majority of people pushing for test scores as evaluation metrics, they actually care about the students.
And I can already see the argument: "Well, those shouldn't be considered for the metric..." Maybe not, but federal laws say that those students' scores cannot be treated any differently than any other student. This, in the end, is the biggest difference in quality between private schools and public schools: private schools hide the scores of their special education students -- or simply expel or refuse to admit them. Most of the charter schools and private schools in this area simply won't take special needs students. When they do, they put them in special programs, which basically means: The same classes but with a tutor paid for by the parents and a stipulation that the student's scores aren't part of the rest of the school's statistics. Oh, and they usually make the county pay for the psych and disability evaluations (~$40K a kid, if I remember right)... because they can do that.
You see, when you have zero experience in this, it's easy to say "Well, a mediocre system is better than nothing", but that's just because you don't know what you're talking about and you can't see that the variance in scores among groups of students is greater than the variance produced by the quality of teacher. This means that no matter how you try to do it, if you base your metric on student performance, what you are measuring is trends in student grouping, not teacher quality.
I live in a right to work state, too.
Why should we require reasons to fire teachers?
Sure, my employer can fire me tomorrow. But I can also leave tomorrow.
Teacher's can't. They are on contracts, contracts which say they cannot leave without penalties, but they can be fired at any time for either misconduct or performance, with only the need for documentation.
Furthermore, as a taxpayer, I don't want my local school administration firing a bunch of teachers because (s)he doesn't like them, making me foot the bill to hire a bunch of new teachers.
You still don't understand.
Scores are arbitrary. At the very least, you can't accept the scores set by the teacher. Bad teachers would simply pad their scores with easier work/questions. If you try to standardize the scores, you're left with standardized tests. That means that you ignore any students who take tests well, regardless of what concepts they might be missing. You instead focus on the lowest students because its easier to raise a student from 60 to 70 than 90 to 100. Instead of teaching kids to understand, you focus on pointless facts, talking points, and simple word triggers because those are the only things that standardized tests are good at measuring.
And that's just the start. Let me blow your world: Teachers don't know what's on the test. Not in any of the states I've been in, anyway. All they know is that the test is taken from the curriculum. As a result, they focus on teaching the curriculum, intensely.
I won't hide the fact that my wife is a history teacher. Her yearly test scores are in the area of 94%. That means that if more than twelve students fail the test, her scores drop and she gets labeled a "sucky teacher". So, how is she supposed to justify teaching her students about the Harlem Renaissance when its not part of the curriculum? That's a day spent on a topic that isn't going to be on the test, and those twelve kids need as much time to study the stuff that will be one the test. How about the Homestead Act and how it shaped the western part of the country? Nope. Not on the curriculum. The Red Scare? Nope. The Korean War? Nope. The effect of atomic weapons on the culture of the late twentieth century? Nope. Not on the test. Don't waste time talking about it.
That is what the idiots pushing for numerical evaluations have given us. In their desire to find someone to blame for the US not being able to pretend like we are the only country that ever succeeds, they have latched onto the idea that learning can be quantified. They then claim that teachers should be judged by these quantified measurements, completely ignoring things like variance, bias, and simple statistical relevance. And in response, teachers are forced to teach only knowledge that can be quantified.
To her credit, she ignores the curriculum and tries to shove all of those things into the class anyway because both of us absolutely despise the fact that ordinary students are being robbed of actual knowledge just so some politician can spout percentages to a bunch of idiots who think that any of it matters.
Let me be more blunt: If you honestly think that test scores of any sort are an accurate reflection of the quality of a teacher, then you are either willfully ignorant or in need of an actual education.
Quit making the education system suck. You're the problem.
You do know that the majority of teachers "unions" are barred from striking, and about half are barred from collective bargaining.
You see, this is the big problem with all the people who want to blame teachers. They use terminology but have no idea what it means.
Teachers Union: Often just a rough union-like organization that offers group rates on legal counsel and representation to the local school boards. Most unions cannot strike, cannot take part in salary bargaining, and have no right to intervene or even take part in either the hiring or firing process. The majority of teachers unions are so weak and toothless that they can barely be called unions.
Teacher Tenure: I have not seen a state that has the tenure that people talk about here. At best, teachers are granted long term contracts which state that the contract cannot be terminated without documented reasons. These "tenured" teachers can absolutely be fired and I've seen over a dozen teachers with over 15 years of experience fired for various failures. Half of the point of "tenure" is to give some incentive to enter into a contract that is as lopsided as those offered to teachers: The school can fire you at any time with monetary recourse on your end based on your performance, but if the school fails to support a teacher (ie: administration are jerks to them, or otherwise harass or abuse them), they cannot leave without triggering a penalty clause in their contract. The other half, shockingly enough, is a protection for the local citizens, ensuring them that the school board or administration won't frivolously fire teachers and force taxpayers to continually pay the costs of searching for and hiring new teachers.
Three Months of Vacation: This has to be the funniest idea. Teachers don't get summer vacation, they get a mandatory furlough every year, and the kicker is that the majority of them are still expected to do some amount of work during that time. Of course, that doesn't fit a political agenda or make you feel better about that teacher in 10th grade that gave you a B after you slacked off in her class because you were a selfish jerk and wanted her to cater to your every whim. I used to live in a coal mining town, and I don't remember anyone ever talking about how lucky the plant maintenance workers were when they got a "two month" vacation every winter. They seemed to think that it sucked that they didn't get paid for two months and had no real ability to find another job to fill the time.
Are you not using even an ounce of common sense? Are you under the (frankly, ignorant) impression that class membership is based on random distribution? Do you have any experience at all with how a school operates? As soon as some teacher is labeled "good", they become desirable, often regardless of any later results. Parents buy into this, because, to be completely honest, they don't have a damn clue what makes a teacher good, so they just accept someone else's opinion. Then, the parents who care, request --often forcefully-- that Super-Special Jimmy is placed in the "good" teacher's class, while the parents who don't care are semi-randomly distributed elsewhere. You see, the "good teacher" label is a feedback loop once you attach idiotic metrics like multiple choice test scores based on unrelated statistical samples of a biased group. So, who do we blame for this? Teachers? Why? All they did was get attention for doing a good job. Administrators, for bowing to pressure from overbearing parents? I guess, but parents file lawsuits which eat money from the budget. Better to just cave than to give up an extra art teacher for the year. So, the parents, then? Sure. They're jerks. But jerks exist everywhere. The real people we need to blame are all the passive sheep who don't call out the jerk parents for their behaviors, and all the idiots who have drank the koolaid that says that a multiple choice test given to 30 individuals is a totally accurate measure of a intensely qualitative, multi-faceted phenomena (ie: learning).
...and none of his peers were in a hurry to duplicate the findings.
And yet, ND is one of the biggest tax sponges in the country.
While it might have the oil and coal reserves to keep itself afloat, it would still fail because the stingy populous would refuse to pay higher taxes (despite having one of the lowest tax rates in the country). Maybe we could save money by privatizing North Dakota.
I think we're actually teaching minorities and disadvantaged students... which we weren't so good at in the fifties and sixties. We've had compulsory education in every state since the early twentieth century (which is a lot shorter than many people believe), but for the first half of that century, the schools weren't so good at actually providing equal quality to all students. One of the things the DoEd is supposed to be working on is leveling that out. The apparent decline in educational quality is due in large part to the fact that we're no longer hiding the fact that we don't do so well with immigrants, minorities, and other disadvantaged students. Of course, this is also why private schools look so good. They're allowed to simply not report those scores/statistics... or simply deny admittance to the students.
Even then, I'm still on the fence about the DoEd. These days it looks more like some zombified department, serving only as the host to the parasite that is No Child Left Behind and forcing all the states to pay for standardized tests that mean absolutely nothing (Seriously: I can't imagine a more depressing achievement than having children with the greatest ability at filling out multiple choice tests). I'm fine with it going away, so long as we don't revert to pre-Civil Rights schools or move to a privatized (serve the rich, screw the poor) school system.
There are DNA and RNA viruses.
I actually clicked the story because I was shocked that anyone could:
No offense, but it was so non-sensical, I assumed that it was the media butchering science again.
Intelligent Design is not falsifiable, thus not science.
What are you talking about? The parents are the one's demanding them. No Child Left Behind? That was pushed by parents and politicians. "No Failure" systems? Those are pushed by parents? Grade Inflation? Parents. Only after bureaucrats started punishing schools for not following these policies did you see the sort of official support they receive now. Now, not only do you get Jimmy's parents threatening to sue you for failing him, you get the government telling you that you're going to be paid less for being honest about his abilities.
If people are looking for who to blame here, we're going to need a lot of mirrors.
...and that train of thought seems to be one of the biggest problems.
"If you don't teach to the test, then what are you teaching to?"
Obligatory Car Analogy:
"If you're not fixing the car with duck tape, then what are you fixing it with?"
Try to understand this: Teaching to the Test is a horrible way of teaching. Not only does it stifle creativity, but it prevents children from learning critical thinking, abstract understanding, and that thing we normally call "common sense". Leaving a history class with the order of every president memorized is worthless. Leaving a geography class with the capitals of every country in Europe memorized is pointless. Leaving a chemistry class with every element's atomic number memorized is a waste of everyone's time. Knowing why the president exists, and how the role has changed over time is very useful. Understanding the differences and similarities between cultures in Europe is valuable. Being able to predict how an element will behave based on its location in the periodic table is far more practical than knowing its exact atomic number.
Saying: "If you're not doing something in a known, horrible manner, then who knows how it's being done" is a pointless statement. Do we know what quality is being taught without standardized tests? Nope. Do we know what quality is being taught with standardized tests? Nope. Do we know what quality is being taught when teachers are Teaching-to-the-Test? Yes! Bad quality. As bad or worse than what it was before. And in far too many cases, really good schools are being forced to switch to Teaching-to-the-Test because idiots can only comprehend numbers and memorized facts.
If it wasn't our future we were talking about, I'd gladly accept the idiocy and then laugh at all of the people who fought for No Child Left Behind as our children become the world's best multiple-choice question answerers... and worthless at actually understanding any subject.
So you hate immigrants and poor people.
But then you say: No, that's not what I said. I said we should punish the people with low-achievement.
And this is where intelligent people point out that you have proposed a policy that would continue to ensure that poor people receive fewer opportunities to improve themselves to improve their path in life and to help make sure that as many immigrants as possible are funneled into that "poor people" bracket regardless of their actual intelligence. Sure, it's not targeted directly at those people, but it includes them far more often than other groups. It's subtle, but you're blind if you can't see it.
So yeah... that's a great plan for furthering the dominance of rich, white, corporate America. And thank God (just the Christian one, of course), because those rich, white, corporate Americans need help right now.
I seriously heard some "sales associate" at Best Buy tell someone that documents would print faster if they bought a parallel cable with gold connectors. While it wasn't the first time I'd heard Best Buy's sales people spouting blatant lies (1998: "You'll want the best CPU you can buy if you want to run Word", 1999: "Sound cards fail all the time. I'd never buy one without the extra warranty." 2000: "WindowsME is way faster than Windows98, and if you don't upgrade now, you'll never be able to.") it is still the winner for sheer absurdity and blatant attempt to bilk another $10 from a customer.
I was just passing by on my way to find a new printer, but when the guy said it, I couldn't help myself. I broke out laughing. Pretty loud. The guy and his two gullible customers looked at me. I was in an odd mood, so I asked the guy how fast electricity traveled in gold. Then I asked how fast it traveled in copper. He didn't know either. I told the customers that he was lying to them. Pointed at one of the cheapest cables on the shelf, and told them that was the one they wanted. The sales guy looked pissed. A few other people nearby were watching. As I walked away, some manager-looking guy asked if I needed help. I told him that I came to buy a printer, but that Office Max was only a few blocks away and their sales staff didn't lie to their customers.
Since then, I probably spent only a couple hundred dollars in Best Buy, almost entirely on DVDs. When given the choice, for any piece of hardware (even cables) I'll go to any other store. While I'm sure that in the long run, Best Buy makes decent money off lying to customers, I'd easily estimate that its lost a few thousand dollars of sales just off me. At the very least, it lost about $160 ($150 printer + $10 for uselessly-upgraded cable) that day for that guy's stupid attempt.
Not if you ask a fundamentalist (even the Literalists): It's about God's love for you... or your love for God... or God's love for the world. Considering what's actually in SoS, I find any of the options a bit creepy. Trust me, whack-job fundamentalists have an answer for everything, and any questions or challenges of inconsistency fall to "The Bible is the Word of God and the Bible says that the Word of God is never wrong".
Needless to say, few fundamentalists are familiar with circular reasoning.
The hate for steam most likely comes from the fact that Steam the service is tied to Steam the store. It's rapidly becoming a monopoly on the PC and that reflects in the stupid prices it commands for titles.
Right. Why let knowledge and research ruin a good argument.
You do know that prices on Steam are set by the publisher not Valve, right? At best, Valve picks times for sales. They don't set prices. Want to complain about high prices? Throw those complaints at the publishers.
While I agree for the most part, I would add that I've talked to a few people who work for the DoEd and none of them liked NCLB. In fact, they all hated it. Even worse, they hated the humiliating schoolhouse-style entrance placed on their office building with "No Child Left Behind" emblazoned across it, implying that it was something other than a stupid law shoved down their throats.
Since NCLB, the DoEd has doubled in size (by the estimates I've seen), yet none of that has accomplished more than forcing students to take standardized tests that show nothing, prove nothing, and are only used by people who don't understand statistics to justify their love of vouchers and private schooling.
I won't say that the DoEd was all that useful before NCLB, but it did help organize some national programs to help out struggling schools. Now it just buries all schools under pointless tests and additional costs. And convinces a generation of ignorant people that there is some shred of value in them. I know that when NCLB started enforcement, some of the local schools were seriously trying to see if they could just refuse federal funds and ignore the law. It would have been cheaper, as NCLB costs them far, far more than the federal government supplies.
Funny that NCLB seems to be so popular with neo-cons and FOX who are supposed to like small government and local independence. Of course, neo-cons and FOX also love rich white people and NCLB is well designed to help them save a buck by encouraging vouchers. They get an extra thousand a year (income: 201,000 now, thank god...) while inner city and rural schools choke and die. Welcome to America.
Shopping for lasers.
Amazon doesn't ship to underwater addresses.
Perhaps you don't realise that for most people in the REAL world, the private sector, that is people who don't live their lives off of other peoples taxes,
That is the point of taxes. Taxes are levied to pay for local public services. Or are you going to lump firefighters and police officers into that same bin of layabouts who suckle at the teat of public taxes? Firefighters aren't any less respected because they are paid by taxes. Why teachers? Because someone on FOX told you they were the problem? Or because you have some grudge from your school days where your teachers didn't cater to your needs (probably because, like me, you didn't need special treatment)?
aren't members of any union
My local teachers aren't members of any union, either. Well, you'd call it a union, but that's a pretty weak application of the term. The ACM is more of a union than the local teachers "union". Its got no teeth or power: No striking, by law. No collective bargaining, by law. No benefits, by law. No protections, by law. It is essentially a weak lobbying group which supplies cheap (not free) legal support for the times when some parent decides to sue a teacher because their child isn't getting good enough grades. It can't even be called a union because unions are specifically outlawed.
get fired for looking the wrong way at their boss after 20 years of service (what the hell is tenure?)
This still describes teachers. Fired for being gay. Fired for not winning enough games. Fired for not being married. Fired for getting divorced. Fired for being married to the wrong person. Fired for worshiping the wrong god. Fired for not worshiping any god. I don't know what fantasy people live in where they believe that teachers have bulletproof tenure. In all of the states I've lived, it simply does not exist. But don't let that stop you. Heaven forbid you do some research before lashing out against those teachers you hated when you were 14.
They MIGHT get 2 weeks vacation.
Teachers in my district get 4 days of vacation. And when taking those days, they are expected to arrange for their own subs (there's a sub system to help them track one down) and provide teaching materials and lesson plans. On average, for each day of vacation taken, it takes about 4 hours of work... done at home, of course.
They MIGHT actually get all government holidays off.
Teachers in my district get six or seven government holidays off. Many of those days that students get off are actually full work days for teachers. As a developer, I get six government holidays. Banks/financial institutions get something like fourteen.
They not only haven't gotten a raise in 10 YEARS they probably took a 10-20% pay CUT at LEAST once in the last 2-3 years
As I said: Locally, salaries have continued to climb. I still get my cost-of-living adjustments. Not the teachers.
This is a good time to note that the majority of teachers are far above the median for the amount of college and post-college education. All of them are required to have a degree and certification, about half have masters degrees. Comparing them to non-degree labor jobs is unfair (to put it kindly). Most teachers in my district have more schooling than I do. Most of them are way smarter than the average MBA I've met. Why do salaries for general office-workers climb while teachers don't?
Because people like to blame teachers. It's an easy target. Everyone went to school so they pretend they know what it's like on the other side. You don't.
if you complain about it they tell you to pound sand and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
So... just like teaching then.
Heres MY plan for ALL teachers. You work 12 months out of the year. Every year your percentage of students grades
Dude. I didn't know it did that. That's pretty cool.
armAd1llo$
Heh. Sweet.
The most powerful group opposing vouchers is the NEA. Not only is the National Education Association the largest union in the USA, it's also the most powerful and most politically well-connected. They say "jump", the politicians ask "how high" and are careful to ask that nicely.
I don't think that--- BWAAA HA HA HA HA HA... HA... Ha ha. Heh.
Sorry, but I thought you were-- BWAAAAAHAHAHA.
You're serious? Really? The NEA? A union that is legally barred from striking or even officially existing in most states? A union that is non-mandatory in all states? A union that vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind (aka: No Child Gets Ahead, No Rich Child Left Behind, or perhaps No Statistic Left Behind) and had it rammed down their throat despite the fact that even an intro to statistics or a moderate amount of common sense shows it to be patently stupid? They're so powerful that they couldn't even stop a piece of legislation that was designed to reduce the quality of education in public schools? They're so powerful that they couldn't stop a state governor from ripping rights away from teachers that were given to them to protect them from abuse by the government and the public.
The NEA is one of the weakest unions in the nation.
Vouchers would make private schools more accessible to more upper-middle-class families
You missed a couple words.
Whenever unfettered competition is allowed, the state schools do poorly both academically and in terms of expense.
I wonder why that is? How many private schools accept students who don't speak English? Around here, its pretty much none. Even the charter and magnet schools turn them away. How many of them take kids who are emotionally or mentally handicapped? Yeah, those kids get turned away, too. How about kids who need special accommodations? Sorry, charter/magnet/private schools aren't really set up to handle those. And so, public schools get all of these kids and then tools jump up from the crowd and complain that public schools spend more and have lower scores. Great. Nice to see that you don't understand statistics, either.
Vouchers and "unfettered competition" is a mechanism used to stratify schools and ensure that children of upper-class parents get the best schooling, while everyone else is supplied with a sub-standard version. More often than not, it walks hand-in-hand with racism as lots of politicians and ordinary parents would much rather send their child to a school without so many "brown" kids. Educational stratification is really nothing more than the classist/racist vehicle of the 2000's. When you equalize across racial and socioeconomic classes, then remove all special needs kids, you find that private schools don't do any better job of teaching than public schools. In many cases, they do worse, as they're more likely to be chained by religious dogma or inflating grades based on the desire to retain paying customers. ...of course, those things aren't reported in testing statistics... because its illegal to separate them out.... unless you're a private school, then you can admit the dumb rich kid, claim he's in a special program and not report his abyssmal scores in your marketing report.
You need to wake up to the reality. The teachers in the district that I live in are legally barred from striking. They are barred from collective bargaining. The do not have "tenure". In their first three years they can be fired for no reason other than "We don't want you anymore". Past that, it only takes some form of documented failure, where that failure can simply be a verbal report by a supervisor. They don't have three months of vacation. They have eight weeks of mandatory furlough. They've had their salaries frozen for three years now (despite the fact that the average person's salary continues to rise) and have zero recourse to complain about it. They have more and more of their time was
I believe that's called a cartel.
They are illegal as well.
Okay, here's a novel thought:
I agree with you (mostly).
Gays shouldn't be fired because they're gay. Men shouldn't be fired because they have sex with strippers. Women shouldn't be fired because go to fetish bars on the weekend. People shouldn't be fired for getting speeding tickets. I shouldn't be fired for going to a Colbert Report taping and you shouldn't be fired for going to a Glenn Beck taping.
None of that has any impact on your work. In fact, many states already have protections on many of those things.
Giving gays that same protection isn't a "special privilege" it's "equality" and "providing basic human rights".
The only reason why giving homosexual couples the right to visit each other in hospitals where unmarried heterosexual couples cannot is due entirely to the fact that in most states it's illegal for homosexuals to marry.. Homophobic legislatures (such as my wonderful home state of Virginia) passed laws explicitly prohibiting it. This was, in many cases, expressly done to prohibit homosexual couples from enjoying the rights and protections offered to married heterosexuals.
So, much like my solution to your previous argument, the answer seems clear to me: Let homosexuals marry. Then all you have to do is say: married couples have hospital visitation rights. Voila! Everyone is equal again!
You don't have much background in genetics, do you?
I don't mean to insult you. I don't expect most people to understand genetics. However, I would hope they understand how much they don't don't know about genetics.
Sequencing an organism is a long, complicated process even with modern sequencing technology. Sequencers don't give you answers, they give you decent guesses. For eukaryotic organisms like the castor bean, its very difficult to even sort out which copy of which chromosome you're looking at. Then you need to find the genes that produce ricin. There's almost certainly more than one coding region, and you do know that they're not labeled, right?
If after a few years you managed to complete your sequencing of the castor bean and if you managed to isolate the collection of genes responsible for producing ricin, you still wouldn't have reached the really hard part of the process: Integrating it into the corn plant. If you were really lucky, you'd be able to get a hold of a corn specimen that had already been sequenced for you, then it might only take millions of dollars and years of research to find a way to integrate those genes into the correct part of the corn genome.
To think that you'd be able to do this with a sequencer off of ebay and some spare test tubes is humorously naive. Jurassic Park wasn't real. We don't do gene splicing with VR displays.
There is a reason why huge corporations do this work. Hundreds of trained geneticists spend years working on getting things like this done, and even they fail repeatedly.
Are spot checks advisable? Sure, why not? Are they advisable because someone might have created an apple that releases sarin gas? No. Sorry, we don't live in fantasy land. The chances of someone pulling that off are miniscule compared to the chance that you're struck by a meteor within the next year.
Given:
knowledge = power
power = work / time
time = money
Thus:
knowledge = work / money ...and the more you make they less you can possibly know.
Of course:
knowing = battle / 2
So:
battle * money = 2 * work ... which leaves us a little confused.
So if:
battle = hell
money = evil
Thus:
hell * evil = 2 * work
Or:
work = (hell * evil)/2 ...so I guess I'll get back to work.