Wow, teachers in jersey city don't do prep or grading? Sign me up!
> In China, if a school gets parent complaints, that teacher would likely be fired.
Now you are just talking crazy (disclaimer: long term expat in china). My wife had a nice laugh at that one, I don't think you really understand Chinese PUBLIC schools. I don't want to spoil it for you, but the Chinese education system is way much more messed up than the American one, especially when non special schools that 99% of the population without money or guanxi attends.
The problem with education politics is that people like you love to totally distort the issues. Ya, there are problems on both sides, but we aren't even having honest debates yet.
His was about the closet to an honest debate yet. I also lived in China, and let's be honest, kids from elite families are not in public schools. They go to private schools where they get a superior education and teachers that are subject to much more scrutiny. That being said, as in the US, public schools in wealthier districts are measurably better than poorer districts. I remember walking into a public school in Tongchuan near Xi'an that was nothing more than a tiny wooden frame with aluminum for the ceiling and siding. That was in sharp contrast to a school outside of my apartment in Beijing in Haidian Qu where most of the elite universities are which sported computers, modern facilities, and well educated teacher. Not too much different than a public school in Palo Alto as an example.
Your comment however is more a deflection than addressing the real issue which is teacher quality and whether teachers should be evaluated and paid according to performance. Taking the though further, would a free-market education system rather than the current public system be a better option for improving educational results? That would be a more interesting conversation to have, if you are willing to participate.
Private schools are technically not allowed except for special subjects (after school) and to teach expat kids (aka international schools, though they take some Chinese students also). Also, where you live doesn't determine where you go to school always, especially if you don't have hukou. So a farmer can't just move to Beijing to have their kids enroll in nice Beijing schools. A farmer could move to palo alto however, and take advantage of palo alto schools. The system in china just fails horribly for most of the kids, and you probably know that.
Lets have an honest debate about education in the states instead of throwing up examples that are probably more screwed up than the USA. Only a few countries in western Europe honestly do better than us; even Singapore and Hong Kong have huge warts.
A pure free market system is just going to lead to sad form of libertarian feudalism. The problem with schools is that the rich kids continue to do well, the poor kids do bad, with little social mobility that the schools should be enabling. Any solution had to look at helping kids that need help the most rather than help rich parents game the system for their maximum benefit.
The real debate we should be having is whether our nation can continue to have a publicly funded education system that supports improving quality and can be a platform that provides any child regardless of economic class an opportunity to receive a quality education. I believe it can, but the situation as it stands today, particularly in poorer districts is not encouraging.
By the way, "public" and "private" are distinctions that I have found to be rather loose in China. Let's just say that the class system is alive and healthy post-Mao...
Low quality, sure, but corrupt? The USA is not china or India, our schools are pretty incorrupt even if incompetent. Getting rid of public education in the states would destroy American society as we know it. We will become more like Mexico, brazil, or South Africa, with the rich hiring body guards and living in fortresses to keep out the crime; thankfully it's is easy to get a gun in the states. We ignore the fact that even our imperfect system is better than the crappy libertarian alternative.
I'm sure teacher unions are part of the problem, but lazy parents who blame the unions for the whole problem are just idiots. Finland has teacher unions and they do very good at education. The problems we have are cultural, but deep down inside, the parents are happy to blame the unions and kept things the way they are, like a republican congress they just want to complain, point out their scapegoat, and make sure no improvements actually happen.
Right, the farmer has to live in palo alto somehow to get education for ther kids, but plenty of farmers live in Beijing and their kids get squat.
Having grown up in the inner city, there were plenty of parents that did not care, they were too busy wallowing in the despair of poverty. But there were plenty of other parents that fought to get their kids a better education and were stymied by a system that simply did not appreciate or care for feedback or parental participation. So those that could afford it sent their kids to Catholic schools, the only place left in NYC to ensure kids got a decent education. I was fortunate enough to be one of those kids, but my parents stretched to make the tuition. Today, it is even worse as parochial schools shut down and magnet schools are not able to meet the rising demand by parents fed up with the public options and desperate for alternatives.
This is not an honest debate. Obviously you are coming from one particular viewpoint and I am coming from another. Part of it might be political views and part might be personal interactions with the US educational system. I have children now in public school and can see how misaligned incentives have created a system that simply does not rewards quality.
As for bringing up Finland, that is a country that has less people than Chicago, a completely different culture, and a homogeneous population. What works there simply does not translate (just as the hagwons in Korea do not translate to the US). What does translate however is making quality the pinnacle for reshaping the US education system, something that oddly liberals resist. Instead they protect the unions and the status quo and that sounds like the camp you support.
The issue isn't distorted by the way, the fact still stands: teachers aren't working 60 hours weeks and they aren't working year round and they're getting paid based not on outcomes but based on seniority. If they happen to have advanced degrees, they get paid for that, regardless of their performance. That would be like paying Obie Fernandez for less for Rails development just because he doesn't have an advanced degree and paying someone with an IT degree from the University of Phoenix more by virtue of the degree itself as opposed to capabilities or past performance.
I really don't care what teachers get paid, however they should be paid based on outcomes and not just because they've survived the system the longest.
First, you come off as highly dismissive of teachers in general. Grammar, body language, word choice, and even the way someone conjugates "to be" is often linked to a person's ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or cultural group. To compare that to the language found in "a prison yard" is insulting and makes me think you're more focused on judging how these teachers speak than on addressing the actual concerns they raised.
Likewise, your calculation on how many hours teachers work is a best-case estimate. I'm not a teacher but I know many, and I went to public school. So I know just how often teachers get to school 30mins to an hour early to prep, work through their lunches, and stay hours after to help students, grade tests, write letters of recommendation, meet with parents, and host clubs or coach sports. And then there are the multiple days at the end of each quarter when teachers work through nights and weekends putting together progress reports. Do you want to factor that into your estimate?
Also, I'm not sure how it is in Jersey City, but most teachers I know spend hundreds of dollars out of their own money on supplies each year because school districts don't have the cash to pay for pencils and paper and other basic supplies.
What school boards need is not someone who is antagonistic to teachers, but someone who is willing to work with them.
As far as "not having the cash" it's interesting how the Jersey City Teacher's Union president earns his FULL teaching salary paid by the taxpayers yet is the full-time union president ALSO making a salary from the Union. He has his own office, paid for by the school district and has zero educational responsibilities.
Blame the union. If you just took his $100K+ salary (and benefits) that could fund 1000 teachers' supplies for a year.
Let's not forget the Jersey City Schools has a 630 MILLION dollar yearly budget and a central office filled with people with no-show jobs. You spend some time going through the line items of the budget and perhaps you'd see the light.
What the teaching system needs is someone to upend the current system, which is essentially held for ransom by the education labor mafia. The reason teachers spend out of pocket is not because there is no money, it is because money that should be benefitting students goes to support poor institutional practices such as keeping poor performing teachers in the system, supporting generous benefits, and frivolous spending on administrative costs. And the parents that send their children to these institutions are powerless to change this or have any impact. All of this is the cost of succumbing to the teacher unions.
We should be glad you do not live in Jersey City. We need voters willing to elect people in place to buck the current system. While you might mistakenly believe the commenter is dismissive of teachers, what I see is someone willing to stand up for quality teachers who still care about their craft and care about the children they teach.
-Mark Twain
It is even more dire that than. The pool of teacher candidates is already compromised since the students pursuing education majors are already the poorest performing of any other college major. Even discounting for the worst performers never completing the degree and licensing requirements, we are generally not talking about a group that is blazing any intellectual trails. Then once a teacher secures a position, there is little incentive for a teacher to improve on the job. Nearly every other job would require some amount for ongoing training, but in education that is rarely implemented.
Teacher quality starts with making the field attractive to more higher performing students. That only happens if the field provides incentives to reward excellence and hard work, and the current arrangement just does not do that. It rewards mediocrity.
You'd better supply a source for a claim like that.
The mean Critical Reading score was 501. Education majors scored 481. The mean Mathematics score was 516. Education majors scored 486. The mean Writing score was 492. Education majors scored 477.
Results directly from a report from the College Board.
I also ran for office three times now as a candidate for Minnesota State Representative. As such, I took a keen engineer's interest in the various reform proposals floating around modern politics. The answers I found may shock you.
The fact is that "merit pay for performance" schemes were invalidated by multiple, peer-reviewed scientific studies that attempted to show they worked.
If any organization had a desire to show that merit pay worked, it was the Rand Corporation. Their close ties to military contractors meant that validating a merit pay link would lead to an easy fix to America's achievement gap woes and a solid solution to produce more and better domestic employees for our nation's contractors.
Instead, Rand's study results aimed high for the merit bonus amounts and achieved record poor results. Several other peer-reviewed studies followed soon after and replicated their results. For an analysis of why this is the case, I recommend the book "Drive" by Daniel Pink.
The fact is, if you want to prove that seniority pay doesn't work, don't stop at teachers. Go to your local software shop. See how they appreciate your suggestion that you should pay engineers instead of based upon years of experience and successful projects finished, pay them based upon the number of lines of code produced and how few bugs are created.
See how quickly they crucify you for crippling their company with vanity metrics. Is it not entirely possible that unions can actually be right at times?
When I was preparing to run for the Jersey City Board of Education, I spent a lot of time studying that district, specifically, the pay scales, promotion criteria and other structural issues relating to teacher benefits and recruitment, including the union contracts. The single biggest problem that public schools typically face (especially in large urban districts) is that any attempt to reward based on merit (regardless of criteria) is met with fierce, almost violent opposition by the teacher's unions. I know this first hand because a big part of my platform was eliminating seniority pay entirely. I received death threats, but I also received some strong support, mostly from frustrated parents.
The opposition to my position on seniority pay was under the guise that "experienced teachers are an asset to schools and we should pay them accordingly." However, under a pure merit pay system, the more experienced, senior teachers should theoretically be the most meritorious, so they would make more if they were, in fact "better." Obviously, that isn't the case, hence the impassioned opposition.
The opposition to merit pay is not based specifically on the system by which merit is determined, but simply the overall concept of merit pay. The reason is simple, most urban school districts are staffed with a high percentage of people that have no business anywhere close to a classroom, let alone actually teaching in it. During the public comments portion of the Jersey City school board meetings, I would hear teachers complaining about some policy or another and the grammar, body language and word choices used by these "teachers" is not unlike one would expect to find in a prison yard. A teacher ought to be able to, at minimum conjugate "to be" correctly, especially when addressing a public meeting! A complete embarrassment. I'm not saying all teachers in Jersey City are like that, but the many of the highly vocal ones that attempt to pull the political strings in that city certainly are. So any thought of merit pay to them is a direct assault on their cushy position.
In the Jersey City teachers union contract, teachers must arrive no later than 8am and can leave at 3pm. They work no more than 183 days per year, with all holidays off, plus the summers. The average salary is $68,000, for a 7 hour work day, which, discounting lunch is more like 6 hours. The get very nice health plans, pensions, 10 sick days, 3 (or maybe 5, I can't remember) personal days among other benefits. Teachers are hardly underpaid. When I taught at a nice private school in China, I had 9 hour days, making less than half the money with no summers off -- and the students there far outperformed any students I ever taught in the US. Teacher pay has nothing to do with it. Parents in the US aren't as involved and even when they are involved, the machinery of the school bureaucracy make change almost glacial. In China (and when i was in Korea before that,) if a school gets parent complaints, that teacher would likely be fired. In the US, schools never fire teachers over parent complaints. So as a parent, what's the point? It takes an act of Congress to even get your kid transferred to another classroom. Parents in the US are powerless because there is no school choice and there's no market-incentives for schools.
The problem isn't that we don't pay teachers enough -- we pay them what the market will support, the problem is that bad or mediocre teachers are almost impossible to fire. It costs New York city an AVERAGE of $250,000 to fire a teacher. So unless a bad teacher quits or unless there is an obvious dereliction (i.e. criminal activity,) a teacher is pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment.