There’s no evidence that “helping” the teachers helps either. I don’t think anyone ever said, “You know what the problem with this school is? Not enough people here from the federal government telling us how to do our jobs better.”
I personally blame the decline in education on allowing women to work outside the home.
No, seriously, I do. And not in a “women should be barefoot and pregnant” kind of way either.
Basically if you were a woman graduating from college before sometime in the 1970s, your options really were teaching or nursing, and that was about it in realistic terms. So both professions got a whole lot of women who were very competent and motivated and who made good teachers as a result.
But as women were introduced into the workforce, a whole host of additional opportunities opened up- engineering, marketing, accounting, law, etc… and the smart, motivated women took those jobs instead of the traditional teaching and nursing jobs.
So we’ve actually seen shortages in both careers, but the nursing profession is raising salaries, and you’re starting to see a lot more competent people go into nursing.
But teaching still has salaries that are relatively low- starting at 32k may not be that bad, but topping out at a maximum salary just shy of 50k after 25 years of teaching sucks royally.
So two things happen- substandard students go into education, as it’s perceived as easy, or it’s the only thing they can get into, and what’s worse, the most motivated and competent junior teachers realize that they can make similar money in any number of other jobs that don’t require any more education or experience and that involve a LOT less bullshit and have greater advancement and salary opportunity.
So that leaves basically the bottom-feeders who literally can’t find a better job anywhere else teaching the children.
I agree that we ought to reflect the value that teachers provide to our society through the salaries and benefits we pay them; if teaching started at 45k a year and topped out at 90k a year, I know a LOT of people who’d rather be teaching English or History or Math instead of being lawyers, engineers or IT people.
Ultimately though, the biggest problem with Hillary’s SWAT team approach is that I’m pretty sure the Dept. Of Education doesn’t even come close to having jurisdiction to take over school districts governed by the states.
I know this guy who works at a pediatric practice in downtown Los Angeles. He’s got a huge load of patients with asthma. His practice is clearly doing something wrong, and I hope that the government will come in, fire all the doctors, and put in a team of crack physicians to cure those poor kids.
To be fair to her I’m sure she’d ditch all that once their votes were in the bag.
Plus she might not even remember anything she said earlier; this is a woman who stated one position, rejected that position 2 minutes later, changed her mind yet again after thinking on it for a day, then finally rechanged her mind again after a couple of weeks.
She’s always willing to change her views with new information; and will not be tied down to the old failed policies of a few minutes before.
I bet they love you too.
Funny thing is, the Department of Education already has a SWAT Team. A real one. Like, a bunch of big guys with guns and heavy armor.
The militarization of American police — no doubt a blowback effect of the military empire — has become an unfortunate part of American life. In fact, it says something about our reliance on the military that federal agencies having nothing whatsoever to do with national defense now see the need for their own paramilitary units. Among those federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions are the State Department, Department of Education, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, to name just a few.
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it was heavily armed agents from one such OIG office, working under the auspices of the Department of Education, who forced their way into the home of a California man, handcuffed him, and placed his three children (ages 3, 7, and 11) in a squad car while they conducted a search of his home. This federal SWAT team raid, which is essentially what it was, on the home of Kenneth Wright on Tuesday, June 7, 2011, was allegedly intended to ferret out information on Wright’s estranged wife, Michelle, who no longer lives with him and who was suspected of financial aid fraud (early news reports characterized the purpose of the raid as being over Michelle’s delinquent student loans).
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According to Wright, he was awakened at 6 a.m. by the sound of agents battering down his door and, upon descending the stairs, was immediately subdued by police. One neighbor actually witnessed the team of armed agents surround the house and, after forcing entry, they “dragged [Wright] out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.”
Other countries may have higher test scores and graduation rates, but our Department of Education can literally beat the crap out of them.
The requirements for an engineering job are just a bachelor’s (of course, most students will get an internship to make the job search easier, which is the equivalent of student teaching). You don’t even need a degree in education to be a teacher (my AP Physics teacher in high actually had a degree in physics rather than education. She was also one of the better teachers I had, probably because she really understood the material. Also she was not a jerk, but I don’t think education requirements can fix that…)
I had teachers that didn’t know the material either (amusingly, mine was also a math teacher, but I was 18 at the time). I agree we would need more rigorous standards for teachers, but increasing the applicant pool will do that job for us - if you have 100 teacher jobs and 90 people apply, you’re only weeding out the truly, truly incompetent. If you have 100 teacher jobs and 500 people apply, you’re getting some great teachers. Engineers are held to high standards because so many people want to be engineers, part of which is the kind of people that build stuff become engineers but part of which is because it’s a high-paying career field.
bump put it rather indelicately, but there’s a point there. If you have bottom of the barrel salaries, you’re going to get the people that are doing the job for the love of the job, or people that couldn’t find a more high paying job, and the latter category is often not very good at their jobs. Unfortunately, with a shortage of teachers nationwide (last I checked), there’s not a lot of room for school districts to be picky. If school districts were flooded with applicants, I imagine they’d end up hiring a higher quality teacher just because they could filter out the applicants that really shouldn’t be teaching.
Of course, that requires an increase in taxes, which Americans are generally opposed to even if it’s the best course of action.
If you do go with highly paid teachers, then you need to do it like Finland where teaching school is equivalent to law school or medical school in terms of selectivity. Just raising salaries wouldn’t help much except to piss off taxpayers even more.
Besides, the way things are trending, it almost borders on child neglect to send your kid to public school anymore. I only know people making the median income or lower, and anyone who can sends their kids to private school or home schools. It’s getting very close to being socially unacceptable to just send your kid to their local public school. Even parents who do settle for public school make a special effort to move to an area with the best schools. This kind of selection should be creating a serious education gap.
To get back to what Clinton is proposing though, this is just standard Democratic love of thinking you can fix any problem if you a) spend enough money on it or b) put the “best and brightest” minds on it. Problem is, when dealing with human behavior, the complexities are too great for even the smartest people to figure it out. Schooling is an issue where there are just too many potential points of failure: the parents could suck, the kids could just be completely disinterested, the teachers might suck at their jobs, the schools could be unsafe, the kids could be hungry or underdeveloped, the curriculum might be poorly thought out, the curriculum might be too undemanding, the curriculum might put too much pressure on. Trillions of dollars in funding increases and the best brains in the world haven’t been able to solve this problem, and Clinton thinks she can fix all the failing schools with smart people?
- The program would likely cost very little;
- No Child Left Behind sure solved things, didn’t it? (Don’t even get me started.)
- She MIGHT, just might, manage to improve things.
But I’ll wait until I have far more detail to judge it.
Each job training program costs very little. Together, they cost a lot and together they have very little impact. Adding yet another small education program to the budget that doesn’t do much isn’t a great idea, and MIGHT work isn’t really a justification for adding another billion to the budget.
So in other words you’re advocating doing nothing about it.
No, I’m advocating ideas based on what works, not ideology+politics, which is what Clinton’s idea is based on. It’s best and brightest-redux/don’t do anything to piss off the teachers unions. Government doesn’t fail because there’s something inherently wrong with government. Government fails because the incentives lead to decisions based on political gain(or fear of political loss) rather than trying genuinely new ideas or ideas that have been proven to work.
A radical idea that’s been proven to work is the Finnish model. We’d have to have the patience to wait for the plan to bear fruit, which would take about 15 years, but it would certainly work. Open up teaching schools that are on par with medical and law schools, make entry standards just as stringent, and pay them as much as lawyers and doctors if they graduate. As they graduate, start pushing the least performing teachers out of their jobs to make space for them.
To be fair to Hillary, when she voted for No Child Left Behind, no doubt her intentions were for the best. Every Student Succeeds which she also supported is supposed to ameliorate some of the effects of the earlier bill.
The next bill she sponsors before the last in the series, All Dogs Go to Heaven, is expected to be Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which may fix some more things.
Geez, is there any popular(at the time) Republican initiative she didn’t vote for or vocally support? Who is this progressive Hillary Clinton and where was she before Bernie Sanders came along?
I live in a Kansas City suburb and I can tell you the public schools here are just fine. Better than most of the private schools actually. They get tons of applicants for each open job. Their is NO teacher shortage here.
One problem with that is teacher pay scales are across the board the same so it doesnt matter if you teach math, physics, or chemistry you are still paid the same scale as the teachers who teach art, music, PE, and english. Its also the same as grade school teachers.
Some states like Nebraska do require degrees in the fields they are teaching.
Plus you dont need a degree in the field you want to teach. Forgetting that guy in Breaking Bad, you dont need a chemistry degree to teach basic chemistry.
Teaching mostly requires being able to control a classroom and getting the students to learn. Their were college professors I knew who were really lousy at teaching the areas they were experts in.
Around Kansas city their is NO shortage of teachers. maybe for the KCMO district, the worse in the area, but not out in the suburbs.
And lets not forget, their are many fields where really only in education can you get paid. For example history, english, art, and music. Yes, you can have jobs in those areas but they are much harder to get. So teachers in those areas are damn glad for that $32k starting salary.
On the issue of teacher salaries and taxes.
Remember that tax income also has to go to policemen, firefighters, and other government workers who are paid about the same as teachers (often less) and equally would like a raise.
What an unusual circle of people you must know. 90% of kids go to public schools, and that figure is increasing.
The trend is actually moving against public schools:
http://www.educationnews.org/parenting/number-of-homeschoolers-growing-nationwide/