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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

308 points by washt 12y ago

pfortuny 12y ago
I know this is easy to say from abroad but something that keeps coming to my mind when reading these statements is: what is needed are (also) teachers with the guts to act freely and teach what they deem necessary DESPITE whatever the government says and scraping the bureaucracy. Be not afraid of being fired. Yes, very easy to say but, as I see it, the only weapon against the Leviathan is your conscience.
jonas21 12y ago
The original post is over here: http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom/ http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...
jqm 12y ago
Good read. I remember a few dedicated influential teachers. Unfortunately, they are but a few and surrounded in my memory by a large number that were simply going through the motions. That was 20 years ago, and it sounds like maybe things have not improved. Quality teachers are just about one of the most important things a society can have. Not sure why we haven't institutionally figured that out.
- OedipusRex 12y ago
  I've had great teachers and I've had terrible teachers. I don't think any teacher sets out to be one of the bad teachers, I think the amount of things teachers go through (low pay, unnecessary hoops to jump through, etc) just grinds a person down.
  - jqm 12y ago
    Maybe they don't set out to be bad teachers. But the way it is set up now, education does seem to get a fair share of people looking for an easy path. Not sure this is the best group to be educating our youth.
    - dbrannan 12y ago
      You get what you pay for.
      - jqm 12y ago
        You get no more than you pay for. You don't always get what you pay for.
- washt 12y ago
  I can say that at least in Virginia, SOL scores are everything. The same scores are used to rate both teacher effectiveness and student success, which I feel is unfair to both parties. It encourages teachers to focus on the standardized test objective of the week rather than encouraging an environment of discovery and learning, and students to gamify the system rather than engage and invest themselves in their education.
deleted 12y ago
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nkangoh 12y ago
I REALLY wish teaching was as prestigious as say, being a doctor, or investment banker. I read a very interesting [1] book on this and it really just opened my eyes regarding the mediocrity of teaching (not quality per say, but as a profession, which eventually leads to poor education). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/145165443X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1420782654&sr=8-3&keywords=education http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/14516...
- brador 12y ago
  It is (in a free market). China/HK has millionaire private teachers.
  - warfangle 12y ago
    It is (in a socialist market). Finnish teachers have some of the utmost prestige.
    - nkangoh 12y ago
      The mentioned book really talks about how Korea, China (and Hong Kong) along with some European countries do education much differently.
      - ulfw 12y ago
        It is in a social free market (Germany). I've never seen a high school teacher having to take on another job. Everyone had their own cars and in particular everyone went one or two multi-week vacation to warmer climates. It's painful to see how little America cares.
    - wyclif 12y ago
      The problem with those who make 1:1 comparisons of the US and Finnish public education systems is that Finland is largely (yes, I know there are some Swedes there) a homogeneous culture, whereas the US is a "melting pot" containing a huge variety of cultures.
tlrobinson 12y ago
More like "Waynesboro Rotary Club Teacher of the Year"? Looks like this is blogspam with a linkbaity title. Original was "The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom": http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom/ http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...
- blakeja 12y ago
  BS, link bait / blogspam are any one of the numerous nautil.us or medium.com articles that seem to consistently make it onto the front page of hackernews. Whereas, this article reflects the same sentiments I have been hearing from close friends over the past years who are public school teachers. And it boils down to two facts that I have taken particular note of after listening to their grievances: 1. Government interference with education has been a huge mistake. 2. We do not pay our teachers nearly enough. You cannot legislate education, especially when trying to create a universal adapter for all education across the country. You cannot get quality teachers in the education system without adequate compensation, period.
  - frozenport 12y ago
    >>You cannot get quality teachers in the education system without adequate compensation, period. In Chicago we tried paying them more and didn't see much improvement.
    - eropple 12y ago
      Tried paying the current teachers more, or undergoing a concentrated effort to evaluate current teachers against a baseline and aggressively court and hire at competitive wages teachers who have a track record of being better than the teachers that you have at that baseline? I ask 'cause while I know nothing about Chicago, I've found that what you said always comes up with regard to the former.
      - sitkack 12y ago
        You can't just fix something with more money. Analogously, it would be like fixing a soup with too much salt by pouring in more water and sour cream, might work, might not.
thirdreplicator 12y ago
That's sad. I would be a teacher if I could get paid $75/hr...
waynemr 12y ago
The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for, in their "starve the beast" agendas. As more quality staff leave, they [conservative groups] can claim greater and greater failures in the public system and siphon more tax dollars into private voucher schools.
- willvarfar 12y ago
  For those of us not from the US, which [conservative groups] are you talking about? Republicans in general? Or some other group?
  - analog31 12y ago
    "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." -- Jerry Falwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell
    - jdoenejdk 12y ago
      And how many US elected Republicans in Congress share those views?
      - scentoni 12y ago
        Depends on whether you're talking about party primaries or general elections. An example of this phenomenon wrt a different topic http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7494179/immigration-republican-president http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7494179/immigration-republican-p...
  - hueving 12y ago
    Anti-government conservatives. Republicans in general fall into this category.
    - 12y ago
rdtsc 12y ago
Great points. This, I think is one of the fundamental problems: --- If parents and local decision-makers really value education (and there is a small portion of the community that does), student and teacher morale would be much different. --- The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. Doesn't matter how fancy the workbooks and new materials or how hard we flog the teachers. The environment is anti-learning. Sure there is tons of lip service of "children are our future". All the best for the children, etc, etc. Except that actions and reality doesn't reflect that. Many students come poor and/or bad families. No new "Common Core" tests are going to help that child learn if they are afraid they might not eat dinner that evening or they will be beaten up by their drunken family members. Just flogging the teacher to teach harder won't work. It would be nice if "teaching" was considered just as a prestigious profession as laywer, doctor, astronaut, CTO of startup. Besides attracting more talent, it would send a cultural message -- education is very imporant and only special people get to do teach. Heck look at the stupid Breaking Bad show. If Walter would be just teaching chemistry vis-a-vis his rich startup-owing friend he would be totally pathetic and uninteresting. Media like that tends to condense, distil and reflect back cultural attidides. Well thank god Walter started cooking meth, and killing otherwise he would have been the most boring person ever.
- marcell 12y ago
  > The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. For an exploration of this idea, I recommend "Lives on the Boundary" by Mike Rose: http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationally-Underprepared/dp/0143035460/ http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationa...
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.
  - yzzxy 12y ago
blazespin 12y ago
I thought all of the points were naive, except for fair compensation. What we need is extremely high compensation (the level of doctors) for teachers who can inspire their students to teach themselves.
- pizza 12y ago
  What's so naive about 4.? I think an environment that encourages learning would have way, way, way more influence over educational outcome than the instructors involved.
WalterBright 12y ago
> SOL tests are inherently unfair, I regularly see claims that tests are at odds with learning. What I don't understand is how anyone can tell what kids have learned without some sort of test.
- analog31 12y ago
  When I was in school, we took a test in first grade that lasted less than a day, and was probably a screen for learning disabilities. I screwed it up, and my mom had to persuade the school that I didn't need to be in special ed. The teachers had many ways to evaluate student progress: Simply watching students, giving assignments such as worksheets, problems, quizzes, tests, and more elaborate homework in high school. My parents got to see my report card. So, I have no problem with testing, per se. Today, I've got two kids in school, and they are inundated with tests. A testing season (preparation followed by one or more test days) can last weeks. Little is learned during that time. Bright kids have already mastered the material on the tests, and are bored out of their skulls. Dull kids are getting drilled in a remarkably narrow range of topics. One of my kids received, as homework, a worksheet on "test taking skills" to review with her parents, consisting of ways to improve her odds slightly on questions that she couldn't answer. The tests cover math and reading, though a new regime of even more tests may change that, by imposing narrow set of easily memorized factoids on the science curriculum. An effect is to give short shrift to other subjects such as music and just playing outside. The sheer amount of testing, and the stakes involved, distort what is taught at school. And I don't think it gives parents any actionable information that they couldn't have learned by talking to the teacher or looking at a report card. If kids are in a dysfunctional school, they probably can't escape from it. The state (WI) has a charter school system in one region, but the charter schools perform no better than the public schools, and discriminate against kids with disabilities. Oddly enough, in its first attempt to expand the charter school system to the entire state, the legislature wrote a bill that would have exempted charter schools from the same "accountability" imposed on public schools. If you work at a large corporation, as I do, think about the quantitative goals that you are given for your job. At one place where I worked, purchasing bought a bunch of stuff because they were measured on getting price breaks from suppliers, and manufacturing threw it away because they were measured on inventory. High stakes metric driven management of complex organizations creates a web of perverse incentives. /rant
animex 12y ago
Maybe do some job research before getting an education degree in the US. I think most teachers would have told you it's pretty shitty in general. In Canada, teachers make more than most software developers, ~90k/yr. Still, much of the same bureaucracy exists here as well.
- scobar 12y ago
  I believe he pursued that profession because of the mission which he thought would be the main focus of the system. Compensation was only 1 (and the last mentioned) of the 5 key areas that need to be re-evaluated.
- kodreaming 12y ago
  I don't know where you get the number, teachers in Canada make ~90k / yr. Let's say that number is correct, and this is why Canada doesn't have a thriving technology industry, companies like RIM fails. They can't pay enough to retain good engineers in the country.
  - animex 12y ago
    Tons of my friends are teachers. Software dev salaries are on the rise but I'm sure the medium is around this range. We constantly lose talent to the bubble markets in the US though.
- pizza 12y ago
  No teacher deserves a shitty system because they didn't 'do their research' beforehand (which they are 110% aware of while starting their career in education).
jurassic 12y ago
No raises in six years as inflation marches steadily on is a 10% paycut. Criminal. It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.
- hueving 12y ago
  >Criminal. Not really. >It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo. It's become very apparent that the majority of our college-educated citizens are not paid very much. Just being "college-educated" is not enough anymore.
- kodreaming 12y ago
  College-educated means nothing unless you are talking about Africa. With all due respect, people got into education is not really the brightest bunch...
  - thinkpad20 12y ago
    > With all due respect, people got into education is not really the brightest bunch... Is that grammar meant to be ironic? :| Anyway, broadly demeaning a giant group of people is offensive, and the suggestion that most teachers are not bright is ridiculous. Many (most) teachers are very intelligent people, enthusiastic about education and greatly desire to give their students the best possible education they can. Unfortunately in America we have such little respect (and pay) for teachers, and the job itself has so much baggage associated with it (as this blog post discusses) that the best and brightest are often discouraged from becoming teachers.
    - douche 12y ago
      Statistics are not demeaning http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-for-every-college-major-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-f...
  - 12y ago
scornwell 12y ago
I don't think there is another profession who's need is so widely advocated for, yet so pathetically enticed. Put some money on education, make it a desirable job, and then watch the world change as talented people try for those positions. Now, just figure out how to get the money committed to education instead of people giving RollsRoyce, Bentley, Ferrari, etc their best years ever.
- jpadkins 12y ago
  its the business model. As long as its taxpayer funded, incentives won't be aligned, and you won't see a lot of money in education. A market system would have a lot higher salaries, and attract a lot more investment.
- Kenji 12y ago
  You forgot "instead of waging war" ;P
loteck 12y ago
Do we care more about student progress or our appearance? We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success. Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum. Why can’t we shift our focus to critical thinking and relevant educational experiences? Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve. Kids in those teachers' classrooms need to come out with some bare minimum of quantifiable education.
- bildung 12y ago
  Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve. But that is true for all countries, while the pervasive test culture is a phenomenon mostly observable in the US. The quality of teachers (or their education) can't be the major reason for the test dependency of the educational system in the US.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    Pervasive test culture is far larger in Asia than in the US. Wealthy Asian nations perform very well, though admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors.
    - hueving 12y ago
      >admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors. A culture of forcing children to study for hours every night at home and go to school 6 days a week?
      - gwillen 12y ago
        I was assuming 'cheating'.
personlurking 12y ago
The other day there was a "best-of" on Reddit where a teacher said that "only martyrs teach now in America." http://np.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/2rj1r1/i_really_want_to_be_a_teacher_but_im_afraid_of/cngetgc http://np.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/2rj1r1/i_really_wan...
retrogradeorbit 12y ago
The Reason Education Sucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98 Edit: for those wanting something less cynical and more serious, I recommend some John Taylor Gatto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU#t=1m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU#t=1m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCuc-2tfgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCuc-2tfgk
- MichaelRender 12y ago
  When I read this article, the first thing I thought of was John Taylor Gattto, a man voted Teacher of the Year who had to resign out of conscience. I was lucky enough to spend a weekend with Mr. Gatto at a conference. Very enlightening.
ck2 12y ago
A calm rational deep and insightful explanation that will be completely ignored and forgotten. Oh I know, let's spend more money on weapons for police and the military while draining all resources from schools, that will solve everything.
ComSubVie 12y ago
> I stepped into the classroom around the time of a major worldwide recession. As the individuals and institutions responsible for this recession escaped accountability for their actions, school districts like ours went into survival mode. > Six years later, we’re still there. We have no plan for the future. > Earlier this year, the school board held its annual budget meeting. I left my second job early to attend and asked board members one simple question: “Is there any cause for optimism?” Each school board member, searching for a silver lining, effectively answered “no” by the time their reasoning caught up with them. I think that's quite the same everywhere. Here in Austria school budget gets cut every year, local media are always bashing the teachers so the social standing of teachers isn't very good, therefore it is hard to get good/motivated teachers and you're struck with unmotivated teachers (and even motivated teachers don't hold their motivation for a lot of years). Most important would be for the community to recognize that education is the most important thing we have for future generations and start investing (financially, socially, ...) into it. However I have no idea how that could be reached.
aerique 12y ago
Honest question: We lived with one car (a car that was given to us) for 4 ½ years. During that time, I walked or rode my bike to school to save on gas. We recently bought a second car with money I saved from my web design business. Is the US really structured so that owning one car is (seen as) a problem?
- WoodenChair 12y ago
  Yes, the U.S. is a giant country geographically and many areas have poor public transportation as a result of how spread out it is. Virginia is a fairly rural state.
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    The kicker is that many populated areas are spread out because the local public infrastructure cannot support higher density. It's a vicious cycle. Can't provide better infrastructure because of insufficient density; can't increase density because of insufficient infrastructure. Most people don't need to live in Wyoming. So they don't. People want to live in cities, for the additional synergistic opportunities. They are driven away by the municipal corruption that spends their higher in-city taxes on sinecures and pensions rather than on actual services and infrastructure.
  - mapt 12y ago
    The US being a giant country has very little to do with the US being mostly car-dependent for the activities of everyday life. We built most of our settlements on the inexpensive outskirts of existing settlements, with free roads and cheap (and secure, as the world's greatest oil producer at the time) oil. We saw such development as 'business' & 'industry' rather than 'planning', and largely consigned design elements to private developers, with the asterisk that we would pay for whatever roads and utilities they needed - including an interstate highway system that was practically a wonder of the world at the time. Strong tax inducements on depreciation of commercial property, and ownership of a single-family home, resulted in an ever-growing sprawl. We actually tore up most of the public transportation that existed in the early 20th century, and the economic vacuum of urban decay accelerated itself with racial tension that much of the rest of the world does not have.
ck425 12y ago
Good post and a lot of interesting points, some of which I've seen raised in the uk too. But one thing that confused me, in the US is only having one car and walking or cycling to work considered a big sacrifice?
- zacharycohn 12y ago
  (full disclosure, I do not know anything about the town OP is from) It is a big sacrifice when you live in a suburban area, which typically don't have great (if any) public transit options. You could easily be 3 or 4 miles out from the nearest grocery store or shop - let alone your job. In many cities in America, you NEED a car to get around. It's just not feasible to live without one.
  - ck425 12y ago
    Is it a big deal to have only one?
    - douche 12y ago
      Imagine that you and your spouse both work 15-20 miles away from your home, in different directions (This is common outside of the biggest urban areas). Unless you REALLY like to bike, you need two vehicles.
    - nsxwolf 12y ago
      If there are 2 working adults in the household? It's a non-starter.
markvdb 12y ago
Make all schools compete for students. And if you can't pay teachers lots of money, at least give them some trust. They're in it for teaching. It works relatively well over here.
kaptain 12y ago
> When we have a desperate need like football bleachers that have to be replaced, or turfgrass that isn’t up to par, we somehow find the money. We — through public or private avenues — meet those needs. Why can’t we find funds to address the areas that seem more pertinent to our primary mission? > Stop by the high school for a sporting event (and I love sports) and you’ll be impressed with the attendance and enthusiasm. Stop by the high school on a parent-teacher night and you’ll see tumbleweed blowing through the halls. Living in China, the expat community often criticizes how parents are fixated on trying to make sure their child does well; for most Chinese children, every waking moment of their life from elementary school on is focused on trying to get into a university. Childhood often consists of going to class, coming home to eat, going to class, coming home to do homework, and then sleeping. The irony in the critique is that most Americans (I float around with a mostly American expat community) are unaware how weird their own sports fetish is. I'm American and I love sports too! But it wasn't until recently (like in the last 10 years) it dawned on me how weird it is that Americans love sports so much. Look at our university system. The university system is just a proxy for a professional sports league, except the participating athletes are not paid and are not allowed to hold jobs. Instead many of them are required to study things they have no interest in, in the hope that they can get by long enough to be able to graduate to a real professional league to begin making a living wage. Meanwhile many schools go bankrupt trying to field a winning team, while the teams that do win make millions that go to university officials. When a university is mentioned in the news, it is most likely in the context of some sporting event. Imagine what would happen if, instead of focusing on sports, people focused on the actual mission of the university. I think this is a microcosm of American culture and the way we treat education needs to change dramatically. All of these tests and metrics smack weirdly of "sportsification" or "athelitis", where we try to turn education into some sort of game because it makes it easier to understand even when there is little correlation with the original mission. I don't know if the situation is as dire as I write it to be. This rant is the result of years of incubation in my mind. Hopefully things will change so I don't seem so grumpy or anti-social (like seriously, it's hard to make friends with other guys unless I can say something intelligent about the Big 10).
keithpeter 12y ago
"Bad teachers can game any system; good teachers can lose their focus trying to take new requirements seriously." This is a major point and it applies to educational 'systems' across the world.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Downvoters: I'm interested in your reasons. My observation above is based on several decades of classroom experience.
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jonpress 12y ago
I was surprised that he mentioned the global financial crisis. I think 'too big to fail' was one of the biggest frauds ever committed against society. There is no such thing as too big to fail. I think the 2008 financial crisis was an evolutionary mechanism for society to rid itself of excessive greed among its leaders (natural selection). The bailout was an unnatural intervention and will only serve to propagate the genes for greed in our society. I think it's only a matter of time though before the next crisis - And I think it will be the same people who will take us there - This time the cause will be more clever and more complicated than the last time.
- deadgrey19 12y ago
  This seems a little short-sighted to me. Bailing out the banks was not a question of protecting the banks (who are by no means blameless), it was a question of limiting collateral damage. A large bank failing has the potential to render (literally) millions of innocent people ("mom's and pop's") instantly bankrupt. If a bank fails, there's no way to get your money out. The money simply goes away. Typically banking preferences run in families, so the effects would probably be even greater, with entire families going bankrupt. The ramifications of such a failure would be felt for generations onwards. This is what "too big to fail" means.
  - FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. You seem to be assuming that it's impossible to bail out the bank's clients and let the bank itself fail, but that is not, in fact, impossible. That would insulate all those families from that collateral damage while still allowing the scumbags at the top to feel the effects.
    - deong 12y ago
      > You seem to be assuming that it's impossible to bail out the bank's clients and let the bank itself fail, but that is not, in fact, impossible. It probably was impossible. Banks don't just function as holding pens for your money. They're (by design) overly leveraged based on the idea that not everyone will want their money at the same time. If the bank fails, you need to come up with all the money at once, and there was never that much money in the bank to begin with. Maybe you could have handled this by some system in which you backed people's deposits with things like bonds, but at a minimum, it's pretty complicated. It's easier, and probably better in the long run, to just reassure everyone that their money is safe in the bank, and give the bank whatever is needed to ensure that promise is kept. Where we went wrong was in failing to meaningfully change the system that incentivized and allowed the failure to occur in the first place. We probably couldn't have done anything to avoid bailing them out the first time, but we could be doing much more to avoid the need to do it again and again in the future, but we're not, because the banks own the government and don't want us to.
noir-york 12y ago
The American political system is broken. Here is a middle-class family that can barely make it. The GOP harp on about lower taxes and immigration, and the Dems talk about economic equality and healthcare. The ACA helps the middle-class but the political gridlock ensures that the president, or anyone else, can't force through effective change. Commonly cited are campaign finance and lobbying and polarisation but those are merely the symptoms of the deeper problem which is the US constitution. A messy compromise, the US constitution effectively gives veto to tiny states (Senate seating). Gerrymandering at the state level ensures that safe seats, and worse, incumbents who have to defend themselves from the ideological 'purists' of their own party. Not a recipe for pragmatic government, vide Brownback, Kansas. I still look forward to the spectacle of the 2016 general but even if Warren were to be the president (a far off prospect, even though she is what the US needs), little real and effective change would come about because she'd be stymied at ever corner. In view of the fundamental alignment of forces political and economic (increasing inequality in both), we can expect a return to a Victorian economy.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  >even if Warren were to be the president (a far off prospect, even though she is what the US needs) There's little evidence that Warren wouldn't just continue the current policies of the Obama administration, perhaps with a few extra low-benefit bureaucratic programs on top. She talks a good game, but so did Obama. I think you've hit the nail on the head, though. The problem here is the entire political system. It's nothing an individual can effectively change (because the system selects for individuals who won't change the system).
  - noir-york 12y ago
    The current policies of Obama are not necessarily the policies he would like to implement. He voted for the cromnibus' because it keeps government open and funds a few of his signature policies, but that doesn't imply its the budget Obama wanted to pass. Obama has to be pragmatic. Obama and Warren 'talk a good game' as you put it but I'd bet that in a different political system, say Britain's, they'd be execute on their talk.
rossta 12y ago
I taught middle school science in Houston for five years. I decided to leave the traditional public school system for many of the same reasons the author makes about his experience. This was over a decade ago so it's sad to hear the same problems persist. Alternatives like charter schools have not always fared well, but some, like YES College Prep (http://www.yesprep.org/ http://www.yesprep.org/), are serving low income areas and achieving profound success. They've been able to replicate a model where teachers, students and parents all buy into the same mission: that all students must gain acceptance into a four year college or university to graduate. YES began with the hard work a few enterprising teachers who became tired of a broken system - not much different from a tech startup in a way. I've often felt if the teaching profession was prestigious as, say, law or medicine, we could eventually solve the problems in education. That's not to say we don't have problems with our legal system or healthcare - but it'd be hard to argue there is a shortage of good lawyers or doctors. Imagine if we had no shortage of good teachers... But we don't pay teachers well, there are stigmas ("Those who can't...) and a lack of long term benefits outside of the daily joy of interacting with young people and helping them grow - we'd all be crazy to leave tech to go teach, right?
- akshatpradhan 12y ago
  Actually, we do have a shortage of Doctors, especially Primary Care. Caps are set in place by Medicare to limit the number of residents in an academic program. Academic hospitals would love to increase their slots but Medicare won't allow that. I think last year something like 23k students applied to residency programs and only 6k got accepted. What happens to the rejected 17k students as they wander aimlessly to figure out what next? Re-apply next year? I think the cap is set by Medicare because they pay the Residents salary across the nation. 6000 students * $60k resident salary = $360,000,000
  - talmand 12y ago
    So, am I to assume there are laws in place to prevent a residency program from paying the salary themselves to bypass Medicare restrictions?
  - debacle 12y ago
tempodox 12y ago
Oh, my. Education in the U.S. is as broken as it gets. If you have to pay for being able to afford a job as a teacher, that spells doom for a whole profession. Not to mention a nation's future.
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tokenadult 12y ago
I read the fine article kindly submitted here and a great many of the comments here before commenting. First of all, the headline of this submission (which is the original article headline, and thus expected by Hacker News rules) is a misstatement of fact. The author of the submitted article is a Virginian who has been teacher of the year at his little-known high school, but NOT the "Virginia Teacher of the Year."[1] The exaggerations go on from there. The author writes, "But public education is painted as a career where you make a difference in the lives of students. When a system becomes so deeply flawed that students suffer and good teachers leave (or become jaded), we must examine how and why we do things." Well, yes, but he could have asked different questions, and come up with the different answers earlier reached by John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year decades ago.[2] Teachers should never kid themselves about how much the school-system-as-such is designed to enable learners to learn well. That has hardly ever been its main purpose. Meanwhile, I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Virginia needs to catch up with all those reforms. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[3] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[4] You don't have to live in a wealthy neighborhood in Minnesota to have adequately funded schools in your neighborhood. The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[5] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[6] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[7] Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices. The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better. (P.S. Many of these school system reforms in Minnesota were sponsored and championed by supporters of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, but most are also supported by Republicans here too. Choice is good for everybody and helps schools have incentive to improve.) [1] http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/recognition/ http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/recognition/ [2] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html [3] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.php http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.php [4] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html [5] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h... [6] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index... [7] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter/dp/1592984762/ http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...
justnotsure 12y ago
I might be oblivious, but why he can't teach at a private school for better compensation?
joshstrange 12y ago
Here is the non-mobile (and from what I can tell, original) article: http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom/ http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...
- sctb 12y ago
  Thanks, we updated the URL from http://www.schoolleadership20.com/m/blogpost?id=1990010%3ABlogPost%3A205389 http://www.schoolleadership20.com/m/blogpost?id=1990010%3ABl....
SeanLuke 12y ago
In what way is this person the "Virginia Teacher of the Year"? The word "Virginia" never appears in the body. He was the Waynesboro (pop. 20K) Rotary Club Teacher of the Year.
- delinka 12y ago
  He's a "Teacher of the Year" from Virginia. Similar to how "Florida man" is from Florida.
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    It is a good point, it made it seems like he was awarded a tittle by the state itself.
- doodpants 12y ago
  He is a Teacher of the Year, in Virginia. I agree that the headline could have been worded more clearly.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
My wife is a school teacher and so I see this from her constantly. She argues that people don't value her work but that it is vitally important. So my question to her is, if it is so valuable then why aren't people willing to pay for it? The answer seems to be, because they can't afford it. People with money spend egregious amounts of money on schooling and private school teachers are reasonably well paid. Publicly funded schools however are like every other major bureaucratic organization, they have to prove their worth and are all competing for a shrinking pot of money. That is where all these bullshit requirements come from. Schools are trying to prove that their teaching is effective. The problem with this however is that the community around the school, the engagement of parents in education and the economic opportunity in the community has as much if not a larger influence on educational outcomes than the actual school day activities do. In my opinion schools should be kind of a seat of knowledge for their communities, not just a place that kids go to during the day and then go back home - like a glorified day care (or prison).
- afarrell 12y ago
  At my university, We had a program called SPLASH! that let us teach classes on anything we wanted to about 2000 local high school students. Now, I'm not under the impression that my 1hr class did anything but make students see that they could use the command line; real learning takes time and continuous investment. But it did show all these high schoolers that there were a bunch of people seriously excited about learning. Why can't a high school host something similar? Possibly liability. One effect of broader community engagement might be that folks are more likely to vote for tax increases to fund schools.
- ashark 12y ago
  Private school teachers are reasonably well-paid? In general? My wife and most of my friends are teachers. Private schools are where you go when you're so sick of public schools' bureaucratic BS that you're willing to take a 1/3 to 1/2 (!) cut in total compensation to get away from it and start feeling like you're a Teacher instead of a secretary who also teaches a bit on the side. None of my friends have done it, but every year I hear another story about one of their co-workers who did, and they always sound a bit envious when they tell it. There are tons of private schools around here, and if any of them paid even close to what public schools do 100% of the teachers I know would apply for a job at one of them ASAP.
Goronmon 12y ago
I honestly don't know how people stay teachers for more than a couple years in most places. The people who I know who are teachers not only get paid fairly poorly, they work 60-70 hour weeks, have less and less control over how they are allowed to teach and also have to deal with crazy parents (ie. parent stalking outside school, sending books/emails, because they apparently aren't teaching in a way that is pro-conservative/pro-christian). It just seems like it takes a lot of effort to get into a field that treats you like crap almost as a general rule.
- talmand 12y ago
  I think the pro-conservative/pro-christian snipe isn't necessary. In my experience parents all across the political/social/class spectrum are capable of crazy things when it comes to their kids.
  - relaytheurgency 12y ago
    It doesn't even have to be political. I had a parent supposedly "so angry that he could not meet me in person for fear of hurting me" because his daughter supposedly came home crying from school every day due to my class. He was just a pushover parent who was being utilized by a girl that did not want to be in physics class. She was even bragging to her friends about how she was going to get her dad to have her pulled from the class.
iguanayou 12y ago
I taught high school for 5 years and made the same decision. The biggest factor for me was how the schools were being administered; just a few examples: - Competition among students, instead of being used as a motivator as piles of research suggests, was specifically DISALLOWED because it might make certain students feel bad. - When a student fell behind because they were slacking off in class, it was the teacher's responsibility to put in extra time and make sure they caught up, stopping just short of doing the work FOR the student. - Double standards, administrators demanding that classes be "rigorous", but then when students complain that the class is too hard, or students get bad grades because they can't hack it, that of course is the teacher's fault, and it is reflected in our official evaluations. - Turf wars among teachers who only care about protecting their own jobs. - I never had a full time job. Schools will hire for, say .6 FTE, or even .2 FTE, which no one can make a living on. I tried holding 3 teaching jobs at once to put together a full time salary and that worked for about 4 months before things fell apart. - Working hours of 60-70 hours per week during the school year leads to burnout. - I make 3x as much as a software engineer. If it was truly about the students, I'd still be teaching, But it's not.
- steve_b 12y ago
  What, in your opinion, is the best research/study showing the benefit of competition in a high school classroom? Most of what I'm finding online are essentially opinion pieces.
- beams_of_light 12y ago
  I don't feel that competition would be healthy between students. Some kids are simply not going to be as smart as others, due wholly or in part to genetic, socio-economic, or emotional parameters. Making them feel like garbage on a daily basis at school will not help them at all.
  - cheepin 12y ago
    If you structure competition as Winner(s) + everyone else (as opposed to a full ranking system), you gain a powerful motivator for competitive students, while not necessarily convincing the others that they are garbage.
mcguire 12y ago
It's really hard to care about X when everyone you work with, judging by their actions, seems to not care about X.
Tyrehernandez 12y ago
Exactly the reason why the educational system needs more than a facelift! There's so much to do. Honoring teachers are great but I think the government needs to do more for the community.

308 points by washt 12y ago

I know this is easy to say from abroad but something that keeps coming to my mind when reading these statements is: what is needed are (also) teachers with the guts to act freely and teach what they deem necessary DESPITE whatever the government says and scraping the bureaucracy. Be not afraid of being fired. Yes, very easy to say but, as I see it, the only weapon against the Leviathan is your conscience.

jonas21 12y ago

The original post is over here: http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom/ http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...

jqm 12y ago

Good read. I remember a few dedicated influential teachers. Unfortunately, they are but a few and surrounded in my memory by a large number that were simply going through the motions. That was 20 years ago, and it sounds like maybe things have not improved. Quality teachers are just about one of the most important things a society can have. Not sure why we haven't institutionally figured that out.

OedipusRex 12y ago
I've had great teachers and I've had terrible teachers. I don't think any teacher sets out to be one of the bad teachers, I think the amount of things teachers go through (low pay, unnecessary hoops to jump through, etc) just grinds a person down.
- jqm 12y ago
  Maybe they don't set out to be bad teachers. But the way it is set up now, education does seem to get a fair share of people looking for an easy path. Not sure this is the best group to be educating our youth.
  - dbrannan 12y ago
    You get what you pay for.
    - jqm 12y ago
      You get no more than you pay for. You don't always get what you pay for.
washt 12y ago
I can say that at least in Virginia, SOL scores are everything. The same scores are used to rate both teacher effectiveness and student success, which I feel is unfair to both parties. It encourages teachers to focus on the standardized test objective of the week rather than encouraging an environment of discovery and learning, and students to gamify the system rather than engage and invest themselves in their education.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nkangoh 12y ago

I REALLY wish teaching was as prestigious as say, being a doctor, or investment banker. I read a very interesting [1] book on this and it really just opened my eyes regarding the mediocrity of teaching (not quality per say, but as a profession, which eventually leads to poor education). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/145165443X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1420782654&sr=8-3&keywords=education http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/14516...

brador 12y ago
It is (in a free market). China/HK has millionaire private teachers.
- warfangle 12y ago
  It is (in a socialist market). Finnish teachers have some of the utmost prestige.
  - nkangoh 12y ago
    The mentioned book really talks about how Korea, China (and Hong Kong) along with some European countries do education much differently.
    - ulfw 12y ago
      It is in a social free market (Germany). I've never seen a high school teacher having to take on another job. Everyone had their own cars and in particular everyone went one or two multi-week vacation to warmer climates. It's painful to see how little America cares.
  - wyclif 12y ago
    The problem with those who make 1:1 comparisons of the US and Finnish public education systems is that Finland is largely (yes, I know there are some Swedes there) a homogeneous culture, whereas the US is a "melting pot" containing a huge variety of cultures.

tlrobinson 12y ago

More like "Waynesboro Rotary Club Teacher of the Year"? Looks like this is blogspam with a linkbaity title. Original was "The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom": http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom/ http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...

blakeja 12y ago
BS, link bait / blogspam are any one of the numerous nautil.us or medium.com articles that seem to consistently make it onto the front page of hackernews. Whereas, this article reflects the same sentiments I have been hearing from close friends over the past years who are public school teachers. And it boils down to two facts that I have taken particular note of after listening to their grievances: 1. Government interference with education has been a huge mistake. 2. We do not pay our teachers nearly enough. You cannot legislate education, especially when trying to create a universal adapter for all education across the country. You cannot get quality teachers in the education system without adequate compensation, period.
- frozenport 12y ago
  >>You cannot get quality teachers in the education system without adequate compensation, period. In Chicago we tried paying them more and didn't see much improvement.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Tried paying the current teachers more, or undergoing a concentrated effort to evaluate current teachers against a baseline and aggressively court and hire at competitive wages teachers who have a track record of being better than the teachers that you have at that baseline? I ask 'cause while I know nothing about Chicago, I've found that what you said always comes up with regard to the former.
    - sitkack 12y ago
      You can't just fix something with more money. Analogously, it would be like fixing a soup with too much salt by pouring in more water and sour cream, might work, might not.

thirdreplicator 12y ago

That's sad. I would be a teacher if I could get paid $75/hr...

waynemr 12y ago

The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for, in their "starve the beast" agendas. As more quality staff leave, they [conservative groups] can claim greater and greater failures in the public system and siphon more tax dollars into private voucher schools.

willvarfar 12y ago
For those of us not from the US, which [conservative groups] are you talking about? Republicans in general? Or some other group?
- analog31 12y ago
  "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." -- Jerry Falwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell
  - jdoenejdk 12y ago
    And how many US elected Republicans in Congress share those views?
    - scentoni 12y ago
      Depends on whether you're talking about party primaries or general elections. An example of this phenomenon wrt a different topic http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7494179/immigration-republican-president http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7494179/immigration-republican-p...
- hueving 12y ago
  Anti-government conservatives. Republicans in general fall into this category.
  - 12y ago

rdtsc 12y ago

Great points. This, I think is one of the fundamental problems: --- If parents and local decision-makers really value education (and there is a small portion of the community that does), student and teacher morale would be much different. --- The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. Doesn't matter how fancy the workbooks and new materials or how hard we flog the teachers. The environment is anti-learning. Sure there is tons of lip service of "children are our future". All the best for the children, etc, etc. Except that actions and reality doesn't reflect that. Many students come poor and/or bad families. No new "Common Core" tests are going to help that child learn if they are afraid they might not eat dinner that evening or they will be beaten up by their drunken family members. Just flogging the teacher to teach harder won't work. It would be nice if "teaching" was considered just as a prestigious profession as laywer, doctor, astronaut, CTO of startup. Besides attracting more talent, it would send a cultural message -- education is very imporant and only special people get to do teach. Heck look at the stupid Breaking Bad show. If Walter would be just teaching chemistry vis-a-vis his rich startup-owing friend he would be totally pathetic and uninteresting. Media like that tends to condense, distil and reflect back cultural attidides. Well thank god Walter started cooking meth, and killing otherwise he would have been the most boring person ever.

marcell 12y ago
> The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. For an exploration of this idea, I recommend "Lives on the Boundary" by Mike Rose: http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationally-Underprepared/dp/0143035460/ http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationa...
w1ntermute 12y ago
If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.
- yzzxy 12y ago

blazespin 12y ago

I thought all of the points were naive, except for fair compensation. What we need is extremely high compensation (the level of doctors) for teachers who can inspire their students to teach themselves.

pizza 12y ago
What's so naive about 4.? I think an environment that encourages learning would have way, way, way more influence over educational outcome than the instructors involved.

WalterBright 12y ago

> SOL tests are inherently unfair, I regularly see claims that tests are at odds with learning. What I don't understand is how anyone can tell what kids have learned without some sort of test.

analog31 12y ago
When I was in school, we took a test in first grade that lasted less than a day, and was probably a screen for learning disabilities. I screwed it up, and my mom had to persuade the school that I didn't need to be in special ed. The teachers had many ways to evaluate student progress: Simply watching students, giving assignments such as worksheets, problems, quizzes, tests, and more elaborate homework in high school. My parents got to see my report card. So, I have no problem with testing, per se. Today, I've got two kids in school, and they are inundated with tests. A testing season (preparation followed by one or more test days) can last weeks. Little is learned during that time. Bright kids have already mastered the material on the tests, and are bored out of their skulls. Dull kids are getting drilled in a remarkably narrow range of topics. One of my kids received, as homework, a worksheet on "test taking skills" to review with her parents, consisting of ways to improve her odds slightly on questions that she couldn't answer. The tests cover math and reading, though a new regime of even more tests may change that, by imposing narrow set of easily memorized factoids on the science curriculum. An effect is to give short shrift to other subjects such as music and just playing outside. The sheer amount of testing, and the stakes involved, distort what is taught at school. And I don't think it gives parents any actionable information that they couldn't have learned by talking to the teacher or looking at a report card. If kids are in a dysfunctional school, they probably can't escape from it. The state (WI) has a charter school system in one region, but the charter schools perform no better than the public schools, and discriminate against kids with disabilities. Oddly enough, in its first attempt to expand the charter school system to the entire state, the legislature wrote a bill that would have exempted charter schools from the same "accountability" imposed on public schools. If you work at a large corporation, as I do, think about the quantitative goals that you are given for your job. At one place where I worked, purchasing bought a bunch of stuff because they were measured on getting price breaks from suppliers, and manufacturing threw it away because they were measured on inventory. High stakes metric driven management of complex organizations creates a web of perverse incentives. /rant

animex 12y ago

Maybe do some job research before getting an education degree in the US. I think most teachers would have told you it's pretty shitty in general. In Canada, teachers make more than most software developers, ~90k/yr. Still, much of the same bureaucracy exists here as well.

scobar 12y ago
I believe he pursued that profession because of the mission which he thought would be the main focus of the system. Compensation was only 1 (and the last mentioned) of the 5 key areas that need to be re-evaluated.
kodreaming 12y ago
I don't know where you get the number, teachers in Canada make ~90k / yr. Let's say that number is correct, and this is why Canada doesn't have a thriving technology industry, companies like RIM fails. They can't pay enough to retain good engineers in the country.
- animex 12y ago
  Tons of my friends are teachers. Software dev salaries are on the rise but I'm sure the medium is around this range. We constantly lose talent to the bubble markets in the US though.
pizza 12y ago
No teacher deserves a shitty system because they didn't 'do their research' beforehand (which they are 110% aware of while starting their career in education).

jurassic 12y ago

No raises in six years as inflation marches steadily on is a 10% paycut. Criminal. It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.

hueving 12y ago
>Criminal. Not really. >It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo. It's become very apparent that the majority of our college-educated citizens are not paid very much. Just being "college-educated" is not enough anymore.
kodreaming 12y ago
College-educated means nothing unless you are talking about Africa. With all due respect, people got into education is not really the brightest bunch...
- thinkpad20 12y ago
  > With all due respect, people got into education is not really the brightest bunch... Is that grammar meant to be ironic? :| Anyway, broadly demeaning a giant group of people is offensive, and the suggestion that most teachers are not bright is ridiculous. Many (most) teachers are very intelligent people, enthusiastic about education and greatly desire to give their students the best possible education they can. Unfortunately in America we have such little respect (and pay) for teachers, and the job itself has so much baggage associated with it (as this blog post discusses) that the best and brightest are often discouraged from becoming teachers.
  - douche 12y ago
    Statistics are not demeaning http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-for-every-college-major-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-f...
- 12y ago

scornwell 12y ago

I don't think there is another profession who's need is so widely advocated for, yet so pathetically enticed. Put some money on education, make it a desirable job, and then watch the world change as talented people try for those positions. Now, just figure out how to get the money committed to education instead of people giving RollsRoyce, Bentley, Ferrari, etc their best years ever.

jpadkins 12y ago
its the business model. As long as its taxpayer funded, incentives won't be aligned, and you won't see a lot of money in education. A market system would have a lot higher salaries, and attract a lot more investment.
Kenji 12y ago
You forgot "instead of waging war" ;P

loteck 12y ago

Do we care more about student progress or our appearance? We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success. Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum. Why can’t we shift our focus to critical thinking and relevant educational experiences? Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve. Kids in those teachers' classrooms need to come out with some bare minimum of quantifiable education.

bildung 12y ago
Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve. But that is true for all countries, while the pervasive test culture is a phenomenon mostly observable in the US. The quality of teachers (or their education) can't be the major reason for the test dependency of the educational system in the US.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Pervasive test culture is far larger in Asia than in the US. Wealthy Asian nations perform very well, though admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors.
  - hueving 12y ago
    >admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors. A culture of forcing children to study for hours every night at home and go to school 6 days a week?
    - gwillen 12y ago
      I was assuming 'cheating'.

personlurking 12y ago

The other day there was a "best-of" on Reddit where a teacher said that "only martyrs teach now in America." http://np.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/2rj1r1/i_really_want_to_be_a_teacher_but_im_afraid_of/cngetgc http://np.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/2rj1r1/i_really_wan...

retrogradeorbit 12y ago

The Reason Education Sucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98 Edit: for those wanting something less cynical and more serious, I recommend some John Taylor Gatto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU#t=1m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU#t=1m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCuc-2tfgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCuc-2tfgk

MichaelRender 12y ago
When I read this article, the first thing I thought of was John Taylor Gattto, a man voted Teacher of the Year who had to resign out of conscience. I was lucky enough to spend a weekend with Mr. Gatto at a conference. Very enlightening.

ck2 12y ago

A calm rational deep and insightful explanation that will be completely ignored and forgotten. Oh I know, let's spend more money on weapons for police and the military while draining all resources from schools, that will solve everything.

ComSubVie 12y ago

> I stepped into the classroom around the time of a major worldwide recession. As the individuals and institutions responsible for this recession escaped accountability for their actions, school districts like ours went into survival mode. > Six years later, we’re still there. We have no plan for the future. > Earlier this year, the school board held its annual budget meeting. I left my second job early to attend and asked board members one simple question: “Is there any cause for optimism?” Each school board member, searching for a silver lining, effectively answered “no” by the time their reasoning caught up with them. I think that's quite the same everywhere. Here in Austria school budget gets cut every year, local media are always bashing the teachers so the social standing of teachers isn't very good, therefore it is hard to get good/motivated teachers and you're struck with unmotivated teachers (and even motivated teachers don't hold their motivation for a lot of years). Most important would be for the community to recognize that education is the most important thing we have for future generations and start investing (financially, socially, ...) into it. However I have no idea how that could be reached.

aerique 12y ago

Honest question: We lived with one car (a car that was given to us) for 4 ½ years. During that time, I walked or rode my bike to school to save on gas. We recently bought a second car with money I saved from my web design business. Is the US really structured so that owning one car is (seen as) a problem?

WoodenChair 12y ago
Yes, the U.S. is a giant country geographically and many areas have poor public transportation as a result of how spread out it is. Virginia is a fairly rural state.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  The kicker is that many populated areas are spread out because the local public infrastructure cannot support higher density. It's a vicious cycle. Can't provide better infrastructure because of insufficient density; can't increase density because of insufficient infrastructure. Most people don't need to live in Wyoming. So they don't. People want to live in cities, for the additional synergistic opportunities. They are driven away by the municipal corruption that spends their higher in-city taxes on sinecures and pensions rather than on actual services and infrastructure.
- mapt 12y ago
  The US being a giant country has very little to do with the US being mostly car-dependent for the activities of everyday life. We built most of our settlements on the inexpensive outskirts of existing settlements, with free roads and cheap (and secure, as the world's greatest oil producer at the time) oil. We saw such development as 'business' & 'industry' rather than 'planning', and largely consigned design elements to private developers, with the asterisk that we would pay for whatever roads and utilities they needed - including an interstate highway system that was practically a wonder of the world at the time. Strong tax inducements on depreciation of commercial property, and ownership of a single-family home, resulted in an ever-growing sprawl. We actually tore up most of the public transportation that existed in the early 20th century, and the economic vacuum of urban decay accelerated itself with racial tension that much of the rest of the world does not have.

ck425 12y ago

Good post and a lot of interesting points, some of which I've seen raised in the uk too. But one thing that confused me, in the US is only having one car and walking or cycling to work considered a big sacrifice?

zacharycohn 12y ago
(full disclosure, I do not know anything about the town OP is from) It is a big sacrifice when you live in a suburban area, which typically don't have great (if any) public transit options. You could easily be 3 or 4 miles out from the nearest grocery store or shop - let alone your job. In many cities in America, you NEED a car to get around. It's just not feasible to live without one.
- ck425 12y ago
  Is it a big deal to have only one?
  - douche 12y ago
    Imagine that you and your spouse both work 15-20 miles away from your home, in different directions (This is common outside of the biggest urban areas). Unless you REALLY like to bike, you need two vehicles.
  - nsxwolf 12y ago
    If there are 2 working adults in the household? It's a non-starter.

markvdb 12y ago

Make all schools compete for students. And if you can't pay teachers lots of money, at least give them some trust. They're in it for teaching. It works relatively well over here.

kaptain 12y ago

> When we have a desperate need like football bleachers that have to be replaced, or turfgrass that isn’t up to par, we somehow find the money. We — through public or private avenues — meet those needs. Why can’t we find funds to address the areas that seem more pertinent to our primary mission? > Stop by the high school for a sporting event (and I love sports) and you’ll be impressed with the attendance and enthusiasm. Stop by the high school on a parent-teacher night and you’ll see tumbleweed blowing through the halls. Living in China, the expat community often criticizes how parents are fixated on trying to make sure their child does well; for most Chinese children, every waking moment of their life from elementary school on is focused on trying to get into a university. Childhood often consists of going to class, coming home to eat, going to class, coming home to do homework, and then sleeping. The irony in the critique is that most Americans (I float around with a mostly American expat community) are unaware how weird their own sports fetish is. I'm American and I love sports too! But it wasn't until recently (like in the last 10 years) it dawned on me how weird it is that Americans love sports so much. Look at our university system. The university system is just a proxy for a professional sports league, except the participating athletes are not paid and are not allowed to hold jobs. Instead many of them are required to study things they have no interest in, in the hope that they can get by long enough to be able to graduate to a real professional league to begin making a living wage. Meanwhile many schools go bankrupt trying to field a winning team, while the teams that do win make millions that go to university officials. When a university is mentioned in the news, it is most likely in the context of some sporting event. Imagine what would happen if, instead of focusing on sports, people focused on the actual mission of the university. I think this is a microcosm of American culture and the way we treat education needs to change dramatically. All of these tests and metrics smack weirdly of "sportsification" or "athelitis", where we try to turn education into some sort of game because it makes it easier to understand even when there is little correlation with the original mission. I don't know if the situation is as dire as I write it to be. This rant is the result of years of incubation in my mind. Hopefully things will change so I don't seem so grumpy or anti-social (like seriously, it's hard to make friends with other guys unless I can say something intelligent about the Big 10).

keithpeter 12y ago

"Bad teachers can game any system; good teachers can lose their focus trying to take new requirements seriously." This is a major point and it applies to educational 'systems' across the world.

keithpeter 12y ago
Downvoters: I'm interested in your reasons. My observation above is based on several decades of classroom experience.

deleted 12y ago

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jonpress 12y ago

I was surprised that he mentioned the global financial crisis. I think 'too big to fail' was one of the biggest frauds ever committed against society. There is no such thing as too big to fail. I think the 2008 financial crisis was an evolutionary mechanism for society to rid itself of excessive greed among its leaders (natural selection). The bailout was an unnatural intervention and will only serve to propagate the genes for greed in our society. I think it's only a matter of time though before the next crisis - And I think it will be the same people who will take us there - This time the cause will be more clever and more complicated than the last time.

deadgrey19 12y ago
This seems a little short-sighted to me. Bailing out the banks was not a question of protecting the banks (who are by no means blameless), it was a question of limiting collateral damage. A large bank failing has the potential to render (literally) millions of innocent people ("mom's and pop's") instantly bankrupt. If a bank fails, there's no way to get your money out. The money simply goes away. Typically banking preferences run in families, so the effects would probably be even greater, with entire families going bankrupt. The ramifications of such a failure would be felt for generations onwards. This is what "too big to fail" means.
- FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. You seem to be assuming that it's impossible to bail out the bank's clients and let the bank itself fail, but that is not, in fact, impossible. That would insulate all those families from that collateral damage while still allowing the scumbags at the top to feel the effects.
  - deong 12y ago
    > You seem to be assuming that it's impossible to bail out the bank's clients and let the bank itself fail, but that is not, in fact, impossible. It probably was impossible. Banks don't just function as holding pens for your money. They're (by design) overly leveraged based on the idea that not everyone will want their money at the same time. If the bank fails, you need to come up with all the money at once, and there was never that much money in the bank to begin with. Maybe you could have handled this by some system in which you backed people's deposits with things like bonds, but at a minimum, it's pretty complicated. It's easier, and probably better in the long run, to just reassure everyone that their money is safe in the bank, and give the bank whatever is needed to ensure that promise is kept. Where we went wrong was in failing to meaningfully change the system that incentivized and allowed the failure to occur in the first place. We probably couldn't have done anything to avoid bailing them out the first time, but we could be doing much more to avoid the need to do it again and again in the future, but we're not, because the banks own the government and don't want us to.

noir-york 12y ago

The American political system is broken. Here is a middle-class family that can barely make it. The GOP harp on about lower taxes and immigration, and the Dems talk about economic equality and healthcare. The ACA helps the middle-class but the political gridlock ensures that the president, or anyone else, can't force through effective change. Commonly cited are campaign finance and lobbying and polarisation but those are merely the symptoms of the deeper problem which is the US constitution. A messy compromise, the US constitution effectively gives veto to tiny states (Senate seating). Gerrymandering at the state level ensures that safe seats, and worse, incumbents who have to defend themselves from the ideological 'purists' of their own party. Not a recipe for pragmatic government, vide Brownback, Kansas. I still look forward to the spectacle of the 2016 general but even if Warren were to be the president (a far off prospect, even though she is what the US needs), little real and effective change would come about because she'd be stymied at ever corner. In view of the fundamental alignment of forces political and economic (increasing inequality in both), we can expect a return to a Victorian economy.

jnbiche 12y ago
>even if Warren were to be the president (a far off prospect, even though she is what the US needs) There's little evidence that Warren wouldn't just continue the current policies of the Obama administration, perhaps with a few extra low-benefit bureaucratic programs on top. She talks a good game, but so did Obama. I think you've hit the nail on the head, though. The problem here is the entire political system. It's nothing an individual can effectively change (because the system selects for individuals who won't change the system).
- noir-york 12y ago
  The current policies of Obama are not necessarily the policies he would like to implement. He voted for the cromnibus' because it keeps government open and funds a few of his signature policies, but that doesn't imply its the budget Obama wanted to pass. Obama has to be pragmatic. Obama and Warren 'talk a good game' as you put it but I'd bet that in a different political system, say Britain's, they'd be execute on their talk.

rossta 12y ago

I taught middle school science in Houston for five years. I decided to leave the traditional public school system for many of the same reasons the author makes about his experience. This was over a decade ago so it's sad to hear the same problems persist. Alternatives like charter schools have not always fared well, but some, like YES College Prep (http://www.yesprep.org/ http://www.yesprep.org/), are serving low income areas and achieving profound success. They've been able to replicate a model where teachers, students and parents all buy into the same mission: that all students must gain acceptance into a four year college or university to graduate. YES began with the hard work a few enterprising teachers who became tired of a broken system - not much different from a tech startup in a way. I've often felt if the teaching profession was prestigious as, say, law or medicine, we could eventually solve the problems in education. That's not to say we don't have problems with our legal system or healthcare - but it'd be hard to argue there is a shortage of good lawyers or doctors. Imagine if we had no shortage of good teachers... But we don't pay teachers well, there are stigmas ("Those who can't...) and a lack of long term benefits outside of the daily joy of interacting with young people and helping them grow - we'd all be crazy to leave tech to go teach, right?

akshatpradhan 12y ago
Actually, we do have a shortage of Doctors, especially Primary Care. Caps are set in place by Medicare to limit the number of residents in an academic program. Academic hospitals would love to increase their slots but Medicare won't allow that. I think last year something like 23k students applied to residency programs and only 6k got accepted. What happens to the rejected 17k students as they wander aimlessly to figure out what next? Re-apply next year? I think the cap is set by Medicare because they pay the Residents salary across the nation. 6000 students * $60k resident salary = $360,000,000
- talmand 12y ago
  So, am I to assume there are laws in place to prevent a residency program from paying the salary themselves to bypass Medicare restrictions?
- debacle 12y ago

tempodox 12y ago

Oh, my. Education in the U.S. is as broken as it gets. If you have to pay for being able to afford a job as a teacher, that spells doom for a whole profession. Not to mention a nation's future.

deleted 12y ago

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tokenadult 12y ago

I read the fine article kindly submitted here and a great many of the comments here before commenting. First of all, the headline of this submission (which is the original article headline, and thus expected by Hacker News rules) is a misstatement of fact. The author of the submitted article is a Virginian who has been teacher of the year at his little-known high school, but NOT the "Virginia Teacher of the Year."[1] The exaggerations go on from there. The author writes, "But public education is painted as a career where you make a difference in the lives of students. When a system becomes so deeply flawed that students suffer and good teachers leave (or become jaded), we must examine how and why we do things." Well, yes, but he could have asked different questions, and come up with the different answers earlier reached by John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year decades ago.[2] Teachers should never kid themselves about how much the school-system-as-such is designed to enable learners to learn well. That has hardly ever been its main purpose. Meanwhile, I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Virginia needs to catch up with all those reforms. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[3] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[4] You don't have to live in a wealthy neighborhood in Minnesota to have adequately funded schools in your neighborhood. The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[5] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[6] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[7] Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices. The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better. (P.S. Many of these school system reforms in Minnesota were sponsored and championed by supporters of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, but most are also supported by Republicans here too. Choice is good for everybody and helps schools have incentive to improve.) [1] http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/recognition/ http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/recognition/ [2] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html [3] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.php http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.php [4] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html [5] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h... [6] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index... [7] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter/dp/1592984762/ http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...

justnotsure 12y ago

I might be oblivious, but why he can't teach at a private school for better compensation?

joshstrange 12y ago

Here is the non-mobile (and from what I can tell, original) article: http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom/ http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...

sctb 12y ago
Thanks, we updated the URL from http://www.schoolleadership20.com/m/blogpost?id=1990010%3ABlogPost%3A205389 http://www.schoolleadership20.com/m/blogpost?id=1990010%3ABl....

SeanLuke 12y ago

In what way is this person the "Virginia Teacher of the Year"? The word "Virginia" never appears in the body. He was the Waynesboro (pop. 20K) Rotary Club Teacher of the Year.

delinka 12y ago
He's a "Teacher of the Year" from Virginia. Similar to how "Florida man" is from Florida.
- rdtsc 12y ago
  It is a good point, it made it seems like he was awarded a tittle by the state itself.
doodpants 12y ago
He is a Teacher of the Year, in Virginia. I agree that the headline could have been worded more clearly.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

My wife is a school teacher and so I see this from her constantly. She argues that people don't value her work but that it is vitally important. So my question to her is, if it is so valuable then why aren't people willing to pay for it? The answer seems to be, because they can't afford it. People with money spend egregious amounts of money on schooling and private school teachers are reasonably well paid. Publicly funded schools however are like every other major bureaucratic organization, they have to prove their worth and are all competing for a shrinking pot of money. That is where all these bullshit requirements come from. Schools are trying to prove that their teaching is effective. The problem with this however is that the community around the school, the engagement of parents in education and the economic opportunity in the community has as much if not a larger influence on educational outcomes than the actual school day activities do. In my opinion schools should be kind of a seat of knowledge for their communities, not just a place that kids go to during the day and then go back home - like a glorified day care (or prison).

afarrell 12y ago
At my university, We had a program called SPLASH! that let us teach classes on anything we wanted to about 2000 local high school students. Now, I'm not under the impression that my 1hr class did anything but make students see that they could use the command line; real learning takes time and continuous investment. But it did show all these high schoolers that there were a bunch of people seriously excited about learning. Why can't a high school host something similar? Possibly liability. One effect of broader community engagement might be that folks are more likely to vote for tax increases to fund schools.
ashark 12y ago
Private school teachers are reasonably well-paid? In general? My wife and most of my friends are teachers. Private schools are where you go when you're so sick of public schools' bureaucratic BS that you're willing to take a 1/3 to 1/2 (!) cut in total compensation to get away from it and start feeling like you're a Teacher instead of a secretary who also teaches a bit on the side. None of my friends have done it, but every year I hear another story about one of their co-workers who did, and they always sound a bit envious when they tell it. There are tons of private schools around here, and if any of them paid even close to what public schools do 100% of the teachers I know would apply for a job at one of them ASAP.

Goronmon 12y ago

I honestly don't know how people stay teachers for more than a couple years in most places. The people who I know who are teachers not only get paid fairly poorly, they work 60-70 hour weeks, have less and less control over how they are allowed to teach and also have to deal with crazy parents (ie. parent stalking outside school, sending books/emails, because they apparently aren't teaching in a way that is pro-conservative/pro-christian). It just seems like it takes a lot of effort to get into a field that treats you like crap almost as a general rule.

talmand 12y ago
I think the pro-conservative/pro-christian snipe isn't necessary. In my experience parents all across the political/social/class spectrum are capable of crazy things when it comes to their kids.
- relaytheurgency 12y ago
  It doesn't even have to be political. I had a parent supposedly "so angry that he could not meet me in person for fear of hurting me" because his daughter supposedly came home crying from school every day due to my class. He was just a pushover parent who was being utilized by a girl that did not want to be in physics class. She was even bragging to her friends about how she was going to get her dad to have her pulled from the class.

iguanayou 12y ago

I taught high school for 5 years and made the same decision. The biggest factor for me was how the schools were being administered; just a few examples: - Competition among students, instead of being used as a motivator as piles of research suggests, was specifically DISALLOWED because it might make certain students feel bad. - When a student fell behind because they were slacking off in class, it was the teacher's responsibility to put in extra time and make sure they caught up, stopping just short of doing the work FOR the student. - Double standards, administrators demanding that classes be "rigorous", but then when students complain that the class is too hard, or students get bad grades because they can't hack it, that of course is the teacher's fault, and it is reflected in our official evaluations. - Turf wars among teachers who only care about protecting their own jobs. - I never had a full time job. Schools will hire for, say .6 FTE, or even .2 FTE, which no one can make a living on. I tried holding 3 teaching jobs at once to put together a full time salary and that worked for about 4 months before things fell apart. - Working hours of 60-70 hours per week during the school year leads to burnout. - I make 3x as much as a software engineer. If it was truly about the students, I'd still be teaching, But it's not.

steve_b 12y ago
What, in your opinion, is the best research/study showing the benefit of competition in a high school classroom? Most of what I'm finding online are essentially opinion pieces.
beams_of_light 12y ago
I don't feel that competition would be healthy between students. Some kids are simply not going to be as smart as others, due wholly or in part to genetic, socio-economic, or emotional parameters. Making them feel like garbage on a daily basis at school will not help them at all.
- cheepin 12y ago
  If you structure competition as Winner(s) + everyone else (as opposed to a full ranking system), you gain a powerful motivator for competitive students, while not necessarily convincing the others that they are garbage.

mcguire 12y ago

It's really hard to care about X when everyone you work with, judging by their actions, seems to not care about X.

Tyrehernandez 12y ago

Exactly the reason why the educational system needs more than a facelift! There's so much to do. Honoring teachers are great but I think the government needs to do more for the community.