Er, teaching also requires some advanced study (not as much as medicine, I agree), has to deal with modern innovations, deals with the immediate health and safety of individuals all the time (it’s a pretty big part of the job), and needs a lot of time to learn the craft.
Maybe the US is different to the UK there. Here, secondary school teachers will teach kids for five or seven years (unless they leave the school or drop the subject when it becomes optional at 14 or 16 - but then they’ll still see the kids at the school). Primary school teachers only have the kid for a year, but have a fair bit of contact with them for the 7 years they’re at primary school. Do US teachers really only teach one year group ever?
Which means at the end of the day that parents/the family’s attitude towards education are still the most important factor.
Don’t get me wrong. My sister and I went to one of the fanciest public high schools in Massachusetts (Lexington) and we still didn’t get as good an education as my BIL, who went to Philips Academy and that has largely do with the fact that PA spends more per kid. But both my BIL and I have the same deal at home-parents who were very involved and set very high expectations for academic performance. My parents have friends who sent their kids through the high school the next town over, which is not that great, and their kids still went on to Brandeis/MIT/Tufts etc. when most of the kids in that high school did not. It’s because of their parents and the cultural expectations they held in relation to performance and college etc.
You can provide all the fancy debate teams, math teams, music programs, highly qualified teachers and whatnot but at the end of the day there has to be some cultural expectation that academics matter and that comes straight from the parents.
Nope. That makes it sound like kids with a disruptive homelife and parents who don’y value education have no chance. That’s simply not true. Hell, I have the kind of background that gets put in misery books and my parents can barely read and write - and don’t care too much about that - but I’ve done very well academically. I can think of lots of examples among my students, too.
Good schooling can overcome a disadvantaged background, just an advantaged background can overcome poor schooling.
(By advantaged and disadvantaged I don’t just mean financial, of course).
They have less of a chance, and educational reforms that end at building a new school and staffing it with high tech computers and good teachers without attempting to reach out to the parental community and help them create the environment those high socioeconomic families have after the school day is over are doomed to lower success rates.
Unfortunately, people get really defensive and the easier fix is to throw money at the situation and pretend like the cheapest fix isn’t one worth considering.
Bullshit. Lateral entry programs (in which people become teachers through intensive six-week summer programs or less) abound, and in many, many states, teacher unions are of the tits-on-a-bull variety. Coincidentally, states with ineffective teacher union are states in which teachers are paid a pittance. No connection between those two, natch.
What the hell are you talking about? Do you have any knowlege whatsoever of the current educational climate? Over and over and over we teachers hear of the need for standards-based programs with scientific backing. We’re strenuously discouraged from outside-the-box thinking. If you’re not familiar with Fountas & Pinnell, the Investigations Program, or Teacher’s College, you’ve got no idea what current trends in pedagogy are like.
Great point! After all, there’s nothing special about teaching. Knowledge of developmental psychology (of what a seven-year-old can understand about, say, character motivation vs. what a ten-year-old can understand) is irrelevant. Understanding of principles of mathematical education–how to use concrete relevant examples to develop a deep understanding of number and place value, for example–is useless. Background knowledge of IDEA, IEPs, PEPs, 504s–what teacher would ever need these in a modern school?
I eagerly await your similarly informed rant about medicine, trusting that you’ve got just as much knowledge about medicine as you do about education.
Yes, of course. How do you propose doing it?
It just so happens that I have a preferred algorithm, but it’s not simplistic. It’s not armchair quarterbacking. It’s based off extensive reading in the field and understanding of the challenges that face modern school teachers.
As for sending our best teachers to our worst schools, good luck with that. I’m in an unusual school: I’ve got a disproportionate percentage of kids from highly-involved wealthy families, AND a disproportionate percentage of kids from extreme poverty (e.g., homeless kids, kids whose parents are in prison, etc.) I love both groups, they’re wonderful folk, but I can easily tell you which kind of kid is easier to teach. The kid from a wealthy, highly-involved family will pay attention during a lesson, won’t talk except when appropriate, will follow multi-step instructions, will take pride in her work, will often understand a new principle on its first presentation. The kid from an impoverished, low-involvement family will come to school exhausted, will posture in class to appear threatening (a behavior learned at home that prevents violence against the child), will see little benefit in school success, will not have done homework, will actively avoid work, will avoid following single-step instructions if possible, will need multiple presentations of principles.
If you go into education for that joy of the Eureka! moment (as I think many great teachers do), it’s a lot easier to get from the first kid than from the second. You get a lot more juice from the first kid than from the second. YOu’ll have to offer some mega-incentives to those Eureka! teachers to get them to go to classrooms with primarily second-group kids.
Look. Teaching takes some skill and some education. But the implication that it’s even close to the type of education and training that an engineer needs is insane. Teachers basically baby sit for 9 months a year. Yes, the future of those kids is critical in many ways and we need to be sure, as a society, that they are doing the best job that they can. But if they screw it up no one is going to die as a direct result. If an engineer screws up bridges collapse, buildings crumble, cars burst into flames and appliances burn down houses.
It’s been stated over and over again that knowledge of the subject is a small portion of the skill set. People skills are crucial. Child Psychology is crucial. Communication skills are crucial. None of those things require extended advanced education and rigorous maintenance and updating.
In the US a teacher essentially teaches one grade. You go to school as a 5 year old and have Kindergarten teacher. Then you go home for the summer and come back to a 1st grade teacher, etc. Once you reach the 6th or 7th grade you start having teachers that are subject specific. The vast majority of kids only take a given subject once in their educational career. You take geometry in 6th grade with your geometry teacher for an hour. In 7th grade you’ve moved on to algebra with your algebra teacher. Now, there are a handful of courses where you might have 2 or 3 classes with a teacher spanning 2 or 3 years, physics and AP physics, world history, government and US history, but that’s still a grand total of 1-2 hours a day for a max of 2 years. These teachers have absolutely no stake in a students progress from year to year. They might pass them in the halls or see them in a study hall but there’s no ramifications for them simply passing a kid along as a sub par student.
Are you seriously doubting that I’ve had interaction with teachers?!?!? What person on this message board hasn’t been in the US school system for 13 years? Who doesn’t have a teacher in their family and cousins, nieces and nephews and neighbors going to all levels of education?
Can I speak for every school district and every teacher? No. Will I claim that every teacher over 55 years old sucks? No. However, I will stand by my stance that there’s nothing inherently beneficial to keeping teachers under tenure for long periods of time. That’s the unions stance, they believe in seniority because it somehow benefits students. I think that’s crap. Politicians bemoan the loss of teachers and the only time a teacher is replaced is when they sleep with a student or quit.
Most bad teachers aren’t stupid. Most bad teachers have plenty of knowledge of their subject. Most bad teacher simply DON’T GIVE A SHIT.
Of course those kids have less of a chance - I agree. Doesn’t mean they have no chance at all. Doesn’t mean their chances won’t be improved by providing them with better education.
Like I said, there are some schools where I live that get much better results - and I mean excellent results compared nationally, not just locally - than some other schools here. The intakes are exactly the same. What else can be making the difference there, but the school?
Actually, here there are many, many attempts to reach out to parents and get them involved. There is a limit to how well they can work, but some things - like free ESOL classes for parents who don’t speak English, classes to help parents teach their kids maths - do help some parents. Schools here have a specific home-school liaison officer. There will always be a few parents who are (almost) unreachable, but there are a lot more parents who just need a bit more knowledge, assistance or attention.
It is possible to provide good teachers and resources and also try to reach out to the parents; like you say, the latter doesn’t even cost much.
Child psychology and people skills do require advanced education, rigorous maintenance and updating. I’m kinda surprised that anyone would claim otherwise.
If I don’t manage my classroom well, kids are more likely to behave badly, meaning that fights and accidents become much more likely too. The school I’m at now, despite being in an extremely deprived area, doesn’t have that many fights, but I have taught at places where I had to physically stand between fighting children every day.
Also, it’d be funny to tell a science or sports teacher that they don’t have to worry about health and safety.
Somehow, you know, I don’t think that a single engineer’s screw-up would lead to the problems you envisage. Everyone else working on the project would have to screw up too. They’re not Gods, they’re part of a team.
That doesn’t sound like a brilliant system. You really have people who specifically teach algebra, rather than teaching maths as a whole?
People do feel that they can claim they know everything there is to know about teaching because they were once a child who had teachers, but that’s like a surgical patient claiming to know more than their surgeon. Hell, if you’ve never worked in a bakery you don’t really know much about that job, either, because all you see is the counter assistant handing over your goods - you don’t see the rest of the job. Nothing wrong with giving your opinion as someone who’s not a teacher - but you should remember that you really do not know all that much about teaching; you only know about being a student.
Just as I will ask questions about the US system rather than assume it’s the same as here, you shouldn’t assume that your experience, many years ago, makes you knowledgeable about the general situation today.
I do think there needs to be more incentives to get good teachers into the worst schools–right now, often schools in a given area, and certainly schools within a given district, all pay the same (or approximately the same–within 5% or so for a given set of qualifications). So the only difference between locations are things like facility, location, and “community”–so their is no incentive to teach in the bad schools and teachers that can get hired in other schools tend to end up there.
This is not to say that a good suburban teacher is sure to be a good urban teacher–or vice-versa. But right now highly undesirable schools are often fighting just to find warm bodies. If they paid 20% more than surrounding schools, it seems like they’d have more choices about faculty, and it’s hard to believe that more choices wouldn’t lead to more skilled faculty.
I think it’s a bit simplistic to assume that the intakes are the same. In every town and district there are fluctuations in the residents. Two schools a mile apart in the same town might have vastly different make-ups. Even if the mean income is the same, the cultures and nationalities might be different. One school might have it’s territory on top of a isolated gang issue that infects the entire school. One school might have a different religious make-up or average family size and parent age.
I don’t think anyone claims that schools don’t matter AT ALL. Nor do people think that every student with a poor home life is a lost cause. However, we have to speak in generalities on topics like this since the resources necessarily need to be applied consistently. Do you throw tax money at a bad school? Or do you throw tax money at fixing bad home situations socially in hopes that the school will follow along?
If you are a shrink, yes, but no one is asking teachers to be therapists. They just need to have a basic understanding of how to convey ideas to children and to understand what children are capable of learning. These things don’t change dramatically from year to year within a teachers career. Yes, occasional updates are beneficial, but it’s not the same as an engineer learning how a new modeling program works and how new epoxies and alloys function.
I’m not saying they need no education, just that at some point a BS is good enough, having a PhD offers little additional benefit.
The systems aren’t universal. Schools are managed different in different towns and states. Many teachers will teach advanced algebra, remedial algebra and plain old algebra, but it’s rare that a teacher handles diverse subjects even within a genre, in a high school with an enrollment of 1,000+ kids it’d be considered a serious staffing issue. Small towns with small enrollments probably have different systems and teachers filling more roles for budgetary reasons. However, my description fits the vast majority of schools in urban and suburban American public systems.
There’s probably a much different debate to be had on that point. Personally I don’t see that as a major issue. In many ways it serves to eliminate the “baby sitter” dynamic that having a student being engaged with one teacher all day long creates, and that might be for the better.
Forgive me if I find the analogy of a person buying bread in a 5 minute transaction from a baker to be a poor analogy to spending 13 years and 8 hours a day directly experiencing the teaching process and the impact of a teacher on a students life. It’s like you are implying that a child can’t judge their parents parenting abilities. I don’t argue that the perspective isn’t different, but to imply that we have no understanding of the pros and cons of the system is a little rude and dismissive.
I was a teacher for ten years before leaving the field, having worked in both wealthy and needy areas. I’ll volunteer to return to teaching, and do it in a disadvantaged area providing these two conditions are met:
Same salary and benefits I received when I departed the field a couple of years ago. I think it came out to a bit above the national average.
I’m given autonomy.
Let me explain #2.
What eventually made me angry enough about education to leave was the ongoing attempt to remove teachers’ decision making from the teaching process. I believe this is done by cramming the preferred (read, “latest”) curricular fad down our throats, evaluating on minutiae (one principal I know actually measured the size of text on classroom bulletin boards), and administrators generally seeing teachers as the enemy.
Let me be clear - I’m not saying we shouldn’t have curriculum and standards. But there is such a thing as over-standardization. We’re dealing with kids here, not computers to be programmed.
The research changes, but one thing that seems to be a constant is the quality of the teacher, not the latest curriculum. This means that teaching is highly subjective - give a strong teacher and a weak teacher the same curriculum to work from and the outcome is predictable. The better teacher gets better results.
So I say, let teachers be teachers. What works in my classroom might not work in the one across the hall. So be it.
If you really want improvement, on professional development days, let me sit and talk with the teacher from across the hall (or from across the state) and compare notes. This is what dedicated teachers do when they actively try to improve themselves by attending conferences. Rarely in my experience was this ever the focus of district sponsored professional development.
I was a good teacher, I think. Well prepared and dedicated. But I have to say, working now in private industry, I’m able to be a much better teacher. I’m not micro-managed, nobody is measuring bulletin boards, and I get results. In a strange way it makes me sad.
My biggest issue is that I believe (maybe I’m wrong) that the public doesn’t have the stomach to continually fund schools that underperform or will underperform even after a substantial investment of money that corrects all the infrastructure/resource issues. And you have to keep in mind that the political pendulum always swings away from you at some point. So by ignoring one of the biggest factors to academic success (parental involvement) and leaving it out of any education based reforms, you set yourself up to make large expenditures of money on schools that only produce mediocre statistics. The kids who’ll manage to pull themselves out of their socioeconomic quagmire are the ones who would have anyway (pushy parents) + a small additional percentage. But it won’t be enough to convince the public that the investment of all those tax funds was worth it.
And you know what that does? Reinforces all those pre-conceived notions that certain people can’t “produce” no matter how much money is spent on them.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t spend money on education-but I certainly do question any plan that fails to acknowledge that parental involvement and responsibility is key.
No, you’re right. It shouldn’t be teachers making decisions about teaching, it should be politicians. Similarly, let’s let zookeepers make decisions about engineering, strippers make decisions about medicine, and radio DJs make decisions about the law. Freakin Nirvana, dude.
I don’t disagree with you; I should have indicated that I was not responding just to you, but to the general tone of the thread, which was, “it doesn’t matter.” It does matter. Good schools won’t help as much as a good family environment, but they will help.
I agree-and to a certain extent I feel money spent on resources like good libraries, teaching materials (teachers should not be expected to pull out of pocket for that shit, I hope everyone can agree on that) and enrichment programs is always money well spent. I just hope that as we move forth on education reform we try to maximise our investment by getting students to make the best use of the great teachers and resources. And that requires cooperation from parents. It would be very sad for me to see a situation where leaving out such a crucial component of the equation results in mediocre stats and creates a public distaste for further investment (which, again, would be ineffective if parents weren’t involved).
We may need to spend money on education but I seriously believe there also has to be a big cultural shift.
By law, every child within this borough has an equal right to attend any school. Parents apply for up to six schools. The schools determine who gets in based on criteria that are the same for every school (except for church schools, which are also state-funded; they have the same criteria as the state schools but with the additional criterion of ‘attends church on a regular basis,’ which comes after the other criteria. None of the schools I mentioned before are church schools).
There are published statistics of how many children in that school have special educational needs, how many receive free school dinners (which you can only get if your parents are unemployed or on a very low income), how many have English as Foreign Language, the incoming exam grades of the students, all sorts of things.
These schools are in the centre of London and barely a mile seperates one from the other. I have taught or studied teaching at four of these schools, know people who teach at some of the others and have visited nearly all of them. When I say that their intake is identical, I say that because I know it to be factually true.
Why not do both?
Though I could see some people arguing against government involvement in parenting; they’d see it as anti-libertarian, intrusive, the ‘nanny state,’ etc. It would also be pretty hard to get right, whereas providing more computers has pretty obvious, measurable outcomes.
You need to have a high level of understanding of child psychology in order to teach children. Knowledge of child psychology is not only required of therapists. You need to know how different children learn (which is not always intuitive to adults), and you do, fairly often, need to function as something akin to a therapist.
There we and Bill Gates agree. I disagree that a specific teaching qualification isn’t needed.
I have to be honest, that still sounds like a really weird system. One teacher teaching one specific part of maths for years and years would surely make them a little bored.
I’m not sure why you think that having a teacher teach multiple types of maths to high schoolers would mean they were with the student all day long, or why you think being with a student all day long equates to babysitting.
I said that you can only understand the pros and cons from a student’s POV (from a long time ago), not that you have no understanding at all.
A child can judge their own parents’ parenting abilities - though they sometimes don’t know the reasons their parents made such choices, and many children would complain that their parent was unfair and cruel if they took away their phone after they’d run up a huge bill.
A child certainly cannot judge all parents based on their own experiences of their own parents.
Come on, honestly, do you really not realise that teachers would know the system just a little better than people who aren’t teachers?
I agree. Hence me saying that the state can, and should, fund programmes to reach out to parents as well as funding the schools directly.
