I don't mean this in a rhetorical way, as in "the system isn't so bad," but this is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently.
I have been fortunate enough to have mostly great teachers and fairly good classroom environments, and have done well in honors and AP classes throughout high school.
Now, however, I'm working as an assistant for a teacher of an on-level Algebra course, a concept that I have been woefully unexposed to since third grade, and the disparity between the classroom environment I was used to and what I saw here really grated at me. These students are clearly not here to learn, and find every way they can to avoid doing their work. Whereas in my AP Calculus course, everyone takes careful notes and, though there is groaning about homework, the teacher can reasonably expect everyone to complete it without nagging.
Part of my teacher's-assistant workload includes grading quizzes and miscellaneous worksheets. I was shocked to find so many dismal grades in what I had always considered a relatively easy subject. The only other time I encountered a class with such low grades was in AP Physics, where the teacher expected us to do a lot of independent study and be able to reason through problems (the reason for the low grades was probably senioritis; I was a junior and my fellow juniors and I all scraped at least a B each semester). Here, however, the students are practically being spoon-fed the concepts by an adequate teacher. I have long since ruled out a lack of intelligence on their part: I tutored a couple of them one-on-one and they were able to figure out what to do to solve problems when they realized they had to. Some of them even demonstrated misapplied intelligence, thinking up elaborate ways to be disruptive during class. Most of them are not stupid. They just don't seem to care.
Now, I never pretend to be an overachiever or a star student. I was pretty lazy in my own study habits, but I did enough to get As and Bs for everything, and after fifth grade it became my philosophy that all homework should be finished on time, even if its completion didn't count much towards my grade. But ultimately, I was often a procrastinator, preferring to read or program computer games over doing assignments. This minimal effort I put into schoolwork still yielded me good results, grade-wise, but these on-level students are so indifferent that they are often getting Ds and Es. Therefore, it seems to me that the amount of effort put into school is not directly proportional to measured performance. Would working only a little harder, despite maintaining a bit of cynicism about the subject, sharply improve their scores? Or are there other factors than just not caring?
Another thing that I just can't get out of my head is the fact that every single person in this class except one is a racial minority. Now, there are a lot of minorities in the school in general, but if the class was a fair representation of the racial population, nearly 50% of the students would be white. I've known, intellectually, that it is a significant problem in America's schools that racial minorities (bar Asians) do not exhibit much evidence of "equal opportunity regardless of race," but this is the first time I've encountered it so blatantly.
I've been trying to think of what the underlying cause of this disparity between my own experience and these on-level students is. The racial correlation is clear (it is the first classroom I've seen where there was a Spanish-speaking interpreter), but I certainly don't think that's the cause, be it oppression or genotype. It seems very possible that the amount of income their respective households make would make a difference, but what causes that correlation? And if this is the root cause, what does it imply? That poorer families can't expect to raise students with educational opportunities? Or is it cyclical, so that those who didn't care about school don't think it is a big deal if their children perform poorly? If it is cyclical, then what caused the correlation between racial minorities and academic apathy in the first place? Perhaps it is explainable for blacks because they were given shoddy facilities during the Jim Crow era, and if nobody cared about the students getting a good education, why would the students? It may be explainable for first-generation Hispanic immigrants if English is their second language, and it therefore requires much more effort to pay attention and understand. But none of these are a product of the educational system (except the racial segregation that has been de jure gone for decades).
The teacher for this class is not a bad one, but I've had so many outstanding teachers that she looks boring by comparison. She works hard to make sure people are understanding the lesson, but it is slow-going with an audience that puts up so much resistance, and it ultimately drags the classroom into a standard 10 minutes of warm-up (which many students don't bother with), 20-30 minutes of checking and reviewing homework, 10 minutes of actual instruction, and 0-10 minutes of classwork formula.
It makes me reflect on some of my teachers that I had. I remember my math teachers in middle school to be unanimously boring, but I was pleasantly surprised by an animated Algebra-II teacher and an amazing AP Calculus teacher who had everything going for him. I also recall some great history teachers, from my seventh-grade Iranian World History teacher to my twelfth-grade European History teacher. The former was no-nonsense and unpredictable, but energetic and informative, and I learned a lot from her. The latter was simply amazing, and despite his class format consisting completely of lectures and note-taking, he was good at making none of it uninteresting, and continually challenged the class to think about the implications of historical facts and was not afraid to delve into the subtleties of the religion and politics of the cultures we were learning about. Would the on-level students in this Algebra class be more passionate about learning if they had more teachers like these?
I asked my father about this apparent shortage of good teachers for those who need them, and his response was that the reason for the growing amount of mediocre teachers was "women in the workplace. Back when teaching was one of the only jobs available to educated women, it was more competitive to become a teacher, but now an educated woman can expect more than being a teacher, so the less ambitious people are taking over." (My father is a feminist liberal who believes firmly in equality between men and women, before you get up in arms over this hypothesis.)
Another factor I thought of might be that the presence of a few jerks in the class can hold everyone else back. An example is an experience I had today: a girl in the class was talking to someone else, and the teacher called her out on it. Because she was arrogant beyond belief, she talked back to the teacher, pretending that she did no wrong and refused to let it go. The teacher shut her up by writing her name on the board, commenting that "this is more typical of elementary school." The girl didn't want to give up so easily, and started making snorting sounds and hilariously fake coughs that sounded more like dog barks. Then she started walking over to the Kleenex box on the other side of the room and taking obscene amounts of tissues while the teacher was talking. This, of course, was extremely disruptive, and the teacher asked her if she needed to go to the nurse (she wasn't fooled by her fakery, but it was necessary to get her out of the class to get rid of this petulant disruption. The girl responded by saying she was already diagnosed with "tonsillitis" and that it wasn't contagious (which is a blatant lie), and that the nurse would just send her back. It took several minutes to finally get her to leave the classroom and go to the nurse just to get her to leave the rest of the class alone during the lesson. I hadn't witnessed such unruly dishonesty in an academic environments since third grade. At least in fourth and fifth grade people found ways to be annoying without lying.
Because I have been brought up on parables of humility and loving thy neighbor above yourself, I frankly feel guilty for reaping the best education public school had to offer while these students, struggling in an on-level class, obviously need it more. What is the underlying cause of this disparity between my experience and that of these other students?
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
1. The American school system is crippled by decades of being unable to remove negligent and incompetent teachers. It's underfunded, sure, but adding more funding is a vastly inefficient and ineffectual gesture that does not compensate for the fact that the money is essentially wasted, in increasingly larger and larger quantities, by teachers that school systems simply cannot remove.
2. Since tenured teachers take what positions they wish to have mostly at leisure (or get placed by the districts into positions where they conceptually do 'the least damage'), the extraordinarily difficult jobs in non-preferable situations go to young teachers desperate for what positions still remain. And, even when they show dedication and passion for the job, they're burnt out in record numbers and abandon teaching as a prospective career. Programs like Teach for America have chewed up scores of energetic young would-be teachers and spit them out.
3. Singapore's teachers are recruited from the top 30% of academic cohorts, Finland recruits from the top 20%, and South Korea only accepts teachers from the top FIVE percent. In the United States, on the other hand, 77% of teachers come from the bottom two thirds of their academic cohorts. A lot of this comes from how discouraging the pay scales and opportunities are for teachers in American schools.
4. Our policy of tying any portion at all of per-student funding to what the district can bring in via local taxation is, frankly, retarded. It goes hand in hand with how stupid it is to expect a teacher to manage classrooms of 35 students and up and have any room to provide any of these children with a quality education. This ensures that there are plenty of school districts that, entirely outside of issues of administrative neglect, incompetence, or malfeasance, cannot equip themselves not to fail and only drag on year after year in states analogous to DC innercity schools.
basically, what isn't wrong with our schools? We have so many institutional problems that I don't expect we can fix, that I could easily number out more up to 20 or 30.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
Replace "grade level Algebra" with "Grade level English" and you have pretty much described my classes.
I teach grade level English, not pre-AP. The pre-AP teacher across the hall has a completely different experience teaching than I do. Practically all my 180 students are minorities, and they are so apathetic about their education I truly feel like I am beating my head against the wall.
They read nothing I assign. They don't do homework. They fail vocabulary quizzes that are basically just matching up the definitions of 10 words - none of them difficult. I gave a grammar test on parts of speech. (PARTS OF SPEECH, PEOPLE!) and 2/3 of the classes failed it.
That means they can't identify nouns and distinguish between action and linking verbs. In the 10th grade. And I taught it before I gave the test, and reviewed it and gave them a blasted study guide for a parts of speech test and they failed it in droves. They also didn't care...few were upset with the failing grades.
My sole purpose is to prepare them for the graduation exam that is given in the spring, and which they must pass to graduate. I spend my time reviewing grad exam objectives....and praying some of it sticks. I teach the apathetic, the unmotivated, and the ones who are just marking time until their 17th birthday so they can legally drop out.
Now, to answer your questions. These kids have always been in our public schools, but many of them left early in their high school careers. I think what has happened is that with No Child Left Behind schools now have to track dropout rates and if they have too high a dropout rate, are in danger of not making their goals. Where many students who were completely apathetic, disruptive, and in general getting in the way of education rather than truly learning were allowed (or encouraged) to drop out in the past, they are now kept and instead "intervention programs" are put in place to keep them in school.
In addition, you've seen the death of many vo-tech programs, and the tracking of every student in to a college prep academic program. In my state, you are automatically enrolled in the college prep, advanced academic diploma in 9th grade. You have to opt out of it by parent request, rather than opt in. So, we are putting a lot of kids in college prep programs, that frankly - are not meant to be there.
The girl you are describing - I have ten of them in one class. My inclusion class has 22 kids with special needs, 7 of which are classified chronic behavior problems. The disruption and the type of thing you are describing is a daily occurrence for me. I do what I can within the system...referring them to the principal when it is too much out of hand. It's difficult. I don't have any answers, just sympathy.
Posted by Jenos (Member # 12168) on :
I'm curious as to what is the causative factor in this issue. How much is the issue comes from social/family pressures that don't stress education? I'm sure quality of teachers is important, but I'm wondering if the quality exacerbates an existing problem, or is the cause of it?
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
I like what Belle said about students essentially being forced into high-school and college. That is something that has bothered me for a long time. Though I will say that I have been pleasantly surprised teaching a college class. Yeah, I lose some of the class. I can see a few sleeping, a couple texting. But I've got a good class. They just turned in their first paper, so we'll see how that goes. I imagine there will be quite a few disappointments, but what's encouraging is that for the most part they seem earnestly interested in learning and improving.
It is a junior level college class though, so I don't have a that similar of an experience to high-school teachers. As far as high-school goes, what's frustrated me and time and time again is the inaction and seeming indifference of parents. I know there's nothing teachers can do about that, but parents dumping their children's education completely in the hands of others and then not doing anything to reinforce it at home is incredibly frustrating.
Posted by natural_mystic (Member # 11760) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: 1. The American school system is crippled by decades of being unable to remove negligent and incompetent teachers. It's underfunded, sure, but adding more funding is a vastly inefficient and ineffectual gesture that does not compensate for the fact that the money is essentially wasted, in increasingly larger and larger quantities, by teachers that school systems simply cannot remove.
2. Since tenured teachers take what positions they wish to have mostly at leisure (or get placed by the districts into positions where they conceptually do 'the least damage'), the extraordinarily difficult jobs in non-preferable situations go to young teachers desperate for what positions still remain. And, even when they show dedication and passion for the job, they're burnt out in record numbers and abandon teaching as a prospective career. Programs like Teach for America have chewed up scores of energetic young would-be teachers and spit them out.
3. Singapore's teachers are recruited from the top 30% of academic cohorts, Finland recruits from the top 20%, and South Korea only accepts teachers from the top FIVE percent. In the United States, on the other hand, 77% of teachers come from the bottom two thirds of their academic cohorts. A lot of this comes from how discouraging the pay scales and opportunities are for teachers in American schools.
4. Our policy of tying any portion at all of per-student funding to what the district can bring in via local taxation is, frankly, retarded. It goes hand in hand with how stupid it is to expect a teacher to manage classrooms of 35 students and up and have any room to provide any of these children with a quality education. This ensures that there are plenty of school districts that, entirely outside of issues of administrative neglect, incompetence, or malfeasance, cannot equip themselves not to fail and only drag on year after year in states analogous to DC innercity schools.
basically, what isn't wrong with our schools? We have so many institutional problems that I don't expect we can fix, that I could easily number out more up to 20 or 30.
Gotta run, so just a quick post: Have you seen data to support 1.? This seems to be the conventional wisdom now, but it's hard to know how much of that is because everyone hates unions. Finland, for example, has very strong teacher's unions and provides good education.
Also, I have seen some data - I think both from Gladwell and the Economist - suggesting that the big drawback is the length of the year. Lower income kids suffer massive "summer learning loss", while upper income kids are sent to constructive camps etc. and don't exhibit this phenomenon. Other countries have substantially longer school years.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
quote:Have you seen data to support 1.? This seems to be the conventional wisdom now, but it's hard to know how much of that is because everyone hates unions. Finland, for example, has very strong teacher's unions and provides good education.
I don't have any data myself, but I did want to point out there's a big difference between a strong union and one that protects the jobs of incompetent employees.
Hobbes Posted by SoaPiNuReYe (Member # 9144) on :
Trade school needs to become more of an option for kids. But then funneling will only become a bigger problem than it already is. Some of the blame lies directly on individual schools too. My entire 4 years of high school I was never assigned a homework assignment for math that wasn't graded for completion. So on days I didn't feel like doing homework (pretty much all of them), I just wrote down gobbledygook and turned it in for an A. And I wasn't the only one either.
Posted by Shanna (Member # 7900) on :
In my personal observation, family involvement makes a huge difference in creating kids who come to school ready to learn and those that just show up (or not show up.)
I grew up in suburban Texas and my town was 50% white (lots of those were farming families) and 50% hispanic (a mixed of first and second-generation immigrants.) The biggest difference was parental involvement and it started young with lots of parents in the elementary school PTA or showing up to bring snacks for class parties or volunteer for different events. If a parent was devoted to the family farm or a workaholic (lots of those in Houston,) those were the kids that suffered. Our principal in those years spoke Spanish, so she was great at finding ways for the non-English speaking parents to get involved. Academic scores were hardly an issue of race and that didn't change much as the years went on as it always seemed to me that the groundwork had to be laid early.
Then a few years ago, I got to watch the guy that I was dating become a teacher for the New Orleans Recovery School District. I spent weeks helping him prepare his classroom, making posters and talking about lesson plans while working in classrooms with broken windows and no electricity. He spent the first two months at one of the worst high schools in the city where it was considered at accomplishment if a kid graduated, even if their reading and writing level was on par with a third grader. Kids would shout racial slurs in the middle of lessons, simply get up and leave, or only show up once or twice in the those two months.
Then he was transferred to an elementary school. Oddly, the violence was something that increased with students getting into altercations with security guards. He did have some bigger breakthroughs with the younger students but the majority of them had severe discipline problems and no matter how many times he would call parents, 95% of them would not show up for parent-teacher meetings. Some even refused to speak to him on the phone.
Now, I'm a big supporter of public schools but if there was ever a city that has benefited from charter schools, this is it! People still debate the effectiveness of charter schools in regards to test scores and such, but it serves the purpose of providing more opportunities to those with parents that are even slightly interested in the education of their children (application and enrollment is much more time-consuming and competitive.) If a school can identify those parents willing to make the first step, its easier to drag them onto step 2 and step 3 whether that's more parent-teacher meetings or getting the parents to enroll their kids in summer school.
Year round school programs also seem to be aiding students here who don't have access to summer camps or enrichment activities (no museum or zoo trips with the parents, etc.) I think alot of these kids are going home to empty houses at the end of the day and just spend most of their time roaming the streets or looking for trouble or anything to keep them entertained for a few hours. Great teachers can make a huge impact but a few hours in a classroom means very little compared to empty summers and hours at home with apathetic or missing parents.
If schools are going to overcome lazy parents and corrupt communities, they've got to become a force to be reckoned with. Its driving me crazy, but does anyone know the name of the man who runs the urban high school with 100% graduate? The school is entirely poor minorities but they send almost all their kids to college. The principal knows every student by name, handpicks his staff, and actually gets up super early in the morning to pick up a bunch of his students and bring them to school. I've seen a couple of tv specials on him and every time I see him, I imagine what it would be like if we put him in charge of doing a massive overhaul of the entire education system here in America.
But honestly, I think most of it is just going to come down to the parents. I'm the biggest slacker of the three kids in my family and I think that's partly because I never needed my parents to be involved. I was naturally bright as a child and often did my homework on the bus ride home from school. I had a brother two years younger who was held back a grade because severe ear infections delayed speech development. My parents spent a good deal of time working with him and helping him catch up, while I sat in my room doing jigsaw puzzles and reading Jules Verne. Fifteen years later and he's finishing up student-teaching with a great academic record while a lack of time-management and study skills meant that I struggled in college. My youngest brother, another quiet and book-loving child, ran into the same problem in high school.
It'd be great if every teacher was an after-school special, but we can't expect them all to be miracle-workers.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
Charter schools being an appropriate response at all, anywhere, is just a perfect signal of dire straits. They're a bad idea in the long term, but who cares about that when your district is useless in short, medium, or long term anyway.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by SoaPiNuReYe: Trade school needs to become more of an option for kids
Mike Rowe (of Discovery's Dirty Jobs fame) gave an interesting TED talk on the subject of, not trade schools specifically, but blue-collar work in general and how valuable it is. Ah, here it is.
I don't necessarily agree with all of what he has to say, but I did find it entertaining and interesting. Maybe you will too! Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
I wish we'd had more vocational/tech classes when I was in high school. We had a great music/theater program, literally half the school was either in one of the choirs, one of the orchestras or bands, or in a production, and that and foreign languages are where I spent all my optional classes in high school, but I would have loved to take a couple semesters of autoshop so I could do more intermediate level things with my car than just changing the oil (which, admittedly, I still rarely do myself).
All of our tech classes were computer tech, stuff like CAD, and they were very popular and very competitive. But almost my entire school was college bound except for maybe the bottom ten percent, and from what few of them I'm still in touch with (the bottom ten), they're all working fast food type stuff.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Charter schools being an appropriate response at all, anywhere, is just a perfect signal of dire straits. They're a bad idea in the long term, but who cares about that when your district is useless in short, medium, or long term anyway.
I'll admit to not having done a great deal of reading on trade schools, but what I have read basically says that trade schools, short or long term, are really no different than regular schools as far as quality goes. Some of them are good, some are bad, it depends on funding and location.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
trade schools? I'm all for trade schools.
Posted by SoaPiNuReYe (Member # 9144) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank:
quote:Originally posted by SoaPiNuReYe: Trade school needs to become more of an option for kids
Mike Rowe (of Discovery's Dirty Jobs fame) gave an interesting TED talk on the subject of, not trade schools specifically, but blue-collar work in general and how valuable it is. Ah, here it is.
I don't necessarily agree with all of what he has to say, but I did find it entertaining and interesting. Maybe you will too!
That was great thanks! I do agree with what he has to say about the decline of blue collar in America, especially the way it is portrayed in the media. It's ironic in a way because blue collar work is so celebrated in American history.
Posted by Stephan (Member # 7549) on :
quote:Originally posted by SoaPiNuReYe: Trade school needs to become more of an option for kids. But then funneling will only become a bigger problem than it already is. Some of the blame lies directly on individual schools too. My entire 4 years of high school I was never assigned a homework assignment for math that wasn't graded for completion. So on days I didn't feel like doing homework (pretty much all of them), I just wrote down gobbledygook and turned it in for an A. And I wasn't the only one either.
Some say it is unfair to grade student's homework. It is not meant to be an assessment, but rather practice. If you can get an A on the actual test by turning in gobbledegook for homework then, in math at least, you more then likely deserve on a good grade in the course anyways.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
Dan, thanks for posting that link to the TED talk by Mike Rowe. I really like him, and I love the TED talks I have seen. Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
Charter schools get to pick the parents which gives an unfair advantage to them. If you can only have parents who care that much, you have a lot less problems. Another thing to consider is parent education level. If you are first generation immigrant and your parents have the equivalence of a 3rd grade education, getting to 11th grade is still a huge improvement over the generation. Also, there is no hw help from parents and it is easy for kids to look and say, I already did so much better than you.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
quote:now an educated woman can expect more than being a teacher
What do you mean "more than being a teacher". If that's the attitude, that's the problem. America needs to pay teachers more, clearly. In Canada, teaching is so oversubscribed that I am presently overseas teaching instead.
You can get good results from students from a poor (I mean not only monetarily) background but it requires not only money but also a collosal community effort that begins the day a child walks into pre-school (not even kindergarten) and doesn't stop bashing away until the kid graduates. And even then you're not getting everyone-- you're just getting more.
Britain, where I am teaching, has huge educational problems too. If you go to a good school, it's fine. If you go to a bad school, that's it.
However, successful schools seem to be the collosal effort schools, where every teacher is working as part of a giant team, the lessons are not standard to one degree or another (e.g. the students in English would choose their own books and that's their English curriculum-- to read and talk about a book, or the maths curriculum is only practical numeracy skills), the rules are bent for chronically late arriving students not to miss out on crucial instruction etc.
In England, if a school is struggling, it goes into "Special Measures" which means ALL HANDS ON DECK. If it cannot pull itself out of the mess it's in, it gets closed down, its name changed and then often reopened as an academy-- sponsored by a local company. Staff may change dramatically, a new headteacher will be bought in. I don't think it's a bad idea: you can get good things done in a difficult situation, it just takes EVERYONE pulling together.
quote:Finland, for example, has very strong teacher's unions and provides good education.
As does Canada.
Posted by Humean316 (Member # 8175) on :
I share pretty much the same experiences as Belle, but for me, though I teach three applied classes, I also teach AP Calculus and Pre-Calculus. I experience both sides of the spectrum, I have kids who desperately want to learn, do their homework, and are not in any way discipline problems, but on the other hand I have students who could not care less about school and who constantly test boundaries of discipline in my class.
Actually though, I think the solution is simple. Treat high school like we treat college. I would have junior high include grades 6-9 where we would teach up to geometry in mathematics, higher level English and History classes, and provide a basic foundation in all subjects. Then I would have students sign up for classes they want after high school with the help of their parents in grades 10-12, whether that is trade classes, choir, band, or mathematics, and allow students to earn high school diplomas by completing different programs within the school. It is this part which would be mandatory under the law, which means that if a student wants to focus on English or Mathematics they can get specialized degrees from high schools that will serve as high school diplomas. In that sense, schools would still offer Calculus, World History, English 4, and Physics, for example, but each student would be able to choose what to focus on and earn specialized degrees leading to their college level work.
I think it would work simply because it would allow students who are apathetic or problems to focus on the things that might help them to be better students, allow teachers to focus on students who want to learn the given subject and not be burned out so quickly, and allow parents and students to take more responsibility for their school work. Furthermore, it will prepare students for college or trade work that they will undertake when they graduate.
Posted by BandoCommando (Member # 7746) on :
Holy crap. What an incredible resource!
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
Yeah, I have watched about 3 of them since I posted that, and I loved them. I have seen a few of the talks, usually because someone here at Hatrack linked to one, but I had no idea there were so many, or that they had been going on for so long.
Posted by SoaPiNuReYe (Member # 9144) on :
quote:Originally posted by Stephan:
quote:Originally posted by SoaPiNuReYe: Trade school needs to become more of an option for kids. But then funneling will only become a bigger problem than it already is. Some of the blame lies directly on individual schools too. My entire 4 years of high school I was never assigned a homework assignment for math that wasn't graded for completion. So on days I didn't feel like doing homework (pretty much all of them), I just wrote down gobbledygook and turned it in for an A. And I wasn't the only one either.
Some say it is unfair to grade student's homework. It is not meant to be an assessment, but rather practice. If you can get an A on the actual test by turning in gobbledegook for homework then, in math at least, you more then likely deserve on a good grade in the course anyways.
In my opinion homework needs to be graded, because otherwise high schoolers wouldn't do it. Either that or quizzes need to be given out regularly because without one of the two, there's no way to get a general idea of how your class is doing until tests. The homework needn't be long, only 2 or 3 questions, just enough to tell how students are doing.
Posted by Hank (Member # 8916) on :
quote:Either that or quizzes need to be given out regularly because without one of the two, there's no way to get a general idea of how your class is doing until tests. The homework needn't be long, only 2 or 3 questions, just enough to tell how students are doing.
Wow, that's a really good point. As a student, I was always annoyed to have to bother with homework when I felt like I already had the concept down, but I can see what a valuable resource it would be for a teacher. This also explains the policy of a history teacher I had in HS. He would give a 10 question quiz every day, we'd all write down the answers twice, we turn in the top set of answers, then keep the second set and grade them in class. Any questions we missed had a corresponding reading assignment, and had to be responded to via 50-word essay. If you missed all 10, you had to write 500 words and read a good bit for your homework. If you got them all right, then you were scot-free.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
Also, a lot of kids prefer homework be a part of the grade, as they do not test well. My sister and I am examples of the extremes of both.
I do VERY well on tests usually, but hate homework. I rarely did it, and always had issues with grades because of it. In the classes I had that were test-focused I rarely got lower than a B+, even if I never studied according to "traditional" studying methods.
My sister HATES tests, and for a long time thought she was stupid because she didn't test well, either in class or on standardized tests. She went to a private college years after graduating high school, and worked in a hands-on environment learning radio and video production in addition to her common core classes. She did great in both of those types of classes, after getting a more mature perspective on learning, but always did better in classes that focused on homework and projects.
Posted by Dan_Frank (Member # 8488) on :
quote:Originally posted by Kwea: Dan, thanks for posting that link to the TED talk by Mike Rowe. I really like him, and I love the TED talks I have seen.
You're welcome! Thanks so much for the link to all the TED talks. I had no idea David Deutsch had given one! I'm a big fan of his, I'm somewhat boggled that I missed that.
Posted by beatnix19 (Member # 5836) on :
My frustration with all the "whats wrong with the American education system discussions" is that most of the people doing the talking are not educators. The people making the laws ARE NOT educators. and the people who think they know how to fix all our problems have NEVER been inside a classroom.
Just out of curiousity, how many of you posting in this thread have any experience or training as a teacher? How many have spent time inside a classroom with today's students?
I recently read a great letter from a teacher to Oprah in response her episode about teachers and education. Check out the link
quote: 1. The American school system is crippled by decades of being unable to remove negligent and incompetent teachers. It's underfunded, sure, but adding more funding is a vastly inefficient and ineffectual gesture that does not compensate for the fact that the money is essentially wasted, in increasingly larger and larger quantities, by teachers that school systems simply cannot remove.
2. Since tenured teachers take what positions they wish to have mostly at leisure (or get placed by the districts into positions where they conceptually do 'the least damage'), the extraordinarily difficult jobs in non-preferable situations go to young teachers desperate for what positions still remain. And, even when they show dedication and passion for the job, they're burnt out in record numbers and abandon teaching as a prospective career. Programs like Teach for America have chewed up scores of energetic young would-be teachers and spit them out.
I just had to comment on these two points. As an educator, I am incredibly offended by both of these statements. This very much supports my above post. I mean you no disrespect sam, but it is obvious you are not an educator and that you have probably spent very little time inside of an actual school building as anything other than a student.
Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
beatnix19- while a lot of people posting don't have teaching experience, the OP and like 4 other people posting are teachers. I don't teach, but I tutor, so, I get a slightly different perspective on the problems, which I think is legit for the conversation too.
Point 2 seems extremely accurate to me from the teachers I know. I believe the average burnout time is 3 years for teaching. Working in the inner city school is dang hard (my husband did it for 2 years) and in our area, the pay was a lot lower in those districts. Most teachers at those schools moved to the higher paying suburb jobs once they had enough experience to get those jobs. One of my friends felt kind of bad about abandoning the poor school and the kids who needed her, but she was looking at like $8-$10k pay difference and that was like 25% increase on her income. Can't say no to that. I know that there are a few good teachers with lots of experience in the inner city who stuck around, but while my husband worked there, they would have to hire like 5 new math teachers every year. My husband's second year he thought it was funny that he was considered one of the senior teachers. Point one doesn't seem accurate to me at all though.
Posted by Stephan (Member # 7549) on :
quote:Originally posted by beatnix19:
quote: 1. The American school system is crippled by decades of being unable to remove negligent and incompetent teachers. It's underfunded, sure, but adding more funding is a vastly inefficient and ineffectual gesture that does not compensate for the fact that the money is essentially wasted, in increasingly larger and larger quantities, by teachers that school systems simply cannot remove.
2. Since tenured teachers take what positions they wish to have mostly at leisure (or get placed by the districts into positions where they conceptually do 'the least damage'), the extraordinarily difficult jobs in non-preferable situations go to young teachers desperate for what positions still remain. And, even when they show dedication and passion for the job, they're burnt out in record numbers and abandon teaching as a prospective career. Programs like Teach for America have chewed up scores of energetic young would-be teachers and spit them out.
I just had to comment on these two points. As an educator, I am incredibly offended by both of these statements. This very much supports my above post. I mean you no disrespect sam, but it is obvious you are not an educator and that you have probably spent very little time inside of an actual school building as anything other than a student.
As an educator I agree with him, at least in my school district. We have more than a few teachers at my school that are terrible. The principal just can't get rid of them.
The few he has managed to get rid of still get paid, they are just given a desk job at the Board offices.
Now, he should have been polite and not made it sound like ALL tenured teachers. It really is a minority. It is still my opinion that teacher unions are just not looking out for the best interest of students.
Posted by Stephan (Member # 7549) on :
quote:Originally posted by beatnix19: My frustration with all the "whats wrong with the American education system discussions" is that most of the people doing the talking are not educators. The people making the laws ARE NOT educators. and the people who think they know how to fix all our problems have NEVER been inside a classroom.
I do agree with this though. Our secretary of education I don't think has ever actually taught before.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
I looked at the bios of our state board of ed. The president of the board is the governor - he's never taught. The secretary is a former superintendent, which means he did teach at one point but is more of an administrator.
The other eights board members? Only one lists teaching at the K-12 level in their bio. Instead, their listed professions include lawyer, real estate broker, accountant, homebuilder, reporter and a community leader/former PTA president. Some list other types of teaching - college level, overseas English instruction, but only one lists teaching at the K-12 level yet they make all the decisions about our curriculum.
quote:Since tenured teachers take what positions they wish to have mostly at leisure (or get placed by the districts into positions where they conceptually do 'the least damage'), the extraordinarily difficult jobs in non-preferable situations go to young teachers desperate for what positions still remain.
Much of this is true in my area. But, I take issue with the idea that tenured teachers take positions they want "at leisure." I wish I knew where that school district was located so I could apply! I've never seen tenured teachers get to pick what positions they wanted or what they wanted to teach. At the secondary level, you get assigned grade levels and class levels (regular, honors, pre-AP, AP, etc) sometime in the summer, and you teach it. You don't get to pick. I know lots of teachers who would rather teach something else or a different grade level or class level and they don't get an option.
Technically you can protest a transfer if you're tenured, but I've seen it happen once and the teacher lost.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by beatnix19: I just had to comment on these two points. As an educator, I am incredibly offended by both of these statements.
Why? It is no disservice to our educational system to note when a system is burdened by the inability to remove teachers for incompetence or negligence in their posts. It is not offensive to note that this wastes taxpayer money and leaves districts dysfunctional. This burden exists in a monumental form in many of our districts. The only people who should be offended are bad teachers who want to keep their jobs.
Here, let me share a wonderful little story from NY.
quote:The evidence of Mohammed’s incompetence—found in more than five thousand pages of transcripts from her hearing—seems as unambiguous as the city’s lawyer promised in his opening statement: “These children were abused in stealth. . . . It was chronic . . . a failure to complete report cards. . . . Respondent failed to correct student work, failed to follow the mandated curriculum . . . failed to manage her class.” The independent observer’s final report supported this assessment, ticking off ten bullet points describing Mohammed’s unsatisfactory performance. (Mohammed’s lawyer argues that she began to be rated unsatisfactory only after she became active with the union.)
This was the thirtieth day of a hearing that started last December. Under the union contract, hearings on each case are held five days a month during the school year and two days a month during the summer. Mohammed’s case is likely to take between forty and forty-five hearing days—eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States. (The Department of Education’s spotty records suggest that incompetency hearings before the introduction of P.I.P. Plus generally took twenty to thirty days; the addition of the peer observer’s testimony and report seems to have slowed things down.) Jay Siegel, the arbitrator in Mohammed’s case, who has thirty days to write a decision, estimates that he will exceed his deadline, because of what he says is the amount of evidence under consideration.
This means that Mohammed’s case is not likely to be decided before December, a year after it began. That is about fifty per cent more time, from start to finish, than the O.J. trial took.
While the lawyers argued in measured tones, Mohammed—a slender, polite woman who appeared to be in her early forties—sat silently in one of six chairs bunched around a small conference table. The morning’s proceedings focussed first on a medical excuse that Mohammed produced for not showing up at the previous day’s hearing. Dennis DaCosta, an earnest young lawyer from the Teacher Performance Unit, pointed out that the doctor’s letter was eleven days old and therefore had nothing to do with her supposedly being sick the day before. The letter referred to a chronic condition, Antonio Cavallaro, Mohammed’s union-paid defense counsel, replied. Siegel said that he would reserve judgment.
Next came some discussion among the lawyers and Siegel about Defense Exhibit 33Q, a picture of Mohammed’s classroom. The photograph showed a neatly organized room, with a lesson plan chalked on the blackboard. But, under questioning by her own lawyer, Mohammed conceded that the picture had been taken, in consultation with her union representative, one morning before class, after the principal had begun complaining about her. The independent observer’s report had said that as of just a month before Mohammed was removed—and three months after the peer observer started observing and counselling her, and long after this picture was taken—Mohammed had still not “organized her classroom to support instruction and enhance learning.”
The majority of the transcript of the twenty-nine previous hearing days was given over to the lawyers and the arbitrator arguing issues that included whether and how Mohammed should have known about the contents of the Teachers’ Reference Manual; whether it was admissible that when Mohammed got a memo from the principal complaining about her performance, her students said, she angrily read it aloud in class; whether it was really a bad thing that she had appointed one child in her class “the enforcer,” and charged him with making the other kids behave; whether Mohammed’s union representative should have been present when she was reprimanded for not having a lesson plan; and whether the independent observer was qualified to evaluate Mohammed, even though she came from the neutral consulting company that the union had approved.
When the bill for the arbitrator is added to the cost of the city’s lawyers and court reporters and the time spent in court by the principal and the assistant principal, Mohammed’s case will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.
Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year. Arbitrators have so far proved reluctant to dismiss teachers for incompetence. Siegel, who is serving his second one-year term as an arbitrator and is paid fourteen hundred dollars for each day he works on a hearing, estimates that he has heard “maybe fifteen” cases. “Most of my decisions are compromises, such as fines,” he said. “So it’s hard to tell who won or lost.” Has he ever terminated anyone solely for incompetence? “I don’t think so,” he said. In fact, in the past two years arbitrators have terminated only two teachers for incompetence alone, and only six others in cases where, according to the Department of Education, the main charge was incompetence.
quote:The contract includes a provision that, this fall, will allow an additional seven hundred to eight hundred teachers to get paid for doing essentially no teaching. These are teachers who in the past year—or two or three—have been on what is called the Absent Teacher Reserve, because their schools closed down or the number of classes in the subject they teach was cut. Most “excessed” teachers quickly find new positions at other city schools. But these teachers, who have been on the reserve rolls for at least nine months, have refused to take another job (in almost half such cases, according to a study by the New Teacher Project, they have refused even to apply for another position) or their records are so bad or they present themselves so badly that no other principal wants to hire them. The union contract requires that they get paid anyway. “Most of the excessed teachers get snapped up pretty fast,” Lombardi, the principal of P.S. 49, says. “You can tell from the records and the interviews who’s good and who’s not. So by the time they’ve been on the reserve rolls for more than nine months they’re not the people you want to hire. . . . I’ll do almost anything to avoid bringing them into my school.” These reserve teachers are ostensibly available to act as substitutes, but they rarely do so, because principals don’t want them or because they are not available on a given day; on an average school day the city pays more than two thousand specially designated substitute teachers a hundred and fifty-five dollars each. Until this year, the city was hiring as many as five thousand new teachers annually to fill vacancies, while the teachers on the reserve list stayed there. This meant that, in keeping with Klein’s goals, new blood was coming into the schools—recruits from Teach for America or from fellowship programs, as well as those who enter the profession the conventional way. Now that New York, like most cities, is suffering through a budget crisis, Klein has had to freeze almost all new hiring and has told principals that they can fill openings only with teachers on the reserve list or with teachers who want to transfer from other schools. Even so, the number of teachers staying on reserve for more than nine months is likely to exceed eleven hundred by next calendar year and cost the city more than a hundred million dollars annually. Added to the six hundred Rubber Roomers, that’s seventeen hundred idle teachers—more than enough to staff all the schools in New Haven. The teachers’-union contract comes up for renewal in October, and Klein told me that he plans to push for a time limit of nine months or a year for reserve teachers to find new positions, after which they would be removed from the payroll. “If you can’t find a job by then, it’s a pretty good indicator that you’re not looking or you’re not qualified,” he said.
quote:“If you just focus on the people in the Rubber Rooms, you miss the real point, which is that, by making it so hard to get even the obvious freaks and crazies that are there off the payroll, you insure that the teachers who are simply incompetent or mediocre are never incented to improve and are never removable,” Anthony Lombardi says. In a system with eighty-nine thousand teachers, the untouchable six hundred Rubber Roomers and eleven hundred teachers on the reserve list are only emblematic of the larger challenge of evaluating, retraining, and, if necessary, weeding out the poor performers among the other 87,300.
This is an article by Steven Brill of the New Yorker, and is fair in its assessment, hardly a union tear-down that you usually get by its most vehement opposition. It's about the Rubber Rooms, and associated issues, in the district.
Here's another story from the other coast.
quote:the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
During our investigation, in which we obtained hundreds of documents using the California Public Records Act, we also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.
quote:Caprice Young, founder of the nonprofit California Charter Schools Association, was LAUSD school board president until 2003. She saw, behind closed doors, what the public can't: the "dance of the lemons," a term that broadly describes controversial tactics LAUSD utilizes to cope with tenured teachers who can't teach but, under the current system, cannot be fired. Those tactics include not only paying them to leave, but quietly transferring bad teachers to other, unsuspecting schools or repeatedly and fruitlessly "retraining" them while they continue to teach, sometimes harming the educations of thousands of children.
Young believes the inability of the schools to oust poor L.A. teachers is playing a key role in L.A.'s emergence as an epicenter of the charter-school movement. "One year with a bad teacher puts a kid a year, or two, behind the other kids," Young says. "If a parent sees their child has a lemon teacher, if they can get them into another school, they will."
A. J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, has a view of the situation that might startle some. The belief that it's hard to oust underperforming LAUSD teachers is nothing more than an "urban legend," Duffy claims. "There is a mechanism to ask for the removal of teachers ... they have chosen not to do it. Part of it is the bureaucratic nonsense that goes on in the district."
According to confidential settlement agreements obtained by the Weekly under the California Public Records Act, the school district goes to great lengths to avoid the formal steps for firing teachers. Not only has LAUSD paid 32 tenured teachers more than $1.5 million to leave, but the LAUSD school board, which says it is reform-minded, allows these teachers to leave with clean records, and with no hint that they took a payout under pressure. The deals are so hush-hush, in fact, that the Weekly has discovered that one teacher, Que Mars, who taught math at Chester W. Nimitz Middle School, is still listed in LAUSD's substitute-teacher pool after taking a $40,000 check — to stop teaching in L.A.
The Dance of the Lemons is widespread; I've experienced it here in Colorado.
here's some more.
quote:Getting rid of a bad teacher is one of the most vexing problems in California. The state’s antiquated tenure system, which puts the rights of teachers above those of students, makes the job of removing an incompetent instructor nearly impossible. But brave parents at Lazear Elementary School in East Oakland stood up for their kids last week by going on strike to protest what they say is especially horrible third-grade teacher.
Because Lazear is in one of the poorest sections of Oakland and teaching there is a difficult challenge, many good instructors with union seniority avoid the school. They end up instead at the city’s more upscale campuses, leaving Lazear and others like it with a succession of rookie teachers and burned out veterans. And because teacher firing rules are so Byzantine, districts such as Oakland end up transferring bad instructors from school to school in the hopes that they’ll quit. It’s known as the “Dance of the Lemons.”
quote:Robert C. Devaney is another case in point. In November 1981 Devaney abruptly resigned as a special education teacher at North Providence High School in Rhode Island after a student complained that he had made sexual overtures. But Devaney got good references and began teaching elsewhere, skipping from job to job as his sexual misconduct caught up to him—but always leaving with a good reference. Finally in May 1996 Devaney was in jail, sentenced to serve twenty years for sexually assaulting a special education student and making sexually explicit videotapes and photographs of two other students.
Never once did Devaney’s references mention any of his misconduct. In each case administrators found it easier to “pass the trash” than to fight the local union for his termination. At the sentencing hearing, Superior Court judge Maureen McKenna Goldberg said, “The employment background of this defendant who was shuffled from one school department to another, from one bureaucrat to the next, is a crime in itself.”
Administrators’ great fear is getting on the wrong side of the unions. Stephen Robinson explains: “I have to make sure I cross all my t’s and dot all my i’s with the teachers’ union when handling a case because they’re going to come after me. The union takes a very aggressive stance when it knows a teacher is in the crosshairs. There will be a very aggressive union rep at prehearings, at postevaluation meetings. The rep walks into the administrator’s office and questions the administrator’s right to do A, B, or C. It takes a very strong-willed administrator to fight through that.”
Getting rid of teachers who have committed crimes can be expensive, but it happens. What is nearly impossible is getting rid of a teacher who is simply incompetent. School district officials in Saint Louis had to work for three years to get rid of an algebra teacher who passed out As to students who would bring her Big Gulps and Snickers bars. In suburban Chicago, a school district had to fight the union the entire way, spending $70,000 in the process, in order to dismiss a math teacher who couldn’t answer basic algebra questions. But these cases are the exception, James Plosia says: “Even though it is possible to remove an incompetent teacher, the process that you have to follow means you win the battle, but lose the war.”
Not even failing to show up for class will cost a tenured teacher his job. In 1997 Wallace Bowers, an English teacher in Collinsville, Illinois, was fired from North Junior High School when he failed to come to school for six weeks. When he finally returned, Bowers said he wanted to keep his job, but Superintendent Thomas Fegley stood firm: “We don’t necessarily concur that somebody can quit coming to work for six weeks and get his job back.” So Bowers challenged the district, with the backing of the powerful Illinois Education Association, an affiliate of the NEA. In the end Judge Henry X. Dietch found in Bowers’s favor, not because of the merits of the case but because of the strange protections offered teachers under Illinois law. If a teacher’s conduct, whatever it might be, is “remediable,” a school board must offer a notice to remedy before firing the teacher. Bowers went back into the classroom and received full back pay.
quote:I mean you no disrespect sam, but it is obvious you are not an educator and that you have probably spent very little time inside of an actual school building as anything other than a student.
Untrue things are frequently 'obvious,' eh? I guess this wouldn't be as amusing if I hadn't read it where I am. I've anecdotally witnessed stuff like this in plenty of classrooms (not as bad, but it is still distressing that it occurs so reliably in a district as affluent as ours), watched the special education department of the school where I completed my practicum get turned into an unambiguous dumping ground for lemons, because it was there that they would conceptually do the least damage to the nominal student body.
Just saying that my observations offend you does very little. These problems are real, they exist, and they are documented. I can attest to them personally (and no, not as a public school student.). I can attest to them with stories from around the nation. And, if you would care to ask many other people who are presently teaching, they would confirm the same for you as well.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Much of this is true in my area. But, I take issue with the idea that tenured teachers take positions they want "at leisure." I wish I knew where that school district was located so I could apply!
There's a lot of districts where the unions have made it so that teachers can apply for and take positions for themselves almost solely on the basis of senority. I've watched that happen personally. I'm not saying all districts do it (any more so than I'm saying that tenure makes all teachers bad teachers), but it's a disheartening example of one of the many ways that protections for teachers do not work out in the best interests of the students.
Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
While there are bad teachers, I guess I am just not convinced that they exist in such high numbers that getting rid of them would fix the problems in the education system.
I also think some of the problems unfortunately cannot be solved. I have kids I tutor that the school is failing without a question BUT I don't actually think it would be possible for the school to not fail them. The problems the kids have are just too time consuming to expect a teacher to be able to handle. And some of the kids are failing the school system. Try teaching a stoned kid geometry sometime. The standard answer given to that is well, then you have to motivate the kid to not be stoned. The kid has heard every motivational pep talk out there. He doesn't care. Jail, groundings, positive reinforcement, promises to the gf, etc- nothing has worked. The kid is 17, honestly at this point, he is old enough to be responsible for his own actions and blaming the teacher is ridiculous (and yes, I have heard people blame the teachers in this kind of circumstance).
Posted by SoaPiNuReYe (Member # 9144) on :
quote:Originally posted by scholarette: While there are bad teachers, I guess I am just not convinced that they exist in such high numbers that getting rid of them would fix the problems in the education system.
I also think some of the problems unfortunately cannot be solved. I have kids I tutor that the school is failing without a question BUT I don't actually think it would be possible for the school to not fail them. The problems the kids have are just too time consuming to expect a teacher to be able to handle. And some of the kids are failing the school system. Try teaching a stoned kid geometry sometime. The standard answer given to that is well, then you have to motivate the kid to not be stoned. The kid has heard every motivational pep talk out there. He doesn't care. Jail, groundings, positive reinforcement, promises to the gf, etc- nothing has worked. The kid is 17, honestly at this point, he is old enough to be responsible for his own actions and blaming the teacher is ridiculous (and yes, I have heard people blame the teachers in this kind of circumstance).
See, I think the problems start much, much earlier than 17. Probably 6th or 7th grade is when you can begin to tell which kids are going where in life. It's the age when a lot of kids start experimenting with drugs and sex and where they start to become aware of their place in the world. A stoned 17 year-old has already made their choices and is probably too far down whichever path he's chosen to do much to change where his life is headed. Yeah, there's still a lot of room for mistakes to be made in high school, but if you ask me, the most vulnerable years are while they're still in middle school because of how impressionable kids are at that age.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by scholarette: While there are bad teachers, I guess I am just not convinced that they exist in such high numbers that getting rid of them would fix the problems in the education system.
I am convinced that the inability of most districts to fire teachers due to incompetence (and the unwieldly costs incurred when the districts even try to remove useless and dangerous teachers) is not insurmountably bad. Districts usually find ways to work around the problem at great cost and inconvenience, including using entire departments as 'dumping grounds' for the dead weight. (It's, in fact, why the special education department here is so utterly, inconceivably useless). It's not something that can be fixed in the short term, since it involves multiple parties holding tight to their own rational self-interest that is destructive to the quality of education. It has to be broken up and goaded into a better shape over time, and I don't expect it to happen for a long, long time, and some states may remain nigh-permanently useless at this. But I honestly expect it to remain pretty much in the same state it is in for at least 15-20 years.
I also don't hang 'the solution' on these points as if they were a magic bullet. As I mentioned, I could keep numbering, and numbering, and numbering. I don't even go into problems with cultures of parenthood, and especially the compounding effect that American children and parents have to deal with in regards to poverty that they wouldn't have to deal with (and usually don't) in other modern nations. There's also the part where schools that can maintain an atmosphere of control usually keep that control, and schools that start to lose it really suffer from a 'broken windows' style degeneration of order and student morale; overcrowded and decrepit buildings work alongside overworked (or just plain bad) teachers to make it an environment which largely doesn't inspire students, and this snowballs over time.
Then, there's the issue of classroom sizes. With so many millions of dollars pouring into overweight administrations, rubber rooms, lemons, heating leaky old schools, and every other systemic piece of rot and inefficiency that have left districts as worm-eaten institutions across america, we're trying to do more with less teachers. I don't care how good a teacher you are, your ability to provide a quality education and needed attention to learners has a hard cap on the number of students you must divide your time between. But what dollars don't have to be wasted on waste have to be stretched perilously across the positive assets your schools have, and one of the effects of this is that good teachers are made nearly useless in the face of critically overloaded classrooms.
And on, and on, and on, ..
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
I find it fascinating that so many teachers seem to think firing bad teachers would help so much. My mom's complaints are usually about the lesson plans locked into what must be taught each day with no flexibility to stop and go over something the kids aren't getting until they do. Apparently, some of the teachers even have little scripts they have to read from when teaching some of the subject matter.
I would think being told what teach, how to teach it, and exactly how long it must be taught for would be a bigger problem. Unless that's just her district. Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
My husband had the same setup for lesson plans.
Posted by DarkKnight (Member # 7536) on :
I have always thought that bad teachers are simply a symptom of the real problem. Administrators. Bad teachers can be fired but you need proper documentation which most Principals won't do. But even before you get to the firing stage, what has the Principal done to improve the teacher? Does the teacher need more classroom skills? More knowledge? Mentoring? How much of that is really done? You barely need any management classes to get your Principal certificate. The higher you go, the worse it gets. Or at least that has been my experience...
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: I find it fascinating that so many teachers seem to think firing bad teachers would help so much.
It would save billions and it would free up a lot of districts from having to trade around a lot of unfit teachers. There's really a significant problem with bad teachers, and the methods of compensation are often a long term dysfunction!
I have anecdotal stories, but they can wait.
Posted by Stephan (Member # 7549) on :
quote:Originally posted by DarkKnight: I have always thought that bad teachers are simply a symptom of the real problem. Administrators. Bad teachers can be fired but you need proper documentation which most Principals won't do. But even before you get to the firing stage, what has the Principal done to improve the teacher? Does the teacher need more classroom skills? More knowledge? Mentoring? How much of that is really done? You barely need any management classes to get your Principal certificate. The higher you go, the worse it gets. Or at least that has been my experience...
One major problem is the lack of training principals have in dealing with adults. My wife received her administration degree, and all of the ephasis was on the students.
I was in the private sector, with a business degree, before becoming a teacher. All three principals I have had could simply use a few human resources and managment classes. They just don't know how to relate to adults on a professional level.
I had two principals that were almost afraid to call a teacher in for a negative review, and my current one prefers to scream at the entire staff rather then talking one on one.
Posted by DarkKnight (Member # 7536) on :
It is ironic that a lot of problems in education are caused by a lack of, or woefully inadequate, education of the educators. I think we discussed somewhere here that one of the main problems teachers cite is that they do not receive the proper education to prepare them for teaching in a classroom, which is made worse by the inadequate mentoring provided once they are hired at a school.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
I haven't been around for a while, and I'm probably going to go back to lurking after this, but I wanted to bring a different perspective. I taught as a long-term substitute (which absolutely sucks btw) and I had at least one incompetent but difficult to fire teacher as a high school student. I'm not denying the problems exist, but there's another issue that I see as an additional problem. That issue:
College isn't for everyone.
There are a lot of people that have no desire to continue to higher education. There are others who probably should not continue for a variety of reasons. Today's education system (from what I can tell) is geared towards getting kids ready for college. Students recognize this. Schools start talking about college prep as early as middle school these days. The students who aren't going on to college, for whatever reason, see no point in putting any more effort into high school than they have to in order to graduate. There needs to be an alternative for students who don't want a college education. I googled statistics regarding college an university drop out rates. I found a variety of articles giving various numbers ranging from 30-50%. Why are we essentially forcing students to continue to an education that they do not want? (And depending on the career they may be interested in don't need.)
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
quote: With the support of the knowledge-based business community (think Nokia), Finnish schools focus on 21st century skills like creative problem-solving, not test prep.
I really like that. I graduated from a good high school with my freshman year of college done, and I still didn't feel like I knew how to do anything. After I got my first job, I was shocked to discover I liked filing. There's something soothing about alphabetizing and sorting things for me.
I also love tracking data and coming up with statistics for it. Meanwhile in my sophomore year of college, I dropped my stats class because it was massively boring. What's wrong with this picture?
Things we love doing shouldn't have the life sucked out of them. They shouldn't be institutionalized until there's nothing but dry theory left. In Meterology 1001, I got to track actual hurricanes and make pressure and temperature maps - including coloring! It's still one of my favorite classes I ever took. Intro to Number Theory wasn't weeks of terminology with insanely repetitious math problems. It was a workbook of proofs. Every day, there was a fun new problem to solve - obviously with a fairly narrow definition of fun.
I guess that's my other problem with education. We spend so much time making everyone cover the same general stuff that you're 20 years old before you have a chance to get to anything interesting! Can we possibly need to give up two decades of our lives to general knowledge, 75% of which you're legally required to take? Let's let kids dig in and discover what excites them.
Posted by Silent E (Member # 8840) on :
Ninety percent of the problem with American education is parents. Period. End of story.
Involved parents = successful students. It's really that simple.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Silent E: Ninety percent of the problem with American education is parents. Period. End of story.
Involved parents = successful students. It's really that simple.
That's actually blatant oversimplification. There are lots of problems. Parents are one of them. You can't cram the weight of the rest into an invented statistical ten percent.
Posted by James Tiberius Kirk (Member # 2832) on :
quote:Originally posted by Silent E: Ninety percent of the problem with American education is parents. Period. End of story.
Wow. That was an incredibly depressing story. Not really sure what else to say.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
It really doesn't surprise me. And, as a non-tenured teacher, stories like this are why I teach from the curriculum guide and only from the curriculum guide. If there are any objections to what I teach, they would have to object with the approved guide put out at the district level, which means my curriculum supervisor would back me up.
You can get creative when you have tenure, not before.
Posted by Silent E (Member # 8840) on :
Citation needed? "Statistical" ten percent? It is an estimate, but a highly accurate one.
If a student has parents that know the teachers, attend conferences, keep track of homework, know what's happening in class, volunteer, hold the student accountable, provide encouragement, provide a good home environment, and most of all read with the child when young, the child will be successful in school regardless whether the teacher is great or mediocre, and regardless of whether the curriculum is old-fashioned or based on cutting-edge research, or whether the school is well-funded. The only other factor that has a significant impact on how well the student will do is whether classmates also have involved parents. If those classmates are a mess because their parents have failed them, it makes it much harder for the student to excel.
I'm not big on statistics or research with respect to topics that can be assessed with simple observation, experience, and common sense. In my opinion, all debates about the educational system boil down to this. All the things we get so worked up about with respect to teachers, money, methodologies, etc., are about how the Band-Aid should look in case the parents fail, which they so often do.
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
Well, sir, what is your solution then? Do we start going into homes and forcing parents to do those things? Or do we adjust the teachers, funding, and methodologies to do the best we can to make up for the lack of involved parents?
Or do you suggest we just let the students fail to learn because they lost the genetic lottery and got stuck with crappy parents?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Belle: You can get creative when you have tenure, not before.
While this makes some amount of sense -- you should learn to work with the existing system before trying to turn it on its head -- it's mostly depressing.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Especially as an imaginative administration can do just about anybody in if the teachers' union isn't in the mood to put up a fight. Just keep reassigning the teacher to less desirable schedules, and eventually out of subject entirely (speed depends on how likely the teachers' union is to oppose).
At least in the systems I'm familiar with, I'd like to see a major reorganization of school-level administration. I'm not sure yet entirely what I do want to see, but too often the ones who end up with the principal positions (at least at the middle and high school level) for the long term are egomaniacs or petty dictators (or both). I was blessed with a wonderful elementary school principal who left his mark on the entire school, and it was incredible. Our high school went through a sequence of interim principals while the school board tried to decide who to hire . . . and while one or two of the interims were good, they were only willing to be principal for a year or so. The guy who ended up with the job was (is) a very bad principal at most things except managing paperwork.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
Well, the good news is that while I have a curriculum guide that lays out exactly what I should be teaching, it does not tell me HOW to teach it. That is, I must teach Nathaniel Hawthorne's literature and cover his contribution to American literature. I also must teach the elements of a short story.
Which Hawthorne short stories I choose, and how I use them is entirely up to me. Same with Poe - I have to cover him, but I can choose which stories and what activities to do with those stories. My book has "The Pit and the Pendulum" but I also enjoy teaching "The Masque of the Red Death," so I will be adding it.
What I don't do, as a non-tenured teacher, is teach someone whose book is not on the approved guide. Nor do I ignore the guide altogether and say something akin to "Meh, I don't like Poe. Let's skip him."
If I had tenure, it's possible I could justify changing things in the curriculum guide - I might could argue that there are other authors from the period who are better representations of it than Poe, etc. But as a non-tenured teacher, I don't try. I teach what's on the guide.
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