posted
OK, I get that. I guess, from my perspective, I'd rather get the genius teacher in a position where they can show other, worse, teachers how to teach well.
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
Administrators make 2-3 times as much as teachers (lot of factors involved).
Thing is, though, you don't need a full complement of administrators for a school district of 2000 kids.
Its not that administrators (good ones) make too much money. Its that we have too many administrators, and many of them are mediocre.
You could get more out of your school administration by combining smaller school districts into a district of 10,000 students or so, using about 1.5 times more administors then you do for a district of 2000, use only the good administrators, pay them slightly more then they are being paid now, and you'd see a lot more improvement then if we simply slashed administrator salaries. (N.B in this post I am talking central office administrators. Not principals and vice principals and support staff on site at the schools. Thats a different kettle of administrators).
My school district of 2000 kids, about 10% of dollars go to central office expenditures. For 10,000 students, we'd be talking about 8 million dollars in administrative costs, and an 80 million budget. But if all those students were in one district, we could cut the administrative costs to about 3 million. Saving of 5 million dollars, or 500 dollars per pupil. Thats over 6% of a school districts budget.
And my guess is, since you got rid of the junky administrators when combining districts, you'd get better results out of the schools.
Posts: 4112 | Registered: May 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Scott R: We don't (okay, *I* don't) want talented teachers becoming administrators.
I'd prefer to pay them better salaries and keep their teaching genius in the classroom.
As a former teacher, I both agree and disagree. IME, some of the best administrators had been good teachers. (Then again, some of the worst had been BAD teachers, and the very worst had never taught at all but still figured they knew more about teaching than teachers did.)
Oh, and I'm admin these days. But college admin, which is rather a different kettle of fish.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:You could get more out of your school administration by combining smaller school districts into a district of 10,000 students or so
Hm...I don't know how this would work... How do you determine school district boundaries? Here, it's by county. Are you saying ignore county lines when drawing school districts?
I think there are going to be a lot of people who are going to have problems with that-- not just mediocre administrators. It's a fight NOW to get school funding for schools in your own county; can you imagine trying to raise property taxes to fund schools in someone else's county?
I'm intrigued by the idea though.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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That makes sense (Paul), to cut back the number of administrators. But to cut their salary could only result in worse administrators, resulting in unhappy, and therefor less productive teachers.
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Paul Goldner: And my guess is, since you got rid of the junky administrators when combining districts, you'd get better results out of the schools.
Of course, in real life you'd be at least as likely to get rid of the better administrators (because they were paid more or for political reasons, etc.) as the bad ones. And research shows that most students do better (educationally and socially) not only in small classes but in small schools.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Homeschooler that can do it well have the obvious advantage of very small class size. But not everyone can do it well. Not everyone has the time, talent, resources etc.
My sister homeschools her girls up to high school. The oldest is a junior and has been excelling - first in her class her freshman and sophomore years - the middle one starts as a freshman next year. It has been great for them. Family trips, individualized curricula etc. But not everyone has the ability or the resources to do what my sister has done.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Rivka- I wasn't talking about enlargening schools, just districts.
If you have seperate districts right now, you have seperate buildings. But you also have different central offices. And its those central offices that can be expanded.
E.G. payroll. You really don't make a payroll coordinators job that much harder by going from a district of 2000 kids to a district of 10,000 kids. You might need an extra secretary, and you should probably pay a bit more.
My school district spends about 200,000 right now on payroll and insurance administration. If we figure we combine with 4 other districts our size, the total expenditure is 1,000,000 for that administration right now. But combine, lets say we spend 100k more for extra personel, and 20k more to attract better people, so instead of 200,000 we are spending 320,000... but covering instead of 2000 kids, 10,000 kids. or a net savings of 680,000 dollars for payroll and health insurance administration.
The ONLY combinations that would need to occur are combinations of central office personnel, and central office buildings.
Posts: 4112 | Registered: May 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Paul Goldner: I wasn't talking about enlargening schools, just districts.
Oh! Given that I live in one of the nation's largest school districts, my confusion is perhaps understandable. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I know that I would hate to have administrators cut at my school, even if it meant a raise for me. I don't want to have to deal with the crap they deal with. I want to be able to teach, and to rely on them to handle their part of school management.
I even think my district needs more central-level administrators, honestly. I don't think central office growth has kept pace with the growth of the district overall, & that makes it hard to coordinate new initiatives at the district level.
There should be a disparity in teacher/ administrator salaries--it's a harder job (imo), it requires more responsibility, often longer hours, usually specialized education, a better wardrobe , and it's year-round.
Posts: 834 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
As a future teacher, I, like Liz don't have a problem with administrators making more than I will. I don't want their job, they can have it. But I do have a problem with more money going into the office buildings and facilities of administration vs. the schools.
If my 3rd grader must learn in a trailer cramped with desks with an air conditioning unit so loud the teacher must turn it off every time she wants to actually, you know teach, then I don't think the school district superintendent should be sitting pretty behind her mahogany desk in her nicely appointed climate-controlled office. So long as there are students in portable classrooms, I want the superintendent and other administrators working out of one too.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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My issue with administrators is the accountability issue. The local high school failed to meet ayp so action had to be taken. All the teachers whose classes had done badly on the test got fired (technically- contracts were not renewed). So, goodbye math and science department. Also, clearly the principal was not up to the task, so they promoted her. The next person they offered the principal job refused it because she figured that there was no way she could fix the school (esp since they had very few math and science teachers now) and she didn't have the connections to get a raise when she failed.
Posts: 1001 | Registered: Mar 2006
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I really hate NCLB. Not necessarily the ideas behind it, but the implementation. It really feeds the idea that taking immediate action (no matter how ill-considered and unrelated to student instruction or performance) is the solution to gaps in student achievement.
Posts: 834 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
I skimmed the article once it started into rhetoric, and wondered why it wasn't in War/World Watch where these articles belong. OSC has done a lot of ignorant bashing of academia, mostly name calling and it drives me nuts.
I believe that the complaint was about moving the school year to begin in mid-August as opposed to the end of August or the beginning of September.
OSC's arguement against was that kids lost time with families. The article did not say whether there would be an increase of days per year or how more days children could be in school. If there are no increased days, vacation would start sooner, or mid year breaks would be longer.
Was there a weather/cultural reason cited by the article (or the Greensboro School board)?
My impression is that southern schools generally run from August to May.
The one advantage I can think of is AP Exams. The AP exams are administered everywhere in the first two weeks of May. Some schools are over as soon as those exams are done, having finished their tenth month. My school was a September to June school, so we had a month of nothing (or more relaxed learning) after AP exams, but had to squish in a year's worth of a huge college level curriculum into a month's less time. It may have just been my school, but we had conspiculously large summer assignments for AP classes, which at least were relevant to the coursework. Other classes had contained summer busywork that made my summer busywork after eighth grade.
I would prefer an eight week summer to a ten week summer, provided that the extra time was given during the school year. I spend the last four weeks of summer wanting to go back to school, if only for boredom reasons. After a certain point, a long break becomes superfluous.
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
Yeah. I don't know the situation in Greensboro, so I didn't comment on it earlier. I know our district keeps trying to move the start of school earlier (into August), so that we can get out earlier in June. The Kings Dominion lobby won't let it happen--school has to start after Labor Day.
And yes, our desire to start earlier/ end earlier has a lot to do with the timing of state testing.
Edit to make post make sense.
[ April 22, 2007, 12:02 PM: Message edited by: Liz B ]
Posts: 834 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
I personally don't have a problem with stretching out the school year and having a shorter summer break, either. I'd rather have more time at Christmas/New Year's and actual spring and fall breaks and a shorter summer.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:OSC's arguement against was that kids lost time with families.
And the justification was hopelessly anecdotal.
He says 'the smartest kids I see in my college class are homeschooled' and he uses this as an overarching proof of his conclusions.
Problem is, even if we were to value his own anecdotal experience over methodological study, it's still bunk: he's not recognizing that his own 'sample' is already pruned so efficiently as to be unrepresentative of the effectiveness of homeschooling. His sample is not just the category of "homeschooled kids," it's also "students in his class." A college class. He is only looking at succesfully homeschooled children in a narrow demographic of homeschooled kids.
The large large large large portion of kids who recieve crappy and/or unsuited homeschooling are conveniently evaporated from his anecdotal sample, since they won't be in any college. Ever.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: [QUOTE] The large large large large portion of kids who recieve crappy and/or unsuited homeschooling are conveniently evaporated from his anecdotal sample, since they won't be in any college. Ever.
It's too bad we don't hold school to the same standards most people with like to hold homeschoolers to. Lots of kids recieve crappy public educations, too, but most people are more willing to forgive that.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Hm. I think there's actually a LOT of public concern about the quality of public education. There's certainly a lot of legislation about it.
Posts: 834 | Registered: Jun 2005
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My experience with home schooled students over 15 years at teaching at the University level is quite different from Mr. Cards. In my experience, home schooled students are likely to show deficits in several important areas. Most notably they are less able to deal with complexity and diversity, their critical thinking skills are less well developed, they are less capable of working in teams and they frequently have a harder time learning from lectures and following a class schedule.
Perhaps a part of the difference is that I teach science and engineering while Mr. Card is teaching creative writing and home schoolers frequently have bigger knowledge deficits in math and science than they do in English. That however does not fully explain the difference. For several years I served on a Predential Scholars selection committee where I interviewed candidates for these scholarships. Each year we had several home schooled students in the pool. These were always students who had excellent exam scores and recommendations or they would never have made it to the interview stage. With out exception the home school students performed very poorly in the interviews by comparison to their public school peers which forms the basis the deficits I summarized above.
What's more, these students were the top home schooled students, the situation was even worse with many of the home schooled freshmen I've dealt with. While some parents do an excellent job of homeschooling, others do not. In Montana a large number of the home schooled population were from ultra-conservative religious families who home schooled in order to shelter their children. Some of these kids had never read a book that wasn't certified Christian literature. They had almost no science background. The worst case scenario I dealt with were some home schooled children I worked with at church. The kid who were age 9 and 11 were barely reading on a kindergarten level.
The public schools have plenty of problems but the biggest problems public schools face aren't under their control. A friend of mine taught elementary school in a local inner city school. Most of the children in that area moved every few months due to unstable family situations. She said that it was unusual for her to have even one child at the end of the school year who had been in her class at the beginning of the year.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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So if kids do badly in public schools, it's not the public school's fault so it's ok? I really hope I'm reading something you didn't intend there, Rabbit.
Again, I'd like to see options available to people without all the stigma attached of not doing things the "right" way. Public school isn't for everyone. Homeschooling isn't for everyone. And with private, charter, and magnet schools, there's plenty of compromise space in between.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
Or for the issue commonly referred to as "migration," which may not be an issue of poor parenting -- but is still a problem schools have no control over.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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What I'm saying is that there are many factors which contribute to a kid's performance in school and that many of them are outside the control of the schools. If a kid is doing badly in a public school (or a private school) it could be for any number of reasons. It could be because the kid never does his homework, it could be because the kid has a learning disability, it could be because his parents don't help and encourage him, it could be because he just isn't very smart, it could be because the teacher is bad, it could be because he has a different learning style, it could be because he's going through some sort of life trama, or it could be for any number of other reasons.
When people try to solve the problems in the public schools without first understanding the source of the problems, they end up with nonsensical programs like no child left behind.
Comparisons between public schools, private schools, charter schools and home schools are often highly flawed because they don't control for important sociological factors that differ between different school types such as parental envolvement, english language in the home, disabilities, economic status and so forth. When studies control for these factors, they find that public schools and private schools perform about the same.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
One study I'd really like to see is a comparison between children who are home schooled, children whose parents volunteer regularly in the public schools, and children in charter/magnet schools that require parents to volunteer. If such a study has been done, I haven't been able to find it.
I think it would be extremely valuable since it would aid parents in determining whether home schooling or volunteering in traditional schools was a better investment of their time and energy.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Comparisons between public schools, private schools, charter schools and home schools are often highly flawed because they don't control for important sociological factors that differ between different school types such as parental envolvement, english language in the home, disabilities, economic status and so forth. When studies control for these factors, they find that public schools and private schools perform about the same.
Thank you Rabbit. This, indeed, was the point I was trying to make, but you put it in broader terms.
Posts: 1099 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Thanks for clarifying, Rabbit. I was pretty sure that couldn't have been what you were saying, but I like to be sure.
At the same time, it's almost more depressing that way. If the problem was just learning environment, you could match the kid up with what's right for them and it would be all better. This way, how do you compensate for the fact that some kids are just poor? Or got crappy parents? We can't fix that.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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I think the biggest problem with Public Education right now is that we have so many things we expect teachers to squeeze into a 180 day school year, and Legislators/Districts are constantly adding more. In Utah, the Public School Curriculum has doubled in the last 50 years (most of it in the last 20) but they haven't added a single day to the school year for (I'm stabbing for the numbers on this one) something around 80 years.
I think home schoolers can be better students because their parents can pick and choose the pace at which to teach a certain subject. A public school teacher has maybe one week, or one day even, to teach something that may take a couple of weeks for some students to understand. In these situations, parental involvement really helps. For example, in third grade, my teacher's schedule was so tight, she went over how to make change for a dollar in one day...well I didn't get it in one day, so I failed the quiz. If my parents hadn't been there to teach me, with the aid of multicolored marshmallows instead of pennies nickels and dimes, I probably wouldn't have passed the test or made it very far in my first job either.
I honestly think that adding some time to the school year, and/or seriously hacking some of the required courses a little bit would seriously help. And of course, as a guy who's likely to end up teaching History: a pay raise for teachers would be really awesome, would help attract talented education graduates therefore culling the number of bad teachers in the schools etc. etc. kind of goes without saying. Posts: 681 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Rabbit: Your comments finally convinced me to stop being a lurker on this board. I'm a 17 year old sophomore math major, and I homeschooled starting in seventh grade. I also live in NC, so I get to see a lot of homeschoolers.
I think the distinction needs to be made as to why a given student is homeschooling. In my case, it is because the public schools refused to teach me. By leaving the school system, I gained the freedom to move forward at a pace that the local teachers can't comprehend.
I also have many friends who are being homeschooled for religious reasons. In those families, they use mostly pre-packaged curriculums that aren't much better than the public school materials. (There are exceptions, of course. Saxon math books are much better for the average student than anything I've seen in the public schools.)
But the ones who are homeschooled for religious reasons do tend to be far more sheltered. Some are hopelessly naive well into their teenage years, but all of those kids have a different outlook on life. They spend most of their childhood being kids, and they take a long time to develop any cynicism.
A few weeks ago, I was facilitating a leadership training for my scout troop. We had about a dozen boys in the room. Only one of my students had ever attended a public school. The rest were either in private christian schools or homeschooled. I was trying to find an example to illustrate the concept of group norms. The first thing I came up with was this: In our scout troop, it is completely normal and accepted behavior to go for several days living off freeze dried food while romping around 20 miles from the nearest telephone or cell tower. I asked if their friends at school would consider that weird. Only one boy had classmates that aren't in scouts, so that totally backfired.
On the other hand, I know several kids that are in situations similar to mine. Our Scoutmaster went to college pretty early, and his kids are pretty smart. They started homeschooling shortly after they met me (though they haven't said if I was the cause). They've been using curriculum materials handed down from other families in the church, and they aren't working very well.
One of their boys is at the age where he barely knows algebra. He recently discovered that I'm capable of answering any of his questions about math, and I'm pretty sure he will have a working knowledge of calculus (and maybe some analysis and abstract algebra) by the end of this summer.
It is quite fair to say that many, if not most, homeschoolers do not get a well rounded education. But I think the academic stuff they do pick up is invariably the stuff that will matter most to them throughout their life. In that respect, I think homeschooling does a better job of preparing kids for their adult life.
The social aspects can be a problem, but they are rarely as bad as many people think they are. Any parent who doesn't get their homeschooled kid involved in an organization like BSA is doing their kid a disservice. Homeschoolers have the flexibility to make the most of those opportunities. For example, I know that any boy in my troop over the age of 13 is a more capable leader than anybody in our county government. (My mom happens to work for those politicians.)
Also, even though I was homeschooler, and even though I started college very young, none of my instructors has ever guessed. They don't notice any immaturity. Also, the faculty members that are in a position to deal with homeschoolers all have a positive view of homeschooling. I think it is because I'm at a good university, as opposed to the community colleges that the less academic homeschoolers end up at.
Posts: 145 | Registered: Apr 2007
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But college admin, which is rather a different kettle of fish.
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