My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years.
I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me.
Activist teachers are also a thing.
I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here.
Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.
- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)
- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the bad ones impairs and burns out the others
Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle. Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with outcome-less proscriptive policies.
* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?
That completely ignores the social and political aspects.
You need to understand that the people who have the authority to do so do not want to document bad teachers, ever. Documenting bad teachers makes political waves and principals and superintendents never want to make waves because that impedes their ability to both do their job as well as get their next job.
Even if a teacher is very bad, they may be well-liked or be an important part of the community. If you attempt to remove that teacher, they may rally support from the community that can be extremely noisy and inconvenient.
It's not rocket science to set up a continuous leader feedback mechanism.
By and large, everyone knows.
Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.
If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.
The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.
For elementary school they absolutely do not know.
In my town the most acclaimed teachers were those organising many recitals with the kids and stuff like that.
Except that 20 years later parents were saying to the strict ones that just taught the material how good they were.
So yeah everybody knows. Not immediately though!
I still remember all of the teachers that were really good and I remember some of the ones that were bad, the ones that were good. I wish that many of them could have lived long enough for me to say thank you.
Can you? How? Do you have a questionnaire or something?
1. they have very expensive benefit plans
2. they get summers off
3. the only way one could get fired is if they showed up drunk, hit students, or had relations with students
4. teachers only have to work 30 years to get a full pension. That means they can retire at 52
i can only imagine the horrors faced by teachers even on the other side of the bay, much less in a red state that isn't the fourth largest economy in the world
tenure protections can be problematic, but so are activist parents, the system isn't great but it is necessary to some extent, your exposure to bad actors as a teacher is massive and requires commensurate protection, just stochastically you'll get parents trying to get you fired every once in a while
There are about 3.5 million public school teachers in the US. The idea that they are incredible is not credible. As an Air Force brat, I attended many diverse public schools. Some teachers were good, some were not, most were ordinary folks. I don't recall any being incredible, though this teacher was definitely incredible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
Any thoughts on this documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ ?
The Department of Education has spent somewhere between $5 and $6 trillion since its inception, with no measurable improvement in results.
After a few tests, I noticed a pattern. Whenever one of the four answers was "all of the above" or "none of the above", that was the correct answer. So I went to the teacher and asked him about that. He leaned over conspiratorially and said "you're right. They're like that because the kids need a break." Then he laughed. I liked him, he was a good egg.
When I was little, my dad taught Air Force ROTC at the local university. He'd sprinkle the test with questions like "what is the insignia on a Soviet fighter jet?" On the classroom wall was a picture of a Soviet fighter jet. The students would still get it wrong. (The answer is "red star".) It was a favorite story of his.
The point of what I posted is the premium value of the benefits package.
For #2, the amount of uncompensated work and just general bullshit they have to put up with is in no way made up for by "having summers off". (Which they don't, really, as they'll often be doing professional development during the summer, and will be preparing for the start of the next school year well before it actually starts.)
(Source: my brother-in-law is an elementary school teacher in the US.)
For #4, is that universal? I feel like that's something that would depend on state or even on school district.
2. Professional development - teachers do opt to get "certs", which result in automatic pay raises. Unfortunately, those certs have no correspondence with better outcomes for the kids. Preparing - yes, this is the lesson plan thing. A teacher told me she worked her fingers to the bone all summer preparing lesson plans. I asked her why she didn't just use the ones from last year. She replied that they had to be individualized for each student. I asked how did she know which students she'd have, as they wouldn't be assigned until the fall? Oops!
4: I googled average number of years until full retirement benefits kick in.
I don't know how it is in your place, but where I'm from governments have — at least for the last 15 years — governed exclusively with a max horizon of 4 years (the time until the next elections). Everything is quick-fixes or patches that kick the can down the road. It's very hard to convince people to care and vote for you if you promise to show results over the next generations, vs if you bump up pensions next year or something.
Basically, to give a different example, that's in essence why you the response to "traffic is abysmal" is "we will widen the urban highways cutting through the city" rather than "we will implement a plan to actually redesign our city away from car-exclusiveness".
Hard guidance is needed for kids. Hard guidance requires authority. So either you give teachers that authority which is very hard especially in diverse settings, or you make the family environment give better implicit and explicit guidance.
Now, the government will always attempt to solve it using the tools they have, which is the school, but it is destined to have vanishingly little success if at all.
Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...
Not that all cases are simply the natural state of kids, but that it's overdiagnosed for that very reason.
"Oh your kid can't sit still and learn about some artificial topic by staring at whiteboards and pieces of paper all day? Better load 'em up with drugs, they clearly have ADHD!"
Sounds like something my Gen X dad, who put zero effort into helping me succeed, would tell me as I failed my way through all school with zero direction or ambition and convinced I wasn't capable of anything useful.
I won't claim more people probably think they have ADHD than actually do, and being bored disproportionately more than most in most situations is absolutely one of the symptoms, but it's a wildly incomplete trivialization of a set of debilitating difficulties that can/do carry long into adulthood. and is heritable.
The opposite, but it doesn't mean the attention is held.
> ...or are these just difficult kids to manage in a room full of kids...?
If you remove "just", "to", and "of kids" then yes.
People—kids and adults—with severe ADHD struggle to manage in all sorts of rooms that others struggle dramatically less in, if they're undiagnosed and have no resources for dealing with it.
If you look back through history, you don't suppose you might find a pattern of people saying, "Kids these days," do you?
I have a close family member with actual attention deficit and extreme hyperactivity.
You cannot mistake it with normal bored kid.
It's like his brain works at 100% intensity all the time.
When you walk with him through the town, he has to touch every door knob, climb every tree, look into every single car, peep into every hole. In a room he finds new object so interesting that he absolutely has to investigate it, for like 30 seconds and then finds another thing and another and another. 24/7. You see his body is tired, almost falling asleep, but his brain won't stop, he keeps finding new distractions he can't ignore.
You would never mistake it for just a regular bored kid.
I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
> And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
Case in point. It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.
> I had a student claim...
Again, this is the student expressing the politics in question.
It seems that multiple people read:
> It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.
and somehow concluded that I am somehow legitimizing "those claims". I am genuinely unable to understand that.
> I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
Which distinction can't be made?
> It's exactly because of the politics...
Which politics, concretely?
I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
You said, and I quoted:
> The politics were mostly fine, but the students... were the problem.
The distinction, thus, is between "the politics" and "the students".
In the rest of my comment, I clearly exhibited that the thing that made "the students" problematic for you were "the politics" that they were expressing.
> Which politics, concretely?
The politics that underlie the false disability claims.
And also the politics that your student expressed by making the statement:
> I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory
Which are the same politics described in the post above yours:
> it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying.
Which are also "the politics" that everyone means when it comes to conflicts between students and teachers in the modern era, and the ones that form the basis of the conflict that TFA is about. Which is to say, the politics whereby educators can do no right, and everything is discriminatory. You described yourself being put in a double bind: first you were politically pressured to make an accommodation for a "high disability rate" that you didn't even believe to be legitimate (and I think you were probably correct in this), and then you were told that this, too, would be considered discriminatory.
In short: the politics whereby the term "discriminatory" (and "bigoted", and the family of related -isms and -phobias) is simply a political bludgeon, which need not be connected to any ordinary understanding of what it means to treat people fairly or equally.
It is all shell games because the goal is not actually to improve outcomes (there is not even agreement about how to measure outcomes), but to keep the system feeling constant shame for supposed "discrimination" when outcomes are disparate.
> I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
I explained a very clear notion: that when you described "the students" causing problems in response to someone describing "the politics" causing problems, you were talking about substantively the same phenomena. The students play a key role in perpetuating the political games, either because they stand to benefit personally or because they have been indoctrinated in some form or another.
> Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
You seem to be under the impression that I dispute your claims about false disability claims. I absolutely do not, and I was agreeing with you on this point.
What I am trying to explain to you is that these claims are part of a political expression: the fact that they might succeed is a show of political power, and the underlying theory of how to accommodate them is either not scientific or not actually aimed at optimizing per-student outcomes (or both). In particular, the metrics are not based in anything related to the described goals, but given purely in terms of identity-characteristic demographics of those who succeed.
Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.
And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students.
0: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...