I didn’t say good teachers don’t make a difference. I said if you are motivated to learn you can do it. More so today than at any time in history with the world’s libraries at our fingertips. And all the more fortunate you are if you also have good teachers.
Current social opinion points the finger at others for personal failure. We’ve nearly lost the concept of personal responsibility in this culture.
We have some cockeyed idea that we need more material resources to make things work. I suspect that’s the final result of capitalism. “I paid my money. Now spoon feed me.”
What we actually need is more internal resources - Dilligence, consistency, willingness, resourcefulness. And they are free.
Cast the first stone, then. You gonna fire everyone who’s kids score poorly in standardized tests, tough guy? Who’s going to teach the poor kids who are likely to fail no matter who their teacher is, then?
“Tough guy”? Don’t be so asinine. In every other profession firing bad or failing employees isn’t given a second’s thought, yet the very mention of firing bad teachers causes a sizable proportion of the population (many of them teachers, it has to be said) to take to arms, gnash teeth and throw a tantrum.
Are you so sure that bad, or failing employees are fired with any kind of regularity? It seems to me that many, if not most, people are fired for business reasons that often have little to do with their competence. Sometimes it’s because of a lack of demand, an economic downturn, etc.
Similarly, most “bad” teachers are either not given tenure, or they quit. The vast majority of people who find teaching is not a good fit for them do not spend their lives teaching. There is, for the most part, not a pressing need to fire large numbers of teacher who have tenure. Furthermore, the situations where there seems to be a lot of “bad” teachers are places where attrition is high, and they is almost always a shortage of teachers. In the business world, few companies fire large numbers of employees if they know they cannot find people to replace them. That’s the situation as it exists in many places.
Every company carries A LOT of dead weight. The main reason is because even in the private sector, where competence can often be measured solely by the bottom line, it’s hard to truly determine actual competence. The same thing applies doubly to fields like medicine, sports, and education. Are doctors whose patients are in worse health, or die more often, worse doctors? Obviously not, but we apply the same logic to teachers.
Think about the NCAA tournament going on right now. How many people do you think will fill out a near perfect (or perfect) bracket this year? Prognostication is hard work even when, in the case of the NCAA, we have loads or past behavior and data at our fingertips. Even ex post facto evaluation is difficult. Is Northern Iowa really better than Kansas, or did they just happen to do perform better in this one instance under certain conditions. Is Teacher A better than Teacher B just because his/her students did better on a test during one school year.
That’s why having the ability to fire teachers more easily doesn’t really address the underlying problems. All it will do is allow administrators to wield more power over teachers and their classrooms, demean the teaching profession, and supplant the belief that education is a cooperative exercise. I don’t think any of that will lead to better teachers or better educated students.
Oh yes…throwing money at the teachers is NOT the way to do this.
I mean…if you want the best doctor(s)…money is not how to attract them. YOu need a great lawyer? Money? They laugh at you. They don’t need money.
You need a good doctor in your hospital…pay them little and tell them they will have extremely difficult patients and working environment and I’m sure they will beat a path to the door.
You setting up a unit in your company? Say a data division? Don’t throw money at them! Money is the lowest motivator to attracting talent.
You want people working for you that are not motivated by money. You want the best…not the money grubbers.
Have we really digressed so far to think that kids are too stupid for their own good?
What happened to the “work hard to get ahead” mantra. This country is going to hell in a hand basket for this to even be freaking mentioned.
So, you tell your first-grade kids, “Work hard to get ahead”? Tell them that if they do their homework now, and keep on working hard at school, then in 12 years they can get into a good college, and in 15 or 16 years they will be able to start on a good career? I think you need more than promises about what might happen that far into the future to motivate them…
Motivate me! Motivate me! Then maybe I’ll do something useful.
It’s this instant gratification mindset that is a part of the problem.
Most of the people you are talking to went through the same ennui of days on end of putting one foot ahead of the other to get ahead. Will it always happen? Nope. Some people do have rotten luck.
Is it likely to happen if you put your best effort into it? Better odds.
Fifteen years of preparation for a good outcome is relatively little with a life expectancy near eighty.
I’m not sure I understand. For any given student, the predominant beneficiary of his diligence in school will be student himself in light of the greater earning potential afforded by education in general and by the more prestigious academic accomplishment that diligence might sow. The effect of this student’s individual achievements on me is nil.
Now, things are a little different when we look at the aggregate. It is important that I live–and more to the point, work–in a society marked by a high level of skill and learning. It’s why most Americans hold jobs unheard of in primitive societies or even merely pre-industrial ones. This is why we have the public school system.
Despite subsidizing that school system, I am told that over and above that, I should provide further incentives to schoolchildren. Why is this? Will they repay me from their increased future earnings? Don’t we already have a system of incentives in place—incentives, which unlike these, don’t impose an additional cost on everyone else? And if they don’t respond to these already well-known incentives, why should we think that they’d respond to these others?
I agree, in every profession I have worked in, I got a bonus for good work and risked termination for bad work. According to the Newsweek article, this is not generally true for teachers.
So, do you want to pay teachers more or have larger student-teacher ratios? Since tenure is a component of compensation, by eliminating it without counterbalancing it with new perquisites or cash, you naturally will reduce the teaching labor supply.
I do not feel qualified to debate this very far, I an neither a teacher nor an expert in education. I simply wanted to point out what I found to be a recent, interesting and informative article on the issues.
I do find it astounding that tenure can be considered ‘compensation’ and that we pay educators so poorly - they are entrusted with the future of our nation (our children).
That article is foolish and cherrypickish. The stats for firing of teachers come from Ohio and Chicago. I suppose they could’ve gone to New York City if they want a more heavily unionized area, but seriously–Chicago represents the country?
The article also focuses very heavily on the “firing bad teachers” idea, with a heavy dose of old-school union-busting aggrandizing (and some real whoppers–they really expect me to believe the union was asking for $90 an hour more to eat lunch with students once a week?). It barely glosses over the other end of things: even successful programs like KIPP have super-high burnout rates.
Here’s the deal. Teaching used to be one of the most lucrative professions that an intellectual woman could enter, so you got some of your smartest women becoming teachers. Now, women can get most jobs they want: the smart women aren’t funneled toward teaching. As the article correctly points out, teachers are often recruited from the bottom levels of college students. They don’t mention that smart people are steered away from teaching: in the course of my certification program, I had two different professors tell me that my brains meant becoming a teacher was a waste, that I ought to go on and get my PhD and become a professor. That’s in the education department!
Nowadays, you get two main groups of people who become teachers. One group is the idealists, the ones drawn to teaching as a calling. A tremendous number of this group gets burnt out quickly by the bureaucracy and the low wages and the low prestige and the long hours and the stress and the heartbreak, and within five years leaves the profession. The second group is the folks for whom teaching really is the best money they can make.
And that’s scary, because if teaching is the best money you have facing you, I don’t want you teaching my kid. But since this group doesn’t have many attractive alternatives, this group has a much lower burnout rate: what else will they do?
You want to improve teaching? Make it a profession:
Look to the AMA and the ABA as a model, or perhaps to the NBPTS. Professional educators should develop strict, high standards for people that want to become teachers, and they should make it a difficult profession to enter. (The Marines are a ridiculous model, despite what the article suggests: until our culture develops a fetishistic adoration of teachers, the profession will never have that panache).
Allow teaching to become a self-policing profession in the best sense. Some districts already do this, with peer evaluations of struggling teachers leading to their improvement or dismissal. Just as medical licenses can be revoked by a professional board of teachers, a teacher’s job should be similarly revocable.
Pay teachers enough to attract the best and brightest. Yeah, it’s great to get that small kernel of the Devoted Folks who don’t get burnt out, but we need a shitload more teachers than that. Without the pay (and self-determinism, and prestige) that goes with a professional career, you won’t get enough caliber of folks to make it a profession.
Motivation for me was to do well in school or I didn’t play sports. No Pass No Play was actually a good rule. Oh and yeah my parents would beat that ass if I came home with bad grades.
That is all the motivation I needed, thanks.
One of the MAIN problems with schools isn’t the kids. It is NEVER the kids fault. Blame the faculty, the administration but above all blame the parents for sending their angels to school and expect the school to provide any and all parenting.
Epic parenting fail. It gets worse every generation.
All of the quoted post I agree with, but this list in particular I believe is the best starting point for improving public education. I would add to it in no particular order:
Administrators - The non-teaching staff of public schools are generally overpaid with respect to the amount of work they do. The best principals move up to good schools and districts and make easy money. The worst cycle through schools leaving a swath of destruction created by stupid ideas. You want to improve schools and treat them like a business? Start by doing what good businesses do and hire good managers.
Testing - Standardized testing simply can not be the only factor in determining a teacher’s success. In Ohio, students take a set of standardized tests that count for NOTHING, the only test that students care about is the last one, which they need to pass to graduate. Yet, everybody with an opinion wants to link teacher’s job and salaries to tests that are meaningless to the kids who take the test. Get rid of the tests, or make them mandatory pass to move onto the next grade and test at least once a year.
Year round schools - In interest of full disclosure, my wife is a teacher. But this has exposed me to many teachers and I can tell you what many fear is being fired. Not because they are not good at their jobs, but because it is very hard to find a new teaching job and there is a very short window in which to find a job. Once job vacancies are filled within a school district, there is a small number of positions that are open to outside hires and those positions are only open for a few weeks in the summer. Once the school year starts in August and September, a teacher without a job simply will not get a teaching position for nearly a year. As a result there is little incentive for teachers to change school districts. In the outside world there is no hiring season, some times are better than others but nothing like the teaching profession. The solution to my mind, make schools a year round job and change the culture so that teachers can find a new job more than once a year. This would go a long way to reducing teacher opposition to education reforms and in the long run reduce the need for unions (district A treats its staff poorly or does not provide decent benefits, district B can offer a better deal).
There once was a time, not so very long ago, when teachers had good education and were respected as an authority on learning. If they sent home a note that the student wasn’t achieving and the reasons they saw for the problems, many parents would make an effort to back the teacher up. It was that teamwork that benefitted the student.
Recalcitrant students found themselves flanked and with little option but to do their best or face uncomfortable consequences.
I would think that people who blame teachers for their childrens’ failure to learn are holding on to long-past personal resentments and, in turn, passing them on to their children. It may feel satisfying when one has been mistreated or underserved in a school to “get even” by pointing out every flaw a child’s teacher has. But, in fact, it will enable a child to blame others for his own shortcomings and hinder his progress.
Rewarding for good behavior (or even as we seem inclined to do today, rewarding in the hopes of good behavior,) works. But anyone who has studied behavior modification knows that negative reinforcement works even better. “Here’s what will happen if you DON’t achieve,” is motivation, as Kearson comments.
We seem to have an unwritten rule today that everything has to be fun, that a child shouldn’t have to do anything which seems unpleasant to him. Is it because of the omnipresent media entertainment?
Before it was possible for every human in the USA under the age of eighteen to receive even a basic education it was a thing highly valued and worth some inconvenience to accomplish. In fact, just getting through a day required quite a bit of work which modern convenience has relieved. I see a generalized devaluing of “hard work” by many now. Modern society was supposed to make lives easier. But that is not the nature of the beast, apparently.
Discipline and learning go hand in hand. Ultimately the goal is SELF-discipline. How do you learn to be independently self-disciplined? It’s a habit developed by imposition and repetition.
I wish we would have tiered schools. You have to really apply yourself and compete with other students to make it into the highest-level school, for example. One of my biggest frustrations was, as a relatively bright kid, I was constantly held back by peers and by behavior issues. In the end, it was a strong disincentive to apply myself because I could just be polite and dutifully hand in homework that I dashed off at the last minute and still get good grades. Then I could pursue my own interests (Nintendo, playing with my computer, reading books on subjects I was interested in) instead of actually doing homework at home, doing assigned reading, whatever. I could have gotten a lot more out of that time but I didn’t because there was no reason to care.
Ultimately there are just some kids that do not want to be in school and the system now punishes everyone by pooling people in classes with those people. Even with honors classes, you still share the school, you share homeroom and electives and the building, and none of the schools I went to had honors curriculum outside core subjects anyway.
I think a lot of kids with behavior problems would probably do better in such a system. Kids who just don’t really ‘work’ in a rigorous academic setting might enjoy technical school and learning applicable skill sets; other kids who can do the work, but just choose not to, have to keep up or they’ve got to switch schools.
Ultimately, not every kid is going to succeed at calculus and not every kid is going to go to college. I think we should have other paths available. Ultimately I think as a culture we would be better off not trying to convince our kids that you only get to choose between college and “Do you want fries with that?”
What if we presented early education focussed simply on reading, writing and 'rithmetic sorts of skills and after a certain level of basic training the student was free to move on to vocational training. Then after a period of time, if he was unhappy with his choice and had developed some motivation based on life’s hard knocks he could be channeled through a young adult venue? Or even older adults?
Things like etiquette, sports and the arts could be subsidized by the community and students could be channeled through parental influence, the legal/social assistance system and choice. Sort of like the old German concept of Turner Halls.