The school administrations are often composed of transient "revolving door" bureaucrats whose only goal is to pad their resumes with bullet-points of dubious changes that they implemented. * Administrators will frequently alter programs ("we do physics in 11th grade? Well we're doing it in 9th grade now!") simply to demonstrate that they've made a difference. * They will place weak students in classes where they don't belong just to maintain the appearance that they are serving a useful function ("Sure X failed biology and he'll be lucky to get into community college, but I'm recommending that he take chemistry b/c it looks good on his transcript"). * They will protect troublesome students to the detriment of other students ("You can't keep X out of class all the time. You're just going to have to learn to control him")
Students and Parents are as much of the problem as the teachers and the administration: There is often a pervasive attitude of entitlement without any effort amongst the students and their parents. Troublesome students are allowed to ruin the learning environment for everyone else. In an ideal world, you could kick those students out of class (or school), but in reality you can't (see ADMINISTRATION).
Amusing--but not uncommon--anecdote: My cousin is a high-school teacher who had a student who continuously disrupted one of her classes. She finally phoned the student's mother to tell her about her son's attitude problem. The mother responded with:
"Look...I don't call you to complain when he misbehaves at home. So, don't call me up because he's misbehaving on YOUR time."
That's not the union's fault, is it?
Really, I just want to be able to fire the sucky teachers and administrators. I am really a downright socialist (with free enterprise a necessary evil that must be vigorously contained); I hate to be arguing against unions.
That only works if you're good at recognizing the bottom 10% and have tight anti-cheating controls. Otherwise, things will go straight to hell. Also, you're neglecting the fact that it'll destroy cooperation among the teachers, because it turns things into a "it's either him or me, and it's not going to be me" scenario. Neither effect is conductive to a better or more effective school environment.
While the idea of firing bad teachers has a lot of merit, handling it in such a way is a terrible idea. That's the sort of quick fix bad managers come up with and one of the ways bad managers can help destroy an entire organization.
But it's a lot easier to give out fixes like these than it is to understand problems, so such ideas are remarkably prevalent. That probably explains why the change X by Y% mentality is lampooned in so many Dilbert cartoons.
We live in Boston, there are plenty of white people here. She lives in the same neighborhood as the mayor of Boston. There are plenty of white people there. Why are there so few white people in that public school? She had no opinion about the actual education provided by either school. Just that all the white kids go to the private school, and all the not-white kids go to the public school.
I wonder if that public school would rank as one of the "suckiest" schools. It seems like (white) people are voting that way with their pocketbooks.
No, you didn't. Forgive my use of the word to describe your position but perhaps you'll see what I had in mind when I did.
>I just said there are clearly cultural differences across races [meaning in the US today.]
So a lower class black participates in the same culture as an upper middle-class black? (anecdotal: I sure as hell don't) A lower-class white shares culturally with middle-class whites? In "attitudes towards education, ambition, work and success" no less (which is what your brought up cultural difference with regard to)? Perhaps the wording of your claim is leading my astray, but as it's written it's not very defensible and can only make sense once your inject it with a vertical register, socio-economic status, good ol' fashioned class relations.
>There are plenty of black people, for example, who will openly talk about this, including Bill Cosby and Thomas Sowell, among others.
Irrelevant.
>Although on a separate point I'd say it's not 100% proven that somehow all failure or imperfection on the part of black Americans, to take one just group, is solely the fault of feeling oppressed, or having suffered from a history of oppression or being a minority or "on the bottom." Some of it may just be due to the results of personal choices and personal behavior and willpower.
Personal choices? Personal behavior and willpower? Sure. Now are you willing to scale that explanation uniformly across an entire sector of the population? Unless you're going to defend something very improbable, you have to explore more comprehensive causalities. The latter don't have to directly do with anything, but can and do mediate every other intersecting relation of cause.
If you just fire the worst 10% every year, you just make teaching less attractive. As it stands, teaching is sufficiently low-status, poorly paid and unpleasant that the only people who go into it are a rare few who really want to teach and a majority who aren't competent enough to do anything else. You can't just fire bad teachers, you need to recruit good ones. For the moment, only a martyr or an idiot would decide to teach.
I am a government employee, btw, and I would happily vote against teachers unions (if I could vote issue-by-issue, not representative-by-representative)
Unfortunately, it looks like those efforts are stalled at the moment due to the mayor losing his re-election bid.
I agree with you though, the unions are a huge part of the problem with the education system in the U.S.
Even worse than this, you assume that we have a good way of measuring teacher quality. The unions are a red herring.
The joyfulness is really important -- private school teachers make shit, but teaching there is great fun and often doesn't require the utterly ridiculous credentialling process of the public schools.
Sure, we're not talking attorney or registered nurse salaries here, but we aren't talking attorney/ nurse student loans or pressure either. No blood, no lawsuits, no ambulance chasing.
Like I say, if the kids are good, teaching is something you would do for free.
Oh -- parents are part of the problem, I will admit. I sort of blame crappy teachers and adminsistrators for creating an environment in which a lot of kids and parents feel alienated from the process. If you don't buy into the process, which requires hard, often unpleasant work, the whole thing goes to hell. But it should be the educators who are on the frontlines of fixing the lazy, fun-only fucked up culture that is the USA.
$45K is a pittance for what these teachers deal with in a city like Baltimore.
http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunction/text_files/teacher_retent...
"In 1999, for example, our schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before (i.e., new teachers hired who were not simply moving from one school to another). But the schools lost more than 287,000 teachers who left for other occupations that year—55,000 more than they hired"
If we have/discover the ability to tell the good teachers from the bad, then we should just start hiring only the good teachers. Eventually the good will out number the bad and maybe even teach the bad teachers a thing or two)
Maybe instead of firing the bottom 10%, we should "improve" them. It's either that or replace them. Of course, you could very well be replacing them with someone just as bad or worse.
Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year.
(Edit: we really DO care about teaching, and spend enormous amounts of tax payers dollars and collective worry on it.)