This sounds like a good example of why making schools a city/town responsibility is such a bad idea. Poor cities have less money to spend on kids that need more help. It’s one of the stranger and dumber things we do in this country.
This will solve nothing.
What about the next worst school under the school boards jurisdiction?
The problem isn’t with the fired teachers, the principal, or even the school board. It is the entire system. The number one problem are the powerful teacher unions but eliminating them won’t solve the problem either.
It is a pure socialist system that has already failed in many parts of the country because it is unable to adapt to changes such as deteriorating social environments. The inner city black neighbourhoods comes to mind.
There is a better way to educate our children under the public purse and its happening already. Charter schools .
It starts from a founder with a vision and the ability to provide an environment conducive to learning to meet the challenges in order to produce successful students.
That attitude translates to the selected teaching staff, many of whom could have come from that failed school. They were powerless to exercise their best efforts under conditions that were less than optimal.
And finally, It translates to the students, the most important factor in getting cooperation towards achieving their academic success.
Yes, it is still single payer, but like our UHC in Canada, Its private enterprise that provides the front line care. Its an institution that is beholden to the parents who select that school for their children and it is beholden to the public which provides the funds, perhaps on the same per student basis for the public school system.
Recently I saw the 60 minutes program on the Urban Prep Academies and the “little Obamas”.
To view these young men in their school uniforms displaying their exhuberance for their education is mind boggling. A far cry from what one would expect from an inner city neighbourhood public school.
Quoth hansel:
Both of these facts make it look to me like the district could save considerable money by hiring a larger number of teachers. Get those class sizes down below the contractual limit, and you don’t have to pay the overage premium, and get more people to do the extra tutoring time, and you don’t have to pay overtime rates for it. This would probably also improve performance: No matter how much you pay a single teacher, there’s not much that teacher can do in a class of over 30 students-- You end up spending most of your time just trying to control the class, and what time you have left for actual teaching has to be directed to the lowest denominator (which, in a class that large, is probably pretty low).
So if hiring more teachers would both save the district money and improve performance, you have to ask why they’re not doing it. Either the district administration are idiots and it never occurred to them, in which case it’s the district administration that needs to be fired, or there are some problems going on that make very few teachers willing to work there, in which case they need to figure out what those problems are and fix them so they can hire more teachers.
I agree that charter schools can do some real good - but they’re niche solutions, not systemic ones. The thing about charter schools is that they can turn students away - a luxury most public schools don’t have. Thus, students who aren’t performing well can be kicked back into the traditional public school system (which, incidentally, helps elevate charter school test scores at the expense of the conventional system.) I’m all for giving charter schools the chance to carry out their own particular educational experiments, within limits - if they work, we can import their ideas into the mainstream system. But we need to keep working to fix conventional public schools in the meantime.
Fine. The school boards can start with requiring students to wear school uniforms, tie and all for the boys. A little thing like what you wear affects your attitude in the class, for both student and teacher. I see that many public schools in Africa where education is so precious require it.
But do you think we can ever go back to those days in the public school system?
Whether or not we could, I’m not at all convinced that it would confer a benefit commensurate with the hassles involved.
I wouldn’t claim expertise in this area, but I did spend a year in law school teaching a constitutional law course in a very good urban public school. I also substitute-taught on a few occasions in very bad schools in the same system. The kids dressed more-or-less the same in both schools - probably a little more expensively in the better school, but nothing dramatic, and I wouldn’t swear even to that.
The difference in the schools wasn’t due to the clothing - it was the students, who genuinely did (or didn’t) want to learn the material. It was the teachers, who had the time and resources to pay attention to individual student needs (or didn’t). And it was the parents, who genuinely did (or didn’t) play an active role in their kids education, came to moot court competitions, and so on.
There are some not-crazy reasons to support school uniforms - they eliminate the disparity between rich and poor students, preclude students from wearing clothes that are too revealing or otherwise inappropriate, and so on. But I also believe that there is value in allowing students to, within limits, develop their own preferences in a variety of areas - including what they choose to wear. There are also the rare, but supremely important and “teachable”, moments when students choose to wear clothing espousing their political beliefs. I’m a huge fan of that - it means they’re engaged, and (hopefully) on the road to becoming politically engaged voters. So, there are costs associated with uniforms, and I’m not convinced that cost is worth paying in most cases.
Addendum: One thing that I think is very valuable about school uniforms is that they can create a sense of “ownership” in one’s education, or one’s childrens’ education. Putting even modest fees down for something like that can really secure someone’s interest - that’s why a lot of development projects these days focus on providing low-cost services rather than “free” ones, or require sweat equity from the beneficiaries. But there are lots of ways to do that which are less offensive to the student sense of individuality than school uniforms - for example, we could require students to buy one or two of their English books at the start of the year, which they’d then keep to start their personal libraries. (Of course, you’d need fee waivers for the poorest students.)
Charter schools are not the same everywhere. In my state ¶, they cannot turn students away (unless they have reached maximum enrollment). In addition, they must operate with almost all the same rules/procedures of any public school in the state. So, they can’t just kick kids out without following the same due process required of regular public schools.
Why aren’t they systemic solutions?
I think the current system *is *the problem. There are just too many entrenched ways of doing things. It would make sense to be able to hire subject experts as teachers, or at least regular lecturers, but the teachers unions block it. I know of several very qualified people that teach math, science, and engineering part time in local colleges and junior colleges but are no accredited to teach in in high school. They are not going to take time off from their day job of designing computers and rockets to do that. The funding system for schools is broken beyond belief. The politics surrounding subject matter, on both sides, is dreadful. Half the parents want you to teach creationism and the others want you to forgo all subjects except AGW and cultural sensitivity.
This would make sense if teaching was just about passing on content knowledge, however one of the absolutely worst history teachers in high school had a doctorate. I also don’t know when the last time you were in a university classroom was, but in general, the professors are lousy teachers. Students in university learn because they have a financial investment in learning and because they have had years of actual teachers who taught them how to learn, and because those students who had no interest in learning have been weeded out in the selection process. That just isn’t true in high school.
In high schools we are required to take all comers. We are responsible for tracking down students that don’t come to school. We are supposed to get the kid who is homeless or abused or who lost a cousin to gang violence last night to be able to show the same proficiency as the nice kid from the safe upper middle class home in the suburbs. I think it can be done, but it is done one kid at a time. These kids need more individual attention not bigger classes. They need more resources, not less. Charter schools can work, so can opera programs and chess programs and math programs. I have yet to see testing get a kid to believe he can learn. What catches the kids is not actually the program but the adults who connect with them. That isn’t ever about content. If you make the connection you can get them to learn anything.
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2010/02/25/cb.ri.teachers.fired.cnn.html
I saw this interview a while back, and it is really sad to me. The parent and the teacher are in complete denial that anything other than the students and their families are the problem. The teacher (guidance councelor) seems to me to be trying to lie but Campbell Brown keeps calling him out, and he stammers on to some other point. To him it is all about negotiation and compensation. He thinks that because he’s been in education for 30+ years that he is immune from being evaluated on his performance.
I am almost always on the side of teachers and public education, but something is very wrong in this district if these people are in any way representative of it.