I believe the U.S. already spends the most on education per child, or at least it’s near the top, but is only barely in the top 20 in educational outcome. Clearly, education spending isn’t the solution.
I’d look at breaking up the teacher’s unions, opening up more competition, reforming public sector pensions, and allow more non-traditional education streams such as apprenticeship or allowing people with industry training but not teaching degrees to teach if they can get hired.
I’m tired of teachers being held up as saints who can fix everything so long as they are given more pay and benefits. There are a hell of a lot of poor teachers in the system. Let’s dump them. I’d rather my daughter be in a class of 50 kids with one great teacher than be in a class of 25 with a teacher who doesn’t give a damn because she’s got job security.
When you have a class of 50 kids, you end up with about 47 kids who have no teacher at all, and the other three who have a parole officer instead of a teacher. It doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are; no public school teacher can handle class sizes that large. Private schools might be able to get some semblance of education out of that, but only because they can kick out the problem students, and even then, the quality of education is going to be pretty low.
Take it from me, you wouldn’t. Back when I was in school at the height of the baby boom, I was in Catholic school with class sizes of 40+ every year.Since it was not a public school, they had complete freedom to kick out any student at any time for any reason. so discipline was never a real problem.
What was left were students who were at least compliant, if not engaged, and teachers who were left teaching either the top 5, the middle 30 or the bottom 5 in every class. No time for questions, no time for one-on-one interactions, no time for anything except reading from the book. Hell, even fire drills took extra long because the teachers had to count heads and make sure all 40 of their students were in the same place at the same time.
When I was a kid, we always had classes of 30+. 35 students was common. For three years between grades 4, 5 and 6 our school had an ‘open classroom’ program where about 150 kids were together in a big open space with a handful of roving teachers. I went to public school. My daughter has a class size of around 30 kids. This is in Canada. My era’s kids got better test scores and better educations than the kids today get, and Canadians are kicking America’s butt in education.
Class size is certainly important, and smaller is better. But it’s not anywhere near the top of the list when it comes to what’s wrong with education today.
Looking at how my daughter is taught, I’d have to say that the biggest factor in whether she has a good year in school or not is the quality of the teachers she gets - and she’s had some horrible ones. She’s had teachers who didn’t know the material they were teaching, teachers who were simply burned out and demanded that the kids sit quietly and fill out handout after handout and not ask questions, teachers who were abusive, who wouldn’t take the effort to sort out who was wrong in an altercation, and so it goes. Good teachers make all the difference, and despite the rhetoric about how the vast majority of teachers are great and wonderful child-loving educators, in my experience that just isn’t true. Teachers fall on a bell curve of competency like everyone else - only the teachers on the tail end stay in their jobs. Other fields churn through people, retaining the good ones and easing out the bad ones. Educators show up to stay.
But this is a hijack of the thread. Suffice it to say that I’d cut half of the Department of Education’s funding tomorrow, remove tenure for all educators, allow states to set their own curriculums without interference from the federal government, and allow any school to hire anyone they want as a teacher, regardless of whether they belong to the NEA or went through a formal teaching education. I’d make them pass a competency exam in the subject they want to teach, then leave the rest of the decision up to the principal of the school - but I’d hold the Principal accountable as well for poor results.
I think this is flawed. Being poor sucks. Being on ‘assistance’ looks a lot like being poor, which is to say it also sucks. It is quite a generalization to claim that people are ‘incentivized’ to be poor, and that’s why they don’t work more. If you’re the contemplative type, meditate on the phrase, ‘take the money out of poverty’.
Not a big fan of Libertarians or Republicans, but this doesn’t sound so crazy. Except… revenues are way down because of the recession. Can’t we balance the budget for more normal levels, while raising taxes on wealthy people?
I worry about the funding cuts, if only because teaching pays poorly enough as it stands that I don’t know you’ll get qualified teachers even with the looser requirements for teaching (that I agree would work well, with a sufficiently well-designed competency exam that included a pedagogy evaluation in addition to subject-matter competency).
As a citizen of Alabama, PLEASE don’t insist that states should have complete control over the curriculum. I don’t really trust the people that would get elected to make these decisions.
You’d get better ones. A motivated, idealistic 24 year old is very often going to do as good or or better job teaching middle school English than a tenured 49 year old who’s been at it 25 years and is just waiting for the pension. The former makes $32k. The latter makes about twice that. Very often, passion and energy count for more in teaching than do credentials or experience. And I say that as 41 year old teacher.
Not at all. It is defined as those making more than 250 thou a year. That has been made clear and obvious for a couple years. You should make random stabs at being honest occasionally. It would keep us on our toes.
Sure, but then you know in many States they’d be teaching the Bible in Science class along with two hours of prayer a day, in others you’d be fired if you didn’t donate/work/vote for the party in charge, and in others all the teachers would be some politicos In-Laws, right?:rolleyes:
Nate makes a good pioint.
Tenure is a Good Thing, it makes sure teachers aren’t fired for political or religous reasons.
And of course, cutting half the budget would mean classes doubled in size, teaching in a open field.:dubious:
You currently have the power to hold the Principal accountable now- I assume you live in a State with elected School boards. Just get out there and vote one in that does what you want, or failing that run yourself.
So Social Security added about 33% more beneficiaries since 1985, and you estimate Medicare is about the same. And yet spending on Social Security has risen 38%, and Medicare and Medicaid 75% just since 2000. Were the Clinton years so terrible?
Conversely, I’d love to teach and have experience teaching both college-level and high-school level audiences (TAing and SAT prep, respectively), but as you imply, even a highly senior 20-year teacher makes 64k or so and I’m making 72k now by NOT teaching computer science.
Which I don’t think is right, considering I don’t personally think that making the computers work nicely is nearly as important as passing along skills to the next generation, but I like money more than ideals in this case.
Except by that logic–we need to pay enough so that all the most skilled people are all teachers–we’d soon wind up paying teachers a million dollars a year. “After all, it’s for the children…”
Many of the skills that make you worth 72k as a programmer would be wasted in a classroom: 99% of students are not learning advanced stuff. They need to learn to use applications, and the older and more more tech-oriented ones are going to be doing basic programming. They don’t need a PhD, they need someone who has the desire to invest time and energy in students, who has the desire to teach well, and who has the patience to deal with students.
Some people keep that desire for 30 years; some don’t. But tenure and union wages make sure that even the ones who have lost it will keep their jobs at the expense at younger and more motivated people.