No, the public schools started actually providing an education for everyone who showed up, and not refusing to enroll students or provide assistance for them and otherwise acting like private schools within the past 25 years. The Confederacy and their easily shot down claims of public schools going to hell followed.
It’s not done badly now. Do certain areas suck? Yeah. Do certain areas kick posterior? You betcha. Just as it ever was.
So, do you think teachers have autonomy? As much as say, a paralegal? A garbageman? I know that in my district, teachers are held responsible for their decisions. We’re looking to replace someone who was held responsible even as I type. And I don’t imagine that you’re advocating paying lousy teachers to stay home and catch up on their stories, so what is it that you’re attempting to say?
My district incentivizes as much as we can and we do our level best to provide incentives for those whose performance is lacking to leave. Of course, our costs don’t skyrocket, because we operate within pretty tightly structured budgetary constraints. So your complaints don’t amount to squat.
Terrible idea. As Left Hand of Dorkness pointed out, you’ll hose the students whose parents are uninvolved, and you’ll also screw over all of the kids who couldn’t get into a private school, all while removing the funds needed to help those kids. As has been pointed out to you in detail at least once.
Well, no it isn’t, no it doesn’t, no it most assuredly doesn’t, on what do you base your belief that the market will fix anything, and schools are currently free to innovate. As to whether or not things have changed? Yes, they have. Go into a classroom in your local school district. Are some things the same? Sure. Has it changed? Absolutely. Will you be able to see and what’s more, acknowledge that? Only time will tell.
Yeah, that dastardly government and it’s evil overlord the NEA.
And I know, from personal experience, what an effort it is to fund the school district with the situation as it currently stands. What you’ve just advocated? How would it be paid for? And your line about unleashing the forces of free enterprise? That’s cute.
Basically, at the end of your latest post, you’ve simply tried to find new (by which I mean “old” as in “tried repeatedly”) places to try and tear down public schooling as it currently exists. Once again, how do you think it would be most equitable to define ‘below average’?
I still have not seen an objective definition of “bad teacher” and “good teacher”. Since “bad” and “good” are qualitative, one must have measurable criteria. What should those criteria be?
(Brief resume: I have taught band for seventeen years in three districts in Texas. Each district was in a distinctly different region of Texas. Remember that Texas is large and cultures vary widely from region to region. I have spent the last eleven years in my current position.)
Test scores? My subject isn’t on a standardized test. For those subjects that are, students bring varying resources to the table. You are placing the careers of adults into the hands of children. We’re not turning out widgets, after all. You will also cause the “teaching to the test” that you are seeing across the country.
Principal evaluations? This would involve establishing criteria for the evaluation. This is simply shifting the problem – it’s still the same problem. There would need to be some system that ensures that the evaluation isn’t personal. Should my career go in the hopper just because my district hires an incompetent principal who is out to get me?
Parent evaluations? Still need some sort of criteria. Then, there is the philosophical issue of being evaluated by people who have never been in my classroom. That doesn’t seem right or effective to me. I have taught in three districts. I can go to each district and find parents who absolutely love me. I also can find parents who absolutely loath me. It comes with the job. Who do you think will sign up for the evaluation duties? Take a look at the user reviews on CNET or the like. The people with a complaint always have something to say while the people who are happy say nothing.
So, the idea of evaluating teachers objectively is really, really tough.
Ah, butSam suggests using vague “market forces”. Let parents and students vote with their feet. Makes sense. However, market forces have decided that Detroit makes crappy cars. Do we let the Big Three fail? Does, in fact, Detroit make crappy cars? Is it simply word of mouth that has led to that? What objective criteria are used in measuring the quality of a vehicle? It seems to me that trends can also be a factor. What makes an Abercrombie & Fitch shirt popular? It’s quality is no greater than what can be found in less expensive shirts.
Sam, you also suggest that schools should be free to experiment and innovate to find a new system that works. Fine. Can we experiment on your kids? Oops. It didn’t work. Your kid is doomed to a miserable life of failure. Sorry about that. Please be assured that we’ll do better with the next generation.
The biggest change in education in the last two generations has been that public schools now teach EVERYONE. That was not true in the 1950s. I’m not talking about racial segregation, either. Public schools today take everyone who shows up. Private schools do not. It is not a level playing field for that reason alone.
My OP intentionally suggests only throwing money at teachers. I intended to spark a discussion on how just doing that might change things. I still believe that making school teaching a financially lucrative job would do a lot to improve public education. I am not, however, complaining about my current pay. I make enough to pay my bills and support my family. I am thankful for what I have.
The biggest problem, as I see it, with market forces is that the market is a harsh mistress. You fuck up in the market, you lose bigtime. We accept that risk of failure because we’re all adults, right, and we get to make our own decisions.
The problem is that with schools, the “consumers” of the “product” aren’t adults: they’re children. And a solution that leaves children in a terrible lurch is not an acceptable solution.
Yes, our current system leaves many children in a terrible lurch. That’s not acceptable either. We need to change the system to make it much less lurchy. Free market solutions give no indication of doing so.
I don’t have experience of both systems, but a close relative does, working at a very senior level on this side of the pond and now in America. State after state, he’s progressively astonished at just how backward American schools can be. Decades behind many other countries. Either America could reinvent the wheel, or learn from what is being done elsewhere. (I’ll stake money on which is more likely to happen.)
I’m not sure that the quality or lack thereof in teachers is really the problem. When I went thru school, my parents were actively interested in how well I was doing. Now, it seems to be left up to just the schools, who are hobbled by No Child Left Behind, students who don’t speak English, gangs and whatever else is going on these days.
Schools are there to teach reading, writing and math. They are not there to teach the language of the country, basic manners or responsibility. They are not there to monitor your child’s medication or mood, to make sure it gets fed, cleaned up and put into decent clothes before it comes to school. If parents would take more responsibility for their children, more than just schools would improve.
I agree with this sentiment to a large extent. It seems to me that a lot of people are quick to claim that the educational system in America is “broken” or otherwise needs serious reform.
I have yet to see convincing evidence that this is the case.
Anytime someone talks to me about merit pay based on student scores (and almost invariably it’s someone who does not have a rudimentary grasp of statistics), my response is simple:
“I have seen in the course of my years teaching good teachers, bad teachers, good students, bad students, good parents, and bad parents. Good parenting trumps bad teaching all of the time. Good teaching might possibly make a small dent in effects of bad parenting. I will agree to have my wages modified as a result of students’ test scores just as soon as parents are willing to receive tax credits or penalties based on their child’s scores.”
Does having to stand in a puddle of piss at the ticket booth at the back of the football field count as dirty? I was also told that if anyone robbed me all alone in the dark back there, just to give them the money. Just part of the job. We didn’t get paid extra for working the games.
Does having rocks, firecrackers and eggs thrown at you count as dirty? (They missed with the egg, but hit the wall.)
Does having to remove a used condom from the doorknob to your room count as dirty?
Does removing shit from your file cabinet count as dirty?
Does getting blood all over you from trying to stop the bleeding on a child who has had her throat slit count?
There’s more. You don’t know what you are talking about.
Possibly, if these things happen every day, or at least a few times a week. Are you claiming that a typical teacher must personally touch human waste, wet garbage, machine oil, and/or toxic substances every day?
Are you claiming that a teacher must change into protective clothing at work every day? Does a teacher need to wear gloves at work? Wash all the grease off of his or her hands at the end of the day? Does a teacher need to wear a respirator at work?
To me, these are elements/examples of what “really dirty” means.
Looks to me like you are the one who has no idea what he or she is talking about, but I wait to be enlightened.
I found out that I had indeed been working daily around toxic substances, but I wasn’t supposed to know and the other teachers weren’t either. My room was about fifteen or twenty feet from a storage room where very old toxic chemicals were kept. I would not have known if I had not had to return to school for something. The men removing the chemicals would not let me in the building. They were wearing protective suits. They also removed huge amounts of asbestos one summer.
All of this took place in a building with three foot thick walls and no air-conditioning in the South. With thirty bodies putting out heat, it got as high as 110 degress in my classroom.
Was it that way every day? No. Did I have to stand in piss every night? No. Did a student die in the hallway every day? No. Did I have a respirator? No. Have I listed all of the examples of the day to day dirtiness of the job? No.
Did I have a dirty job? yes. Do I have respiratory problems? Yes. Was my job dangerous some days? Very.
And some teachers need to do all of the things you’ve asked about. We also teach industrial arts to these students. We do it all.
You may notice that I go back and forth in tense. I haven’t taught in a long, long time. But my experiences were very intense and very meaningful to me. And you cannot possibly know what teaching was like in that school unless you taught there. Despite all of the dirtiness and violations of decency, it was worthwhile.
But you weren’t there and so you won’t be enlightened. Pity.
Now, tell me about your years of teaching experience.
:shrug: From your response, I gather that you did NOT have to touch human waste, toxic substances, etc. on a daily basis. Thus, it looks to me as though you didn’t have a “really dirty” job like working as a garbageman, or working in a sewage plant.
I’m not sure what your point is. It appears you admit that your job did not require you to come into contact with human waste, toxic substances, machine oil, and the like on a daily basis. So I know enough to conclude that your job was not “really dirty,” like the job of a garbageman or a sewage plant worker.
It’s hard to believe anyone would seriously argue that a teacher’s job is at roughly the same level of dirtiness as that of a garbageman, so as noted above, I’m a bit puzzled as to what your point is.
Well, not “really dirty”, but not as cleans as your average office worker. Classrooms are indeed pretty dirty places, and are invariably poorly climate controlled. It’s not being a garbage man, but it’s not being a computer programmer, either. One thing nobody mentioned is that teachers get each and every cold and flu that passes anywhere near them.
That’s probably true. (Although I would note that I work in an office and there is a huge vermin problem. And the landlord is rather stingy with the air conditioning . . blah blah blah . . . uphill both ways)
But anyway, the bottom line is that teaching offers a mixture of wages; job security; job duties; benefits; and working conditions which a lot of qualified people find attractive even without the sort of massive pay increase alluded to in the OP.
“Bad schools” have two big problems: They hire and protect inadequate teachers and they are teaching a cohort of pupils who are not able–even in the best of educational environments–to compete academically.
Hiring and protecting bad teachers: The DC system is wonderful example. Rhee proposed merit pay up to $130,000/yr (current average is about $66k/yr) for teachers who gave up tenure in exchange for effectiveness measured by how well the teachers raised baseline test scores. The union turned this proposal down. I am confident that Rhee will lose the battle to improve the quality of teachers and will not long stay in a dead-end job. We’ll see.
Bad students: Ultimately there is an upper limit of learning determined by baseline ability. The cohort of students left in badly-performing public schools is heavily skewed to students with less innate ability to learn and substantially inferior average IQs. The best and brightest pupils come from brighter families, and brighter families find their way out of bad public schools.
What is frustrating to me is this: The notion that the problem is not the teachers and/or not the students is a testable hypothesis. Surely the minimum we should do is establish a handful of competing environments with rigorous applications of the various proposed remedies, and decide once and for all where the problems lie. We should, for instance, identify several horrible public schools to be test cases. In one we place top-performing teachers, paid whatever it costs to get them there. In another we assign an unlimited amount of money to throw at the pupils to ameliorate whatever external excuses are being used for their poor performance. In a third, we do both. And so on. The amount of money such an experiment would cost is trivial compared to the overall teaching budget. No student would be harmed since only an improvement on the status quo would be tested.
That won’t happen. We won’t ever be able to say politically that a given cohort of students has a much lower baseline, innate potential. And we won’t get better teachers in bad schools to replace the heavily entrenched current ones. We probably won’t even get more rigorous competency certifications.
Until we are able to honestly admit and identify the real underlying issues, we should continue to expect the same hodgepodge of mediocre results.
Actually it seems to me the Kansas City example was a reasonable, if not comprehensive, test of some of these hypotheses.
Or if such experiments do happen, creative excuses will be invented to avoid the obvious and reasonable conclusions which can be drawn from those experiments. Or metrics will be invented so that failure can be swept under the rug.
I used to teach. I was very good at it, IMHO…and have letters from parents and students sometimes written years later to give some weight to that opinion.
I left teaching because of the money. I wanted a family and I couldn’t do it on the money I was making. $100K…$50K? Don’t make me laugh. I taught for 6 years at made $21K…and it wasn’t that long ago (1995 is when I left). I interviewed for jobs in supposed higher paying areas…and couldn’t find them. Back then I heard of teachers making $50K…and couldn’t even find one to offer me $35K…let alone $50K.
That being said, I decided to leave teaching because I sat down and thought about jobs and pay. My thoughts at the time were these:
Why does one job pay differently from another? It can’t be because of ‘importance’…because if a job were truely important it owuld pay well. Teaching seemed very important to me but payed crap…so what defines pay?
Supply/demand for the position. Seems many people want to be teachers so pay will be lower. Also, many teachers were ‘second income’ women who were not the primary breadwinner. It used to piss me off to no end to hear women say…well at least my husband got a $10000000000 bonus and a 65554646% salary increase from his promotion so we’ll be ok…when staring at yet another salary freeze (I was making the same amount after 6 years as when I started).
Difficulty in being ‘officially qualified’ for the position. Well, they were allowing math teachers to teach with only a semester of Calculus so basically anyone with a pulse was qualified to teach math…so again…very easy to be ‘qualified’ to teach. Heck, I was qualified to teach English because I took 3 Lit courses in college as part of general studies.
Price paid for ‘failure’ - Defense lawyers who fail get their clients killed or jailed. So, people will pay big bucks for a defense lawyer if they can afford it. Surgeons who fail kill and maim their patients…and so on. Teachers? If they fail little Johnney might drop out of school while under a better teach might have become a doctor. Who’s to know?
Cost/inconvenience to replace - At my current job it would be a strong inconvenience to replace me…therefore they make sure to pay me appropraitely. Teachers? They can be replaced in 3 minutes. No…I’m not being snarky they literally can.
Who benefits from the occupation? - Defense lawyer…ONE. That ONE will pay. If a job benefits the masses but only a little each, they are not willing to pay. That’s why most lawyers are paid more than most journalists.
benefit of ‘just a little’ more competency. - Again, Sports figures, defense lawyers etc that are ‘just a little better’ can have a huge impact that people will pay for. Teachers? Again, little Johnney doesn’t become a doctor…who will know?
No matter how you analyze teaching, it always seems to fall on the ‘wrong’ side of the pay equation.
After thinking about this, I decided to leave teaching. I miss it. I loved it. I, IMHO, was pretty good at it. However, it required too much sacrifice without getting any ‘credit/respect’ for it from society that made me leave.
