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So to summarise, (nearly) everyone thinks teachers aren't accountable and their performance isn't really measured, and that this means they don't do a good job.
I don't agree 100%. Way back up the thread, someone alluded to mediocrity in many areas --> it's true, and I'm not sure anyone would argue. Most corporates are full of people who more or less just punch their cards. In many organisations the link between actual hard work and receiving benefits from an incentive scheme or promotion are often tenuous. I think a lot of it is that people (parents, rightly so) place such a huge importance on the outcomes of education - and they feel they don't get it. I guess teachers are under the spotlight in this sense. Which raises an interesting point. The standard ways of incentivising are threat of termination, potential to earn bonus, or the chance to be promoted. Teaching (and nursing - in fact, much of the health sector outside doctors - and I would imagine a whole lot of other professions) don't really have the possibility of bonuses (because of the impossibility of measuring performance and allocating profit (if any) against it) and aften pretty flat pay increases with promotion. Really, its only prestige and responsibility. So, if the way to incentivise a firefighter, or a policeman, (etc) is in many ways through having their service recognised, why are we - society, everywhere - so down on educators? |
in a society where people generally do not take responsibility for their own actions, teachers are a very convenient scapegoat.
Are they perfect? Of course not. But they also aren't the overarching problem. Take a look at the parents first. Then look at the system. You want to know why most good teachers quit? Becuase of idiocy like "no child left behind." They have little or no control over the curriculum in the classroom. The latest fad in "accountability" means another round of biased, ill-designed standardaized test that they have to teach to. |
I'm hopeful that Flint. can now see how hard it is to suggest measurable and effective tools that value (not applaud) teachers' work.
My opinion on education generally - Increasing pay will only add incentive for new people coming in - Teachers in the system for 10 years or more don't have any incentives other than intrinsic (self actualizing) - Good schools usually have Principals who haven't given up the fight for looking at every individual kid and their personal needs and finding ways to support teachers to meet the needs - Good schools have a culture amongst the staff of caring about every kid (almost as if they were your own) - Poor/good teachers can be identified by observations, interviews and work logs by people trained to understand the dynamics of classrooms, pedagogy and the interplay of human motivation (of both teachers and students) and the environment (home/district) in which the school exists. THIS ONE WOULD COST MEGA BUCKS TO STRUCTURE, ENSURE UNBIASED POSITIONING, AND YEARS TO IMPLEMENT. - Appreciation (from parents) can be as simple as saying a genuine thanks!!!!! If I heard that once a month I'd be surprised. If I go to my accountant to get my tax papers filed, I'll either see him and say thanks or email him! I show the guy at the 711 more appreciation than I get from most parents. - The reward for teachers often, is KNOWING that you have reached the kids in some way that has elevated them to a new level. Many teachers won't know this though as it's hard to measure (both in influence and degree). - Put all teachers on a 5 year contract/terms/tenures with six monthly reviews with their Principal. It might not move the bad teachers out too quickly but I am sure it would raise standards. Unfortunately this may act as a threat but that's pretty much how most industries work. Hell I have been on yearly contracts all my working life (25 years). It's not the greatest feeling in the world but heh...? The cost would be enormous again and the Principal would be consumed with looking through portfolios etc. It's not like you can pull out a spreadsheet and see the amount of widgets being produced/sold. Some ideas...always more...many not very workable:rolleyes: |
I agree with much of what you posted...but competition is still the answer.
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Who do you suggest should be competing fint? Education should be a right, not a commodity.
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Obviously my point was that there should be competition between schools (both public and private) for tax dollars instead of the current monolithic, monopolistic system where mediocrity(not meritocracy) is rewarded. |
Well it has been almost 15 years since we discussed public education in this thread. It seems that most of the arguments are the same. IMHO, things are even worse today (and we have done little or nothing to improve). Note that the prePARF discussion is much more civilized...which indicates to me that the split may not have been the best idea...and perhaps that some of our newer posters have taken things downhill a bit (apparently, folks here once had ideas, not Cheetos jokes and name-calling).
So, what is better/worse now in education? have we solved the problem...or was there never a problem? |
It has festered and gotten worse.
And now, we have children being taught "social justice", which is neither. And teacher pay has gone up quite a bit in 15 years, probably outpacing all of the others on that list. Teachers in my area start around $55k. When you look at it on a per-hour basis, it's now probably one of the highest paying professions you can get into right out of college. But there is no accountability with that money, so the bad teachers push out the good. |
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as that is exactly and only what this BS is all about want better teachers let students grade teachers they are the people in direct constant contact with the teachers and know who is a good teacher and who is not |
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Let students grade teachers? LOL...and inmates grade guards? |
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I am much less concerned with teacher salaries than less than proper education. It seems to me that funding and administration of schools should be local rather than per the Department of Education.
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1) The only way to force schools to teach things like "social justice" is to make them unaccountable to parents. 2) Teachers are well aware that their high pay, massive amounts of time off, low accountability, and low barriers to entry (low education requirements of teachers) are dependent are on education funding being awarded at state and federal levels (once again, not being accountable to parents). |
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Come back Nostatus...we love you...we miss you..
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In America's infinite wisdom with standardized testing etc it has bureaucractized and made education into an assembly line process. In other words a one shoe fits all sizes model. The failing in that is that each child's education is a individualized process. Everybody learns at different speeds, has different talents and inate intetests.
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Actually tabs, the one shoe size fits all was the best. IMHO education went south when we started stratifying education. In the one room school house the smart kids helped the slow ones. The smart kid got the benefit of truly learning the subject and the slow one got more time and help than just the single teacher can provide. Plus everyone got a sense of community from helping.
Pulling out the smart kids just made it harder to help the slower ones and make them feel 'special' and entitled... a local magnet school is a very small pool to pull from people wise. Teaching freshman chemistry to incoming college kids was always an awakening to the students. Vanderbilt brought in top notch kids from all over and was a big eye opening. What was 'easy' in high school once you start playing with everyone else being top performers, isn't so easy anymore. Charter schools will never work because they can self select. Public schools are REQUIRED to take and educate the dross. Private are not. Until society is ok with leaving a large segment of its population behind, ~33% just on raw statistics, we will not fix schools. I'm almost to the point that I would do away with all schools. There should only be schools paid for by business, government, and the wealthy. Those that need educated labors should pay for them. Just more socialism for business. |
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Just to throw into the conversation and create discord before I go away:
Let us say a Teacher earns $30,000.00 per year. Works 19 pay periods (38 out of 52 weeks or 9.5 months of the year) which is $1,578.95 per working pay period. 27 pay periods in a year? Works out to $42,631.58 as the effective annual salary. Work is designed to be seasonal (around the requirement to plant and harvest), pay appears to be designed to be seasonal. Did I pass my Maths? |
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Excellent point. Schools should go to year around. Forget this summer vacation crap to help bring in the harvest. A Two weeks around X-mas/new year, a two weeks mid may, and two weeks later summer. That way you don't fight the stupid that comes from being off that long. Gotta reteach everything. Other problem is that school is just considered day care rather than education. Unfortunately I think we have gotten so used to full access to education that we don't cherish it like we should. I'm not sure how to fix that... keeping perspective while providing benefit to society. |
Without summer vacation bad parent's would have NO motivation at all to do anything about their kids.
Summer vacation at least means parents have to be parents for a short consecutive period. School should start later in life, after age 10 for boys, perhaps a year or two earlier for girls. With a more mature mind you can learn faster; the early years really are wasted for most kids. School at an early age hurts curiosity and self driven discovery of new things about the world. The teacher/child ratio just isn't there to answer questions, and not being able to get answers to questions results in eventually giving up. Take the resources we have, cut the time in school in half, double the student/ratio. I think we'd see much better functional literacy if we did that. |
I guess I use summers to explore my kids interests in a way that would be infeasible for a school to do. When my oldest was interested in geology, we took a trip to a "gem mine". He had a blast sifting through the dirt and sand, and had a blast trying to use his books to figure out what each thing was.
I also try to work the things they've learned into real-world examples. For example, my oldest has learned about money, geometry, and measuring this year. He's going to help me build something this summer (I haven't quite decided what yet). He also keeps asking me if he has enough money for Minecraft. I've been working with him on figuring out the answer. (He keeps counting dollars as 1¢ and ten dollar bills as 10¢.) I'd hate for these experience to go away because my kids are in school year-round. This is the part of the year that I get to take charge of their educations. |
It is also my observation that the best teachers do not need to be highly paid, they just need to be free to get good results without a stupid system interfering.
If you have a stupid system, and highly paid, you will get the stupid teacher ratio near 100%. So long as the system is poor, it will spit out and reject good teachers. |
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Jobs with low salaries don't attract the best and brightest - who woulda thought? |
Back to the 2005 OP...which seems just as pertinent now as then (recent teacher strikes for more pay, the seemingly lesser quality of high school graduates, and the massive amount of student spending/debt that has ensued since then). Isn't choice an equally big problem..spending tens of thousands for a degree that pays little?
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I have no kids, and little or no interaction with schools anymore. BUT, I went to 11 different schools from 1st grade to 12th grade. I saw a lot of very different systems and rules.
I still believe the "new math" they forced on us was the start of the dumbing-down of American kids. The old way of simple math that had taught generations of kids was ignored because it was not new. The new ways to teach math is so convoluted as to be silly. When history is not even taught anymore, and common sense in education has become completely uncommon, I really have no idea what the answer is. I know I pay a huge chunk of taxes to the local schools and get nothing at all for it. The federal government need to be 100% out of the mix. Shut down the federal department of education, it need to be all done by the state and county and local cities. And the first thing that needs to happen is eliminate the teachers unions but that will happen right after peace in the middle east. |
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College is not public education. There are public colleges, but they are not required to take and educate everyone like the public school system. A state university can actually end up being far more selective than a private college if it's reputation grows. No one is guaranteed a college education. We do require by law attendance at public school. I don't know if it better for society to try to teach those that do not want to learn by keeping them corralled at a public school till they are adults and can be locked into a prison, or let them loose because they have been expelled and putting the responsible parent in jail for any miscreation. Would be interesting to see how many parents fill out paperwork to emaciate their kids if they were responsible. |
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I think you need to discipline the troublemakers (and there will be a lot fewer). those that still cause problems should be moved to an alternative school (until they prove they are able to return). Charter schools were not needed where I grew up...because the standards were quite high (enough for the brightest students) and other folks just passed with lower marks. Few children disrupted class because the punishment was corporal. Not learning was not tolerated and if you did not meet the minimum, you got summer school, repeated the grade entirely or both. |
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Why should there be discipline? That is a parent problem. You are there to learn. Don't want to learn, don't be there and there should be NO alternative schools. Again, make parents responsible. They can pay for private daycare for their miscreants. We need a modern classical education. Everyone gets the same foundation. 1. Reading to the level of classic works like Adam Smith (oh god the corn... man goes on and on about corn...) and Shakespeare. 2. Math through algebra. 3. Basic science of how things work. Physics, chemistry, biology. You should know how your body works. The Krebs cycle is just as basic as 2+2. 4. Physical education. 5. Programming. (replaces foreign language). |
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I would add history/civics. |
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