High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials • Hacker News Board

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#141

Post by noxToken » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 6:13 PM UTC

abraves10001 wrote: post #103

noxToken wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really a shame we don't value education more. This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. We just don't care (as a whole) about education for others outside of our sphere . When you have the ability to move to better school system or to pay for private school attendance, you have no need to improve public schools. Not all public school systems are bad. I image that eve…

> This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole Everything you wrote after that sounds exactly like we don't value education as a whole. We individually value getting a good education but far too frequently ignore how education as a whole is beneficial to society.

I guess I misspoke. You understood what I mean in the end, so I guess mission accomplished?

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#142

Post by noxToken » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 6:14 PM UTC

Arizhel wrote: post #113

noxToken wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really a shame we don't value education more. This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. We just don't care (as a whole) about education for others outside of our sphere . When you have the ability to move to better school system or to pay for private school attendance, you have no need to improve public schools. Not all public school systems are bad. I image that eve…

>This might sound nit-picky but I think we all (Americans) value education as a whole. That's a bunch of crap. If we (Americans) valued education as a whole, we wouldn't vote for leaders who continually cut education budgets. It's very simple: we as a society do not care about education. It's not a top political issue ever, unlike abortion, defense spending, guns, and who uses what bathroom. We keep school funding an…

I misspoke. The sibling comment summed up what I meant:

> We individually value getting a good education but far too frequently ignore how education as a whole is beneficial to society.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#143

Post by ashark » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 6:16 PM UTC

kelvin0 wrote: post #61

I applaud the budding journalists persistence, and certainly having someone falsify their credentials is a really terrible start into such an important position. However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but se…

> However, I must mention that I been in contact with so many really bad HS staff (teachers, principals..) all with legitimate credentials, that I am starting to wonder about their significance? A principal should probably have some teaching experience, but seems to be like more of an MBA/business type of background?

Teacher raises and admin positions are all about box-ticking with the right pieces of paper. It's typical (though not universal) for admin to do the minimum time teaching (half-assing it, obviously) they need to for any kind of higher degree/cert they want (I want to say for a lot of programs it's 2 years or something like that) then move on, so yeah, many have little teaching experience—ask any teacher, nearly all teachers suck and don't know what they're doing the first couple years, that's just how it is, so you don't get good in that time, and you probably also don't get a sense of how periodic curriculum shakeups and such screw with teachers doing their jobs (not to mention their private lives, when they lose their evenings to some stupid new paperwork that you've introduced which could have been derived from other data you already have if you weren't a moron).

Education, Ed. Admin, and related higher degrees are ridiculous. You'd probably have to dig hard to find a program that's not a joke. The reason is that schools give zero shits about where your degree is from or what the program's like, just that you have one (and maybe your GPA, if it's for hiring—if it's just for a pay bump, they don't care about that, either, it's just automatic). There are lots of teachers/school admin. Consequently, many universities, even otherwise kinda-decent ones, have joke master's and PhD programs for teachers/admin, to rake in that sweet sweet teacher money, since the teachers/admin mostly just want 1) easy, 2) convenient (online or evenings/weekends, and as few hours as possible), and 3) cheap enough to justify the effort in a direct cost/benefit way (trivial to calculate from pay scales). The classes are nearly pure busy work.

If they don't just want to tick a box to get a raise or to go into admin and actually want to learn something, they get a non-education higher degree (usually in a content area of some kind—English, Mathematics, that kind of thing)

Source: am married to a teacher and, not through her, good friends with several others.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#144

Post by nkurz » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

throwaway729 wrote: post #68

nkurz wrote: post #29

I don't know how common falsified credentials are in school administration, but I'll mention a parallel experience that was a formative part of my upbringing. While I was in high school, my father taught at a small private college in Wisconsin, where he was on the hiring committee for the new college president. After being hired, the chosen candidate's behavior was surprisingly erratic, prompting my my father to cont…

Fascinating. To this day, it's nearly impossible to find any account of these events. It's really hard to imagine that someone could commit such outright blatant theft and get away without so much as a hit on Google. Was the con artist ever tracked down?

It's really hard to imagine that someone could commit such outright blatant theft and get away without so much as a hit on Google.

The events happened in the early 1990's, just prior to the advent of the internet. The false resume and the firing are the parts of the story that I have personal knowledge of. The financial allegations are third hand, but I believe them to be true. It's possible that recent events have better coverage, but I'd guess that even now there is a lot of crime and fraud that is never reported.

Was the con artist ever tracked down?

Not to my knowledge, although I'm no longer close to the community. I've occasionally wondered whether this might be because someone took matters into their own hands, and he's dead and buried in the woods somewhere. Googling now, I was surprised to learn that a janitor at the college was recently convicted of a 30-year-old murder of the mother of one of my classmates: http://chippewa.com/news/guilty-verdict-in-old-ladysmith-kil.... But I suspect that instead he's likely on to a new scheme somewhere else.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#145

Post by r_smart » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #140

r_smart wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers in the US make more than the median salary, and get a ton of perks. The US spends more per student than any other developed world. I'd say we're paying plenty.

Source? What are these perks like? Also, teachers are paid in highly variable ways depending on state, school district, and union (if any). Saying that teachers get paid higher than average should be expected, considering they are usually required to have a bachelor's degree, pass many rounds of background checks continually, and (in many districts) must continue taking classes and gain education (similar to a nurse)…

Teacher salaries in 2013 (there's more data there than that, but whatever)[0]. Census data for the same year [1]. And lastly, per capita spending on students[2].

Perks teachers enjoy are variant as you mention, but tend to be solid. My GF is a teacher, her perks are: Contracted for 38 hours / week, 15 sick days a year that roll-over (I think there's some limit), something like 3 weeks of vacation during the school year, summer vacation, pension program, good health insurance, very difficult to be fired from the job.

Also, when looking at teacher salary vs median, realize that they are working a lot less of the year than other people. I did the math between my GF and I and once you account for all her time off, she makes slightly less than I do.

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.60.a... [1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... [2]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#146

Post by matthewmcg » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 7:10 PM UTC

throwaway729 wrote: post #119

Cyph0n wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He earned that title, and he was your teacher (a superior), so I don't understand why you were annoyed. Most importantly, it was the first day! Think of an interview for example: would it be polite to address your interviewer using his/her first name? No, unless the interviewer gives you permission to do so. Edit: It seems like a lot of HN users have a severe aversion to authority, so I guess I've learned something n…

The respect goes both ways. I call people with doctoral degrees "Dr." unless I'm invited otherwise or we're in a non-professional setting. Doctoral degrees usually aren't mere pieces of paper; going out of one's way to diminish the work and sacrifice involved is kind of rude. But I also think it's kind of snooty and ill-mannered to explicitly demand to be called Dr. Like with table manners. It's rude to not be decent…

This sounds like an application of Postel's maxim[1] to the use of titles.

[1] RFC 1122 § 1.2.2: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#147

Post by sebleon » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 7:46 PM UTC

sebleon wrote: post #31

charlieflowers wrote: post #28

This is simply excellent. What a great story. I'm surprised no one has just stated that yet. Excellent.

More comments like these are needed here!

Welp this got downvoted, I guess HN doesn't look kindly at promoting positivity here?!

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#148

Post by cr0sh » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

BrandonMarc wrote: post #15

The articles I've found have all conveniently avoided answering the biggest question: why didn't the "adults" running the school figure this out sooner? ideally, before she was hired? That the students figured it out is proof it was certainly possible to figure out.

The next question would be: Are the students going to investigate that question next?

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#149

Post by panzagl » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 8:12 PM UTC

ryanmarsh wrote: post #129

panzagl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High School is secondary education. Primary education is much harder and for some reason much less well rewarded. Everyone remembers the high school teachers who were phoning it in, but forgets about the elementary school teachers who taught them well enough to be able to make the distinction.

Sorry. I should have said primary and secondary.

No worries, I'm probably overly sensitive to people extrapolating the performance of their burnout Theater teacher to the profession as a whole.

Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials

#150

Post by losteverything » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 8:25 PM UTC

magic_beans wrote: post #133

losteverything wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never had thought a normal, well reared person would Google anybody just because they can. I think the net-natives think nothing of it and probably dont think it's wrong. My comment demonstrated my discovery that I am not surprised it was from a young person.

You haven't explained why you think it's wrong to Google someone. Note: not everyone you encounter is a "normal, well-reared" person. Googling someone is a good way to weed out the less "well-reared".

Hmm. Googling a person is nosey. Nosey is not desireable. Nosey is not acceptable behavior I had passed on to me and I passed it on to all my children.

Google lets a nosey person be nosey in private and anonymously. It is still not desireable.

Young people ( and some older ones) Google everything and think it's all the same. That was my point. Nobody my age tells me or my peers "Hay, I just found out our new manager is divorced and has 3 kids,and used to work for botuniverse.com."

I would directly ask that person "why on earth did you want to find that out!?!?"

Perhaps this is a generational think....