I don’t just want ‘a good American school system that teaches students what they need to learn to be good citizens and productive members of society’ I want ‘an America school system so fuckawesome that it makes everyone else feel like retards and their penises are small’. You know, sort of like the American military. I would definitely like to pay less money for it if possible, but if there was no other way to get the military we have right now I would still agree to pay what we do for it.
That said, while I certainly don’t think that the effect will be more than modest, vastly inflating teacher salaries is an easy enough target. I have no idea how to solve the problem of lazy parents and unmotivated students and I don’t know enough about the educational curriculum other than to make ignorant folksy judgments. But it is the first and clearest step towards making America go up in the Smartness rankings and that kind of thing gives me a woody.
Look to countries where education is working, and see how teachers are compensated compared to other members of society. The charts I’ve seen show that teachers tend to get significantly more pay relative to other professions in countries with high scores.
(Standard disclaimer: I think public education IS working, overall, in our country, despite having some serious deficiencies in specific places. The United States remains the most innovative country on the planet, and plenty of those innovators are products of our public schools).
I’ll summarize the problems with education in this country in one post. You can thank me later.
There is no good way to reward teachers (or schools, for that matter) based on performance. Standardized testing sucks as a metric. There’s no controlling for the quality of students or amount of parental involvement in any given class, or for cultural factors that may impede education.
Teachers are everyone’s favorite political punching bag, so they get the short end of the stick in a good many ways that are invisible to the average person. Case in point, my brother, who got offered a contract by the school board that would have required him to spend $5,000 out of pocket on classroom supplies (excluding only textbooks) before he was allowed to spend school funds on them–gradebooks, pencils, worksheets, you name it. That worked out to somewhat more than 10% of his take-home pay at the time as a master’s degree holder.
“Tenure” has been distorted beyond all recognition, from “you cannot be fired without proof of incompetence” (protection from political reprisals) to “you cannot be fired for any reason ever”. This is related to point 1.
Related to two, teachers have a lot more apparent free time than actual free time. Again with my brother: he spends his summer “vacation” taking classes for professional development-- that are **required **by the state to maintain his teaching license. They share this with relatively few careers, all of which appear to pay more (nursing, engineering, etc). The 7:15-3:15 day doesn’t allow, at least at his school, ANY time for grading or lesson planning, prep work, etc. He pulls as much overtime as I do as an IT Director, and I get paid more than twice as much and get more of that time comped–I generally have MORE free days/hours than he does when it’s all said and done.
I taught for a summer. Specifically, teaching SAT prep to relatively wealthy and intellectual kids over a summer, part time (I taught 2-4 class periods a day). And after that experience? Fuck, if that’s the bullshit a teacher in a near-ideal situation has to put up with, they should be making significantly more than me. Probably they should be making more than Rand Rover and his Scrooge McDuck-style money bin. (By which I mean it’s imaginary. The way he talks, he’s at most a junior money market salesdrone in a credit union somewhere with delusions of being big time.)
I found this chart concerning time spent/pay around the world.
I planned on being a teacher. Started with elementary, switched to secondary education. By the time I was planning for student teaching, I had realized it was not the career for me. I had little patience for students who did not care. I was frustrated with the lack of support the office gave teachers. I was sad for the students who had so many issues, trying to teach them anything was more than they could handle. In the numerous practicums I had completed, I had worked with some amazing teachers and some amazingly horrible teachers.
If you can’t access that website tell me and I’ll copy stuff from the article for you. But the takeaway points is that 1) U.S. Teachers across all levels of education work much longer hours than those in other countries and 2) The ratio of salary to GDP for the U.S. is significantly below average. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf
Quick Summary: The OECD is a once per three years international exam (most recent one being 2009) which measures… you know what, let me summarize it for you.
What’s interesting is that viewing pay to PISA score assessment is that while Norway and Israel outperform the other countries despite the low pay the countries that have a wage around or below where the U.S. tend to be at around the same area in PISA assessment i.e. slightly but statistically significantly below average.
Here’s a question, how do you prove incompetence when there’s no good way to qualify a teacher’s performance?
I actually looked up the NYC rubber rooms, and found this interesting New Yorker article. About half way down they detail the arbitration process for a teacher accused of incompetence. First, the teacher was accused, then observed by a neutral observer for up to a year, then if the observer agrees that they are incompetent, it’s arbitration time. This teacher’s hearing was expected to take over 40 hearing days, spread out over a full year, and cost about $400,000 between the lawyers and arbitrator. My understanding is that she was ultimately found incompetent and dismissed, 3 years after the initial accusation.
Apparently, this is the new, improved, streamlined arbitration process.
And yet when one of TheKid’s teachers commented in class that she likes smoking herb, two days later she was gone. Fired. Yes, she admitted to doing something illegal; however, per TheKid she never seemed under the influence in class.
You don’t, same for any job whose success has a large luck factor in it even accounting for individual competency. A human being will have to assess competence and we’ll just have to accept that their judgment may be flawed. You can err on the side of forgiveness or caution if you feel like; just make this well-known to the teachers ahead of time and make sure that they understand that there’s a chance they’ll be fired even if they don’t deserve it just due to luck of the draw.
Obviously such a system is not going to work for a profession as shitty as teaching currently is. If you implemented such a system that already has such huge disincentives in it it’ll just drive more people out. It’s an inherently demotivating factor like work hours or lack of safety that you just can’t eliminate–hence why you will need to boost salaries across the board as well.
That’s why I said those two points are related, duh.
In all seriousness, the goal should be controlling for as many classroom variables as possible–right now, the current system compares assessments across multiple cultural and economic boundaries; and worse, attempts to push the exact same curricula and goal conditions. Worse yet, it (under the auspices of NCLB) assumes below-average results are A) entirely the fault of the school’s personnel and B) something to be punished by reducing the school’s resources, which makes no damn sense whatsoever (they can’t do their job with their current funding level–I know! Let’s give them LESS!)
Does the current system suck? Absolutely. That doesn’t make solutions easy.
Regarding the NYC example, what standard is the neutral observer using to compare them to? Some of those standards might take a year to evaluate, especially in a low-student-compliance environment where even a great teacher might have to spend a good portion of the year on basic assertion of authority and classroom management, curriculum be damned. Certainly there’s some cleanup to be done regarding the arbitration hearing phase.
That’s because “The Rules” say that teachers (as with many other professions) cannot use illegal drugs even off the job. Whether or not that rule is a good one, it’s clear-cut and easily defined–almost the exact opposite of “Professor X is a bad teacher because his kids do worse than the state average.”
Sometimes kids are just stupid. Its their fault they’re not learning, no fault on the teachers themselves. But teachers make an easy scapegoat, because every right-wing nutjob thinks he can homeschool the kid better so he doesn’t learn the forbidden topics like sex and evolution
I just wanted to chip in with a quick point about teacher holidays. I taught English and Media Studies in a tough high school for a year. That was all the time I needed to realise that it wasn’t the job for me. During that time, I worked from 7:30 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon, and then, after a short break for dinner, began work on my second job, planning lessons, creating study materials, and marking books for the next day. This took me from about 6:00pm til around 01:00am the next day. Now, granted, a significant proportion of this time was spent frantically pacing my room desperately trying to concoct ideas exciting and attention-grabbing to satisfy my chronically concentration-impaired students. Some people may be able to rattle off genius lesson plans at the drop of a hat. I envy those people, but may it also be said that they are in a minority.
So that’s 15 hours work a day, every weekday, plus extra time prepping and marking on the weekends, which I shall generously discount in the interests of keeping the math simple.
15 times 188 is 2820 hours of work per year.
Nowadays, I work in an office. I start at nine, leave at five, never take my work home with me, and don’t have to deal with a single angry, resentful, hyperactive teenager or any fuckwit parents. I also get four weeks holiday a year and don’t work weekends.
8 times 233 is 1864 hours of work per year.
To put it another way, 2820 divided by 365 is 7 hours, 45 minutes work, every single day.
Come on kidchameleon, let’s let LHOD make his argument. LHOD is a grade A turkey and cries sweet, sweet bitch tears, but he does know how to make an argument and will generally step up to do so.
Aaaaand Japanese teachers work almost half as many hours as American ones. And while starting salaries of U.S. Primary Teachers are comparable to Japanese ones, teachers get paid much more there after 15 years of experience. Otherwise that link pretty much says what kidchameleon is saying.
It’s an attempt to force a ‘liberal crybaby’ insult onto LHOD through nothing but bald assertion and the power of wishful thinking. Don’t get too riled up about it, just accept it as the price of interacting with him. Like a dog humping the sofa or a baby puking all over your clothes.
Yeah, I’ve kinda wondered that, too. RR’s not much for substantive argument, but he’s kind of fun to think about. Like, he seems to post with slightly more rational leanings in the morning, and then goes into his bitchy tears mode at night. Is he drunk, or is he horny?
And what does he mean by calling me a bitch? Is he telling me that, though I’m a man, I’m as contemptible as a woman? Or is he telling me that I’m like a small prisoner he fantasizes about putting his penis inside?
Or is he thinking back to when he was eight on the playground, and the teacher wasn’t watching, and the bully repeated an idiot nonsense phrase at the victim until the sheer malice behind the nonsense reduced the victim to tears? If it’s this, is he replaying the scene with fond memories of being the bully, or is it a fantasy in which he finally gets his revenge, however displaced? In either instance, is it the sheer pleasure of repeating the phrase that moves him, or does he somehow not realize that the rest of the world has grown up and moved on from being eight, and than a totally nonsensical insult lacks any power nowadays?
Or is he just happy that I–or anybody–is thinking about him as much as I just did, that knowing he’s in someone else’s thoughts helps lift the black despair of loneliness into which he’s fallen?
I have no answers, but so many questions, none of them important.
Okay, a much more substantial post, however cherry-picked the statistics. Where are you getting the per capita GDP? Because the estimates I’m seeing are significantly less for North Carolina.
But that’s not what matters. When you’re trying to figure out how to attract teachers, you need to look at the salary options for people you want to become teachers: that is, people who are academically-focused, hardworking, creative, and intelligent. You don’t need to be factoring in the salaries of people who will be lucky to get promoted to shift manager at Burger King, because those folks aren’t among the pool of applicants you hope to attract. If you’ve got stats for the median income of people working in fields requiring at least a four-year degree–especially such people who are in the top third of their class–that’s going to give you the number you want. Not the mean income of the entire state.
To be completely clear: I make the argument that our teachers are not as good as they could be, overall. I’m a rockin teacher, of course :), but overall we could be doing a lot better. I want to up the standards a lot, and up compensation commensurately. I want it primarily for my own benefit, because living on a teacher’s salary is not satisfying to me, but I also believe that by doing so, we’ll drastically improve the quality of education in our country. The #1 predictor of student success is teacher quality. The best way to improve teacher quality is to recruit better teachers. Let’s do it.
Having been a teacher, I can sympathize. The issue is this: in every class, there are usually 3-5 troublemakers. These are kids who talk back, act up, and use vulgar langage. These kids can hijck the calss-they refuse to obey, and disrupt the class. the principals won’t do anything, and the schools are afraid of lawsits. So these little shits wind up absorbing most of your energy-you come in with a lesson plan, and wind up spending half the time trying to get these problems to stop.