Nick, our system is broken to the extent that we have educational inequity along racial and economic lines. There are a whole lot of unique challenges facing urban schools that we need to do a better job of addressing. To say the problem boils down to the individual students for not valuing education enough is not sufficient. As a general matter, we need to expand opportunity to level the playing field for students in this situation.
I always find it amazing how you simply declare the answers of others to be "not sufficient" while offering nothing more than your own opinion in return.
You focus on inequity because you don't like the results as a whole in these schools. However it is clearly possible to go to these schools and get the education necessary to go to college. It is entirely possible. The fact that X percent instead of Y percent achieve that mark is not necessarily a sign that the school is bad.
Having taught in these schools, instead of being a dismissive law school student who had the opportunity to teach and choose not to, I can tell you that opportunities abound. When I was teaching at Menlo Avenue Elementary School Foshay LC School had formed a school within a school and was offering those within it a fully paid scholarship for four years to USC. When it came to advanced programs or extra-opportunities we were always scrambling to fill slots because the kids kept dropping off or out.
I could go on and on. We had monthly book giveaways via the RIF program where every student was given a free book. Every student in the school received free breakfast and lunch. I have to this day never seen the amount of money available budget-wise that I saw in the inner-city schools.
You cannot educate someone against their will. You cannot demand world class excellence educationally of someone when they prefer never to pick up a book. You can provide multiple excellent opportunities and still not have a good result.
Answer me this Shawn, you advocate the leveling of opportunities, as if such a thing were even possible to predict and track. If it were possible and they were level, do you honestly expect fully equitable outcomes?
Please let me know if there is a coherent point in gooddog's post; I failed to find it.
Gooddog was that teacher screaming at the camera to prove he was a bad teacher...
Granted that the piece was slanted but really the SC administrator and the NY union did not come off looking very good. Especially with that 600 step process to remove a teacher for incompetence...but hey they made sexual predators easier to fire...I bet it's only a 300 step process. Like that's some crowning achievement.
Yah, teachers unions are a big problem. The ineffective ones simply take pay from teachers already under paid and the effective ones just fight any changes regardless of merit.
I'm now for vouchers. Good teachers will be able to find better paying jobs anyway and bad principals wont be able to hire good teachers because they'll leave for the competition at their first opportunity and their schools will go out of business. Kids who want to learn trades can find a school tailored for them.
Answer me this Shawn, you advocate the leveling of opportunities, as if such a thing were even possible to predict and track. If it were possible and they were level, do you honestly expect fully equitable outcomes?
Nick
I'm all for the government 'leveling the opportunity', I think it's misguided for government to level the outcome.
Let me rephase: It is desirable for government to pursue equality of opportunity in education but futile and undesirable to seek equality of outcome (since there are variables beyond government's control which affect outcome).
I'm all for the government 'leveling the opportunity', I think it's misguided for government to level the outcome.
Let me rephase: It is desirable for government to pursue equality of opportunity in education but futile and undesirable to seek equality of outcome (since there are variables beyond government's control which affect outcome).
Exactly. However the difference between yourself and others is that you measure equality of opportunity by the opportunities given. Others, likely Shawn himself if he is honest measure the equality of the opportunity by the outcomes. You note that there are variables beyond the government's control which affect the outcome. The answer to that according to Shawn and others is of course to expand or seize control of such variables with the government.
Example:
Tom and Timmy attend the same schools for twelve years and are always assigned the same teachers, classes and programs. When we test at the end Tom outperforms Timmy to a considerable degree. We start looking at those external variables. Tom has a two parent home, both parents are college educated and are also advocates for his education. Timmy has a single parent home, with a mother who is a drop-out and could care less about his report card.
By your reasoning the educational opportunities have been equalized. The outcomes have not. In reality though it is very likely that Timmy has received loads of extra-tutoring, after school program opportunities, and summer school. Even with that the school might have gotten him to perform better than he would have, but not as good as he might had he come from a certain background.
You will note that Shawn's wording is very deliberate. He said that we need to expand educational opportunities to level the playing field. He did not say that those expanded opportunities need to be equitable.
Nick's response: "It's the black people and poor people's fault."
Nick's response: "What challenges? I don't see anything?"
Nick's response: "That's just your opinion. There are no systemic problems-- only individual failings"
Nick's response: "What problem?"
I ask you a question. You caricature with me with a self-dialog where you put words into my mouth. Interest level of intellectual discourse you are advocating there Shawn.
Nick-- we're talking about very basic (to this question) assumptions about the nature of educational inequity. I'm saying we should attribute the source of the disparity to systemic concerns (for a host of specific reasons we could get into later). You're saying nothing more than individual effort explains the achievement gap in education along racial and economic lines. Is that correct?
Exactly. However the difference between yourself and others is that you measure equality of opportunity by the opportunities given. Others, likely Shawn himself if he is honest measure the equality of the opportunity by the outcomes. You note that there are variables beyond the government's control which affect the outcome. The answer to that according to Shawn and others is of course to expand or seize control of such variables with the government.
Example:
Tom and Timmy attend the same schools for twelve years and are always assigned the same teachers, classes and programs. When we test at the end Tom outperforms Timmy to a considerable degree. We start looking at those external variables. Tom has a two parent home, both parents are college educated and are also advocates for his education. Timmy has a single parent home, with a mother who is a drop-out and could care less about his report card.
By your reasoning the educational opportunities have been equalized. The outcomes have not. In reality though it is very likely that Timmy has received loads of extra-tutoring, after school program opportunities, and summer school. Even with that the school might have gotten him to perform better than he would have, but not as good as he might had he come from a certain background.
You will note that Shawn's wording is very deliberate. He said that we need to expand educational opportunities to level the playing field. He did not say that those expanded opportunities need to be equitable.
Nick
Well I'm not opposed to putting additional resources into areas where students' are underperforming based upon stardardized exams. By the way this is not an 'urban' phenomenom. I live in a rural area and it's a big issue here. What bothers me is that once a school is deemed to be 'failing' all the blame is placed on the school and the teachers. Why? That subsequently puts a lot of pressure on the school to teach to the test which they do. Basically the last month of public school in my area is devoted to test prep.
I see NCLB as a governmental approach to acheive equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. Someone else brought up a good point that underacheivers should be given the option of atttending a trade school.
Nick-- we're talking about very basic (to this question) assumptions about the nature of educational inequity. I'm saying we should attribute the source of the disparity to systemic concerns (for a host of specific reasons we could get into later). You're saying nothing more than individual effort explains the achievement gap in education along racial and economic lines. Is that correct?
I'll be happy to answer your question but do believe you should do me the courtesy of answering mine first since it was asked first. Additionally I haven't mocked your responses or attacked you in any fashion so again, extend the same courtesy that has been given to you.
Answer me this Shawn, you advocate the leveling of opportunities, as if such a thing were even possible to predict and track. If it were possible and they were level, do you honestly expect fully equitable outcomes?
(1) Jobs and some here think it's wise to remove the protection that tenure grants teachers, ostensibly because teachers are not doing a good job, and that firing the "bad teachers" will leave a pool of "good" teachers. Maybe vouchers will help the victimized students to rush into the embrace of the "good teachers".
(2) One implication is that Jobs knows better because Apple puts out great products and he is a star CEO.
(3) Another tacit assumption is that the performance of students in standardized tests is a measure of their teacher's performance much like the performance of a computer or app' in benchmark tests is a measure of the engineer.
In my post above, I gave you a little taste of the daily, unrelenting crap that teachers have to put up with year after year.
Let's look at the commonplace arguments (1), (2), and (3) above more honestly.
(1) A teacher makes a social contract with the rest of the world : I will stay out of front line development in my subject in order to take successive generations of youngsters through the basics needed for them to advance to cutting edge work at a place like Apple Inc. This means that I will lose my own competitive marketability as a researcher as years go by. At 30 or 40 , I will not be able to compete in the research market, having forgotten much of my graduate school learning that simply isn't used for K-12 teaching and some of which has become obsolete. I will also be too old to hire: no one in industry hires you at entry level at 55 to retire or die or use up lots of medical benefits in just a few years.
I am like the soldier, in the old movies, who lies over the barbed wire so that those after me may step on my back and cross quickly to the forward position. The field commander will tell you this is a crucial job even if the human bridge doesn't get the fame and glory of the guy at the point position.
If you betray me by violating that contract ; refusing me protection and denigrating me, then you are an unmanly moral coward.
You may have seen how sometimes a gold medalist sprinter will step up to the mic and thank his mother for teaching him how to walk and only then thank his coach for teaching him how to run. That would be what a man with some class would say.
Vouchers (even if sufficient to actually get these underachieving students to the "better" teachers: they are far from sufficient) would simply dump masses of ill-mannered punks and well mannered but unschooled students into the "better schools" to detroy them absolutely. When those "good" teachers get a load of a dozen parents who won't come to the phone, let alone to the school, and she has to either inflate grades or flunk 85% of each class at the end of the year, she will learn that there is no room at the "good" school for a double population in the coming school year. She will see the incompetent students promoted "socially" by the District. All the students will see that performance is not really required and over a few years, more and more of them will simply flip teacher the bird when warned about failing grades.
Soon, the percentage of bird flippers overwhelms any hope of solving the problem. And of course, as happens to many of us teachers, we are magically transformed from the "excellent" teacher we were last year to the "bad" teacher every one loves to dump on today.
I know this because I have taught math and physics at all levels, from 7th grade to University graduate course work.
I have also worked as a researcher with NASA and with people of the caliber of HP's Barney Oliver ( head of R & D at HP for over 30 years; awarded the President's Medal of Science, and BTW, an ex boss of Steve Jobs. I taught physics at Deanza College ( minutes from the Apple Cupertino campus ) and at Foothill College in Palo Alto where sophomores discussed Dirac's equations and quantum electrodynamics very fluently with me. All of them wanted me to replace their prof. I had to ask them to not push for that, because , as a part-timer, it would get me in a lot of political trouble.
In graduate school, lab students from neighboring classrooms would sneak out of their rooms and pile up outside my door to listen to my explanations. There too, requests were made by naive sophomores to replace the tenured prof with me in the lecture hall as well.
My 7th Grade "honors" students in South Central LA also learn perfectly well with me and perform well above average on the standardized tests.
I tell you all of this, Chuckles, so that you will understand that I AM one of those "good teachers". And that I am also one of those "bad teachers". Last semester, the mother of an impossibly ill-behaved student created a very loud scene in my classroom and accused me of sabotaging her daughter's "four-oh" average. I tried to explain that 40% is not what "four-oh average" means but, rather, that it is 10 points below failing. She removed her child from my roster and insulted everyone within earshot.
And my "regular" classes (of students with parents who are about as helpful as that lady) score "far below basic" consistently year after year without a worry in the world.
You see, Chucky, the term "bad teacher" is virtually meaningless.
Would you like to know why ?
Pay attention.
Kids are not inanimate units on a conveyor belt who respond consistently to the application of "best practices", to then comply with "standards", the way a chunk of code will comply with IEEE 802.11g standards if only the code pounder will key the code in correctly.
Kids are willfull creatures who fight back and play the system like a cheap fiddle. I suspect my little darlings will chew you up and spit you into the unemployment line in less than a month. They gave me a "week" to quit. I am still standing. And every one of them who DESIRES an education is getting twice as much "performance" from me than I ever got from my teachers.
In more than 15 years in the District, I have found only two teachers of mathematics who "under performed". One was truly deserving of discipline only because she wasn't used to the verbal abuse that a 6th grade brat can spit out at a teacher. She lost her cool as I am sure you brave snipers would , if only you had the backbone to step into the classroom and try teaching public school just once.
The second teacher needs only a little more advice and support from the "village" to become a good teacher.
By the way, Barney Oliver resigned from his local School Board in disgust over the trammels and beaurocracy that hit him, head-on, when he tried to remedy these same problems.
Imagine, a man so tough that ( it is told ) engineers would hide under their desks when he walked down the hallway at HP. So rough, that I was jokingly checked for bruises and bite marks, by a former employee of his, when I told him I worked with Barney and lived at his home for a few weeks, as he kindly tried to help me find teaching work in the area ( NASA's project was killed by Uncle Sam and I had no safety net nor family to stay with. Barney opened his home to me and helped me in many other very generous ways.) And, imagine a man so intelligent that he had a huge number of patents to his name and was awarded the national equivalent of a Nobel prize. And yet, even he could not handle the stupidity at his "upscale" local school system.
Do you suppose Dr. Oliver was a dunce too ?
(2)
Now, if you know anything about Apple, it is that Jobs takes no crap and hires only the best.
Do you see how this is exactly the opposite of the conditions forced on public school teachers nationwide ?
Can you imagine what would become of Apple Inc. , Steve Jobs' image, and my Apple stock value if Jobs were forced to hire ill-mannered, indolent, violent, repugnant little thugs who flipped him the bird and laughed in his face as he walked down the hall ? Do you dream, for a moment, that Jobs would get anything like an iPod in shrink wrap anytime this century ? And what if his hands were tied as to the application of any disciplinary action that would come anywhere near sufficiency ? Hell, Chuckles, he would become Silicon Valley's version of " Doin'-a-heck-of-a-job-Brownnie" in less that a week.
And what do you suppose those "good teachers" in high-scoring neighborhoods could do to deal with the punks pouring into their classrooms ? Do you suppose , Chuckster, that the "good" teachers would remedy the stingyness and inhumanity of the politicians and their fat-cigar-sucking-criminal-owners in industry who just recently refused to raise the minimum wage for the punks' parents so that maybe they could pay the bills AND raise the kids properly ? Do you really ? And after several generations of this, do you suppose the "good" teachers will magically transform the demographics of the incoming refugee students ? Hell Chuck, ..... vouchers ???? It's a bluff. The "good" schools would blanche if this actually happened.
I think maybe people, like Jobs, who have become acustomed to throwing their weight around and "just fire him" -ing people, in an environment where this tactic works well enough, would find themselves rudely awakened and in shock , if their disciplinary arm were hacked off at the shoulder. The same goes for other institutions like the military, medical schools, private and exclusive academies, etc.
Again, Chuckman, a public school is none of those institutions. "THINK DIFFERENT" and know that you don't have anything on your shelf that I haven't tried already.
This is why you limit your post to pissy little one liners.
(3)
When dealing with an interaction between two persons,
it is basic ethics to note that the end result is not the sole responsibilty of one of them. Do you really need this explained to you, Chuckerman ?
Here then, ... it's just like football: if the QB throws a long pass and hits the receiver squarely on the chest and that receiver continues to pick his nose and scratch his crotch while the ball falls to the turf and is snatched by the other team, ..... then you would be a real slime bucket to fire the QB , right ?
Well I hope this helps.
Oh, and don't forget : we need teachers in the classroom.
Yes, I'm aware. He or she didn't do so in an even remotely eloquent, coherent manner, however.
_______________________________
You are talking about taking my bread and butter and ruining me for something I am not guilty of, after I sacrificed most of my youth for my career. So BITE ME !
You are talking about taking my bread and butter and ruining me for something I am not guilty of, after I sacrificed most of my youth for my career. So BITE ME !
Was that nearly eloquent enough ?
My father is a teacher. I have deep respect for him and many of his colleagues.
Teacher don't need to be paid more. Do you realize how much money most teachers make, even those just starting out? Most make 40k starting out and then get up close to 100k when they retire or even sooner than that. And the fact that you get to work only 9 MONTHS OF THE YEAR? Wonderful if you ask me. No need to pay them anymore than what they get.
What planet are you talking about? I've been teaching 10 years I can tell you this is a falsehood. I work 210 days a year. I go to school when I'm not teaching in order to maintain my license. I do this for less than 45K and I really don't mind or I wouldn't do it. I do wish, however, that you would get your facts straight. $54K is the best I've heard of any retiree making in this area (Many end up substituting to keep up with diminished health benefits.)
Steve Jobs is absolutely right about 'claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools". This should also include bad principals who do not work in partnerships with their staff, who 'fires bad principals'! I've seen too many principals & teachers self absorbed in technology, and not about creating the conditions for their students learning. Too many schools are still hiding behind the outdated institutional curriculum and not harnessing the computer as a valuable learning tool. The best learning takes place when the learner takes charge of their own learning. Technology in the classroom needs to backed up by improved teacher training, full time technicians in all schools, old schools being redesigned to incorporate technology and professional development for all teachers to keep up with new trends in technology.
See below, and consider this: private schools can expel problematic students permanently for virtually any reason. They can even expel students for truancy and lousy academic performance. The public school I work in certainly doesn't have this luxury. Please think about the implications of that before ignorantly bashing public school teachers.
Following class, authorities said the 17-year-old student and a 15-year-old freshman then assaulted the teacher in the hallway, knocking him to the ground.
[...]
Authorities said the 60-year-old teacher was taken to Albert Einstein Medical Center where he was listed in stable condition. He suffered two broken vertebrae in his neck and cuts to his face.
[...]
[FROM THE VIDEO]:
REPORTER: "Both had been expelled other years, but the state lawmakers and the courts have decided these types of individuals cannot be banned from school forever."
PAUL VALLAS, PHILADELPHIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS CEO: "Both had attended Roosevelt Middle School, and they had both been expelled from Roosevelt, but state law only allows you to expel a student for one year. After one year, students have to be reinstated."
See below, and consider this: private schools can expel problematic students permanently for virtually any reason. They can even expel students for truancy and lousy academic performance. The public school I work in certainly doesn't have this luxury. Please think about the implications of that before ignorantly bashing public school teachers.
I've said that this is a major liability that public schools bear in teaching our youth. NCLB doesn't take this into account.
Originally Posted by trumptman sheepishly in another thread
I watched Shawn claim I was a racist in [this] thread
This is generally why people don't find you credible. I never said you were a racist. But had we gotten around to it, I would certainly think you support structurally racist policies that contribute to the achievement gap in education. Structural arguments are less about personal prejudice than about the consequences of the policies we enact.
Comments
Sigh.
Nick, our system is broken to the extent that we have educational inequity along racial and economic lines. There are a whole lot of unique challenges facing urban schools that we need to do a better job of addressing. To say the problem boils down to the individual students for not valuing education enough is not sufficient. As a general matter, we need to expand opportunity to level the playing field for students in this situation.
I always find it amazing how you simply declare the answers of others to be "not sufficient" while offering nothing more than your own opinion in return.
You focus on inequity because you don't like the results as a whole in these schools. However it is clearly possible to go to these schools and get the education necessary to go to college. It is entirely possible. The fact that X percent instead of Y percent achieve that mark is not necessarily a sign that the school is bad.
Having taught in these schools, instead of being a dismissive law school student who had the opportunity to teach and choose not to, I can tell you that opportunities abound. When I was teaching at Menlo Avenue Elementary School Foshay LC School had formed a school within a school and was offering those within it a fully paid scholarship for four years to USC. When it came to advanced programs or extra-opportunities we were always scrambling to fill slots because the kids kept dropping off or out.
I could go on and on. We had monthly book giveaways via the RIF program where every student was given a free book. Every student in the school received free breakfast and lunch. I have to this day never seen the amount of money available budget-wise that I saw in the inner-city schools.
You cannot educate someone against their will. You cannot demand world class excellence educationally of someone when they prefer never to pick up a book. You can provide multiple excellent opportunities and still not have a good result.
Answer me this Shawn, you advocate the leveling of opportunities, as if such a thing were even possible to predict and track. If it were possible and they were level, do you honestly expect fully equitable outcomes?
Nick
Please let me know if there is a coherent point in gooddog's post; I failed to find it.
Gooddog was that teacher screaming at the camera to prove he was a bad teacher...
Granted that the piece was slanted but really the SC administrator and the NY union did not come off looking very good. Especially with that 600 step process to remove a teacher for incompetence...but hey they made sexual predators easier to fire...I bet it's only a 300 step process. Like that's some crowning achievement.
Yah, teachers unions are a big problem. The ineffective ones simply take pay from teachers already under paid and the effective ones just fight any changes regardless of merit.
I'm now for vouchers. Good teachers will be able to find better paying jobs anyway and bad principals wont be able to hire good teachers because they'll leave for the competition at their first opportunity and their schools will go out of business. Kids who want to learn trades can find a school tailored for them.
Vinea
Answer me this Shawn, you advocate the leveling of opportunities, as if such a thing were even possible to predict and track. If it were possible and they were level, do you honestly expect fully equitable outcomes?
Nick
I'm all for the government 'leveling the opportunity', I think it's misguided for government to level the outcome.
Let me rephase: It is desirable for government to pursue equality of opportunity in education but futile and undesirable to seek equality of outcome (since there are variables beyond government's control which affect outcome).
Gooddog is describing what its really like to be a teacher.
Yes, I'm aware. He or she didn't do so in an even remotely eloquent, coherent manner, however.
Our system is broken to the extent that we have educational inequity along racial and economic lines.
Nick's response: "It's the black people and poor people's fault."
There are a whole lot of unique challenges facing urban schools that we need to do a better job of addressing.
Nick's response: "What challenges? I don't see anything?"
To say the problem boils down to the individual students for not valuing education enough is not sufficient.
Nick's response: "That's just your opinion. There are no systemic problems-- only individual failings"
As a general matter, we need to expand opportunity to level the playing field for students in this situation.
Nick's response: "What problem?"
I'm all for the government 'leveling the opportunity', I think it's misguided for government to level the outcome.
Let me rephase: It is desirable for government to pursue equality of opportunity in education but futile and undesirable to seek equality of outcome (since there are variables beyond government's control which affect outcome).
Exactly. However the difference between yourself and others is that you measure equality of opportunity by the opportunities given. Others, likely Shawn himself if he is honest measure the equality of the opportunity by the outcomes. You note that there are variables beyond the government's control which affect the outcome. The answer to that according to Shawn and others is of course to expand or seize control of such variables with the government.
Example:
Tom and Timmy attend the same schools for twelve years and are always assigned the same teachers, classes and programs. When we test at the end Tom outperforms Timmy to a considerable degree. We start looking at those external variables. Tom has a two parent home, both parents are college educated and are also advocates for his education. Timmy has a single parent home, with a mother who is a drop-out and could care less about his report card.
By your reasoning the educational opportunities have been equalized. The outcomes have not. In reality though it is very likely that Timmy has received loads of extra-tutoring, after school program opportunities, and summer school. Even with that the school might have gotten him to perform better than he would have, but not as good as he might had he come from a certain background.
You will note that Shawn's wording is very deliberate. He said that we need to expand educational opportunities to level the playing field. He did not say that those expanded opportunities need to be equitable.
Nick
Is the following accurate?
Nick's response: "It's the black people and poor people's fault."
Nick's response: "What challenges? I don't see anything?"
Nick's response: "That's just your opinion. There are no systemic problems-- only individual failings"
Nick's response: "What problem?"
I ask you a question. You caricature with me with a self-dialog where you put words into my mouth. Interest level of intellectual discourse you are advocating there Shawn.
Nick
Exactly. However the difference between yourself and others is that you measure equality of opportunity by the opportunities given. Others, likely Shawn himself if he is honest measure the equality of the opportunity by the outcomes. You note that there are variables beyond the government's control which affect the outcome. The answer to that according to Shawn and others is of course to expand or seize control of such variables with the government.
Example:
Tom and Timmy attend the same schools for twelve years and are always assigned the same teachers, classes and programs. When we test at the end Tom outperforms Timmy to a considerable degree. We start looking at those external variables. Tom has a two parent home, both parents are college educated and are also advocates for his education. Timmy has a single parent home, with a mother who is a drop-out and could care less about his report card.
By your reasoning the educational opportunities have been equalized. The outcomes have not. In reality though it is very likely that Timmy has received loads of extra-tutoring, after school program opportunities, and summer school. Even with that the school might have gotten him to perform better than he would have, but not as good as he might had he come from a certain background.
You will note that Shawn's wording is very deliberate. He said that we need to expand educational opportunities to level the playing field. He did not say that those expanded opportunities need to be equitable.
Nick
Well I'm not opposed to putting additional resources into areas where students' are underperforming based upon stardardized exams. By the way this is not an 'urban' phenomenom. I live in a rural area and it's a big issue here. What bothers me is that once a school is deemed to be 'failing' all the blame is placed on the school and the teachers. Why? That subsequently puts a lot of pressure on the school to teach to the test which they do. Basically the last month of public school in my area is devoted to test prep.
I see NCLB as a governmental approach to acheive equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. Someone else brought up a good point that underacheivers should be given the option of atttending a trade school.
By the way this is not an 'urban' phenomenom. I live in a rural area and it's a big issue here.
Right!
It's particularly an issue in urban and rural areas.
Nick-- we're talking about very basic (to this question) assumptions about the nature of educational inequity. I'm saying we should attribute the source of the disparity to systemic concerns (for a host of specific reasons we could get into later). You're saying nothing more than individual effort explains the achievement gap in education along racial and economic lines. Is that correct?
I'll be happy to answer your question but do believe you should do me the courtesy of answering mine first since it was asked first. Additionally I haven't mocked your responses or attacked you in any fashion so again, extend the same courtesy that has been given to you.
Answer me this Shawn, you advocate the leveling of opportunities, as if such a thing were even possible to predict and track. If it were possible and they were level, do you honestly expect fully equitable outcomes?
Nick
Let's try again.
(1) Jobs and some here think it's wise to remove the protection that tenure grants teachers, ostensibly because teachers are not doing a good job, and that firing the "bad teachers" will leave a pool of "good" teachers. Maybe vouchers will help the victimized students to rush into the embrace of the "good teachers".
(2) One implication is that Jobs knows better because Apple puts out great products and he is a star CEO.
(3) Another tacit assumption is that the performance of students in standardized tests is a measure of their teacher's performance much like the performance of a computer or app' in benchmark tests is a measure of the engineer.
In my post above, I gave you a little taste of the daily, unrelenting crap that teachers have to put up with year after year.
Let's look at the commonplace arguments (1), (2), and (3) above more honestly.
(1) A teacher makes a social contract with the rest of the world : I will stay out of front line development in my subject in order to take successive generations of youngsters through the basics needed for them to advance to cutting edge work at a place like Apple Inc. This means that I will lose my own competitive marketability as a researcher as years go by. At 30 or 40 , I will not be able to compete in the research market, having forgotten much of my graduate school learning that simply isn't used for K-12 teaching and some of which has become obsolete. I will also be too old to hire: no one in industry hires you at entry level at 55 to retire or die or use up lots of medical benefits in just a few years.
I am like the soldier, in the old movies, who lies over the barbed wire so that those after me may step on my back and cross quickly to the forward position. The field commander will tell you this is a crucial job even if the human bridge doesn't get the fame and glory of the guy at the point position.
If you betray me by violating that contract ; refusing me protection and denigrating me, then you are an unmanly moral coward.
You may have seen how sometimes a gold medalist sprinter will step up to the mic and thank his mother for teaching him how to walk and only then thank his coach for teaching him how to run. That would be what a man with some class would say.
Vouchers (even if sufficient to actually get these underachieving students to the "better" teachers: they are far from sufficient) would simply dump masses of ill-mannered punks and well mannered but unschooled students into the "better schools" to detroy them absolutely. When those "good" teachers get a load of a dozen parents who won't come to the phone, let alone to the school, and she has to either inflate grades or flunk 85% of each class at the end of the year, she will learn that there is no room at the "good" school for a double population in the coming school year. She will see the incompetent students promoted "socially" by the District. All the students will see that performance is not really required and over a few years, more and more of them will simply flip teacher the bird when warned about failing grades.
Soon, the percentage of bird flippers overwhelms any hope of solving the problem. And of course, as happens to many of us teachers, we are magically transformed from the "excellent" teacher we were last year to the "bad" teacher every one loves to dump on today.
I know this because I have taught math and physics at all levels, from 7th grade to University graduate course work.
I have also worked as a researcher with NASA and with people of the caliber of HP's Barney Oliver ( head of R & D at HP for over 30 years; awarded the President's Medal of Science, and BTW, an ex boss of Steve Jobs. I taught physics at Deanza College ( minutes from the Apple Cupertino campus ) and at Foothill College in Palo Alto where sophomores discussed Dirac's equations and quantum electrodynamics very fluently with me. All of them wanted me to replace their prof. I had to ask them to not push for that, because , as a part-timer, it would get me in a lot of political trouble.
In graduate school, lab students from neighboring classrooms would sneak out of their rooms and pile up outside my door to listen to my explanations. There too, requests were made by naive sophomores to replace the tenured prof with me in the lecture hall as well.
My 7th Grade "honors" students in South Central LA also learn perfectly well with me and perform well above average on the standardized tests.
I tell you all of this, Chuckles, so that you will understand that I AM one of those "good teachers". And that I am also one of those "bad teachers". Last semester, the mother of an impossibly ill-behaved student created a very loud scene in my classroom and accused me of sabotaging her daughter's "four-oh" average. I tried to explain that 40% is not what "four-oh average" means but, rather, that it is 10 points below failing. She removed her child from my roster and insulted everyone within earshot.
And my "regular" classes (of students with parents who are about as helpful as that lady) score "far below basic" consistently year after year without a worry in the world.
You see, Chucky, the term "bad teacher" is virtually meaningless.
Would you like to know why ?
Pay attention.
Kids are not inanimate units on a conveyor belt who respond consistently to the application of "best practices", to then comply with "standards", the way a chunk of code will comply with IEEE 802.11g standards if only the code pounder will key the code in correctly.
Kids are willfull creatures who fight back and play the system like a cheap fiddle. I suspect my little darlings will chew you up and spit you into the unemployment line in less than a month. They gave me a "week" to quit. I am still standing. And every one of them who DESIRES an education is getting twice as much "performance" from me than I ever got from my teachers.
In more than 15 years in the District, I have found only two teachers of mathematics who "under performed". One was truly deserving of discipline only because she wasn't used to the verbal abuse that a 6th grade brat can spit out at a teacher. She lost her cool as I am sure you brave snipers would , if only you had the backbone to step into the classroom and try teaching public school just once.
The second teacher needs only a little more advice and support from the "village" to become a good teacher.
By the way, Barney Oliver resigned from his local School Board in disgust over the trammels and beaurocracy that hit him, head-on, when he tried to remedy these same problems.
Imagine, a man so tough that ( it is told ) engineers would hide under their desks when he walked down the hallway at HP. So rough, that I was jokingly checked for bruises and bite marks, by a former employee of his, when I told him I worked with Barney and lived at his home for a few weeks, as he kindly tried to help me find teaching work in the area ( NASA's project was killed by Uncle Sam and I had no safety net nor family to stay with. Barney opened his home to me and helped me in many other very generous ways.) And, imagine a man so intelligent that he had a huge number of patents to his name and was awarded the national equivalent of a Nobel prize. And yet, even he could not handle the stupidity at his "upscale" local school system.
Do you suppose Dr. Oliver was a dunce too ?
(2)
Now, if you know anything about Apple, it is that Jobs takes no crap and hires only the best.
Do you see how this is exactly the opposite of the conditions forced on public school teachers nationwide ?
Can you imagine what would become of Apple Inc. , Steve Jobs' image, and my Apple stock value if Jobs were forced to hire ill-mannered, indolent, violent, repugnant little thugs who flipped him the bird and laughed in his face as he walked down the hall ? Do you dream, for a moment, that Jobs would get anything like an iPod in shrink wrap anytime this century ? And what if his hands were tied as to the application of any disciplinary action that would come anywhere near sufficiency ? Hell, Chuckles, he would become Silicon Valley's version of " Doin'-a-heck-of-a-job-Brownnie" in less that a week.
And what do you suppose those "good teachers" in high-scoring neighborhoods could do to deal with the punks pouring into their classrooms ? Do you suppose , Chuckster, that the "good" teachers would remedy the stingyness and inhumanity of the politicians and their fat-cigar-sucking-criminal-owners in industry who just recently refused to raise the minimum wage for the punks' parents so that maybe they could pay the bills AND raise the kids properly ? Do you really ? And after several generations of this, do you suppose the "good" teachers will magically transform the demographics of the incoming refugee students ? Hell Chuck, ..... vouchers ???? It's a bluff. The "good" schools would blanche if this actually happened.
I think maybe people, like Jobs, who have become acustomed to throwing their weight around and "just fire him" -ing people, in an environment where this tactic works well enough, would find themselves rudely awakened and in shock , if their disciplinary arm were hacked off at the shoulder. The same goes for other institutions like the military, medical schools, private and exclusive academies, etc.
Again, Chuckman, a public school is none of those institutions. "THINK DIFFERENT" and know that you don't have anything on your shelf that I haven't tried already.
This is why you limit your post to pissy little one liners.
(3)
When dealing with an interaction between two persons,
it is basic ethics to note that the end result is not the sole responsibilty of one of them. Do you really need this explained to you, Chuckerman ?
Here then, ... it's just like football: if the QB throws a long pass and hits the receiver squarely on the chest and that receiver continues to pick his nose and scratch his crotch while the ball falls to the turf and is snatched by the other team, ..... then you would be a real slime bucket to fire the QB , right ?
Well I hope this helps.
Oh, and don't forget : we need teachers in the classroom.
Come on in, the water is fine.
Any more questions ?
Yes, I'm aware. He or she didn't do so in an even remotely eloquent, coherent manner, however.
_______________________________
You are talking about taking my bread and butter and ruining me for something I am not guilty of, after I sacrificed most of my youth for my career. So BITE ME !
Was that nearly eloquent enough ?
--------
Wrong coast. I scream from South Central LA, CA.
But that's OK sweetie. You can bite me too.
Love,
_______________________________
You are talking about taking my bread and butter and ruining me for something I am not guilty of, after I sacrificed most of my youth for my career. So BITE ME !
Was that nearly eloquent enough ?
My father is a teacher. I have deep respect for him and many of his colleagues.
So, yes. Bite you.
Teacher don't need to be paid more. Do you realize how much money most teachers make, even those just starting out? Most make 40k starting out and then get up close to 100k when they retire or even sooner than that. And the fact that you get to work only 9 MONTHS OF THE YEAR? Wonderful if you ask me. No need to pay them anymore than what they get.
---------------
CBS 3 Philadelphia - "Teacher Injured By Students Over Confiscated iPod"
Feb 24, 2007 10:46 am US/Eastern
[...]
Following class, authorities said the 17-year-old student and a 15-year-old freshman then assaulted the teacher in the hallway, knocking him to the ground.
[...]
Authorities said the 60-year-old teacher was taken to Albert Einstein Medical Center where he was listed in stable condition. He suffered two broken vertebrae in his neck and cuts to his face.
[...]
[FROM THE VIDEO]:
REPORTER: "Both had been expelled other years, but the state lawmakers and the courts have decided these types of individuals cannot be banned from school forever."
PAUL VALLAS, PHILADELPHIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS CEO: "Both had attended Roosevelt Middle School, and they had both been expelled from Roosevelt, but state law only allows you to expel a student for one year. After one year, students have to be reinstated."
See below, and consider this: private schools can expel problematic students permanently for virtually any reason. They can even expel students for truancy and lousy academic performance. The public school I work in certainly doesn't have this luxury. Please think about the implications of that before ignorantly bashing public school teachers.
I've said that this is a major liability that public schools bear in teaching our youth. NCLB doesn't take this into account.
I watched Shawn claim I was a racist in [this] thread
This is generally why people don't find you credible. I never said you were a racist. But had we gotten around to it, I would certainly think you support structurally racist policies that contribute to the achievement gap in education. Structural arguments are less about personal prejudice than about the consequences of the policies we enact.