And about disbanding the teachers unions, fuck that noise. I'm tired of hearing how the teachers unions are scapegoated into the Big Bad Interest Group that's fucking up American education. I'm not buying it, and every time I hear someone say they should be disbanded, the same fucking motive is at the bottom of it - "I want to force teachers to do as I want, and I can't do that because they stick up for one another." I'm sick of it.
But imagine for a second if this kind of thing was the norm across all subjects (history, science, etc.) and it was, more or less, "the way it should be."
There's only one solution:
But really, though, that's saying something about the government when we have to fear what would happen if they took control over an already inefficient and wasteful system, which leads inevitably to: people should care more about the government, seeing as they're already being violently violated by it.
NCLB is a horrible system, but it was put in place for a reason.
Yes. It's a back door attack on the educational system, because amazingly, public schooling is really, really popular. So instead of attacking a very popular program head-on, where you're going to end up looking like a size 14 heel, you cut the legs out from underneath it by giving it impossible goals. Then when those goals aren't met (because, quite frankly, they were impossible TO meet), you can get all pious and say that you gave them a chance and they blew it, and maybe a new system can be employed - a system built on the private sector. It's even better when you can use a scam to base your unreasonable metrics on so you can point to it when people start criticizing your goals.
(Oh, and if this sounds oddly familiar, it's because they used the exact same fucking playbook against SCHIP.)
A far better analogy (and I must say I 100% agree with you on this, it may even go into the 101% area) is the destruction of the New Deal/Frontier/Great Society Reforms during the 1980's. The conservatives, by that time knew that they couldn't attack the reforms-everyone liked them, and the thought at the time was that a country couldn't stay as rich as America was without them-and instead, at a time when the system was considered weak, said that the New Federalism reforms would lower taxes, and hell, who wants taxes?
And bam, that was the beginning of the shithole we're in.
And about disbanding the teachers unions, fuck that noise. I'm tired of hearing how the teachers unions are scapegoated into the Big Bad Interest Group that's fucking up American education. I'm not buying it, and every time I hear someone say they should be disbanded, the same fucking motive is at the bottom of it - "I want to force teachers to do as I want, and I can't do that because they stick up for one another." I'm sick of it.
Unions are fine. I've been part of one. They're pretty awesome.
The Teacher's Union just happens to presently be really shitty in some of its practices, which needs to change.
There has to be a limit behind tenure that keeps horribly bad teachers from displacing awesome teachers just because the newbies are new.
And about disbanding the teachers unions, fuck that noise. I'm tired of hearing how the teachers unions are scapegoated into the Big Bad Interest Group that's fucking up American education. I'm not buying it, and every time I hear someone say they should be disbanded, the same fucking motive is at the bottom of it - "I want to force teachers to do as I want, and I can't do that because they stick up for one another." I'm sick of it.
I have no problem with the teachers union existing. It's necessary. It's a mostly good thing. But I feel that in order to affect major change in the educational system teachers unions need to go away for a while. Once changes were put into place and the system was all around better the teachers unions would come back. I just feel that protecting students and our society as a whole is a lot more important than protecting teachers.
And yes, teachers should do what most people want them to do, their god damned job. They shouldn't be able to hide behind tenure and the teachers union if they're no longer able to teach the children of the US.
And about disbanding the teachers unions, fuck that noise. I'm tired of hearing how the teachers unions are scapegoated into the Big Bad Interest Group that's fucking up American education. I'm not buying it, and every time I hear someone say they should be disbanded, the same fucking motive is at the bottom of it - "I want to force teachers to do as I want, and I can't do that because they stick up for one another." I'm sick of it.
I have no problem with the teachers union existing. It's necessary. It's a mostly good thing. But I feel that in order to affect major change in the educational system teachers unions need to go away for a while. Once changes were put into place and the system was all around better the teachers unions would come back. I just feel that protecting students and our society as a whole is a lot more important than protecting teachers.
And yes, teachers should do what most people want them to do, their god damned job. They shouldn't be able to hide behind tenure and the teachers union if they're no longer able to teach the children of the US.
Again, DoR, your reason for busting the teachers union is "I want to force teachers to do what I want (because, as you've seen in this thread, they're not going to just agree with you), but I can't do that as long as they back each other up." It's a bullshit reason. And it's quite clear that you (along with a lot of the posters) don't get why we give teachers tenure - it's to protect them from an insane parent who is infuriated that said teacher is reading Harry Potter in the classroom (and yes, that's actually a real world example.) I've found that when you see the unions protecting bad teachers, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out that the administration has been fucking with the teachers for years and so they're not going to give any fucking ground. In places where the administration isn't at war with the teachers union, bad teachers find the atmosphere to be a whole lot less favorable.
And I'm fucking tired of teachers being expected to take it up the ass without any lube "for the children". Is teaching children important? Yes. So lets start treating the people that are responsible for doing exactly that decently, instead of expecting them to do their jobs out of the charity of their heart because you don't want to pay $50 more in property taxes.
And about disbanding the teachers unions, fuck that noise. I'm tired of hearing how the teachers unions are scapegoated into the Big Bad Interest Group that's fucking up American education. I'm not buying it, and every time I hear someone say they should be disbanded, the same fucking motive is at the bottom of it - "I want to force teachers to do as I want, and I can't do that because they stick up for one another." I'm sick of it.
I have no problem with the teachers union existing. It's necessary. It's a mostly good thing. But I feel that in order to affect major change in the educational system teachers unions need to go away for a while. Once changes were put into place and the system was all around better the teachers unions would come back. I just feel that protecting students and our society as a whole is a lot more important than protecting teachers.
And yes, teachers should do what most people want them to do, their god damned job. They shouldn't be able to hide behind tenure and the teachers union if they're no longer able to teach the children of the US.
Again, DoR, your reason for busting the teachers union is "I want to force teachers to do what I want (because, as you've seen in this thread, they're not going to just agree with you), but I can't do that as long as they back each other up." It's a bullshit reason. And it's quite clear that you (along with a lot of the posters) don't get why we give teachers tenure - it's to protect them from an insane parent who is infuriated that said teacher is reading Harry Potter in the classroom (and yes, that's actually a real world example.) I've found that when you see the unions protecting bad teachers, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out that the administration has been fucking with the teachers for years and so they're not going to give any fucking ground. In places where the administration isn't at war with the teachers union, bad teachers find the atmosphere to be a whole lot less favorable.
And I'm fucking tired of teachers being expected to take it up the ass without any lube "for the children". Is teaching children important? Yes. So lets start treating the people that are responsible for doing exactly that decently, instead of expecting them to do their jobs out of the charity of their heart because you don't want to pay $50 more in property taxes.
And this is why I don't really think effective change will ever be put into place. Not just because of the teachers unions (really, they're small fish in a big pond of the fucked up education system), but because almost everyone is afraid of dramatic changes to the educational system. The teachers are, the parents are, and you can bet your ass the politicians are.
And it makes sense to be afraid. In order to change the system you have to change it while it's still running. And that's dangerous. No one knows if any plan would fix it. One change might make it worse (NCLB). Something else might make it better. But after NCLB I doubt teachers or politicians would be willing to make a sweeping change to the educational system. That's why I would want the teachers union to go on hiatus.
Does it basically come down to "I want teachers to go along with this without getting in the way of the changes"? Yes, I'd agree that's basically my stance. And there's not any way I'm going to get you to agree with it (I think).
But I do want you to know that I have a great deal of respect for teachers. I feel like they're being shitted on with the current system. I feel like a majority of the educational system's problems stem from that. I also feel like the only thing to fix the education system involves taking away their protection for a while.
I just feel that protecting students and our society as a whole is a lot more important than protecting teachers.
It's not as simple as that.
Disbanding unions would reduce the job security and bargaining power of teachers, and make teaching less attractive and viable as a career. This would mean that the quality of people who would be attracted to teaching would drop. We all know that teachers have a tremendous influence on a person's growth and education. So by disbanding unions you would ultimately hurt the students.
I just feel that protecting students and our society as a whole is a lot more important than protecting teachers.
It's not as simple as that.
Disbanding unions would reduce the job security and bargaining power of teachers, and make teaching less attractive and viable as a career. This would mean that the quality of people who would be attracted to teaching would drop. We all know that teachers have a tremendous influence on a person's growth and education. So by disbanding unions you would ultimately hurt the students.
To this I say that it would be a temporary thing. 1-2 years at maximum. Disbanding might even be the wrong idea here altogether.
Does anyone here think teacher unions would go for a systemwide change in the education system? Something like I proposed, or something completely different altogether? If the government started to change the system radically, and start enforcing new training methods for teachers would teacher unions strike? If not, then there'd be no reason to disband the unions. As long as they'd go along with the changes (if they were well thought out and fair to both students and teachers) there'd be no reason to do anything to the unions.
I'm just not sure myself that they'd go for any sweeping changes. And the teachers union opposing changes that have very little to do with what it is suppose to protect (job security, wages, hours) would be an example of a broken union. But there's every chance that I'm completely wrong here and that the unions would go with the changes as long as they weren't the "we're firing everyone and starting fresh" type of changes.
I am generally very opposed to any sort of government-influenced reforms on teaching methods. Like mcdermott pointed out a few pages back, the possibility of abstinence-only education creeping into the educational system via the federal government scares the crap out of me. Think about how many votes Alabama has...
Oh so many points to work on here. Lets work this backwards.
How are your teachers unions in the states? Here they are provincial and like nuses and doctors you have to belong to it to teach. Like the Nurses and Doctors they have a collective agreement with the government and it get renegotiated every 3-5 years about. Oh and tnure in a high school? how the hell does that happen? Tenured postions are the province of Academia not public education.
Here in BC (and I beleive) and the other provinces we do have standardized testing. In grade 12. In academic subjects only, and they are used mostly for College/University applications. I did the "provincials" (as most high schoolers and teachers here refer to the tests as) for English, French, History, Math, Chemistry, and Biology. The rest of the schooling is based on ministry approved curricula and they do accreditation checks on a percentage of schools each year, as well as random testing at other grades and subjects. This seems to give a pretty good overview of how each school and district is doing.
this subject is very dear to my heart as my Daughter is in grade one and my Auntie has been a teach all her adult life. It is very important for the parents to work WITH the teacher and not against them. My daughter is having the same problems that my husband had at this age. She is bored by the standard stuff and easily distracted. Unlike my husbands teacher who was marking days to retierment, her current teacher is working with us and her on this. If she can focus on getting her work done, she gets to get the big books out and read those, small things but they are making such abig improvment. Her teacher does not have to constantly work on getting Katheryn to pay attenttion and My Girl gets the lessons she needs. It also helps the class cause Katheryn is not be a disruptive brat. Sigh, I fear for the day she doesen't have as wonder full a teacher as Ms. McKinnon. That woman is what more schools need, she teaches us almost as much as she teachers our daughter I think.
Being a teacher has to be one of the most ungratefull jobs on the planet these days. At least in the western world. I joke to my twin sister that the reason is the parents atitude.
When their kids come home with a bad report card they say; What is wrong with that dammed school.
When their kids come home with a good report card they say;Thats what I expect from MY kid!!
How can teacher status improve if they only get the blame and none of the credit?
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I think the first step to getting our education back up to par is to completely scrap the NCLB act wholesale. Let's just call a spade a spade and say "Like just about everything Mr. Bush has had a hand in, this is an awful disaster."
Then we start pitching ideas from there. Because honestly, I don't see how NCLB is even tweakable. It's fucked from the premise on down.
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AlectharAlan ShoreWe're not territorial about that sort of thing, are we?Registered Userregular
I've found that when you see the unions protecting bad teachers, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out that the administration has been fucking with the teachers for years and so they're not going to give any fucking ground. In places where the administration isn't at war with the teachers union, bad teachers find the atmosphere to be a whole lot less favorable.
This is quite true. In fact, it's often not necessarily even over a period of years. Administrators are often required by factors outside their control to do enormously unpopular things, and teachers and students both tend to view a few odd incidents as indicative of incompetence, despite the fact that the very fact the school functions is a marvel of competence. When your school system's primary model seems to be the penitentiary system (the majority of schools in our country, and maybe the world over, are partly buildings in which to imprison children while their parents go to work) it's a wonder that anything gets accomplished at all. Administrators, by the very nature of their profession, are lightning rods for a great deal of resentment, deserved or not, and this contributes to Union non-compliance.
And teaching is an impossible job. Every fucking yahoo thinks that their child is special, when in reality the vast majority of children are simply average. Every time a teacher speaks out loud, they endanger their job, because every class has at least one parent willing to go to fucking court because Harry Potter is evil. Teacher's need a union, because we expect them to do entirely too much. They are our prison wardens, our disciplinarians (despite the fact that we give them no effective tools), our teachers of ethics and civic duty, our babysitters, our nutritionists in many cases, and thanks to the increasing prevalence of things like peanut allergies, medical practitioners to whom we entrust our children's fragile lives. This is all in addition to attempting to educate them. They have the most important, difficult job in the country, and they get little reward, next to no recognition, and are often the first person we blame when something goes wrong. It's a wonder anyone competent joins the field. Maybe we should start worrying less about making the teacher's unions tougher on bad teachers, and focus more on making sure that they aren't the only ones left.
The only way to improve education is a huge shift in attitude. Some kids hit middle school and high school, stop giving a shit because they're little assholes, and just start failing tremendously because of lack of parental motivation. It needs to be socially unacceptable to be bad at school. It sounds mean, but it should be looked down upon by everyone and constantly reinforced in a negative way.
How to change the attitude? I don't know. Spend millions in advertising? Give parents a huge tax break if their kids perform better in school? And I'm not talking passing every grade, because NCLB just passes failures to the next grade. I guess standardized tests?
The only way to improve education is a huge shift in attitude. Some kids hit middle school and high school, stop giving a shit because they're little assholes, and just start failing tremendously because of lack of parental motivation. It needs to be socially unacceptable to be bad at school. It sounds mean, but it should be looked down upon by everyone and constantly reinforced in a negative way.
Yeah Japan's suicide rate is pretty high isn't it?
The only way to improve education is a huge shift in attitude. Some kids hit middle school and high school, stop giving a shit because they're little assholes, and just start failing tremendously because of lack of parental motivation. It needs to be socially unacceptable to be bad at school. It sounds mean, but it should be looked down upon by everyone and constantly reinforced in a negative way.
Yeah Japan's suicide rate is pretty high isn't it?
Or they gave up because their parents got divorced and they totally lack motivation and become depressed.
I'm sure I was just being an asshole though. Glad I'm not in college or turned things around.
I believe that there is too much hand-holding done in our school systems. It's too acceptable for kids to be poor at academics, and not enough kids are failing grades that they have no business passing. Standardized testing is definitely detrimental to our school system, and I feel that it needs to be taken out completely. The curriculum is also a problem. I feel some subjects, like math, are stretched out more than they should be.
My nephew is in the second grade and he's learning multiplication now, not because of his school, but because of what is taught to him by his parents, my parents, and myself. The typical curriculum doesn't start to cover multiplication until the third grade, but seeing my nephew grasp this concept now leads me to wonder why things can't be stepped up a bit in the way we teach kids mathematics. It makes me think of all the people I knew that struggled with algebra throughout their high school career, and it leads me to believe that they would have done better if only they weren't coddled so much when they were younger.
English suffers from this as well. Too many people are content to speak and write poorly. The occasional grammatical or typographical error may be acceptable, but there are too many people who are content with being unable to so much as manage one complete sentence without making an error of some kind. Most Americans are only taught to speak one language, and we can't even do that efficiently. That's pretty sad when you consider the fact that many of our foreign counterparts speak two or more languages, and some of them speak ours better than us.
When I was growing up, a high school diploma actually meant something. At the very least it meant that you were a competent individual. This is hardly the case anymore as a high school diploma seems to be scarcely worth the paper it is printed on these days. Even two-year college degrees don't seem to carry much weight with them anymore. Is it because society is so advanced, or because our education is so far behind? Unfortunately, it seems to me that it is the latter.
As a whole, we are becoming more and more aggressively ignorant. I feel the Department of Education is a farce and should be done away with. 67.2 billion dollars a year (source: http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html) are wasted on a department that creates standardized tests, hands down regulations to schools in exchange for funding, and runs our education system into the ground. If this money were handed out on a state-by-state basis, that's more than a billion dollars per state for education. I'm sure the states could think of better ways to spend that money then a federal agency that has no idea what is going on in each district.
Completely changing the system may be detrimental to some students now, but as the old adage goes, if you want to make an omelette, then you have to break a few eggs. It is painfully obvious that what we are doing now is not working and is hurting not only our children, but also our society as a whole. Our schools need to be more like colleges, and less like day care programs.
All of this comes down to quality of teaching. People feel like the education system doesn't give a shit because they are willing to allow shitty students to go on being shitty. But a competent teacher wouldn't have that, and would work towards helping these students. I guess in that, it shouldn't be like college, because you have to remember that these are just young kids who need guidance from somewhere and can't always get it from their parents.
So I bring up again the issue with teacher's salaries. As it is, we wonder why married women make up the bulk of teachers in our school systems (at least until high school, where it somewhat evens out). Not to knock on that demographic, but they represent a section of society that doesn't really need the money. I'm not saying that all working married women don't need the money, just that with the paltry pay teachers get there's no real way that contributes to the family finances. By making teaching an attractive position again, we create more competition amongst talented, dedicated people.
1) Not everyone learns at the same rate. You helped teach your nephew. Awesome. Some kids don't have anything close to that.
2) Diplomas did not mean more back in the good old days. I hate to break that to you. I doubt you're older than my father and he got by on being an outstanding athlete and little else. He pretty much learned to read when I did.
I think there should be curriculum guidelines, but they should be very loose. I don't really have a problem with standard tests either, so long as they are ONLY a measure of success, and not used for punitive measures. Also, I believe states and at the very lowest section, counties should be scrutinized. Scrutinizing a single teacher at any particular year for a serious performance evaluation is a bit dense. The quality of students the teacher gets, as well as their attitude and what they have had a chance to learn before are probably all greater factors than the one year being tested.
So I bring up again the issue with teacher's salaries. As it is, we wonder why married women make up the bulk of teachers in our school systems (at least until high school, where it somewhat evens out). Not to knock on that demographic, but they represent a section of society that doesn't really need the money. I'm not saying that all working married women don't need the money, just that with the paltry pay teachers get there's no real way that contributes to the family finances. By making teaching an attractive position again, we create more competition amongst talented, dedicated people.
Man wut?
The median household income in this country is like $40K (give or take). I don't know of anywhere in the country where teachers make less than $20K (at least not much, and not for more than a year or two). You're saying that's insignificant? I'd wager that for a majority of those married women, their salary is anywhere from 30% to 50% of their family's income.
Hell, I believe my mother-in-law makes more than my father-in-law.
No, I think the appeal of teaching for many of those women is the schedule: most either have kids or intend to eventually, and as a teacher (especially teaching in the district where you live) you're going to have roughly the same schedule as your kids...at least more so than almost any other job. Which makes is a great choice as a second income in a two-income household.
2) Diplomas did not mean more back in the good old days. I hate to break that to you. I doubt you're older than my father and he got by on being an outstanding athlete and little else. He pretty much learned to read when I did.
Yeah, diplomas didn't really mean more then, there was just less education required to make a decent living.
I know not everyone learns at the same rate, which is why I feel that more kids should be failing grades/classes that they are passing. Maybe I was just told diplomas were more important in the days of yesteryear, and I grew up to find out I was lied to, but they sure seemed more important back then. Perhaps the importance of a high school diploma is really only the sentiment it has attached to it as per the trials of high school life in general. That's all my diploma really means to me anyway.
I agree with setting loose curriculum guidelines, and scrutinizing school districts, but I still don't see a need for standardized testing as a measure for success. If guidelines are set and school districts are scrutinized, then it seems to me that grade reports should be enough to measure the success of a particular region.
Why does every solution to schools involve "make more people fail". How is this a good thing?
How is it that people getting a passing grade when they don't actually know the material they were supposed to learn is any better?
Because you're simply proposing we deny people some qualifications which are generally assumed to be inadequate, rather then fix the underlying problems.
I was under the impression that the inherent quality of diplomas wasn't higher back in the day, but rather that their rarity made them relatively more valuable than now. It's more common now to ride the bandwagon straight out of high school to college, though it's certainly justifiable in that many career positions require degrees now.
Because you're simply proposing we deny people some qualifications which are generally assumed to be inadequate, rather then fix the underlying problems.
I'm also saying that we need to change the qualifications. I feel that more should be expected from students not only in what they study, but also in how they are graded. Even if we didn't change anything, isn't denying them inadequate qualifications better then just giving them credit for meeting those inadequate qualifications when, in all actuality, they can't?
The teachers in the public school system are horribly underpaid.
The fact is, teachers - along with doctors - are a nation's most important asset. Human capital investment, i.e. education, is the only investment that always has positive returns. It also happens to be the only way for the USA to even hope to compete with fast-growing economies like China and India.
The way teachers are regarded and treated in this country is very disappointing.
Although I can not comment on most public schools, the teachers at my school were paid just fine. Starting was around 45,000 for most and 49,000 for Master's degrees. Each year their pay grade went up (obviously quicker for those with a Master's) and capped after i believe 15 years for non masters degrees at about 65000-75000, and Masters capped at 20 years at 80,000. I did live in California so the numbers are slightly misleadering, but they are not as bad as many pretend.
Does it basically come down to "I want teachers to go along with this without getting in the way of the changes"? Yes, I'd agree that's basically my stance. And there's not any way I'm going to get you to agree with it (I think).
You're never going to get me to agree with it because that's the mentality of a tyrant.
Oh so many points to work on here. Lets work this backwards.
How are your teachers unions in the states? Here they are provincial and like nuses and doctors you have to belong to it to teach. Like the Nurses and Doctors they have a collective agreement with the government and it get renegotiated every 3-5 years about. Oh and tnure in a high school? how the hell does that happen? Tenured postions are the province of Academia not public education.
Here in Newfoundland it used to be that after two years of teaching, you got tenure, which means they couldn't fire you, but if the school scaled down they could send to other schools all over the island. Now it's a lot harder to get tenure, my Dad who retired from High School teaching about 3 years ago and now teaches at the University, knows a lot of good teachers who have been teaching for 6-8 years with no tenure.
And we called the standardized tests "Publics" here.
re: NCLB, I can safely say that standardized testing sucks, and that I'm glad I'm up in Canada.
And it's quite clear that you (along with a lot of the posters) don't get why we give teachers tenure - it's to protect them from an insane parent who is infuriated that said teacher is reading Harry Potter in the classroom (and yes, that's actually a real world example.)
Granted the situations of teacher that you're familiar with are quite different than the ones I've seen, but there must be a way of protecting teachers from idiot parents while still being able to fire a teacher for being incompetent. I don't think NCLB is the right approach, but I'm not sure what is.
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And it's quite clear that you (along with a lot of the posters) don't get why we give teachers tenure - it's to protect them from an insane parent who is infuriated that said teacher is reading Harry Potter in the classroom (and yes, that's actually a real world example.)
Granted the situations of teacher that you're familiar with are quite different than the ones I've seen, but there must be a way of protecting teachers from idiot parents while still being able to fire a teacher for being incompetent. I don't think NCLB is the right approach, but I'm not sure what is.
Any ideas?
Well, for one, don't treat the teachers union like it's the devil incarnate. As I've said, unions only protect bad teachers when they have to put up a unified front.
Second, define "bad". There are ways to get rid of incompetent or outright dangerous teachers. The problem is that a lot of school administrations like to define "bad" as "doesn't agree with us". Which leads us back to point 1.
The teachers in the public school system are horribly underpaid.
The fact is, teachers - along with doctors - are a nation's most important asset. Human capital investment, i.e. education, is the only investment that always has positive returns. It also happens to be the only way for the USA to even hope to compete with fast-growing economies like China and India.
The way teachers are regarded and treated in this country is very disappointing.
Although I can not comment on most public schools, the teachers at my school were paid just fine. Starting was around 45,000 for most and 49,000 for Master's degrees. Each year their pay grade went up (obviously quicker for those with a Master's) and capped after i believe 15 years for non masters degrees at about 65000-75000, and Masters capped at 20 years at 80,000. I did live in California so the numbers are slightly misleadering, but they are not as bad as many pretend.
Man, I think starting my school district in Dallas was 30k(ish. Fuzzy 6 year old memory). They had an interesting program which I almost decided to do, which was basically, anybody who graduated from a Dallas high school in the top 10% of their class got a letter in the folder with their diploma. The letter offered them a guaranteed position in a Dallas school at the above pay, if they got a teaching certification within 5 years. They really wanted teachers.
Man, I think starting my school district in Dallas was 30k.
Starting pay for teachers up here only recently (last 2-3 years) broke the $20K line in many areas, well below median per-capita income.
I remember hearing that when Helena put up a teaching position opening that had a decent salary for there - well, they got responses from all over the US, from top notch candidates.
They had an interesting program which I almost decided to do, which was basically, anybody who graduated from a Dallas high school in the top 10% of their class got a letter in the folder with their diploma. The letter offered them a guaranteed position in a Dallas school at the above pay, if they got a teaching certification within 5 years. They really wanted teachers.
They had an interesting program which I almost decided to do, which was basically, anybody who graduated from a Dallas high school in the top 10% of their class got a letter in the folder with their diploma. The letter offered them a guaranteed position in a Dallas school at the above pay, if they got a teaching certification within 5 years. They really wanted teachers.
Wow, that's actually kind of scary.
The thing is that schools are desperate. The cost of a post-secondary education combined with the low salaries that teachers get means that in many ways, it's a sucker's game.
They had an interesting program which I almost decided to do, which was basically, anybody who graduated from a Dallas high school in the top 10% of their class got a letter in the folder with their diploma. The letter offered them a guaranteed position in a Dallas school at the above pay, if they got a teaching certification within 5 years. They really wanted teachers.
Wow, that's actually kind of scary.
The thing is that schools are desperate. The cost of a post-secondary education combined with the low salaries that teachers get means that in many ways, it's a sucker's game.
We have(or had, Mitt may have killed it) a program where the state'll pay for your college at any state school if you agree to teach in state one year for each year of school they pay for.
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There's only one solution:
But really, though, that's saying something about the government when we have to fear what would happen if they took control over an already inefficient and wasteful system, which leads inevitably to: people should care more about the government, seeing as they're already being violently violated by it.
A far better analogy (and I must say I 100% agree with you on this, it may even go into the 101% area) is the destruction of the New Deal/Frontier/Great Society Reforms during the 1980's. The conservatives, by that time knew that they couldn't attack the reforms-everyone liked them, and the thought at the time was that a country couldn't stay as rich as America was without them-and instead, at a time when the system was considered weak, said that the New Federalism reforms would lower taxes, and hell, who wants taxes?
And bam, that was the beginning of the shithole we're in.
Unions are fine. I've been part of one. They're pretty awesome.
The Teacher's Union just happens to presently be really shitty in some of its practices, which needs to change.
There has to be a limit behind tenure that keeps horribly bad teachers from displacing awesome teachers just because the newbies are new.
I have no problem with the teachers union existing. It's necessary. It's a mostly good thing. But I feel that in order to affect major change in the educational system teachers unions need to go away for a while. Once changes were put into place and the system was all around better the teachers unions would come back. I just feel that protecting students and our society as a whole is a lot more important than protecting teachers.
And yes, teachers should do what most people want them to do, their god damned job. They shouldn't be able to hide behind tenure and the teachers union if they're no longer able to teach the children of the US.
Again, DoR, your reason for busting the teachers union is "I want to force teachers to do what I want (because, as you've seen in this thread, they're not going to just agree with you), but I can't do that as long as they back each other up." It's a bullshit reason. And it's quite clear that you (along with a lot of the posters) don't get why we give teachers tenure - it's to protect them from an insane parent who is infuriated that said teacher is reading Harry Potter in the classroom (and yes, that's actually a real world example.) I've found that when you see the unions protecting bad teachers, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out that the administration has been fucking with the teachers for years and so they're not going to give any fucking ground. In places where the administration isn't at war with the teachers union, bad teachers find the atmosphere to be a whole lot less favorable.
And I'm fucking tired of teachers being expected to take it up the ass without any lube "for the children". Is teaching children important? Yes. So lets start treating the people that are responsible for doing exactly that decently, instead of expecting them to do their jobs out of the charity of their heart because you don't want to pay $50 more in property taxes.
And this is why I don't really think effective change will ever be put into place. Not just because of the teachers unions (really, they're small fish in a big pond of the fucked up education system), but because almost everyone is afraid of dramatic changes to the educational system. The teachers are, the parents are, and you can bet your ass the politicians are.
And it makes sense to be afraid. In order to change the system you have to change it while it's still running. And that's dangerous. No one knows if any plan would fix it. One change might make it worse (NCLB). Something else might make it better. But after NCLB I doubt teachers or politicians would be willing to make a sweeping change to the educational system. That's why I would want the teachers union to go on hiatus.
Does it basically come down to "I want teachers to go along with this without getting in the way of the changes"? Yes, I'd agree that's basically my stance. And there's not any way I'm going to get you to agree with it (I think).
But I do want you to know that I have a great deal of respect for teachers. I feel like they're being shitted on with the current system. I feel like a majority of the educational system's problems stem from that. I also feel like the only thing to fix the education system involves taking away their protection for a while.
It's not as simple as that.
Disbanding unions would reduce the job security and bargaining power of teachers, and make teaching less attractive and viable as a career. This would mean that the quality of people who would be attracted to teaching would drop. We all know that teachers have a tremendous influence on a person's growth and education. So by disbanding unions you would ultimately hurt the students.
To this I say that it would be a temporary thing. 1-2 years at maximum. Disbanding might even be the wrong idea here altogether.
Does anyone here think teacher unions would go for a systemwide change in the education system? Something like I proposed, or something completely different altogether? If the government started to change the system radically, and start enforcing new training methods for teachers would teacher unions strike? If not, then there'd be no reason to disband the unions. As long as they'd go along with the changes (if they were well thought out and fair to both students and teachers) there'd be no reason to do anything to the unions.
I'm just not sure myself that they'd go for any sweeping changes. And the teachers union opposing changes that have very little to do with what it is suppose to protect (job security, wages, hours) would be an example of a broken union. But there's every chance that I'm completely wrong here and that the unions would go with the changes as long as they weren't the "we're firing everyone and starting fresh" type of changes.
How are your teachers unions in the states? Here they are provincial and like nuses and doctors you have to belong to it to teach. Like the Nurses and Doctors they have a collective agreement with the government and it get renegotiated every 3-5 years about. Oh and tnure in a high school? how the hell does that happen? Tenured postions are the province of Academia not public education.
Here in BC (and I beleive) and the other provinces we do have standardized testing. In grade 12. In academic subjects only, and they are used mostly for College/University applications. I did the "provincials" (as most high schoolers and teachers here refer to the tests as) for English, French, History, Math, Chemistry, and Biology. The rest of the schooling is based on ministry approved curricula and they do accreditation checks on a percentage of schools each year, as well as random testing at other grades and subjects. This seems to give a pretty good overview of how each school and district is doing.
this subject is very dear to my heart as my Daughter is in grade one and my Auntie has been a teach all her adult life. It is very important for the parents to work WITH the teacher and not against them. My daughter is having the same problems that my husband had at this age. She is bored by the standard stuff and easily distracted. Unlike my husbands teacher who was marking days to retierment, her current teacher is working with us and her on this. If she can focus on getting her work done, she gets to get the big books out and read those, small things but they are making such abig improvment. Her teacher does not have to constantly work on getting Katheryn to pay attenttion and My Girl gets the lessons she needs. It also helps the class cause Katheryn is not be a disruptive brat. Sigh, I fear for the day she doesen't have as wonder full a teacher as Ms. McKinnon. That woman is what more schools need, she teaches us almost as much as she teachers our daughter I think.
When their kids come home with a bad report card they say; What is wrong with that dammed school.
When their kids come home with a good report card they say;Thats what I expect from MY kid!!
How can teacher status improve if they only get the blame and none of the credit?
Then we start pitching ideas from there. Because honestly, I don't see how NCLB is even tweakable. It's fucked from the premise on down.
This is quite true. In fact, it's often not necessarily even over a period of years. Administrators are often required by factors outside their control to do enormously unpopular things, and teachers and students both tend to view a few odd incidents as indicative of incompetence, despite the fact that the very fact the school functions is a marvel of competence. When your school system's primary model seems to be the penitentiary system (the majority of schools in our country, and maybe the world over, are partly buildings in which to imprison children while their parents go to work) it's a wonder that anything gets accomplished at all. Administrators, by the very nature of their profession, are lightning rods for a great deal of resentment, deserved or not, and this contributes to Union non-compliance.
And teaching is an impossible job. Every fucking yahoo thinks that their child is special, when in reality the vast majority of children are simply average. Every time a teacher speaks out loud, they endanger their job, because every class has at least one parent willing to go to fucking court because Harry Potter is evil. Teacher's need a union, because we expect them to do entirely too much. They are our prison wardens, our disciplinarians (despite the fact that we give them no effective tools), our teachers of ethics and civic duty, our babysitters, our nutritionists in many cases, and thanks to the increasing prevalence of things like peanut allergies, medical practitioners to whom we entrust our children's fragile lives. This is all in addition to attempting to educate them. They have the most important, difficult job in the country, and they get little reward, next to no recognition, and are often the first person we blame when something goes wrong. It's a wonder anyone competent joins the field. Maybe we should start worrying less about making the teacher's unions tougher on bad teachers, and focus more on making sure that they aren't the only ones left.
Battle.net
How to change the attitude? I don't know. Spend millions in advertising? Give parents a huge tax break if their kids perform better in school? And I'm not talking passing every grade, because NCLB just passes failures to the next grade. I guess standardized tests?
B.net: Kusanku
Yeah Japan's suicide rate is pretty high isn't it?
I'm sure I was just being an asshole though. Glad I'm not in college or turned things around.
My nephew is in the second grade and he's learning multiplication now, not because of his school, but because of what is taught to him by his parents, my parents, and myself. The typical curriculum doesn't start to cover multiplication until the third grade, but seeing my nephew grasp this concept now leads me to wonder why things can't be stepped up a bit in the way we teach kids mathematics. It makes me think of all the people I knew that struggled with algebra throughout their high school career, and it leads me to believe that they would have done better if only they weren't coddled so much when they were younger.
English suffers from this as well. Too many people are content to speak and write poorly. The occasional grammatical or typographical error may be acceptable, but there are too many people who are content with being unable to so much as manage one complete sentence without making an error of some kind. Most Americans are only taught to speak one language, and we can't even do that efficiently. That's pretty sad when you consider the fact that many of our foreign counterparts speak two or more languages, and some of them speak ours better than us.
When I was growing up, a high school diploma actually meant something. At the very least it meant that you were a competent individual. This is hardly the case anymore as a high school diploma seems to be scarcely worth the paper it is printed on these days. Even two-year college degrees don't seem to carry much weight with them anymore. Is it because society is so advanced, or because our education is so far behind? Unfortunately, it seems to me that it is the latter.
As a whole, we are becoming more and more aggressively ignorant. I feel the Department of Education is a farce and should be done away with. 67.2 billion dollars a year (source: http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html) are wasted on a department that creates standardized tests, hands down regulations to schools in exchange for funding, and runs our education system into the ground. If this money were handed out on a state-by-state basis, that's more than a billion dollars per state for education. I'm sure the states could think of better ways to spend that money then a federal agency that has no idea what is going on in each district.
Completely changing the system may be detrimental to some students now, but as the old adage goes, if you want to make an omelette, then you have to break a few eggs. It is painfully obvious that what we are doing now is not working and is hurting not only our children, but also our society as a whole. Our schools need to be more like colleges, and less like day care programs.
So I bring up again the issue with teacher's salaries. As it is, we wonder why married women make up the bulk of teachers in our school systems (at least until high school, where it somewhat evens out). Not to knock on that demographic, but they represent a section of society that doesn't really need the money. I'm not saying that all working married women don't need the money, just that with the paltry pay teachers get there's no real way that contributes to the family finances. By making teaching an attractive position again, we create more competition amongst talented, dedicated people.
1) Not everyone learns at the same rate. You helped teach your nephew. Awesome. Some kids don't have anything close to that.
2) Diplomas did not mean more back in the good old days. I hate to break that to you. I doubt you're older than my father and he got by on being an outstanding athlete and little else. He pretty much learned to read when I did.
I think there should be curriculum guidelines, but they should be very loose. I don't really have a problem with standard tests either, so long as they are ONLY a measure of success, and not used for punitive measures. Also, I believe states and at the very lowest section, counties should be scrutinized. Scrutinizing a single teacher at any particular year for a serious performance evaluation is a bit dense. The quality of students the teacher gets, as well as their attitude and what they have had a chance to learn before are probably all greater factors than the one year being tested.
Man wut?
The median household income in this country is like $40K (give or take). I don't know of anywhere in the country where teachers make less than $20K (at least not much, and not for more than a year or two). You're saying that's insignificant? I'd wager that for a majority of those married women, their salary is anywhere from 30% to 50% of their family's income.
Hell, I believe my mother-in-law makes more than my father-in-law.
No, I think the appeal of teaching for many of those women is the schedule: most either have kids or intend to eventually, and as a teacher (especially teaching in the district where you live) you're going to have roughly the same schedule as your kids...at least more so than almost any other job. Which makes is a great choice as a second income in a two-income household.
Yeah, diplomas didn't really mean more then, there was just less education required to make a decent living.
I agree with setting loose curriculum guidelines, and scrutinizing school districts, but I still don't see a need for standardized testing as a measure for success. If guidelines are set and school districts are scrutinized, then it seems to me that grade reports should be enough to measure the success of a particular region.
How is it that people getting a passing grade when they don't actually know the material they were supposed to learn is any better?
I'm also saying that we need to change the qualifications. I feel that more should be expected from students not only in what they study, but also in how they are graded. Even if we didn't change anything, isn't denying them inadequate qualifications better then just giving them credit for meeting those inadequate qualifications when, in all actuality, they can't?
Although I can not comment on most public schools, the teachers at my school were paid just fine. Starting was around 45,000 for most and 49,000 for Master's degrees. Each year their pay grade went up (obviously quicker for those with a Master's) and capped after i believe 15 years for non masters degrees at about 65000-75000, and Masters capped at 20 years at 80,000. I did live in California so the numbers are slightly misleadering, but they are not as bad as many pretend.
You're never going to get me to agree with it because that's the mentality of a tyrant.
Sic semper tyrannus, buddy.
Here in Newfoundland it used to be that after two years of teaching, you got tenure, which means they couldn't fire you, but if the school scaled down they could send to other schools all over the island. Now it's a lot harder to get tenure, my Dad who retired from High School teaching about 3 years ago and now teaches at the University, knows a lot of good teachers who have been teaching for 6-8 years with no tenure.
And we called the standardized tests "Publics" here.
re: NCLB, I can safely say that standardized testing sucks, and that I'm glad I'm up in Canada.
Granted the situations of teacher that you're familiar with are quite different than the ones I've seen, but there must be a way of protecting teachers from idiot parents while still being able to fire a teacher for being incompetent. I don't think NCLB is the right approach, but I'm not sure what is.
Any ideas?
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
Well, for one, don't treat the teachers union like it's the devil incarnate. As I've said, unions only protect bad teachers when they have to put up a unified front.
Second, define "bad". There are ways to get rid of incompetent or outright dangerous teachers. The problem is that a lot of school administrations like to define "bad" as "doesn't agree with us". Which leads us back to point 1.
Man, I think starting my school district in Dallas was 30k(ish. Fuzzy 6 year old memory). They had an interesting program which I almost decided to do, which was basically, anybody who graduated from a Dallas high school in the top 10% of their class got a letter in the folder with their diploma. The letter offered them a guaranteed position in a Dallas school at the above pay, if they got a teaching certification within 5 years. They really wanted teachers.
Starting pay for teachers up here only recently (last 2-3 years) broke the $20K line in many areas, well below median per-capita income.
I remember hearing that when Helena put up a teaching position opening that had a decent salary for there - well, they got responses from all over the US, from top notch candidates.
Wow, that's actually kind of scary.
The thing is that schools are desperate. The cost of a post-secondary education combined with the low salaries that teachers get means that in many ways, it's a sucker's game.