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His ideas about schools and education are incomplete. One reason we have teacher's unions is to help avoid good teachers being fired due to ignorant complaining
by fizzer9 18y ago
His ideas about schools and education are incomplete. One reason we have teacher's unions is to help avoid good teachers being fired due to ignorant complaining noisy parents (and students). And by the way, even with unions a female student can ruin a male teacher's career with a simple "he touched me" lie.
Smart parents will do their best to send their kids to private schools, but the less fortunate kids will get stuck in public. If it were even easier/cheaper to send your kids to private, then there would be an even greater separation between the kids who's parents care and the kids who's parents don't give a damn (the haves and have-nots).
The answer isn't to make more private schools, the answer is to fix public schools. And the problem with public schools is not the teachers. The teachers are working within a system that is broken. Rather than go into the details, here's a quick example: you're a teacher. You cover the material in class. You're inventive, dynamic, clear, withit, the whole nine yards. You assign homework on the material, go over the homework, and then give a quiz (on that material). Students fail because they didn't study and don't care (and this stems from most parents not giving a shit about school as long as their kids are out of the house and having some fun in sports). You go over the quiz in class, and give a test later in the week (on the same material). The students fail because they don't care and didn't study. You have a choice: do you fail a bunch of students and bring down a shitstorm of parent complaints and administration complaints? Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?
If you fail a bunch of students, administration will claim that you're a bad teacher. You'll have constant visits by "guests" (from administration) in the back of the room evaluating you. Parents will complain loudly that you're inept. Everyone will turn you into a scapegoat. If you're not tenured, you're gone.
Let me give you a hint: teaching is just a job, like any other job except that you're helping kids and so you try to go the extra mile if you can. But it's still just a job, and its not worth all the shit you get to make it rigorous if no one else is doing it, if you get no help from administration, and if you in fact get severely punished for it.
You want to fix education? Let the teachers teach, and let them fail students who fail. And for Pete's sake, get rid of the fucking standardized tests. They turn education into color-by-numbers.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago"Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?...get rid of the fucking standardized tests. " Standardized tests are the solution to the first problem. This is what we do at both NYU and Rutgers (with intro classes), and it works quite well.
- fizzer9 18y agoGreenspun seemed to be talking about public high schools, and that's what I was talking about as well. Standardized testing is just a race to the bottom. As soon as everyone agrees upon the standardized test, anyone who teaches anything outside of the box at all gets punished because an hour spent on something that's interesting and happens to catch the students' fancy on a given day is one less hour spent preparing them for the standardized test.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoIf the students are doing well, spending an hour on interesting side topics won't hurt the test results. If students are doing poorly, then sticking to the basics is the way to go. Walk before running, and all that. As far as the race to the bottom, standardized testing prevents it. The race to the bottom is what you described; make your test easier than others to avoid problems with whiny parents/students. A standardized test puts a floor on how far down you can go.
- fizzer9 18y agoThe existing situation is this: there are standardized tests, teachers are sticking to the basics -- they have no choice since they've got to teach to the test like everyone else (lest your students score a percentage point lower than another teacher's students), students are doing poorly, students are passing anyway because of the enormous forces on teachers in the broken system. The standardized tests are part of what's broken in the system. Also part of what's broken is that there are enormous forces preventing teachers from failing students who actually fail.