7 ms·

"Still, school administrators can do more than they’re doing. They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them the support they de

"Still, school administrators can do more than they’re doing. They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them the support they deserve. Administrators can fire more of their worst teachers, as Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, did last week." There is a gigantic elephant in that room with "NEA" painted on its hide.

jbooth 16y ago
Very true. But as long as the NEA and the unions are the only ones who stick up for teachers while everyone else wants to cut their salaries and assign them more work in the name of "eliminating government waste" (while leaving earmarks and military funding untouched, of course..) Anyways as long as they're the only one that actually sticks up for teachers then they'll have a place in the world. You just have to smack them around once in a while when they're totally wrong about something, like their resistance to the Obama admin's effort's at merit pay. EDIT: From the article, kindergarten being the most predictive grade is fascinating.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  ...everyone else wants to cut their salaries and assign them more work in the name of "eliminating government waste" (while leaving earmarks and military funding untouched, of course..) Argue with straw men much?
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Go take a look at a municipal budget over the last 5 years, pretty much anywhere in the US. It's not a straw man. State and local budgets have been strapped since 2002-2003 or so, all the way through the supposed "boom", and it got worse after the collapse. The stimulus bill, for example -- it was like 40% tax cuts, had a bunch of earmarks, but the local aid that would've helped teachers was what got stripped out in order to get the last couple votes. Congress can reduce the deficit by cutting state aid. States can balance their budgets by cutting local aid. School districts get stuck with the lack of funding from their congressman's admirable devotion to balanced budgets. In between voting for putting 2 wars and a $50 million senior center for his district on the credit card. I'm just giving you the truth - you can accept it or not.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      I don't dispute that congress is a bunch of crooks. I dispute the term "everyone else" - most people who criticize teachers for being overpaid and underworked (which is uncommon) also criticize pork barrel spending.
      - jbooth 16y ago
        Well, first off, people who criticize teachers for being overpaid and underworked are just plain wrong. Teachers have a really hard job and it's one of the top 5 most important jobs in our whole society. Regarding my original point, that nobody stands up for teachers.. I mean look at that stimulus bill. Teacher pay makes up a huge portion and often an outright majority of local budgets. When local budgets are crunched, and it's either lay off teachers or raise taxes, guess which way the local populace usually goes? Everyone wants something for nothing.
        yummyfajitas 16y ago
        Teachers are certainly underworked relative to other professionals, even for the 9-10 months that school is in session. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf They are also overpaid, particularly if you account for the value of all their fringe benefits, including summer vacation, tenure, defined benefit pensions, early retirement and gold-plated medical care (all of which are very expensive). In fact, they are usually paid right on the money if you look at salary alone - a 45 year old teacher with 20 years experience in NYC gets $83-95k/year (equivalent to $99-114k/year if they worked all year). That's not bad even for NYC. http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolProfessionals/Salary/Salary+Step+and+Differential+Schedules.htm http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro... It gets even worse when you realize teachers tend to be low human capital individuals, at least compared to other college grads. Most likely they would be below average if they pursued other professions: http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpretingscores.pdf http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...
        16y ago
- Empact 16y ago
  How do you explain that while the NEA supports the firing teachers based on age, rather than merit - ejecting good young teachers while retaining old bad ones - while it's innovative charter schools that can go right ahead in paying teachers highly in hopes of attracting the best teachers: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html?_r=1&hpw http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html?_... Who is sticking up for teachers there? The NEA, which supports age over talent? Or the charter, which is focused on attracting and retaining good teachers?
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Did you read the comment you're responding to? I said they were wrong sometimes, specifically in regards to merit pay. I said that, in black and white, right there on the page. Or gray, because it's being downmodded because people who don't like the implications of it. Anyways, yeah. Charter schools. Whole other bag of worms. I like them in theory, in practice the way they're funded usually tends to be crooked -- quick example, in the town I was a Selectman in, a charter school started up. It cost us about 7k/year to educate a student, round numbers. Cost the charter school, say, 9k. Every student that left us for the charter school, 9k was taken from our budget and assigned to theirs. To add insult to injury, we actually had to pay to bus the kids there on top of it, plus additional unitemized strains on the police budget, etc. That's not exactly kosher.
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Oh, and as far as "why" they support age vs merit (in other words, "last in first out", youngest teachers go first in a layoff), it's because that's how all the union contracts are structured, and that's wrong, but NEA is a product of the unions. Not defending, just explaining. I'd love to throw the NEA under the bus - the problem is, nobody else stands up for teachers.
sprout 16y ago
The problem with this debate is that if you speak to most teachers, they agree wholeheartedly that procedures need to be in place to fire bad teachers. The issue is that they are very hostile to the educational administration establishment that has decided test scores are the ideal measure by which to base this. Test scores, while they are good at measuring some aspects of learning, ultimately tie teachers' hands and force them to teach from only state-approved curricula. Especially scary if you live in a state where Thomas Jefferson has been struck from the books because the board of education has an ideology to push, and is unconcerned with teaching truth. So if you ask most teachers, they support this sort of thing totally, and therefore the unions would too. But only if they receive assurances that standardized testing - an enemy of free thought - is a minimally important part of the evaluation system. Peer review is the ideal. Now, this obviously still brings charges of cronyism, and it certainly will create cliques of teachers, but only rarely cliques of bad teachers. And I think it's worth knowing that we pass a widely varied bunch of knowledge onto our children, instead of only those facts that are deemed convenient and useful by powerful cliques in the state legislatures.
- lutorm 16y ago
  This is the real issue. I have absolutely no problem with rewarding good teachers and sanctioning bad ones. The crucial question is how good and bad will be defined. Standardized testing is absolutely not the way to do it.
  - richieb 16y ago
    Perhaps we should ask the students and student parents? After all the parents are paying the bill (even when it's indirect via taxes)
  - shasta 16y ago
    If you mean that a teacher's salary shouldn't be a simple function of test scores, then sure. If you mean standardized testing shouldn't be used to evaluate children, or that evaluations of students - even relative ones - shouldn't be used in evaluations of teachers, then can you please explain what you have in mind as the alternative?

jbooth 16y ago

Very true. But as long as the NEA and the unions are the only ones who stick up for teachers while everyone else wants to cut their salaries and assign them more work in the name of "eliminating government waste" (while leaving earmarks and military funding untouched, of course..) Anyways as long as they're the only one that actually sticks up for teachers then they'll have a place in the world. You just have to smack them around once in a while when they're totally wrong about something, like their resistance to the Obama admin's effort's at merit pay. EDIT: From the article, kindergarten being the most predictive grade is fascinating.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
yummyfajitas 16y ago
...everyone else wants to cut their salaries and assign them more work in the name of "eliminating government waste" (while leaving earmarks and military funding untouched, of course..) Argue with straw men much?
- jbooth 16y ago
  Go take a look at a municipal budget over the last 5 years, pretty much anywhere in the US. It's not a straw man. State and local budgets have been strapped since 2002-2003 or so, all the way through the supposed "boom", and it got worse after the collapse. The stimulus bill, for example -- it was like 40% tax cuts, had a bunch of earmarks, but the local aid that would've helped teachers was what got stripped out in order to get the last couple votes. Congress can reduce the deficit by cutting state aid. States can balance their budgets by cutting local aid. School districts get stuck with the lack of funding from their congressman's admirable devotion to balanced budgets. In between voting for putting 2 wars and a $50 million senior center for his district on the credit card. I'm just giving you the truth - you can accept it or not.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    I don't dispute that congress is a bunch of crooks. I dispute the term "everyone else" - most people who criticize teachers for being overpaid and underworked (which is uncommon) also criticize pork barrel spending.
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Well, first off, people who criticize teachers for being overpaid and underworked are just plain wrong. Teachers have a really hard job and it's one of the top 5 most important jobs in our whole society. Regarding my original point, that nobody stands up for teachers.. I mean look at that stimulus bill. Teacher pay makes up a huge portion and often an outright majority of local budgets. When local budgets are crunched, and it's either lay off teachers or raise taxes, guess which way the local populace usually goes? Everyone wants something for nothing.
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago
        Teachers are certainly underworked relative to other professionals, even for the 9-10 months that school is in session. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf They are also overpaid, particularly if you account for the value of all their fringe benefits, including summer vacation, tenure, defined benefit pensions, early retirement and gold-plated medical care (all of which are very expensive). In fact, they are usually paid right on the money if you look at salary alone - a 45 year old teacher with 20 years experience in NYC gets $83-95k/year (equivalent to $99-114k/year if they worked all year). That's not bad even for NYC. http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolProfessionals/Salary/Salary+Step+and+Differential+Schedules.htm http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro... It gets even worse when you realize teachers tend to be low human capital individuals, at least compared to other college grads. Most likely they would be below average if they pursued other professions: http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpretingscores.pdf http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...
        16y ago
Empact 16y ago
How do you explain that while the NEA supports the firing teachers based on age, rather than merit - ejecting good young teachers while retaining old bad ones - while it's innovative charter schools that can go right ahead in paying teachers highly in hopes of attracting the best teachers: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html?_r=1&hpw http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html?_... Who is sticking up for teachers there? The NEA, which supports age over talent? Or the charter, which is focused on attracting and retaining good teachers?
- jbooth 16y ago
  Did you read the comment you're responding to? I said they were wrong sometimes, specifically in regards to merit pay. I said that, in black and white, right there on the page. Or gray, because it's being downmodded because people who don't like the implications of it. Anyways, yeah. Charter schools. Whole other bag of worms. I like them in theory, in practice the way they're funded usually tends to be crooked -- quick example, in the town I was a Selectman in, a charter school started up. It cost us about 7k/year to educate a student, round numbers. Cost the charter school, say, 9k. Every student that left us for the charter school, 9k was taken from our budget and assigned to theirs. To add insult to injury, we actually had to pay to bus the kids there on top of it, plus additional unitemized strains on the police budget, etc. That's not exactly kosher.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Oh, and as far as "why" they support age vs merit (in other words, "last in first out", youngest teachers go first in a layoff), it's because that's how all the union contracts are structured, and that's wrong, but NEA is a product of the unions. Not defending, just explaining. I'd love to throw the NEA under the bus - the problem is, nobody else stands up for teachers.

sprout 16y ago

The problem with this debate is that if you speak to most teachers, they agree wholeheartedly that procedures need to be in place to fire bad teachers. The issue is that they are very hostile to the educational administration establishment that has decided test scores are the ideal measure by which to base this. Test scores, while they are good at measuring some aspects of learning, ultimately tie teachers' hands and force them to teach from only state-approved curricula. Especially scary if you live in a state where Thomas Jefferson has been struck from the books because the board of education has an ideology to push, and is unconcerned with teaching truth. So if you ask most teachers, they support this sort of thing totally, and therefore the unions would too. But only if they receive assurances that standardized testing - an enemy of free thought - is a minimally important part of the evaluation system. Peer review is the ideal. Now, this obviously still brings charges of cronyism, and it certainly will create cliques of teachers, but only rarely cliques of bad teachers. And I think it's worth knowing that we pass a widely varied bunch of knowledge onto our children, instead of only those facts that are deemed convenient and useful by powerful cliques in the state legislatures.

lutorm 16y ago
This is the real issue. I have absolutely no problem with rewarding good teachers and sanctioning bad ones. The crucial question is how good and bad will be defined. Standardized testing is absolutely not the way to do it.
- richieb 16y ago
  Perhaps we should ask the students and student parents? After all the parents are paying the bill (even when it's indirect via taxes)
- shasta 16y ago
  If you mean that a teacher's salary shouldn't be a simple function of test scores, then sure. If you mean standardized testing shouldn't be used to evaluate children, or that evaluations of students - even relative ones - shouldn't be used in evaluations of teachers, then can you please explain what you have in mind as the alternative?