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We don't revolutionize teaching because TENURE AND SENIORITY RULES ARE LOCKED DOWN BY THE UNIONS. Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break

We don't revolutionize teaching because TENURE AND SENIORITY RULES ARE LOCKED DOWN BY THE UNIONS. Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year. (Edit: we really DO care about teaching, and spend enormous amounts of tax payers dollars and collective worry on it.)

Natsu 16y ago
> Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year. That only works if you're good at recognizing the bottom 10% and have tight anti-cheating controls. Otherwise, things will go straight to hell. Also, you're neglecting the fact that it'll destroy cooperation among the teachers, because it turns things into a "it's either him or me, and it's not going to be me" scenario. Neither effect is conductive to a better or more effective school environment. While the idea of firing bad teachers has a lot of merit, handling it in such a way is a terrible idea. That's the sort of quick fix bad managers come up with and one of the ways bad managers can help destroy an entire organization. But it's a lot easier to give out fixes like these than it is to understand problems, so such ideas are remarkably prevalent. That probably explains why the change X by Y% mentality is lampooned in so many Dilbert cartoons.
- forkandwait 16y ago
  Hehe... I just thought of this: I bet there is easily a consensus between parents and peers on the suckiest 5% for most schools in the US today. When it actually becomes hard to all agree on the suckiest 1 out of 20, we probably would be a long way toward better schools.
  - hdctambien 16y ago
    A woman I work with's daughter just started school this year. She decided to send her to a private school because if she went to the public school she would be one of only a handful of white children. She didn't want her daughter to "grow up feeling like a minority". We live in Boston, there are plenty of white people here. She lives in the same neighborhood as the mayor of Boston. There are plenty of white people there. Why are there so few white people in that public school? She had no opinion about the actual education provided by either school. Just that all the white kids go to the private school, and all the not-white kids go to the public school. I wonder if that public school would rank as one of the "suckiest" schools. It seems like (white) people are voting that way with their pocketbooks.
    - mkramlich 16y ago
      Though it's not popular to talk about it, there are cultural differences between races, as a general rule -- especially regarding attitudes towards education, ambition, work and success.
      - lists 16y ago
        You mean differences between socio-economic strata. It's not popular to talk about so-called 'cultural differences' between races because it's the wrong way to talk about it.
        mkramlich 16y ago
        why is it wrong?
        lists 16y ago
        Incorrect would be the more precise term. The distribution of race/ethnicity across class is historical, not structural. In other words, no matter where you go, the lower class is always described as possessing ineffectual "attitudes towards education, ambition, work and success". It's rather uninformed to suggest these are inherent "cultural" attitudes rather than the conditioning of being on the bottom.
        mkramlich 16y ago
        I never said it was inherent. I just said there are clearly cultural differences across races [meaning in the US today.] This is not a unique position held only by me. There are plenty of black people, for example, who will openly talk about this, including Bill Cosby and Thomas Sowell, among others. Although on a separate point I'd say it's not 100% proven that somehow all failure or imperfection on the part of black Americans, to take one just group, is solely the fault of feeling oppressed, or having suffered from a history of oppression or being a minority or "on the bottom." Some of it may just be due to the results of personal choices and personal behavior and willpower. It's almost shocking to me that I have to suggest this with such caution and delicacy.
pmb 16y ago
The unions? That's your bad guy here? Teachers are poorly-paid and looked-down-upon in our society and you are blaming the only organization which sticks up for them? The unions suck, certainly, but firing teachers only works if there is a ready supply of quality replacements. Plus, if you remove the perk of job security, you are going to have to significantly increase teacher pay to compensate. Even worse than this, you assume that we have a good way of measuring teacher quality. The unions are a red herring.
- forkandwait 16y ago
  Teachers aren't particularly poorly paid -- they make about 45k a year with summers off (that is the country wide salary, the median elementary school teacher salary in San Jose is 65k) and potentially have a great job (when a class is good, teaching is a joy as long as enough easy kids balance the hard ones). The joyfulness is really important -- private school teachers make shit, but teaching there is great fun and often doesn't require the utterly ridiculous credentialling process of the public schools. Sure, we're not talking attorney or registered nurse salaries here, but we aren't talking attorney/ nurse student loans or pressure either. No blood, no lawsuits, no ambulance chasing. Like I say, if the kids are good, teaching is something you would do for free. Oh -- parents are part of the problem, I will admit. I sort of blame crappy teachers and adminsistrators for creating an environment in which a lot of kids and parents feel alienated from the process. If you don't buy into the process, which requires hard, often unpleasant work, the whole thing goes to hell. But it should be the educators who are on the frontlines of fixing the lazy, fun-only fucked up culture that is the USA.
  - natnat 16y ago
    You can get a R.N. degree at a community college in three or four years. Getting a job at as a teacher requires just as much education plus certification, which usually requires a bachelor's degree plus additional classes plus a bunch of student teaching.
    - forkandwait 16y ago
jdietrich 16y ago
Why haven't the unions been broken? Nobody would tolerate unions that protected incompetent lawyers or doctors. Union-breaking is practically a science these days, it's neither expensive nor difficult, especially against a workforce with no ability to mount a meaningfully disruptive strike. It appears to me that there simply isn't the political will to do it. The teaching unions make more noise than parents and students, so they win. We return to my basic thesis, that we don't care as much about education as we'd like to think. If you just fire the worst 10% every year, you just make teaching less attractive. As it stands, teaching is sufficiently low-status, poorly paid and unpleasant that the only people who go into it are a rare few who really want to teach and a majority who aren't competent enough to do anything else. You can't just fire bad teachers, you need to recruit good ones. For the moment, only a martyr or an idiot would decide to teach.
- 3am 16y ago
  The answer is completely obvious - because the teachers unions are not actually the problem with the US education system. They are just a convenient scapegoat for some people to demonize.
  - timepilot 16y ago
    Several teachers in my family - none of them would agree with you.
    - niels_olson 16y ago
      why?
- brg 16y ago
  Who has an incentive to work against public unions? Public unions operate in a monopoly for which one business can not be undercut. And after all, public unions vote.
  - forkandwait 16y ago
gte910h 16y ago
The unions would happily cancel much of the seniority rules for an over 2x raise of salary.
- brg 16y ago
  If union voters have the same distribution of that of public voters, then the most active and vocal will be those with retirement in mind. I think it would be hard sell to get these voters to agree to a change that will immediately affect their near-term future.
busyant 16y ago
The Unions are only part of the problem. You want to fire the shitty teachers, right? I'm all for that. Unfortunately, this is only a PARTIAL solution. You also need to be able to fire the shitty administrators (see below). AND you need to be able to "fire" the shitty students (troublemakers). The school administrations are often composed of transient "revolving door" bureaucrats whose only goal is to pad their resumes with bullet-points of dubious changes that they implemented. * Administrators will frequently alter programs ("we do physics in 11th grade? Well we're doing it in 9th grade now!") simply to demonstrate that they've made a difference. * They will place weak students in classes where they don't belong just to maintain the appearance that they are serving a useful function ("Sure X failed biology and he'll be lucky to get into community college, but I'm recommending that he take chemistry b/c it looks good on his transcript"). * They will protect troublesome students to the detriment of other students ("You can't keep X out of class all the time. You're just going to have to learn to control him") Students and Parents are as much of the problem as the teachers and the administration: There is often a pervasive attitude of entitlement without any effort amongst the students and their parents. Troublesome students are allowed to ruin the learning environment for everyone else. In an ideal world, you could kick those students out of class (or school), but in reality you can't (see ADMINISTRATION). Amusing--but not uncommon--anecdote: My cousin is a high-school teacher who had a student who continuously disrupted one of her classes. She finally phoned the student's mother to tell her about her son's attitude problem. The mother responded with: "Look...I don't call you to complain when he misbehaves at home. So, don't call me up because he's misbehaving on YOUR time." That's not the union's fault, is it?
- forkandwait 16y ago
  Good point. I would only say that in the long term, the parents' and kids' alienation from the system as a whole is partly the fault of the system. A lot of schools in working class areas SUCK -- everybody knows it and feels stuck with it, so why would they feel like they should play along with the teachers when they call? Really, I just want to be able to fire the sucky teachers and administrators. I am really a downright socialist (with free enterprise a necessary evil that must be vigorously contained); I hate to be arguing against unions.
- 16y ago
hdctambien 16y ago
You don't really have to worry about firing the worst 10% ... how about keeping the good teachers? http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunction/text_files/teacher_retentionsymposium.pdf http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunction/text_files/teacher_retent... "In 1999, for example, our schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before (i.e., new teachers hired who were not simply moving from one school to another). But the schools lost more than 287,000 teachers who left for other occupations that year—55,000 more than they hired" If we have/discover the ability to tell the good teachers from the bad, then we should just start hiring only the good teachers. Eventually the good will out number the bad and maybe even teach the bad teachers a thing or two) Maybe instead of firing the bottom 10%, we should "improve" them. It's either that or replace them. Of course, you could very well be replacing them with someone just as bad or worse.

Natsu 16y ago

> Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year. That only works if you're good at recognizing the bottom 10% and have tight anti-cheating controls. Otherwise, things will go straight to hell. Also, you're neglecting the fact that it'll destroy cooperation among the teachers, because it turns things into a "it's either him or me, and it's not going to be me" scenario. Neither effect is conductive to a better or more effective school environment. While the idea of firing bad teachers has a lot of merit, handling it in such a way is a terrible idea. That's the sort of quick fix bad managers come up with and one of the ways bad managers can help destroy an entire organization. But it's a lot easier to give out fixes like these than it is to understand problems, so such ideas are remarkably prevalent. That probably explains why the change X by Y% mentality is lampooned in so many Dilbert cartoons.

forkandwait 16y ago
Hehe... I just thought of this: I bet there is easily a consensus between parents and peers on the suckiest 5% for most schools in the US today. When it actually becomes hard to all agree on the suckiest 1 out of 20, we probably would be a long way toward better schools.
- hdctambien 16y ago
  A woman I work with's daughter just started school this year. She decided to send her to a private school because if she went to the public school she would be one of only a handful of white children. She didn't want her daughter to "grow up feeling like a minority". We live in Boston, there are plenty of white people here. She lives in the same neighborhood as the mayor of Boston. There are plenty of white people there. Why are there so few white people in that public school? She had no opinion about the actual education provided by either school. Just that all the white kids go to the private school, and all the not-white kids go to the public school. I wonder if that public school would rank as one of the "suckiest" schools. It seems like (white) people are voting that way with their pocketbooks.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    Though it's not popular to talk about it, there are cultural differences between races, as a general rule -- especially regarding attitudes towards education, ambition, work and success.
    - lists 16y ago
      You mean differences between socio-economic strata. It's not popular to talk about so-called 'cultural differences' between races because it's the wrong way to talk about it.
      - mkramlich 16y ago
        why is it wrong?
        lists 16y ago
        Incorrect would be the more precise term. The distribution of race/ethnicity across class is historical, not structural. In other words, no matter where you go, the lower class is always described as possessing ineffectual "attitudes towards education, ambition, work and success". It's rather uninformed to suggest these are inherent "cultural" attitudes rather than the conditioning of being on the bottom.
        mkramlich 16y ago
        I never said it was inherent. I just said there are clearly cultural differences across races [meaning in the US today.] This is not a unique position held only by me. There are plenty of black people, for example, who will openly talk about this, including Bill Cosby and Thomas Sowell, among others. Although on a separate point I'd say it's not 100% proven that somehow all failure or imperfection on the part of black Americans, to take one just group, is solely the fault of feeling oppressed, or having suffered from a history of oppression or being a minority or "on the bottom." Some of it may just be due to the results of personal choices and personal behavior and willpower. It's almost shocking to me that I have to suggest this with such caution and delicacy.

pmb 16y ago

The unions? That's your bad guy here? Teachers are poorly-paid and looked-down-upon in our society and you are blaming the only organization which sticks up for them? The unions suck, certainly, but firing teachers only works if there is a ready supply of quality replacements. Plus, if you remove the perk of job security, you are going to have to significantly increase teacher pay to compensate. Even worse than this, you assume that we have a good way of measuring teacher quality. The unions are a red herring.

forkandwait 16y ago
Teachers aren't particularly poorly paid -- they make about 45k a year with summers off (that is the country wide salary, the median elementary school teacher salary in San Jose is 65k) and potentially have a great job (when a class is good, teaching is a joy as long as enough easy kids balance the hard ones). The joyfulness is really important -- private school teachers make shit, but teaching there is great fun and often doesn't require the utterly ridiculous credentialling process of the public schools. Sure, we're not talking attorney or registered nurse salaries here, but we aren't talking attorney/ nurse student loans or pressure either. No blood, no lawsuits, no ambulance chasing. Like I say, if the kids are good, teaching is something you would do for free. Oh -- parents are part of the problem, I will admit. I sort of blame crappy teachers and adminsistrators for creating an environment in which a lot of kids and parents feel alienated from the process. If you don't buy into the process, which requires hard, often unpleasant work, the whole thing goes to hell. But it should be the educators who are on the frontlines of fixing the lazy, fun-only fucked up culture that is the USA.
- natnat 16y ago
  You can get a R.N. degree at a community college in three or four years. Getting a job at as a teacher requires just as much education plus certification, which usually requires a bachelor's degree plus additional classes plus a bunch of student teaching.
  - forkandwait 16y ago

jdietrich 16y ago

Why haven't the unions been broken? Nobody would tolerate unions that protected incompetent lawyers or doctors. Union-breaking is practically a science these days, it's neither expensive nor difficult, especially against a workforce with no ability to mount a meaningfully disruptive strike. It appears to me that there simply isn't the political will to do it. The teaching unions make more noise than parents and students, so they win. We return to my basic thesis, that we don't care as much about education as we'd like to think. If you just fire the worst 10% every year, you just make teaching less attractive. As it stands, teaching is sufficiently low-status, poorly paid and unpleasant that the only people who go into it are a rare few who really want to teach and a majority who aren't competent enough to do anything else. You can't just fire bad teachers, you need to recruit good ones. For the moment, only a martyr or an idiot would decide to teach.

3am 16y ago
The answer is completely obvious - because the teachers unions are not actually the problem with the US education system. They are just a convenient scapegoat for some people to demonize.
- timepilot 16y ago
  Several teachers in my family - none of them would agree with you.
  - niels_olson 16y ago
    why?
brg 16y ago
Who has an incentive to work against public unions? Public unions operate in a monopoly for which one business can not be undercut. And after all, public unions vote.
- forkandwait 16y ago

gte910h 16y ago

The unions would happily cancel much of the seniority rules for an over 2x raise of salary.

brg 16y ago
If union voters have the same distribution of that of public voters, then the most active and vocal will be those with retirement in mind. I think it would be hard sell to get these voters to agree to a change that will immediately affect their near-term future.

busyant 16y ago

The Unions are only part of the problem. You want to fire the shitty teachers, right? I'm all for that. Unfortunately, this is only a PARTIAL solution. You also need to be able to fire the shitty administrators (see below). AND you need to be able to "fire" the shitty students (troublemakers). The school administrations are often composed of transient "revolving door" bureaucrats whose only goal is to pad their resumes with bullet-points of dubious changes that they implemented. * Administrators will frequently alter programs ("we do physics in 11th grade? Well we're doing it in 9th grade now!") simply to demonstrate that they've made a difference. * They will place weak students in classes where they don't belong just to maintain the appearance that they are serving a useful function ("Sure X failed biology and he'll be lucky to get into community college, but I'm recommending that he take chemistry b/c it looks good on his transcript"). * They will protect troublesome students to the detriment of other students ("You can't keep X out of class all the time. You're just going to have to learn to control him") Students and Parents are as much of the problem as the teachers and the administration: There is often a pervasive attitude of entitlement without any effort amongst the students and their parents. Troublesome students are allowed to ruin the learning environment for everyone else. In an ideal world, you could kick those students out of class (or school), but in reality you can't (see ADMINISTRATION). Amusing--but not uncommon--anecdote: My cousin is a high-school teacher who had a student who continuously disrupted one of her classes. She finally phoned the student's mother to tell her about her son's attitude problem. The mother responded with: "Look...I don't call you to complain when he misbehaves at home. So, don't call me up because he's misbehaving on YOUR time." That's not the union's fault, is it?

forkandwait 16y ago
Good point. I would only say that in the long term, the parents' and kids' alienation from the system as a whole is partly the fault of the system. A lot of schools in working class areas SUCK -- everybody knows it and feels stuck with it, so why would they feel like they should play along with the teachers when they call? Really, I just want to be able to fire the sucky teachers and administrators. I am really a downright socialist (with free enterprise a necessary evil that must be vigorously contained); I hate to be arguing against unions.
16y ago

hdctambien 16y ago

You don't really have to worry about firing the worst 10% ... how about keeping the good teachers? http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunction/text_files/teacher_retentionsymposium.pdf http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunction/text_files/teacher_retent... "In 1999, for example, our schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before (i.e., new teachers hired who were not simply moving from one school to another). But the schools lost more than 287,000 teachers who left for other occupations that year—55,000 more than they hired" If we have/discover the ability to tell the good teachers from the bad, then we should just start hiring only the good teachers. Eventually the good will out number the bad and maybe even teach the bad teachers a thing or two) Maybe instead of firing the bottom 10%, we should "improve" them. It's either that or replace them. Of course, you could very well be replacing them with someone just as bad or worse.