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 ...'"
Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
SCENARIO #2: Put that same teacher in a classroom of African-American kids from Oakland, California. The kids will do poorly because African-American culture rejects learning -- and rejects Western culture in general.
In scenario #2, the teacher would be fired as a "bad" teacher. In scenario #1, the same teacher would get a bonus for producing such accomplished students.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps not, but it may be a matter of matching teachers to students.
Scenario one: place a teacher with a logical methodical style in a group of students who show up to play games. Scenario two: place that same teacher in group of motivated kids who show up to learn the subject.
In scenario one, the teacher gets fired. In scenario two, the teacher does quite well leading the kids from step to step and introducing exciting concepts into the classroom while making it fun.
There were other factors as well, but the above is basically what happened to me when I taught English overseas. There were teachers who were great entertainers who did very well in the first circumstance. That wasn't me. I did very well in a school with a different style, where the focus was on the language and we we're expected to play games (though I did sneak in one or two).
My getting fired was good for my career and good for the students at both schools.
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: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:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is teaching apparently the only profession that is not capable of being objectively judged?
Welcome to the real world.
SCENARIO #1: Take one SW developer. Put her on a project for a kick ass new feature that will get a lot of attention (but they aren't doing anything particularly difficult.)
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.)
I'd sure as hell rather see a great teacher unfairly fired occasionally (they'll rise to the top elsewhere) than see the person's seniority be the prime consideration. How's seniority based teaching been working out for us?
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
I'm an English language arts department chair at a very diverse school. As part of my job, I have to observe teachers in all different kinds of classes, AP to freshman remedial classes. It is easy to see which teacher is a good teacher and which isn't. To go with a nice car analogy. If a mechanic is working on a PoS or a Rolls, you can still tell if he knows what he is doing.
A good teacher cares, asks questions, engages the students with appropriate questions and pushes them to do a little better than they currently are regardless of the class. The bad teacher doesn't.
Now as to the subjective point. When did objective become synonymous with truth? My evaluations are subjective, with objective elements. Nevertheless, I have the experience to be right subjectively.
There is a charter school in Oakland with minority (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame you will be modded troll for this due to perceived racism against african-americans, despite raising a very valuable point. Guess that's why you went AC, I don't blame ya.
No, this is just genuine racism. There's nothing integral about being african-american that makes one reject learning.
racism, n
1: the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races
2: discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
Replace 'African-American' with 'poor' and you've a much clearer metric.
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.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a teacher educator, but my background isn't in public school teaching; it's in psychometrics and quantitative psychological research. Because of this, I find my views are vastly different from the faculty around me.
When I see the discrepancy between poor-inner-city-[minority] and well-to-do-suburban-[majority], my science sense starts tingling, and I think, "I wonder if it's because of X, Y, or Z... or maybe something else. What data could I gather to establish or refute some of these connections."
In other words, I tend to think like you do.
My colleagues just scream, "Oppression!" They conduct qualitative "critical analyses," which means they gather data to back up their apriorisms (because "everyone's biased; we're just acknowledging ours and leveraging it"). In the end, the conclusion they formulated before even gathering the data is supported and the view that it is race, not socioeconomic status, becomes accepted as social science "law."
One of my graduate students showed me an article this week which compared the achievement between poor whites and poor blacks on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (which is a popular whipping boy of the anti-standardized test movement). Long story short: There was a whopping 3-point difference between the two groups, and both were 20 points below the national mean. (The PPVT uses an IQ-equivalent scale, so 100 is the mean, with a standard deviation of 15.)
But the researchers concluded that "the sample (N > 200) was too small to generate any meaningful conclusions." I wonder if they would have included the same caveat had they discovered a significant difference.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I know this. I edited that post a couple of times for concision. But, since you brought it up, let me explain.
Given that the distribution of the normative sample is known, one could quite easily estimate the necessary sample size for a given difference to be considered significant. This should be done *before* the research took place. The fact that these researchers stated that their no-difference findings may be due to a small sample (which was equal to about 10% of the size of the entire norming sample) hints that they *thought* there would be a bigger difference.
It may actually be quite clever: If you expect a big difference, sample narrowly so that only your expected difference would be significant, while still plausibly dismissing non-significant differences as the result of a small sample.
Also, while you are correct that the specific caveat of sample size wouldn't be applicable if they found a significant difference, there are other important limitations (e.g. external validity) that would have to be discussed. The research I have seen on the topic tends not to bring up those or anything else that could lessen the impact of their conclusions, but only when they find a difference.
Thanks for keeping me honest on it.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
There are of course exceptions to any generalization, but stereotypes and generalizations exist BECAUSE the observed trait is accurate sufficiently often. When you're dealing with statistical sample sizes measured in millions or tens of millions, you can draw some pretty accurate results.
Yes, correlation is not causation, but that's completely irrelevant to the discussion. If you're drawing conclusions from the results of the ENTIRE standardized testing results from one year and notice that (all other things being equal) one race scores consistently higher than another, it's perfectly valid to use those results in a discussion however unfair those results seem.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that Hitler did something doesn't automatically make that thing factually incorrect. Hitler has no effect on whether or not different races have different intelligence levels (from what I've read they don't, but I'm not a biologist).
You have to separate your emotion from the facts. It's intellectually dishonest to try to discredit something simply because a disliked individual/group/whatever was in favor of it. If there is no difference between the races, fine; use facts to support that. You do not need to invoke Hitler unless your goal is not to spread the truth, but instead propaganda.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
No it's not. You pretty much need to be an Oreo and ignore "black culture" in order to get ahead.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a _racial_ issue (i.e. genetics do not really play a role here), that's a _cultural_ issue.
And Japanese are not economically that much worse off than Americans.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
There isn't just one cause to the problem. Culture plays a role- if a culture values learning (especially if the *parents* value learning) the importance of school will be stressed to the children and they'll try harder.
Economics have a factor as well- well off people tend to be educated, and thus see value in education. Those who aren't educated tend to be poorer and don't value it for their children either. Without that stress in the home, the children don't put the effort in.
The thing is- you can fix culture. You can't fix economics- some people will always be worse off, and until we have robots and cheap renewable energy we will always need people for menial jobs. So you have to work on the factor you can, and provide opportunities to people who manage to overcome economics on their own.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Informative)
And the income disparity isn't caused by any cultural differences? It's pretty obvious that Asian-American families have lower tolerance for gang membership, deadbeat dads, and and most of the other hallmark problems with stereotypical African-American culture. The cultural differences that make the parents more successful (and leads to higher income) are the same ones that lead to the kids getting a better education (which eventually leads to them having higher incomes, too).
It's far from just a self-perpetuating income disparity where the rich are better educated. Just look at how over-represented people of Asian descent are compared to whites in higher education institutions, and how common entitlement beliefs are among the richer whites. Being rich certainly helps, but the cultural component is significant.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are putting the cart before the horse. How is that we hear so many stories of Asian immigrants coming to this country with nothing, or next to nothing and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, often with less than most native-born people who linger in stagnant poverty over generations. It doesn't take money to climb the socio-economic ladder (although it surely helps a lot), it takes initiative, drive and holding education in value. If you took those well-off Asian-Americans and put them in the same situation as the perpetually poor in the U.S., the majority of them would eventually rise out of that level again.
It most assuredly is culture that a large factor in the success of some people and the continual failure of others. When everyone around you, including your church leaders and government leaders are telling you that whitey is keeping you down (like, say, our President's pastor for almost half his life), how is it surprising if you believe it and give up on life?
The biggest factor afflicting the perennially poor, of which blacks comprise and unfortunately large proportion, is the people who exploit them by pounding into their heads that they are now and can only ever be victims: and those people are also too often black themselves and mostly liberals. They are the ones keeping the poor down, by stripping them of their dignity and enslaving them in the chains of lowered expectations, and perpetual dependency. After all, if the persistent underclass were to rise out their problems, who would want to listen to the stupid class-warfare rhetoric that so many of our leaders spew like a KKK Grand Wizard?
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are putting the cart before the horse. How is that we hear so many stories of Asian immigrants coming to this country with nothing, or next to nothing and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, often with less than most native-born people who linger in stagnant poverty over generations. If you took those well-off Asian-Americans and put them in the same situation as the perpetually poor in the U.S., the majority of them would eventually rise out of that level again.
You're missing something very obvious here. US immigration law is tortuous and acts as a giant filter selecting for only the most desirable immigrants. In order to even make it to the US from Asia, you need to be abnormally hard-working, resourceful, and industrious.
The astounding success of Asian immigrants in the US has nothing to do with Asian culture. It is entirely due to the fact that Asian immigrants in the US form a highly biased selection relative to the population of all Asians, consisting only of those people who are smart and persistent enough to make it through the immigration gauntlet. In other words, you only see the bright ones in America, because the others aren't even allowed to immigrate here.
In contrast, the majority of African Americans are descended from slaves (sad, but true), and most (80-85%) of the Hispanic population stems from illegal immigration (source [wikipedia.org]). This explains why the selection effect of immigration law is only really visible in Asians.
Re:Difficult to Define a "Good" Teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
When my sister was in high school she had two teachers who were chronic alcoholics (not that I don't see how the job could drive one to the drink). Nothing resembling teaching was going on in these classes. When she investigated the student complaint option, she asked about the procedure. This was:
1) Fill out a form which indicates who you are, who the complaint is against, and what the complaint is. Hand in the form.
2) Form is taken directly to the teacher the complaint is against.
3) Teacher fails student listed on the form.
I can't imagine the procedure for parental complaints was much better.
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is any direct measurement very subjective, an objective measurement (exam grades achieved by children) is skewed by so many factors it's not even funny and even brings in its own set of problems - it's more dependent on the children who happen to be in the class than the teacher to begin with, and since it is often used despite that it means that most teachers (even the good ones) are forced to teach to an exam syllabus rather than actually providing a rounded understanding of a subject.
But you have to remember that the entire reason that the exams were instituted for a very good reason. Part of a hypothetical "rounded understanding of a subject" is actually being competent in the basic skills associated with the topic. That wasn't happening in many many cases. "Rounded Understanding" isn't possible until "basic understanding" has been achieved. Even if ALL they do it end up teaching the test, that's still a hell of a lot better than teaching nothing at all and graduating students that don't have basic skills required to function. That's what was happening (and still is, in a lot of cases) and that's why, in the large, that the testing was instituted.
Brett
Re:Public education... (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks more like YOU are a product of the LA school system. The reporters usage is correct. He is talking about a rule, i.e., the rule to show up on time.
Re:Public education... (Score:4, Informative)
My personal theory is that it's to teach them to take standardized tests.
Drivers permit/license
SAT/ACT
GRE
Industry Certifications
Boards
That, or it's to teach people to work line shifts. Turn on, turn off. Do job a, switch to job b, switch to job c, then go home when the whistle sounds.
It's CLEARLY not designed for learning.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the first things I taught my daughter about school is that her teacher is not infallible, that everything she learns at school isn't necessarily true and that doing her homework the way the teacher wants it done anyway is how she'll get good grades.
"Daddy, my teacher said that Google is not a number like you said it is." "That's okay, just tell her its a one with a million zeros after it, and if she doesn't believe you, say okay and feel good about knowing something she doesn't."
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Informative)
Moreover, she shouldn't believe that her parents are infallible either. Google is a mispelling of Googol, which is actually just 1x10^100. If you'd like, you can Google it [google.com] :)
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you ignorant? First of all, the "feel-good" curricula (wow, incorrect spelling and incorrect use of the plural, is that because all those mean liberals didn't teach you correctly?) was mainly a right-wing strawman. Secondly, NCLB is pretty much the opposite of feel-good curricula, and it hasn't really helped matters, eh?
Support the Fair Tax. http://fairtax.org/ [fairtax.org] Promote peace, kill more bad guys.
Oh, guess you ARE ignorant.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's not; it's an example of preferring a one plural form over another, more or less equally, acceptable one:
(from here [reference.com]).
And what's more, curricula is actually more common than curriculums, judging by the number of Google hits (~12.7 million to 2.2 million, respectively). At very worst, what he did was impose one of his pet peeves on the conversation, in a dickish way that added nothing of value and served to undermine his point.
You, on the other hand, decided to blame your own ignorance and lack of research on someone else's supposed shortcomings, and justify it with a fabricated "rule," that ignores the actual facts and history of the language. He's a schmuck; you're an ignoramus, and an arrogant one at that.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Informative)
curâ...ricâ...uâ...lum [kuh-rik-yuh-luhm] Show IPA â"noun, plural -la [-luh] Show IPA , -lums.
1. the aggregate of courses of study given in a school, college, university, etc.: The school is adding more science courses to its curriculum.
2. the regular or a particular course of study in a school, college, etc.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=curriculum&x=0&y=0 [reference.com]
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Informative)
Welcome to the club man. It's a pain in the ass but worth every minute of it. Just don't forget that part about loving teaching.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I and a lot of people I know discounted teaching not because we aren't interested in teaching, but because for us it's not the difference between $32K and $28K, but the difference between $110K and $40K.
I hope to retire into teaching, but I'd like to be able to more than subsist.
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:Public education... (Score:5, Informative)
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?
The break varies, in my district it is 9-10 weeks. Most teachers are required to take continuing education to maintain their licenses, and many of those classes, workshops, and other professional activities are done in the summer to accommodate teacher schedules.
For example, I would love to get a part time job this summer--and I am looking--but I have a week-long workshop in June, and a few other job-related full-day commitments before the end of the summer. Many employers are not interested due to the swiss-cheese scheduling that is required to accommodate my professional obligations.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Teachers work harder than you 9 months a year. Taking 1.5 months off (it's about 2.5 months for the students, but the teachers have clean up, seminars, and set up in that time) is something that we really shouldn't begrudge them.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference. Raising teacher pay could attract worse teachers that do it for the money. People who really want to teach, such as myself, will often take a cut in pay to do so.
Yes, I agree, some people who are good teachers are willing to take a pay cut to teach. But others who would also be good teachers opt to do something else because they don't want to be paid so poorly. Your approach guarantees that the teacher population is made up of two groups: 1) people who are so committed to teaching that they don't mind the low pay (good) and 2) people that take the teaching job because it's the best they can get (bad).
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.
Yes, you're right. Raising teacher pay will attract more people. Then, we do our best to hire the ones who will be best at teaching. With a larger pool of applicants than before (including the applicants who would have been there anyway at a lower pay point, but also a bunch of new applicants as well), how can you argue that we'll end up with worse teachers than if we paid them bus fare and had the smaller applicant pool? That really strains the boundaries of logic.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Informative)
Cut the teamism. Education has been fucked up long before NCLB. In fact, it is a liberal enclave and the left has used "do it for the children" as a means of gaining power for themselves and the teachers union for 40 years.
Biased much? Did you ever stop to think that maybe the liberals actually want to help the children? Especially since the United States maintains its world position through education (though not for long). And do you realize that conservatives have favored government education mandates and control (through funding) since at least Reagan, except with the extreme right in recent years and its anti-science agenda?
We throw WAY too much money at education. Much of it doesn't go to the classroom and teachers where it should. Rather it goes to administration.
The US spends approximately 3.4% of its GDP on public primary and secondary education. That is less than Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Ireland, UK, Spain, the EU as a whole, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus, Poland, Malta, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, just to name a few. It is, however, about equal with Greece.
Leftist feel-good cirriculums dominate and as such our kids learn to either throw a ball or drop fries.
Leftist? Do you realize that our curriculum is very moderate compared to most of the world?
Science and math skills tank but we have happy little taxpayers who learn to vote in all the politically correct garbage they read in the "picture books" they were given in grade school.
Do you have any figures to back that up? No. How about this: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf [ed.gov]
By grade eight, the United States out performed 37 of 47 countries in Math, being primarily beat by 5 Asian countries (Taipei, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Japan) and equal to European countries (Hungary, England, Russian Federation, Lithuania, Czech Republic).
Also according to this study, the US has been improving average scores since it began tracking (1995). We are behind Asian countries because Asian school systems work harder, having much longer school years (220 days average vs 180 days in the US). Asian schools are often 6 days a week, 8 hours a day.
CUT the funding, limit the course work to what matters, fire administrators, and raise teachers' pay to attract our brightest to the field. Otherwise, stop bitching about education and stop using my tax dollars to fund this toilet.
How exactly are you going to cut the funding AND raise teachers' pay? I agree that we need to raise teachers' pay, but we should do it by increasing educational spending and cutting some spending elsewhere ($16 Billion a year in farm subsidies? $613 Billion a year on Defense? $48 Billion in earmarks?)
The US has been in a slight population boom since 1992, meaning more children to educate (approximately 11% increase). The US still has the largest percentage of the population completing upper secondary education (HS) of all countries in the world except Japan, and over the past forty years it has steadily increased (81% in 1960 to 87%). The US also has the largest percentage of the population completing higher education (college/university degree) in the world at 27 percent.
The US also has one of the worst student to teacher ratios in the world, averaging out to 16, but in lower income schools averaging over 35.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003026.pdf [ed.gov]
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can tell you from first hand experience that if you want to improve the quality of education every child recieves, the first thing you can start with is bringing the teacher to student ratio from 25-30 down to 15-20. Quite honestly, most classrooms I've been in can barely support the 30 -35 students in them. In the school I'm student teaching in, they're looking at a 40:1 or 50:1 ratio next year due to budget cuts. I can't imagine doing anything but lecturing in an environment like that. And it'll be impossible to grade more than a few things a week with 250-300 students.
The biggest issue with the school that I'm teaching in is that ratio, because it means I can't move around my classroom or arrange students in any way other than a block-style. The block-style seating arrangement means I can't circulate to assess my students as effectively. It means that I'm stuck at the front of the room talking at students. It makes it very difficult to group students for effective instruction. In short, it screws me out of a lot of strategies I could use to more effectively teach.
It also means that my students are discouraged from talking with one-another about the material, which means that they can't scaffold for each other as effectively.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Informative)
Look at a state like NY where the education unions have forced the state to provide funding to lower average class sizes and raise teacher salaries.
Now teachers average $65k/year and class sizes are decreased dramatically. The urban district where where I live has an average class of 19. When I attended school in NYC in the early 80's, it was 30+.
Guess what? Performance still sucks, particularly for the lost generation of urban youth growing up in broken households, with parents who don't care and a culture that embraces ignorance and dependency.
It sucks in the burbs too, where the precious Connors and Jennifers get B's in watered down classes and have an inflated view of their own abilities.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
>History? Who cares what happened centuries ago.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Also, when you grow up, you'll find your ability to engage with other intelligent people rather limited. Not everyone likes to talk about computing.
I speak from experience.
There, that was a history lesson. Now go read the post from the beginning :o)
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Funny)
...whereas those who study history will recognize it when they are repeating it.
/sorry, feeling cynical tonight
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm hoping this is a joke ?
Arts and music are for many what makes life worth it. Not having a chance at being exposed to those, at least once, in school, would be very sad for many kids who have no chance to look into it at home. I still remember art projects I did in junior high.
History is totally superfluous. Except if you want a chance to stand back and understand what is happening today, and not repeat yesterday's mistakes.
Sport is not only about being fit. It's about social skills, strategy, coordination, getting acquainted or re-aqcuainted with your body... Not eveybody wants to be a gym rat, some do actually want to have fun. Again, kids deserve a chance to try that out.
I do agree about religion... I'd like philosophy instead.
The school you want is a very dull one.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then what do you suggest be cut? English? Reading? Math? Science?
There's not much low-hanging fruit left in most curricula, but one suggestion would be penmanship. I still resent the hundreds of hours I spent being forced to practice a completely worthless skill in second through fourth grade. My school could have put that time to much better use.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Informative)
Three highschools, two elementary schools, and a middle school, all spread across three states at opposite coasts. In elementary school we got the DARE treatment about how ALL drugs were The Devil, in middle school they kept on with that and went on to abstinence bible thumping, and in all three highschools they outright lied to promote the abstinence agenda.
As a bonus in one of the highschools the principal banned all mentions of south africa because he thought we shouldn't care so much about other race's problems.
Oh and all of these, like pretty much every other school in the country, were Zero Tolerance schools. What kind of liberalism should I have looked out for because every school I've ever been to from florida to oregon has been more religious right than bleeding heart liberal.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
You might take a long, hard look at your hypothesis, as the school system is essentially a liberal enclave.
Probably because they tried to teach you a bit about reality, which is notorious for its liberal bias.
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Public education... (Score:5, Funny)
My son came back from his classes in favor of a second term for Bush. It didn't really matter because he was 5.
Is "why" a legitimate question? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's blatantly obvious, the NEA is exceptionally powerful and won't permit it.
Brett
Unions don't always oppose this (Score:5, Insightful)
The teachers' union in Toledo, Ohio, has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It's called "peer review" and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.
...
union members today overwhelmingly support it.
...
The AFT endorsed peer review in 1984.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91327130 [npr.org] Listen to the story -- the text is a poor summary.
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.
Re:Labor Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Labor Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of my most difficult teachers in high school are among those that in retrospect I recognize to have done the most for me. Only a few of those would I have evaluated so highly during my schooling.
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:Labor Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
Many schools already have this. The problem is, students are either too lazy to do this, or intentionally give terrible comments about teachers they dont like, regardless of that teacher's teaching ability.
The "lazy" student is used constantly by bad teachers. There are some teachers who can't teach, pure and simple. In order to boost their self esteem, they call students who simply can't learn the way they teach, lazy. Sure, there are some lazy students who won't do anything. And most teachers that can teach, the students like. The teachers who only have to explain things once because they make it crystal clear, the teachers who will spend a week going over a concept until the students grasp it, those are the teachers that students like. The type that can't teach, give pointless assignments, are strict about parts of grades that don't matter (like failing students because they picked a slightly different typeface other then Times New Roman) usually students hate.
Ex. A teacher has to constantly discipline a group of 5-7 students who disrupt class. When it comes time to do evaluations, these students all give the teacher terrible reviews. And, since it is done anonymously, there is no way to tell which students gave the evaluations, so there is no way to determine their bias against the teacher. The teacher is then fired because of those bad reviews, simply because some students didnt like the teacher disciplining them.
But usually teachers have 200 or more kids in a year, so those 5-7 would be quite insignificant.
Re:Labor Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
Two words... (Score:5, Informative)
jdb2
It's the bueracracy we hate ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that we don't want to trust people in authority to make decisions, so we come up with a process or committee or something to ensure that one person can't make the hard decisions. But time and time again, it's shown that if no one can make hard decisions, no one will.
And while it's probably going to beat the hell out of my karma for it, I recommend The Death of Common Sense [amazon.com], by Philip K. Howard. It basically goes into examples of how our unwavering belief that a legal processes can sort through the mess impartially causes all sorts of unexpected results.
As soon as the authority to make a decision is lost, how can bad behavior be punished?
make em want to leave (Score:5, Insightful)
Give 'em a broom instead of a class. They'll get the point.
two reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)
first is tenure.
second reason is unions.
Broward County schools are filled with bad teachers. The unions keep them working.
recently a broward teacher had a delusional episode in the classroom. she had a pair of scissors and was threatening a student shouting about demons.
the union not only kept her job, but she's coming back to the classroom (albeit at a different school).
Bad teachers are a bit like molesting priests. They get moved around schools when people complain about them.
Re:two reasons. (Score:5, Informative)
[citation needed]
You shouldn't ask for a citation unless it's actually hard to find. I'm making the radical assumption that you have access to Google. This was the fifth result [justnews.com] when searching Google for all of: broward county teacher scissors. Note that what the report adds is that the teacher had no previous issues and that her freakout was reportedly a result of an adverse reaction to medication.
Tenure is the key (Score:5, Insightful)
The article summary is incomplete. The title of the article is "Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task"
Well, the problem, and the solution, are right there.
Tenure is intended for university professors mainly; it intentionally makes it harder to fire a tenured person, so they can "push the boundaries" a bit in their classes.. without the fear of being fired for petty political reasons.
The universities do not just give out tenure to every new professor, they make sure they are competent first. If the California schools have *tenured* teachers that can't teach, that is the problem RIGHT THERE. Don't give tenure to a teacher until they know they can teach. Simple as that.
This is only one side of the story. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because 'bad' is subjective. (Score:5, Insightful)
Same as any other profession (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked as a computer programmer for over 20 years, and I have never seen or heard of any programmer being fired for incompetence, no matter the magnitude.
As far as I'm concerned, teachers deserve our support, and I think all of the bitching is just a smokescreen to support cutting education funding, and a mind-trick to turn people against unions.
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.
Media using teachers as punching bags again (Score:5, Insightful)
The article kicks off describing how a group of shrill, ignorant parents took the word of an emotionally disturbed 12 year old and decided to push for someone to be fired based soley on that.
Parents like to treat teachers as their personal governesses. Like that cheerleading coach who was crucified for playboy pictures that were not a big deal until some fat dumpy girl who didn't get picked had a tantrum and made her mum charge into the headteachers office with the pictures.
Your kid isn't special. In all likelihood, your kid is a spoilt, willfully ignorant little shit who will give the teacher hell no matter how much they try (and they do try; nobody sticks at teaching who doesn't see it as a vocation as well as a job). Your little darling is so convinced they will be a millionaire professional sportsperson/musician/actor because you've always told them how 'special' they were, that they carry this overinflated sense of entitlement into the classroom along with 30 other 'special' kids.
The result basically lord of the flies with nicer clothes. And the people who take up the under paid task of controlling the little bastards are constantly subject to demands to fire them, cut their pay, and increase their work loads.
Back off assholes.
Re:Media using teachers as punching bags again (Score:5, Insightful)
Back off assholes.
Give me a voucher for half the value of what the public school spends on each of my kids, which I can take to the private school of my choice, and you'll never hear from me again.
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]
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two words - you already know what they are. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem with competitive schools is that for competition to work, you need to have schools that lose. And that means that the students lose. The entire point of public schools is to allow kids who can't afford to compete for education to get an education that will at least get them through life.
I support private schools, but not at the expense of public schools. We need to always have that support network for everyone in our society.
-b
Why is it so hard to fire bad parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because bad parents affect kids more than the teachers, and there are a /lot/ more bad parents out there.
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).
Unions think teachers should not be accountable (Score:5, Informative)
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
"I think most nerds have had bad experiences with teachers in public school. Because either teachers count off for the most ridiculous things, have a personal bias against some things (and will fail you if you think otherwise), have a personal vendetta against students who (rightfully) correct them, or many other things that are wrong with our public school system."
Well, this isn't surprising. As someone who has been in high-school and also someone who grew up in a family of teachers I can safely say that this is inevitable. Nice teachers will simply be bullied untill they give in. High-school kids are highly observant of the level of authority a teacher has and once they see a weakness they can be quite merciless.
The people who are left are either split between people who have some natural authority and dickheads(the kind you read about in this article). A lot of teachers see students correcting them as an assault on their authority and they are partly right about this. Yes, the student may be right but admitting this may weaken the position the teacher has or aspires to have and thereby he has to carefully maneuvre between admitting his faults and maitaining order in the classroom(and over the students in general).
Remember that a high-school student spends around 5 years in a high-school but a teacher needs to maintain his position many times longer and that can cause the teacher to become ridgid. Personally, I see this as in inevitability though through good planning the damage can be minimized.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
This would also be alleviated if there was a license required before people could become parents.
For all the back-and-forth that's going to take place in this article, the fundamental truth is that shitty parents generally lead to shitty students.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News for nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's no accident: that entry level teacher is still motivated and idealistic, and he's willing to spend a lot of extra time. Give him a few years of teaching, and he'll lose all that.
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.
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: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:Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the problem is, what metric are you using to judge the teacher?
If you judge by student performance, you run into two problems: stupid/unmotivated kids, and "teaching the test" issues.
If you judge by observers, what method do you use to observe?
I work in higher ed - we regularly get kids coming in that I am flabbergasted that they EVER got through high school. Unfortunately, in TexAss, the "top 10%" of each high school is automatically required to be able to enter any state College.
So since we aren't a "top tier" university, we are forced to take the "top 10%" of kids from Redneckistan, Mexishithole, ElBarrio, MiniAfrica, and NewZimbabwe High Schools - you know, the kids who "graduated with a 4.0 GPA" and yet have NO writing skills, NO speaking skills, and barely can manage 3rd-grade mathematics and english equivalence. They expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter - after all, they were socially promoted for 12 grades beforehand, their education paid for completely (and will continue to be so, even the ILLEGALS who shouldn't even be in this country might be getting tuition waivers and in-state rate soon, which is fucked up beyond belief when the kids on our military bases don't get that), the test standards constantly lowered for them, the curriculum altered, the language taught not the language they need to use in this country, and of course, the standardized tests removed because it was easier to stop testing than try to explain why there was a "racial disparity" between black/white/asian/hispanic/etc in the results every year.
You know what? We get feedback from the people we send out every year, the new teachers out there. What do they tell us?
- The parents WILL NOT help discipline the kids.
- The parents WILL NOT make sure the kids are doing the work.
- The parents will start screaming "lawsuit" if you suggest that little Tyrell, LaShawna, or Chiquita needs to go back a grade because they can't keep up with the expected standard.
- The school administrations WILL NOT back the teacher up if there is a discipline problem - let alone the drug and gang problems they are dealing with.
- The school administrations WILL NOT back up the teacher on giving a kid poor grade once the parents scream - doesn't matter if they never do a bit of work, never turn in homework, and even if they were in the bathroom doing crack during test time, the TEACHER gets blamed for the kid's performance.
I know there are "bad teachers" out there. You know what? There are EVEN SHITTIER KIDS OUT THERE.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
I know there are "bad teachers" out there. You know what? There are EVEN SHITTIER KIDS OUT THERE.
As a homeschooling parent, I'll play devil's advocate here. The law says The Children must attend school, but it can't require them to actually be good students (be it grades or, for the most part, behavior).
Since public school authority over kids has been emasculated over the years, preventing them from doing real enforcement for problem kids, the proper solution is simply to repeal compulsory education. They should still collect *some* taxes to support a system where people who want to be educated can go. Then, the schools can have a sane policy for kicking people out, since their mission will be to, you know, educate kids, as opposed to play tax-funded babysitters for shitty parents.
Yeah, yeah... an educated citizenry is a cornerstone of a healthy, productive society. How's that working out, anyway?
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Informative)
Schools should teach some basic statistics. This includes the difference between statistically analyzing a random variable (climate science) and trying to predict the outcome of a single instance of the random variable (weather prediction), and why the two are fundamentally different.
There are other arguments, like that the sun is a 1400 petawatt nuclear reactor, and a 0.0001% variation is solar temperatures will make a hell of a lot more difference to earth temperatures than 1000 years of coal burning.
Schools should teach the Stefan-Boltzmann law in physics class. It gives a good first approximation of the impact of a 0.0001% variation of photosphere temperature on Earths surface temperature (it's, um, 0.0001%, or about 280 uKelvin. Good luck finding a thermometer that's that accurate).
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll be the first person to call out a shitty teacher or an obstructive union, but this kind of discussion cannot go ahead without factoring a huge dataset: Parents. Of course, the first person who does finds himself voted out of office pretty quickly.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Informative)
Because the teachers union is WAY too powerful!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw
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.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Informative)
It differs from system to system, but the main issues are failing to teach well. For us, there are three areas a teacher needs to have proficiency, content development, promoting engagement, and classroom management. The teacher has to be able to develop a lesson that is appropriate for the grade level, cognitive ability for the students in that classroom, and that covers the standards being taught. Most teachers can do this well.
Promoting engagement is where a lot of problems arise. Can a teacher make a lesson engaging? Do they ask relevant questions that probe a student's understanding or that prompt a student to look further for a more robust understanding? Does the teacher work with all the students in the room in ways that at least attempt to get a student involved.
Finally, teachers have to manage the classroom well. Do they spend forty minutes taking roll and asking about the students' plans for the weekend, or do they get right to the lesson? How do they deal with students who are acting appropriately, or inappropriately? Do they control the situation or let the student? Etc.
If a teacher isn't proficient in many of these areas or is egregiously negligent in one of them, you can begin the process to terminate employment.
Of course there are several steps involved.
Of course, the article is correct that it is much easier to fire someone who is negligent. Proving a teacher is bad in the classroom isn't easy.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost every criteria you put forward is subjective, and the rest of what you propose (Conference, Observe, Remediate, Terminate) bears a strong resemblance to union contracts in many fields.
The problem is that management and parents never want to follow the rules that are laid out in the contract. Read the comments in this thread and you will see that many people are complaining about the fact that at some stage in a process similar to what you outline the teacher was found to be competent/compliant with the rules. People want to fire "bad teachers", but they want to fire them the second they themselves identify them, not wait until after there has been some verifiable non-subjective proof of wrongdoing or incompetence.
Any review or remediation will be called "bureaucratic obstacles" or "politics" by the people who think this is easy. See bad teacher=fire bad teacher, simple.
Never mind the teachers that would get fired because they tried to teach something that violated the parent's world view (e.g. evolution).
I'm sure every person in this thread who is in favor of abolishing tenure is well intentioned, but most of them have probably never found themselves unemployed at the age of 55 with a "bad teacher" reputation hung around their neck because the school board realized they could save tens of thousands in salary and retirement costs by firing a teacher that ran against them in the last election.
At least removing obstacles from the firing path will never lead to a world where teachers will be afraid to publicly complain about waste and corruption in the schools, right? Whistle blower laws are just another legal trick in the union's arsenal.
The teachers that are "bad" because they dared to tell a well connected parent that their precious little butterfly has no business being in an advanced class will sleep better knowing that they lost their job to save us from the scourge of easily identified bad teachers.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were to ask you if an apple is past its ripest point, you would have difficulty telling if the apple I gave you was just a day past its prime. If the apple was rotten, you would just know.
The notion that you can't quantify bad teaching is somewhat of a red herring for this issue. We aren't talking about the two average teachers down the hall, we're talking about someone who is clearly bad. When I was in high school, I had a Physics teacher who didn't notice when two fellow students drew a six foot tall penis on the back wall. He spoke in half sentences, and couldn't remember how physics worked. He should have been fired. When you get into the middle of the road teachers, firing them is a whole other issue.
Re:Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if you want to find an open minded area, you need to find someplace centrist.
Bullshit. Just because a position is midway between two others does not mean it is openminded.
There are openminded people who call themselves liberals, and (far fewer, but they're out there; see below) openminded people who call themselves conservatives. There are people who will accuse you of not being openminded if you disagree with them. There are people who have looked at a situation from many angles and formed a very well-informed opinion based on much evidence, and who are accused of closedmindedness because they're not willing to give a second chance to old anecdotes that waeren't worth anything the first time either.
Openmindedness is a willingness to evaluate new evidence, or a willingness to consider different axioms, both of which are pretty much antithetical--by definition--to everything that conservatives stand for. It is not the willingness to humour stupid people.
Re:Easy to fire anyone in the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's Simple (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, none of those 5 were mathematics teachers, I'm guessing.
Nor were they English teachers, it'd seem ...