Why Is It So Difficult To Fire Bad Teachers? 1322
Ant writes with this depressing story about how public schools sometimes work: "This six-page Los Angeles Times article shares its investigation to find 'the process [of firing poor teachers] so arduous that many school principals don't even try (One-page version), except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare ...'"
Labor Economics (Score:4, Interesting)
Seeing the result of poor education is an easy task. It's even easy to identify poor teachers by merit and/or performance... The difficulty comes in establishing universal standards that will do that by a set of static rules. Of course there are the pandemic issues with unions and so on. My spouse is a teacher, and several friends I graduated with are in education, and the story (at least in Colorado) is the same: The Union only steps in for members of the herd that are to be culled. In more... sane... states (our state is the lowest in Higher Education funding by several orders of magnitude) your mileage may vary.
Blame teachers of course (Score:1, Interesting)
And we have serious shortage of teachers with ineffectual administrations, apathetic parents and disinterested communities who want someone else to fix *their* schools they don't bother to get involved with.
But, as usual, let's focus on the teachers.
Which is why I didn't go into teaching.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's Simple (Score:1, Interesting)
There are too many of them. Whatever tests they have to take to become authorized to teach aren't working.
I've had maybe 5 good teachers, out of say the 7 new teachers I get each semester for the last 10 or so years. ~5/700.
Of course there were some ok teachers, some nice teachers, but only 7 or so that could actually teach.
All the rest were either teachers so they could feel smart, teachers so they could order people around, or a few were teachers just so they could get money.
I'm in highschool, and I have a teacher who doesn't attend class when she doesn't feel like it. Sometimes she hires a substitute even when she's in the room messing with the gradebook but not grading anything (or watching youtube, she seems to enjoy doing that during work hours as well). She doesn't really teach us anything. The worst part is, most people who take Spanish 2A in our highschool were not doing well in spanish (otherwise they'd have taken the faster class in middle school), so a bunch of Ds on the midterm doesn't turn any heads.
The whole class constantly complains about her to the principle, but nothing is ever done. If you walk in to "guidance" and start to say
"My teacher isn't prepar-"
The staff will quickly cut you off, as they've heard it before.
"Oh you mean Mrs. [removed name]?"
I come from a private school in Toronto (Score:1, Interesting)
Which had, at one point, literally gotten in trouble for teaching beyond the curriculum. Apparently, Grade 9 students are "children" and cannot understand the concept of acceleration.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a great quote from the article:
Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.
Either the journalist is a product of the LA school system or the LA school system mandates that teachers show up late.
More to the point, however, is that this is actually not such a bad system, no matter what populist journalists wishing to stir up anti-(government|teacher's union) sentiment says. As somebody with managerial experience in the federal government, I can attest that establishing a pattern of misconduct is a very effective way to get people fired. However, it requires that administrators keep their paperwork in order. There has to be a written record in place establishing that the misconduct actually happened. This requirement is a good thing in government positions because it keeps people from getting fired for political reasons and thus helps prevent nepotism and cronyism. The horror stories that you hear about the impossibility of firing bad employees always come from inept administrators who could not be bothered to properly manage their personnel and want to blame the system for their failings.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense, we have complained about our son's teacher many times. She gives them incorrect information and punishes them for what the previous class did. Many of the parents in the community have complained and even petitioned the local school board to fire her, however she is repeatedly found to be not at fault and her job is kept. California is suffering huge losses of teachers due to budget problems this year, and out of all the ones who were fired, the one or two bad apples aren't in the list.
It seems that just being a bad teacher isn't enough to have your teaching job pulled in California. All you need is some seniority and a union to back you up and you're not going anywhere... ever.
Fire them school-by-school (Score:2, Interesting)
I just had a conversation this weekend about a policy tried with some success in Chicago. When an entire school has an egregious record of underperforming, fire everyone in the building and start over. Make them re-apply for their jobs. (I tried searching for an article to support this story just now, but I couldn't find one.)
Obvious--Teachers' Unions (Score:5, Interesting)
Its easy. Teachers' Unions have no incentive to do anything but gain as much money and power for the teachers as possible. They are not there for the students. Students don't vote or pay dues to the union.
Unfortunately, boards of education have been fairly powerless. There is this myth of the "Virtuous Teacher" who is perfect in all ways, makes minimum wage, and would solve all the worlds problems if only they had a little more resources. This is reinforced by the media, both in moves and TV as well as reporters. The truth is that teachers are regular people, there are good and bad ones. But if you try to stand up to the union, you are demonized as an "evil teacher hater". Nevermind the fact that test scores haven't gone up despite hundreds of billions of dollars in spending increases. Or the fact that we spend over $12,000 PER STUDENT in Atlanta and D.C., two of the lowest performing school districts in the country!
I have alot of respect for teachers. In fact, I have often thought about going into teaching High School after I retire as a way of giving back. I would not have made it to where I am without the exceptional work of many caring teachers. But I also had to put up with more than a few worthless, incompetent teachers who didn't care one bit about actually teaching. They came in with no preparation, read straight out of the book, and gave completely worthless exams. It was absolute torture having to sit there for 60-90 minutes a day, every day, with someone getting paid to waste my time. Back in High School myself and many others wondered how they could keep their jobs. Now I know.
Hopefully the tide is turning. If a paper like the LA Times is criticizing the union there maybe hope yet. We now need some boards to stand up to the unions.
Is this just USA? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a teacher myself of 11 years (UK, Science) I can say that this is not the situation here. Sure, some teachers are disliked more than others - it goes with the job - but by and large (and I mean 95%) we work well with our students and they work well with us. We enjoy each others interaction in the classroom and around school, have a laugh and learn some interesting stuff.
We don't go around picking on kids and watching youtube instead of teaching. What kind of pride in your job would that give?
I don't have any experience of the US high school system but it seems to have fallen apart for the majority of kids. Is this, sadly, the case? Or have teachers been singled out as a scapegoat for the failings of US society? I genuinely can't believe that American teachers are so universally awful.
Easy to fire anyone in the USA (Score:3, Interesting)
Just put a few drops of hashish oil into their coffee each day. The amount is so small that they won't feel stoned, and it will accumulate in their bodies.
Then after a week or so, call them in for a 'random' urine test. The test will show (horror upon horror!) molecular traces of THC in their urine and you will have NO PROBLEM firing them, denying them unemployment, getting them thrown out of public housing, getting any professional license revoked, and just generally screwing up their All-American lifestyle forever.
Works every time. Done in the USA to hundreds of people daily for twenty years now.
Seriously, it's how we got rid of the asshole gung-ho Neidermeier officers back in the 1980's when I was in the US Navy. One positive test and they were gone: no appeal, no second-test review, no $2000 gas-spectraography review confirmation, no nothing. A few drops a day and the assholes disappear. Took the JAG years to realize that we were doing this, but we were out of 'service' by then.
It's like judo. You use your opponent's fanaticism against them.
But time has passed and wounds have healed. If you were booted out of the military for failing a drug test and you are the kind of person who never did or never would get high, then it probably happened to you. Think back about who you were seriously pissing off at the time. It was probably one of us.
We're not sorry. The military is better place because we did it. There was no permanent, endless war at the time and this was the easiest way to get rid of the psychos who would have gotten us all killed when the PEW finally arrived after 9/11.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually a high school department chair, so I know a little about this issue. The problem is not finding good teachers. There are actually a lot of good applicants whenever an opening occurs in my department. The problem is the difficulty in getting rid of bad teachers. The process even where I live, a state without unions, is tremendously difficult. It can be done, but it isn't easy.
Personally, I believe this issue is the primary one impacting our students' success. If we could fire bad teachers, we could get rid of the concept of merit pay, incentives and all the other band-aid-on-a-broken-arm solutions.
How Do I Fire an Incompetent Teacher? (Flowchart) (Score:5, Interesting)
This is for NYS:
How Do I Fire an Incompetent Teacher? (Flowchart) [reason.com]
Why is it so hard to fire bad CEOs? (Score:1, Interesting)
Welcome to more right wing union bashing. If you are asking why is it so hard to attack union members, why aren't you asking some of these questions?
Why is it so hard to fire incompetent and corrupt Wall Street managers who have nearly destroyed the world economy?
Why is it so hard to stop subsidies for agribusiness that force Americans to pay more for food? Why is the government subsidizing inefficient environmentally destructive corn based ethanol production?
Why are tax rules and subsidies going for so-called "clean coal", which is about as stupid a phrase as "safe heroin"?
Why is it impossible to end huge boondoggle weapons programs intended to fight the cold war, which has been over for 20 years? Why don't we spend money on the kind of asymmetrical combat that is the major problem in the 21st century?
Why does the government support a pharmaceutical industry that kills people for profit? Why are drug companies allowed to suppress clinical trials that show their products are useless or unsafe?
Why are overseas produced products, including food, drugs, and toys allowed to poison people?
Why are defense contractors working in the middle east completely uncountable for their behavior, including murder, rape, and killing military personal because of bad electrical wiring?
Why are corporations allowed to write legislation that guarantees they make money no matter what they do? Why are there no negative consequences for bad corporate behavior (RIAA, Microsoft, predatory lending, credit card interest/fees)?
Why are willfully ignorant religious morons making technical and scientific policy? Why are people who deny evolution and think that the universe is only 6000 years old in charge of responding to global pandemics and developing environmental crises like climate change>
Just wondering...
Re:Labor Economics (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't happen just in california (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny you would say that. I AM a Hungarian-American student. I grew up in Budapest, Hungary and moved to the USA at the age of 18, after finishing high school in Hungary. I am currently in the nursing program at my local community college and what I see in every single class is part frightening, part infuriating.
Young American college students (I take night classes, so their ages range between 18 and 50 in my class) are awful. They lack the most basic respect, which they display by talking shit about any teachers they don't like as soon as the teacher turns away. Many send and receive text messages on their cellphones all the time despite clear instructions that forbid doing so. Many act like not understanding something is the teacher's fault for not being able to explain things right, at which point they give up entirely and sigh audibly.
I'm taking basic college level chemistry and, forget kids not being prepared to go to college, the MAJORITY of my chemistry class cannot do FRACTIONS and PERCENTAGES. How do you expect these people to go anywhere near college? These are the kinds of things they were supposed to master by age 10. No wonder they can't do even simple chemistry which involves balanced chemical equations. The entrance test for my program involves basic algebra (the stuff you study in high school by grade 10). A student has to have a combined FIFTY PERCENT math score to pass and be eligible to become a Registered Nurse, yet many fail brutally. They fail using decimal numbers. Fractions. Percentages. These are the same people who will be measuring out your morphine after you get carted into the ER.
Nursing students in particular are terrible. They don't want to learn how the distribution of ions in an IV bag breaks down, or what it even means, because "it will be on the bag and explained anyway" -- god forbid they ever get into a situation where they don't have everything written down, pre-measured out, chewed, and digested for them. They lack critical thinking or the desire to have any.
My chemistry teacher sheepishly told me that I'm flying through his class while my fellow students are failing at a 50% rate because I'm used to a more intense method of lecturing back home. I told him he was wrong. He lectures just fine. He's just not used to having decent students in his class.
Don't even get me started on English or writing essays.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:4, Interesting)
Note: I do not live in the US.
In the Netherlands, where I live, we have a seperated the high-school classes based on your learning capacity. If you are smart, you will be able to visit the higher high-school classes, if you aren't you will go to the lower classes. We now have 4 distinct levels(more or less), and the highest level is split in two where people in the higher class of the two get taught greek and/or latin.
The ability to maintain control is different for the different levels of students and it is widely known and accepted that people in level 1 are much harder to control than people in level 4 although you will always have problems with teaching in every level if you can't keep order.
Thankfully, people in level 4(where I have studied) mostly take their work seriously and I learned in a mostly healthy environment partially because of that.
I have dozens of examples of teachers who had limited to no authority and without exceptions the learning process was disturbed by that. Effects ranged from taking the teacher not seriously in class to outright insulting them in public and actively trying to get them to leave by means of causing distress.
Re:Public education... (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoa! Slow down tiger. I don't disagree with some of what you are saying, but the vitriolic rhetoric will get us nowhere. I would humbly suggest you go into the classrooms you're talking about and see what is going on. Don't pick one, that wouldn't be quite fair. There are actually a lot of wonderful schools that are working to produce independent thinkers (don't read as liberal). These students will be very successful in the world, both in a job and in more abstract endeavors.
What I'd like is a reasoned discussion about what is working and what isn't. I'd argue saying limit the course work to what matters is a pretty complex suggestion. So, what do we see as valid? What is the mission of schools? Who gets to decide?
Now the pay raise point, you can scream that to the heavens!
Re:Simple answer (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife teaches at a public high school in Missouri. It's actually fairly easy (at least in her building) to get rid of a teacher who doesn't work out -- one guy lasted only for his contracted year before his contract wasn't renewed, and another guy who's been dragging his heels at finishing his certs is leaving at the end of May, after maybe three years.
Here's how: (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's how you get rid of a teacher: make their life miserable. My IT teacher quit his job, and here's how the school board bastards got rid of him:
He was teaching his Security class, showing us how to use BackTrack, Wireshark, Nmap etc... He has been teaching this class for years. His superiors recently decided that they don't want him around anymore, so they started complaining to the school board that he is teaching students "hacking" and they will all become criminals, etc. They would make up new lies about him every week. They even threatened to call the police so he would stop teaching kids "how to commit crimes". So he decided one day that he's had enough and would quit. Interestingly, once he submitted his resignation letter all his problems went away. All the treats stopped. The school would pay his salary until the end of the school year and then he would leave. So for the rest of the semester we would just waste time and played video games in class instead of learning, because he couldn't teach the class anymore.
So there went one of my favorite teachers. Most of the teachers in my high school were incompetent fools who have never deserved their jobs, but they all stayed. None of them were fired. I feel like I was denied an education.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, they are redefining it. Their music and clothing often becomes the norm.
The Freshwater case is a prominent example of this (Score:4, Interesting)
NYC Rubber Room (Score:1, Interesting)
While firing teachers may be difficult, getting them out of the classroom isn't in NYC.
I first heard about this via "This American Life" on NPR, but this site summarizes it nicely:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/32769 [librarything.com]
My father was a local teachers' union president for two years. The grievance system can be quite arduous, however many local board members and superintendents were pretty efficient at finding ways to fire teachers or make their job so miserable they quit.
All that said, for us to 'fire' teachers seems to imply that we believe that teachers cannot learn and retrain to become better teachers. Isn't that ironic?
Re:two reasons. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, are you cherry picking your data.
1) Tenure is good as long as it is appropriately given out. As in, not like candy. Though, arguably it isn't appropriate for high school teachers.
2) That psychotic (no not delusional, you clearly don't know what you're talking about) episode was the result of mental illness (or rarely another medical condition). Though you (among others) might not be comfortable with someone who is mentally ill teaching kids, as long as it is treated (yes, this can and most of the time is successfully treated) there really isn't any problem. And I can tell you now that you wouldn't even have the faintest clue about whether that is going on when the illness is properly treated.
3) She was able to keep her job, not because of the union, but because of labour law. There are many a law to protect the ill and that includes mental illness. The only problem would be if this teacher refused treatment, then there would be a safety issue. That would allow the school to take further action.
4) She would have changed schools not because of the outburst, but because of its social repercussions. As in, it would be *very* difficult, if not impossible, to control those kids after something like that happened. Never mind similar things beyond that classroom.
5) In case you haven't gotten the theme here, there is a difference between a bad teacher and someone who is ill. There is a difference. You should get to know it.
Re:who defines bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's exactly the point. Also, you can't assume that all children and all parents are well-meaning in their complaints. I certainly went to school with some first class jackasses, and often the parents weren't much better. They define a "good" teacher as one that defines little Johnny an "A", even if their miserable child blew off all the work. And it's not unusual for a kid to lie as well. Didn't any of you have the kid in class who would try to get a teacher in trouble?
Add in the locally-elected school board, and teach a subject like literature or history or science, and it's a recipe for someone with an axe to grind complaining about every little bit in the course content - not how it's taught, or whether the kids are doing well, but rather what is taught. Because they're a nut. It would be great to fire bad teachers, but in a lot of cases, administrators, parents, the kids and the school boards are more likely to get rid of the really good teachers, maybe a few rotten ones, and leave nothing but the barely adequate.
In my educational experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I did have a handful of good teachers. Namely, two good middle school science teachers, my sociology teacher, 20th Century History teacher, CAD teacher, art teacher (I made a bong mug), and good elementary teachers (until public school. Although they were about as friendly as Catholic school nuns are widely supposed to be). That's it. And, those teachers were the ones always getting into it with the administration. The most wildly incompetent teachers were the ones in the administration's best graces. My sociology teacher couldn't get textbooks for his class, for example.
A large part of the problem is the incompetent teachers. They have no interest in emphasizing retention. Starting College Algebra, but don't remember how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions? No problem, the first month of the class will be spent reviewing it! It is very much the case that the further you progress through the curriculum, the less you are expected to remember. Instead of booting the kids who can't handle fractions out of the College Algebra course and sending them back to a more appropriate course, the curriculum is dumbed-down to fit them (I once had to make up a test in College Algebra, along with a classmate a year ahead of me who was about to graduate valedictorian. We were sitting out in the hall, and I was breezing through the test, while my classmate looked quite perplexed, stuck on the first problem. Finally, she turned to me and asked "What does perimeter mean?" God I hate this country...). As a result, your average and above-average students not only don't learn the material they should, but they often lose confidence and interest in school in particular, and learning in general (luckily I still enjoy learning, I just chose to learn out of the state-sponsored daycare/prison).
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, in pretty much any other field it's rediculously easy to fire someone for cause.
So that brings up the pretty obvious question of "what's so special about teaching"?
Is is a generic sort of "you can't fire a government worker" problem, or is it somethings specific to teaching?
What besides a Union is going make it not trivial to fire someone for incompetence?
Re:Public education... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe I was lucky, but I felt that I had a good many teachers who really cared about their students, and wanted to see them learn and succeed. Sure, there were some awful teachers in the mix, but I really felt they were outnumbered by the dedicated ones.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
The truth is however, success in the USA is 20% effort and 80% connections.
But as to education, a lot of the poorer performing students simply had a very negative attitude in general, and idolized sports players or music artists.
Culture is a BIG drive behind how one perceives value in education, and I think the targets should be parents and cultural figures, who should be instilling an appreciation of learning and in general "figuring things out". Fostering curiosity is key. It kills me to see rappers or other artists bragging about how successful they are and how easy it is to be so. It is a false image of what life is really like.
Vouchers (Score:2, Interesting)
The only way I see to fix the system is with vouchers. This is the only way to have competition within a state-funded education system.
If a teacher's students' parents all transfer their kids to another school because the teacher is incompetent, there's no commission that can save that teacher's job: the school will have no money to pay him/her. That's the extreme case, but short of that, the schools that provide the best education will get the most students.
I realize there are some likely problems with vouchers, such as the money getting spent on religious education. That's a valid concern, but (a) I think it can be addressed to some extent and (b) compared to the ongoing train wreck we have now, I don't see it as so terrible.
Despite being a generally center-left voter, I have always thought vouchers were a stellar idea. (Think "single-payer education".) The ongoing antipathy the Democrats have to them just shows, to me, that they're in the unions' pockets. But why more parents don't demand them just mystifies me.
Re:Is this just USA? (Score:3, Interesting)
My experience with my friends who were teachers is that they had to work 7am to 10pm to keep up with the required paper work and grading. They finally burned out. They didn't get to pick their own curriculum- they taught to what was assigned by the state.
Combined with the low pay.. it overall seemed like a sucky job. Except for the 3 months off. But lately it's more like 2.5 months off.
Re:Labor Economics (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you not see the conflict of interest in this? Do you really believe that most high school students are capable of differentiating a teacher who cannot explain material from a teacher who simply teaches to a high standard and who won't spoon feed his/her students? There is a difference between a genuinely bad teacher and a teacher who expects his students to learn for themselves. Giving students the power to fire their teachers will lead, in my opinion to a system where teachers are afraid to push their students, where they are afraid to give hard tests, and where they are afraid to not all but give the answers to tests out before giving the tests.
I have always thought that if students are treated as consumers, and teachers as service providers, then the market will provide what the typical consumer wants: high grades with as little effort as possible. If teachers are to serve their public service role of training competant citizens, then they must have the power to, at times put pressure on their students.
Re:you know (Score:3, Interesting)
The ones making $75,000 a year and up are the problems. They are on all of the boards and they are insulated from ever losing their jobs. In most systems, after the administration goes through all of the hoops that are necessary to try to terminate the employment of a tenured teacher, a review board composed of tenured teachers has to approve the termination. This is supposed to compensate for the fact that teaching is hard to evaluate. In reality, this allows the tenured teachers to create an environment where they can collectively keep their jobs in the face of almost any situation.
Re:Right wing union wharrgarbl (Score:3, Interesting)
Paid a salary that is pathetically poor for people of high intelligence and education.
For as long as I can remember, college students declaring their major as teaching have had horrible SAT scores. Here is a recent example: http://blogs.tampabay.com/schools/2008/09/sat-scores-of-t.html [tampabay.com]
So, there goes the theory that K-12 teachers are more intelligent than the average high school graduate, let's work on the salary theory. The average teacher salary in New York is almost $60,000. Not too bad. Teachers rank just behind computer scientists and dentists in average hourly pay. They also have great benefits and are some of the few people left in the US who can retire with a full pension while still of working age.
Summary: decent pay, great benefits, job security, dumb people.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to break this to you, but community college in the US is basically "High School, Take 2." If you want to judge American students, that's fine-- in fact I bet most of your observations are still correct-- but please do so at a REAL university.
Re:Is this just USA? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've taught in both the UK (3 years) and the USA (2 years so far), and it really depends on the school and the culture of the surrounding community. As a new teacher, I found that I was forced to teach every year group and as a result I had to prepare lessons for 7 distinctly different classes and age groups every week. I also had to stand outside during breaks and lunch, and also cover for sick teachers during my free hours.
Other teachers viewed this as the way things were, and wouldn't negotiate with me for less of a variety of classes. I work best when I can focus on one topic and make it fun. I couldn't keep up in the UK, and I was seen by many parents and other teachers as not doing enough even though I was putting in 60-70 hour weeks. I ended up quitting and returning to the USA.
Back in America, I am teaching math, and English. Even with teaching two subjects, I'm only preparing lessons for 4 distinctly different groups of students (my math classes are all 7th grade). This is a lot less work for me, and I can put a lot more effort into teaching interesting and fun lessons. I actually feel like I'm teaching instead of babysitting for the first time in my career.
It sounds like you have a good situation in the UK. I wouldn't suggest switching schools too easily. While I do prefer some aspects of the English education system, my overall experience favored the American system over the English one. YMMV
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:3, Interesting)
Without being a jerk, I would observe that part of the problem might be the cohort you're observing, since most students with anything going for them academically and intellectually will attend four-year colleges and universities straight out of high school rather than community colleges. Although it's possible to receive an excellent education at them and lousy educations at four-year schools (see the book Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education [jseliger.com] for more), by and large there's a reasonably strong correlation between school ranking and achievement of the students within.
If you were at, say, the University of Chicago rather than a community college, you'd be getting a very different experience.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
Duh (Score:3, Interesting)
This is seriously a mystery for some people? It's because they work for the government. They get away with being "bad" teachers because there's no motivation not to be bad teachers.
It's not like people have a choice. What are they gonna do? Send their kids somewhere else? Stop paying the portion of their taxes that pays bad teachers? Good luck.
If the government is going to have anything to do with education (which it shouldn't) there should be a voucher system where the government pays for schooling, but the actual schooling is provided by privately run schools. It's no big surprise to anybody that the people most against voucher systems are the teachers unions, filled with bad teachers.
Re:Public education... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Public education... (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with you 100%. But this is definitely a resource problem. Ask most parents, and they would agree they would like to see better student/teacher ratios. Ask them if they are willing to pay twice as much in state and local taxes to achieve this, and I suspect you'll get a much different answer! Other than relying more heavily on volunteers and getting rid of some district administrative staff, I really don't know how to deal with this issue.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I take my first teaching job, assuming I do it here in Nebraska, I will go from ~$32,000/yr to ~$28,000 if I don't do anything but teach. That's a huge cut when a person has three kids to feed, but it is what I love doing. Sure, I'd love to get paid more, but I also want kids to learn from people who LOVE teaching.
Please forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't you have 3 months a year to do some other work to make up a chunk of that difference? Or do teachers end up working during summer break?
Re:Simple answer (Score:3, Interesting)
How about "judging by complaints?" If you get complaints about the teacher from parents (that aren't about the teacher being too difficult or strict -- i.e., not unreasonable or stupid on the part of the parents) then listen to them and fire the teacher. It's really that simple!
In every single one of those cases, the teacher should just fail the student, or kick him out (to detention or elsewhere; it doesn't matter where as long as he's not disrupting class anymore), or do whatever needs to be done. It doesn't matter whether the dumbass administrators will "back up" the teacher or not, because the teacher will not get fired, no matter what (as per the article).
Either that, or the article is wrong. And if you're going to claim that, then you had better be able to prove it!
Re:Simple answer (Score:2, Interesting)
In terms of producing obedient and unquestioning assembly-line workers for the manufacturing and (increasingly) service industries? It's working great!
If you thought "educated" meant "capable of thinking critically and understanding important scientific, social, and political issues" -- well, that was never what "public education" was for, anyway.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the USA we have, and/or had, similar systems. It tends to vary by state/district and I've been in so many it has blurred. Most schools had a concept of "gifted/regular/remedial" in some fashion. The advantages I think are obvious, but this model has always been under attack. It seems the schools prefer to mix capabilities, trying to drive mediocrity instead of excellence. Good training for the corporate world, but I digress.
The only compelling argument against the segregation approach is that teachers too wish to teach the more eager, more docile elite, than to deal with the remedial students who in many cases may be dangerous, but certainly more troublesome. As a result, remedial teachers tend to teach remedial students, making a bad situation worse. Maintaining control/authority in these levels does at times become a bigger concern than teaching.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure whether that qualifies as a "real university", but I studied one semester (exchange program) at University of Connecticut. When I arrived there, I remember some people talking to me like I was lucky to get some *real* education for a semester (unlike what I had in my poor country, Canada). Turns out that the level of the classes I got there was so much lower than that of my University (U. of Sherbrooke) that I had to study by myself a before returning for my next semester. It was also the first time I felt I had an impact on the group's average just by myself!
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm the parent OP. I understand well that community college is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to higher education, and being a young immigrant with no family support at all, it's what I can afford, so, as you pointed out, that's all I can comment on. But my point persists: these people are becoming registered nurses, even supervisors and unit managers eventually, as a unit manager position at all the places I looked at in the Jobs section of the local paper requires only a few years of experience as an LPN, no 4-year degree. No matter where they were educated, those who graduate from the program WILL be working as real nurses. It's a scary scenario.
My anatomy and physiology teacher told me one of his students asked him if "the difference between a gram and a milligram is really that important".
Wherever the education system broke down, these people were still under ten years old. That's what needs to be improved. We need teachers who are willing to step up and fail the kids who can't cut basic math at whatever age and direct them to the remedial program where they will learn. There is WAY too much individualism allowed in public schools in the USA. You go to school to LEARN. You want to be an individual (and a disrespectful one at that), go to the playground or club, whichever is age-appropriate for you.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a problem, all teachers get complaints. You get complaints if you try to teach evolution to christians, or mathematics to dumb kids, or cooking to boys, or woodwork to girls, or sports to fat kids.
Parents are basically, a complete bunch of wankers.
Re:Simple answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Simple answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:3, Interesting)
The asians have a long history of doing very well in this country while maintaining a strong sense of ethnic identity. The African American culture came out of slavery and Jim Crow laws, so I can't see being a subjugated people really fostering a go get em attitude. If you got feisty as a black in the south back 70 years ago, you got lynched. No surprise they stopped trying.
Re:Two words - you already know what they are. (Score:1, Interesting)
Competition can't create a better system for all, it can only increase localization of excellence. If you believe a public school system should be excellent for all students, you have to think very carefully about applying strategies based on competition. It sounds like what you've got is a better school for those who can pay more. What about for those who can't pay? What kind of school do they get?
The bigger picture here is that teacher unions have consistently demanded better schools for all students, regardless of what their parents can or can't pay, and at this critical juncture in history, this article is a calculated attempt to generate anti-teacher, anti-union sentiment. Two days before this article was published, the local union here announced that its members had just voted 3-1 to go on strike to force the school district to use the federal stimulus money to prevent increases in class size and counselor load. The timing of these two events is not a coincidence.
Re:Public education... (Score:4, Interesting)
More accurate is, "No Child Gets Ahead."
Re:Simple answer (Score:3, Interesting)
You just condemned the kids after ALL of the complaints about PARENTS and ADMINISTRATORS.
You enumerated exactly what no-one in authority in this country has the courage to do: PLACE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF EDUCATION ON THE PARENTS.
After all, if a parent can be sued for lots of $$ when their child breaks things belonging to others, why are they not also held responsible for seeing to that their children are educated?
Re:Public education... (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>>>cirriculums dominate
>>>Are you ignorant? First of all, the "feel-good" curricula (wow, incorrect spelling and incorrect use of the plural)
I think you're being nitpicky. Most words borrowed from Latin and other languages use English plurals. Examples: "codes" not "coda". "sports". "arts". "laws". "senators". And on and on and on. Why should curriculums be any different?
Re:Public education... (Score:3, Interesting)
I sometimes wonder whether the good teachers game the system and the bad teachers go along with the system.
There was a comparative study of kids in St. Paul, MN, Kyoto and Taipei -- how they start out the same but the U.S. kids are significantly behind by grade 4. They found that the talk about Japanese cramming, for instance, wasn't that significant a factor. The one thing that was a glaring difference was that the U.S. school's administration office often couldn't tell the researcher _where_ a particular student physically was situated at a given moment. In other words, the Japanese and Chinese schools still had the students sitting in rows in their designated seat in their designated classroom. American schools used to be like that into the 70s and I wonder whether we shouldn't go back to a system where kids shut up and listen more instead of sitting around cozy little work groups socializing. Could it be that the relative chaos of a current U.S. school's structure gives the bad teachers a way to hide their inefficiency?
Re:Public education... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice false dichotomy you're setting up here. I can use it for my AP English Lang students. You see, it's possible to want to discuss the issue maturely without being pushed to one extreme or the other. I actually live in a non-union state, and I like it that way. I want more competition between schools, but I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Re:Public education... (Score:3, Interesting)
I swear to god, teaching is the only profession where people seemingly earnestly make the argument that improving pay won't improve the pool of job candidates. In every other profession on the planet, people raise the pay to attract higher-quality candidates and use competition for jobs between the candidates to select the best ones from that pool of candidates.
Exactly. Teaching is a highly skilled job. It requires education, responsibility and rare talent. Every other job with those requirements is very well paid, so why not teaching?
Re:Simple answer (Score:2, Interesting)
I work as a teacher's aide in an elementary school. The teacher in the classroom has no idea where countries are located (she claimed Brazil was in Africa), how they are pronounced or who their leaders are. She can name Queen Elizabeth, but not Gordon Brown.
Now, I understand that she's an elementary teacher, but she has to teach social studies and science to these kids and she doesn't know the basic information. She teaches kids that have state exams in these areas, yet isn't prepared to learn the information herself. When we had testing last week, there were several questions on the exams that she never covered because she just didn't know. At least for this teacher, if it's not in the book, don't ask her about it.
Re:There is a charter school in Oakland with minor (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like a KIPP [kipp.org] school. I've read some of the analyses by proponents of this kind of school setup. My conclusion is that KIPP schools demonstrate that kids who seek out a rigorous curriculum and learning environment will benefit from such. Maybe I'm biased by "romantic notions of teaching." KIPP schools have the advantage of not having to serve anyone they don't feel like, though, so the "no excuses" approach is limited to the kids who choose to go to the school.
Just another story (Score:1, Interesting)
Early 1990s I think. My sister was a HS Biology teacher. Sis thought the chem teacher was creepy. One day she went into his chemical storage room and found pools of mercury lying around the floor, bottles with leaky stoppers lying on their side on the shelves, etc., and various other obvious problems. Upon closer examination, she found he had organized the chemicals so that pairs of chemicals with the most volatile reactions were always stored next to each other. There were massive quantities of magnesium and inflammable liquids -- up to 100X more than any school would ever use. He had basically arranged his chem storage as a giant bomb, and the chemicals from the leaky bottles were gradually eroding the seals on some of the more dangerous other bottles. It took a fully-suited hazmat team almost 3 months to safely clean up that mess (during the summer months, so the school was empty). The teacher's union made it impossible to fire the dude, or even to mention his problems in public. The nature of his violations have been kept secret from the kids and their parents to this day. He was demoted to study hall monitor, where he spent his time typing single-spaced diatribes against the school, the government, the president, the pope, etc. Last I heard, he was still there, supervising kids and banging out his manifesto in study hall. He never even got a demotion or pay cut. Just a change in duties to keep him away from the chemicals.
Re:Simple answer (Score:2, Interesting)
In practice this obviously means (just 2 examples) :
-> teaching data denying global warming
-> teaching data agreeing with global warming
-> teaching against evolution
-> teaching for evolution
AND tolerating, without ridicule ANY conclusion any individual kid comes to.
Back in the day, in my grade 11 English class, we were required to debate. This was rules-based debating, awarding points based on rebuttals, etc. However, we had a touchy-feely teacher who objected to the concept, because often the "wrong side" would win. "Wrong" of course being defined as anything the teacher disagreed with.
Due to a quirk of scheduling, I managed to get two debates on consecutive weeks. The first was debating capital punishment, and my team drew the affirmative. The second was also debating capital punishment, and I was added to the negative team, who were short a debater.
In both cases, my team won the debate, by large margins.
The teacher promptly ordered the result of the second debate overturned, and gave me a poor grade, because "obviously" I must have cheated. I escalated it all the way up to the Board of Education. In one of the more memorable memories I had of high school, I witnessed the Board members drop their jaws to the floor listening to the teacher's justification for her grading. First off, she said I was being "intellectually dishonest" by arguing both sides of the same proposition. Ignoring the fact that I didn't *choose* what debates to be part of (they were assigned to us), whether you agree with your debate topic or not is irrelevant. In fact, it's quite beneficial to argue the merits of something you personally disagree with; it helps you judge the validity of your own position from a different view. That a teacher didn't realize (or accept) this was quite a shock to the Board.
But even more damning was the teacher's second argument for my grade. She gave an impassioned speech explaining how capital punishment was immoral, with numerous (irrelevant) emotional examples of why it was bad. Again, the Board pointed out that whether capital punishment was moral or not wasn't the issue, the issue was the debate.
At this point, she basically flipped her lid, and was practically yelling at the Board members. "Don't you understand? Capital punishment is *murder*! It's *wrong*! How can I give a passing grade to a student that advocates *killing*? You're asking me to reward immoral behaviour, and I won't do it!"
She didn't have to, as the Board directly upgraded my mark, and that teacher found herself removed from the debate process the next year. However, she was still in the system, evaluating her students using her moral criteria.
Sure, I won. But only because I wouldn't back down. The teacher wouldn't budge. The vice principal wouldn't do anything. The principal wouldn't do anything. It took me (and my mother) months to escalate this up to the Board, during which time, this teacher was teaching students that debate was a popularity contest and a way to show your moral superiority.
Sadly, they don't teach formal debate any more, and I see the effects of that in many places. Students are not taught to not become emotionally involved in a debate; over the years I've seen more and more that people are trying to shout each other down rather than debate.
I'm pro-evolution and a global warming "denier", and I'm more than happy to debate those topics with people. However, I find that many of my ideological opponents tend to (a) confuse an appeal to emotion with a logical argument, and (b) become hysterical when they feel they're losing.
I've won more debates than I've lost, but I've certainly lost a few in my time. And I've learned more from those debates than from the ones I won. Winning doesn't make you challenge your assumptions.
Re:There is a charter school in Oakland with minor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:2, Interesting)
SCENARIO #2: Put that same developer on a team fixing bugs that made it to the field and need quick resolution (a potentially more challenging job.)
Way to go with the clumsy and totally inaccurate parallel.
Let's have your software developer above be trying to fix bugs in the code while the customer, who knows somewhere between jack and squat about programming because he is too lazy to learn, is trying to "add his own features". Do this without version control.
In the above parallel, the code monkey is the teacher, the program is the child's education, and the customer is the parent. Sounds like a challenge? It doesn't end there. This code monkey has to try to debug hundreds of such programs simultaneously, and gets a new set every year. No time to try and figure them out... just start debugging on the fly.
Add to the above problems malicious, black hat hackers trying to include code that makes the program compatible with their personal imaginary friend. This 'compatibility' code is cut from ancient and obsolete code repositories and pasted in at random locations with little skill or regard for the damage it may do to the rest of the program. These would be various and assorted clergy.
Now add in some highly skilled spammers who have unrestricted access to the program in your care. They keep hacking at it so that all it will do is display logos and popups. If you watch TV, then you've seen this process at work.
Now we are starting to get a little closer to what teaching is like using a software development metaphor. I know... I have been both a teacher and a software engineer. In fact, America faces a perennial shortage of math teachers because the job requirements are little removed from those of being a code monkey. After a few years of frustration, most math teachers quit and move on to easier jobs that pay better, like being programmers.
Re:Public education... (Score:3, Interesting)
pretty much everyone on my mothers side is a teacher, so I've heard/seen a lot about it over the years.
when you factor in marking, its more like 10 hour days, but teaching is a sweet deal.
there is also a '4 for 5 program' where you work for four years, and only get 80% of your salary. on the 5th year, you dont work, you get a long 1 year holiday, and you still get paid for it!
if teaching was something i were great at and passionate about, I would be all over it.