<p>“Thank you Opie! The article reinforces the point I have tried to make about vouchers many, many times in these forums.”</p>
<p>You’re welcome, but I must warn you when you agree with me, you embrace the dark side … (labored breathing through a mask) ;)</p>
<p>Did you ever notice you never see me and darth vadar at any of the same functions?</p>
<p>“Not surprisingly, the kids haven’t shown large gains in academics.”</p>
<p>because the goal is money, not improvement. </p>
<p>Education is a cash cow, somebody figured out how to tap that money and become profitable. I remember the days when youth soccer was a team with a volunteer English guy coaching us. It cost a little bit to play, but really not that much. Today I know youth coaches making 6 figures coaching u11’s and u15’s three nights a week. So parents could have their kids win a partial scholarship. Funny how when people figure out how to milk the cow, they reason it’s for the kids.</p>
<p>OoM, you missed the point. The free market principle SDpidey and I refer to is pay for performance. Marite, tenure involves academic freedom (I’m an academic; I need tenure to be able to express my views clearly during discussions). Teachers should not have tenure but multi-year contracts. In my town, tenure is granted after only 3 years. Do you all see the disaster it has wrought vis-a-vis quality of education? An upper middle class town’s HS should have average SAT scores breaking 1000 (out of 1600) easily. Our HS’ average is in the 900’s.</p>
<p>“OoM, you missed the point. The free market principle SDpidey and I refer to is pay for performance”</p>
<p>honestly, I didn’t miss the point, I just stood on another side of the issue to give you a different perspective. It doesn’t mean your wrong and I’m right. It’s just a different view of the same situation.</p>
<p>NJMother:</p>
<p>Whether one calls it tenure or guaranteed employment is immaterial.</p>
<p>My point is that the best teachers my Ss had had tenure; the worst did not. In other words, just because they had guaranteed life-long employment did not cause my Ss’ teachers to sit on their duff and do next to nothing. </p>
<p>I’m not saying that this is true in every case, just as I know that not every tenured prof goes on to publish another book. But at least in my experience (and I started being involved in my kids’ education nearly 20 years ago), the causal relationship between guaranteed employment and slacking is not established. </p>
<p>Students, moreover, are not like inert raw materials that can be shaped into marketable commodities. A teacher may need to do very little to ensure that one kid does spectacularly well on tests and may need to spend lots of time and energy getting a barely acceptable performance from another. One year, our high school missed on one NCLB criterion for AYP or whatever it’s called because two Asian students with poor English language skills joined the school. Two students out of 2,000 and the school misses!</p>
<p>
Marite, I agree it is not a causal relationship. However, tenure creates a dangerous situation where a teacher who chooses to sit on her duff is protected. So while not expressly CAUSING slacking, it prevents removal of the slacker. Maddening to both parents and non-slacker teachers who resent being lumped in with (and compensated at the same rate as) the slackers.</p>
<p>Marite, our middle school got in trouble because one too few Hispanic kids showed up for testing. It would have been fine if he or she had shown up and gotten a zero. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>StickerShock sees what I see. And yes, it does matter what one calls it. Tenure has a specific meaning that’s tied to academic freedom; guaranteed lifetime contract does not. removal for cause applies in both cases, but what constitutes cause would differ.</p>
<p>We did have a problem with incompetent teachers in our district at one point. They were removed from the classroom but allowed to serve in the DoE and draw a salary. With a more cooperative union head, that practice was eliminated, and mediocre teachers were removed. I actually got one teacher transferred from my S’s class. She was not slacking; she just was not appropriate for that particular class, even though she was well liked by the students. I did mention in my letter to the principal that I thought she was in the wrong class, not the wrong profession, and I was not calling for her to be fired. Within a couple of weeks of my complaining, she was moved to a class where her approach was far more suited and my S got a teacher who taught at the appropriate level. The issue of tenure (or guaranteed employment) did not come up.</p>
<p>Marite, it wouldn’t; the teacher was reassigned, not fired. Teachers can be reassigned, if allowed by contract.</p>
<p>In our case, the reassignment made sense because the teacher and the class were not a good fit. In previous years, incompetent teachers were reassigned to the DoE; the new union head worked with the School Committee and the superintendent to end that practice and those incompetent teachers left the district. In other words, they were fired. At the moment, there are no such teachers in the system, as far as I know.
What is needed is collaboration between unions, superintendent, school boards, principals and parents who are willing to do the work.
When I complained in the hearing of my S’s GC, I was told I should write the letter so that the principal could act on it. And so I did.</p>
<p>By the way, k-12 teachers should also have some of the protection afforded to college profs. They are even more at the mercy of school boards, parents, the local media, when it comes to what and how they can teach (file under “evolution”).</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/education/19board.html?_r=1&oref=slogin[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/education/19board.html?_r=1&oref=slogin</a></p>
<p>ESL is like that, too. Teachers take graduate level courses on the research findings about the best practices for English Language Learners…and what things can actually impede the students’ progress.</p>
<p>Then when they get in the classroom, district policy requires them to do the latter and forbids the former.</p>
<p>Opie wrote" I have not found that to be the case for my Ss, The teachers who were weak were inexperienced and did not have tenure. They left the school and some left teaching soon afterward, burnt out by the demands of the job. The best teachers happened to have tenure. They routinely went well beyond what was expected of them.</p>
<p>Similarly, college profs do not cease to be productive because they have tenure."</p>
<p>Why would a great teacher even want tenure? Job security for them would be result from performance. The current situation prevents the hardest working and most talented teachers from getting paid more. They should be paid more. Tenure does not produce sloth, but it does make it very difficult to get rid of slothful people.</p>
<p>The point about charging for different degrees of difficulty among students makes a poor argument. Every American is guaranteed a free and appropriate education.</p>
<p>Spideygirl:</p>
<p>First, the quote you cited was mine, not Opie’s. </p>
<p>You have not been the target of parents who wanted you fired because you assigned a book that they did not care for, or taught subjects they thought ought not to be taught or taught in different ways. </p>
<p>I am not suggesting that every school district is as easy to work with as mine has proved to be. I only wanted to point out that lack of guaranteed job security will not necessarily make for better teachers. It might make for greater ease of getting rid of bad teachers, but there is some value to shielding teachers from the whims of school boards and parents with agendas.</p>
<p>I won’t rehash the reasons why it is hard to come up with a system to identify the hardest working or most talented teachers. But just a few examples:
The teachers who burnt out at my Ss’ school were enormously hard working, putting in at least 10 hours a day at school and probably more hours at home. But some were not very good. And some were faced with difficult students (one of whom eventually got shot to death in a drug deal gone bad). One teacher who riled some students and parents (“he ought to be fired” said several to me) was later acknowledged to have done the most to teach his students how to write.</p>
<p>As for charging for different degrees of difficulty, you yourself brought up the free market. A free market does have differential pricing. Think about hotel rooms, or airline fares, for example. Or public versus private education.
Yes, every American is entitled to a free education. But private schools are entitled to reject students they do not consider desirable, whether from an academic standpoint, from a disciplinary one, or a financial one. Public schools must accommodate all, including those who have profound special needs, either by admitting them or by paying for their education elsewhere. Just yesterday, there was a segment on NPR discussing a student with profound needs, whose education cost $65k per year.</p>
<p>We routinely pay for out of district placements that cost in excess of $100K, per student. Some of these students are basically uneducable, and their “education” is really more health and safety management.</p>
<p>Private schools can pick and choose whom they will select to attend. They never have to deal with those pesky problems of special needs, handicapping conditions, language barriers, behavioral issues…all of which public school must deal with. </p>
<p>Of course, as a taxpayer, I am really disgusted that I have to pick up the tab for someone else’s kid to attend a school where the goals are showering and brushing teeth (I know someone with a child at one such school, with one such goal). I am a huge believer in public education, but not taking care of extraordinary “educational” expenses…on my tax dollar. In this respect, I’d like to see a little more “free market”, as costs would be kept more in line, if parents were expected to pay those costs out of pocket, as opposed to relying on public dollars.</p>
<p>Allmusic,</p>
<p>I have friends with a daughter in a situation not much better than the one you describe. They have had a long, hard road and have spent countless thousands out of pocket even with the school system kicking in for various out of district payments. Even with both parents working well-paying full-time jobs, there is no way they could afford the needed services entirely on their own and they do not have the qualifications necessary to take care of this child without a lot of help. Personally, I would be disgusted if there were not some publicly-funded agency that they could turn to for help. If that raises my property tax by a few bucks a month, I am happy to pay that cost.</p>
<p>I agree with Bassdad. I raised this example only to show that public schools and public school teachers often deal with a very different school population than private schools and the free market solution is no panacea for every educational problem.</p>
<p>Special services vary widely between different areas. I know of a family in the NE and they have 2 boys who have learning disabilities that have required private school placements. Their public school paid for those placements for years. Soon their father will be relocated to another area of the country. They must go b/c otherwise he will be unemployed. They looked at special placements and what their new public school has to offer. There is not an appropriate public or private school for one of their sons. They are really scrambling and are thinking about sending one of their children to a boarding school/private placement and asking the new public school to pay for it. Their other son will go to a private school, it appears to be a good fit, and is much, much less expensive than a similar private school in the NE. In addition, they offer financial aid, and feel that this family will qualify for substantial grant money through their private funds. They will not ask the public school to pay for that placement.</p>
<p>I don’t know where one draws the line on these costs. Our per pupil spending is about $10K a year, for regular education. Now, all of those students would clearly benefit from more one on one time, fewer children in a class, more resources, etc. But, we spend every year cutting costs from our regular education budget while some children receive special educations costing $100K a year.</p>
<p>If it were only a matter of a “few bucks a month”, it would be one thing. But there is an entire segment of the population, probably 80% of those kids in the “middle”, who are having their educations shortchanged so that one or two kids can learn to tie their shoes. These mandates are ruining regular education, and if that is the goal…so that all education will be privatized, the feds and state govt’s are doing a bangup job.</p>
<p>We have one of the worst state funding issues of any state in the country, so I am not saying everyone is suffering like we are. But these issues are giant, divisive, and creating huge issues in public school systems across my state, with no relief in sight.</p>