81–90 of 153 posts
It continues to amaze me that the US is so unambitious in this regard. Donald Trump on education: http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Donald_Trump_Education.htm His solution? School choice, competition. Completely ignoring what the 25 countries do that rank higher when it comes to education.
What do they do besides make the population so desperate to escape poverty that they will push their kids to the brink of madness to study for exams that are make or break for their lives?
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> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? Wealthy people will always have nicer cars and better vacations and bigger houses, but that doesn't mean the children of poor people should be relegated to terrible schools where they'll have no future.
sorry, but schools are a lot less important than families.
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Not where I went to school, half an hour after the kids left the vast majority of teachers were gone.
I mean, a lot of comes down to the individual teachers. The good ones, who care about their students, will spend extra time running student groups (drama clubs, etc) and participate in teacher groups. Add in grading and planning on top of that and you can easily be working 12 hour days, easily. But you can still have plenty of teachers that don't care about making the extra effort.
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Just to clarify: if you rent an apartment that is in an area with high property taxes, you still get to go to the same local school as the people who own their homes.
Yes, but these towns go to great lengths in their zoning codes to exclude affordable apartments. If we could decouple education from locale then maybe there wouldn't be so many municipalities trying to explicitly prevent affordable housing.
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Not true in MN--you can open enroll your kids in any district. You may not get the exact school you want due to demographics, but it's still a valid counter-example. By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? I'm all for trying to pull people up by their bootstraps, but we can't just level everything out in some misguided attempt at 'fairness.' You will never achieve that fai…
> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? Sure, let wealthy ADULTS have more advantages. However, children have no say in their circumstances, so I do think it is right to at least give CHILDREN equal opportunity and resources.
The problem isn't financial, it's political. There isn't a correlation of budget per student and outcomes. Successful schools aren't the richest schools -- they are the ones with the most involved parents. The problem is cultural as wel as political.
When black kids who like to read and study are bullied because they are accused of 'acting white' -- no amount of money solves that. Look at the academic success of poor Asian kids by comparison. Asian cultures and families prioritize education almost to an obsessive degree. Consider the proportion of Asians in the Ivy League compared to their proportion of the population (even when excluding international students.)
The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life.[0][1][2][3] Ok, there's an easy four hours of content to listen to. Enjoy! The short takeaway for me was basically that local funding through property taxes is a terrible idea if you want anything approaching fairness. If you can afford to live in an area with high property taxes, the US school system…
The problem with that conclusion is that some of the highest-funded public schools in the country such as DC are among the worst performers. Funding is not the sole (or even most important) determinant of quality in education.
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Not true in MN--you can open enroll your kids in any district. You may not get the exact school you want due to demographics, but it's still a valid counter-example. By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? I'm all for trying to pull people up by their bootstraps, but we can't just level everything out in some misguided attempt at 'fairness.' You will never achieve that fai…
> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? Sure, let wealthy ADULTS have more advantages. However, children have no say in their circumstances, so I do think it is right to at least give CHILDREN equal opportunity and resources.
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Sorry, but my parents were both teachers. Summers are spent planning for next year. This idea that teachers get 1/4 of the year off is total fantasy.
It's the classic problem. If they are good teachers, they spend time planning for the next year, taking/leading seminars on teaching, and looking for ways to improve themselves as educators. If they are bad teachers, I'm sure many literally do take off the summer and do little/no work. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like salaries depend on whether you are the former or the latter.
The teachers are segregated as much as the kids, such that the PHD in math with 30 yrs experience and a fat paycheck did a good job teaching my high school calculus class, and teachers of somewhat lesser quality are stuck wearing bullet proof vests and having their cars vandalized and stolen. Simultaneously, inside individual districts something akin to communism reigns where the union enforces strict salary discipline based on skill and experience. Its between districts where things get competitive.
Schools are run locally but regulated at state level. My SiL can run her classroom as the locals and her agree, but to renew her state teaching license every couple years she needs X continuing education units per year and her coworkers run the entire range of ant and grasshopper mentality. Its a classic confusion of butts-in-seat with productivity or confusing panic'd last minute cramming with productive effort.
If the license lasts five years between renewals, and career attrition is roughly 10% per year, then the tiny minority of teachers who retire as teachers will have renewed roughly 8 times, while simultaneously a huge fraction of people holding a teaching license are leaving the field or have left the field and are therefore not working very hard on CEU to renew. So its simultaneously true the teachers study and prep constantly and that teacher don't study and prep at all, because a very small fraction of survivors need to while a very large fraction will not survive.
The supply of teachers is too high leading to intentional burnout by management, careers that are shorter than the time it takes to pay off the student loans, and unpleasant working conditions because they can and it reliably produces countable beans. There is no contradiction in stating very few entering the field will be successful, while all who are successful enjoy great rewards. Those who have a very long and well paid NBA career will be quite happy about it; simultaneously almost every kid wanting to be a pro basketball player will not have a long well paid career in the field; the situation is the same for teaching.
Headline is wildly misleading. The company that is the subject of the article pays $21/hour, which works out to $42,000 a year, probably without benefits. The 25th percentile for a US high school teacher is $45,520, plus significant benefits. Median pay is $57,200.
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Teachers make median income of around 57k[1] in the US and that is on par with other professions with similar educational requirements despite the fact that they don't work nearly 1/4 of the year. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...
Sorry, but my parents were both teachers. Summers are spent planning for next year. This idea that teachers get 1/4 of the year off is total fantasy.
If they can't find multiple 2 week vacations in that summer they aren't being at all efficient in their planning.