The low pay wouldn't be so much of a problem if teachers got more support from parents and administration. For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story". It's a fucking circus.
Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.
Silly waste-of-time after-school meetings about meeting standardized testing goals is also a complete waste of time as well.
Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.
As an aside, I knew a teacher who "retired early" basically due to a mental breakdown from the stress. I suspect most teachers know someone who's done the same.
Edit: And if you're male, all it takes is an unsubstantiated claim of impropriety from a female student to end your career immediately.
Easily the worst and most stressful job I've ever had. And it really sucks because I was an excellent teacher. Got great reviews from observers and students. My students learned a ton. I really liked teaching too.
Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers.
This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA, which can be just as misleading as an over-reliance on standardized testing. We have the latter where I come from (Ireland): university placement was determined entirely on the basis of nationwide exit exam scores when I left school and my understanding is that little has changed. Your school grades are utterly irrelevant and have no other purpose than to help students, parents and teachers estimate the national examination outcomes. you could turn in no homework for 5 years, get Fs in everything, and be on permanent detention; it will have no effect whatsoever on your university admission prospects.
This is good in some respects, flawed in others. Kids that don't fit in at high school but are smart and determined to do well academically can't be held back by discriminatory attitudes among their teachers, for example; on the other hand, those with a highly developed aptitude in a single area (eg math) or who are heavily involved in relevant extracurricular activities are at a disadvantage because such things carry no weight in the admissions process. Of course, kids that don't like high-pressure test situations are really screwed even if they consistently perform well in other contexts.
> > Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers.
> This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA,
Certainly true.
Also, it's necessary for when a teacher has to defend themselves for failing a student. If you need to fail a student, there is high pressure against doing so. Fail a student and parents and administration both complain loudly. You've got to have all parent contacts (throughout the year) documented (time, who you talked to, what was discussed), as well as all test and exams available for combing through by interested parties.
>For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story".
I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school. Not all, of course, and I'm not saying you're one of them - but the implicit suggestion you're making (side with the teacher by default, don't listen to the kid's side of the story) would be even worse than the way it is now.
>Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.
Suck it up. I TAed a bunch of CS classes in grad school, including a couple proof classes, and yes grading can be a bitch (CS103 was especially rough). And believe me, Stanford students know how to ask for points back. But that's part of the job. If you can't justify the grades you give, and/or you can't grade consistently, then you deserve pushback from students.
>Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.
I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early.
I don't mean to dispute that teaching is stressful, and I'm all for much much higher teacher salaries (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.). But your complaints don't really seem reasonable.
I think you sailed past the fact that the professor for your course had a TA to help with grading. I TAed a junior level computing systems course, derived from the CMU offering: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ Some weeks I would get very little research done because the grading and office hour help duties were so substantial - and that's even with farming the work out to other TAs.
If the professors in the course had to have done both teaching and grading, there's no way they could have sustained the level of instruction and assignments required by this substantial course. One or the other would have suffered. I assume the same was true for your courses.
My point: college courses with TAs don't neatly map to pre-college courses because in elementary, middle and high school, one teacher has to do it all.
The point of that part of my comment wasn't to issue a who-was-busiest challenge (though I'm pretty sure I'd win such a challenge, against either the OP or any of the profs I was TAing for), but to say that long hours grading and regrade requests are to be expected, and especially that the latter are not just the result of unreasonable expectations on the part of the students. Grading is not always fun, but that's why someone gives you money to do it.
And even though it's apples to oranges, I'll state for the record if I hadn't been taking three classes, working on my startup (which I launched during school), and (one quarter) interning at NASA, I think I would easily have had time to put together and deliver lectures in addition to the office hours/recitations/review sessions I was holding, problem sets I was grading, exams I was helping write, robots I was admining, class logistics I was organizing, and whatever else happened to fall under the umbrella of my TA duties any given week.
Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for much else. And you're thinking of a work week in the same way that a grad student, professor or startup founder does: work all the time. Which brings us back to the point of the original article: if we're going to expect people to put in that much time and effort, perhaps we should pay them more to compensate.
I said in my comment that I think teachers should be paid more. I can think that and also think that the complaints in the comment to which I was replying were unreasonable.
>Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for much else.
Again, it's beside the point, but actually I think I would have had time for quite a lot else. Do you really think working for NASA, starting your own company, and being a full time grad student at once take up the same amount of time as preparing and delivering a couple lectures a week?
I took the complaints not as "these are unreasonable expectation of a teacher," but as "these are unreasonable expectations of someone who is paid as little as teachers are."
As to your final question, to quote my freshmen year English professor, "Anything is hard if you do it well." The course I had in mind was relatively new, and as such its contents were in flux. The projects and lecture material were under constant revision. If the professors for the course I TAed had had the TA responsibilities as well, they would have had time for little else but the course.
> > For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior,
> I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school.
During my time teaching I didn't meet any. Not saying there weren't any, just that I didn't run across any.
You must understand, high school kids are kids. They do the same stupid things we did when we were kids. They try to push bad behavior as far as they can until there are repercussions. Teachers are adults and professional educators. We've seen the behavior patterns over and over and over again. We try our damned best to let and get the student to win, but some are determined to get themselves thrown out.
Teachers and students are not on the same level, and it totally undermines the teacher's authority for administration to even hint that they are (eg, by having them sit together and "referee" a discussion).
> > Also, grading is a bitch.
> Suck it up.
Hey, you want educated professionals to take teaching jobs? I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable. I've worked plenty of other jobs. I've worked outside in the summer heat. I'm telling you that grading -- and dealing with the fallout from grading -- is miserable, and if you want good professionals to stay in the career for more than their first year, you're going to have to find ways to make it less miserable.
> I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early.
That's the thing: it doesn't really end between 2:30 and 4. There's meetings after school on many days. There's paperwork. There's parent contact that must be carefully maintained (which provides necessary documentation if the student fails). And then there's grading. And that's if you're not doing any coaching or other after-school clubs.
> (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.)
If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone. Teach a government class and point out something bad about the current local gov't? Gone. Superintendent gets a complaint about you? ("He assigns my kid too much homework!"). Gone. Superintendent simply doesn't like you? (Regardless of how good a teacher you are.) Gone. Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.
Yes, the health benefits are good. Perhaps this makes up to some degree for the lower pay.
Where did you teach? I'll move there to raise my kids. Seriously - I grew up in a reasonably good school district (Livingston, NJ) and while there were some good teachers, many (I want to say most, but don't trust my memory to be undistorted) were atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Public_Schools
>I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable.
To be clear, when I say a proof class, I mean that I was grading 30 problem sets (8 TAs, 240 students - this was CS103) of 13-15 problems, around 10 of which were proofs, every week. And many of the students were learning how to write proofs in this class. Trust me, there's nothing as painful to grade as that.
>If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone.
It wouldn't be perfect. But I prefer a situation with some false negatives to a situation with zero true negatives. That is, I'd rather have most bad teachers and a few good teachers get fired than have no teachers get fired. May be less fair to the teachers (if you're of the school of thought that would rather let 100 guilty men free than punish 1 innocent - depends how you define fair) but it would be far better for the students.
>Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.
It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.
>I've got no idea what you mean by "rubber rooms".
Do you have no idea what I mean by "Google" either?
> > Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.
> It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.
The union sets up fairly strict protocols that the administration must follow if they want to fire a tenured teacher (the administration can, of course, let go a non-tenured teacher at any time).
The school administration is led by the superintendent of schools -- an elected position. The superintendent gets paid a lot of money and wants to get reelected. If parents complain to the super -- and they do -- then the super wants to placate them to ensure reelection.
Kids are kids, and they exaggerate (and often lie) to their parents about school. Parents want to believe that their child is telling the truth about mean Mr. Teacher picking on them, being too tough on them, grading them too harshly, or assigning too much homework. So parents quite often complain to the principal (who works directly for the super and is not part of the teacher's union), or even directly to the super.
No, they wouldn't. They might be more accessible, even more effective, but they wouldn't be more credible.
In any case, I'd appreciate knowing specifically which parts you thought were condescending, since I wasn't trying to be, and it's not obvious to me on a reread where I was. Would you still have found them condescending if I hadn't said "Stanford"?
The condescending part is the “if I'm a grad student and I can read proof problem sets then all you lazy teachers should just suck it up, and if you say teaching is hard then you don’t know what you’re talking about” part (but also the part about how most teachers are shit). Your tone made you sound (a) incapable of empathy, (b) self-entitled, (c) both uninformed and uninterested in learning what people’s views are based on their own first-hand experience. All of these erode your credibility, and make holding a conversation with you unpleasant. (Notice that you also just did the same thing to me: I’m telling you straight up that your tone eroded your credibility in my eyes and you are telling me that I’m wrong.)
Anyway, I have no personal gripe and am not trying to tear you down; consider this just a friendly reminder that a little humility and open-mindedness goes a long way, especially when you’re talking about an issue about which it’s clear your analysis is coming from outside and is mainly anecdotal, and the guy you were talking to is an expert speaking from first-hand experience.
* * *
For what it’s worth, on the actual subject at hand, the vast majority of my teachers (in public schools in a mostly middle-class/upper-middle-class suburb at the edge of Los Angeles county) from elementary school through high school were frankly quite excellent, and worked their asses off for their students, easily spending 60 or 70 hours a week on school-related activity.
I am a teacher in private practice. I like teaching through my community nonprofit organization much better than I would like teaching with a lot of school bureaucracy, and I can give my clients better service too.
I know a number of teachers and administrators, and caterping's comments ring true. It sums up what I hear over and over.
At this point it comes down to what is the low hanging fruit? Of these problems what are the easiest (and/or best value) to solve? The biggest change I've seen is the relationship between teacher/school and student/parent. That same problem is all too often described as a "student's attitude" problem. But really the school administration and parents are just as complicit.
We all had the same ornery students around when we were in school. Arguably I was one of them. The way I remember it is we just had a much shorter leash. So, in the end, I was forced to just comply and "play the game". Which was a healthy life lesson. If I was given the options that these kids were, I'm sure I would have exploited fuck out of it. And I can promise I never would have learned that sometimes you just have to jump through all the hoops and "play the game" to get things done.
My mother was for many years an elementary school teacher in a district that was almost entirely Hispanic, where a large percentage of the students could barely speak English and where many were the children of migrant farm workers who never stayed in one school for the entire year.
When NCLB hit, her school was unsurprisingly deemed "failing." The response was to focus exclusively on test scores, eliminating any program (art, sports, music) that did not directly traslate into better performance on the benchmark test. And yet, because the students still couldn't speak English, nothing much changed and the school was taken over by the state, which meant the principal and many of the teachers were fired.
How does this sort of thing make any sense? How are the teachers to blame for their unprepared students? These teachers are working in the hardest districts with the most students of greatest need, and our national response is to punish them.
It's distressing to see in many of these discussions exactly the attitudes described in the article: teachers are lazy, they're overpaid, they even get summers off! Never mind that their salaries are so low that many need to find alternate work for the summer to make ends meet, or that it is impossible to get all the work done during the school day, necessitating often long nights.
There are bad teachers, just as there are bad programmers and bad doctors. We should try to help them become better teachers, and fire them if that's not possible. But we shouldn't castigate an entire profession as a result, and we should acknowledge that if we actually wanted good teachers, we will have to pay for it.
I don't think that's relevant to what he's saying. He appears to be claiming that teachers have a pretty sweet deal already, such that any hardships they encounter are already balanced by the perks.
It takes a few years to get tenure. Also, note that teachers sign an employment contract for each year they teach. This means that the administration has 3 chances to simply not renew a new teacher's contract if they don't like them.
So, it's only difficult to fire teachers after you've had them working for you for a few years.
And even then, the district can make your life miserable without firing you. They can have someone from the central office sit in and observe you every day. They can give you a lousy schedule, give you too many preps, move you between crummy rooms, or a number of other things to get you to leave.
First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive. It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience, ie all your high salaried employees.
Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract? Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families, and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become teachers.
Oh please. I went to a (religious, not preppy) private school and the the non-unionized teachers did just fine. My family also paid about between 5 to 9k a year (complicated reasons for the range, basically the school over charges single child families and undercharges multi-child families, but also gives you a break if you have kids in an elementary school and a high school) Canadian dollars (so at the time, it would have been 3k to 6k American) for two children in private school. The average the province of Ontario paid at the time was 11k per child.
The market can handle delivery of education just fine without complicated unions and pay scales. All we need to do is to ensure that every family can afford to send their kids there (vouchers, or whatever).
I guess the answer is that it might not scale to a nationwide level when 300 million people are involved.
Saying, "At my school...." is sort of like saying, "I got a web server to work on my home machine and now I'm ready to handle Amazon level traffic." You gotta think about how it's going to scale. You gotta think about unintended consequences and whatnot. Pointing out an example of how one particular school worked and how it worked well is not an argument for nationwide policy changes.
You're criticizing someone's argument by using a parallel argument. There's also no reason for it to not work, at least that you've demonstrated. The web server analogy falls apart because the server is analogous to a single school, so a series of web servers may work... The point is that, in general, private education spends less per student. That's compelling evidence to at least investigate the effect of single employer, unionized employment systems on education quality. You can argue that vouchers will have some sort of distribution issues between socioeconomic levels and education quality, but as to whether they could allow realized savings on education (with the savings being used to subsidize failing schools), that seems pretty settled.
I'm unable to reply to your comment below so I'm replying here.
Edison is a for profit company that run schools in Philadelphia. It used to, I don't know if they do now. Edison has run schools in other districts. Results are mixed as far as I know.
No Child Left Behind has provisions about tutoring and many for profit tutoring companies are making money off of the mandate. Incidentally, one of George Bush's brothers is involved in with a tutoring company. There is a drive to privatize education by going to a for profit model.
For profits (and non profits) don't provide busing. They don't provide school lunches for low income students. The U.S. has dreadful public transportation in most localities and the lack of adequate transportation is a major problem for poor people who get vouchers. For profits don't normally build schools poor neighborhoods. Actually, for profits don't build schools. They get the taxpayers to pay them.
For profits provide workers with sub standard pay and benefits. That's how they become more efficient. For profits provide the corporate leaders with huge salaries though. The realized savings don't occur when one factors in long term damage that will be done.
I am not advocating for the abolition of public education, but rather true equal "opportunity." You do cite valid concerns about private educational facilities, but that does not mean parents shouldn't have the opportunity to send their child to a school if they so desire. There's never anything wrong with maximizing someone's choice. I'll have to look more into these for-profit companies running schools. That's too bad that public money is being used to fund them. I also don't like the assumption that a for-profit company will do "damage" to education by virtue of the fact that it is for-profit. Although, they may ultimately not be effective in serving students needs.
Actually, I didn't criticize the argument. I asked a valid question. Namely, does the idea scale for a nation of 300 million people.
When you include private education do you include private higher education? Do you include for-profits? Their overall expenditures per student aren't less.
I apologize for misinterpreting your attitude from your subsequent response to your own comment as disbelieving of the original commenter's viewpoint. Consequences of voucher systems are as-of-yet unknown or unexplored, but I greatly dislike fear of consequences as a reason for abandoning the pursuit of change altogether. Why would you include higher education? Higher education is a completely different issue from "the education problem." I'm unaware of any for-profit, private, non-postsecondary schools in the country. Obviously, if we did move to a voucher system, for-profits would not be included as it makes no sense for citizens to obligatorily fund a corporation when alternatives exist.
For some time, I've lamented the negative effects that the government's effective monopoly over primary education has had on our system. Eliminating choice eliminates the natural incentive to improve that results from consumers choosing better alternatives.
I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government continued to fund education for those who can't afford it, but stopped actually running the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.
> I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.
A traditional stumbling block (though not the only one) is the question of religious schools. Voucher proposals have historically been seen as ways to get the government to fund religion, leading to various backlashes dating back to the 19th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaine_Amendment
A solution could be to only allow vouchers to be used for secular schools, but that runs into opposition from religious conservatives, and it's also unclear if it'd be permissible to exclude all schools run by religious organizations from an otherwise generally available program. I suspect conservative support for school vouchers that allowed religious schools would take a huge nosedive as soon as Islamic schools started taking advantage of them though, which is currently what's causing the Netherlands to rethink its voucher program.
It's kind of bizarre. The government takes the people's money, using its militarized police powers, and then "gives it back" in the form of school funding. If the person then wants to CHOOSE which school they would like their children to attend, which is paid for with the money they had in the first place, then suddenly every lunatic crawls out of their cupboard and starts shouting "But the government is funding religion!"
News flash. The government isn't funding anything. The government produces nothing and their only source of income is theft from productive individuals who do produce things.
Your theory of taxation and funding is quite far from the theory the founding fathers of the U.S. had, which might explain why you find the setup bizarre. I suggest reading some of Thomas Jefferson's writing for the explanation!
Who is going to build a school in a poor neighborhood then? Who is going to transport the child to the good school? When the slots to the best schools are filled by children of wealthy parents then what?
We would end up with a worse two-tiered system than what we have now.
If there is voucher money available, then the poverty of a neighborhood is a lower factor than it is for, say, retailers.
On the other hand, poor neighborhoods can be more dangerous and involve greater academic and social challenges. The solution is not to measure schools in poor areas against those in good ones and declare them worse because they perform more poorly (due to circumstances beyond teachers' control), but to measure students' baseline ability and then fund and reward relative improvement, rather than on the basis of absolute outcomes.
For example, say you go into a neighborhood on the first day of school and find that only 50% of 10th graders meet expectations for literacy. The best teacher in the world is not going to be be able to bring that up to the 95% level in a wealthy area on the other side of town, but if the proportion of students who are literate rises to 75% by the end of the 12th grade (correcting for dropout %ages), then that's a huge improvement. In economic terms, it's worth adding more funding right up to the point where marginal net gain falls below zero.
There are obviously willing and committed teachers willing to take on these important challenges. Maybe they would do better by setting up nonprofits and applying for funds to establish charter schools instead of abdicating their negotiation power to the national unions.
National unions do not negotiate salaries at the national level. Salary negotiations are done at the local level from district to district done by local union reps.
Not all negotiations are about pay and benefits. Presumably there is some benefit in being organized at the state and national levels or unions wouldn't bother to do so.
Definitely there are reasons for having a national union. But you made a statement about not abdicating negotiation power to national unions. I assumed that by this you meant salary since that is the subject of the article about which all these discussions come from. Of course, things do get off topic and so I'm sorry if my assumption was incorrect.
The principle at play is the idea that where there is money to be had, there will be entrepreneurs that want to collect it. How effectively that would work is the subject of plenty of research that I'm not familiar with.
There is no system you can devise within the bounds of a capitalist society in which people with greater means don't achieve better educational outcomes.
Where my wife grew up, it took one teacher to teach 60 pupils. A class size of 50 was an exceptionally small class size. Several of the countries that best the United States in academic achievement
have much higher class sizes per teacher than the United States has. It is definitely possible to improve teacher productivity over the low level maintained in the United States. There are whole books on the subject.
Whether or not the magic number is 20 or 50 or 60 the point is there isn't much room for productivity growth. The U.S. may gain a one time increase in productivity growth by doubling the size of classrooms but the inherent problems addressed by the parent will still exist.
Who knows. With Khan Academy you have one guy teaching 1 billion people. It works pretty well too. Maybe we can get rid of most teachers and school districts. It's not like giving them more money has ever yielded better results before, it's clearly fallacious to claim it will do so now.
With Khan Academy you have one guy providing supplemental help to motivated people. You do not have 1 billion people be taught. Do you know of any cases where Khan Academy (with nothing else) has taught a person enough about a subject so that person could pass a final exam for a corresponding course at a university? I really haven't heard of this and would like to know. My question is not a snarky one.
Actually, there are lots of a cases where underfunded schools improve student performance with more money. There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.
There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.
I'd be happy to look at the examples you can find citations for. In my state, Minnesota, school funding was largely equalized statewide in the 1970s. That political feat was lauded as the "Minnesota miracle," and got our then governor on the cover of Time magazine as a can-do, innovative governor. With special funding adjustments for high-poverty areas and special funding for school districts to promote racial integration, the inner-city school districts of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the two largest school districts in Minnesota, actually get MORE funding per pupil than most other school districts in the state.
But after a generation of this experiment, the results are disappointing. On the whole, schools anywhere in Minnesota are probably better than schools in most places in Mississippi, which is why many observers are guessing at the macro level that funding makes a difference.
But within Minnesota, both the Minneapolis and St. Paul districts are laggards in academic achievement, and most disturbingly to people like me who hope for all school pupils to learn and thrive, the "achievement gap" between "white" pupils and "pupils of color" is wider in Minnesota than almost anywhere else. That last observation is especially disturbing because Minnesota has no history of de jure school segregation or of impairing the civil rights of black people. (The first black graduate of the University of Minnesota graduated before my late grandfather was even born.) Something is seriously awry in the Minneapolis Public Schools, despite adequate funding, and when I read in the local newspaper, as I did a few months ago, that a union-endorsed candidate for the Minneapolis School Board has NEVER lost for as long as the schoolteacher union has been organized as a collective bargaining unit, I think that more than just funding levels are a problem here.
The bad schools in Minnesota tend to be much better than the bad schools in Mississippi. There will still be variation amongst school districts because there are lots of factors involved (not least of which are cultural factors). But what adequate funding to is to raise the average (and median) but not eliminate the variation. Well, at the very minimum, eliminating the variation would take more money than society is willing to pay.
If teachers with experience aren't any better then they shouldn't be paid more for experience (not exactly true with a finite teacher supply, but close enough). Shifting money to newer teachers is going to drive newer teachers away from teaching jobs? I don't think you thought this through.
Regarding personality conflicts, having some teachers fired because they can't get along with their boss is a small price to pay to get rid of the worst teachers easily. Principals should be incentivized to keep talented teachers, and thus discouraged from firing them for petty reasons.
I thought it through just fine, unless you have a large supply of smart well educated people who'd like to be making the same amount of money, and maybe less in real terms, ten years from now, and 20 years from now, and so on.
No? Well then I guess we're going to have to pay people more as they have more seniority, just like virtually every other industry.
I disagree, although I think many of your observations are valid. It's unfortunate that our politics have become so polarized that both critics and defenders of teachers often wind up talking past each other.
There are obvious downsides to a seniority system. Younger teachers tend to get offered poorer contractual terms during collective bargaining, be handed the worst assignments (when they have the least experience), and are sometimes even bullied by older teachers with much greater authority and job security. I feel this is true of seniority systems in general, but in education the potential consequences have particularly wide-ranging implications for society. While we don't want to lose skilled veteran teachers, we don't want to raise the barriers to entry too high for new entrants to the profession either. Over longer periods, that leads to a succession problem.
I'm less convinced by your argument about monopsony. You mention that there are thousands of employers in cities (plural) for software engineers, but then refer to a single public school district with a handful of private schools, as if teachers were chained to the first city they work in. On the other hand, there are about 6 million teaching jobs in the US, vs. maybe a million software engineering jobs (going by memory from BLS data). And since, as you say, k-12 education necessarily involves a fairly low student-teacher ratio, the demand in that job market is very predictable based on demographics. While instructional methods may be disrupted by technology (and ought to have been disrupted far more than they have been up to now, if you ask me), a good part of junior education is about social skills and learning to find and function as part of a non-familial social group. Even if we could put a holodeck in every classroom tomorrow along with all other pedagogical disiderata, teachers would still be needed to manage kids' behavior and needs in more or less the same proportions as today. I think that number can be a bit higher than 20 (I grew up with class sizes of closer to 30, and it was fine), but there are only so many children that an adult can supervise and assist effectively.
re: monopsony -- You didn't read my comment carefully. Teachers obviously aren't chained to a city, but not all of us are 20 years old and eager to hop around the country. Once you do things like buy a house / apartment, or have an SO with a job, or kids in school, or a group of friends, or family, or get divorced and are forbidden by court order from moving your child around, or have an underwater mortgage, or just plain like where you live, you stop wanting to move. Having one dominant and maybe one or two small alternate (and who knows what their labor demand is) local employers would discourage me or I'd think most reasonable people from wanting a career in a given field. Employment at will is a fine theory when there aren't monopoly / monopsony effects and both buyers and sellers have little leverage and are price takers. Remove that and people naturally see protection.
I think this is the most insightful reply to the original post. Indeed, thinking about "numbers of students teached" is a really crappy metric for the performance of a teacher; it's far better, for example, to use something like (average increase in standardized test scores per student) * (number of students) / (hours taught) or somethng similar (assuming we do believe in standardized tests), the only problem with this metric being how you evaluate which teacher is responsible for which proportion of the increase in test scores, but this can be solved with proper randomization.
The idea behind this is that one should consider that a bad teacher is far more likely to fail his students (as lon as he doesn't control the exams), while a good teacher will send his students to the best univerisities/high schools/jobs availiable.
You're both half-right. due to the state and county segmentation of education, union influence and educational job security varies widely. In places like New York, unions are very powerful and dismissals are difficult. In some places, it's far easier.
Likewise, some places have very high academic standards, and in other places creationism is considered a valid element in science currricula. Academic quality is not strongly correlated to unions' bargaining ability, as far as I can tell.
You don't even have to cite poor districts to see this. In Bloomington, IN, the presence of the University also ensures that you have a large number of non-English speakers every year, and every district everywhere has a certain number of disabled children (who have mostly been mainstreamed now for lack of funds for special care).
Teachers work as hard as any human being can, and directly affect the lives of everybody in the country - and yet they're routinely despised and asked to sacrifice just a little bit more. It's no wonder so few people are still willing to do that work.
The same applies at the university level, of course, with increasing reliance on no-benefits adjunct workers paid chump change for a chance to "get into the profession" (as if there will ever be well-paid positions afterwards), and even full-time lecturers are not exactly paid huge amounts of cash - my wife has a PhD in physics and was just paid $35,000 for a one-year visiting professorship.
Special Education students are often mainstreamed not due to a lack of funding but due to the legal requirements written into their individualized education programs. While there is certainly benefit for many students with IEPs to being mainstreamed, much of it has to do with parents fighting with the school districts over their children being "labeled."
I actually think teachers shouldn't have entire summers off. That's a great time to review teaching methods and materials, prepare curriculum, hold teaching conferences, and other things that would free them up during the school year to focus more on class time. Trying to do those things after teaching hundreds of students all day long is really difficult. It's amazing to me that teachers even manage to do as well as they do.
Moving to yearlong schooling with a shorter summer break and a longer winter break, plus longer breaks between each quarter would be better though. Students who aren't exposed to reading and writing English at home wouldn't slowly fall behind year after year due to the long summer vacations.
I have to agree with you though. The policy makers do more harm than good, but the truth is that by setting some bureaucratic benchmark, they feel they can wash their hands of any responsibility on the matter without spending more money on education.
The problem with these standardized benchmarks is that they only punish students and schools for cumulative educational deficiencies instead of allowing them to slow down and address them, so as students go from grade to grade, they're gradually robbed of the education they should have had.
I think the current educational goal of having all students meet some standard benchmark of academic achievement is flawed. Instead, we should simply try teaching students as much as they can learn at the pace at which each student learns best, or better yet, teach them a love of learning and the ability to continue learning on their own. If that means slowing down the curriculum for some students, then so be it. It's better that they master what skills they can in the given time they have in school than to force them into more and more difficult material with an ever poorer and poorer foundation to work off of until they give up.
Honestly, we should only provide standard individual benchmarks to assess where an individual student stands in their development so that teachers can adjust the curriculum to match each student regardless of how well they know that student or where they came from. And then we should also give teachers the freedom, time, and flexibility to adapt to their students' individual needs.
The way it is now, we force teachers to treat students like products in an assembly line. The benchmark-based punishment and reward system we have now even incentivizes this treatment of students. It's sad.
Just to clarify, do you mean that they're given access to school facilities properly compensated in pay during the summer?
I have to ask since I was describing the extra summer work in the context of what they're paid to do, not what they do in their free time.
I expect most good teachers already spend their own time, especially during the summer, planning and preparing things for their students, but I'm arguing that it should be institutionalized and they should be properly recognized and compensated for their work.
If it's already like that then I think my local school district must be different. The high school parking lots are empty whenever I drive by during the summer.
"review teaching methods and materials, prepare curriculum, hold teaching conferences." None of those require being on the school premises. I've known enough teachers to know that any conferences they do go to are in the summer.
Operating an entire school building just to give teachers a continuous workspace and the ability to easily talk to their coworkers would be wastefully expensive anyway.
To get a better look at the real pay, benefits should also be taken into account. Any government job should be compared to a similar skill-level private sector job, again pay plus benefits.
When it comes to schools, I don't think you can talk about pay or costs without also focusing on the administration. It is a system. Requiring a part of funding to go to teacher salaries would allow upping just that part of the equation, if need be. If this requirement already exists, and pay plus benefits are poor, then something higher up the food chain is broken and should be what is focused on.
Let's fire the bad teachers! That's a great idea. Except, how do you define bad teachers?
I've been a teacher for many years. I'm an average teacher. Not great, not horrible. Some students really like me and others not so much. As far as I can tell society wants three things:
1. Almost everyone to have access to a great education.
2. Almost everyone to pass.
3. Almost everyone who passes to know the material.
The fact is, you can have any two of these but not all three and society is not willing to come to grips with this reality. Society is also not willing to come to grips with the fact that the truly great teachers are, well, truly great. A rarity and it will always be this case as long as truly inspirational people can better be fulfilled doing something other than teaching.
Think you know the answers? Then get into a classroom and lead the way. What? The low pay, lack of respect, long hours, emotional stress aren't worth it? I see.
I think the whole "If only we could fire bad teachers!" argument is an absurd talking point. The educational institution as a whole is a failure, not just a bunch of incompetent teachers somehow ruining an otherwise top-notch educational system. The same entity which routinely hires appallingly bad teachers is now trusted to competently fire them?
People are fired because some boss decides to fire them. We're given no reason to assume that this is the same thing as firing based on incompetence. But it is clear that the bosses want their subordinates to have less job security and decisionmaking power. That's why bosses understandably go on offensives against unions.
Teachers' bosses for some reason go unnoticed. Teachers have managers ("administrators"), and the top bosses are the government (meaning we look at the distribution of power in society, to see whose interests are likely served by the educational system).
I'm certainly not a fan of most schoolteachers I've met. Being admitted into an unhealthy institution, and thriving within it, is not a hopeful sign. But they're better than their bosses, and the real flaws of the system lie elsewhere...
Can you elaborate on why you can only have two of those three things? They seem very subjectively defined and I don't see why you can't have all three. I'm not a teacher (I have tutored and TA'd), so I'm curious where this opinion comes from.
It is my belief that not everyone is capable of mastering each topic. That there aren't enough potential great teachers to make this possible unless you do some sort of selection method.
Harvard gets great results but they select who enters the university. If you want almost everyone to pass and to know the material then some sort of pre-selection criteria must be met.
Your conclusions from your example are factually not true, because there are schools where everyone gets a "good education" that do not have pre-selection criteria. I would also agree that not everyone is capable of "mastering each topic," but why do you need to master them and why do they need to know each topic? I'm sorry, I just don't feel like you answered my question. I don't think you need great teachers to have everyone learn material. The onus of learning should be on the student and our goals for what students should learn are maligned with this concept. The fact that there isn't a definition for bad teachers doesn't mean there aren't bad teachers (you have to agree with this) and that something shouldn't be done about them. The way that I look at the three points you have numbered is that the first one follows from the other two. By working to redefine classroom expectations to closer align with placing responsibility on students for doing the learning, we can realize that more people can effectively learn appropriate material to a satisfactory comprehension level.
Yes, there are schools where everyone gets a good education without a pre selection criteria. They do not, however, posses the property that almost all of the students pass and almost all of the students know the material. You can't get all three conditions to be true simultaneously.
Of course there are bad teachers.
The onus of learning should be on the students? Sure. But then you aren't going to get almost everyone knowing the material because most people don't want to learn.
I'm sorry, I still don't understand how these three things can't be filled simultaneously, you just keep saying they can't without giving me any more reason. Feel free to respond by explaining or not, I'm just curious why that's the case. I agree that a large number of students don't want to learn, but a lot of those students also just don't learn, in which case why are we paying to "teach" them?
In my experience, children are very curious. I'm very skeptical when teachers claim otherwise, despite them having experience with many children, since they're often the ones pummeling that curiosity out of them as part of the job. (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm)
My sister was Teacher of the Year for LAUSD, and if she doesn't spend her own money on supplies for her students, they simply have nothing to write on or with. She has never had a class size under 35 that I'm aware of. Yet, her job is on the line based solely on the test scores of her kids, many of whom are mainstreamed special Ed kids. In what way is this a recipe for success?
That's pretty much what my wife goes through. Her kids have iPhones, Blackberrys, Android phones, (a lot of them are dealers) yet they can't bring a notebook or a pen/pencil, she's got to supply them or nothing would be done. She's teaching 9th grade Biology and Earth Science, yet her students are often 10th, 11th and 12th graders who fail year after year. Some of the 'kids' are 20 years old. 3 of her classes are special ed who's she's suppose to have a special ed co-teacher, but doesn't have one. As well as class size with over 35 students. She's expected to get them all to pass the NY State regents, nothing else matter. One of the biggest problems is students don't show up consistently and class length is only 40 minutes.
The Arts School in downtown L.A. was originally budgeted as a $70 million project, then raised to $120 million before construction began, then finished with a final cost of $573 million.
Giving LAUSD more money to manage seems like a bad idea to me.
It would be interesting to see where the money really goes. Cause it's NYC it's sure not to the teachers or for getting the students books. Not that the students would even use the books, and whatever books they get they never return at the end of the year.
I have read somewhere that the ratio of administrators to teachers goes up constantly. That would also explain the rise in college tuition. More and more administrators and consultants to pay. Wish I could find hard numbers somewhere. But as with all political discussions real data is hard to find..,
If an article complaining about teacher salaries doesn't mention that most teachers get their summers off, I find it difficult to believe any other points it tries to make. I knew a few teachers that worked jobs in the summer to supplement their income and that seems pretty reasonable given that the vast majority of people I know work all 12 months.
We don't blame soldiers, while we do blame teachers, because almost everyone has personal experience dealing with lazy, bad teachers as a student. Many people also have direct experience with lazy friends who became teachers for lack of other options.
There are bad teachers. Sure. But there are good ones too. And teachers are the largest professional field in the US (about 6.2M, versus, for example 1.2M lawyers). This indicates a couple of problems:
1) The thought you can rid yourself of all or even most bad teachers is absurd. You can't easily chop off the bottom 10% each year and bring in an additional 500,000 new teachers.
2) With a population that large the quality of teaching will regress to the mean. We just realistically can't expect an all-star team of 6M of anything.
So what do we do? The first thing is to realize the big problem is in the inner-city and rural areas -- in underserved communities. And honestly, I think we need to focus a bit more on the community and less on the classroom proper. Like I'd really like to see summer reading programs in these communities, with some strong incentives. I also think things like Khan Academy would actually really help. I'm probably overly optimistic, but I think getting kids to listen to lectures is easier than getting them to do homework at home.
My experience is that good schools and good students actually do quite well. The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.
So even if we hired every engineering graduate from US schools every year, we wouldn't fill the gap, by a long shot.
My point is that for a population this huge you're not going to be able to backfill for any reasonable dollar amount or you have to significantly lower your standards, in which case you're probably hiring people that will largely fall into that same bottom 10% next year.
Fine. Amend kenjackson's statement to say that, in the real world, voters have demonstrated in practice they are unwilling to pay sufficient taxes to attract a high quality group of people to teaching as a profession.
suggesting that if the United States systematically persuaded the bottom 5 percent of teachers to leave teaching for some other occupation, year after year after year, it wouldn't be long before the academic achievement outcomes in United States schools would be as high as those in schools anywhere in the world. The issues he considers in his article are quite interesting, and show that he has thought a long time about education reform and side-effects of education policies.
As for the claim that the bottom 5 percent of teachers leaving the occupation couldn't be made up numerically (you mentioned 10 percent, but I am following Hanushek's figure), I disagree with that claim on several grounds.
1) Previous studies of the issue have shown that there are many credentialed teachers who are not currently actively teaching full-time. Again, I am still Googling for studies as I post this (this is a fact I read in books years ago), but it's fairly widely known that there are teachers with credentials who currently don't participate in the teacher labor force.
2) On the basis of international comparisons of class sizes, and on the basis that a bottom-5-percent teacher probably does more harm than good, we might just as well persuade the worst teachers to do other kinds of work, and have the top 95 percent of teachers divide up the students for slightly larger class sizes each, and perhaps a share of the compensation packages formerly allocated to the worse teachers who have left the occupation.
3) Supply of labor is generally elastic with respect to demand (especially in the current United States economy, with high unemployment). If schools around the country announce that they are dismissing teachers who don't perform well, and still sticking to the same class size targets, something else will change (perhaps the prestige of the occupation of teaching, as it becomes known as an occupation that doesn't tie the fortune of competent teachers to pay scales designed for incompetent teachers) and new workers will be attracted to make the investment, whatever that is, to enter the occupation.
See Hanushek's article for more details. I think this is an important issue to discuss, and I'm glad you joined issue about what is possible, and what should be done.
The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.
I'm glad you mentioned that issue at the bottom of your post. That is an issue of great concern to me too. My reply to the article submission in this thread, with a link to an article by Kenschaft on mathematics teaching,
is motivated by that concern. Best wishes for finding people to collaborate with to help improve education for able students from low-income backgrounds who currently can't afford to shop for schools.
Eric's famous position I do find somewhat flawed. First, the gold standard everyone uses is Finland, but Finland doens't do this. In fact none of the top ranking countries do such a program. I'd love to see this done w/ gret success in a single poor-performing school district first.
Also, in some of the analysis I've seen the US already does relatively well when you control for various relative socio-economic strata. The point being that the problem isn't really in a lot of schools. But there are very targeted schools where the problems run really deep. Cutting 5% of the teachers from Overlake HS in Bellevue is probably worthless (and even counterproductive). And, at least based on the numbers, you could fire everyone at Oakland International.
Plus it just doesn't pass the sniff test to me that you can simply get the 6 million best teachers in the US and inner city Detroit starts scoring like Singapore. Just doesn't smell right, unless we deal with some of the larger issues.
Lastly, I just don't think you can fire 5%, or 300K/year, and realistically fill those spots. And unlike the private sector, no one is going to pin their hopes on a profession where a bad year, likely ends your career (since firings of gov't positions are public record).
Note the rhetorical sleight of hand in this op-ed piece. The op-ed piece, and the advocacy group sources it cites to back up its claims, take care to write about "teachers’ salaries" rather than write about "compensation packages for teachers." The rhetorical reason for this is to divert attention from how expensive it actually is to taxpayers to provide the total compensation package for a typical schoolteacher, including subsidies for "professional development" (which most professionals pay for out of their own pocket), family health care benefits, and defined-benefit pensions. And that's not even to mention the issue of schoolteacher job security
But to begin to get United States schools on track to meet the standards met in other countries, policy analysts in the United States have to be honest about what the overall framework of regulation now is, and just exactly what teachers are accountable to do, for what level of compensation, under current contracts in most school districts.
P.S. I should make clear that an effective teacher is worth the teacher's weight in gold, and currently the best teachers in the United States are mostly substantially underpaid. But they are underpaid, in large part, because they haven't mobilized their own political participation to unshackle their pay from the lockstep pay scales that also are granted to ineffective teachers. That's why I do my teaching on a contract basis with public school districts or through my own nonprofit organization, so that I can deliver quality lessons without bureaucratic interference and gain professional recognition for the results of my teaching.
Most people do not talk about total compensation in the U.S. when discussing salaries. My total compensation is around $65,000. It is much less than anyone I know in the private sector with comparable education and experience. And this while comparing my total compensation with just their salary.
Most professionals do get health coverage and some sort of pension coverage (usually 401K matching funds). I don't think it's fair to include these things when talking about teacher pay unless one does this for non-teachers as well. As a society we usually don't include these things when talking about non-teacher pay. Heck, most people think that they only pay half of FICA and that the employer pays the other half.
Given the hours worked, emotional stress, and grief that many teachers experience I think teachers are underpaid. Very much underpaid. I'm a teacher and have an obvious bias. At my school our contracts are being negotiated right now. It's clear we are going to take a pay cut. I haven't had a pay raise in 2 years and will be taking a pay cut over the the next two years.
The job is becoming less and less desirable. I strongly encourage anyone who will listen to me to not go into teaching. It's a bad career choice in my opinion.
Actually it is. There is an easy way to compare them from an actuary point of view. Both types of systems have a present day value and both are calculable expenses to the employer. Some 401Ks are much nicer than my pension. Some are much worse. But they are comparable.
Yes. All pensions invest in the stock market. Well run ones invest in government bonds too and other safe instruments. Right now my pension is around 80% funded as a result of the market crash.
I believe that statement is untrue. Regardless, let me rephrase my question: are you guaranteed a certain retirement benefit regardless of market performance?
It is my understanding that pension programs typically guarantee some percentage of your highest salary, with a multiplier for length of service.
I like to know of an example of a pension system in the U.S. that does not invest in the stock market. I'm in a defined benefit pension system and regardless of how the stock market does my benefit is guaranteed by the state. Of course, the actuaries who set up the pension devised it so that it the guaranteed benefit would very likely be able to be met by the contributions I make to it.
There is a push by some politicians to get states to declare bankruptcy so that they will be able to renege on their guarantee.
I like to know of an example of a pension system in the U.S. that does not invest in the stock market
Social Security, as mentioned in the Wikipedia link. Additionally, there is no reason a private pension couldn't be directly funded.
I'm in a defined benefit pension system and regardless of how the stock market does my benefit is guaranteed by the state
Which is what I meant when I asked about being invested in the stock market. While your pension may be funded via stock market investments, for all intents and purposes, your pension is unrelated to the market. With my 401k, I am very much at the whim of the market. If I hit 65 and my anticipated returns don't materialize, there's nobody for me to sue. Thus, pensions are not directly comparable to 401ks.
There is a push ... guarantee.
Given the unrealistic contracts that were agreed to, in light of our near-term economic realities, bankruptcy or mass firings and re-hirings are literally the only way this problem can be addressed.
I think your assertion about the "rhetorical sleight of hand" is pretty far off-base, and is an (admittedly subtle) strawman. The main points of the article, from my perspective were 1. The issues with education in the US are complex, and blanket vilification of teachers is neither warranted nor productive. 2. The pool of high-quality new teaching candidates seems limited (and quite possibly shrinking); current compensation levels for teachers, relative to other job opportunities, is almost certainly a contributing factor.
Your argument is effectively responding to the idea that "we don't find that pay package attractive enough to make us want to be teachers" by saying "but you're using the wrong word- you should look at compensation." Okay, then "we don't find that compensation package attractive enough."
I certainly don't think that just paying teachers more is going to fix anything. But the vilification of the profession, which the article laments and you effectively condone, is in my opinion a big distraction. I agree that tenure is not a perfect system, but neither is it entirely without its benefits. Until more progress is made on a more comprehensive response to education reform, attacking the teachers for not giving up their long-held rights seems a bit unrealistic.
But the policy point is that what happens now is that people are attracted into teaching who value job security far more than most start-up-founding hackers value job security, and who value being accountable for demonstrable results far less than most other people in professional occupations. What you call "their long-held rights" (tenure and other job protections granted by state statute) is precisely what makes the occupation of teaching so different from most other occupations.
That is a reasonable possibility, and I think we probably agree on many aspects of the problem. The general observation still holds though, that the current compensation reality does not attract a broad enough pool.
The challenges of professional recognition, accountability and performance measurement which you aptly highlight are very real. I may be interpreting you incorrectly, but you seem to blame teachers for those issues. My thought is that teachers recognize that the broad challenges facing the industry, and recognize that a comprehensive solution will probably require some significant reforms. But I imagine they also believe that just giving up some of their current rights will not be a sufficient solution without more comprehensive reform. So in the meantime their better off with the status quo.
> including subsidies for "professional development" (which most professionals pay for out of their own pocket)
To be fair, they're required to take such classes by law. At least, when my mother was alive, she needed to take so many credits per year to retain her teaching certification.
> including subsidies for "professional development" (which most professionals pay for out of their own pocket)
Is that true in tech circles (or among professionals in general)? In the circles I move around in (acoustical/civil/mechanical/environmental engineers) professional development costs are pretty much always covered by the employer, especially in cases where CEUs are required to maintain certifications.
Certainly not true in tech circles as far as I know, though some particularly ambitious individuals (me for one) probably do do things on their own dime over and above company-funded courses.
Agreed on all points. I am sympathetic to the author's thesis, but found plenty of annoying rhetoric in the article:
Blaming soldiers vs. teachers:
Soldier quality is more difficult to assess (all of us have gone through school; few through the military), soldiers have significantly less autonomy in decisions, and soldiers (like police & firefights) get some slack because they risk their lives on the line.
"Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education"
As parent noted, tenure issues are huge. Professors also don't make much, but tenure (once they get it) really makes up for it. Also, 14% isn't bad given that many teachers have 2 months off.
School administrations try (and fail) to determine "teacher quality" by looking at standardized test scores.
Quality of teaching is easy to assess however: you just have a few experienced teachers pop in and observe a class or two, and it's obvious to them if the teacher is good or not.
> Also, 14% isn't bad given that many teachers have 2 months off.
It's not 2 months off, it's 2 months unemployed.
When they hire you as a teacher, they ask you ahead of time if you want them to reduce your paycheck amount so that you can receive checks during those 2 months.
So, if there's a salaried teaching position for 50k, said teacher actually gets paid 41.6k (50k * 10/12)? Unless a stated salary is quietly reduced by 1/6, then it most certainly is two months off.
Teachers don't have a "yearly salary" per se ... instead, they have a number written on the contract that indicates what they'll be paid for the school year.
When someone says, "teacher $X makes $Y per year", it means that $Y is that number written on the contract for the school year.
Note, given that
* most teachers spend a couple of weeks after the school year ends tying up loose ends from the year and organizing themselves for next year,
* and then simply need time to decompress from dealing with a large number of kids every day for so long,
* and also that they spend the weeks before school begins prepping for the new year and doing professional development,
there's not really much time in between to get another full-time temporary job to supplement their income.
If the earth-moving industry were like the education industry, the hand shovel would still be the tool of choice and bulldozers, backhoes, and other machines would not exist. A basic problem with education is that the technology has stagnated. The public school classroom has not changed much in 50 years. Teachers still have live lectures during class, kids still do homework at home. Each teacher's class size is the same as the other teachers' in the school. There's no innovation aimed at dramatically reducing costs and raising outcomes.
The cause for this stagnation is obvious: the education industry is controlled by people who have a strong interest in keeping the education process inefficient and labor intensive. When was the last time you heard a teachers' union or a department of education support a technology that promised to reduce the cost of education and the number of teachers? Instead, the public education industry is focused on making education more inefficient: requiring teacher certification, reducing class sizes, increasing funding, etc.
The most promising recent developments in education have come from outside the establishment. Wikipedia makes it possible to get a fairly good understanding of any subject quickly and for free. Khan Academy features thousands of ten-minute long micro-lectures covering most of the math and science taught in schools through high school along with software to test mastery and help students tutor each other. Flash card sites help students memorize. These are the "bulldozers" of the education industry which will enable one person to do the work of hundreds. These are the technologies which will "fix" education.
I'm late to the discussion, but want to add a few things.
First, is there really a large group of people who think that teachers a.) are whom to blame for the state of American education; and b.) are paid too much? The only time I hear about people making such arguments is in op-eds like this one that try to refute them. I think such op-eds are battling straw men.
That said:
1. If you look at total compensation broken down by per-hour-worked (which I think is a fair metric), teachers are paid within the norms for their level of education, etc. There is a reasonable write up on this here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/hate-the-deception-not-the-te...
2. I think a growing number of people are outraged at Teachers Unions, and Teachers Unions try to associate themselves back to just being "teachers". It's a dirty trick. People don't want employment contracts dictating how their kids are taught. They want teachers to be able to work longer hours if they're inclined to, try creative strategies, etc. They want to attract and keep the best teachers by paying them more than less effective teachers. Many (most?) union contracts dictate terms that disallow this kind of stuff. People are upset at the obstacles the union is putting up, not with the teachers that often are forced to have to join that union.
3. I am upset that we, as a country, continue to spend more and more per-pupil on education and have stagnant-at-best results. Something like only 40 cents per dollar spent on education actually make it into the classroom ("citation needed", I know). I'd like to see education spending done more effectively. If this means moving dollars spent on bureaucratic waste into higher teacher salaries, I'd welcome that change.
Is there any good evidence that the main problem with our schools is bad teaching? In other words, if you're going to spend money on improving educational outcomes, should you spend it on "better" teachers or on something like early childhood interventions, as per arguments like this:
(Ignoring for the moment that spending people's tax dollars on better teachers is politically more acceptable than spending it on targeted interventions.)
> Is there any good evidence that the main problem with our schools is bad teaching?
Not to my knowledge.
Ask any teacher (and they are the ones who know) what the main problem is, and they'll tell you that the problem isn't necessarily the schools, or teachers, or administration -- it's the parents. If parents do their job and make their kids' learning a priority, that would make the biggest improvement to the situation by far.
I would be very curious to see what effect increased student punishment had on education quality. Some rules should be more lax (I once spent twenty minutes having to explain why I was in the hallway after the bell rang in order to avoid detention [the answer was that my locker was on the other side of the building from my classroom]), but most systems are too lax. We try to keep students around who have no interest in learning because it "keeps them off the streets." This has two results. First, even if they make it to the end, they probably wind up on the streets anyway. Secondly, they drag down those who do want to learn or would be willing to learn such that their chances of excelling are minimized. We should have more remedial job training (not sure how well this would work, but other analogous programs such as rehab over jail have proven quite successful) and stricter rules about whether students can stay in school or not. These shouldn't be performance based per se, so much as based on a student's effort to complete assignments, pay attention in class, etc. We consequently end up paying a lot of money for people who don't learn anything and bring down those who could. We'd also have to pay for the job training, but it's shorter curriculum would serve to save money and probably increase their chances of gainful employment. I'm not sure how well this would work, but we've certainly never tried it in the US, at least that I'm aware of.
> We try to keep students around who have no interest in learning because it "keeps them off the streets."
The reason this is done is because they are children -- not adults. They are immature and may be making bad decisions. They might have a rotten home life with bad role models. The point is, you try to help them anyway in case they do indeed see a reason to turn their life around.
Why do you think schools have so much sports education? One reason is because it keeps some kids around who otherwise would simply drop out. And every good teacher knows that you can often get a problem kid in your class to focus and learn something by having one or more of their coaches get on their case.
Mmm, yes. I agree to a certain extent. I guess my belief is that there are ways to engage a child outside of a formal education system that would have the same effect while concentrating on something they want to do, since learning is not that thing. I haven't thought this entirely through, but it seems that the current paradigm isn't optimal. You're absolutely right that sports and arts programs provide outlets auxiliary to a standard education, but for students with no interest in traditional learning, maybe it would be better to focus on those things they do enjoy and leave off those that they won't engage in. It would be analogous to the perception that everyone should attend college because it leads to a better life, when in fact many students should be attending post-secondary technical schools. Why not start the split earlier for those who actively refuse to be educated?
> Why not start the split earlier for those who actively refuse to be educated?
Because:
(A) in high school they're still kids, and
(B) one main goal here is to have an educated citizenry, and this means educating all kids as well as we can, whether the kids themselves think it's a good idea or not. :)
Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.
Silly waste-of-time after-school meetings about meeting standardized testing goals is also a complete waste of time as well.
Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.
As an aside, I knew a teacher who "retired early" basically due to a mental breakdown from the stress. I suspect most teachers know someone who's done the same.
Edit: And if you're male, all it takes is an unsubstantiated claim of impropriety from a female student to end your career immediately.
Easily the worst and most stressful job I've ever had. And it really sucks because I was an excellent teacher. Got great reviews from observers and students. My students learned a ton. I really liked teaching too.