Didja even read the OP? Sheesh.
According to the article I linked to, the student teacher ratio got to be something like 12 or 13 to 1. Didn’t help.
What exactly do you mean by “raising standards”? Would all teachers have to pass some difficult test? If so, get ready for the discrimination lawsuits.
Sure, because the perceived self-interests of teachers are important to you. And there’s no shame in that. Everyone wants to make a buck; to pay their bills; to feed their family; etc.
Sam Stone’s point, which I think is probably correct, is that teachers (and other public servants) have a tendency to cloak their self-interest with arguments about the public interest.
These arguments seem to be based on self-serving speculation.
Whereas your side is based on grotesque ignorance, which there IS shame in, or should be.
And yes, I read the OP. And I read the article. And your snide aside about discrimination lawsuits is absurd and not worth responding to. As for class size, that is one piece of the puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle is not doing the really dumb things that were done in Kansas. The fact that they did some dumb things (leaving a child on a school bus all night so that she got frost bite) doesn’t mean that all the things they did are dumb.
We have a model for how to have high standards. ABA. AMA. Look 'em up. We can do it.
We shouldn’t be giving licenses to people who say, “I don’t know anything about the Revolutionary War. Who was president then?” But we are. Because otherwise we can’t fill the positions. We need to fix that.
For 34 years I taught in the Detroit Public School system. The first ten at a middle school and the last 24 at a high school. I loved the job — at least until the last year or two. If I had it to do over again, I would seriously consider something else.
Teaching is now obsessed with standardized testing and student scores on those tests. The final straw for me was the opening staff meeting at my final year when the principal announced that “if you are spending class time on material NOT on a standardized test, you should ask yourself why you are wasting this valuable time”.
Thats not teaching.
I’m sorry but I don’t buy most of these arguments or solutions people have put forth. First, why does everyone assume that teachers (collectively) are bad at their jobs? Is it because our education system is broken? Because if that is all you got, I think you are making a serious error in logic. Our healthcare system is broken too, but I don’t hear people ever talk about how lazy and stupid our doctors and nurses are. Our space program has stalled and wasted billions of dollars, but how many people argue that our aeronautical engineers and astronauts are dumb? I know it’s fun to rag on teachers, but I think that they are, on average, just as competent, professional, and intelligent as people in almost any other field.
Second, more/better individual training does not mean you will get better product. Politicians are typically well trained and better educated and look where that has gotten us. Training does not equal competence. Even if you accept that raising teacher pay will attract smarter people, it doesn’t mean they will be better teachers or educators. Most people don’t know if they could hack it as a teacher until they do it. Just knowing stuff and liking kids isn’t enough.
I would say that it depends which jobs you are talking about. My original comment did not have a “schooling” qualification, but let’s suppose it did. What does someone with an MSW earn? I would guess it’s not too different from what a teacher earns. What other jobs do you feel have “equivalent levels of schooling” to teachers?
I’m not sure what your point is. There are a lot of jobs that are really dirty and which tend to pay pretty well because of this. Teaching is not one of them.
Lol. Nice strawman.
I am claiming exactly what I said – no more and no less. Please don’t pretend that I claimed something else. Thank you.
Spoken like someone who has no idea what he is talking about. Try working as a paralegal or a case manager some time.
Lol. If you feel I am unqualfied, why not just rebut my arguments instead of setting up strawmen and arguing from ignorance?
And there are plenty of jobs that are really clean and that tend to pay well. Teaching is not really dirty, is not remotely clean, and does not pay well.
I’m sorry–I should’ve recognized yet another of your total non sequitur statements by now, instead of trying to find a way that it could be relevant.
You’re descending into “I know you are, but what am I?” territory here. I’ve worked as a writer for IBM, as a secretary, as a legal transcriptionist, in addition to retail work and kitchen work. Teaching is pretty damned rigid in its structures. I do know what I’m talking about. You simply do not.
At this point, I’ll wait until you post something factual before responding any further; your contributions to teaching threads appear to be about as informed as your contribution to global warming threads, and further efforts on my part are just likely to annoy the metaphorical pig.
Daniel
Then why not fight my supposed ignorance? Do you really feel that a teacher has the same level of autonomy as a paralegal or a case manager?
It sure doesn’t seem like it. The OP proposed giving more money to teachers. Period. I posted an example where that was done without accomplishing anything. And you responded as if I had missed some important point.
So you have no answer for my question at all? It was a very simple question.
How exactly would you “raise standards.”? Or should we just throw some money at teachers in exchange for the vague promise that “standards” will be “raised”?
Sure, and it’s a piece that apparently didn’t have much of an effect in Kansas City. Is there any empirical evidence that reducing class sizes in public schools from their current levels would improve education?
Based on my own experience (and those of my children), I tend to doubt it. In my experience, the main problem is keeping potentially disruptive children under control.
:shrug: It seems there was essentially no improvement at all in Kansas City. Anyway, one can expect that any institution will do a lot of things which, in hindsight, were “dumb.” That’s just human nature. That’s practical reality.
So you are proposing a requirement of 3+ years of graduate level schooling for teachers; a difficult licensing exam; and a state board to discipline teachers who don’t meet standards?
Sure. So what?
The point is that teaching offers a combination of wages; job security; cleanliness; job duties; and benefits which enough people find attractive that there are plenty of applicants for teaching positions.
Lol. Is hurling insults all you can do at this point?
I said that the days and hours of teaching are not as demanding as most full time professional jobs.
Obviously that’s relevant to the discussion. The point is that teaching offers a combination of wages; job security; job duties; and benefits which are attractive to a lot of people.
I’m not sure why you are (apparently) disputing this obvious point.
Who has more autonomy: A secretary or a teacher?
Simple question.
Ok, and are you seriously claiming that a secretary; a paralegal; or a case manager has the same level of autonomy as a teacher?
Simple yes or no question.
Lol. i.e. you have no good response to my argument.
This is simply not true: the US Department of Education keeps a running lists of teacher shortages state by state(warning PDF). Most states have shortages in many subject areas, year after year. There are not enough applicants. Not even close.
Given this, do you agree that we need to do something to increase teacher compensation? (and I consider improving working conditions to be an increase in compensation, and in many cases it would give districts more bang for the buck than simply increasing salaries.)
Of course. If it’s true that there is a bona fide shortage (i.e. there are vacancies being advertised with no qualified applicants applying), then yes, wages need to be increased, at least for those vacancies. I will take a look at the paper you linked to.
One of the big things to notice is what subject areas. Generally speaking, it’s math, science, technology, and foreign / world languages. IOW, areas where you can easily make more money with the same background. The only reason there’s not a shortage of business teachers is that there’s not a lot of business classes, so not a lot of positions to be filled.
Think about it: if you’re good enough at science / engineering / technology (which usually is what you call computer classes), you’re at least good enough to work in the private sector in these jobs. Which pays more than teaching. Even if I stayed in academia, I could make more as a researcher than I do teaching. Granted, it works out to roughly the same per Diem, when you take length of work year into consideration. If I were to find work in the private sector, I could make a higher per Diem, even without finishing a PhD.
Damn, Sam, learn to take some gentle ribbing, or alla that stress and bile’ll kill you.
How’s by you read my post? There are bidding wars sometimes. Depends on the individual, their field of specialty and what a given school district thinks they might bring in the way of positives.
Not enough of the latter, I can assure you.
Point out to me where I said any such thing.
Not funny. There’s a degree of truth in what they say and what you say. People, being people, will always strive to get the most that they can. It’s human nature. But an awful lot of teachers care about their students and an awful lot of nurses care about their patients. And they are union members. PATCO members all got fired, so there’s precious little to be said in that instance.
Yeah, because look at what a highly motivated and productive workforce following that dictum created at GE. Or are you claiming that by firing the bottom 10% (and how would you determine that?) one time only that you would believe the NEA?
As others have pointed out, your claims that teaching retains people is absolute nonsense. And how would you describe “Below average”? I know it’s been asked before, and if there’s any sort of answer forthcoming, it’ll be slapped down as it has been in the past and this thread will die until someone else comes along and posits that teachers are over/underpaid and we’ll be off to the races again, but since we’re only three pages into this little dance, I’ll be polite and ask you once more, “How do you think it would be most equitable to define ‘below average’?”
We’re just fortunate to live in a society where nobody else would dare do such a thing, thereby making it easier to blame teachers, nurses and their respective collective bargaining agencies for everything that we, as individuals, find less than noble.
To my everloving shame, it was Missouri, not Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri to be specific.
It does if you want to believe that the public education system is irrevocably broken and needs to be thrown aside roughly.
Only because we’ve got the wretched excuse that we do for health care. Just wait until it’s nationalized. Then you won’t be able to turn around to swing your dead cat without hitting someone whose great-aunt’s cousin’s friend’s girlfriend’s half brother couldn’t get an MRI on demand, thereby demonstrating that health care needs to be given to the free market (whatever that may be).
Excellent question, particularly since NASA is supported by tax revenues.
And that’s why you’re a socialist swine. Not to worry, we’ve got an open bar and canapes and it’s all on the dime of the local property owners. So tuck right in.
And this is a good point, but better training is more likely to equal competence. And it’s done by virtually every employer out there and it seems to be a good thing.
Actually, you are incorrect here. As I suggested earlier, it’s human nature for people to link their self interests to the public interest.
Just as many seem to have shortages in ESL and Special Ed. And quite a few have shortages in everything (or everything except for social studies, where coaching stipends serve as a significant salary boost to a significant portion of the faculty–not all of them, of course, but enough to make filling vacancies easier.).
I’m not adverse to different salary schedules for different areas. It’s simple common sense, and no more unfair than anything else.
Well, it’s better to say that conditions have to be improved such that the job is more desirable. That might include more pay, it might include better working conditions, or other incentive. IMO, merit pay would go a long way towards selecting for the good ones and hinting to the lazy and bad ones that they should maybe look for another career.
Someone above said that this was a ‘teacher bashing thread’. I’m certainly not bashing teachers. I am bashing a system that provides perverse incentives.
The incentive starts before people even go into education in college. When you have a career path that gives raises only on seniority, and tremendous job security, and otherwise isolates people from the consequences of not working as hard as their peers, then right from the start you’re making it an encouraging career choice for the poorly motivated and lazy.
In my opinion, professionals of any sort should never be unionized. Unions can make sense in jobs where there really is no value in being smarter, or more motivated. Assembly line work, for example. If you can’t stand out from the crowd regardless of what you do, I can understand the desire to ban together and bargain collectively.
But professionals need autonomy. They need to be creative and innovative. They need to be held responsible for their decisions. And the difference between the good and bad in a profession is dramatic - in software development, the stats show that the best developers are ten to twenty times more productive than the worst. A bad software developer can wreck a project, and you’d be much better off if he were paid to just stay home and watch TV. The same is true in other professions. There are huge disparities between the best and worst.
When you analyze the quality and output of various professionals, the results usually break down by the 80/20 rule, or close to it - 20% of the people are responsible for 80% of the value the profession brings. The bottom 10% to 20% bring no value at all or are actually harmful, and the rest in the middle are your average performers. This kind of ratio is not true of assembly line workers or pipe fitters or other laborer jobs that tend to be unionized, and so unions do much less harm by keeping everyone equal.
But unionizing a profession that expects employees to be autonomous and creative and self-directed, and removing the incentives for the best to stay and the worst to leave is much more destructive to quality. In such professions, you NEED to be able to churn out the bad ones. And costs skyrocket because you need to raise salaries high enough to retain the good ones, and if you’re not allowed to pay them more than the bad ones, the bad ones wind up grossly overpaid.
If, instead of all teachers making $55,000, the poor ones made $30,000, the average ones made $50,000, and the best ones made $80,000, you’d still attract the best candidates, because they would be confident of being able to climb the ranks. The poor students and the lazy ones would know that they’ll never make the rarified heights of salary, and would seek greener pastures. And once in the system, there would be greater incentive to work harder, train more, and in general to be a better professional.
As for how to tell which teachers deserve the pay and which don’t, I’m afraid to do that properly you’re going to have to open the schools up to competition and let the market decide. Vouchers and open competition and allowing the schools to be profitable so they have an incentive to raise quality is what is needed.
The fact that you can’t even tell me how to measure the good teachers against the bad tells me that the system is broken and needs drastic reform. It needs to be opened up to market forces, so the market can make the determination, and so that schools are more free to innovate. Our school system and the way we teach kids is one of the few industries that looks almost exactly the same as it did 50 years ago. Rows of desks in classrooms with a teacher at the front and kids with worksheets. Sure, there’s a computer curriculum now, but the process of teaching really hasn’t changed much.
Is that really the best way to teach kids in the 21st century? I don’t know. The funny thing about market forces is that they wind up finding optimal solutions through an evolutionary process with an outcome we can only guess at. No one predicted that one of the biggest, most profitable uses of the internet would be a gigantic online auction system, but eBay appeared out of the chaos and stuck.
Maybe there are much better ways to teach kids, but we’ll never know because the system is mired in bureaucracy and change only happens around the thin margins because of the opposition of government and teacher’s unions. Maybe kids would be best taught in a distributed model, where they travel to different facilities on a weekly, monthly, or semester basis, each specializing in an aspect of education. Maybe educational facilities would open up right in various companies and kids would rotate through them getting real-world experience. I have no idea. But it would sure be worth trying, and unleahing the forces of free enterprise to experiment with what works.
employmentspot.com Heres teacher salaries by state. Not close to 100 K.
The public school system went to hell a few years ago. In the 50s and 60s there was little difference between public and private schools. There were always articles rating the schools and public schools won a lot of the competitions. It was done well once and it can be done again. It seems the politicians have just given up. I am not sure if it is due to private companies wanting to take over the school system.
Post 96. Increasing market forces via vouchers is a pretty bad idea, unless you’re okay with fucking over the kids of uninvolved parents.
Daniel
I agree.
Anyway, let’s suppose the OP had said something like this:
Then I wouldn’t have much of an objection.
We can talk about solutions to that problem, to exactly what mix of public and private we need, and how we can insure that kids of uninvolved parents are still covered, but that doesn’t eliminate the need for market forces to be involved if you truly want a top-flight education system.