The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
K-12 education in the states is highly anti-socialist. You tie school funding to local property taxes for fuck's sake.
Whether something is run at the local, state, or federal level is a separate question from whether it's run by the government (socialism!) or a freeish market (capitalism!).
Healthcare, for example, is mostly market based but each state is quite isolated from each other. K-12 used to be done only by local property taxes. Most states have switched to state-based funding with a sidecar of local taxes. So they are quite comparable.
And one more time: if the government owns the means of production (schools) and employs the labor (teachers), it's socialism. Like the local police. That's socialism too, in spite of the fact that it's locally funded and run.
An educational system that is open to all and paid for through taxes is a socialist concept.
And yet, is in no way a bad thing, as educated people make the nation better.
Although let me tell you, I'm in Education classes right now, and many of them are terrible. We got taught how to do Venn Diagrams the other day. So all the people bitching that teachers get paid too much are right in one regard. The teachers that actually know what they're doing and are effective though, those deserve much more, and the rest of the shitty teachers should be held to that standard. If they can't perform that well, then too damn bad.
And I'd agree with Jeffe's earlier comment about the system being a fucking travesty in that we continue to graduate students from high school who can't read. When a student is passed through a class despite failing a class because the administration will not let a teacher fail a student, there's a problem. You can't move a student up who has not learned the previous material.
K-12 education in the states is highly anti-socialist. You tie school funding to local property taxes for fuck's sake.
Whether something is run at the local, state, or federal level is a separate question from whether it's run by the government (socialism!) or a freeish market (capitalism!).
Healthcare, for example, is mostly market based but each state is quite isolated from each other. K-12 used to be done only by local property taxes. Most states have switched to state-based funding with a sidecar of local taxes. So they are quite comparable.
And one more time: if the government owns the means of production (schools) and employs the labor (teachers), it's socialism. Like the local police. That's socialism too, in spite of the fact that it's locally funded and run.
Ok, anti-socialist might be going a bit far. But the way it's run in the US right now, it's not registering very high on the collective action scale. The local focus for most of the funding is seriously terrible.
An educational system that is open to all and paid for through taxes is a socialist concept.
And yet, is in no way a bad thing, as educated people make the nation better.
No argument here. I just wanted to point out that public education, just like so many of the things people take for granted in this country, is basically pure socialism. The way we've handled it over the years falls a bit outside the ideal, but it's still a socialist concept, just like the roads and cops and firefighters and Clean Water Acts and whatever else.
Although let me tell you, I'm in Education classes right now, and many of them are terrible. We got taught how to do Venn Diagrams the other day. So all the people bitching that teachers get paid too much are right in one regard. The teachers that actually know what they're doing and are effective though, those deserve much more, and the rest of the shitty teachers should be held to that standard. If they can't perform that well, then too damn bad.
And I'd agree with Jeffe's earlier comment about the system being a fucking travesty in that we continue to graduate students from high school who can't read. When a student is passed through a class despite failing a class because the administration will not let a teacher fail a student, there's a problem. You can't move a student up who has not learned the previous material.
And summer break is dumb too.
Are you in undergrad or grad education courses? I've never taken undergrad courses, but I know quite a few future teachers who either did or are taking them, and they sound pretty universally horrible. My grad courses have been awesome, though.
And the people who don't get fucked by our healthcare system by being unable to get meds for chronic conditions, well, they're a minority anyway..
If you don't think our current healthcare situation completely fucks people Ross, I'm not sure we occupy the same reality
You do know what I do for a living, right? And what my college degrees are in?
Our healthcare system is screwed, for a lot of reasons and at all points of the process. It fucks patients, doctors, and staff pretty much equally.
EDIT: also don't fall into Twainian statistics traps. Your linked article applies to 0.28% of all Americans.
Okay so what's the point of your appeal to authority if you're going to immediately agree? I'm not sure what the point of contention is here, or why you got all defensive when someone said healthcare in the US is fucked last page and then say its screwed this page
So in my personal incredibly biased opinion, a good teacher is worth much more than they are getting paid currently. As an anecdote, take me. In high school I was a very serious underachiever, I would almost never do my homework, took easy classes if I could get away with them, and in general dicked around until I was on track to drop out before my senior year. Really not that uncommon these days.
In my junior year I encountered my first really great teacher, and he completely turned me around. For some reason or another he decided that I was going to be a project of his, and started assigning me special reading outside of class. I realize now it didn't really matter what I was reading, he was just looking for something to engage me so I would start a discussion with him about it. Once he got me engaged outside class-time he would hassle me about all my classes, ask about my homework, and talk to my other teachers about how I was doing. It got to the point that I would come hang out in his classroom during lunches and I would do my homework while he graded papers and kept me focused. Without his direct attention and inspiration I would likely have dropped out of high school and be much worse off than I am now. He even checks up on me a couple times a year, to make sure I am sticking with college and offering advice about new books to read and such.
I understand that my opinion is biased to the point of being useless, but I cannot stress enough how much difference one good teacher can make in a life.
Everyone agrees excellent teachers deserve more money and the terrible ones deserve to be fired, a) how do we actually, objectively, determine the difference and b) how do we break the teacher's unions so we CAN do this?
Everyone agrees excellent teachers deserve more money and the terrible ones deserve to be fired, a) how do we actually, objectively, determine the difference and b) how do we break the teacher's unions so we CAN do this?
Except that breaking the teachers' union is absolutely no guarantee of either teachers being paid more or more bad teachers being fired.
That certainly is the narrative that anti-union forces have been pushing, and pushing hard.
I will point out that, as nice as it would be, teachers should not be paid based on how awesome it would be if all teachers got paid a million dollars and personal servants because teaching is so important. Teachers should be paid based on what is required to get and retain qualified teachers. If we could get brilliant teachers into the classrooms by paying them minimum wage, then minimum wage is what we should pay them. Because the money that goes to teaching does not come out of some magic pit of twenties, it comes from taxpayers, and the government has an obligation to not be throwing away money it doesn't need to.
(I'm also not really swayed by arguments like, "The government wastes tons of money on stupid stuff, so it should waste a little extra money on teachers, too!" The government being retarded in one area does not mean it should be retarded in other areas.)
Now, we have a lot of good teachers who work for the money we currently pay them. The amount we pay these teachers, at least, is thus pretty much spot-on. If we need to boost salaries to get a larger number of them? Sure, we can talk about that. But the amount we pay teachers isn't exactly esoteric knowledge. Everyone knows what they earn. And we still have people lining up to get into the teaching profession.
The problem is less teacher's salaries across the board, and more getting good teachers into shitty schools and then allowing them to do their jobs. And uniformly boosting salaries isn't really going to do that, because teachers are still going to try to get into the good districts with plenty of money, which is where we need them less.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Everyone agrees excellent teachers deserve more money and the terrible ones deserve to be fired, a) how do we actually, objectively, determine the difference and b) how do we break the teacher's unions so we CAN do this?
Except that breaking the teachers' union is absolutely no guarantee of either teachers being paid more or more bad teachers being fired.
That certainly is the narrative that anti-union forces have been pushing, and pushing hard.
Teacher's unions absolutely are the reason we can't fire bad teachers. They also resist evaluating and ranking teachers. So, uh?
In NYC this is actually going down right now. We have thousands of terrible teachers, because of the teacher's union none of them can be fired, they literally get paid to sit in an empty room ("rubber room"). Mayor Bloomberg slashed their budget which will force them to layoff teachers. There are more bad teachers (objectively by any standard bad, many are criminals) than the number that must be laid off.
Will they lay off the bad teachers? No, instead there's a Last In, First Out rule where the newest teachers will be the ones laid off. The governor (democrat Governor Cuomo) is now in a position where he can change the law, dump LIFO. But he's not. The measure has already passed the (Republican controlled) state senate. But the (democrat controlled) state assembly is controlled by the teacher's union.
This really isn't about unions or collective bargaining or democrat vs. republican, the teacher's union actively works to prevent teachers from being fired. And why not, each one is paying them dues. And the teacher's union has a lot of sway with the democratic party.
I think we can all objectively agree that bad teachers need to be fired right? We've all had those amazing teachers that we'll remember forever, but I'm sure we all also remember the fucking terrible ones too.
Everyone agrees excellent teachers deserve more money and the terrible ones deserve to be fired, a) how do we actually, objectively, determine the difference and b) how do we break the teacher's unions so we CAN do this?
Except that breaking the teachers' union is absolutely no guarantee of either teachers being paid more or more bad teachers being fired.
That certainly is the narrative that anti-union forces have been pushing, and pushing hard.
Teacher's unions absolutely are the reason we can't fire bad teachers. They also resist evaluating and ranking teachers. So, uh?
In NYC this is actually going down right now. We have thousands of terrible teachers, because of the teacher's union none of them can be fired, they literally get paid to sit in an empty room ("rubber room"). Mayor Bloomberg slashed their budget which will force them to layoff teachers. There are more bad teachers (objectively by any standard bad, many are criminals) than the number that must be laid off.
Will they lay off the bad teachers? No, instead there's a Last In, First Out rule where the newest teachers will be the ones laid off. The governor (democrat Governor Cuomo) is now in a position where he can change the law, dump LIFO. But he's not. The measure has already passed the (Republican controlled) state senate. But the (democrat controlled) state assembly is controlled by the teacher's union.
This really isn't about unions or collective bargaining or democrat vs. republican, the teacher's union actively works to prevent teachers from being fired. And why not, each one is paying them dues. And the teacher's union has a lot of sway with the democratic party.
I think we can all objectively agree that bad teachers need to be fired right? We've all had those amazing teachers that we'll remember forever, but I'm sure we all also remember the fucking terrible ones too.
First off, the rubber rooms are gone. (They now place the teachers into administrative positions pending judgment.) And the school district was the main cause of their existence, as they refused to hire more arbitrators to work through the backlog of pending cases.
Second, please define "bad teacher". Because there are a lot of people out there who would define the term as being "one who teaches the theory of evolution". Or "one who doesn't treat my child like the special snowflake he or she is". There's a reason that the teachers union fought for and got a system in which the school district has to show clear and documented bad performance and/or misconduct to dismiss a teacher for cause.
Which leads into my final point - yes, you're right that the teachers union fights against unwarranted dismissals. I don't get why you have such a hard time with that. The union fights for a dismissal procedure that requires that the school district has to show legitimate cause for dismissal of the teacher. If the district cannot do so, then they can make the choice to not allow him into the classroom - but they cannot just fire them. And, as we've discussed before, LIFO exists to prevent school districts from both using RIFs as punitive measures or to get rid of more expensive senior staff in favor of cheaper junior teachers.
I will point out that, as nice as it would be, teachers should not be paid based on how awesome it would be if all teachers got paid a million dollars and personal servants because teaching is so important. Teachers should be paid based on what is required to get and retain qualified teachers. If we could get brilliant teachers into the classrooms by paying them minimum wage, then minimum wage is what we should pay them. Because the money that goes to teaching does not come out of some magic pit of twenties, it comes from taxpayers, and the government has an obligation to not be throwing away money it doesn't need to.
...
Now, we have a lot of good teachers who work for the money we currently pay them. The amount we pay these teachers, at least, is thus pretty much spot-on. If we need to boost salaries to get a larger number of them? Sure, we can talk about that. But the amount we pay teachers isn't exactly esoteric knowledge. Everyone knows what they earn. And we still have people lining up to get into the teaching profession.
Do we really have people lining up to get into teaching? I admit I've done barely any research on this as of late, but the impression I got from having an english teacher for a mom and my one year as an an Ed major in college was very much the opposite. Either way, though, it is a difficult question. We already have more than enough people getting into education for the most retarded reasons imaginable ('I want a job with summer vacation!' 'I like kids!' 'I like showing people what I know!' 'I like <x>, and being an <x> teacher is way more practical than most other jobs in the field!'), and if teachers were to suddenly make as much money as we seem to agree they deserve (if not 'ought to get'), we'd likely see a lot more people getting into it for the ultimate-awful reason of making money. Which would make the situation worse all over again.
And as far as unions go, breaking them is the absolute wrong thing to do. Yes, in a lot of cases they do shitty things like make it all-but-impossible to fire tenured teachers even if they are heinously bad, but what we have to remember is that the reason it's gotten to that is because of horror stories we've all heard and some have even posted here:
keeping teachers until the last second before they get tenure and then canning them
how dare you give my angel of a child a C i'll have you fired for this
that kind of thing.
It's a long, hideous chain-reaction of fuckmuppetry that involves everyone from kids to parents, administrators and teachers. The kid is a dickhead in school and fails the class. The parent is utterly unable to believe their little angel would do such a thing and demands he is passed. The teacher says fuck no, that is a betrayal of the purpose of my job and it's not doing your kid any favors in the long run either, the parent goes to the principal/dean and, because (s)he is scared of legal action or whateverthefuck, the admin makes the teacher change the grade.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but this exact chain of events happened to my mom on a quasi-monthly basis before she decided to leave the position.
If you don't have some kind of protection you end up with what Aurora Healthcare recently did in Wisconsin: Fire everyone you possibly can who has more than 2 years of experience and hire fresh grads at half the normal pay telling them "well its the economy and you're lucky to have a job"
Yea... I've heard so many horror stories, now with education you don't get people dying, but you get kids with fucked up futures
An educational system that is open to all and paid for through taxes is a socialist concept.
And yet, is in no way a bad thing, as educated people make the nation better.
Although let me tell you, I'm in Education classes right now, and many of them are terrible. We got taught how to do Venn Diagrams the other day. So all the people bitching that teachers get paid too much are right in one regard. The teachers that actually know what they're doing and are effective though, those deserve much more, and the rest of the shitty teachers should be held to that standard. If they can't perform that well, then too damn bad.
And I'd agree with Jeffe's earlier comment about the system being a fucking travesty in that we continue to graduate students from high school who can't read. When a student is passed through a class despite failing a class because the administration will not let a teacher fail a student, there's a problem. You can't move a student up who has not learned the previous material.
And summer break is dumb too.
I agree this does suck, but its because as teachers and faculty they are incentivized to graduate students, so what do you expect?
Do we really have people lining up to get into teaching? I admit I've done barely any research on this as of late, but the impression I got from having an english teacher for a mom and my one year as an an Ed major in college was very much the opposite.
In any reasonably desirable district (as in, not downtown Detroit and not northern Alaska) you'll generally have fairly absurd applicant:position ratios. My wife applied for a position that had, IIRC, over a hundred applicants, and this was just in Montana. And not even Bozeman or Missoula.
EDIT: And this was before the economy went kaplooie. Before cutbacks.
It depends on subject area, as well.
We've got History and English teachers running out of our ears, but nobody to teach sciences.
Do we really have people lining up to get into teaching? I admit I've done barely any research on this as of late, but the impression I got from having an english teacher for a mom and my one year as an an Ed major in college was very much the opposite.
In any reasonably desirable district (as in, not downtown Detroit and not northern Alaska) you'll generally have fairly absurd applicant:position ratios. My wife applied for a position that had, IIRC, over a hundred applicants, and this was just in Montana. And not even Bozeman or Missoula.
EDIT: And this was before the economy went kaplooie. Before cutbacks.
It depends on subject area, as well.
We've got History and English teachers running out of our ears, but nobody to teach sciences.
That's very much because science teachers don't get paid enough to teach considering what they could get in the private sector with a similar amount of education.
No where near, actually. This is also a problem at the college level. Try to find a decent business professor that isn't retired and basically just teaching for the kicks.
You absolutely cannot appreciate why the unions are so protective of teachers' jobs until you've had to deal with parents. In flavors ranging from "oh you exposed my child to something my holy book says is false" to "my child will be an astronaut and the only thing holding him back is crappy teachers like you" to "you didn't say the pledge of allegiance hard enough why do you hate america" to oh fuck it I'll let you fill in the blanks.
Second, please define "bad teacher". Because there are a lot of people out there who would define the term as being "one who teaches the theory of evolution". Or "one who doesn't treat my child like the special snowflake he or she is". There's a reason that the teachers union fought for and got a system in which the school district has to show clear and documented bad performance and/or misconduct to dismiss a teacher for cause.
Which leads into my final point - yes, you're right that the teachers union fights against unwarranted dismissals. I don't get why you have such a hard time with that. The union fights for a dismissal procedure that requires that the school district has to show legitimate cause for dismissal of the teacher. If the district cannot do so, then they can make the choice to not allow him into the classroom - but they cannot just fire them. And, as we've discussed before, LIFO exists to prevent school districts from both using RIFs as punitive measures or to get rid of more expensive senior staff in favor of cheaper junior teachers.
While I agree that letting the PTA fire teachers would be a bad idea, the situation here is letting the Schools Chancellor fire unfit teachers. As for what defines unfit, google gives me this list from an editorial:
Flanagan's bill would set aside seniority to allow the chancellor to choose who goes from among the 2,671 teachers who have been given unsatisfactory performance ratings; the 1,149 who were excessed from positions, have been unable to persuade any principal to hire them and are getting paid full salaries; the 882 who failed to get properly certified for their slots after five years; the 529 who have been convicted of criminal charges; the 305 who have been found guilty of showing bias in the workplace; the 183 who have been disciplined for absenteeism and lateness abuses, and more.
While we need to protect teacher's ability to teach things that are unpopular with parents, I don't see how empowering the chancellor could possibly lead to that. Cathie Black isn't going to be meeting with pissed off soccer moms.
As I recall, teacher demand varies in high school on subject to some degree. It's far more rare to find people with Math and Science degrees to teach high school than English or History from what I've heard from people in the Education department at my school. Lots of full time teaching positions at the entry level are very competitive from what I've seen though.
Can we use the term "ineffective" teacher instead of "bad"?
Like many have said, parents are protective as shit towards their "precious snowflakes" and so it makes sense that a union is there to help teachers who have to deal with that crap, but they certainly should not defend teachers who are ineffective.
There also needs to be very powerful protections for a teacher to be able to teach fact, such as the theory of evolution, without getting lambasted by uneducated parents every few seconds.
Oh, and we need to stop culturally demonizing not going to college after high school. Not everyone can cut it, and not everyone should be wasting their time and money trying to do so. But since colleges and college loan companies are a business, I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
Can we use the term "ineffective" teacher instead of "bad"?
Like many have said, parents are protective as shit towards their "precious snowflakes" and so it makes sense that a union is there to help teachers who have to deal with that crap, but they certainly should not defend teachers who are ineffective.
There also needs to be very powerful protections for a teacher to be able to teach fact, such as the theory of evolution, without getting lambasted by uneducated parents every few seconds.
Oh, and we need to stop culturally demonizing not going to college after high school. Not everyone can cut it, and not everyone should be wasting their time and money trying to do so. But since colleges and college loan companies are a business, I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
I would argue that's really not true. If you can graduate high school, you can graduate college with a C average no problem. I haven't seen any data, but I would imagine colleges have been dumbing down their majors for a while now (excluding things like pre-med and engineering paths).
I have a business minor. The less said about the average student in those courses the better.
You absolutely cannot appreciate why the unions are so protective of teachers' jobs until you've had to deal with parents. In flavors ranging from "oh you exposed my child to something my holy book says is false" to "my child will be an astronaut and the only thing holding him back is crappy teachers like you" to "you didn't say the pledge of allegiance hard enough why do you hate america" to oh fuck it I'll let you fill in the blanks.
Second, please define "bad teacher". Because there are a lot of people out there who would define the term as being "one who teaches the theory of evolution". Or "one who doesn't treat my child like the special snowflake he or she is". There's a reason that the teachers union fought for and got a system in which the school district has to show clear and documented bad performance and/or misconduct to dismiss a teacher for cause.
Which leads into my final point - yes, you're right that the teachers union fights against unwarranted dismissals. I don't get why you have such a hard time with that. The union fights for a dismissal procedure that requires that the school district has to show legitimate cause for dismissal of the teacher. If the district cannot do so, then they can make the choice to not allow him into the classroom - but they cannot just fire them. And, as we've discussed before, LIFO exists to prevent school districts from both using RIFs as punitive measures or to get rid of more expensive senior staff in favor of cheaper junior teachers.
While I agree that letting the PTA fire teachers would be a bad idea, the situation here is letting the Schools Chancellor fire unfit teachers. As for what defines unfit, google gives me this list from an editorial:
And who, exactly, do you think this Schools Chancellor (something like a superintendent, I assume?) is beholden to?
The mayor, and no one else. In 2002 Mayor Bloomberg got the state legislature to remove NYC's Board of Education. Now we have a Department of Education directly under the mayor's personal control.
As to your other questions, I don't know what administrative bodies rate teachers for the performance review ratings other than references to a Teacher Performance Unit, Labor Support Unit, a "Peer Intervention Plus" program who all are supposed to aid Principals, but this is all casual googling and I need to get going.
So then let me open up this can of worms- should we be paying our hard science teachers substantially more than other teachers?
Obviously. If you are going to make any kind of free market argument for pay you can't not. If it's harder to attract good labor to a position, the pay has to obviously go up to compensate.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
You absolutely cannot appreciate why the unions are so protective of teachers' jobs until you've had to deal with parents. In flavors ranging from "oh you exposed my child to something my holy book says is false" to "my child will be an astronaut and the only thing holding him back is crappy teachers like you" to "you didn't say the pledge of allegiance hard enough why do you hate america" to oh fuck it I'll let you fill in the blanks.
Second, please define "bad teacher". Because there are a lot of people out there who would define the term as being "one who teaches the theory of evolution". Or "one who doesn't treat my child like the special snowflake he or she is". There's a reason that the teachers union fought for and got a system in which the school district has to show clear and documented bad performance and/or misconduct to dismiss a teacher for cause.
Which leads into my final point - yes, you're right that the teachers union fights against unwarranted dismissals. I don't get why you have such a hard time with that. The union fights for a dismissal procedure that requires that the school district has to show legitimate cause for dismissal of the teacher. If the district cannot do so, then they can make the choice to not allow him into the classroom - but they cannot just fire them. And, as we've discussed before, LIFO exists to prevent school districts from both using RIFs as punitive measures or to get rid of more expensive senior staff in favor of cheaper junior teachers.
While I agree that letting the PTA fire teachers would be a bad idea, the situation here is letting the Schools Chancellor fire unfit teachers. As for what defines unfit, google gives me this list from an editorial:
Flanagan's bill would set aside seniority to allow the chancellor to choose who goes from among the 2,671 teachers who have been given unsatisfactory performance ratings; the 1,149 who were excessed from positions, have been unable to persuade any principal to hire them and are getting paid full salaries; the 882 who failed to get properly certified for their slots after five years; the 529 who have been convicted of criminal charges; the 305 who have been found guilty of showing bias in the workplace; the 183 who have been disciplined for absenteeism and lateness abuses, and more.
While we need to protect teacher's ability to teach things that are unpopular with parents, I don't see how empowering the chancellor could possibly lead to that. Cathie Black isn't going to be meeting with pissed off soccer moms.
The chancellor already can fire all those people - as long as she goes through the process. What the bill will do is allow the chancellor to use an RIF to dismiss people outside of the current system without oversight. If you can't see the problem with that, then you're being obtuse.
And let's note that your editorial is from the NY Daily News, which has a known anti-union bias.
Can we use the term "ineffective" teacher instead of "bad"?
Like many have said, parents are protective as shit towards their "precious snowflakes" and so it makes sense that a union is there to help teachers who have to deal with that crap, but they certainly should not defend teachers who are ineffective.
There also needs to be very powerful protections for a teacher to be able to teach fact, such as the theory of evolution, without getting lambasted by uneducated parents every few seconds.
Oh, and we need to stop culturally demonizing not going to college after high school. Not everyone can cut it, and not everyone should be wasting their time and money trying to do so. But since colleges and college loan companies are a business, I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
I would argue that's really not true. If you can graduate high school, you can graduate college with a C average no problem. I haven't seen any data, but I would imagine colleges have been dumbing down their majors for a while now (excluding things like pre-med and engineering paths).
I have a business minor. The less said about the average student in those courses the better.
Right, but if we were able to remove the social stigma from not going to college, then it would be more plausible for a bachelor's program to actually demand something of its candidates. There are other factors that contribute to the universal dumb-down I'm sure, but a really big one is this notion that college is just what you do after going to high school. If it could work the opposite way and more and more people start raising their personal bar to meet the standard of higher education that would be awesome, but that's clearly expecting a little too much of reality.
So then let me open up this can of worms- should we be paying our hard science teachers substantially more than other teachers?
Obviously. If you are going to make any kind of free market argument for pay you can't not. If it's harder to attract good labor to a position, the pay has to obviously go up to compensate.
Yep.
Teaching is not just some homogenous mass of learning where every person is interchangeable. Any private company pays different positions different salaries based on demand. And at least in my experience, so does any government agency. You don't pay a software programmer the same as a VB script writer just because they're both writing code all day. One is harder than the other, and thus there are fewer people who can do it, and so you pay that person more.
If there are twenty people in a district who can teach biology and five hundred people who can teach english, you absolutely should be paying the biology teacher more.
I'm guessing, though, that this logic does not go over well with teacher's unions.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I'm fine with some hard sciences getting paid more, but who is to say that you knowing how atoms work is more important than knowing how governments work? Why then would a science teacher get paid more than a history teacher? Discerning which one of those subjects is more important and thus deserves more pay is a difficult one, as both are highly useful.
I fully intend to try and get some science certifications though, cause the more I can teach the better.
edit: Also, computers need to be integrated into the curriculum somewhere. People should NOT be reaching college without knowing how to work a computer's most basic functions. They're ubiquitous now, learning to use them is pretty much mandatory.
I'm fine with some hard sciences getting paid more, but who is to say that you knowing how atoms work is more important than knowing how governments work? Why then would a science teacher get paid more than a history teacher? Discerning which one of those subjects is more important and thus deserves more pay is a difficult one, as both are highly useful.
I fully intend to try and get some science certifications though, cause the more I can teach the better.
edit: Also, computers need to be integrated into the curriculum somewhere. People should NOT be reaching college without knowing how to work a computer's most basic functions. They're ubiquitous now, learning to use them is pretty much mandatory.
Do we currently have open science positions, while we have 100:1 applicant-to-position ratios for history?
Well gee, I think one of those needs to be paid more.
Well yeah, but once you have 80 of those history teachers move over and get a science certification, and the school has all of their positions filled, should we still give the science teachers more?
edit: Just for clarification, there should absolutely be a monetary incentive to get teachers into those positions, but I can't see two effective teachers in two different subjects in a school that has no vacancies being paid variable amounts of money for the same amount of work, but with different content.
Posts
You do know what I do for a living, right? And what my college degrees are in?
Our healthcare system is screwed, for a lot of reasons and at all points of the process. It fucks patients, doctors, and staff pretty much equally.
EDIT: also don't fall into Twainian statistics traps. Your linked article applies to 0.28% of all Americans.
Whether something is run at the local, state, or federal level is a separate question from whether it's run by the government (socialism!) or a freeish market (capitalism!).
Healthcare, for example, is mostly market based but each state is quite isolated from each other. K-12 used to be done only by local property taxes. Most states have switched to state-based funding with a sidecar of local taxes. So they are quite comparable.
And one more time: if the government owns the means of production (schools) and employs the labor (teachers), it's socialism. Like the local police. That's socialism too, in spite of the fact that it's locally funded and run.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
And yet, is in no way a bad thing, as educated people make the nation better.
Although let me tell you, I'm in Education classes right now, and many of them are terrible. We got taught how to do Venn Diagrams the other day. So all the people bitching that teachers get paid too much are right in one regard. The teachers that actually know what they're doing and are effective though, those deserve much more, and the rest of the shitty teachers should be held to that standard. If they can't perform that well, then too damn bad.
And I'd agree with Jeffe's earlier comment about the system being a fucking travesty in that we continue to graduate students from high school who can't read. When a student is passed through a class despite failing a class because the administration will not let a teacher fail a student, there's a problem. You can't move a student up who has not learned the previous material.
And summer break is dumb too.
Ok, anti-socialist might be going a bit far. But the way it's run in the US right now, it's not registering very high on the collective action scale. The local focus for most of the funding is seriously terrible.
Are you in undergrad or grad education courses? I've never taken undergrad courses, but I know quite a few future teachers who either did or are taking them, and they sound pretty universally horrible. My grad courses have been awesome, though.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Okay so what's the point of your appeal to authority if you're going to immediately agree? I'm not sure what the point of contention is here, or why you got all defensive when someone said healthcare in the US is fucked last page and then say its screwed this page
I'm confused
In my junior year I encountered my first really great teacher, and he completely turned me around. For some reason or another he decided that I was going to be a project of his, and started assigning me special reading outside of class. I realize now it didn't really matter what I was reading, he was just looking for something to engage me so I would start a discussion with him about it. Once he got me engaged outside class-time he would hassle me about all my classes, ask about my homework, and talk to my other teachers about how I was doing. It got to the point that I would come hang out in his classroom during lunches and I would do my homework while he graded papers and kept me focused. Without his direct attention and inspiration I would likely have dropped out of high school and be much worse off than I am now. He even checks up on me a couple times a year, to make sure I am sticking with college and offering advice about new books to read and such.
I understand that my opinion is biased to the point of being useless, but I cannot stress enough how much difference one good teacher can make in a life.
Except that breaking the teachers' union is absolutely no guarantee of either teachers being paid more or more bad teachers being fired.
That certainly is the narrative that anti-union forces have been pushing, and pushing hard.
(I'm also not really swayed by arguments like, "The government wastes tons of money on stupid stuff, so it should waste a little extra money on teachers, too!" The government being retarded in one area does not mean it should be retarded in other areas.)
Now, we have a lot of good teachers who work for the money we currently pay them. The amount we pay these teachers, at least, is thus pretty much spot-on. If we need to boost salaries to get a larger number of them? Sure, we can talk about that. But the amount we pay teachers isn't exactly esoteric knowledge. Everyone knows what they earn. And we still have people lining up to get into the teaching profession.
The problem is less teacher's salaries across the board, and more getting good teachers into shitty schools and then allowing them to do their jobs. And uniformly boosting salaries isn't really going to do that, because teachers are still going to try to get into the good districts with plenty of money, which is where we need them less.
Teacher's unions absolutely are the reason we can't fire bad teachers. They also resist evaluating and ranking teachers. So, uh?
In NYC this is actually going down right now. We have thousands of terrible teachers, because of the teacher's union none of them can be fired, they literally get paid to sit in an empty room ("rubber room"). Mayor Bloomberg slashed their budget which will force them to layoff teachers. There are more bad teachers (objectively by any standard bad, many are criminals) than the number that must be laid off.
Will they lay off the bad teachers? No, instead there's a Last In, First Out rule where the newest teachers will be the ones laid off. The governor (democrat Governor Cuomo) is now in a position where he can change the law, dump LIFO. But he's not. The measure has already passed the (Republican controlled) state senate. But the (democrat controlled) state assembly is controlled by the teacher's union.
This really isn't about unions or collective bargaining or democrat vs. republican, the teacher's union actively works to prevent teachers from being fired. And why not, each one is paying them dues. And the teacher's union has a lot of sway with the democratic party.
I think we can all objectively agree that bad teachers need to be fired right? We've all had those amazing teachers that we'll remember forever, but I'm sure we all also remember the fucking terrible ones too.
First off, the rubber rooms are gone. (They now place the teachers into administrative positions pending judgment.) And the school district was the main cause of their existence, as they refused to hire more arbitrators to work through the backlog of pending cases.
Second, please define "bad teacher". Because there are a lot of people out there who would define the term as being "one who teaches the theory of evolution". Or "one who doesn't treat my child like the special snowflake he or she is". There's a reason that the teachers union fought for and got a system in which the school district has to show clear and documented bad performance and/or misconduct to dismiss a teacher for cause.
Which leads into my final point - yes, you're right that the teachers union fights against unwarranted dismissals. I don't get why you have such a hard time with that. The union fights for a dismissal procedure that requires that the school district has to show legitimate cause for dismissal of the teacher. If the district cannot do so, then they can make the choice to not allow him into the classroom - but they cannot just fire them. And, as we've discussed before, LIFO exists to prevent school districts from both using RIFs as punitive measures or to get rid of more expensive senior staff in favor of cheaper junior teachers.
Do we really have people lining up to get into teaching? I admit I've done barely any research on this as of late, but the impression I got from having an english teacher for a mom and my one year as an an Ed major in college was very much the opposite. Either way, though, it is a difficult question. We already have more than enough people getting into education for the most retarded reasons imaginable ('I want a job with summer vacation!' 'I like kids!' 'I like showing people what I know!' 'I like <x>, and being an <x> teacher is way more practical than most other jobs in the field!'), and if teachers were to suddenly make as much money as we seem to agree they deserve (if not 'ought to get'), we'd likely see a lot more people getting into it for the ultimate-awful reason of making money. Which would make the situation worse all over again.
And as far as unions go, breaking them is the absolute wrong thing to do. Yes, in a lot of cases they do shitty things like make it all-but-impossible to fire tenured teachers even if they are heinously bad, but what we have to remember is that the reason it's gotten to that is because of horror stories we've all heard and some have even posted here:
keeping teachers until the last second before they get tenure and then canning them
how dare you give my angel of a child a C i'll have you fired for this
that kind of thing.
It's a long, hideous chain-reaction of fuckmuppetry that involves everyone from kids to parents, administrators and teachers. The kid is a dickhead in school and fails the class. The parent is utterly unable to believe their little angel would do such a thing and demands he is passed. The teacher says fuck no, that is a betrayal of the purpose of my job and it's not doing your kid any favors in the long run either, the parent goes to the principal/dean and, because (s)he is scared of legal action or whateverthefuck, the admin makes the teacher change the grade.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but this exact chain of events happened to my mom on a quasi-monthly basis before she decided to leave the position.
Yea... I've heard so many horror stories, now with education you don't get people dying, but you get kids with fucked up futures
I agree this does suck, but its because as teachers and faculty they are incentivized to graduate students, so what do you expect?
We've got History and English teachers running out of our ears, but nobody to teach sciences.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
That's very much because science teachers don't get paid enough to teach considering what they could get in the private sector with a similar amount of education.
No where near, actually. This is also a problem at the college level. Try to find a decent business professor that isn't retired and basically just teaching for the kicks.
While I agree that letting the PTA fire teachers would be a bad idea, the situation here is letting the Schools Chancellor fire unfit teachers. As for what defines unfit, google gives me this list from an editorial:
While we need to protect teacher's ability to teach things that are unpopular with parents, I don't see how empowering the chancellor could possibly lead to that. Cathie Black isn't going to be meeting with pissed off soccer moms.
Edit: Beat'd.
SteamID: devCharles
twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesewise
Like many have said, parents are protective as shit towards their "precious snowflakes" and so it makes sense that a union is there to help teachers who have to deal with that crap, but they certainly should not defend teachers who are ineffective.
There also needs to be very powerful protections for a teacher to be able to teach fact, such as the theory of evolution, without getting lambasted by uneducated parents every few seconds.
Oh, and we need to stop culturally demonizing not going to college after high school. Not everyone can cut it, and not everyone should be wasting their time and money trying to do so. But since colleges and college loan companies are a business, I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
I would argue that's really not true. If you can graduate high school, you can graduate college with a C average no problem. I haven't seen any data, but I would imagine colleges have been dumbing down their majors for a while now (excluding things like pre-med and engineering paths).
I have a business minor. The less said about the average student in those courses the better.
The mayor, and no one else. In 2002 Mayor Bloomberg got the state legislature to remove NYC's Board of Education. Now we have a Department of Education directly under the mayor's personal control.
As to your other questions, I don't know what administrative bodies rate teachers for the performance review ratings other than references to a Teacher Performance Unit, Labor Support Unit, a "Peer Intervention Plus" program who all are supposed to aid Principals, but this is all casual googling and I need to get going.
Obviously. If you are going to make any kind of free market argument for pay you can't not. If it's harder to attract good labor to a position, the pay has to obviously go up to compensate.
The chancellor already can fire all those people - as long as she goes through the process. What the bill will do is allow the chancellor to use an RIF to dismiss people outside of the current system without oversight. If you can't see the problem with that, then you're being obtuse.
And let's note that your editorial is from the NY Daily News, which has a known anti-union bias.
Yep.
Teaching is not just some homogenous mass of learning where every person is interchangeable. Any private company pays different positions different salaries based on demand. And at least in my experience, so does any government agency. You don't pay a software programmer the same as a VB script writer just because they're both writing code all day. One is harder than the other, and thus there are fewer people who can do it, and so you pay that person more.
If there are twenty people in a district who can teach biology and five hundred people who can teach english, you absolutely should be paying the biology teacher more.
I'm guessing, though, that this logic does not go over well with teacher's unions.
I fully intend to try and get some science certifications though, cause the more I can teach the better.
edit: Also, computers need to be integrated into the curriculum somewhere. People should NOT be reaching college without knowing how to work a computer's most basic functions. They're ubiquitous now, learning to use them is pretty much mandatory.
Well yeah, but once you have 80 of those history teachers move over and get a science certification, and the school has all of their positions filled, should we still give the science teachers more?
edit: Just for clarification, there should absolutely be a monetary incentive to get teachers into those positions, but I can't see two effective teachers in two different subjects in a school that has no vacancies being paid variable amounts of money for the same amount of work, but with different content.