Nazi Communist TERRORIST Fascist Satanic Pedophile Teachers From Hell

The BBQ Pit
22

Why is it that the further away someone is from the classroom, the more power she or he seems to have over what happens in that room?

I understand your question and it’s reasonable. I can’t think of anyone who wants to improve our educational system more than teachers! After all, one thing is certain: We are not in it for the money!

The first thing that I would do to improve schools is to require every teacher and school administrator to pass a National Teachers’ Exam. (Something similar to the Bar Exam for attorneys.) I had to take it when I became a teacher, but it is no longer required.

School administrators should be selected by the teachers they would be working with.

What the teachers in NEA are objecting to are unrealistic standards applied to all schools no matter what the situation is. Let me give you some examples of absurd situations arising only from my particular area:

  1. I live in an area known as “The LIttle United Nations.” Our student population is in a state of constant flux with Cambodians, Laotians, Mexicans, Kurds, and Indians. These students are expected to take and pass “the test” even if it is their first day in an American school and they do not speak English.

  2. The student achievement test was administered this school year during flu season. In several counties the schools were closed to stop the spread and because so many students and teachers were sick. The test had to be given anyway with no exceptions. “The time for excuses is past.” Sick children came to take the test. There were not enough teachers to give it. Substitutes could not be found. Besides, there had to be 95% attendance on test day or the school would fail.

  3. The school where I used to teach is the only school in the county that teaches autistic children. The standards for these children and their teachers are the same as for any other student – including those in schools for the gifted. Should teachers who choose to teach the disadvantaged be penalized? (I turned down a chance to teach at an academic magnet.)

  4. The increase in funding for the No Child Left Behind Program has been cut in the President’s budget.

And this is just one tiny corner of the picture.

Its a little like the people rising up and saying to the POTUS:

“By the end of the year, we want a balanced budget, free health care for all, a strong well-paid military, clean air and water, safe and successful schools, no unemployment, a drug free environment, no poverty, and an end to cancer and heart disease. The time for excuses is past. And if you don’t give it to us, your Cabinet is obstructionist and the White House is a terrorist organization.”

23

Master Wang-Ka, I am in total agreement about joining professional organizations. I had to file two grievances during my career and I won both of them. People outside of education don’t realize how political the hiring and firing can get.

I belonged to what is known as the “Unified Teaching Profession.” It consists of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association, the Middle Tennessee Education Association, the Tennessee Education Association, and the National Education Association. Here in Tennessee, if we joined one, we had to join all – which was fine with me.

24

No Child Left Behind…leaves children and teachers behind, as far as I can discern. I don’t teach K-12, but a friend does, and she came back from a recent job fair in near-despair. She’s qualified to teach math, among other subjects, and has been doing so for many years. But all of a sudden her qualifications are no longer good enough because of NCLB. The demands on teachers for more credentials, more qualifications, more degrees, etc. will result in good teachers no longer being able to teach. So where are they going to get teachers for all these kids before they get left behind? My friend is feeling obsolete and is about to give up the teaching profession for nursing instead.

Just an anecdote.

–viva, AFT; CTA
(Two strikes against me!)

25

…and therein lies the rub.

Yes, I have known a bad teacher or two. One was a highly qualified, multi-degreed individual who just happened to be batshit crazy.

The other was as dumb as a box of Bic lighters, and I have no idea how he qualified for a teaching certificate.

Then again, one of the dumbest humans I have ever met was the holder of an MD and was licensed to practice medicine. In fact, the only professions I know of that simply do not have incompetent people in the field are things like “astronaut” and “stunt man,” where being incompetent gets you killed off quick.

But you know what? Both these “bad” teachers still have jobs, and will continue to have jobs, for political reasons. No law is going to force these two out of education. The only thing that WOULD would be the government hiring spies to infiltrate the schools, work with all these people, and then tell Bush precisely where the idiots were, whereupon the government could somehow force them to quit their jobs…

Of course, you’d have to pay these spies quite a bit. Probably more than I make. Why? Because while they gathered information, they’d have to teach. AND TEACHING IS HARD GODDAMN WORK!!! At least, it is if you’re doing it right.

Schools use the ABC system of grades for a reason.

A= excellent
B= above average
C= average
D= below average
F= failing, unacceptable

Oh, and you used to be able to drop out of high school at sixteen. Anyone remember all those ads that said “Don’t Drop Out! Finish School?” Anyone notice how you don’t see those ads any more?

This is because the politicians couldn’t stand it. They had to meddle, and they not only meddled, but they rigged the game so it would look like they’d won.

When I was in school, you’d see the occasional D on a paper. This was intended as a warning. Get up off your duff! You can do better than this!

Well, y’know what? We don’t do “D” any more. “D” equals “failing” these days. The politicians have done raised the stakes. If a kid makes a “D” it means the same as an “F”.

So now, instead of a warning, the kid just gets turbofucked, boom, right there. Better luck next time, kiddo. Maybe you would have taken the warning to heart, and worked harder. Maybe not. Too bad. We’re Raising The Standards, you know, and if you can’t keep up, well… well… um… well, we’ll punish those teachers some more. After all, it’s well known that anything that’s wrong with a kid can’t possibly be the PARENTS’ fault…

And the politicians didn’t much like all these high school dropouts, either. So they passed a law that says you CAN’T drop out any more. THERE! Solved THAT problem!

And now, all those sixteen, seventeen year old punks, losers, and thugs who would have had to go get jobs and grow the hell up are now bored stiff and sitting in my math class, cutting up, being a pain, and interfering with my ability to teach the kids who WANT their free public education. Thank you ever so bloody much, politicians. You sure solved that problem!

The only politicians I have ever known who know FUCK-ALL about education are those who WORKED in education. The others, as a rule, do not. And, of course, you are going to have politicians in EVERY generation who seem to think you can legislate problems out of existence… and, because of No Child Left Behind, I must include President Bush in this sorry list.

In the President’s state of the union address, last time, he remarked that he didn’t think it was unreasonable for third graders to be able to read at a third grade level. His smug bullshit made me want to kick the TV in.

His remark, you see, implies that an unacceptable number of third graders CAN’T read at a third grade level. Gee, news to me. Can’t ALL third graders read?

Well, NO, THEY CAN’T. Some are retarded, you see. Some have learning disabilities. One or two have been locked in a damn basement until last week when CPS found them and stuck 'em in foster homes. Some have ADHD and it’s all we can do to keep them from flying around the room.

But nearly all third graders read just fine, thank you.

But apparently, this isn’t good enough. No Child Left Behind. ALL children must perform to a given standard, and to assure quality control, we’re going to test them. All of them.

And since the recent tax cuts have left the gov’mint kinda strapped, these procedures will not be funded by the gov’mint. The schools themselves will have to figure out a way to do it themselves.

And if standards are not met, funding will be cut further.

What is it with funding cuts? Every politician I’ve ever seen who wants to meddle in education seems to think you can improve things by taking money away. This, to me, is like forcing a racehorse to run faster by feeding it less if it doesn’t win races.

And with No Child Left Behind, we are not only cutting the horse’s rations every time it loses a race, but we’re going to beat the shit out of the jockey, too, for losing. We’re RAISING OUR STANDARDS! NO HORSIE LEFT BEHIND!!!

And in time, the logical result of this is an emaciated horse who can’t even stand up, and a jockey who tells you to fuck off and goes and gets a job teaching rich kids how to play polo. Good luck winning any races, then.

Education isn’t a business, and you can’t RUN it like a business. You can’t privatize it and maintain the same standards. No private school is going to want to take kids with learning disabilities or actual brain disorders; it’s not cost-effective. PUBLIC schools do it anyway; it’s the law, and we aren’t running it for a profit. Hell, we can’t possibly be in it for the money.

And if the politicians ever figure this out… well… they’ll ignore it, and keep using education as a whipping boy to get re-elected.

But if the PUBLIC ever figures this out… well… there may be hope. Wonder how bad things will have to get before they do?

26

A slogan that both Rod Paige and Master Wang-Ka can agree upon:

“No Hyperbolic Bullshit Left Behind”

27

Master Wang-Ka, it’s obvious from your comments that you are a teacher. So I’d like your comments on this question.

Is it true that because of these required standardized tests that everyone is required to take you basically have to teach the test, at the expense of everything else?

28

Master Wang-Ka there are private schools that take kids with learning disabilities and brain disorders. Some of them specialize in it, and are leaders in the field.

They are, to be sure, oftentimes different schools than the ones taking gifted students. But to make this claim is disingenuous.

If there’s a profit to be made educating students, someone will step in and educate them, and do it well.

29

Interestingly, Dubya’s hero Winston Churchill invoked Godwin when he said, in 1943:

30

Not exactly; the answer is complicated. Still, since you’ve behaved like a reasonable intelligent human, I’m gonna treat you like one. Bear with me, here.

Standardized tests have been around since Hector was a pup, and there’s generally nothing wrong with them. This is how we establish a “norm” by which to measure our children’s performance. This is how President Bush knows that third graders should be able to read at a third grade level: because we’ve tested generations of third graders in various locations throughout the country, and we’ve established that third graders in general should be able to do thus-and-such.

Politicians think that tying incentives to student performance is a good idea. In theory, it’s a peachy idea. In practice, it doesn’t always work.

Let’s start with a burger-flipper at McDonalds. We will tie his raises and perks to his performance.

If he can flip X burgers per hour, we will pay him minimum wage (MW).
If he can flip X+10 burgers per hour, we will pay him (MW)+10c per hour.
If he can flip X(squared) BPR, we will pay him (MW) squared.

This is an incentive for our burgerflipper to do well, yes? To increase his productivity?

But teaching is not a business. Let’s take Mrs. Red, who teaches at Tom Landry Elementary, in Arlen, Texas. She has twenty students in her English class, all of whom are middle-class Americans, no non-English speakers, all of whom come from “good homes,” and are motivated to do well in school

We will now contrast Miss Blue, who teaches at Cesar Chavez Elementary across town. She has forty-three students in her Language Arts class, all of whom come from “the bad side of the tracks,” many of which are involved in gang activity (or want to be), several of which speak little or no English, and few of her students see any point in school. Those who do are branded “sellouts” by their peers.

Is it fair to judge Mrs. Red and Miss Blue by the same standards? I guarantee you that Miss Blue works a helluvalot harder than Mrs. Red does… but both teachers, assuming the same grade level and subject, are going to be judged by the same standardized test results.

Let’s throw Mr. Wang-Ka into the mix. Mr. Wang-Ka is SPED, special education. He’s a rare beast; specialized SPED teachers are hard to find, and experienced ones are like gold nuggets. Mr. Wang-Ka teaches a variety of subjects, and his students range from “ordinary kid with a minor learning disability in one subject” to “retarded child, being mainstreamed for social reasons” to “psycho child who routinely tries to kill anyone sitting next to him if Mom forgot to give him his ritalin with his Wheaties this morning.”

Is it fair to judge Mr. Wang-Ka by that same yardstick? Depending on his students, Mr. Wang-Ka can take a hell of a lot longer to show any kind of quantifiable results with his kids.

Mr. Wang-Ka’s workload changes like a kaleidoscope, every year. One year, he’ll be teaching Life Skills, basically nose-wiping and basic hygiene for the profoundly disabled, mandated by law. Another year, he’ll be teaching resource history for perfectly ordinary kids with minor learning disabilities. It all depends on what kind of kids he HAS that year, which is entirely dependent on the community around him.

Mr. Burgerflipper flips perfectly identical burger patties, each one 1/10th of a pound, made from high grade ground beef, shipped from McDonalds’ Central. Every patty is the same.

Teachers do not have this luxury. We can’t pick and choose our students, not unless we work in private schools. We do the best we can with what we have been given, because we are required to do so by law. We do so with retarded kids, we do so with gang wannabees, we do so with your kid and with mine. Whatever the community gives us.

Treating us in the same manner as a business, which can pick and choose the material it works with, is insane. Cutting our resources if we don’t meet a set of arbitrary standards is also insane. But we put up with that, too.

So, back to your question:

Well, sir, from your nick, I’d assume you’re in the Air Force. So was my father-in-law. He tells me that if the CO wants a sky hook or a bucket of invisible paint for a Stealth bomber, you fetch him one, and no excuses.

Same’s true with teachers. If the Prez wants X result, and threatens your livelihood if he doesn’t get it, then you need to find a way to get him X result, and no excuses.

There are two simple ways to do this:
(1) COOKING THE BOOKS. You alter the test results in such a way as to feign compliance. This is insanely dangerous, as your career is quite fucked if you get caught. Teachers can’t do this, for reasons of access; only administrators can really manage this one, and since they can deflect blame onto teachers, few take this option. Still, it’s happened.
(2) TEACH TO THE TEST. Forget whatever subject you used to teach; your subject is now Standardized Test 101. The school obtains old, released copies of old tests or unclassified “safe” practice tests, and you go over that material with the kids.

And over it.
And over it.
And over it.

After all, your performance reviews and evaluations are now directly tied to test results. The higher your kids’ scores, the better YOU look.

Now, there are only so many school days in a year, and you only have so much teaching time with each group of kids. You’ve got to make use of that time. You can only do so much.

So… given a choice… are you going to teach Animal Farm? Shakespeare? Trigonometry? Government? American History?

Or are you going to focus like hell on the material which is directly tied to your end-of-year raise, and to hell with everything else?

I leave your actual answer as an exercise for the student of human nature.

31

Thought so. Man, that sucks. Remind me not to become a teacher when I graduate.

32

There’s profit to be made in fast food, too. So why are we bitching at McDonalds because we’re all too fat?

I am well aware of private schools that take “special needs students.” I’ve worked in two, personally. It constitutes the largest part of my teaching experience.

I never said there were NOT schools that did this… only that it wasn’t cost effective. It isn’t. Private schools charge tuition, and if the tuition won’t pay the costs of housing, feeding, and educating the child in a given time frame, there is no profit.

Disabled kids, special needs kids… these kids are more expensive than your average kid on the street. Ask any educator. Hell, ask any parent who has one. Under such circumstances, “tuition” simply doesn’t cut it. This is where alternate sources of funding come in.

Major sources include insurance, the Social Security administration, charities, and various welfare organizations, both governmental and private.

Y’know what? Some people don’t have insurance. Some people don’t qualify for welfare. Some people don’t get Social Security benefits, for one reason or another.

When that happens with a special needs student, that means that the parents are stuck with the bill themselves… and I am here to tell you that damn few private school administrators are willing to take on a kid who is going to cost them money to deal with.

There was, in fact, an episode of Boston Public that dealt with just this: parents of a physically disabled kid enroll the kid in public school, and when the school fails to meet his requirements (an elevator, private nurse, etc) within 72 hours, they sue, claiming that the school CANNOT meet the kid’s needs, and therefore, by federal law, the SCHOOL must pay for the kid’s tuition at a private institution, out of its own funds. I wish this were further-fetched than it is.

The only schools of which I am aware that EVER show a profit – or even break even – are private academies, hellaciously expensive. Good luck getting your learning-disabled darling into one, and even more luck paying for it all.

There are institutions that specialize in socializing and educating special needs kids. These could be described as “hospitals” as much as “schools,” and I know of at least one that routinely shows a profit… but it is managed by an HMO, not by educators, and it, too, is hellaciously expensive. Again, good luck paying for it all.

I said it wasn’t cost-effective. I meant it. And if you can prove me wrong, well, I will be mightily surprised, and will certainly favor you for President; the last one made it cost-effective by simply making it mandatory and refusing to spend any money on it…

33

Here’s something ugly too - I was checking out articles in a local (Chicago) newspaper about the districts that are considering dropping the program at the cost of losing the federal funding, and ran across this article, which states:

So if Teacher Wang-Ka has a particularly rough group one year, and they can’t live up to the standard expected scores given in the No Child Left Behind requirements, wham, the whole school gets slapped down for it, and the school may even have to offer transfers elsewhere as a result.

34

And without that funding, us teachers will have to cut back on our private marijuana research. We won’t be able to keep all our prostitutes and strippers on the payroll. We may even have to get rid of the fountain of champagne in the teachers’ lounge, and quit driving Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes.

DAMN YOU, BUSH!!!

35

I was coming to the pit to start a thread on Mr. Paige myself. What he said was absolutely beyond the pale and he should be fired immediately. Calling a political organization terrorists, in a time when the President has asserted for himself the right to imprison without charge any American citizen accused of terrorism, is scary and inappropriate. How is he supposed to work with these people now? “You’re a terrorist. Ha! Just kidding! We won’t ship you off to Guantanamo. Yet.” Fire the motherfucker.

36

I work in the testing industry, and personally I’m all for NCLB. It gets us contracts. :slight_smile:

In a nutshell, if a school wants to get additional funding, it will make sure as many kids pass the standardized test as possible. As for whether they actually TEACH the test, I can say it’s indirectly so. Our guidelines for creating these tests are based on what educators plan to teach their students. Some of our items get rejected for this reason: it’s not on their agenda.

Some teachers are tempted to do things like keep copies of last year’s test, or call each other when tests come out and share answers. Some states are VERY tight on security administering these tests as a result. They account for each and every test booklet, even the unusable ones. One client has not just the test booklets sealed, but each subject in the test sealed as well.

Other states, not so tight. These are the ones that either result in us having to produce a brand new test in mere hours, or they just renege on their contract altogether and take an old standardized test off the shelf.

There are many mitigating factors that can lead to contents of a test being rejected outright. THe governor of the state of one of our clients decided the way the state was teaching Social Studies wasn’t up to snuff, so he axed the program altogether. All the work we did for that client is now sitting in shelves in our warehouse. Since they already paid for it, we can’t recycle them for other projects.

37

Well and nobly said.

However Churchill’s government was not averse to, um, bending the law to imprison people who spoke out against the war or dared to compare Churchill unfavorably to Hitler. And Churchill defended lying about the course of the war to make England look better.

Of course that was an actual declared war.

38

To go a bit further on the standardized testing…

There is a time and a place for it, and I think all teachers would agree with that sentiment. The trouble is, the government is fixated on norm-referenced testing. Norm referenced testing is when you compare a group of test takers to the very small group the testmakers originally used when putting together the test. The trouble comes when the norm reference group is small, is made up of one socio-economic group, and is made up of one ethnic group from one geographic location.

Even more trouble comes when the test is re-normed. You see, if you offer the same type of test to students, over the course of several years, they will get better at taking it. Their scores will rise, creating an inaccurate impression of how the kids compare to the norm-referenced group. So, the test makers create a new norm group, rescore the test and start over. As a result, the scores of the students taking the test drop 3-10% in the course of one year. Does Bush and his NCLB legislation take this into account? No. So, the schools, the teachers, and the students are punished. The same drop occurs when a school changes from one test to another completely different one. Same punishment, too.

There is a time and place for norm-referenced tests. The SAT is one such, and it’s extremely useful at comparing students and their abilities against one another.

However, only testing students in such a mannner that there will always be winners and losers, no matter how hard the teachers and students work is unethical and immoral.

Some states, including California, are switching over to benchmark referenced tests, which I think is a wonderful idea. Instead of comparing students to a far away norm referenced group, the tests simply assess can the student do A, B, C, and D. The trouble of “teaching to the test” still remains though, unless the tests and the curricula of the schools are aligned.

I have the luxury of ignoring standardized testing until about a week before the tests. Even then, I usually review with the kids test taking strategies, anxiety deflection, and ways to do better on the tests. My kids have done quite well on those benchmark tests because I teach to the curriculum standards, and I’ve gotten more than a few compliments for doing just that. The catch is, though, I have my kids for two full classes - Writing and English. With two classes a day, five days a week, and 30 weeks before the test, I just manage to cover the majority of the standards. Other teachers, like math, history, and science, don’t have that luxury. They have the same number of standards they must teach, and half the time I do.

We really just can’t win.

39

I teach History in the Chicago Public Schools and every April we are required to give all members of the Junior class the ACT and the PSAE (Prairie State Achievement Exam) on back-to-back days. That is over 8 hours of testing in two days. This year I have been permanently yanked out of one of my classes in order to help coordinate all the test-prep activities that we are doing in an attempt to raise our admittedly poor test scores. In my remaining classes, I find myself more and more teaching and re-teaching concepts that I think might be on the upcoming tests, such as map and chart-readings. Math, Science, and English teachers are all doing the same. The thing is, these tests are at best a highly imperfect way of assessing whether or not these kids are learning. Many of our students are Latino and English is their second language. They do not currently possess the vocabulary to score high on these tests, and all the preparation in the world will not change that. (If you disagree, I invite you to take a standardized test on an academic subject in a foreign language after being exposed to that language for 5 years. Good luck.)

Also, speaking of NCLB, not a single teacher at our school likes this law because of the many reasons already eloquently stated above. I mean this literally. NOT A SINGLE TEACHER. We have an ex-army veteran who is a right-wing conservative Bush supporter/liberal hater and HE cannot stand NCLB. The NEA is not being obstructionist; it is trying to get a badly flawed law fixed.

PS Oh, by the way, fuck you Rod Paige.

40

One more thing my friend/soon to be ex-teacher said she overheard at the job fair:

An administrator told a potential hire that if teachers where he works don’t raise students’ test scores within a year, he fires those teachers.
Of course, it’s ALL the teachers’ fault if the kiddos don’t score. Always.

Hey, I used to think it was entirely my fault when my college students didn’t pass. It took me years to learn that some people will insist on failing no matter what we do. I try to salvage as many as I can, but I remind myself now that I cannot save everyone. Hell, I try my best to stop plagiarism in its tracks very early in the semester, with warnings, info, scare stories, examples, etc. And still there are those who think they can just cut and paste stuff off the Internet, put their names on it, turn it in…and all I have to do is Google. I just gave an F to a repeat offender for the entire semester.

Sorry to get off topic a bit, but NCLB just brings it out in me and makes me glad all over again that I don’t have to teach to a damn test, that I have no parents to deal with, that I have professional liability insurance in case some student ever tries to sue me, and that both campuses will support me when I bust plagiarists.

41

I’m not aware that this type of pretesting is done this way. The way my company does it with our clients is that we put in extra field test questions that aren’t graded. Instead, their statistical data is gathered to see how well they worked with a diverse group of students. If they make the cut, they get included in future tests. Try it before you buy it.

Also, when clients review the items we submit, they have bias committees to make sure the question doesn’t favor one demographic over another. For example, having a farming term that rural kids would know but urban kids may not know. There’s been too many lawsuits for test adminstrators to want to risk getting burned on anymore.