Right, the DOE is a funding vehicle, which isn’t a bad thing and some of its programs do good work that help school districts in ways they can’t help themselves by infusing capital from outside the tax base of the district. However some programs they have impose costs and procedures on the recipients which can sometimes offset the benefit of receiving the money or even make it a net loss.
The majority of funding comes either from State or local (different States have different schemes, in West Virginia for example most school funding is county then state then federal, in Ohio it’s municipal then state then federal.) The rules are mostly drawn up at the state and district level, which would in theory (but not practice) control teacher in classroom behavior.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides, in pertinent part, that Congress shall make no law “…abridging the freedom of speech…”
The Fourteenth Amendment makes the First Amendment applicable to the states. Accord Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).
The First Amendment applies to public schools, and students do not “…shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” See Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). In order to regulate speech in a public school setting, officials must show that the forbidden speech, if permitted, would “…materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.” To claim that Romney can be criticized for bullying but Obama cannot in no way comes close to meeting that standard.
I missed that part, but she’s not entirely wrong. If I were to say that “Bush is a shithead,” I can’t be arrested, because that’s free speech. On the other hand, if I were to say, “I hate Bush so much that I’d put a bullet in his head if I had the chance,” the Secret Service may well pay you a visit that may or may not include you walking out in handcuffs. (Note to the Secret Service: This is purely a hypothetical. I have no intention of shooting either of the Bushes.)
I’m not disputing whether she’s an idiot, because she clearly is. It’s just that criticizing the president may well lead to arrest, given the right set of circumstances.
That’s not my complaint about the teacher. She has every right to hold the opinion that the two claims of bullying are not of the same caliber. Indeed, I agree with her. Wholly apart from the nature of the acts, anything done at age ten cannot be compared in terms of culpability with something done at age 16 or 17.
No, the complaint is that she has no right, under the Constitution, to stifle the argument of anyone arguing differently. In other words, she cannot threaten a student who argues that Obama’s a bully with arrest, toothless a threat though it may be, because that has a chilling effect on argument and is not permitted of a public school. See Tinker, cited above.
No. The criticism in your example does not lead to an arrest. It’s the addition of the threat that does so. You are free to criticize all you like. And in any event, the compliant is that you cannot forbid criticism of one presidential candidate while permitting it for another, as this teacher has done, even if one candidate is also the sitting president.
Apparently you didn’t listen to the video. She claimed that if you badmouth a president, you can be charged and imprisoned for it. That shows utter ignorance of the Constitution.
I can’t watch the video right now; I’m going to stipulate that the descriptions y’all have given are accurate.
I want her out of my profession.
I want teachers who know the crap out of their subjects, who are intelligent, who are articulate enough to explain complex subjects to students in an appropriate way. I do not want my colleagues to be intellectually and ethically bankrupt placeholders who instill their students with a loathing of the intellectual world.
This goes to my belief about education: it should be as well-paid, as respected, and as difficult a job as practicing law. It should not be something people get into because it’s their best chance at a middle-class job; it should be what the best and brightest decide to do.
As long as we pay teachers poorly, we’ll have to accept teachers like her; as long as we accept teachers like her, we’ll never end up respecting the profession.
No, we don’t. This is because [list=a][li]I have no idea what she is making, except the certain knowledge that it is way too much []Increasing her salary would do nothing at all to drive this moron back to the fast food franchise where she belongs - just the opposite in fact. []Did you read the linked article? Nothing disciplinary is being done to this buffoon. That’s the issue that should be addressed.[/list]Merit pay for teachers may be a fine idea, but only if those who don’t have merit don’t get paid. [/li]
Regards,
Shodan
It would certainly push her towards the bottom of the hiring lists when it comes to choosing and hiring candidates. We don’t get into it for the money, but I have collegues who are staying on staff because there are few other options. So increasing the salary, thereby making it more enticing, could easily lead to better qualified and higher quality teachers.
Merit Pay, if there is a viable way to get it done without teaching to testing for the sole purpose of making money, I’d love it.
You don’t get this supply and demand stuff, do you? In your business, do you recruit the best people by reducing salaries? When I went to school teachers got good salaries, and the vast majority of my teachers were very smart. My AP History teacher did do discussions, but he usually won. Anyhow he got arrested for sassing a cop during the New York school strike, so we lived him.
Yes friends, conservatism and economic illiteracy do go hand in hand.
This teacher handled the situation very, very poorly and let it get out of hand. She was factually incorrect about the law, and unprofessional. She definitely deserves to be reviewed and put on an improvement plan. I don’t think she should be fired outright over it, but perhaps given a year or two to improve, before being let go.
It’s really, really, really hard to be a teacher, so I have some sympathy for her. Not much, but some. A lot of people really want to be teachers, and they even want to be good teachers, but it takes time.
I admit that if she doesn’t improve, she doesn’t belong in the classroom. But I think she deserves a chance.
As for the side discussion going on, I’m all for increasing teacher pay IF the requirements to become a teacher a lot more stringent (like they are for a lawyer or doctor). However, I think you’re going to have a really hard time attracting people to the job anyway. Hell, even if someone offered me $100K a year to go back to teaching, which is a hell of a lot more than I make now in my private sector job, I still don’t know if I’d do it.
But if the pay, merit-based or otherwise, were better, then teaching would attract better candidates at the training stage, when college students are choosing their majors and their career direction.
If you’re going to introduce merit-based pay, you also need a reasonable system to evaluate what good teaching looks like. Right now, basically the only measure is performance on standards-based test, many of which do a very poor job of actually testing a student’s understanding of the material, and also aren’t very good at assessing higher-level skills and reasoning. If you want to evaluate teachers properly, that itself will cost some money, because you need to do more than look at test results.
As for this teacher, at a minimum i think she should be told in no uncertain terms that this sort of political partisanship is unacceptable in the classroom. Some form of discipline would be appropriate, but if this was an isolated incident i’m not sure that firing is appropriate. I’ll repeat here what i said in the Pit thread about this incident:
Is that always the case?
Here in San Diego, the city’s Unified School District has laid off hundreds of teachers recently due to budget problems, and those layoffs are done based on nothing but seniority. Last year, i worked on a federally-funded grant program to improve the teaching of American History in county schools, and one of the teachers i worked with, a fabulous teacher who won a county-wide and a state-wide award for her teaching, was pink-slipped because she lacked seniority.
Absolutely.
The problem is that the people calling for merit-based pay are often the same ones who think that NCLB-style standardized testing is the proper way to measure educational outcomes and teacher quality.
I know this is a bit of a hijack, and others have addressed this already, but high salaries attract more qualified workers in just about every other profession (even unionized professions), why wouldn’t it work in education?
Yep. The ‘seniority’ thing is, in my opinion, the #1 reason that bad teachers stay in their jobs. I have seen many good teachers lose their jobs when cuts come, while mediocre teachers stay, because of their dates of hire.
Of course, the question becomes, “how do we determine and document who is a ‘good’ teacher and who isn’t, and how do we provide resources and feedback so faculty can improve their teaching skills?” Clearly NCLB and standardized student testing is an ineffective way.
For that matter, what stops a school from giving certain teachers the best students so that they would be favored in any learning-based measurement of “merit”?
(Excuse me for a moment while I turn my Urban Legend alarm off, as I am about to use one of its “trigger phrases”)
I have heard that even having observers in classrooms for purposes of observing teachers can be abused through “cronyism” within a school district.
In most occupations, merit pay is an excellent idea, but in teaching, it’s almost impossible to determine fairly, since it depends on the students. I even remember one case where students threatened to do poorly on a state exam (which, in part, determined how much funding the school would receive) unless there was something in it for them. “You want Merit Pay? We want a 10% cut!”