Oh wait, its a PUBLIC job. Everyone is forced to pay their salaries and our children education is in their hands.
You want to see a companies tract record? Ask them for it. They dont give it to you? Use someone else. Most often there is no -viable- competition in the school system.
Oh. If only people were as keen for employee transparency in... politics, judges, government-hired programmers, national banks, election officials, public transport...
And there's always the viable competition of home-schooling you know. Oh wait, it's easier to complain about how someone else does their job, isn't it.
Most of us get over it, but it takes at least two years to get back into the swing of things. Your idea would have us kicking those people out when they are at their most vulnerable. Hope your area has a good suicide hotline.
You forgot about how all those "experts" never seem to step up to the plate and go into teaching - because the job is so well paid and so easy after all.
So why don't you pick up an education degree then?
Oh that's right, because you know the job is almost intolerably hard.
*mutter mutter* The number of people who put down teachers for "having it easy", and the number of times I've heard those people say "I wouldn't teach no matter what you paid me."
You made the choice to buy such an expensive home (rather than rent), you made the choice to live alone (I assume), you make the choice to buy the more expensive 'healthy' food, you made the choice to take the lesser wage at the teaching job, you made the choice to live/work in central Florida.
If you wish to bemoanyour position in life that is fine... only keep in mind that you are there by your own choices.
Society and politicians made the choice to implement expensive and poorly-considered educational policies, they made the choice to pay teachers crappy wages, they made the choice (multiple times) to make teachers the scape-goat for society's ills, they made the choice to play on teachers' sense of responsibility to get them to accept decisions that acted against their self-interest.
If society wishes to bemoan the position of the economy/education/society that is fine... only keep in mind that you are there by your own choices.
Except that teachers in the state systems have very little control over who they work for.
Once I got my teaching degree in Australia, I knew I had to take whatever job I was first offered. I'm now currently 2000km away from my closest family, in a climate I'm beginning to hate. My chance of moving closer to them is nil to zero with my current state employer.
And please don't say I should go into the private system - the best teachers I've ever seen are in public schools, and the laziest in private schools.
Getting into trouble because of personal problems is a difficulty of every area of human endeavor, not just teaching. The good teachers will be able to find another livelihood, just like the rest of us when that happens to us... You need to have a way to get rid of bad teachers, which isn't happening in New York.
Except that the standards of training expected of teachers, means that the person who has just his job because of a biased evaluation, has done so after spending years of education and money on their training.
Are you really saying that someone in their 40's (Probably with children, mortgages and student loans.) who after a lifetime of teaching, is going to have the time or motivation to get anything else but a bottom-end job? Because if that's really your attitude, don't be surprised when highly motivated teachers decide they'd rather abandon the ship BEFORE it sinks.
Want to know why it's hard to get rid of "bad" teachers? They're becoming the only ones who can survive in the current education system. Bad teachers actually have an advantage, because their lack of enthusiasm or effort means they don't burn themselves out.
Stakeholders - parents, politicians, taxpayers - are often more interested in finding someone to blame.
You want to know why education is "failing"? Too many cooks. Simple as that. A-hem. "New Maths", "National Testing", "National Curricula" and now "Teacher Evaluation".
A fellow teacher gave me the heads-up while I was getting my degree. Politicians and Bureaucrats get the most credit when they implement change, not when they do the job right. So you see one "generation" of bureaucrats pushing "Policy A" and moving up through the government ranks. Then the next generation goes "This isn't working, let's implement Policy B". They get promoted. Third generation goes "No, we really need to do Policy C". Then you get the fourth "generation", who says "None of this #!$! is working, we need to get back to the basics of Policy-Before-A"
Fine, if it's year after year and consistent, but IT WON'T BE. We're talking about politicians here! The instant they can divert a little bit of attention from their own cock-ups by throwing some schlub to the wolves, they will. Newspaper headline "Hon. IAmNotACrook cleans up Education by Firing 50% of Teachers." By-Line in 1/2-sized font "Refuses To Comment On Weekend Party With Teenaged Hooker."
The reason teachers and unions want to block this type of broad-scale reporting are twofold:
1. That's what report cards are for!!! 2. We deal with governments and bureaucracies EVERY DAY. They're NOT competent to implement something like this!
But the minute a state- or national-wide evaluation system is implemented, there will be a drive to evaluate everyone. So either an administrator will pigeon-hole an outlier school into one of the government-mandated categories, or if somehow an administrator with enough balls to say "unevaluated", Joe Public will assume this is hiding a major problem. "Whoa, they couldn't even manage basic evaluation - I'm not sending my kids there."
The instance we expect schools to compete with EACH OTHER, we'll see the same things we've seen with small-town businesses, banks and other government services. The small, edge-of-the-wall schools will haemorrhage students and teachers (Hey, would you stay teaching at a school that was likely to shut down in two years?) to larger, impersonal schools. (Who, let's face it, will be able to afford public relations officers to put a positive spin on things like "We've just cut down our environmental impact and running costs - by shutting down 1/2 our library and removing textbooks from the classrooms.")
Now competition is fine in businesses and banks, but we're talking about a basic right here. I'm hearing too many people saying "I don't care what happens to most students (and teachers), as long as MY kids get a good deal." Do we want schooling to become like Target or Wallmart?
<quote><p> By every metric I am an utter failure and would be perceived as such in any court of public opinion.....our crews have cut on average 10-20% off the construction time, we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in production</p></quote>
<p>Sounds like you are using the wrong metrics.</p></quote>
And you think a government is going to come up with the right metrics for teachers? The type of thinking that has guided NYC's decision really pisses me off - I call it "Managing-From-A-Distance". It's when government or administration departments think they can run something from an office on the other side of the workshop/campus/city without EVER going to actually LOOK at what's happening in the workforce. I see it again and again, and it only ever seems to make a workforce less efficient.
I understand the impulse of parents to be involved with education, but surely if they REALLY wanted to see what's going on, they could do what older genrations did - get involved with their children's education! P&C, help with homework and study, talk to their kids, or hey, the really good guide to making a judgement about a child's progress - what type of people do they hang out with?
This call to make education transparent just seems to be an excuse to be lazy.
I find it interesting that the author of the article states that he'd "... love to see some competition for Microsoft Office arise and challenge Redmond's dominance." yet recommends that the Australian Government "... would be silly to choose any other standard than one supported strongly by Microsoft." How does he expect the competition to occur if every government user (which is a MASSIVE userbase in Australia) doesn't have the option of using alternatives?
I'm finding the argument about: "... licensing costs - which are not a factor with open source suites such as OpenOffice.org - are only 'a small proportion of overall ICT expenditure'. Any software change is likely to involve significant cost in installation, training and maintenance"
a little confusing considering the statement that several departments were: "... signalled their intention to eventually migrate to Office 2010 as part of their next upgrade."
As a teacher in an Australian school currently being switched to 2010, I'd say that using Microsoft Office 2010 would involve a HIGHER retraining cost than LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
And I still can't understand why the government didn't decide "Microsoft Office 2010 is the preferred Office Suite AT PRESENT, but files must be saved in OpenDocument Formats."
So what does birth weight and parent's IQ have to do with breastfeeding?
Balanced nutrition, bonding between parent and child (which has been shown to have long-lasting effects on emotional development) and antibody and white blood cell transfer from mother to child.
Assuming, of course, that the parents aren't less-knowledgeable about a subject than their children.
It doesn't even matter if the parents are less knowledgeable - just the fact that you're interested in your child's education lets them know that education is important, and they'll try harder.
As a High School Teacher, if you're going to open the Internet up to them, wouldn't short-term (1 or 2 week) assignments be easier? (Other than the marking of course.) It'd test the ability to problem solve and research more realistically, and you could use turnitin.com to ensure students aren't copying each other/the Internet.
On another point, at the University I did both a pure Science degree, and then an Education degree (with credited subjects). What I found interesting was that the Science degree was taught in centuries-old formal format - lectures/labs/exam, but the Education degree was taught in small-class format/group projects/presentation assignments/etc. Only towards the end of my degree did one of my old science lecturers announce that he was taking some of the Education subjects as a way to upskill his teaching methods.
I'd argue that the problem with Economics isn't the science conducted in it, but rather what happens to it once large businesses with ulterior motives twist it to the view they want.
Would even this be enough? One of the things that the author of "Godel, Escher, Bach" mentions, is that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem pretty much states that ANY "complete" system can be broken. The only way to avoid this, is to design an incomplete system (aka, one that is lacking features) that is small enough that all possible interactions are predictable (aka Java's original limited sandpit design).
As an Australian hobby electrician, I find it interesting that so many electronics stores follow a basic evolutionary path. Stage 1 - Open up a new chain, supplying electronic parts/books/kits because other stores don't stock such basic materials for the hobby electrician. Stage 2 - start to supplement income with consumer electronics because, hey, a basic part only costs 20c at best. Stage 3 - reduce parts/kits catalogue to one tiny rotary shelf of resistors/transistors/capacitors because "Well that leaves more floor space for the higher return items." Stage 4 - wonder why people are going to the new electronics chain, who are currently in Stage 1 or 2, and actually supply the parts hobbyists NEED (As opposed to the impulse buys we make AFTER we've got our basic resistors/transistors/connectors/etc.)
Tandy used to be a massive chain when I was very young, but now I'm surprised to find a Tandy shop still open. Dick Smith used to be awesome but now you'd be lucky to find a multimeter in half their stores, let alone a decent selection of parts. Jaycar is shifting backwards and forwards between Stages 2 and 3. I'm hoping the Jaycar CEO's continue to realise that removal of low-priced parts means they'll lose all the "impuse-buy" sales as well, because my only other option is LittleBird electronics, and I LIKE walking into a physical electronics store for a bit of a browse.
Slashdot Mirror
Use metrics? That seems to fix everything.
Oh wait, its a PUBLIC job. Everyone is forced to pay their salaries and our children education is in their hands.
You want to see a companies tract record? Ask them for it. They dont give it to you? Use someone else. Most often there is no -viable- competition in the school system.
Oh. If only people were as keen for employee transparency in ... politics, judges, government-hired programmers, national banks, election officials, public transport ...
And there's always the viable competition of home-schooling you know. Oh wait, it's easier to complain about how someone else does their job, isn't it.
Symptoms include chronic tiredness combined with insomnia, heightened emotionality, loss of interest in EVERYTHING, inability to focus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_(psychology)#Phases
Most of us get over it, but it takes at least two years to get back into the swing of things. Your idea would have us kicking those people out when they are at their most vulnerable. Hope your area has a good suicide hotline.
You forgot about how all those "experts" never seem to step up to the plate and go into teaching - because the job is so well paid and so easy after all.
*mutter mutter* The number of people who put down teachers for "having it easy", and the number of times I've heard those people say "I wouldn't teach no matter what you paid me."
I am assuming it is easier to be a teacher than an engineer, based on the supply and demand for both.
Swap yah.
You made the choice to buy such an expensive home (rather than rent), you made the choice to live alone (I assume), you make the choice to buy the more expensive 'healthy' food, you made the choice to take the lesser wage at the teaching job, you made the choice to live/work in central Florida.
If you wish to bemoanyour position in life that is fine... only keep in mind that you are there by your own choices.
Society and politicians made the choice to implement expensive and poorly-considered educational policies, they made the choice to pay teachers crappy wages, they made the choice (multiple times) to make teachers the scape-goat for society's ills, they made the choice to play on teachers' sense of responsibility to get them to accept decisions that acted against their self-interest.
If society wishes to bemoan the position of the economy/education/society that is fine ... only keep in mind that you are there by your own choices.
There's always a "worse".
Once I got my teaching degree in Australia, I knew I had to take whatever job I was first offered. I'm now currently 2000km away from my closest family, in a climate I'm beginning to hate. My chance of moving closer to them is nil to zero with my current state employer.
And please don't say I should go into the private system - the best teachers I've ever seen are in public schools, and the laziest in private schools.
Getting into trouble because of personal problems is a difficulty of every area of human endeavor, not just teaching. The good teachers will be able to find another livelihood, just like the rest of us when that happens to us ... You need to have a way to get rid of bad teachers, which isn't happening in New York.
Except that the standards of training expected of teachers, means that the person who has just his job because of a biased evaluation, has done so after spending years of education and money on their training.
Are you really saying that someone in their 40's (Probably with children, mortgages and student loans.) who after a lifetime of teaching, is going to have the time or motivation to get anything else but a bottom-end job? Because if that's really your attitude, don't be surprised when highly motivated teachers decide they'd rather abandon the ship BEFORE it sinks.
Want to know why it's hard to get rid of "bad" teachers? They're becoming the only ones who can survive in the current education system. Bad teachers actually have an advantage, because their lack of enthusiasm or effort means they don't burn themselves out.
"Sometimes instead of focusing on measuring quality, you just need to focus on doing the things that you know will increase quality."
Oh god. Someone on Slashdot is talking sense.
Stakeholders - parents, politicians, taxpayers - are often more interested in finding someone to blame.
You want to know why education is "failing"? Too many cooks. Simple as that.
A-hem. "New Maths", "National Testing", "National Curricula" and now "Teacher Evaluation".
A fellow teacher gave me the heads-up while I was getting my degree.
Politicians and Bureaucrats get the most credit when they implement change, not when they do the job right. So you see one "generation" of bureaucrats pushing "Policy A" and moving up through the government ranks. Then the next generation goes "This isn't working, let's implement Policy B". They get promoted. Third generation goes "No, we really need to do Policy C". Then you get the fourth "generation", who says "None of this #!$! is working, we need to get back to the basics of Policy-Before-A"
Fine, if it's year after year and consistent, but IT WON'T BE.
We're talking about politicians here! The instant they can divert a little bit of attention from their own cock-ups by throwing some schlub to the wolves, they will.
Newspaper headline "Hon. IAmNotACrook cleans up Education by Firing 50% of Teachers."
By-Line in 1/2-sized font "Refuses To Comment On Weekend Party With Teenaged Hooker."
The reason teachers and unions want to block this type of broad-scale reporting are twofold:
1. That's what report cards are for!!!
2. We deal with governments and bureaucracies EVERY DAY. They're NOT competent to implement something like this!
1. Do you have kids?
2. Are you currently implementing another solution to getting your children educated?
It's amazing how loud people are when they want someone else to solve a problem.
But the minute a state- or national-wide evaluation system is implemented, there will be a drive to evaluate everyone. So either an administrator will pigeon-hole an outlier school into one of the government-mandated categories, or if somehow an administrator with enough balls to say "unevaluated", Joe Public will assume this is hiding a major problem. "Whoa, they couldn't even manage basic evaluation - I'm not sending my kids there."
The instance we expect schools to compete with EACH OTHER, we'll see the same things we've seen with small-town businesses, banks and other government services. The small, edge-of-the-wall schools will haemorrhage students and teachers (Hey, would you stay teaching at a school that was likely to shut down in two years?) to larger, impersonal schools. (Who, let's face it, will be able to afford public relations officers to put a positive spin on things like "We've just cut down our environmental impact and running costs - by shutting down 1/2 our library and removing textbooks from the classrooms.")
Now competition is fine in businesses and banks, but we're talking about a basic right here. I'm hearing too many people saying "I don't care what happens to most students (and teachers), as long as MY kids get a good deal." Do we want schooling to become like Target or Wallmart?
<quote><p> By every metric I am an utter failure and would be perceived as such in any court of public opinion.....our crews have cut on average 10-20% off the construction time, we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in production</p></quote>
<p>Sounds like you are using the wrong metrics.</p></quote>
And you think a government is going to come up with the right metrics for teachers?
The type of thinking that has guided NYC's decision really pisses me off - I call it "Managing-From-A-Distance". It's when government or administration departments think they can run something from an office on the other side of the workshop/campus/city without EVER going to actually LOOK at what's happening in the workforce. I see it again and again, and it only ever seems to make a workforce less efficient.
I understand the impulse of parents to be involved with education, but surely if they REALLY wanted to see what's going on, they could do what older genrations did - get involved with their children's education! P&C, help with homework and study, talk to their kids, or hey, the really good guide to making a judgement about a child's progress - what type of people do they hang out with?
This call to make education transparent just seems to be an excuse to be lazy.
I find it interesting that the author of the article states that he'd "... love to see some competition for Microsoft Office arise and challenge Redmond's dominance." yet recommends that the Australian Government "... would be silly to choose any other standard than one supported strongly by Microsoft." How does he expect the competition to occur if every government user (which is a MASSIVE userbase in Australia) doesn't have the option of using alternatives?
I'm finding the argument about:
"... licensing costs - which are not a factor with open source suites such as OpenOffice.org - are only 'a small proportion of overall ICT expenditure'. Any software change is likely to involve significant cost in installation, training and maintenance"
a little confusing considering the statement that several departments were:
"... signalled their intention to eventually migrate to Office 2010 as part of their next upgrade."
As a teacher in an Australian school currently being switched to 2010, I'd say that using Microsoft Office 2010 would involve a HIGHER retraining cost than LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
And I still can't understand why the government didn't decide "Microsoft Office 2010 is the preferred Office Suite AT PRESENT, but files must be saved in OpenDocument Formats."
So what does birth weight and parent's IQ have to do with breastfeeding?
Balanced nutrition, bonding between parent and child (which has been shown to have long-lasting effects on emotional development) and antibody and white blood cell transfer from mother to child.
Assuming, of course, that the parents aren't less-knowledgeable about a subject than their children.
It doesn't even matter if the parents are less knowledgeable - just the fact that you're interested in your child's education lets them know that education is important, and they'll try harder.
As a High School Teacher, if you're going to open the Internet up to them, wouldn't short-term (1 or 2 week) assignments be easier? (Other than the marking of course.) It'd test the ability to problem solve and research more realistically, and you could use turnitin.com to ensure students aren't copying each other/the Internet.
On another point, at the University I did both a pure Science degree, and then an Education degree (with credited subjects). What I found interesting was that the Science degree was taught in centuries-old formal format - lectures/labs/exam, but the Education degree was taught in small-class format/group projects/presentation assignments/etc. Only towards the end of my degree did one of my old science lecturers announce that he was taking some of the Education subjects as a way to upskill his teaching methods.
Love this comic, but there's a lot of field-specific knowledge that this view ignores.
I'd argue that the problem with Economics isn't the science conducted in it, but rather what happens to it once large businesses with ulterior motives twist it to the view they want.
At Griffith University, Australia, we took a "Philosophy of Science" subject as part of the degree - mostly based on the philosophy of Karl Popper.
Basically, Science is:
Observable
Repeatable
Falsifiable and
Communicated.
I've always found this definition useful.
Would even this be enough?
One of the things that the author of "Godel, Escher, Bach" mentions, is that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem pretty much states that ANY "complete" system can be broken. The only way to avoid this, is to design an incomplete system (aka, one that is lacking features) that is small enough that all possible interactions are predictable (aka Java's original limited sandpit design).
As an Australian hobby electrician, I find it interesting that so many electronics stores follow a basic evolutionary path.
Stage 1 - Open up a new chain, supplying electronic parts/books/kits because other stores don't stock such basic materials for the hobby electrician.
Stage 2 - start to supplement income with consumer electronics because, hey, a basic part only costs 20c at best.
Stage 3 - reduce parts/kits catalogue to one tiny rotary shelf of resistors/transistors/capacitors because "Well that leaves more floor space for the higher return items."
Stage 4 - wonder why people are going to the new electronics chain, who are currently in Stage 1 or 2, and actually supply the parts hobbyists NEED (As opposed to the impulse buys we make AFTER we've got our basic resistors/transistors/connectors/etc.)
Tandy used to be a massive chain when I was very young, but now I'm surprised to find a Tandy shop still open. Dick Smith used to be awesome but now you'd be lucky to find a multimeter in half their stores, let alone a decent selection of parts. Jaycar is shifting backwards and forwards between Stages 2 and 3. I'm hoping the Jaycar CEO's continue to realise that removal of low-priced parts means they'll lose all the "impuse-buy" sales as well, because my only other option is LittleBird electronics, and I LIKE walking into a physical electronics store for a bit of a browse.