posted
The principal of the high school I teach at here in New Zealand has just returned from an international educational conference in Orlando, Fla. He's full of enthusiasm for what he heard while we poor plebs just plug away at the chalkface. One of the speakers he waxed lyrical about (Hersberg, I think, from Philadelphia) spoke on the negative impact of teacher unions in the US on the progress of teaching and on teachers in general, particularly as a reason for young teachers to get out after 1 or 2 years in the job, and also as a reason why teachers are not highly regarded as a profession, either by the general public or by other professionals. I wonder how teachers (and others) on Hatrack feel about that view. Be interested to know... [My impression as to why young teachers leave is because they can make more money in better conditions doing something else.]
Yeah, I'm interested too...it seems that the unions are a good thing, but then, I don't have the experience to say that for sure.
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posted
I went to school in a system with a very strong teachers' union. A bad side of union was that it made it nearly impossible to get a teacher fired, even when s/he needed to go. A positive side was that the union helped the teachers fight back when the city tried to back out of pay agreements.
Basically, it gave the teachers more power. That power (like anything else) can either be used poorly or well.
Edited to note that I'm not a teacher myself. This is just my impression going through the system as a student.
posted
I think Miro has a good point - it's not a question of whether or not unions are always bad or always good.
Personally, the teachers I know all say they appreciate some of the union benefits, but they don't always agree with the unions politically.
It's the same with my husband, as a member of a firefighter's union. He doesn't agree with many of the political stances the national union office takes, but he appreciates much of what the local union does for firefighters. Especially the support and help they give to families of firefighters that have been killed on duty.
So, despite the fact that the union consitently endorses candidates that he doesn't vote for, he believes they do enough good to continue paying his dues every month.
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posted
I think the general feel of the comments that I posted above was that teacher unions hold back progress by resisting change. My own union, the PPTA, has battled through this, especially when there has been a more conservative government in power, and we've had some huge fights with the government (NZ teachers are government employees on a national basis, even though the hiring and firing takes place at a school level) over pay rates and teaching philosophies, most of which we've won. Teachers are fairly well regarded here, but that has taken a lot of hard work to achieve.
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posted
Over the years I have waxed and waned on unions. As a young teacher I was really active when Kansas first went the NEA route and negotiations began instead of "meet and confer."
When I was elected to Uniserve Board of Directors in Kansas, I began to lose interest. I just did not have the energy to devote to union things. I spent my time trying to teach. I also observed a bureaucratic aspect to unions that I had not seen before.
As an administrator I really could get along fine without unions.
My experiences have been in small schools. Our union activities were civil, for the most part, and took place across tables where everyone knew everyone else.
I would not have been able to take any union employee telling me I had to leave my job at 4 p.m. because if I stayed late I made others look bad. (Which I know did happen in larger schools)
So those are some loose thoughts about teacher unions and me.
Teachers need somebody to look out for them. These days everyone is taking potshots at education.
not edited for errors of any kind
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posted
Thanks to my teacher's union, I will be fully paid for the rest of this year, as I am out on sick leave. Not a good time for me to be objective, as I am extremely relieved and grateful.
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quote:I would not have been able to take any union employee telling me I had to leave my job at 4 p.m. because if I stayed late I made others look bad. (Which I know did happen in larger schools)
Wow, my union would never say anything like that! That's pretty amazing, quite mind-boggling really. Maybe that's the kind of attitude being referred to in my first post.
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posted
No, it is not mind boggling, in the case of nasty negotiations, where the teachers are getting the shaft.(a work to rule situation) As a general policy, it would stink, and I would ignore it, no matter the cost in the teacher's room.
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posted
Well, it did happen. It is likely the stuff you would hear that makes teacher unions sound terrible. I suspect it is rare, or at least I hope it is.
Look at Elizabeth's post and you see why unions exist.
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Oh, if we're talking work-to-rule, then absolutely. We've done all that stuff in our various battles with the government. The trick is in finding the right balance of scaring the govt without alienating the parents. We've managed to do that so far.
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posted
I'm not a member of a union (much to my parents' chagrin) but I get the mailers every week from them.
Texas has some interesting laws about teachers and unions, none of which I really understand (except I know we can't go on strike), but the union here does help defend the teachers' rights during the state legislation. I agree with some things, I don't agree with others. I'm trying very hard to stay out of the political side of teaching
Edit: They do good things in providing legal representation for teachers here and making sure that the teachers interests are looked after in school affairs. My mom experienced some strange accusations last year and her union representative stepped in and helped clear her name.
posted
I was doing a paper over teacher's unions at one point, but I never really finished it. Many of the articles I recall reading seemed to express the opinion that a decade or two after obtaining the right to collectively bargain, which even today not all states recognize I believe, that the many local teacher's unions started to abuse their collective bargaining rights. Many complained about the life-time tenure that many teachers get after only a few years of teaching. The union has been very resistant to change when comes to tenure, in most cases out right rejecting to even discuss performance based wages and things of that sort. While I can see how it would be hard to find a truely unbiased method of rating performance, that isn't really any different from what any other worker at a typical buisness would have to deal with.
I know that teacher's are still underpaid, but they seem to be limiting the number of personel that each school can hire. It would be my opinion that many lay-offs of the untenured teachers are a result of tenured teachers in the union being unwilling to bend on wages disputes. In many ways it resembles the automotive union of ten years ago, where all of the employees with a decade or two under there belt banded together to get outrageous wages; including things like "triple time" on holidays, and in doing so many fewer people were hired and many of the newest employees were fired. Obviously, the teacher's union doesn't get paid nearly as well or get anything like "triple time," but that is probably mostly because they are being funded mostly through the public sector. The automotive industry can be made to give more, because they have more. Of course they automotive unions antics eventually led to most of those jobs being outsourced, living all workers with no jobs. I suppose you can't really outsource teacher's positions, although one could make the case that homeschooling and private institutions are quite similar to outsourcing.
Hopefully I kept myself from rambling to much, and I hope I didn't seem seem to cruel when comes to the teacher's union. I've witnessed some pretty lousy things coming from the local chapter of the union when I was going through the school system, so I'm definitey biased. Ironically, I'll probably end up teaching in a few years. Anyways I tried to be as inoffensive as a could possibly be when I haven't slept in the last 36 hours (dumb macroecono..., 15 pag..., ).
I, too, would like to hear the opinions of some people who have actually played a role in the teacher's union, because my information is all second hand at best. It would be nice if I could regain some respect for the institution.
Now to catch some z's and forget everything about economics.
quote: While I can see how it would be hard to find a truely unbiased method of rating performance, that isn't really any different from what any other worker at a typical buisness would have to deal with.
The only problem there is I've never seen a rating of teachers' performance that doesn't depend on the performance of a third party (the students). An automotive worker who gets paid based on how many car doors he attaches to a car body doesn't have the car door insisting it doesn't want to be attached. the car door is totally passive, as opposed to living, breathing, often uncooperative students.
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posted
Its true that performance isn't only based simply on your own, but also on the people you are responsible for taking care of. A student's bad performance may reflect poorly on a teacher, but this is also the case with many other professions. In fact anyone on the management level has to deal with this. While its true that the automotive worker on the line doesn't have to worry about the car door performing poorly, the plant manager does have to worry about the line worker's performance.
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quote:The only problem there is I've never seen a rating of teachers' performance that doesn't depend on the performance of a third party (the students).
And that is the big problem with rating teacher performance.
My father, before he left for another sting of active duty, was working for the state legislature with the Education committee. They had a panel of teachers, and local businessmen, and one of the businessmen kept talking about teacher accountability, and how they should be measured, etc.
One of the teachers asked the businessmen (who made ice cream, apparently) how he chose his ice cream ingredients. He said he chose the ones of the best quality, that would make the best ice cream.
She said "We don't get to pick and choose what kids we teach. We have to teach the children in our class. They may have learning problems, they may have problems at home, they may have parents that don't care. Those are things beyond our control, and try as we might to positively impact those students, they may not improve. What then?"
What's the basis of comparison - do you compare the teacher's performance this year based on last year? How can you, the students are different. Do you compare say, student test scores against the state averages? What if you teach in a poor urban area, and the kids there have never scored at the state average - is it fair to compare their scores to the rich suburbs where all the kids have parents with college degrees, and computers in every classroom, and well-staffed libraries? Is it fair for that inner-city teacher who has to fight just to get the leaking roof tin he classroom fixed to be compared to teachers across town in state-of-the art facilities who have budgets to spare when it comes to buying learning materials for their classrooms?
That's not to say that the inner city kids are stupid and cannot learn - but the decks are stacked against them, and against their teachers. The kids that most need help, usually go to the poorest schools. Money does not solve every educational problem but it certainly goes a long way toward providing a decent learning environment.
There are no easy answers, unfortunately.
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I understand the historical need for unions - before, management had the power to dictate terms while workers had none.
With the introduction of unions, the balance of power is usually in sway with neither side ever gaining a significantly upper hand, although the occasional speedbump manifests on one side or the other as in the case of useless workers hiding under the blanket protection of the unions or managerial incompetence covered by golden parachutes.
quote: It's the same with my husband, as a member of a firefighter's union. He doesn't agree with many of the political stances the national union office takes, but he appreciates much of what the local union does for firefighters.
I'll have to check, but I think I remember reading that you can legally request that dues that would be spent on political issues which you don't agree with be returned. I don't think it's easy because you have to prove that you are, in fact, against those issues the union supports.
posted
I have spent a lot of my life dealing with unions and am a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Union party in Minnesota(otherwise known as DFL). I have had a lot of experience dealing with the AFT and Education Minnesota and from all of the teachers I have spoken with, the unions are a very positive thing. We had an interesting test happen a few years ago here. Our state imposed something called graduation standards, which were little more then glorified poster making. The unions stood up, not just for teachers, but for the students, and fought against the enforcement of imbalanced standards against students, with little to no educational merit. I have had many friends become or attempt to become teachers. Their reasons for leaving have never been one of the unions, but rather the low pay that is just barely above poverty in many states, the poor treatment and lack of respect from students, and the lack of respect from the public in genreal. Teachers are some of the hardest workers in the nation and the unions fight hard to give them power as a united front. Arguably the bad side of being a teacher is the students, whom are of the attitude that teachers don't deserve respect, don't do enough work, and are not worth a damn. This is the attitude we need to work to change, rather then attempting to blame outside forces like the union. (As I post this I am currently a college student, so trust me, I see this every day, even in college.)
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quote: What's the basis of comparison - do you compare the teacher's performance this year based on last year? How can you, the students are different. Do you compare say, student test scores against the state averages?
The state of Virginia is using a computer database of student perfomance for longitudinal analysis of teacher performance. So for example, the students froma 6th grade math teacher are tracked to their 7th, 8th, and 9th grade math classes, and their performance is tracked backwards to determine which teachers' students consistently perform beter than other teachers' students. It takes awhile for the results to come back, but it's probably the only way to really tell how good any particular teacher is.
Right now it's in a fairly early stage, but if it works you can expect it to spread to other states.
As to the original question: It's a mixed bag. I think most people agree on that.
My feeling about unions in general is that you ought to be able to form a union any time one is really needed, but it should be disbanded again as soon as it has done its job.
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quote:The state of Virginia is using a computer database of student perfomance for longitudinal analysis of teacher performance. So for example, the students froma 6th grade math teacher are tracked to their 7th, 8th, and 9th grade math classes, and their performance is tracked backwards to determine which teachers' students consistently perform beter than other teachers' students. It takes awhile for the results to come back, but it's probably the only way to really tell how good any particular teacher is.
This is also an entirely bogus way to judge performance.
If you were judging, say, how well a car performs after 10, 20, 30, and 40 thousand miles, this might be legitimate - provided the car has not had any accidents and has had proper maintenance during that time.
Thing is, the emotional and psychological changes in students between 6th and 9th grade are astounding. Gauging their performance in 6th grade with their performance in 9th grade tells you next to nothing about the quality of their teachers. (Just like judging that car at 10k and 40k tells you nothing about the manufacturer, if it was in a major accident in the interim)
Some students will improve no matter how bad their teachers are, simply through motivation. Some students will implode because of a bad home situation that worsens over the years. Other students will discover the opposite sex and lose focus, while others still may realize high school "counts" and really apply themselves.
Students cannot be treated as lumps of rock that have been chiseled and refined with each year - their changes are more fluid and unpredictable, and are in response to a whole host of stimuli.
In short, the 40 minutes a teacher spends with a student each day is very little in the grander scheme of their development than the remaining 1400 minutes of that student's life each day. Gauging year to year progress, in that respect, is next to useless.
posted
Thank you, FC. I love it when other Hatrackers say what I am thinking. Usually, if I wait long enough, this will happen.
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posted
Exactly, Elizabeth. And they tend to do so with much greater clarity and relevance than I would have.
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quote: have had many friends become or attempt to become teachers. Their reasons for leaving have never been one of the unions, but rather the low pay that is just barely above poverty in many states, the poor treatment and lack of respect from students, and the lack of respect from the public in genreal.
Is this really the way it is in the US, generally? I nearly moved to the US about 5 years ago (I have 2 married children living in Utah), getting as far as being registered as a teacher in Utah. Other reasons made us decide to stay here, but a concern in the back of my mind, at least, was the sentiment expressed above. How true and how much of an issue are these things, and why are teachers so poorly paid in many states?
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For an individual student I agree. But data analysis on (let's say) 150 students per year tracked over several years should pick out teachers that are consistently failing to prepare their students for upcoming material.
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quote:This is also an entirely bogus way to judge performance.
If you were judging, say, how well a car performs after 10, 20, 30, and 40 thousand miles, this might be legitimate - provided the car has not had any accidents and has had proper maintenance during that time.
Thing is, the emotional and psychological changes in students between 6th and 9th grade are astounding. Gauging their performance in 6th grade with their performance in 9th grade tells you next to nothing about the quality of their teachers. (Just like judging that car at 10k and 40k tells you nothing about the manufacturer, if it was in a major accident in the interim)
Some students will improve no matter how bad their teachers are, simply through motivation. Some students will implode because of a bad home situation that worsens over the years. Other students will discover the opposite sex and lose focus, while others still may realize high school "counts" and really apply themselves. ... In short, the 40 minutes a teacher spends with a student each day is very little in the grander scheme of their development than the remaining 1400 minutes of that student's life each day. Gauging year to year progress, in that respect, is next to useless.
I disagree, respectfully.
In tracking groups of students taught by given instuctors, you would expect such variation to be equally distributed across the different groups of students.
That is, although such variation certainly would exist between individual students -- and this is an important thing to recognize on the individual level -- there is not an expressed reason for such non-teacher-related variation to cluster within teacher-groups. One would expect such non-teacher variation to be more or less equally distributed amongst the teacher groups.*
If there are differences between the groups, this should be attributable to the teachers, insofar as the groups are otherwise relevantly similar, within the given standard of error. A "power analysis" would tell you what the n would have to be in order to detect such a difference (also within a given standard of error). I have not done the power calculation, so I cannot comment on the exact numbers, but I'd guess that there would be enough information to detect statistically significant differences for the sample in question above.
Whether or not the statistically significant difference (if any) would translate into "clinical" (or "real-world") significance in a separate matter again. On that I cannot comment.
In other words, what Glenn said, only with less brevity and clarity.
[*This assumes the data analysis controls for other possible confounders, such as geographic area (inner city, etc), socioeconomic status, etc. One must either only compare between groups from (e.g.) similar geographic area and SES, or one must adjust the analysis accordingly. Although this is complicated, it can be done.]
[ April 13, 2005, 06:26 AM: Message edited by: Glaphyra the Righteous ]
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posted
Another way to think about, in regards to your car analogy:
If you are examining hundreds of cars from different manufacturers, you know some of the problems you see in some of them after a few years will be due to individual events. However, if an unusual and worrisome clustering of problems keeps cropping up in the Azteks, Bonnevilles, Grand Ams, and Sunfires, then it'd be a good idea to check out the Pontiac plant.
Doesn't mean it proves that this is where the problem must be, just that it wouldn't be entirely bogus to go back and look at the common factor that unites these incidents. Again, though, this is all dependent on the numbers involved, possible confounding factors, and whether the "problems" are significant in a meaningful, real-world sense.
But still, it makes sense to start with this approach and go on from there.
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hello, i can't resist hopping in on education. first, the unions wanting teachers to leave at a specific time like 4pm is a great way to show how much extra work teachers do without fiscal compensense. who wants a 9-5 job where you have to stay until 6 some days(bus duty afternoon), show up at 8 some days (bus duty morning), show back up from 7-9pm others(unpaid security at extracurricular events, supervision for extracurricular activities, or to discuss raw material quality with suppliers...i.e. unfed, unwashed, unmedicated, overmedicated, unequipped, uninterested students) and be evaluated on your ability to convince your students of the importance of education in a few hours each day when their families have spent years convincing them otherwise,with an increasing amount of parenting being expected(instilling values,self esteem, a conscience) somehow without exposing the students to anything the actual parents don't like. i was shocked to find most kids i knew got to "play hooky", not attend school on their birthdays, parents giving ignorance as a reward. both my parents were teachers, in tennessee, possibly the least funded state educationwise, i have't checked recently, but we were ranked 50th out of 50 states a few years ago. my parent spent their own money to make up for lacks in educational supplies, kids see what their parents value, every high school around me has a football stadium, but no gifted program. i can make $46 a day substitute teaching with a bs in secondary ed, while my brief stay in texas-ranked 36th in education funding at the time, got me $75 in the less well funded districts, $100 in the more prosperous ones. of course, the legislators who determine educational funding put their own children into private schools, ignorant people are much easier to control.
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Until there is a test that can incorporate all aspects of a teacher's work, not just the numbers on tests their students take, I feel it is all a lot of baloney.
Like this, for instance:
"At a time when Virginia, Maryland and other states face massive budget deficits, craftiness is a much-needed quality among public school teachers, who say they find themselves having to spend more of their money to supply their classrooms. For some, these out-of-pocket expense items include not only decorative posters, but also such essential items as pencils, glue bottles, scissors and facial tissues."
posted
I sure wouldn't argue with anyone who states that teachers are underpaid, undervalued, and undersupported in general.
That is a different thing from the general approach to assessment, though. The sort of thing Glenn describes really does (to me) sound like the most rigorous and well-grounded way to identify problem spots. Mind you, a given teacher whose students tend not to do as well later on may well not be a inept or lazy teacher -- in fact, the issue might be that his department is relatively undersupported, or that he is such a phenomenal person that he is sought out by parents of kids with special needs.
Identifying this "hot spot" may well mean identifying a place where more resources may need to be diverted.
What Glenn describes is a standard application of statistical analysis. I think maybe we [me included] are all worried about how the information yielded by that tool may be used -- i.e., an evaluator automatically assuming that a "hot spot" means a bad teacher. However, this is not the fault of the tool. Rather, the fault is in how it is used; the problem is with how even the most accurate and reliable information available can be misused for ill purpose. (Same as in the field of medicine or anything else.) Very important concern nonetheless, even if a different concern.
[ April 13, 2005, 08:36 AM: Message edited by: Glaphyra the Righteous ]
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quote:kids see what their parents value, every high school around me has a football stadium, but no gifted program
How very sad. And very true.
And you are right to call the attention to the parents - many times the athletic facility improvements are funded through boosters and other sources of funding.
When my daughter first started the gifted program at our school, we met with the teacher, and talked with her about her ideas. She welcomed suggestions, and wanted to know what our kids were interested in. When many of the parents mentioned their kids were interested in some sort of ancient history (Ancient Egypt was really big on the list) one parent asked if we could do a field trip to a museum, because the museum was featuring an exhibition of Egyptian artififacts. The answer was no - funding wasn't available. When we all spoke up and said we'd pay for it, we were told no - we couldn't do trips that were funded outside the school. When we asked her if we could raise money for additional supplies, she told us any fundraising had to be coordinated through the Parent Teacher Organization and that it had to go to the general fund, we couldn't earmark it for gifted education.
And yet, the school athletic departments and band programs had booster organization and their money could go directly to those programs. We couldn't do it with the gifted program though, because it was an academic program, not an extracurricular activity.
It was extremely frustrating, for the parents and for the gifted education teacher.
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posted
CT, I'm a fan of good statistical analysis. I just don't see how this can be -- the sample groups are too small, and the external confounding factors too many and too diverse.
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I agree that teachers are very underpaid and not treated like the professionals they are.
However, in other professions, the poor workers are weeded out. Thanks in part to unions, that doesn't happen in teaching. I had more than enough lousy teachers through my life to know that.
There should be some way to evaluate a teacher's performance. The rest of us get scrutinized.
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I don't know -- what size are the sample groups?
I was figuring that 3 classes a year of 25 students each class would give a sample of a few hundred students over the course of three years (for each teacher). Like Glenn said, it would take awhile to pull together enough data, but it does seem to me to be the right way to start.
But I admit to being pretty clueless* about other people's jobs, so maybe my numbers are all wacky. *Don't ask me to plumb a door -- trust me.
[You could also "tust" me, but I'm not sure if that's legal in this state.]
[ April 13, 2005, 01:00 PM: Message edited by: Glaphyra the Righteous ]
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posted
For many high school teachers, it probably is a few hundred over the course of three years. But in that case, we are also talking about teachers who are seeing these students for a grand total of no more than 4-5 hours per week. How can that possibly produce statistically significant results?
And are we looking at grades? Because grades alone, IMO, are a truly lousy way to evaluate student progress. And doing so in this scenario would encourage artificial inflation of scores to boot.
posted
Standard sample sizes for most statistical testing range from 30 to 40. I think it might depend somewhat on what kind of test you are doing (Z, t, f, chi^2, etc.).
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[rivka:] A different issue, though, no? One wouldn't necessarily have to use test scores. Another marker could be failure rates in higher-level math courses, or something of the like. Track the kids from Mr. X's algebra class and see how they continue to do as they progress through the system, as compared to other algebra math teachers' kids.
Again, with numbers in the hundreds, one would reasonably expect that confounders would be randomly distibuted across the teachers, given similarity of populations to start with (or given appropriate controlling). That is, you'd expect that any variation in math scores due to sexual experimentation (and boy-hooey, I do agree that social experiences can affect one's productivity) would affect each teacher's group of students in the same way.
[BTW, I can surely see this info being used inappropriately. I just don't see any better way of trying to sort through this. But again, I admit to being prone to error in puzzling through things outside my field. ]
[ April 13, 2005, 01:09 PM: Message edited by: Glaphyra the Righteous ]
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posted
Except that then you need a large enough sample of teachers in similar conditions in order to have a moderately valid statistical analysis of their comparative abilities. And try finding that, given conditions vary so much between schools.
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I'm not sure that this is more the case for teachers and schools than it is for, say, pediatric oncologists and hospitals. I think you have to do the best with what you have and be up front about the limitations or possible/likely confounders to the study.
But just because the pediatric oncologist treating a substantially Latino-heritage population at a California research center is going to have some different issues and circumstances than the rural pediatric oncologist treating a substantially Eastern-European- and Hmong-heritage population in Minnesota (along with the differences in state insurance provisions, SES, farming/rural access issues, etc), doesn't mean that the field doesn't work to come up with standard of care guidelines. And work on tracking outcomes measures across the field, to boot.
I get that it's tricky, but I don't think the suggestion to apply this method is outside the pale.
[ April 13, 2005, 01:17 PM: Message edited by: Glaphyra the Righteous ]
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posted
Again, "kicking out of the profession" is a matter of application of the information, not a matter with the tool that gathers the information.
Do peds oncologists get "kicked out of the field?" Depends on what you mean by that. They definitely do get censured (formally and informally) by colleagues for having substantially poorer success rates. For example, if your mortality rates are higher than typical, you will get fewer referrals from primary care physicians (who definitely do keep track of these sorts of things). Lose enough of the referral base and you will go under.
Look, I get that this information could be used for ill or good. I also get that it could be misinterpreted or misrepresented by persons with untoward agendas of their own. But the science of gathering the information isn't the problem in that case -- it's how the information is used. A different matter.
Glenn's post was pretty roundly objected to on the basis of the method (not the application), at least by my read, and I don't think that was warranted on the face of it.
[ April 13, 2005, 01:26 PM: Message edited by: Glaphyra the Righteous ]
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posted
By the way, I'll support a rousing critique of the way power structures tend to replicate themselves through subversion, spin, and making the poop slide downhill. I just like to be clear and careful about exactly what it is I'm protesting, though. Here I'd object to the possible application much more loudly than I would the tool.
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posted
With few exceptions, the entire public school system is flawed from top to bottom. Just like every other industry, the primary modivating factor is self interest. Buisinesses that thrive are those that can channel this in a way to attact and keep customers in order to make a profit. For school these customers are the parents.
Having had our children enrolled in both public and private schools, we have found our experience with the latter to be positive while quite negative with the former. When our child had a difficulty the private school was willing to offer assitance, and to talor the program to fit our childs needs. The public school offered some token support but was unwilling to put in any real effort. Why? If they didn't keep me, the custormer, happy, we would take our business elsewhere. The public school has no accountablity to the parents, and therefore didn't care.
The solution? Abolish all public schools. Make all schools privatly run orginizations that need to compete for students. Lower income families should then be entitled to finantial aid in the form of vouchers. This type of system would improve many aspects of eductation. A few would be:
1) Improvement in education quality. With schools competing directly, teachers and adminitraters will be highly modivated to provide a high quality school.
2) Lower education costs. Much of the Bureaucrats fat (particularly in the goverment sector) will no longer be needed. These schools will also find creative ways to trim costs that would never occur to a government organization. What this means to the average citizen is lower taxes.
3) Greater availability of specialty schools. Every child has differing talents, strenghts and weaknesses. Many private schools will be able to find niche customers for children with special needs or abilities. Consequently, children will be able to learn in a school that will best facilitate their learning style and ablility instead of being pushed into the "one size fits all" mold in public schools today.
As I stated before, what this systems does is it gives power back to the parents. A failing school will lose their customers and a successful school will flourish with increased enrollment. And the teachers? Well, a successful school will need to attract the best teachers, and the best way to do that is to offer good compensation. The only losers will be the bad teachers, the corrupt unions, and the do nothing bureaucrats in the government. And lets be honest, these are groups that we deserve to lose.
Posts: 157 | Registered: Apr 2005
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My main problem is in the use of such things, yes. Allowing gathered statistics to be used internally in educated, personal judgments of teachers by schools and schoolboards, I support.
I'm somewhat reactionary, though, because of the large pushes to penalize teachers based on arbitrary application of largely irrelevant statistics (such as the NCLB act does on the school level).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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"Me, too" (regarding the above post) and "sounds like we are on the same page, then" (regarding the one above that). Posts: 93 | Registered: Nov 2004
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