Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
I think Gates may be suffering from some sort of genetic thinking defect. Remember a couple of years ago when his father said that there should be no (or greatly reduced) inheritances. Wow! What a sport! His son has 50 Billion dollars and he’s willing to give up to right to pass on his wealth. Brings tears to my eyes.
Speaking of Gates and schools he attended an elite private school in the suburbs of Seattle. Then he went to Harvard, took a place that might have gone to another student who actually valued liberal arts, and left early.
If he’d like to spread the wealth I’d suggest he back the following plans:
- The best software engineers go to work at the worst companies
- The richest guys marry the poorest girls. No exemptions for those already married.
- The richest families live in the poorest neighborhoods.
- The richest kids go to the worst schools.
Oh, wait a second! Those changes might mean Gates and his family would have to give something up. Never mind.
In short the hypocrisy is overwhelming. If Gates has some guilt he has to get over perhaps he could try therapy instead of telling other people how to be good.
It’s a little unfair to chastise Gates for having a privileged upbringing, and use that as evidence that he shouldn’t have opinions on, well, anything but having a privileged upbringing, it seems.
Giving up the right to pass on your wealth is a pretty big deal. I must be misunderstanding you there.
I think you are misunderstanding. Or I am. If the parents/kids get to choose which school they want to go to, how could the schools possible claim to have the same intake?!?!?! The parents/kids are self selecting which schools they want to go to. If School A has a reputation for being better then that school is going to get vastly more applications and therefore is likely to get a better mix of students. The school a mile away with a poorer reputation is going to get fewer applications and is going to get a lesser pick of students. Sure, the schools might be required to take the same number of low income kids but all low income kids are not created equal. The low income kids who get their paperwork together and do everything they can to get into the good school is going to have a good chance of doing so. That kid, even though low income, is almost certainly going to have a more involved parent and higher expectation to learn and succeed. The low income kid who doesn’t apply to 6 schools and just takes whatever is left is going to end up in the lesser school, and the kid with lackadaisical parents are going to probably be poorly motivated and disciplined students.
This system sounds like precisely the type of environment that would exacerbate a unequal system. In the US you traditionally go to the school you go to based on where you live, period. The boundaries are fixed and the only self selection that can be done is if parents up and move to another school district. (Private schools excluded of course)
Um, because there are better ways to spend the money and money is quite limited. You better get the best return you can on your investment, and in the US throwing money at schools has been about the most ineffective way to spend money possible. You are better off filling potholes on the way to the school.
Have there been measurable outcomes? I haven’t seen any studies that confirm that providing more computers has a profound impact on improving poor schools. If so, what was the relative cost of that improvement compared to alternatives?
If teachers need to be therapists we have a much more serious social issue than bad education. And it’s simply not true that teachers need a high level of child psychology training. I have 3 teachers in my close family and none of them have anything more than an basic education on the subject. They took 2 Child Psych classes in their 3 year program. The implication that a teacher in the US has any real therapeutic skills is an insult to real Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Social Workers.
It probably does. And the teacher isn’t chained to the classes they are teaching, they can move around. But the point is that they aren’t attached to the kids in any way. It’s a side issue, I’m just saying that it’s easy for them to look the other way when a kid struggles and that is why we have so many kids matriculating with substandard skills. Frankly I don’t blame them entirely so long as they use that time to help better students, the problem is that some don’t and just coast.
They are separate issues and aside from the point. Where you draw the line on how many subjects a teach handles is neither here nor there. It was just trivia.
They know the system well. However they have a vested interest in it and they want to get as much money into the system as possible. It benefits their bottom line. In what world is it ideal to let the people who allot the funds be the people who benefit from them. That’s essentially corruption.
Teachers can be too close to the forest to see the trees. They may not be able to think outside of the current system and can only consider things within their little microcosm. I’m not claiming that they should be kept out of the equation, however the implication that only teachers know what’s going on is asinine.
Apologies< I don’t have time to read the whole thread right now.
But I would think the thinking behind the OP is that a good teacher has a far greater impact on a “bad” student than on a good.
i.e - A good student, with good parents, good resources and the like will often be in a position to learn regardless of the teacher, naturally good teacher will help them to learn more however a bad teacher won’t neccessarily stop them from learning.
On the other hand, a student that is already facing a few disadvantages really needs a good teacher to give that added impetus to learning and help them to get ahead…
Thus - the greatest benefit to society as a whole could be had by directing the “best” teachers to where the greatest improvements could be made.
(and no I am not even going to attempt to address the issue of how much a teacher’s success or otherwise is a product of their specific environment, or if a good teacher at a top private school will succeed at an innercity holding pen)
I think we need to back up a little bit. Has anyone even effectively demonstrated that there are more bad teachers than there are bad practitioners in any other field? The logic always seems to be something like our children are not as well educated (on average), so the we must have bad educators. There are several problems I have with that line of reasoning.
First, many of our kids are among the best and brightest in the world. But, our system has never attempted to duplicate the rigid and parochial systems that exist in other countries. We have completely different cultural educational expectations. I think it is unfair to judge our education system solely on test scores and the numbers of engineers we graduate without acknowledging the cinematographers, musicians, and producers we create. Part of the reason American culture, financial expertise, and entertainment is embraced worldwide is because our education system allows creative people to thrive.
Second, just because they kids are not learning as much as we think they should be, doesn’t mean the teachers (as a whole) are bad at their jobs. Imagine if we applied this logic to every other field. Are our doctors bad because people are overweight and unhealthy, and because our system of health care is screwed up? Are military personnel bad at their jobs because we fail to achieve our objectives in war?
People succeed or fail for many, many reasons. I think it’s kinda unfair to pin the failure of students on their teachers when there are often a great number of reasons why they may have failed.
This is totally unfair. Bill Gates has given and is giving A LOT to make the world a better place.
Steve Sailer asked an interesting question about this type of issue:
Perhaps we are better off at the end of the day putting the best teachers with the best students.
In any event, I do agree that the skills necessary to be a good teacher are probably different in a lousy school than in a good school. Of course, “Lousy school” is in many ways a euphemism for a school with a lot of low quality students.
It is based on location - notice where I said ‘borough.’ It just so happens that this is a very densely populated area, and there are lots of schools within a half hour walk of each other.
School A will get more applications, but it doesn’t get to look through them and say ‘hmm, I like the look of this student, but this one doesn’t look so good.’ Places are allocated for the school based on the entry criteria (which, as I said, include ability. I never said they included income. There are very few wealthy people with kids in this borough anyway - nowhere near enough to make the difference to any school).
It’s a little bit annoying, with me explaining the system in detail, and pointing out my wide-ranging personal experience of the system, that you still somehow think you know more about it than I do. When I say the intake is the same, it’s because the intake simply is the same.
On what grounds do you say that giving the schools more money has been ineffective?
What, you’re actually doubting that providing more computers helps schools? You’re doubting that, in an age where kids need to know how to use computers to have a chance of getting pretty much any job? 
No. It’s just part of the job. It always has been, always will be. Again, I’m surprised that you’re questioning this - it’s like questioning whether bus drivers need the ability to tell left from right.
You’d rather insult teachers by claiming that they’re just babysitters. 
If any psychologist was insulted by the idea that teachers need knowledge of child psychology, then, well, that psychiatrist should check themselves in for treatment too.
That is true, but those decisions should be made by people who have at least worked in education for a decent amount of time, and are taking advice from people who work in education still. Currently they’re made by people who, quite often, didn’t even attend state schools themselves and don’t send their children to them, people who have less of a vested interest than almost anyone else in the country. That’s crazy.
If you’re talking about everything after grade 12, you’re right. If you’re talking about grade 12 and earlier, your economic status predicts your future success about 9 kajillion times more accurately than whether you had good teachers.
What does “good teacher” mean, anyway? Any way you can think of to measure the effectiveness of a teacher is polluted beyond usefulness by things completely out of a teacher’s control, like economic status, ESL requirements, variations in funding, crime rate, behavioral issues, student/teacher ratio, district policy/officials, local politics, health care, local magnet schools (which do NOT affect every district or even schools within a district equally), and whether the kids had breakfast that morning.
If you’re prepared to reward a bunch of teachers who have white, upper class kids who score better on standardized tests because of all the above reasons, then you’re out of your goddamned mind. You’d be doing the exact opposite of your intent by rewarding teachers in the easiest situations and punishing the teachers in the hardest ones.
Most states put doctors in charge of making decisions about their profession, and lawyers in charge of making decisions about their profession. Teaching ought to be similar, IMO.
Like it or not, our society has created a specialized profession for the survival of our civilization. Public schools serve the purpose of making sure that the next generation has the skills necessary to keep this ship afloat. It’s no trivial task. It’s not “babysitting,” as you put it.
I’m not suggesting that everyone be excluded. I’m suggesting:
- Teachers should have a primary place at the table, to prevent idiotic travesties like NCLB (indeed, a single statistician at the table would’ve been enough); and
- People who ARE talking out their ass should be excluded.
Most people spend more time on the road every day than they do in the classroom, but they don’t think that gives them special insight into solving traffic flow problems. Most people spend more time on the computer every day than they do in the classroom, but they don’t think that turns them into software engineers. Most people who undergo chemotherapy don’t go try to tell the doctors how a hospital should be run. But for some reason, people have this absurd idea that teachers are babysitters, that no special knowledge is required to teach, and so their ignorant and ridiculous opinion is somehow relevant to the decisionmaking process.
By all means, educate yourself on pedagogy, on poverty dynamics, on developmental psychology, on IDEA, on NCLB, on DSS, on all the other alphabet soups we need and all the other academic subjects we need to be effective teachers. Then come back and opine to your heart’s content.
But Omniscient, you could not be less aptly named.
This has provoked an emotional response in me. Surprising, because I have left teaching behind many, many years ago.
You cite Doctors, engineers etc…I understand why you do.
The problem is that Doctors, Engineers and the like have things teachers do not…THEY GET PAID A NONPATHETIC WAGE!
They also have things like:
They can be promoted and earn more money.
They are respected by most people in the community.
Years of experience matter in that you become more employable after more experience.
and so on…none of which apply to teachers.
IF you want teachers to act like professionals then, by God…TREAT THEM AS SUCH! DO NOT come up with all this crap about what doctors, lawyers, engineers and such have to do with out also bringing up pay equality with these professions.
This used to piss me off something fierce when I was a teacher. Everyone has all these ideas about teachers…and many of them are good ideas…so long as teachers have the respect and pay of similar professionals.
If you will not do so, then go bugger off in some dark corner out of sight and sound.
{I know, I know…the next thing brough up will be how well paid teachers are…with all these cites showing salaries 3, 4 even 5 times what I and every teacher I’ve ever known was paid…but that is another rant}
Not to hijack my own thread but this assertion puzzles me. From what I’ve seen of teacher pay in various communities over the years teachers, by and large, have superb health benefits, and after 5-10 years are usually making a middle to upper middle class wage relative to their communities. I value teachers but let’s not kid ourselves that the average education major has the competitive intellectual chops to be an engineer or doctor.
Why do you consider them underpaid?
Because in many, many places anyone who has the credentials to teach can get a job.
Everything else–any attempt to quantify how “difficult” or how “easy” teaching is–is bullshit. The difficulty of a job has absolutely nothing to do with how well it “should” pay. The fact that there is a teacher shortage in many places means that the market price of teacher labor is well below the equilibrium price, which means that schools in hard-to-staff areas–urban and rural, primarily–have little or no choice in who they hire. This degrades the average quality of the staff, as it does in any market.
Now then, raising pay isn’t the only way to deal with the teacher shortage. Other, non-pay incentives would shift the teacher-supply curve right and lower that price. But one way or another, a surplus of teachers is best for the system.
Just one point: My wife is a public school teacher in California, and her health benefits are not that great at all. So much so that we have opted to have her drop out of her school health insurance program, and join my insurance coverage under my employment. I work in private industry. We actually save money this way.
Ed
Instead of comparing their pay to that of their community, compare their pay to people with similar levels of education.
Educational requirements vary with location.
In New York, a master’s degree is required for permanent certification. Many ther states require less.
In 1986-1990 I was paid $13,575 per year. I started in 1986 at $13,275 - $13,575 was my ending salary.
In 1990-1994 I was paid $20,875 per year for 5 years…and that salary was the same as I started as when I was given Tenure (and this was college teaching to boot)
In 1995-1996 I was paid $33,500…again college teaching but was also in a city where cost of living was higher than the previous jobs.
GROSSLY underpaid. I also didn’t suck when I taught…
When I taught High School, I was awarded 2 awards, one of which was an award for excellence and the other was an award for best first year teacher in the State.
When I taught college, I ran 3 math contests one of which was a state-wide contest. I was elected to the faculty executive committee. I was also Head of the Scholarships and Awards committe as well as one of 3 members of the faculty research committe which had a budget to give research awards and decied whether or not to give paid leave of 1-2 years for faculty members to do research.
I was no slouch. In all humbleness, I was on fire…kickin butt and chewin bubblegum.
Didn’t matter for pay. Pay sucked. I looked elsewhere (which is why I did the 1 year for $33,500) because I thought there HAD to be places that actually payed a nonpathetic wage. Couldn’t find very many…and the ones I found were reserved for minorities.
Health insurance? It SUCKED! It didn’t pay for squat. It didn’t pay prescriptions or even doctor visits. We were told it was for ‘catastrophic’ health emergencies…however when one faculty member’s kid got cancer…it paid for little of that as well.
So, I left teaching though I was good at it and I loved it. I needed to actually earn an income…and an income that increased MORE THAN INFLATION rather than didn’t even acknowledge inflation existed.