Fed up with Teacher Hate and Disrespect in this Country

The BBQ Pit
281

I’m ready, but I’m afraid you’re not: you seem to think recruiting from the top third is ridiculous, implying that you’re happy to say that, as long as we’re recruiting from the bottom third, there’s no way to predict which beginning teachers will be good. That’s also pretty damned ridiculous.

If we’re gonna get serious about teacher quality, then yeah, we WILL have to pay more. That’s my entire point. You can’t continue to recruit from the bottom third of college kids and then fire your way out of the hole you’ve dug.

To be fair, though, I am a godless couchfuck.

kidchameleon, what does an average job that requires a certification dependent on a four-year degree pay in North Carolina?

282

Exactly this. Very few people in the top third of my college graduating class considered teaching as a profession. Too lucrative to go into medicine, law, or engineering. Good luck accomplishing that when everybody is clamoring to cut taxes and reduce school services.

Teach for America is an exception. They recruit heavily, and it’s almost as much a prestige thing to be accepted as a reflection of a desire to do social good. Even so, many, if not most, of the people in the program end up doing something other than teaching afterwards.

If teaching would have offered a starting salary (not to mention raise structures) similar to any of the engineering jobs available to top college seniors, we’d have a lot more teachers right now. That’s easy for a few people to accept intellectually, but few communities actually want to put their money where their mouths are.

As it is, I would only possibly consider teaching if I had enough money to retire permanently and wanted to try something new on a lark. And even then, probably only in a private school or in the suburbs. It sounds insane to teach for a living. So, hat’s off to vast majority of school teachers, who aren’t stereotypically incompetent and lazy.

283

I have no idea whether or not Rand Rover is an attorney or not, I was responding to your idea that intelligence or personality had something to do with being licensed to practice law.

As for moronic cretins, both sides of the political spectrum have them, as do all professions.

284

Thanks for the hat, but I’d prefer the money. I realize this is an uphill battle, for the reasons you say; but as long as we’re recruiting teachers from the bottom third, we’re devaluing the profession, and I don’t think that’s good for our country. The problems with our country’s educational system are often exagerrated in my opinion, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. And throwing money at the problem, via offering decent salary for folks who are awesome, is one way to improve it.

285

Who’s the other one? Bricker?

Also, I passed Evil Economist’s tax lawyer test in a thread a while back (basically I wrote an extemporaneous essay on transfer pricing to his satisfaction), so I’m bona fide, certified, and funkdafied up in this mofo.

And excellent post above zeriel. LHOD’s policy proposals really come down to “pay me more money for the good of humanity (really, trust me on this one),” which rings a bit hollow to me.

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What about those of us who are atypically incompetent and lazy? We just get ignored?

287

Sadly no, I stole it shamelessly from one of Lore Sjoberg’s old comedy videos before he became a Wired columnist.

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Quite hollow indeed (no offense LHOD, you are a smart respectible person in a noble profession). Not that I disagree with the premise that increasing teacher pay would produce better teachers… I believe it honestly would help a little.

But no one seems to be addressing my main concern that I tried to bring up in this thread that we could make HUGE gains in improving education in this country if we supported teachers better. Make students and parents more accountable. Make sure teachers can rely on administrators to support their decisions, and not pressure them into grade inflation.

It’s so frustrating that in 2 years of teaching at a pretty decent school, I was pressured more times than I can remember to inflate a student’s grade because of sports, graduation requirements, or some other extra curricular. Sometimes I held my ground, but sometimes they make sure the battle you would fight to do so would be hell.

What incentive does a student have to actually perform if they know they are going to pass a class despite a complete lack of effort?

289

No hat for you!!!

Seriously. Get out of the classrom if you think you are incompetent and lazy :p.

290

At the same time, the correct solution is probably going to HAVE to involve “Pay teachers on a level commensurate with other professionally employed non-research degree holders” at some point. I agree with LHOD on that much, I just think he’s putting the cart before the horse by suggesting we do this without also reforming heavily our methods of evaluating teachers.

Sure, market forces can set demand for teacher salaries–but that cuts both ways, and setting higher salaries will cause more qualified applicants to consider teaching.

Other needed reforms, IMHO: Stop trying to make them pay for necessary job supplies out of salary (and let’s get rid of the tax break for it while we’re at it). Make the state-required certification and continuing education courses more formal parts of a teacher’s employment year, so as to reduce complaints that teachers “do nothing” in the summer by giving them a structured something to do–and while we’re at it, have the districts offer plans similar to what us engineers and lawyers get along the lines of “We’ll reimburse 50-100% of your tuition for the continuing education if it’s A) in the academic areas we’re paying you to teach and B) you get B+ grades or better”.

Regarding administration: I perceive this as the same problem some businesses were having in the 80s and 90s (and to some extent today)–with increasing perceived education “requirements”, the people getting promoted to “principal” and “middle manager” aren’t necessarily the best people–more often, they’re “people who had the free time to get an MBA/Ed.D.” (which usually means they’re not pulling their weight on the front line).

291

Woah there–I am ALL ABOUT reforming how we evaluate teachers. It’s just nobody argues with me when I suggest that, so we don’t talk about that much. I want to make teaching a really hard profession to get into, and I want it to be hard to stay in, and I want it to pay a lot, partly because I think it’ll be good for our nation, partly because I think it’ll be good for our kids, and partly because I think I’m good enough that it’ll be good for my wallet. I make no bones about the last part, but if I were totally self-interested, I’d be a tax attorney, not a teacher. The other reasons are important as well.

I do, however, want to ensure that any teacher evaluation tool measures teacher effect, not external factors such as student poverty. Design a tool that measures teacher effect on student learning, and I will be as vociferous an advocate for it as I am for increased teacher pay.

292

Helicopter parents have been known to show up even in college deans’ offices demanding that Professor So-and-So be fired because s/he was mean, unfair, too hard, gives their little darling too much work, etc. Fortunately, most college admins, AFAIK, don’t take this sort of crap seriously because they don’t have to, and then there’s FERPA, which prevents profs from having to respond to said parents’ bullshit emails.

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Wrong. You would be a tax attorney if you were interested in providing services that people value more highly than the services you currently provide.

294

I’ve never been able to figure out helicopter parents - do they want their kids to be dependent on them forever, or do they just not know any better?

295

The sun’s gone down. Are you laying off the booze tonight, or don’t you have something to say about my bitchy tears?

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Those sweet, sweet bitch tears will come out soon enough. For now I’ll just enjoy laughing at you getting it exactly backwards. I’m the one providing society with services valued at several times the value placed on the services you provide, but somehow I’m the selfish one.

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There’s a fairly large presumption in there regarding what “society” consists of and why we should trust the value judgements of a bunch of mayonnaise-sandwich-eating losers who still believe in Intelligent Design.

In a serious answer, you can’t by definition get accurate market pricing on a service provided by the government, because even if we all agree that service is enough of a necessary public good and/or natural monopoly to fall under the aegis of government, it automatically gets undervalued by the mere existence of the “HOLY SHIT TAXES” crowd of whiners and the larger but just as foolish crew who honestly believes that “public employee” MUST by definition mean “low-paid, otherwise you’re wasting MY MONEY”.

298

There you go.

299

I’m confused - how is the GDP of NC (a state) defined? Is it actually per capita (or family) income?

300

A couple of things:

We don’t really have a teacher shortage. We have a shortage in a few areas - namely Spanish, math, and special education. They tend to get paid more and are more likely to be recruited from other teaching fields (aka alternative licenses Teach for _____ City programs, whatever).

It doesn’t take a Teach for America recruit to make a good teacher. Hell, it doesn’t even take the top third of your graduating college class to be a good teacher (though I’m sure it could help). The Kipp Model (my KIPP friends work from 7am-5:30 on campus btw) isn’t that much different than from what public schools want to do, they just have more money and better resources to try to do it. I think we can all agree on one thing, and that is parents and students need to step it up.

To me, urban teaching is 20 per cent content area, 50 per cent relationship with students, 20 per cent ‘teaching skills’ (planning, differentiating, etc.) and 10 per cent luck of the draw. I have to be really fucking good at my content area to be able effectively plan for my classes and meet different students’ needs. I also have to have a good classroom community: when kids adore you, they’ll [often] walk to the ends of the earth for you. But hey, you can’t reach everyone, and some kids are determined to fail. You can’t do much for the perpetual assholes, but you can be consistent and still role model good behavior for everyone else.

BUT that doesn’t translate into a high jump in test scores. (Most of my students don’t even try their hardest on those tests, so they score lower than what their abilities really are.)

Get real!

You can’t really expect that ‘drawing new blood from the top 1/3 of colleges to replace veteran teachers’ or even a fairer ‘evaluating based on lesson plans’ or any of that to bump any group of kids up 5 grade levels of reading or math in a year. You can be a Teach for America scholar or you can open up your own urban school for black boys only and give them ties and a longer school day - it just doesn’t work, no matter what brochure says. Fancy schools with funding from Oprah can still have failing test scores.

You can’t smooth away poor early childhood education, intelligence, disabilities, or what have you.

If you really want to fix America’s schools, you have to crack down on behavior, invest in early childhood education, stop promoting kids to the next grade for ‘social’ purposes, and refuse to graduate students who can’t fucking read. Let them stay in school an extra year or two, I don’t care, but not even Superman could take a group of 120 high schoolers (with half of whom read at grade four or below and the other half who are still learning English) that late in the game and give them a (deserved) diploma. (I said 120 because that’s a typical teachers’ load. I know secondary teachers share students, but you get the idea.) And if you’re teaching physics, how do you expect to do as well as your other-side-of-the-tracks colleague if your students can’t read or do math? Even when you manage to get your classroom calm and on track, you still have to deal with academic deficits!

Look. My students are not going to be Rhodes Scholars. Many may not even have ‘professional’ jobs in their lifetimes. Of the 40 that I’m dealing with right now, I see one who could go to college and about five more with potential if they step it up. Most are headed for juvy or adult jail at the rate they’re going. I have many kids who are in gangs or have family members who are. One kid is thirteen with Surenos tats on his hands and his ‘uncle’ who drops him off in the morning is a walking poster boy for the Mexican Mafia (complete with a low-riding vehicle and weapons and everything!)

Short of cheating, I can’t work magic with test scores, but if my students leave our program feeling better about themselves and feeling like they may want to contribute positively to society, I think I did a great job. I’m a good role model and I’m a positive influence and when I get a letter from a kid who says something like, “Miss, thank you for believing in me and making me feel good about myself”, I know that I did well. When a kid says to me, “Hey Miss, you the coolest teacher we ever had” a week after yelling to at me to “get out of her fucking face” because I asked her nicely to stop chatting during test time, I know I’m doing something right. Dear God, I hope so, because even though I’m only contracted part-time (no benefits), I come home and can’t get through the rest of the afternoon without a nap, only to wake up and have parenting duties til 8 before I lesson plan or do paperwork for the next day. Unpaid, of course, but I do it because I care.

The model for a successful school isn’t the product of a genius. It’s common sense. But to actually crank out successful students in our failing urban schools takes superhuman effort of the teachers and the partnership of students, parents, administrators, taxpayers, and government.