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If you want to see an interesting perspective on education in America, I highly recommend watching Bill Gate's TED talk (start at the 8 minute mark): http://ww

If you want to see an interesting perspective on education in America, I highly recommend watching Bill Gate's TED talk (start at the 8 minute mark): http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates_unplugged.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates_unplugged.html In summary, currently teachers are not held accountable for the quality of their teaching due to the way their contracts are structured. Also, formulas for teacher's pay reward experience and extra education, even though both have been shown to be unrelated to teaching quality. Simply throwing more money at the problem will not help, we need to rethink the current system.

megablast 16y ago
Difficult for the situation to change, if your unions are anything like ours in Australia. In NSW, they recently introduced a website that displays the score of standardized tests, not at the student level but at the school level. There wass a huge uproar by teachers, suddenly everyone can see how well they do, they and their schools can be examined. Due to this, they have come very close to striking at times, lots of complaints about not being able to teach properly, at having to "teach to the tests". There is some truth to this, but it is also a way out for the bad teachers. There needs to be some mechanism for recognising and removing bad teachers. The system is setup at the moment almost as a teacher retirement plan, once you get in, you can't get out.
uuilly 16y ago
Looks like he's also in an upcoming documentary about the broken US public school system: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/waitingforsuperman/ http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/waiting... Some of those scenes are from the lottery to get into the DC voucher program. DC is my hometown and the public schools are Cuisinarts for kids. Recently all future funding for the DC voucher program was pulled.

megablast 16y ago

Difficult for the situation to change, if your unions are anything like ours in Australia. In NSW, they recently introduced a website that displays the score of standardized tests, not at the student level but at the school level. There wass a huge uproar by teachers, suddenly everyone can see how well they do, they and their schools can be examined. Due to this, they have come very close to striking at times, lots of complaints about not being able to teach properly, at having to "teach to the tests". There is some truth to this, but it is also a way out for the bad teachers. There needs to be some mechanism for recognising and removing bad teachers. The system is setup at the moment almost as a teacher retirement plan, once you get in, you can't get out.

uuilly 16y ago

Looks like he's also in an upcoming documentary about the broken US public school system: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/waitingforsuperman/ http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/waiting... Some of those scenes are from the lottery to get into the DC voucher program. DC is my hometown and the public schools are Cuisinarts for kids. Recently all future funding for the DC voucher program was pulled.