Just starting to research this California idea ( heard it chatted about on talk radio this morning while at the gym).

http://www.betterca.com/blog_categories/proposition_74

Seems like a good idea to a root problem for our education system countrywide.

No job field in the world gives you tenure and lifelong job security after a few measly years. Years relatively without quantitative measures I might add.

Anyone with any input/ideas?

Fandros

The root problem with our education system is a total abdication of responsibility by the students, parents and teachers. Making it harder for teachers to gain tenure is only going to discourage even more competent people from going into what is already a joke of a career suffering from laughably low wages and no respect from the public at large. The entire tenure system is a protectionist move to prevent school systems from replacing teachers with nominally less experienced and definitely lower paid employees in the eternal quest to spend as little money as possible, so municipalities can instead build bigger new football stadiums (conveniently to employ many future graduates as hotdog salesmen and ticket scalpers).

At least if that's the proposition you're refering to ... the site you linked is a quagmire and I had to go elsewhere to get any more information than I should vote no on it.

As is now, there are a grundle of teachers that are teaching our kids that lack any skill/drive to succeed.

Don't get me started on their wages, the massive amounts of time off they get is unheard of in the world. Top that off with wages earned for hours work and you get a decent living.

But, perhaps they do deserve more...a merit pay system if they pass quantitative standards.

As I see it, it's better than what we have now. I'd vote yes over current....

I live in Utah and not Cali, but I would enjoy seeing this up for debate here.

Fandros

What would be the incentive for a teacher to go into the Milwaukee public school system...which you are teaching animals basically..or take a job in a burb with more chance to succeed? I am with Malse..teaching as a career is basically laughable when talking about big city school systems.

So, leave as is and deal with our kids falling further behind the global power curve?

There has to be a happy medium here. It simply cannot stay as is.

Fandros

My wife is a second grade teacher in a public school. The wages are pretty good. We both work 9 hours per day. When we get home, I play on the computer and she does school work. Correcting papers, making lesson plans, etc. Yes she gets 2 months off in the summer, but you know what? She spends most of that time taking continuing education classes that are mandatory by the state and the cost comes out of our pocket. She has 20 kids. 18 are hispanic who are primary spanish speakers. Most of them are discipline problems. If you have never been a fly on the wall of a class like this then don't even think about speculating from the side lines. You know what tenure is for? It is because the public school system is absolutely political from the principal up. Parents complain to a principal because a teacher tried to hold a student back because they are not meeting standards. Guess who the principal is more loyal to? The teachers or the parents? Tenure is there to protect teachers from being the fall guy for a horribly political reactionary system. You want to fix the public education system. Start at the principal and work your way up. Teachers are very hard working people and a just trying to make the best of a screwed up system.

Perhaps, but I still think the system needs worked from ground up.

Too god damn many teachers just coasting on by. And yes I'm very familiar with the system. My gal is a teacher and I've spent many days in and around the system.

Fandros

Too many people coasting by is a normal symptom of bureaucracy. If you want to eliminate that, the first step is divest all Federal interests from the public school system and keep professional managers and their dumbfuck standardized measurement schemes as far away from children as possible.

No job field in the world gives you tenure and lifelong job security after a few measly years. Years relatively without quantitative measures I might add.

I can only speak from experience about higher education, but I can say *definitively* that college professors do receive 'quantitative measures' of their job performance - in the form of statistics kept on pass/fail rates in our classes, graduation rates, pass rates on entrance exams for specific programs, student evaluations, and instructional evaluations conducted every semester by the department head. These evaluations continue, by the way, even after an instructor has received tenure; the only difference is that they are done annually instead of every semester, and tenured professors can and have been fired for poor job performance (or by running afoul politically, as has happened a few times recently here, and been settled with lawsuits). Want to know what lovely term the administration at our school has to decribe the proportion of students who drop or fail (get anything less than a 'C') in an academic course here, even considering how hard we have to fight to uphold any standards whatsoever? You guessed it, it goes down as failure of instruction; heaven forbid that the *students* ever be held accountable for anything, certainly not their own work - and I can only imagine it's worse in the public school system where parents are more involved in the equation.

It doesn't matter if the students never showed up to class and were simply Pell Grant farming (being curtailed here, finally, due to restrictions being placed on how many times a student can repeat a course, but exacerbated by the fact that our final day to drop with a 'W' is the day *after* Financial Aid checks are cut), were horribly unprepared for your class in the first place (I get nonmajors students crammed into my freshman Biology majors' class every semester, not to mention that 60% of our incoming freshmen are not operating at college level in at least one area), or just are the all too typical 18 year old who has coasted through the public school system without ever having to work a synapse and don't have any idea *why* they are there.

Because I teach the freshman majors' classes, I'm where the 'rubber meets the road' with regard to their reality check on what it means to do college level work in science. My course *has* to be equivalent to what the students get at UT or Texas A & M or any other 4 year instiution producing future scientists, and so needless to say I'm staring down the barrel, despite my best efforts, of a 50% drop/fail rate again this semester. I'll also be lucky to squeak by with next years' contract once again come spring; it is only because that I contribute to the College significantly in other ways (grants, sponsoring a campus science club, judging a large number of regional science fairs) that I get renewed at all.

Add to that whole 'accountability' thing the fact that 20% or so of what determines whether we receive tenure here is the direct result of student evaluations. God help you if you do your job well, but aren't likeable in the eyes of an 18 year old who resents the fact that you are actually making him or her work, or has issues with women/gringas in authority due to cultural bias.

This has gone a bit far afield but... you get my point. The public may not understand or particularly like it, and it is not without its problems, but teachers, both at the public and post secondary level, require a certain level of protection (once they have proved their competence) from the ire of students, parents, and least-common-denominator administrators in order to be able to maintain standards and enforce them in the classroom, as well as to be able to conduct research and engage in the free exchange of ideas. As it is, we're under constant pressure to dumb down our exams and 'teach to the test' in order to make the state bean counters' numbers, and if teachers' jobs are at stake every time someone gets hacked off because the city councilman's kid didn't pass algebra, things will be even worse than they are now.

Do I support continuing review of performance for tenured faculty, as well as competency tests for incoming teachers? Absolutely. Dismantling tenure, however, is only going to ensure that education gets dumbed down, and creative thinking stifled even more, as teachers will simply be unwilling to take risks for the sake of stimulating their students, nor to rock the boat regarding standards - it will accelerate, rather than arrest, the downward spiral of American education into a cesspool where nothing but indoctrination and regurgitation of a pre-approved set of 'facts' is recognized as 'education' by the least-common-denominator set.

Regards,
Nydia

But, perhaps they do deserve more....

Fandros


Yes, they do deserve more, and to start with how about they deserve having parents actually parent their own children rather than sending them in to the school systems to be babysat and disciplined, only to scream for lawyers the first time said discipline offends poor Johnny/Mary.

Not all teachers possess those qualities to become the teachers we see in the movies who can turn an unruly class into a cooperating group of achievers over the course of several months. That does not take away from their abilities to do the job, though; being able to do the job means having the opportunity to use the time in class with students for TEACHING, rather than having to constantly interrupt the process to deal with discipline issues.

keep professional managers and their dumbfuck standardized measurement schemes as far away from children as possible.

Ditto that!!

My son never saw half of the history or geography or social studies material I had in school (I know because we spent a lot of time going over his homework assignments together) because they were locked into teaching according to a standardized system. Not to mention the politically-correct altered textbooks that have rewritten history so as to offend the fewest.

I thought I was upset about his never saying the Pledge of Allegiance due to the politically correct, but when I learned he had no clue who George Washington Carver or Florence Nightengale or Marco Polo (the wonder in Civilization?) or Ponce De Leon or Cortez were, not to mention so many others, I was appalled at the school system's failure to teach him.

Well, I wish I had ya'll for bosses. See if I only accomplish 50% of my job I'm out on my ass.

Ya'll are more than willing to accept the status quo at the moment. Quick join the damn PTA and keep those lemon's in business!!!!

Prop 74 is definately not 100%...hell it's far less, but it's a site better than what we have now.

Start ground up, and by gods folks look into what's really needed to teach your kids. Teaching certifcate and that's it....

Grade the teachers, and keep politics out of setting the grading system.

Fandros

Oh please.
This is borderline retarded.
First of all NONE of you have any concept of what its like to be an inner city school teacher. I barely do and I teach in fairly large and extremely economically diverse system.

Are there some teachers in there just for a paycheck? Yea. Sure. Most of them are gone in 3 years. You cant fake it in there. You either do it.. or you cant.
Innercity teaching is raw edge. And a teacher who cant relate/communicate/care about their students get run out fast. Show me a teacher teaching in inner city district for 10+ years, and most of the time, ill show you a FANTASTIC teacher. Thats where you find the true believers and the people making a REAL difference in this world.
I teach 4 different levels. Honors, College Prep, Basic, and Intergrated. I have the spectrum. "From Yale to Jail" is the saying, and yeah.. I have, in the same night, written a letter to judge on behalf of one of my students in regards to his sentencing on the same night I wrote a recommendation to Princeton.
Honors is easy. They devour the content. The biggest obstacle in those classes is keeping them challenged and on edge. You can teach history there, you can play around with lesson plans and veer off.
Today for example my honors class was having a student to student debate of the views of Hobbes and Locke in re human nature. It was spirited and lively and all I had to do was moderate.
They leave and my intergrated comes in and we are working on how to construct a paragraph for the upcoming Frosh research project in 2 months. Baby steps. (shut up Vhex)

As a parent have you ever come to PPT for child drunk or high? I hope not, but Ive see it. How do I mark the success or failure of this child? He comes from a "culture" of failure where he is EXPECTED to fail. I feel like doing backflips when a kid like this brings in his homework for a week straight, or kicks ass on a tough project 10x more than the Honors kid citing Kant or producing a super slick high quality project.

Most of you wouldnt be able to handle a week in a inner city classroom. They would run you out like your ass was on fire.
Because here is the basic truth: They dont care what you know until they KNOW you care. And you cant fool them, and you cant fake it. And if you dont care, what are you doing there? You going to go to war every day?
Seriously... you might as well be debating the diets of Martians, because you have no clue on what you speak.

I substituted for the Columbus Public Schools. I was expected to teach the kids math and they didn't even have text books. It doesn't matter how good or bad the teacher is if the school system or the higher ups simply don't give a shit about the kids and only pay it lip service. I had kids that were tough but hungry to learn and weren't given the proper tools to do so, not by the teacher but by the school systems.

It was very tough to relate to the children, they almost all lived a harder life than I. I had one white kid all day, and had a huge mixture of african americans, hispanics, native somali's, etc. Relating was tough with the children, letting them know I cared wasn't hard. Teaching them was made hard, not because of what I do or don't know but because the kids have been set up for failure by the system.

Lleauric
..
Location: Connecticut
So, tell us more about the ghettos in Connecticut :)

[Seriously though, I assume you drive across the river....]

Dear Fandros:

Did you even *read* the text of Prop 74? Just curious. This measure extends the time during which a teacher can be fired for no cause whatsoever, without even a hearing, from two years to five. It does *nothing* to address actual problems with the public school system (overreliance on standardized tests as opposed to teaching how to learn, ongoing training, evaluation, and competency tests for teachers, crumbling infrastructure, etc). It's an empty piece of 'feel good' legislation (Look, I'm doing something!) that is nothing but punitive, in that it fixes nothing and allows districts to run on a 'revolving door' system, employing the lowest-paid, most pliant teachers possible, then allowing districts to look like *they* are doing something by getting rid of them for no cause and without any right of appeal on the part of the teacher, when their five years are up. This won't, especially in urban districts, improve teaching quality at all; quite the opposite, as it is difficult to recruit and retain dedicated teachers in those districts as is.

By the way, the reason I'm able to type this out when I would normally be in my evening lab is that I'm currently being evaluated by my students, and so had a few minutes to run to my office and do so. As far as that 'cushy' schedule goes, we have a 50 hour workweek if one includes contact hours, mandatory office hours, and mandatory administrative/paperwork hours, which much be crammed into a 4.5 day week (we're closed from noon on on Fridays for 'budgetary' reasons and aren't allowed on campus on the weekend without clearance, nor are we allowed exterior building keys, because god forbid we be trusted with unsupervised access to our own offices).

Regards,
Nydia

Dont be fooled by the rep of Greenwich/Westport area.

Yea.. the "Gold Coast" is amazingly affluent. But the majority of CT remains post industrial blue collar. Hartford/New Haven/Bridgeport are your typical NE cities ravaged by the mass migration of the factories to the South or abroad.

I have infinate respect for school teachers.
Hell I only teach community fencing , a completly *voluntary* "Course" as it is, something I charge alot for ($100 per lesson), and much to my bewilderment I always get abuncha idiots who goof off and don't take it seriously, even when its thier own money and time.

I can only imagine what alot of professional teachers have to deal with, and have a really hard time blaming them *in general* for a lack of willingness on the part of students/partents.

You simply can't teach someone who doesn't wanna be taught, and thats the student/parents fault.
I think we just expect too much of teachers when we expect practically nothing from students.

Nydia,

I stated earlier that I think it's far from perfect. I just used it as a tool to get folks to discuss a root evil of this countries failing education.

Teachers need to be as responsible for their very great charges as are the common folks for our other jobs.

Not lesser responsibilities...more. Not lesser standards, more...

And Bruddah L2, please don't cry out the call of the inner city plight as the only tough grounds our education system has. It's flat out wrong, try growing up in a system that's just a sight above a one room school house early on. And then realize that your education was far superior than what the kids are getting today.

Have an answer for that? No, it's not solely the baliwick of the parents...nor are the kids inherently stupid. It's the system that's failing, it's the inability of teachers to do their jobs...for their own reasons or others...

The public school system as it stands is not much more than standing in line to sit down and wait for the bell to ring.

It stinks...

Fandros

I don't think anyone is disagreeing that our public school system is a national disgrace, but we're baffled by why you think making it take longer to achieve tenure is anything like a solution.

I mean, who's more likely to take a stand against institutionalized stupidity, the effective temp worker who knows they have to shut and say nothing for 5 years, or the veteran educator who's seen every play in the kid's book and has the job security to do something about it?

Teachers, being outnumbered by parents and children both, will always shoulder a far greater share of the blame than they should. But our very culture has lost a positive attitude toward education. It's always someone else's responsibility, intellectual role models are far and few between (and hardly in the same league as sports heroes), and among our youth achievement is too often derided as the bailiwick of losers. Change the culture, and the rest follows.

Piece of cake.

Let me elaborate on something L2 touched on. He has a class of honor students and a class of future drop outs. How is it (Fandros) that the same teacher that, I will assume, uses the same teaching methods for both groups of students, can produce future college graduates and future GED recipients at the same time? Is it because he gives more effort to the honors class? Negative! The only variable in the equation is the students. I am irritated byt the haste to condemn the teachers for the failings of the students. Every class of every grade level has high achievers and low achievers. A good kid can learn from an average teacher, while a low student will do poorly in the same class with the same teacher, hearing the same lessons. Is that the teachers fault? Get a grip.

Ooooh, bits of this thread make me angry! I just finished a long argument elsewhere on a similar topic. Want my suggestion?

Flip flop the entire system. It's absolute nonsense that teachers are basically the on the lowest pay scale of the school system and yet are supposed to be the ones actually fulfulling the task of the public schools - educating children. No wonder so many teachers are bad - unless a good teacher has a real drive to work with students and a passion for the job they can find a much better position elsewhere in the private sector. Paper pushers at the top who couldn't care less about the students (that's not a slam - you just have to realize that for most of the administrative types at the district offices it's just a 9-5 job) are paid twice or more what I get.

So turn it over. Put teachers near (not at the top) of the pay scale. Attract better teachers. By all means fire the bad ones. But don't barely fund me and then criticize what I do.

I'm grumpy today. I can't get my district to supply anything, not even a stupid network switch for my office so I can connect to the Internet. Yes I know they're cheap, but it's one more stupid expense out of my pocket. The school doesn't even supply paper for my students to write on. The only dictionary set I have in the classroom I bought myself at a yard sale. My six Spanish speaking students in my freshman English class will have to make do with an English-Spanish pocket dictionary I have left over from MY highschool, because over the summer someone stole my set of quality ones from school storage. When I reported the loss the district personal accused ME of stealing MY stuff.

I didn't even start the year with a desk - I had to make one out of scrap wood (thankfully I also teach a shop class). And you're going to tell me I'm overpaid for the amount of time I work? I work part time jobs all summer, and still don't make a pay scale competitive to what I could get in the private sector.

Catch is I love this damn job, love the kids I've got, and am sticking it out.

But I want my freakin' network switch!

Nydia back to her old posting ways...=) How about I throw in the idea of school vouchers into the mix. We have them here in Colorado. In a nut shell if you don't feel your public school is providing the eduction your child deservers you may use a school voucher to place him/her in another district or private school. You recieve a tax break and the original school does not recieve the share of money they would have recieve from that childs taxs to pay for his/education. Yes, this takes funding away from school that may have needed it but forces the school system provide better results to students if they want your business. Think of it as introducing free market into the beurocratic system. A good idea.

Vouchers are a horrible system because they assume that individual members of a society only need to contribute to themselves. Umm, unless that's your philosophy, in which case I suppose it's cool. But it's very short sighted. There's even a community here in Phoenix that doesn't pay educational taxes at all, under the assumption that they're all retired and therefor don't need the public school system anymore.

Soooo you take the voucher and take your kid to another school. That's the good part. What happens to the students still at the school? You're fooling yourself if you think you can get the majority of families to take a program like this seriously, plus we're already seeing the problems with schools starting to act like businesses.

The first problem is that all of those students who DON'T leave are now left in a system that's even more poorly funded than before, which means we keep turning out kids who are poorly educated. Guess what happens when election time comes around? You have a majority that's frankly dumb as a brick and thinks Iraq and Afghanistan are countries in South America and voting in stupid leaders and dumber laws. Laws like, "Gee, lets cut taxes cuz...um...yeah. And vote in wrestlers to office! Who needs education laws, I never needed school!" No joke.

The district I teach in is starting to see the second effect - running school like business. Someone called students "customers" the other day and I wanted to hit them. I waited tables for a long time, I know what a customer is. The customer is always right. The customer should always leave with a smile. If the customer complains do whatever you can to fix things for them, because you live under the threat of them taking their money elsewhere. Is that really what adolescent teens should be?

What we need to do is revamp public education from the ground up and get serious about it. We need to stop assuming that parents who never went to teaching school know the best way to run schools and stop groveling at their feet for money. We need to put all of these fancy studies on education into effect (and if you read studies on education then you know just how many aspects are never implemented in the classroom). We need to show students that education is important, and frankly I'd love to see laws backing that up.

Performance pay and rating schools by grades is a joke. Tell me what I'm supposed to do about a student who is failing my junior level class right now because she doesn't turn in homework, but next week when her paper is due and the unit test review is going on she'll be gone from school because mommy and daddy are taking her to Disneyland? Parents don't place importance on education, and you can bet junior never will either.

I'm so disgusted with a public that refuses to take education seriously and then heaps the blame on the people who, according to the business model, are the equivalent of checkout clerks at the grocery store.

The schools by all rights should only carry 50% of the blame. Mass popular culture in the United States typically runs counter to the ideals that are condusive to treating teachers with respect and encouraging learning by the students. Teachers have to have the pashion to teach as equally as the students to learn. Schools in other countries do well because instructors are revered and learning is charished and the government understands that its better to face the world armed with knowledge as opposed to ignorance. Not so in the land of gangsta rap and sports heros who seem to be the role models for kids.

One thing in the US that should be noted: You don't need to be a star pupil in order to live a happy, prosperous life. You pretty much just need to stay focused and work hard. Its possible that the Governator is trying to apply that set of values towards schools, which means that the days of handouts for no productivity may be over if you work in the government sector. Those that want to teach will be uneffected, but the bums might get a slap in the face.

But doesn't competition in the market place create better performance for those who would like to see a better product. In this case your/my childs education. If the school system feels a bit of sting from loosing funding due to poor performance then maybe they should get a bit more serious about their efforts to attract students back with a higher quality product i.e. their education?

Actually , Phel, in response to your rep hit you are too close to see the trees through the forest.

I do understand the system, and I do see the mass production angle that's being used to pump out half witted teachers and sling them into a job that requires a much higher degree of quality.

Next year I'm taking my son out of the public school system. I'm removing him from the mass production bullshit. I'll no longer have him play in a system that's low on checks and balances and high on teachers threatening to strike for more time off and higher pay.

There's a new school in the area, with smaller class sizes ( not the teachers fault mind you ) and teachers who are there not only for the paycheck.

Mind you, my gf and I fight over this all the time. But like you and your wife Phel, she comes from a family of educators. Who bitch and bitch and bitch about the state of schools today....but take no blame upon themselves...

Me, I'm on my son everyday to do his homework. I check his grades daily and no matter what I do...what he does....I can't get a teacher to stick to his own set of expectations...

Hell, he's in 8th grade this year....and there's been more than a few classes where they watch fucking movies...

Shame shame and double shame...

All I really want is ALL teachers to have to meet criteria...some sort of real standard and constant testing. If they don't meet it ....then they are put through training or dismissed...regardless of tenure.

Fandros

A charter school or private? Personally I like Csap(sp) testing. Prove the school district is teaching the children and reward them accordingly. If your teaching tot he test your teaching the students what they need to know about reading writting etc etc....

Sort of, it's a nice theory. But again, the first problem is all of the students that don't take the voucher program and will suffer anyway - mainly the group whose parents don't care/back education in the first place. Either way, they do enter the workforce and become voting citizens or, worse yet since hopefully many in that demographic don't vote anyhow, polled for their opinions. Political types love to base their actions off what the polled public says.

My district is trying the second approach of being competitive and working to attract students. So we're in the spot I described above, treating students like customers. It's nearly impossible to academically punish someone because they might leave the school. Do drugs or pull a weapon on campus? Slap on the wrist - you might go to a different school otherwise. Pull a knife on security (true story)? Three day suspension, make up the homework when you get back, and parents threatened with a lawsuit.

You know all those articles you read about state standardized tests and how some student with a B average can't pass them? Those are a joke. Students have a B average because very few teachers are in a position to grade accurately. If I graded my classes honestly, the way I want to, probably a third would fail and the average grade would drop to a C or D. But then my school's rating would drop, and junior might want to go to another school, so I'll end up being fired and unable to do any good at all. This is very common, grade inflation is a huge problem.

This year we opened our enrollment in hopes of attracting more students (more students=more money). We're now several hundred people over capacity, and the new enrollment brought at least one serious gang into the school as well as a very serious race war going on. And trust me, that's a population that isn't going to help our test scores. But our CEO...erm, superintendent wants us to make money here.

Again, we're catering to people who know nothing about education (I got a lecture a few weeks back from a parent on my policy of no late work because his son was busy playing guitar that night and couldn't write a one page paper) and the whole system suffers. You can pull your kid, but I guarantee the rest of the population will catch up with that decision eventually.

Education is a resource, not a commodity. Eric Margolis said that, I think. Students (and, sorry, parents) should not be treated like customers.

Either way my district, by rights, should be one of the richest in the Phoenix area. We don't suffer from numbers, just from public apathy and lack of funding from extremely wealthy people. I drive a beat up pickup, my students drive H2s and BMWs.

Off to work! This should be fun to read when I get home.

And Lums that what I got from Prop 74, and the gist of the conversation discussing it.

If you're a teacher wanting to teach then you're safe and likely to be rewarded for it. If you're a damn lemon and just there to take role, look for work elsewhere.

Even in the roles of Federal employment nowdays things are tightening up. Work/produce or get out of the way.

Why would anyone wish to sanction the status quo today? Surely the teachers that love to teach, that succeed , that find ways to make it work want their peers to do the same.

How do you tolerate getting students from the last year who obviously passed along so they didn't have to deal with them again?

I have much respect for the real teachers, I've had a fair share of teachers who I still look back to 20 years later and think "He/she really made a difference in my life".

My son, hell 8 years of school and he's yet to see more than 1 or 2. It's sad, and the cookie cutter mentality needs to change. Get a standard and fight for it.

Fandros

And yes, I realize that the system isn't only the teachers. I am cognizant that the teachers also fight their battles with the system.

But change starts from ground up and top down. Principals and their like are middle men and can either be squeezed out by successful drives or changed.

You can't accept the status quo....you can't.

Fandros

I think part of the problem is that education in many areas uses a "one size fits all" mentality. There are some students who don't want/need a standard education past a certain point, and I don't think they should be forced into it.
After a certain point, if you can read, write and do basic math, you've got all you really need to have to survive in daily life. After that point (say 8th grade), having a system designed more to prepare students for what they want to do later on might work well. Instead of high school as we know it, there would be several tracks a child could enter into that had a different emphasis on what was taught and what the final goal would be.

Let me put in this disclaimer before I go any further:
I understand that many children don't really know what they want to make their career. However, they really aren't forced into thinking about it much until late in high school. Maybe this would change if another system was in place.

For example, lets say that there is a student who wants to build custom motorcycles- that is his dream. He isn't really going to need a lot of advanced literary theory in this occupation, but he will most likely need some business skills, a very solid understanding of trigonometry and other math, some metalworking skills, perhaps a bit of sculpture and so on.

After the 8th grade, why couldn't the student above enter into a program with this in mind? A traditional classroom and higher education program isn't going to do much to get him where he needs to be, and there really isn't any system currently in place that is going to do so.

Likewise, why keep students who (and I can feel the heat coming my way already) have no interest in school or who just aren't very smart in the same program as students who are quite bright or who want to learn? It is doing both groups an injustice to place them in the same classroom; the teacher should not be expected to be able to keep a smart child engaged if they have to teach to the lowest common denominator.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the foundation of the system is rotten, and if we keep trying to remodel the house that it is built on, we're never going to solve the problem.

I think the problem with that would be that most people change their mind so much about what they want to do, at that age, you'd get them a few years down one track and then it would be hard to switch them to another.

Well, in some sense..

Schools DO have customers... the customer is society. We as educators are expected to produce a product that can be useful to the customer in some sense.
That is a very limited view of it however.
The question we should be asking is our production ideal the correct one. In a sense we are still using a educational model based on the needs of a society that no longer exists. The model that emerged in the post WW2 industrial era asked schools to produce factory workers as its "base model".. i.e. read a blue print, do a job, follow directions.
What we are seeing is that this base model no longers serves our needs as a whole.
The question then becomes what do we as a society value, in a holestic sense. What kind of human beings with what skills are we to help create?

Btw.. the US Educational system for all its problems and all its outdatedness is still one of the best things about this country.
NOBODY strives to education as broad a spectrum of its populace so equally as does the US. There is no weeding out or early selection of talented as you see in Europe and Asia. There are no high stakes tests for 13 year olds that determine the course of their lives. When you see low scores comparitive to other nations, keep in mind they would have already prevented a good majority of low scoring students from these tests long ago, and the ones taking them are the ones with more aptitude in that genre.
The US is the most culturally diverse and racially harmoneous nation on this planet. We owe a LARGE part of that to the diversity we see in our schools hallways. This core trait of America is one of our greatest strengths, if not our greatest strength. Vouchers would be a great way to go about destroying that. Segregation by choice rather than force. Either way... obstacles to the core values of what we believe in

all i have to say about this is my fiance grew up in california, went to public school until college, attended a private university, graduated with a masters in education and now works for the airline industry as a maintenance scheduler. he did teach in california, mostly to special ed and high-risk students. he stopped a number of gang disputes in and around his classroom, dealt with parents who didn't have a clue what their child was doing or cared to, and was always under the microscope about every little thing he taught or said. he said to hell with this and quit teaching. he loves what he's doing now and wouldn't go back to teaching if his life depended on it.

Maybe we should emulate the Canadian system.

"Oct. 27, 2005. 06:49 AM

Politcally incorrect

Citing a string of alleged comments that serves as a crash course in what not to say to students, the Ontario College of Teachers has launched a disciplinary hearing against former Windsor-area schoolteacher William Fabel. Among the complaints cited in documents presented yesterday at the hearing:
After the Columbine shooting, he entered the class pretending to be a gunman, causing students to cower under their desks.
To the mother of two students at the start of a parent-teacher interview, he asked: "Who do you want to talk about first? Dumb or Dumber?"
He told one student his mother was a "M.I.L.F." meaning a "mother I'd like to f---."
To a female Grade 10 student, Fabel said: "I was looking at Playboy magazine and saw someone who looked just like you."
He spoke about his own sexual activities and offered tips to male students on "how to get into girls' pants."
He mimicked an Italian accent and said Italians are fat and hairy and can only pursue careers in cement.
He referred to a student as "a retard from the sticks."

LOUISE BROWN
EDUCATION REPORTER

From praising Osama bin Laden and calling the Holocaust an "exaggeration" to telling students he'd like to have sex with their mothers, a former Windsor-area high school teacher is accused of having broken just about every taboo of civil conduct in class or out.

William Fabel is alleged to have dished out insults equally: Girls ("I'm a leg man; I have cameras hidden under all the girls' desks!"); boys ("How many of you guys would sleep with these girls for a million dollars?"); gays ("There's no room in the world for them"); Catholics ("That nun isn't getting any"); fellow teachers ("Go check them out at the strip club going down the pole"); the school principal ("If you want to laugh, picture the principal naked!"); and blacks ("Watch your back; I have a n----- friend who could fight anybody.").

In what is being called one of the more "outrageous" cases to come before the Ontario College of Teachers in the eight years it has overseen the province's teachers, Fabel is facing a disciplinary tribunal for charges of professional misconduct and incompetence three years after he was fired by the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board for a reported breach of the Safe Schools Act, which outlines acceptable conduct for teachers as well as students.

At the opening of his disciplinary committee hearing yesterday at the college headquarters in Toronto, Fabel denied all 26 complaints and the hearing was adjourned until Nov. 7 to allow both the college and Fabel to review new evidence that emerged this week. Fabel declined to comment, even to confirm he is in his early 40s or that he no longer teaches, even though he remains a certified teacher "in good standing" with the College of Teachers until the tribunal rules on his case.

But the type of racist, sexist and sexual comments of which the one-time history teacher is accused contradicts everything society expects of teachers, says college spokeswoman Lois Browne. "The outrageous nature of the remarks this teacher is alleged to have made are very unusual, and the college takes these sorts of complaints very seriously because teachers are supposed to be role models for our children," Browne said yesterday."When teachers are in charge of a class, parents, the public and other members of the profession expect that they will meet a set of behavioural standards, and these types of comments don't do it, in terms of racism and sexism and other grounds."

The Ontario College of Teachers referred Fabel to a disciplinary hearing for misconduct in 2003. But it has taken two years to come before a tribunal. This is partly because of the length of the investigation, said Browne, and partly because Fabel has requested several postponements. The college has not stated what penalty it will seek at the end of the hearing, but these could range from compulsory "sensitivity training" to revoking Fabel's teaching licence.

Costs of his legal defence are being paid by Fabel's former union, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, which typically pays the legal costs of teachers charged with offences when they were active union members, said association president Donna Marie Kennedy.A cluster of former colleagues who had come to Toronto to testify expressed frustration at another delay in a case that has dragged on for three years.

Fabel taught history, geography and sociology at St. Anne High School in Tecumseh, near Windsor, from 1997 to 2002, with the bulk of the complaints near the end of his tenure. Browne said about one-quarter of formal complaints against teachers that are filed with the college end up in disciplinary hearings, which are adjudicated by three educators.

Fabel's hearing was postponed at the request of lawyers for both Fabel and the Ontario College of Teachers, who said notes based on some witness testimony surfaced suddenly the day before, leaving neither side time to review them. Fabel graduated in 1988 from the University of Toronto's bachelor of education program."

Let's look at school vouchers a bit closer. What happens when a district introduces the system? All of the people who have the means and the time to take their kids to school at some location farther away will all go to the same magnet blue ribbon school. Can these schools take all these kids? Not likely. Some will be turned away. What about the kids whos parents rely on the school busses to get their kids to school? Do the school busses add extra routes to pick up kids in the inner city and take them off to suburbia? Not likely.

If you want someone to blame for your child not being challenged, blame Bush for his no child left behind program. It forces teachers to focus more on bringing the lowest students up to the middle rather than focus on the children who want to learn and are higher achievers. NCLB is educational socialism. If you want educational capitalism then shitcan NCLB. Ask yourself this. Why am I complaining about the public education system? Is it because my high achieving child isnt being challenged? Then blame NCLB. Or is it because my low achieving child isnt being morphed into a genius? Well then blame yourself. How people determine that the teacher is responsible for any of this is beyond me.

If the teachers were poorly skilled then all students in any given class should be testing low. Every class I know of has a wide range of test scores. I never hear of parents of the high achievers complaining. I only hear the low achievers parents complaining because they refuse to believe that their child that watches 8 hours of tv per day, plays nintendo and never reads could be the reason why he isnt a genius and its the parents fault.

Once again society is looking for someone else to blame for their bad parenting.

Huh...

I think the author of the No Child left behind program was Mr Ted Kennedy.

And Phel, my son isn't having trouble due to a non involved parent bucko. It's teachers playing hob and being flat out lazy.

Maybe your wife is a solid teacher and maybe she cares. But if you try to sell me a load of bullshit that she doesn't see a group of teachers who are just collecting pay I'll have to call bullshit.

Fandros

I am an education researcher.

Everyone thinks the U.S. education system is so horrible, but in reality our system does fair, and is slowly improving. The U.S. has some serious challenges that other countries do not have, such as large immigration of people that not as educated or trying to recover from the consequences of slavery / persistent poverty.

Everything in the political domain has an education response. People feel so strongly about education because they usually have a personal connection to the schools. And with how reactionary our politics have become, it has made education a constant pendulum of reforms swinging back and forth--especially since the last 23 years (A Nation at Risk). It is no surprise people are shouting back and forth over this proposition or that this thread is already 4 pages long.

If you care to read an account of history and a piece of research that puts forth some data rather than blathering diatribe, check out Tinkering Toward Utopia by Larry Cuban and David Tyack. It will give you a good perspective of the U.S. system and back up the above statements.

Finally, this proposition won't do anything but make the profession even more political. This is because the reform is aimed at school organization/staffing policies, which have historically had zero (or very small) impact on student learning. This might be because only about 5-10% of the variance in student outcomes is explained by school-level factors. If you want to get to the bottom of improving student achievement, you simply have to attack the real issue in education: improving instruction.

What is more upsetting is that schools generally do not have the leadership to recognize that ineffective teachers are simply left alone to repeat their poor instruction year after year. The solution isn't to fire them (frankly there are not many good teachers out of the box) but to coach them and train them. The poor excuse for professional development in this country today consists of school districts spending hundreds of thousands on consultants to come give speeches to or do workshops with teachers about various programs or new reforms. What we really need to do is attack instructional development with peer and mentor classroom observations and develop each teacher's capability over the long run, but it's hard to have a slow-moving reform like this in today's world where one educational reform replaces the next at a frenzied pace.

If you want some real data to support the instructional leadership approach, check out The Teaching Gap by James Stigler and James Hiebert. These guys went around the world and video taped lessons from classrooms in dozens of countries, and then studied how different societies approach classroom teaching. Japan (who the rabble rousers would probably cite as being at the top of the achievement ladder) has a radically different approach to teaching mathematics than the U.S. or even Germany. They focus heavily on collegiality and constantly peer-reviewing their lessons.

Anyway, education reform is not an overnight fix with any organizational mangagement proposition.

Xapp

Thanks for the input Xapp, good stuff.


Fandros

Fandros,,

How dare you accuse Kennedy of authoring the No Child Left Behind Act... He never does anything that fails... Everyone knows it is Bush's fault.. It always is..

Oh.. here is the proof you are right.. http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/releases/rel61704.html

Now, back to the original point of this thread. One problem we have, is you get teachers who take pride in thier job, they excel at what they do, and they make a difference. You get those same types of personalities in the private business sector, and many times they advance quickly because of thier merits. But, you do have teachers out there that could really give a shit, and are mainly looking to bring in the paycheck, and will do JUST enough to keep the job. I am willing to bet that if you look at the school systems that have high standards and a high graduation rate, you will find many more of the former type of teacher.

I do think that it really depends on the teacher... Once in college, I failed a class mainly because it was boring, I could not concentrate, had trouble following along.. ect.. I had to retake the same class, but this time I had a teacher that really interacted with the class, had unique ways of getting the information out, and made the class interesting. I got a 4.0...

This is a perfect example of the utter failure of education in our country. We allow political talking points carefully selected to avoid real debate to dominate a largely tangental discussion and completely obscure the underlying issues.

Sorry, hit post too early there.


We have something like four thousand years of experience with education, going back to Socrates, Plato, Zen, pick your philosophy at will, and extending all the way up through the Enlightment and Victorian eras of western thought that has almost uniformly considered education a liberal art. Try to shove our government subsidy business model that we like to pretend is a free market into it has been an unmitigated disaster. Students are a not a product of the education system. The education system can't have a product at all, it's completely antithetical to what learning and thinking are actually about.

What happens when you productize something is obvious. You start thinking you can quantify it, measure it, reduce it to assembly line processes, stamp it out better, faster, meaner, leaner, and most importantly cheaper. You develop metrics, you implement quality control on those metrics. The human mind is not made of metal, does not have rivets that are counted and tested. The day graduation became more important than learning, something fundamental was lost in the educational community. We keep going down that road, and every year we get more test, more achievement metrics, more business process management intrusion into it, to make it more efficient. And every single time that happens, the real education suffers.

It doesn't take a behavioral scientist to look at the social methods people learn by when they're outside the indoctrination factories we refer to as public schools. People posit ideas to their peers, discussions and arguments and periodically fisticuffs occur, and the group eventually reaches a consenus or two about what the solution or result is. The scientific method was codified out of this to directly counter things like confirmation bias, but is almost unchanged from the ideas about conceptual discovery and communication that existed for as long as people have been tallking and writing. Education isn't about memorizing facts, it's about exercising your brain the same way gym class exercises your legs.

The concept of this conversational education has been completely lost. People are afraid to deviate from anything outside curriculum that have been exactly measured and preapproved. And now we get this moronic idea that creating a revolving door of teachers, so they have no opportunity to learn from their OWN peers, to continue their own professional education from the people best capable of teaching them - other teachers - and instead metricize and measure and stick even more disincentives for anyone to THINK instead of producing, and focuses the people who should be starting that educational conversation with children on their own job security, their own metrics, their own "product." A teacher with a degree rubber-stamped on their forehead is not a finished product.

So now we have an entire generation of people who believe that everything is merely representative facts and opinions, nicely compressed into bite-size packages that can fit in between bells and TV commercials, arguing over the data about test scoring metrics and how we should make teachers compete in some joke of a "free market" economy to make them more efficient.

A "free market" in education would be to remove the government mandated "right to education" that all people are granted, and completely scrap the public school system. That would probably work out great for the 60% or so portion of the American populace that can afford it.

Thanks for posting that link, Shanno.

Knowing that Kennedy did indeed sponsor the No Child Left Behind FAIRNESS ACT(2004), which was to require the Department of Education to follow the rules in Bush's No Child Left Behind policy/program to prevent schools from being unfairly judged is a good thing to know.

Caps and Bold text are mine.

Here is another angle. A couple school years ago my wife had a very poor student who she decided needed to be held back for the benefit of the student. Needless to say the parent didn't take it too well. The parent complained to the principal, the student was not held back and my wife was more or less reprimanded for "improperly assesing" the kids performance.

In a nutshell the public education system suffers from poltical pandering to the constituents. Parents can complain about anything they disagree with, especially being told their "perfect genius johnny" is performing low. Everyone from the principal up is essentially a politican. Guess what politicians do when a constituent complains about one of the politicians subordinates? Knee jerk reactions in full force and huge shit snowballs come rolling downhill.

I am so fed up with this whole bullshit issue that from today I am going to seriously pressure my wife to go work in a private school. You armchair qb's can burn the public education system to the ground for all I care. I think my wife is actually being held back by the system because if it were a capitalist education system she would be making more money.

Phel, you don't understand. It's not the K-4 that I take umbrage with. As a whole that system hasn't changed in 30 years. Its lil more than teaching basics, coloring and hell abc's/123's. Where I start to find fault is the middle grades. Where the kids have more than one teacher and where kids are stuffed between the cracks and passed on rather than work'em.

Has your wife ever taught more/higher than the second grade?

Fandros

I will admit that I have been thinking alot about this. You are right, she has only taught first and second grade for her eight years of teaching. Yes there are some teachers at her school that aspire to be vice principles/principles so they half ass their teaching while they schmooze the uppers and the district. My wife is a damn good teacher and a very hard worker. She deserves better. Hence my last post about burning it down.

I have to say that I grew up in hawaiian gardens, ca. I had shitty teachers, shitty materials, shitty campuses, and shitty school mates. But you know what, I got an education. I had algebra in jr high, and calculus in high school. I dont sit on my pitty pot and blame teachers, schools, anyone, etc. Your kid doesnt doesnt know the first thing about a tough school, but you know what I was a good student so I learned something. People need to stop being fucking victims and blaming everyone else for thier failures. Is your kid not doing well at school? Then look in the mirror.

Students are the biggest problem, at least in my experience. I've spent ten years in the LAUSD and am very glad that I don't have to return. It might be a cesspit overall, but most of it is that way from the absence of repercussions.

In high school, about 10-20% of my fellow students were loud, disruptive dipshits on a daily basis (honors/AP classes tend to be an exception). In most cases, the teachers seemed _afraid_ to stand up to them, much less send them to the dean. Maybe they had ADHD, or domestic problems, or something of that nature. They didn't want to be there. The teachers probably didn't want them to be there. I sure as hell didn't want them to be there (on account of migraines rather than any desire to pick occasional grains of information from the blighted fields of LAUSD).

But rambling aside, there are a few ideas to be discussed.

1) Cut off mandatory education at eighth grade. That's the way it worked in Russia, and probably still does. It's better, IMO. If someone has no desire to continue on to high school, they shouldn't be there. (I've worked on and off for ages. The only skill I had to use extensively that I picked up after eighth grade is typing at a decent pace.)

2) Stop promoting kids to the next grade if they are failing the present material, however simple it may be. When a ninth-grader says (with a straight face) that Texas is one of the original 13 colonies, there's something wrong.

3) Stop the damned Harrison Bergeron-ing of the curriculum. If the course material is aimed at the lowest common denominator of academic ability/knowledge, ensure that the class consists of students of the lowest common denominator of academic ability/knowledge. Split up at least high schools into a system similar to the French one: math/science schools, liberal arts schools, and trade-inclined schools. Admission should be purely meritocratic. More categories (computer science, military, etc) would be nice as well.

4) Remove as much federal regulation as possible.

5) Sack most of the administrators. My old high school had four vice principals and four counsellors. The vice principals functioned as overpaid rent-a-cops. The counsellors had counseling work for all of two weeks at the beginning of each semester and joined the vice principles in their ever-vigilant patrols right after.

6) Make the curriculum more rigorous over time. I still get lab partners in college who wonder what the fuck a centimeter is.

7) Reduce the student-to-teacher ratio, preferably as part of Step 3.

8) The more condoms are distributed, the fewer kids the schools will have to deal with 12-18 years down the road. Abstinence is generally adhered to only by nervous nerds who are very unlikely to procreate prior to college regardless of sex ed (I speak from personal experience here) or deeply religious folks who opt out of the sex ed classes.

9) Send incompetent teachers to the better schools, and vice versa. Decent students will learn even if a trained monkey leads the class, moreso with peer interaction.

10) It's 1 AM and I'm procrastinating on my test preparations to ramble semicoherently on a message board for a game I haven't played in over a year. Go me.

In a nutshell the public education system suffers from poltical pandering to the constituents. Parents can complain about anything they disagree with, especially being told their "perfect genius johnny" is performing low. Everyone from the principal up is essentially a politican. Guess what politicians do when a constituent complains about one of the politicians subordinates? Knee jerk reactions in full force and huge shit snowballs come rolling downhill.

I am so fed up with this whole bullshit issue that from today I am going to seriously pressure my wife to go work in a private school.Very much agree, except it's worse in some private schools. Smaller population bringing in money means they really have to listen to parents sometimes, especially as parents see themselves as paying more money. I also looked at private schools, most of them didn't even pay as well as public and their standards for teachers and teacher training offered throughout the year were much lower than the public system. By all means though, if she'd be happier there give it a whirl, I'd be curious to know how it goes.

Willgatus - you've got some good points, and I'm too rushed this morning to address all of them other than to say quite a few of those have been tried and unfortunately often fail because...well...people seem to screw up anything good they start. The biggy is tracking students, so that a curriculum that caters to the lowest learning isn't holding others back. This became slightly abused, plus parents didn't like being told their student was a low achiever. Ugh, on that note I worked special ed for about a year once with a regular teacher helping with a staffing shortage. I saw parents pull crap you wouldn't believe to get severely handicapped students out of the program so they wouldn't be stigmatized or some crap like that.

My all time favorite was the kid who had fluid in his braid (or something), always wrote stories about how he saw his dad get shot, and mom comes in one day looking like she's straight out of the trailor park with seven toddlers around her - no joke here - screaming that her angel shouldn't be in special ed and he was just trying to get attention. Freakin' parents.

Fandros and Osgilliath, a note from yesterday. I'd personally fully support your decision to pull your kid and go elsewhere either through vouchers or force of will if you didn't feel they were getting a good education. BUT the catch is that it's a bandaid solution for your kid only. The whole system needs to be reworked. The small steps forward we've made in education over the last fifteen years would have been much easier if we could overcome problems outlined in threads like this. It's frustrating as a teacher because the problems are so obvious, solutions are everywhere, but the voters and the people in charge of school districts won't do what's needed.

Phel, ya wanna sling hash?

Look in the mirror huh...what a crock of shit. My son has 3 teachers who have them put their homework in a folder that they'll, or their lil assistants, grade sometime in the next week. Excuse me, how's that for feedback? Do you have kids ? Or ones that are in the grades I have a problem with?

My son is in 8th grade and I have him in Algebra , creative writing and a few other classes that he could've waited on a few more years. He's not failing btw ya git, he's struggling. Oh, and he's been reading at a college level for the last year....yeah I need a blasted mirror.

I have a serious problem with the teachers at this level and yes the administration governing them.

Your reply is I need a mirror. /chuckle How about I suggest you get more perspective, and have your wife move up to the middle grades. Perhaps she'll still be a powerfully motivated teacher. And perhaps she'll fade as most of them seem to be doing.

Really had to bite back a few biting comments Phel. You can thank me later that you're wife isn't spitting mad over your shoulder as she might have been had I posted my initial response to your lil stab.

Ahhh and again I don't want to hear your bullshit about how my kid, or anyone elses for that matter, don't know from tough. There are dedicated police officers that have to be on school grounds at all times. I walk the halls to visit the teachers during their breaks on a regular basis...the kids are outright thugs with a mouth that most sailors would blush at. The hands off and pussify them approach that was forced on us by liberal assholes has really made the teachers jobs life tough.

Here's my thought. If you remove tenure from teachers and admins...then teachers won't take positions unless they are given support. Hmmmm wow now what happens? Can you imagine? Let me paint it for ya....In order, after teachers will no longer simply take a paycheck to teach at a tough school there will have to be dramatic changes. I.E real changes and real support for the teachers. Right now I'd argue that the tenure situation actually hurts the teachers and the kids. I'm not saying fire the lemons, I'm saying coach and teach them as they do in the rest of the world. Identify them and work the problem, not hide them under tenure.

Fandros

I am just a few years removed form high school and personally I don’t see how Prop. 74 would help the school systems at all. The school district I come from is the 8th largest in California. My senior year in high school my school was pushing the 4000 student mark with about 5 other high schools all the same size within 5 miles of my school. It amazes me how fast it’s grown but I do believe that it’s is the root of the problems.

With such growth it’s hard to weed out bad teachers because, bad or not, they’re needed. If only good teachers get credentialed our high schools would be more like colleges with huge class sizes and very little discipline if any at all. I don’t see how extending the probationary period before a teacher reaches tenure will help anything at all.

If you remove tenure from teachers and admins...then teachers won't take positions unless they are given support. Hmmmm wow now what happens? Can you imagine? Let me paint it for ya....In order, after teachers will no longer simply take a paycheck to teach at a tough school there will have to be dramatic changes. I.E real changes and real support for the teachers.

Fandros, you have it exactly backwards. In case you haven't already figured it out, making teachers even *more* powerless than they currently are will not enable them to ask for anything - certainly not for radical changes to the system. I know it may sound counter-intuitive to you, but as someone who has been around the tenure system for quite a while now, I can tell you that as the current balance of power stands, it is only those professors with tenure that have the ability to push for anything at all - those without tenure who attempt to 'make waves' regarding enforcing standards, curriculum changes, or suggest that things should be done in any way other than a bottom-line approach simply don't get their contracts renewed. Introducing a system that allows the districts to keep teachers for long enough without any rights and what you get is a demoralized revolving door system that is even worse than what we currently have.

And there are *always* people desperate enough to take a job teaching in a tough school, and more often than not, they are underqualified - the Dallas Independant School District's "alternative certification" (one I have personal familiarity with, although it is typical of many districts with teacher shortages) program is already a joke, and by removing one of the primary *incentives* for going into teaching, you're only going to drive qualified folks out, not entice them in. Where is that 'support' you speak of magically going to come from?

Tenure does *not* mean that you can't be fired. It means that you can't be fired without cause, and without a hearing - that is all. Mainly, and most importantly, it means that you can't be fired simply for unpopular speech - which is *exactly* what is needed to make effective changes to curriculum and instruction in the wake of standardized-test, save-a-buck at all costs, education-as-widget manufacturing plant mania.

Yes, teachers need ongoing evaluation and training (by the way, the reason I was off the wire for a few days was because I was at the Texas Science Teachers Association conference in Houston, where several thousand science teachers were getting their required CEUs, and where I learned, among other things, how to extract and amplify DNA from Doritos in order to test for genetically modified corn :) ), but removing the very thing that makes it possible for them to effect change in the systems they teach in, as well as one of the few attractions to stay in a largely thankless and low paying field *isn't* going to make the current situation any better.

Regards,
Nydia

(huge aside follows)

At my own school, despite the fact that 60% of our incoming students are not college ready, that they need every bit of individualized instruction we can give them, and that low student/teacher rations are one of the primary benefits of attending a community college and what are primarily responsible for making it possible for these students to 'catch up', our College, in a desire to save a whopping $27,000 per year and break up one of the last bastions of integrity at our school (a high density of tenured professors in the College of Science), is trying to double science lecture class sizes and hire local BA/BS folks to teach the laboratory sections of the department's classes (thus also conveniently eliminating the need for 40% of the professors they currently have). Mind you, these students simply *need* more intense instruction than a minimally trained instructor can give them, and this change would be undoing what the school spent 20 years building in order to get their nursing program accredited and a reasonable graduation rate and success rate in 4 year colleges, and would occur in the face of financial aid changes that will no longer pay for a course after a student drops it twice.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! Yet, since the faculty doesn't actually have any power to do anything but recommend against these changes (and polish up their vitae), and the net effect will be a department even less capable of producing resistance to whatever rediculous money-saving, least-common-denominator-serving, anti-real education efforts to boost our enrollment and pass rates *on paper* that the College comes up with in order to look good and keep the State and federal money flowing in, it looks like a win/win for the board, and will probably happen even though the medium to long term effect will be highly detrimental to both the students and to the College.

Things at the public schools don't happen much differently, and that is one reason the underfunded 'No Child Left Behind' act has been such an unmitigated disaster. Since funding was tied to passing test scores, districts made it clear that teachers were supposed to get those passing scores by whatever means necessary, which meant more often than not pitching anything that looked like actual brain-developing, critical-thinking stimulating, holistic style instruction in favor of 'teaching to the test'. Being from Texas, where we've had this system for just over a decade now, the community colleges are now having to do CPR on these kids' atrophied logical and critical thinking faculties, not to mention the attitude they bring due to having been bored out of their skulls by what passes for 'education' under this system.

There is a business management model currently used in retail (think Walmart and/or Cub Foods as examples) whereby people are hired as part-time employees, giving them minimal access to benefits and a set schedule for increased pay; when employees get "seniority" and are nearing the plateau of full-time employment, it is not uncommon that they will be laid off or fired for "just cause" (although many states do not require just cause for firing) which allows the employer to hire new people who will start at the bottom of the scale, saving wages and benefit costs.

Arnold is simply applying that same model to the teachers. Time for him to return to acting.

Isn't it nigh impossible to really prove cause tho Nydia? Top that off with marginal teachers never being put to the "cause" and your arguement defeats itself.

Outside the educational arena there is similar problems. The Union keeps marginal and outright deadbeats on the payroll. Making it night impossible to rid a workforce of slugs that drag down productivity and morale. I put forth that tenure and the teaching unions lock things in similarly.

Tenure doesn't give protection to the kids or the system. Tho I'd agree things need to change above the teachers level as well.

Fandros

Right to work states are common Bly. It doesn't equate to lower wages or other such Union urban legends. You still require skilled labor to get the job done. The only areas that you see such rampant firing/high turnover are in retail and other low skilled areas.

Fandros

Isn't it nigh impossible to really prove cause tho Nydia? Top that off with marginal teachers never being put to the "cause" and your arguement defeats itself.


So you want to create a system with nothing BUT marginal teachers?

I don't see how many more ways people can reiterate this to you Fan, but this proposition does absolutely nothing productive to solve anything other than reducing California's education budget. It is a purely a business move, and has nothing to do with getting better teachers. We're not talking about some fast-moving multi-million dollar industry with jet set superstars making bank while a bunch of dullards ride their coat-tails and drag the system down because they have tenure and can now shoot up heroin on the job without fear of getting fired.

Again I'll restate it to you Malse. I think 74 has many faults. I just used it to start a discussion about a massive problem that needs dealing with.

Being a teacher is one of the most important job fields we have. And as such it should have checks and balances that have nothing to do with politics. I'd also argue that with those checks and balances that good teachers get better pay.

Fandros

Then you should hate 74, because it's going to make the profession even more political, and the likelihood of teachers getting better pay out of having less job security is frankly comical because the exact opposite is true in the rest of the world.

/sigh

Malse, have problem with reading 101?

74 is only interesting because it's someone trying to do something that's long overdue. I'm not even a resident of Cali, thank gods, and hardly a supporter of that quagmire they call an education system over there.

What I'm saying...and please to listen....is that something needs doing. It's a line of discussion here, not a supportive action.

Fandros

And malse, the only place it's true that less security means less pay is the min wage jobs.

In the rest of the world a shortage of highly skilled workers that'll take a job means higher pay not the other way around. Which begs me to ask, what field are you in?

Fandros

Here, this is more inline with what I'm thinking.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/10/31/teacher.pay.ap/index.html

Biggest opponents to this say personal objectivity could become involved. With teachers and administrators that don't get along becoming a problem.

Just like the rest of us. We have folks upset that Federal employees are soon going to be without their automatic raises.

I say, let it be so!

Fandros

I work for a company that provides SCADA systems to control power distribution networks to about half the civilized world. The reason there aren't unions and similiar such organizations amongst my working peers is that we haven't *needed* them yet, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have benefitted from it. Other high paying professions (hello doctors and lawyers) have their own guild/union-like organizations in many countries to protect their interests and I have yet to see any indication that such organizations implicitly promote incompetence in the work place.

If you're going to ding me on failing to read your regurgitation of absurdly unsupportable assertations, perhaps you should actually join the discussion amongst the people who have more than 3 line posts about the hows and whyfors of the current educational morass. It's not like you're illucidating us to the presence of bad teachers - we've all been through school too.

It's clear to everyone who I'm ever spoken with, regardless of profession, that the linking of a laughably artificial metric of student achievement to teacher salary and job security would be hugely counterproductive because we've already seen what happens when you link school funding, departmental funding, etc, to it. The result of which, if you want the cliff notes so you don't have to read the thread, is a systematic replacement of real education with ScanTron 101.


Biggest opponents to this say personal objectivity could become involved.

You've got me on reading 101 there though, I have no idea what that sentence means.

You seem to be basing your argument on the idea that bad teachers never get fired, which is patently untrue. There is nowhere you can go where gross incompetence will not get you fired except upper management (or the White House, lately!). On the other hand, we have seen the exact same effect repeated over and over in dozens of industries when it becomes easier to replace veteran employees with cheaper ones. The overly "achievement oriented" business-logic stupidity infesting educational politics has already done huge amounts to reduce pre-collegiate teachers to unskilled labor.


Edit: Having read through the CNN article about the CO ProComp initiative, I'd have to say that sounds better in general but I haven't read further on it to make any real comments. The main thing I like is a net overall increase in teach pay, which will bring in more people and create more competition for positions, which does have a documented association with increases in overall job performance.

Sorry for the ding, was patently out of line on my part.

Let's not get derailed into a Pro Union/anti union arguement. I've tons of dislike and experience for the Unions of today.

Fandros

Since we've already have a sort of performance pay system (In Arizona, a right-to-work state where while we have unions, they don't have much power), can I point out some of the immediate problems? These are facts, not what-ifs.

- Schools, often from the top down, enforce cheating. Like it or not, it happens. One school in our area was heavily fined (um, somehow?) a few years back for basically teaching students the answers from the test. The administration had given out the instruction to do so.

- Grade inflation, already a huge problem, will increase. Should I pass my students and get paid (or even keep my job), or grade accurately and not get paid more?

- Teaching to standardized tests ignores a large part of the curriculum. Ever read federal, state, or district standards for a given subject? At least in Arizona they're very comprehensive and it takes the entire year to get through most of them. Tests don't cover them all - if we continue the trend of teaching to tests you'll see less comprehensive material being taught. Annoyed at high school students who don't know what a prepositional phrase is or what the Mexican-American War was? Too bad, those weren't on the state test.

- As noted somewhere above, different classes have very different aptitudes. Kinda sucks if you're the teacher with the eight students who barely speak English being graded against a teacher who lucked out and only has one. And no, they don't balance out over a year, classroom dynamics vary a great deal from year to year.

- Here's the one that isn't a fact, just an observation. As a teacher I'm expected to cover more than the curriculum. I'm regularly asked (literally asked) to be a mentor to students, introduce material that helps them grow as an individual, mediate disputes, and basically raise kids for their parents. Show me a standardized test for that or a way to base my pay off time expected for that. That's even in some of the standards.

Lack of objective observers sounds like a union line, and has little to do with the problem.

Fandros I usually agree with your posts and they often seem well thought out, but it seems here you're pretty quick to lump teachers into a lazy group as a whole, especially middle school on up. I could do the same with any profession. These are quick fix solutions that are being proposed, and they neglect the reason why you find mediocre teachers in the system.

Two points worth restating. 1. The public needs to take education seriously, fund it correctly, and enforce parent behavior that detracts from the schools. 2. The school system needs a complete overhaul that puts the pay and emphasis back on those in the classroom.

Everything else is a band-aid fix.

Think you mean me and not Favras. ;) I'll take the compliment either way. ;P

Not all teachers are bad, not by a long shot. But I do feel as though they've been given the shitty end of the stick and aren't expected to live up to high standards.

By that I mean I believe the tenure system rewards everyone past X amount of years. I certainly wouldn't want to imply the teachers that live/breath and eat their jobs.

Fandros

Yup, definately meant you, sorry about that.