7 ms·

My mother was for many years an elementary school teacher in a district that was almost entirely Hispanic, where a large percentage of the students could barely

by necubi 15y ago

My mother was for many years an elementary school teacher in a district that was almost entirely Hispanic, where a large percentage of the students could barely speak English and where many were the children of migrant farm workers who never stayed in one school for the entire year. When NCLB hit, her school was unsurprisingly deemed "failing." The response was to focus exclusively on test scores, eliminating any program (art, sports, music) that did not directly traslate into better performance on the benchmark test. And yet, because the students still couldn't speak English, nothing much changed and the school was taken over by the state, which meant the principal and many of the teachers were fired. How does this sort of thing make any sense? How are the teachers to blame for their unprepared students? These teachers are working in the hardest districts with the most students of greatest need, and our national response is to punish them. It's distressing to see in many of these discussions exactly the attitudes described in the article: teachers are lazy, they're overpaid, they even get summers off! Never mind that their salaries are so low that many need to find alternate work for the summer to make ends meet, or that it is impossible to get all the work done during the school day, necessitating often long nights. There are bad teachers, just as there are bad programmers and bad doctors. We should try to help them become better teachers, and fire them if that's not possible. But we shouldn't castigate an entire profession as a result, and we should acknowledge that if we actually wanted good teachers, we will have to pay for it.

davatk 15y ago
I would be a lot more sympathetic to teachers if their pay system wasn't seniority based, or if it wasn't so hard to fire teachers.
- BudVVeezer 15y ago
  Teachers generally have yearly contracts. It's not hard to fire them.
  - lsiclait 15y ago
    false. in the united states, as a result of the teachers' unions, it is very difficult to fire a teacher. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-must-fire-bad-teachers.html http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-must-fire-bad-teac...
    - anigbrowl 15y ago
      You're both half-right. due to the state and county segmentation of education, union influence and educational job security varies widely. In places like New York, unions are very powerful and dismissals are difficult. In some places, it's far easier. Likewise, some places have very high academic standards, and in other places creationism is considered a valid element in science currricula. Academic quality is not strongly correlated to unions' bargaining ability, as far as I can tell.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  Dude, their pay system is seniority based because otherwise they'd never get a raise at all.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Eliezer 15y ago
  ...neither of the problems you cite is actually any individual teacher's fault.
  - chc 15y ago
    I don't think that's relevant to what he's saying. He appears to be claiming that teachers have a pretty sweet deal already, such that any hardships they encounter are already balanced by the perks.
- earl 15y ago
  But they essentially have to be. First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive. It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience, ie all your high salaried employees. Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract? Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families, and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become teachers.
  - natrius 15y ago
    For some time, I've lamented the negative effects that the government's effective monopoly over primary education has had on our system. Eliminating choice eliminates the natural incentive to improve that results from consumers choosing better alternatives. I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government continued to fund education for those who can't afford it, but stopped actually running the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.
    - yequalsx 15y ago
      Who is going to build a school in a poor neighborhood then? Who is going to transport the child to the good school? When the slots to the best schools are filled by children of wealthy parents then what? We would end up with a worse two-tiered system than what we have now.
- caterping 15y ago
  > or if it wasn't so hard to fire teachers. It takes a few years to get tenure. Also, note that teachers sign an employment contract for each year they teach. This means that the administration has 3 chances to simply not renew a new teacher's contract if they don't like them. So, it's only difficult to fire teachers after you've had them working for you for a few years. And even then, the district can make your life miserable without firing you. They can have someone from the central office sit in and observe you every day. They can give you a lousy schedule, give you too many preps, move you between crummy rooms, or a number of other things to get you to leave.
Vivtek 15y ago
You don't even have to cite poor districts to see this. In Bloomington, IN, the presence of the University also ensures that you have a large number of non-English speakers every year, and every district everywhere has a certain number of disabled children (who have mostly been mainstreamed now for lack of funds for special care). Teachers work as hard as any human being can, and directly affect the lives of everybody in the country - and yet they're routinely despised and asked to sacrifice just a little bit more. It's no wonder so few people are still willing to do that work. The same applies at the university level, of course, with increasing reliance on no-benefits adjunct workers paid chump change for a chance to "get into the profession" (as if there will ever be well-paid positions afterwards), and even full-time lecturers are not exactly paid huge amounts of cash - my wife has a PhD in physics and was just paid $35,000 for a one-year visiting professorship. Argh.
- ktsmith 15y ago
  Special Education students are often mainstreamed not due to a lack of funding but due to the legal requirements written into their individualized education programs. While there is certainly benefit for many students with IEPs to being mainstreamed, much of it has to do with parents fighting with the school districts over their children being "labeled."
jodoherty 15y ago
I actually think teachers shouldn't have entire summers off. That's a great time to review teaching methods and materials, prepare curriculum, hold teaching conferences, and other things that would free them up during the school year to focus more on class time. Trying to do those things after teaching hundreds of students all day long is really difficult. It's amazing to me that teachers even manage to do as well as they do. Moving to yearlong schooling with a shorter summer break and a longer winter break, plus longer breaks between each quarter would be better though. Students who aren't exposed to reading and writing English at home wouldn't slowly fall behind year after year due to the long summer vacations. I have to agree with you though. The policy makers do more harm than good, but the truth is that by setting some bureaucratic benchmark, they feel they can wash their hands of any responsibility on the matter without spending more money on education. The problem with these standardized benchmarks is that they only punish students and schools for cumulative educational deficiencies instead of allowing them to slow down and address them, so as students go from grade to grade, they're gradually robbed of the education they should have had. I think the current educational goal of having all students meet some standard benchmark of academic achievement is flawed. Instead, we should simply try teaching students as much as they can learn at the pace at which each student learns best, or better yet, teach them a love of learning and the ability to continue learning on their own. If that means slowing down the curriculum for some students, then so be it. It's better that they master what skills they can in the given time they have in school than to force them into more and more difficult material with an ever poorer and poorer foundation to work off of until they give up. Honestly, we should only provide standard individual benchmarks to assess where an individual student stands in their development so that teachers can adjust the curriculum to match each student regardless of how well they know that student or where they came from. And then we should also give teachers the freedom, time, and flexibility to adapt to their students' individual needs. The way it is now, we force teachers to treat students like products in an assembly line. The benchmark-based punishment and reward system we have now even incentivizes this treatment of students. It's sad.
- ojbyrne 15y ago
  I'm reasonably sure they do spend the summers (though probably not in all cases) doing the things you described in the first paragraph.

by necubi 15y ago

davatk 15y ago

I would be a lot more sympathetic to teachers if their pay system wasn't seniority based, or if it wasn't so hard to fire teachers.

BudVVeezer 15y ago
Teachers generally have yearly contracts. It's not hard to fire them.
- lsiclait 15y ago
  false. in the united states, as a result of the teachers' unions, it is very difficult to fire a teacher. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-must-fire-bad-teachers.html http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-must-fire-bad-teac...
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    You're both half-right. due to the state and county segmentation of education, union influence and educational job security varies widely. In places like New York, unions are very powerful and dismissals are difficult. In some places, it's far easier. Likewise, some places have very high academic standards, and in other places creationism is considered a valid element in science currricula. Academic quality is not strongly correlated to unions' bargaining ability, as far as I can tell.
Vivtek 15y ago
Dude, their pay system is seniority based because otherwise they'd never get a raise at all.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Eliezer 15y ago
...neither of the problems you cite is actually any individual teacher's fault.
- chc 15y ago
  I don't think that's relevant to what he's saying. He appears to be claiming that teachers have a pretty sweet deal already, such that any hardships they encounter are already balanced by the perks.
earl 15y ago
But they essentially have to be. First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive. It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience, ie all your high salaried employees. Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract? Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families, and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become teachers.
- natrius 15y ago
  For some time, I've lamented the negative effects that the government's effective monopoly over primary education has had on our system. Eliminating choice eliminates the natural incentive to improve that results from consumers choosing better alternatives. I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government continued to fund education for those who can't afford it, but stopped actually running the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.
  - yequalsx 15y ago
    Who is going to build a school in a poor neighborhood then? Who is going to transport the child to the good school? When the slots to the best schools are filled by children of wealthy parents then what? We would end up with a worse two-tiered system than what we have now.
caterping 15y ago
> or if it wasn't so hard to fire teachers. It takes a few years to get tenure. Also, note that teachers sign an employment contract for each year they teach. This means that the administration has 3 chances to simply not renew a new teacher's contract if they don't like them. So, it's only difficult to fire teachers after you've had them working for you for a few years. And even then, the district can make your life miserable without firing you. They can have someone from the central office sit in and observe you every day. They can give you a lousy schedule, give you too many preps, move you between crummy rooms, or a number of other things to get you to leave.

Vivtek 15y ago

You don't even have to cite poor districts to see this. In Bloomington, IN, the presence of the University also ensures that you have a large number of non-English speakers every year, and every district everywhere has a certain number of disabled children (who have mostly been mainstreamed now for lack of funds for special care). Teachers work as hard as any human being can, and directly affect the lives of everybody in the country - and yet they're routinely despised and asked to sacrifice just a little bit more. It's no wonder so few people are still willing to do that work. The same applies at the university level, of course, with increasing reliance on no-benefits adjunct workers paid chump change for a chance to "get into the profession" (as if there will ever be well-paid positions afterwards), and even full-time lecturers are not exactly paid huge amounts of cash - my wife has a PhD in physics and was just paid $35,000 for a one-year visiting professorship. Argh.

ktsmith 15y ago
Special Education students are often mainstreamed not due to a lack of funding but due to the legal requirements written into their individualized education programs. While there is certainly benefit for many students with IEPs to being mainstreamed, much of it has to do with parents fighting with the school districts over their children being "labeled."

jodoherty 15y ago

I actually think teachers shouldn't have entire summers off. That's a great time to review teaching methods and materials, prepare curriculum, hold teaching conferences, and other things that would free them up during the school year to focus more on class time. Trying to do those things after teaching hundreds of students all day long is really difficult. It's amazing to me that teachers even manage to do as well as they do. Moving to yearlong schooling with a shorter summer break and a longer winter break, plus longer breaks between each quarter would be better though. Students who aren't exposed to reading and writing English at home wouldn't slowly fall behind year after year due to the long summer vacations. I have to agree with you though. The policy makers do more harm than good, but the truth is that by setting some bureaucratic benchmark, they feel they can wash their hands of any responsibility on the matter without spending more money on education. The problem with these standardized benchmarks is that they only punish students and schools for cumulative educational deficiencies instead of allowing them to slow down and address them, so as students go from grade to grade, they're gradually robbed of the education they should have had. I think the current educational goal of having all students meet some standard benchmark of academic achievement is flawed. Instead, we should simply try teaching students as much as they can learn at the pace at which each student learns best, or better yet, teach them a love of learning and the ability to continue learning on their own. If that means slowing down the curriculum for some students, then so be it. It's better that they master what skills they can in the given time they have in school than to force them into more and more difficult material with an ever poorer and poorer foundation to work off of until they give up. Honestly, we should only provide standard individual benchmarks to assess where an individual student stands in their development so that teachers can adjust the curriculum to match each student regardless of how well they know that student or where they came from. And then we should also give teachers the freedom, time, and flexibility to adapt to their students' individual needs. The way it is now, we force teachers to treat students like products in an assembly line. The benchmark-based punishment and reward system we have now even incentivizes this treatment of students. It's sad.

ojbyrne 15y ago
I'm reasonably sure they do spend the summers (though probably not in all cases) doing the things you described in the first paragraph.