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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

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Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#161

Post by lutorm »

Locke1689 wrote: post #152
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have kids, do you really want them to be educated in fill-in-the-bubble hell? Because that is how school is these days, teachers don't teach, they do test prep and then administer those tests, and the testing companies have gotten rich in basically a corrupt cycle. Read the linked article for crying out loud. Also, NCLB passed with bipartisan support at the beginning of Bush's term, it wasn't his fault, but it…

This is crazy. If you have another metric for student performance other than test scores, just say it.

We do have another metric: The teachers', who spend 5 days a week with the kids, knowledge. They have a dataset infinitely deeper and more multi-dimensional than a standardized test can give. Of course, it doesn't lend itself well to making graphs, but that's the nature of complex data.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#162

Post by saraid216 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #137
wpietri wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. That's not true in any way. The purpose of the education system is to create a well-informed citizenry prepared for a productive life and for the duty of running a country. The goal of standardized testing is to get some very rough metrics about superficial, easy-to-observe aspects of some basic parts of the apparatus. The two are ver…

The purpose of the education system is to create a well-informed citizenry prepared for a productive life and for the duty of running a country. Could you be specific? In particular, how do I measure whether a citizen is prepared for a productive life or not? Heck, we could start by testing the hypothesis that getting everybody to focus lots of classroom time on standardized tests improves actual education. How would…

> Could you be specific? In particular, how do I measure whether a citizen is prepared for a productive life or not?

I like that you ignored the latter half.

You don't measure the citizen. You measure the rate at which the country is liberalizing. That is, the rate at which its core philosophical attitude is becoming more individualist, egalitarian, meliorist, and universalist. The purpose of public education is to shift us from the medieval era into the modern era. (And to be clear, being conservative is the opposite of being radical; it does not contradict being liberal. Many things that belong on the political Right are legitimately liberal but not Left.)

How many people are concerned with individual rights? How many people demonstrate equal moral worth and status to all individuals? How many people have a positive outlook on the future? How many people recognize universal qualities in all human beings? The rate at which these indicators are moving is positive, but that rate should be increasing in a country with a strong educational system; you'd ask the questions differently in a different era.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#163

Post by MattGrommes »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #79
Bud wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if you aren't a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have. This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the entire issue in question, and then just blithely…

What evidence do you have that things were better before 2001?

Talk to any teacher or administrator who gives a shit about their students and were teaching before 2001. I come from a family of teachers and school administration and they all point to NCLB as a huge turning point downward in education. Even the ones who favor more standardized testing as a way of finding teachers who aren't up to snuff say the test score has to be one input to the equation, not the only thing. Making the test score all-important skews teaching the same way making one metric in business all-important skews the business toward that metric.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#164

Post by vacri »

curt wrote: post #125
sirmarksalot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked that up on the BLS website, and while you're not using the same units as them, your numbers don't seem to match up. According to BLS, the median pay is $53,230 per year, which would be closer to $26.50 an hour, assuming a 40-hour work week. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-s... Maybe the Forbes article you're referring to about is only counting classroom hours, which is a pretty abs…

Teachers work 9-months out of the year. Here's the site: http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2011/12/22/the-teach...

This is a myth perpetrated by people who believe that since the kids are on holiday, so are the teachers.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#165

Post by jmcqk6 »

milesskorpen wrote: post #149
xenofanes9 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charter schools. There are a wide range of approaches, but the charter school I attended provided an alternative for both teachers and parents looking for flexibility in their child's education.

Some charter schools are amazing, and some are awful ... just like public schools. Research has failed to find any evidence that charter schools perform better as a group -- which is surprising, since they can (by and large) select their students and have flexibility in hiring. Moreover, they undercut public schools in the same district. Seems like a net-negative to me.

Thank you so much for pointing this out. For people who are so focused on "data-driven education" they always seem to ignore this. The fact of the matter is that collectively they perform no better than public schools, while undermining those very schools they are trying to 'fix.'

Perhaps part of the issue is that people are focusing on a 'silver bullet' for education. Standardized tests, charter schools, and even things like kahn academy have been offered, but it's all based on a false premise. There is no silver bullet. We know the strategies we need to take to improve education, but we always fail at tactics because of the assumption that there is one tactic that can be applied everywhere and it's just going to work.

That said, there might be one tactic that could work everywhere: teacher autonomy. Let the people in the classroom decide the tactics they need to use in order to teach the children they are charged with educating.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#166

Post by vacri »

Nate75Sanders wrote: post #2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bur...

Isn't this rather self-evident, that those who work to gain control of the structure gain control of the structure, and those who don't, don't? It seems to just be a wordier variant of 'use it or lose it'. Does such a self-evident law really require the appellation 'Iron'?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#168

Post by yummyfajitas »

lutorm wrote: post #161
Locke1689 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is crazy. If you have another metric for student performance other than test scores, just say it.

We do have another metric: The teachers', who spend 5 days a week with the kids, knowledge. They have a dataset infinitely deeper and more multi-dimensional than a standardized test can give. Of course, it doesn't lend itself well to making graphs, but that's the nature of complex data.

The subjective opinions of a teacher are not a metric, they are merely a noisy data set.

They are also nearly worthless scientifically - they are incomparable (how do you compare the opinion of teacher A to that of teacher B) and non-reproducible (how can one repeat an observation).

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#169

Post by [deleted] »

MattGrommes wrote: post #163
yummyfajitas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do you have that things were better before 2001?

Talk to any teacher or administrator who gives a shit about their students and were teaching before 2001. I come from a family of teachers and school administration and they all point to NCLB as a huge turning point downward in education. Even the ones who favor more standardized testing as a way of finding teachers who aren't up to snuff say the test score has to be one input to the equation, not the only thing. Mak…

[deleted]

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#170

Post by yummyfajitas »

saraid216 wrote: post #162
yummyfajitas wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of the education system is to create a well-informed citizenry prepared for a productive life and for the duty of running a country. Could you be specific? In particular, how do I measure whether a citizen is prepared for a productive life or not? Heck, we could start by testing the hypothesis that getting everybody to focus lots of classroom time on standardized tests improves actual education. How would…

> Could you be specific? In particular, how do I measure whether a citizen is prepared for a productive life or not? I like that you ignored the latter half. You don't measure the citizen. You measure the rate at which the country is liberalizing. That is, the rate at which its core philosophical attitude is becoming more individualist, egalitarian, meliorist, and universalist. The purpose of public education is to s…

So you are proposing that the purpose of education is indoctrination into value system X, and propose that a successful system will indoctrinate more people?

Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc?

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