Tenure & union wages also ensure that the good teachers who have made long careers won’t be fired to make room for desperate kids who can’t find jobs elsewhere. But who will work for less until the economy improves & they can leave those snot-nosed brats behind.
Social Security currently brings in more than it pays out. It’s not a current budget problem. Mind you, there’s a disaster looming, but in any case, Soc Sec is self-funded, thus it has no real part of a budget discussion.
There’s certainly a debate as to how to fix Soc Sec, and we have a thread or two on it- but it’s not a current budget problem. Medicare/Medicaid is a much bigger looming problem, six teism that of SocSec. Long before we need to fix SocSec, we need to fix Medicare/Medicaid, which currently does have a negative cash flow.
Discretionary spending is the real issue.
Here’s how we can cut there (IMHO).
- No increase in Defence.
- 10% across the board cut otherwise, other than the iRS- incrreease their enfocement budget by 20% which historically will bring in 5 times what we spend.
This saves $150 billion or so.
There’s also $124 billion that could be saved by getting rid of (wiki)"The GAO identified during its audit work an estimated $125.4 billion of ‘improper payments’.[6] "
But the deficit is about the same as the entire Discretionary budget, in order to balance the budget, we’d have to cut every program 100%.
Clearly we need some tax increases. Sorry Pubbies, it can NOT be done with cuts. **Impossible. **
There’s certainly a difference to be split there.
Do you think that $32k is a fair price to pay for people with those desires, energies, skills, and patience? I think it seems rather low, frankly–just based on my experiences as a consumer of education, good pedagogy doesn’t seem to be a particularly common skill, or a particularly teachable one based on the number of teachers of all types and ages who were informed and enthusiastic and had no idea how to convey that information and enthusiasm to students (every math TA ever is my cite).
One would ideally find a way to maintain something akin to tenure that allowed the shedding of poor or unmotivated teachers while retaining the protections afforded by tenure to beliefs and political stances.
Sam lives in Canada, which clearly makes him an expert on how local schools run in the US. Many states have programs allowing those with degrees and not having formal teacher training to get into the ranks of teachers - my son-in-law’s father did exactly this in California, and my daughter had a former lawyer in NJ. In some states you might have to join the teachers union after being hired (though I might be wrong about this) but no one ever did not get hired for not already being a member.
In my experience as a member of the Site Council in my kids’ high school, principals are very prone to political pressure, both from noisy parents and from the Superintendent and school board. Since they don’t have tenure, the tenure causing our problems side should expect them all to be wonderful. Hardly.
No, it’s not. I meant no interference in the standard curriculum by the Dept of Education, not abrogating the constitution. In other words, if one state wants to have schools that focus more on technology, or perhaps on agriculture or whatever people in that state have a comparative advantage in, they should be allowed to do that. And more to the point, they should be allowed to be more flexible in how they teach.
Generalization and standardization of education are always assumed to be a good thing, but there’s a big advantage in allowing 50 states to compete with each other and allow them all to try different things. Innovation in education would increase, and we’d be able to compare alternate mods of education and figure out what works best and what doesn’t.
In addition, the curriculum needs of an inner-city school may be completely different than those of any ivy-league prep school. Let’s make sure we leave enough local latitude to allow for that kind of educational diversity.
Yes, because in every other field that doesn’t have tenure and unions, no one keeps the GOOD employees around, right? It’s a veritable Logan’s Run out there in the workplace, with experienced workers being axed on their 40th birthday to make room for the cheap kids with no experience.
Please. This is just another variant on the tired claims that teaching is just SO different than every other job that there’s no possible way to evaluate teachers, that you absolutely have to have tenure and union protection, that merit pay can’t possibly work, yada yada. All arguments put forward by the very institutions and union employees trying to protect their sweet deals and avoid the kind of competition in the workplace that the rest of us have to deal with every day of our lives.
First of all, workers in all fields are already protected from being fired for political or religious reasons. The reason for tenure among university professors is to protect research from being influenced by job fears. High school teachers should not be diverting from the curriculum to indoctrinate students in their own personal politics or religion in the first place. I WANT them fired for doing that. Here in Alberta, a teacher named Jim Keegstra taught his kids that the holocaust never happened. We fired his ass for that. I’m sure glad he didn’t have tenure.
Tenure is wholly inappropriate at the grade school level. All it does is insulate teachers from the consequences of their own actions.
Are you of the opinion that the nation’s teachers are paid by the Dept. of Education?
I have a friend who worked as a highly-paid programmer, and quit to teach computing at a junior college. He took a $20K cut in pay to do it. He likes the work environment better, he likes teaching better than programming, he likes the job security and the retirement plan, and it just suits his lifestyle.
I could easily make the same choice - I make significantly more than he does, but I’ve thought of going the same route, simply because I love teaching. And I’m really good at it - I’ve got several years of teaching experience in corporate training, night classes for various subjects, and I’ve authored video tutorials for home schooling and received rave reviews consistently. But I’m completely shut out of the public school system here, because I don’t have a degree in education.
I could well imagine taking early retirement when I’m in my 50’s and getting burned out in the corporate world, and spending the last ten years of my working life sharing my knowledge with students. I’ll bet there are a LOT of people out there like that. They’d work for less pay. Shutting such people out of the educational system is just a bad idea.
I can give you an example of this: I used to be the director of a day care. Our staff was primarily middle aged ladies who’s kids had left home, and they wanted to keep working with children. They were generally kind, patient, and had a whole lot of skills earned through hard experience for how to deal with various issues with children. They worked for low pay because they were stay-at-home moms anyway and not the breadwinners in their households. That allowed us to keep costs down and make daycare affordable to more low-income people.
Well, our local teacher’s union was having none of that. They kicked up a fuss about the poor education and low pay of day care workers, and demanded that the licensing rules be changed so that workers had to either have a B.Ed or or be in the last two years of a B.Ed program. See, this was good for them - it got students in the education program more work, and it provided a job outlet for newly graduated teachers who couldn’t find work in the public system.
So, the system was changed, and we had to fire all the ladies. Their replacements were typically young students who had no desire to work with small children and no experience in raising them. They were there marking time until they could find a ‘real’ teaching job, so they didn’t give a damn about doing a good job. We also had to pay them more money, which required us to raise our rates. That in turn required the government to raise the subsidy - and property taxes to go along with it. In addition, staff turnover was through the roof, so we never had experienced people and bookkeeping effort went way up.
Finally, the new restrictive standards resulted in major shortages of workers, which meant we couldn’t meet the minimum staff-to-child ratio. The government had to give us a waiver. It turned out they had to give waivers to almost every day care around because there just weren’t enough willing students or unemployed teachers to fill the jobs.
What really happened here was that a powerful, politically connected organization used government as a mechanism to transfer wealth from the day care system to them. It wasn’t about improving day care - the changes made day cares worse.
That’s a perfect example of how demanding arbitrary educational standards can damage education.
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They can do that now. You don’t come from around here, do you?
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No, teaching isn’t that special, *all government jobs are special. * Before Civil Service such jobs were laden with patronage, nepotism, religous and political interests. Still are in any nation without Civil Service. Tenure is a just a special type of Civil Service.
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Not political, no protection (other than Civil Service and tenure) for being fired for political beliefs. And, how is it better that a entire State or School district "indoctrinates students in their …politics or religion " than a single teacher? At least with a single teacher, the kids get a new viewpoint in the next period. You have to have read about entire States down here trying to have standards that show that the Theory of Evolution is just a theory and that Creation should be taught along side it, given equal time, and other religous ideas.
Note that Jim Keegstra was a local elected official, just the sort of person you want to have in charge of education. He was removed from his teaching position by the Federal Government of Canada- just the people you have said you don;t want to have any voice in education. In any case, he was removed for violation of a Federal law, which even under Tenure would get you immediately fired. Your example proves exactly the opposite of your argument.
Your arguments are the ones I have heard time and again from the Pubbies, not based on any valid complaints against Tenure and/or teachers Unions, but based entirely upon the fact that such Unions often donate heavily to the opposing party, and thus the GOP wants them muzzled. The GOP has had a long term disinformation program against Teachers for this reason.
- The Dept of Education supplies funds to schools.
I don’t know of any school district that limits tenure to good teachers. All of the ones I’ve dealt with it give it more-or-less automatically to everyone who manages to go a certain number of years without getting fired.
Do you think the federal government sets curriculum standards? Do you think it dictates how teachers teach? There was recently some movement for a national standard, mostly well received, but it has certainly not yet been implemented, and I don’t think it is even close to being lockstep. There weren’t even any testing standards until No Child Left Behind. If you don’t believe, you should check out the varying state level grades given for the teaching of evolution. Quite a lot of variance. One of the bio textbooks our school uses has a nice interview with Dawkins in it - try to sneak that into Texas.
Most school districts get to pick their own textbooks from an approved list. Texas is an exception, which is why they have additional power over the publishers. It appears the right-leaning state allows less local control than some left leaning states like California. Interesting, isn’t it.
Even within a district there is significant variation. The number and type of AP classes varies a lot in my district across high schools. So much so, in fact, that an equity committee was begun to make sure kids in one school weren’t losing out over those in another. Besides the academic high schools, there is a Continuation school for kids with issues making it tough for them to go to a traditional schools (like girls with babies) and a high school teaching trades like auto repair.
I’m not arguing your suggestions are bad, just that they clearly aren’t the answer to the problem, since they’ve been implemented already.
I know some teachers who did not get tenure because they did not measure up (and the school was right). Our district has few if any younger teachers, because pretty much all those without tenure got laid off due to the funding crisis.
If you think that school administrators are not competent to select good teachers while they can in the present situation, why do you think they’d get more competent when a teacher has more experience?
For a first-year teacher straight out of school, new B.A. in hand? Yes, I think that’s plenty. It’s about what most non-technical people straight out college make. For the ones that stay in it and gain experience and skills without losing their enthusiasm, and that are able to take on more responsibilities, their salary should rise. I have no problem with a 20 year teacher making 60 or 70k – IF they are still an effective teacher and if they’ve taken on added responsibilities comparable to senior professionals in other fields. I don’t think you deserve 70k because you’ve managed to be minimally adequate for 20 years.
In the case of someone coming into education later in life, such as yourself, I’d like to see school administrators have the ability to offer them significantly more money than the 24 year old. But teacher’s unions oppose that quite strongly.
For the reasons already outlined by Sam, tenure has no place whatsoever in K-12 education. Teachers getting fired for airing controversial intellectual views is exceedingly rare. I suppose there is probably are some rural districts where they might still fire a teacher for knocking creationism or something, but they are far from the norm. Tenure is far, far more commonly used to protect incompetent or misbehaving teachers.
Sure, some don’t. They weed out the worst of the worst. But most who stay get it.
Most administrators don’t have much choice in selecting good or bad teachers. Most of their faculty is already in place when a new principal is hired, and many are unfirable. That’s the problem. If an administrator consistiently hires bad teachers, the administrator is fireable – which is a good thing.
Sounds like an excellent reason to get rid of tenure.
Bet the district wishes they could have just kept the *best *teachers, old or young. Bet the parents do, too.
We do only if you count private schools. we are somewhere around 40th in spending per student in public education..
How do we determine who ARE “the best teachers”? Some tests thought up by bureaucrats? Or as was done in the past before tenure- by their religous or political leanings? :rolleyes:
I was under the impression that the Department of Education was tying funding of various programs to various demands for how the states teach. Is that not correct?
Do you have a cite for that? Because I have a pretty good cite that says otherwise:
Spending per secondary school student (most recent) by country:
Spending per primary school student:
The U.S’s spending is very close to what Canada spends: The Canadian average is $7,507 for primary and secondary averaged together. I don’t know what the U.S. average is because I don’t know the percentages of primary vs secondary.
The OECD does periodic standard tests of math, science and literacy so that country comparisons can be made. The data is here: OECD Data from standardized tests out on 15 year olds in all OECD countries.
Out of 33 countries, here are the rankings of the U.S and Canada:
Canada Rankings
Math: 5th
Reading: 3rd
Science: 2nd
US Rankings
Math: 27th
Reading: No Score
Science: 22nd
That’s pretty pathetic. Clearly there’s something wrong with your education system. And it’s not money - Canada has roughly the same standard of living, spends about the same on education, and yet has markedly better educational outcomes. You’re getting beat in math and science by countries that spend significantly less on education - in some cases by countries that only spend 1/3 as much on education.
Time to try something different. Stop trying to fix the problem by throwing more money at the teacher’s unions and the Dept. of Education. You’ve been doing that for a long time - as well as ceding more power to those organizations - and your education system isn’t getting any better. It’s just getting more expensive.
Maybe your people are just smarter.
I am sure that you do not really believe that he meant that literally. I stand by my comment as to his intent.
You’re right – there is no possible way to tell the difference between a good teacher and a bad one. It’s all a mystery. Same way nobody can tell which doctors or infantrymen or computer programmers are good or bad. It’s all impossible to tell. :rolleyes:
There have been literally thousands of studies done on how to measure teacher effectiveness. I’m not going to do a literature review for you; suffice it to say that
- No single measure is sufficient (as with doctors or infantrymen or computer programmers)
- It is nonetheless quite possible to employ multiple subjective and objective metrics in combination to get an accurate assessment of an individual’s performance.
- This is already done routinely at hundreds, perhaps thousands of schools across the nation
There’s nothing about teaching that makes us unable to be judged.
I thought you wanted to cut the deficit? :dubious:
Yeah, the last performance review I was in, my manager was worried that I wasn’t wearing a cross. I think that cost me a few eval points. And of course, we all have to declare our political leanings so the bureaucrats can figure out who to fire. So :rolleyes: yourself.
Here’s yet another example of a justification for why teaching is just SO different from every other job in America that it’s just impossible to evaluate teachers. But it’s a load of crap. Good managers know who the good people are and who the bad ones are. They can make allowances or even give extra points to teachers who take on the worst kids or teach the hardest subjects. They know how to account for personal bias when getting complaints from co-workers or parents of kids. Administrators have to deal with issues like this in EVERY field. Teaching isn’t unique.
My wife is an administrator in a hospital. The nurses are of course unionized, and they make the same claim: It’s just impossible to evaluate them and pay them for performance, because the job is just SO complex. Nonetheless, if you asked her to she could rank her nurses from best to worst without breaking a sweat.
I understand unions and seniority pay systems for workers on assembly lines or field workers that do mostly manual labor. They all essentially do the same job at about the same level of efficiency, so it makes sense to pay them based on seniority. But unions are a disaster when it comes to knowledge workers, because the difference in performance between the best and the worst is immense. If you want to create an efficient organization, it’s all about setting up incentives so that the most capable workers have an incentive to work hard and take on increasing responsibility, and the worst workers are eased out of the system.
In a typical company, about 10% of the workers in a given year are given unsatisfactory ratings. These workers are either put in remedial training programs, or given additional management oversight to correct their problems, or, if they continue to score in the bottom 10% they are let go. This churn allows for constant hiring, which means you’re always filtering your workforce, keeping the best and allowing them rise to the heights of their ability.
In Union jobs, this does not happen, even for new hires. According to this article in the Denver Post:
That’s a big problem. When teachers are never fired, it also means new teachers are only hired to backfill retirement. The average age of teachers goes up, and the system becomes clotted with bad teachers.
It’s even worse than that. In my experience (and in my wife’s), union seniority systems actually act to drive out the good teachers or nurses. The ones who care, the ones who try to make the system work, become increasingly responsible to cover for the bad ones. Good teachers have to correct problems caused by the bad ones. Their workloads are increased because of the teachers who constantly call in sick or who don’t do their share of common tasks. But the good teachers don’t get paid any more. It leads to frustration and the good ones eventually say “Screw this!” and leave. It’s the main reason my wife left nursing and went into management - she just couldn’t stand carrying the load for the slackers any more.
The first and most effective reform the school systems in both Canada and the U.S. could make would be to bust up the teacher’s unions, institute merit pay, and delegate authority downwards. Give a principal a bonus for coming in under budget while maintaining educational outcomes, or for increasing educational outcomes while staying within budget. Then let him or her hire whoever he wants to. Put accountability as close to the teachers as you possibly can. Create incentives that cause the good teachers to take on more responsibility and fire the bad ones.