Atlanta Fulton Co Public schools are being investigated for systemic academic cheating ordered from the top to the bottom. Ethical teachers and whistle blowers that would not play ball were transferred or fired. Teachers were ordered to make the students pass the standardized test at all costs. Students complaining about cheating were threatened with failure of grade. Teachers erased wrong answers or left answer sheets in the open and also roamed the room giving hints and correct answers to cover up their dismal efforts at education. This was ordered by Administration. One student who aced the math portion was found to be illiterate. Teachers Union at its best. Protect our jobs program and screw the students. This topic is in the news right now. Check it out yourself. Oh, and as for the simplest machines, yes, I know wikipedia says the same wrong thing as the school textbooks which is my point. A wheel and axle=continuous lever, pulley=continuous lever, wedge=double inclined plane, screw=inclined plane wrapped around a cylinder, and that makes 6, except it is only 2. The 3rd for the last time is the piston pump. I chose the simple machine because the taught information from a machine design standpoint is simply wrong. Wikipedia is wrong. So are modern textbooks. Old physics books back me up. Hard to argue with physics, even for a wannabe mechanical engineer. If you are happy with misinformation on the most basic scale, laugh at my zeal. If have a college degree and think I am wrong, I can tell you that I do not have one but, probably know more than you do. A challenge.
You don’t see this as a result of NCLB and “school accountability”?
So which was it?
ETA: Or were you serious about the second one?
It would, indeed, be a challenge to figure out in what sense you know more than I do; I’m afraid I’m not up to that challenge.
Do you mean old as in “books from the 3rd century”?
That is one way of doing things, but it means teachers are essentially just acting like factory workers and will get the same respect as anyone else in a job where people are interchangable.
If I were a teacher I’d prefer a model more like the ABA or AMA so that I was perceived as a professional whose individual skill and effort makes a difference. I’d like to see teachers pushing for ever higher standards for their profession and willing to weed out those who do a poor job. One bad teacher can effect a student for life by putting them behind where they need to be to. They also make the job of the teachers receiving those students more difficult.
Nope, not really.
I merely point out your inconsistency.
Here’s where we are in agreement. This man should NOT be a teacher, should not be in a position where he is ever in a room with children again. Good. We agree.
But you seem to think it’s absolutely fine that this guy has been on “suspension” for 14 years, collecting nearly six figures for doing nothing, because the teacher union has fought for him tooth and nail and frustrated any attempt by NYC to fire this guy.
Because, hey, we have to keep those dues coming in and keep making contributions to Democrats. That’s the important thing.
That educating kiddies thing… er, yeah, right, that’s important, too, I guess.
The fundamental disagreement between **RR **and LHOD stems from a mostly-unstated assumption that we all (excepting RR, of course) hold: that teachers are undervalued and way underpaid. If teaching school earned you $100,000 to start with, and upwards of $500,000 once you’d completed a doctorate, much as practicing law pays or other professions, competition for these jobs would be ferocious, and unions wouldn’t exist in their present form, which is to defend their members’ rights. We could go over to a professional AMA, ABA type model–if teachers were compensated on that order, but they’re not, nor will they ever be in our society with people like RR running around loose. So this is the price we pay for refusing to acknowledge teachers’ worth: they need unions, and tenure, and rubber rooms, just to keep the system working as it is. You want real change? Offer real dollars. Until then, suck it up.
Before you go off on another mocking peroration, RR, recognize the similarity of this argument to John Boehner’s case that the Democrats are fools for thinking that Pubbies will bend on taxes–ain’t gunna happen. Well, maybe not. But who’s the loser there? We all are. On second thought, forget about this paragraph–I don;'t want to encourage you to go off on another of your patented and pointless digressions. Stick to education–that’s what you know so much about.
He has denied your straw-man multiple times now.
He said, simply, that it is the job of the union to advocate for their members. Legally, that is their job. They can’t avoid doing their job. But in this particular situation, he wants the union to lose the case. He wants the teacher to get fired. There is nothing contradictory about both a) wanting the union to do their best to do their job, and b) wanting the union to lose the case anyway. There is a clear parallel for this. If a murderer is arrested and tried for their crime, then that murderer will have a defense attorney. We should all want the murderer to lose the trial, be convicted, and be sent away to prison. However, even if we want the murderer to be convicted, we should all want the defense attorney to try as hard as possible, to do their best, to represent their client. It is important that we send murderers to prison, but it is also important – even more important – that the system as a whole works properly, because we have not only this one murderer to consider, but also all possible future innocent defendants, who will be railroaded into prison if we do not have a system where defense attorneys passionately defend their clients.
Wanting an advocate to do their job passionately and well is not equivalent to wanting the guilty party to go unpunished.
If you cannot see the difference between these positions, then I suggest you enroll in a basic civics class at your local community college. Or an intelligent high schooler should be able to explain it to you, with large colorful pictures if necessary. The most ridiculous part of your pathetic attempt to keep pinning a belief on him that he obviously doesn’t hold is that there are, potentially, plenty of people who might not agree with LHoD’s real argument. I’m not even sure I agree myself. I don’t actually know too terribly much about K-12 education, but it seems to me sh1bu1 has made a compelling point.
But if you persist in your endless repetitive fantasy straw-man arguments, instead of engaging what he has actually written, then it will become absolutely impossible for anyone on this board who is fully literate in English to take you seriously.
Guy, teachers make on average more than I do, so, no, they are NOT underpaid.
And frankly, if “everyone” agreed they were, you wouldn’t have characters like Chris Christy and Scott Walker in Wisconsin scoring political points by going after them.
What we should do is what the private sector does- pay people by results.
Doctors who routinely kill their patients do not get the big salaries. Lawyers who routinely lose cases that were winnable do not command the big bucks, either. In fact, more often than not, they are driven out of the profession after a certain point.
But in the teaching profession, you can have 20% of your kids be functionally illiterate, and that’s considered success. You can get caught molesting kids and be put on paid leave for a decade.
You put a lot of emphasis on degrees, like that’s important. My late mother was an art teacher, I don’t think the woman even had a bachelors (it was the 1960’s, it was a different time). But I have people come up to me today who say they became professional artists because of what my mom taught them back then.
Oh, yeah, and she didn’t do it for a six figure salary. She did it because she loved the work.
My solution is simple enough. Put REAL competition out there. School choice, every family gets a voucher. Let parents decide if what is happening in the schools is working for their kid, and if it isn’t, find a school that does.
Competition is the best solution, because it makes people improve themselves.
it seems to me that you are fulfilling Santayara’s definition of a fanatic.
You are redoubling your efforts while losing sight of your goal.
If the teacher’s unions are putting the interests of their members above the interest and well-being of their students, to the point where they need to defend the incompetant, the lazy and even the harmful, where drugging kids becomes easier than teaching them, and they look at a 20% illiteracy rate and say, “Job Well Done”, they’ve lost sight of their goal of being “educators”.
And frankly, if I were a member of that union who tried to do a good job, put forth an effort, and I found that they were taking my dues and using them to defend pedophiles, I’d be pretty upset, too.
Well, seeing that most people make more than Mickey D burger flippers, everyone must be overpaid !
That’s tautological and/or circular.
Couldn’t possibly identify a more clueless cohort of deciders, even if you wanted to. Parents will decide whatever some yahoo bellows on TV, especially if it’s all sexed-up with “child-molestors” and other villains. As I said, if you have an ABA-style system setting standands and seeing that ABA-style salaries (and respect) are paid to teachers, you’ll get schools with a lower failure rate. You get what you pay for, and you’re paying for an awful stopgap bureaucracy-- and you think you’re paying too much. You’re paying far too little for education, and you’re getting exactly what you deserve.
The advanced degrees are partly to underscore that degree of respect, btw, but mostly to ensure a pecking order within the schools. If you can work as a teacher’s aide with BA, say, and get a chance to do a little teaching that you work very hard on, under a Ph. D. or Ed.D.'s supervision, and work for your master’s degree as you slowly get to teach more and more classes on your own (the whole while earning six figures, of course), you’ll be a pretty good teacher by the time you get your doctorate. But, no, you want to throw a kid with a BA into a classroom of 35 kids, and tell her to teach for seven hours for a salary just over the poverty line, with a prospect of someday earning $60,000 and being vilified for it by the likes of you.
…no, it does not seem that way to you. That much is becoming clear.
I specifically said I didn’t necessary agree with him. I specifically pointed that out. And yet, now you are attributing arguments to me just as blindly, hastily, sloppily, and ridiculously as you did LHoD. You misread, in every post, what other people have said.
Would you say the same thing about defense attorneys defending a client? That’s the key question. Would you claim that the defense attorney is somehow at fault when they successfully defend a guilty client? If not, why not? What are the specific reasons involved?
I don’t necessarily agree that LHoD’s approach is a good way of thinking about this issue. But that is where he is coming from, and if you want to discuss this with him, intelligently, then you need to understand the legitimate place that a legal advocate has. It is already an established part of our long-standing legal institutions that the system as a whole is best served by passionate defense. That’s the starting point.
If you are incapable of understanding the reasons for that that, if you are unable to distinguish between the outcome of an individual case from the efficiency and stability of the system as a whole, then you have absolutely no place speaking on this topic. Or on any other topic, honestly.
Good thing she didn’t do it for a six figure salary as - and you know this good and well because you have been given the stats - on average teachers don’t get paid anywhere near this.
Remember, with the stats that I showed you there is not a single state in the US where the average pay for a teacher is over 60k.
This 100k/six figure/however you want to represent it next is a load of arse. Yes, some may do. Some very, very lucky ones do. They probably have to go all the way to become principal or something. But very few get there.
Let’s see if this works:
No! I want him to be fired!
Me, too, and I said that earlier, and I’ve said it in many threads and other contexts through the years. I think I’m an awesome teacher, and I’m constantly working to become a better teacher. My college courses to become a teacher were mostly stupid-easy, and I wish they’d been a lot harder, to weed out the people who (for example) asked me who the president of the US was during the American Revolution, or who said they hated to read anything but the Bible, or who completed a major course project on the countries of Columbia and Africa.
I want a profession that’s very difficult to enter, that only the smartest people can enter–and that pays enough to attract the smartest people, not only people who feel a calling, but also people who are just really competent and looking for good money. Screw the three-months of vacation, forget the tenure: give me money, give me respect.
Then give teacher organizations high deference when setting education policy and when choosing who gets licenses. Not the final call–that remains the call of politicians–but give them great deference and listen heavily to what we say.
But we’re not there yet.
I’ll point out that I’m only describing the union’s best course given their current situation. I’d much rather be in a world like doctors, where your professional association is separate from your liability insurance. Support me in getting there, and I’ll be the first person in the professional organization to recommend the suspension of the license of a malefactor. BUT THAT’S NOT WHERE WE ARE. Currently, the union IS the liability insurance. RR can’t describe how he thinks the policy should be written, because there’s no sensible way to write the policy under the current setup.
But it also isn’t going to happen when you have teachers unions that act like Teamsters. Tolerating bad teachers results in lack of public respect, it makes every other teachers’ job harder, and it drives some really good teachers out of the profession.
If the first thing that come to mind when one thinks teachers union is opposing merit pay, a longer school year, and higher standards, then we have the situation we are in now. I had some great teachers, and know some outstanding ones now, but I have also met a distressingly large number who are almost breathtakingly stupid. How someone with poor grammar can get hired as a teacher is beyond me.
What I’d like to see is the teachers organizations pushing for higher standards for incoming teachers and more accountability for current teachers. Once we have that the pay will follow.
Well, that’s what I’m describing, a world in which teachers’ pay is high enough to attract the sort of people who are now applying to law school and medical school (and getting in and succeeding at those demanding fields). If teachers need to pass exams in writing, in speaking grammatically, in pedagogy, in curriculum design, and spend years demonstrating their expertise, and sometimes fail to land a full-time job because of the high numbers of other more qualified applicants, then the education system will improve. But how are you going to attract people to that field with a low starting salary that maybe doubles over the course of your career?
So you are saying that anyone who is accused of a heinous crime should not be given any form of defense, as long as “we know” they are guilty.
I guess some people really do hold this opinion - hard to believe. But you should at least be honest enough to explicitly state that this is what you believe.