You should read the whole thread.
You’re the one who wrote it, and, like I said in the first place, ya might not want to say things like that.
(And it’s “Black,” for God’s sake. They’re an identifiable racialized ethnic group and the least one can do is get the most common name right.)
There is an artist known for various ‘Blak’ works and this terminology, but she is very much not American, it’s a completely different ethnic group.
You won’t find Asian-American students describing academic success as “acting white”.
That’s a cultural issue.
That is not everything, but it is something, a piece of the puzzle, however small or big. And yes, it probably does prevent academic success in some individual cases. The historical development of such attitudes is almost certainly based in past racial oppression. But that doesn’t make it any less a cultural issue. It’s a part of people’s attitudes and beliefs and behavior.
The treatment of paraprofessionals is the great shame of our profession. I have cringed so hard listening to teachers contain about their salaries in front of paras who make less than half of what we do. And it’s not the same job, so some pay differential is to be expected, but lord, it’s awful how often we forget about them when pushing for higher wages. Most teachers don’t even think about it.
We had a nightmare of a superintendent for two years. Of his many sins, the worst was cutting all custodial staff pay for 10%, moving most custodial jobs to night shift (so people would quit) and pinning new hires at minimum wage. Custodians who had been at schools for years or decades were pushed out of shifted to nights. And especially in elementary schools, these people had relationships with kids. They were part of the fabric of the community. And they had vast institutional knowledge of how ancient HVAC and plumbing systems worked.
It was cruel and did permanent damage to our community, but it didn’t get nearly as much community outrage as other things. Because it was happening to custodians.
Professional licensure can be a great way to enact regulatory capture and twist laws in favor of the licensed at the expense of the non-licensed.
For years I was the director of a day care. Our workers were generally in two categories - young mothers with their own children in the daycare, or older empty-nesters who loved children and wanted to work with them. We paid close to minimum wage, hut the young mothere got free daycare as well, and the older ones were genrally second income earnees who weren’t really doing it for the money anyway.
This was the situation for a long time, and worked really well. The young mothers had skin in the game, and an incentive to make sure the okace ran well, the kids were happy and not abused, etc. The older women just loved kids and were happy to be doung something valuable. The low wages kept the price of daycare down so working people could afford it.
Enter the teacher’s unions and the university which had been graduating far more teaching candidates than there were positions in schools. This made their employment-to-graduate ratio look very bad. So they collaborated with the teacher’s unions, and suddenly the ‘consensus’ view was that it was a scandal that day cares were filled with untrained amateurs. Something must be done ™.
Lobbying campaigns started, and soon we were issued an edict by the government that all employees either had to have education degrees or be students of education in at least their third year.
So, we had to fire a lot of long-term, very excellent employees, and attempt to replace them with young teaching grads. It was a disaster. The young women didn’t want to be there, they hated the pay, and many of them didn’t even like kids. We started getting parent reports of abusive behaviour, and the turnover rate was crazy. Keeping someone for more than a few months was almost impossible, so the little kids had to constantly deal with strangers.
This started multiple rounds of mandatory wage increases for our new employees, which drove up the cost of daycare and forced the government to increase subsidies. And since we could never keep a full slate of employees, the child to supervisor ratio tanked to the point fhat most daycares couldn’t keep up the mandated ratio and had to operate on waivers. This was also bad for children.
This is a perfect example of how regulatory capture can cause special interests to conspire against the common good for their own benefit, The only people that ‘won’ out of this were the teacher’s unions who managed to expand their dues-paying membership into the daycares. Everyone else, from the kids to taxpayers, paid the price.
Poorer teacher wannabes can’t afford the expensive test prep courses. And yes, in general, here in the USA, more black people have poverty issues.
So, those long-term, very excellent employees were not members of the Teachers Union? Somehow i have some doubt here that the Union would lobby to get rid of dues paying Union member sin favor of those who did not (at that point in time) actually belong to the Union).
I think i am going to need a cite.
The long term employees, as I explained in some detail, were either young mothers with children in the daycare or elderly empty-nesters who wanted to work with kids. None of them were in any kind of union or organization, or had any credentials. They required police background checks and that’s about it.
Remember, this is a day care, not kindergarten. The children in there were generally from age 1 to age 5, at which point they would often go into a kindergarten program where there were actual teachers.
Their replacements were education students or graduates of education programs that had yet to land a full teaching program. THEY were the dues-paying members that ousted the long term employees.
This was 20 years ago and a local issue. I didn’t learn about it in the papers - I dealt with it as director of a day care. I have no ideas what articles were published about it, if any, and I’m not going to bother to look. If you want to research it, knock yourself out.
It isn’t only college students taking the test. There is a program to fast-track parapros and other staff working in education who want to become teachers.
My wife (42) was working as a para and just took her teacher certification test. She barely passed on the math section and aced the rest. Not terrible for being out of college for so long.
That’s not a problem with Black culture, though. That’s a problem with economic disparity.
While I recognize that increasing regulation and official requirements doesn’t always improve a situation, something just sounds kind of…off…about the expectation that a successful business model for childcare requires paying very low wages to young mothers and elderly hobbyists with no certification in the field.
I mean, hell, AFAICT even to become an auto mechanic in Canada you have to complete a multi-year registered apprenticeship including classroom instruction and on-the-job training. All those hoops to jump through just to be able to fix cars, while for taking care of actual living human children it’s good enough just to throw near-minimum-wage pay at a few young moms who want the free childcare and little old ladies who want to play grandma?
I certainly acknowledge that there are many wonderful and highly skilled practitioners in various fields who don’t have formal credentials, and a lot of sterling stalwart employees who do great work for shit pay simply because they love the job. Not dissing any of those fine people (many of whom are older workers) at all.
I’m just a little weirded out by the contrast in attitudes where it’s expected that the people who look after your cars have to be formally trained and certified in mastery of the requisite knowledge and skills, but the people who look after your kids don’t.
Around 45 years ago I helped my mother study for the Miller Analogies Test. I was shocked to learn from the prep booklet that people hoping to enter elementary school teacher training programs scored 23 or 24, which was worse than random answering.
Teenagers and other uncertified people have been babysitting since time immemorial. Are you saying that kids should never be left in the care of anyone who hasn’t undergone years-long training and certification?
Babysitting isn’t the same as being the primary caregiver for group of children 8 hours a day.
Maybe not- but there have been people who have been the primary caregiver for a group of children for 8 ( or even more) hours a day without years-long education and certification for a very long time as well. Sometimes they are even called babysitters although they are caring for one or more unrelated children full-time possibly in addition to their own children. Think about the employees Sam_Stone mentioned, the young mothers who had their children in the daycare. In my state, they could have opened their own registered family day-care and only been required to complete 30 hours of training every two years - which is some training, but not nearly as much as students of education in their third year have had.
I think there’s lots of room to discuss the amount and nature of training early childhood educators should have, and part of that discussion has to be what we, as a society, are willing/able to actually pay for: we can’t demand that they all have a certification that takes 5 years and $100k to obtain and expect daycare to be affordable.
But I don’t think casual babysitting or care of your own children is really comparable, any more than teaching your child to read makes you ready to run an elementary school class.
Sure, just as there have always been people who repaired vehicles, in many cases very competently, without years of official training and certification. I made it very plain that I’m not dissing or criticizing competent people who do important and difficult jobs without formal credentials.
I’m just a bit startled by the disparity of expectations for qualifications in auto repair vs. child care. Why should we take it for granted that the childcare business has to be dependent on paying shit wages to young moms and older quasi-volunteers who aren’t doing it for the money, while the auto repair business can thrive with certification requirements including years of training and apprenticeship?
I agree with MandaJo that this is about what we as a society choose to pay for. People don’t try to run auto-repair businesses on a minimum-wage shoestring, partly because nobody needs to have their car in the repair shop for eight or nine hours of every working day, so auto repair businesses can charge a fair price but still be considered affordable.
Heh, I’d start with teaching them what division is before moving on to comparing fractions with different denominators. Seems like not knowing what division is is only going to lead to frustration when moving beyond.
Regardless of color, black, white, brown, when one graduates high school proficiency in 8th-9th grade math and reading ought to be a given. Notice I didn’t say writing! 
These are the folks who are going to be voting and raising children of their own and not having a jr high education is not good for the country. We are a globalized planet now. We need to act accordingly.
I did mean to mention that people who are themselves earning minimum wage or a little more cannot possibly afford to pay for child-care if the workers are going to be paid more than the clients are. But I disagree that there is as big a disparity in expectations for auto-repair vs child-care as you seem to believe. Even your cite ( which basically advertises trade schools) says :
In British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, certification for automotive service technicians is available, but is not legally required.
Additionally at least some (probably all) of the provinces requiring certification allow someone with experience to skip the apprenticeship and just take the test , so that someone who has already been working for ten years in BC doesn’t have to start over if they move to New Brunswick.
And of course in those provinces that do require apprenticeships and certifications, those apprentices are in fact repairing cars during the apprenticeship - it’s not like they are required to have two or three years of classroom training before touching a car, which is what the original post described , a new requirement the all employees had to have education degrees or be students of education in at least their third year.