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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

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Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#191

Post by icelancer »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #123
halffullheart wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously this is a complex issue, and I don't mean to single you out here, but I'm surprised how often I hear the argument that teachers aren't good enough from people who are concerned about the quality of education in the US. It seems to me that in most other industries, the workers in the field are given the benefit of the doubt. In other words, do people really believe that Americans are great at being programme…

Most of us have been to public schools. We have direct, first-hand observations about the quality of teachers. I had a few stars, most were just getting by, some actively sucked. From everything I've ever heard, most people had the same experience. It's not like we're talking about something none of us know anything about. We've been there, seen it.

We're also teaching kids about subjects they literally couldn't care less about. Every single class I took on World History, Arts, and English literature was very close to useless. I bet the artists and English lit lovers would say the same thing about Chemistry and Physics.

We don't trust 16 year olds to make decisions on what they do and do not want to study, so we force them to study some things we know they won't like. And why?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#192

Post by saraid216 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #170
saraid216 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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?

What did you think it was?

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

Uh, polling?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#193

Post by ntumlin »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #183
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.

Classroom work? Like it used to be when we were kids. You went to school, and learned the material in class, and the teacher had a grasp on where everyone in the class. You did homework, and took tests prepared by your teacher. Now teachers in some states have to spend 30 min a day just teaching HOW TO TAKE A STANDARDIZED TEST! "here you go little johnney, fill in the bubble the whole way"

What prevents the teacher from giving his class all the answers so that he doesn't have to work and doesn't get fired for his students grades being too low.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#195

Post by ntumlin »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #172
bloaf wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I still have no evidence, but I'm going to use more extreme appeals to emotion and stronger language to try to make you overlook this point"

Ya, when it's kids at stake, I get emotional, and the hellish system in place has to go.

"Forget your silly logic and think of the children!"

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#196

Post by ntumlin »

saraid216 wrote: post #192
yummyfajitas wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? What did you think it was? > Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc? Uh, polling?

Hopefully the goal isn't to indoctrinate people but to prepare them to go to college, get a job, make money, spend money, etc.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#197

Post by sirmarksalot »

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...

That's a detail that's sort of glossed over in the article. I'd like to see some evidence for that. While I wouldn't be surprised if teachers work significantly less during the summer, I'd be very surprised to find out that they don't work at all. It rings of the assumption that classroom time is the only work time.

Even if they don't work all 12 months of the year, is it feasible for a teacher to take another similar-paying job during the off months? If not, then hourly pay is not a good indicator of income. I can't imagine a person who is only going to be available for 2-3 months, and who has split responsibilities with classroom preparation, would be able to get a non-menial job to fill in the gaps, somewhere along the lines of $15/hour.

So taking $15/hr * 40 hours (optimistic) gives $600 per week, multiplied by 13 weeks gives $7800 for the summer. Add that to the $52000 estimate from BLS, and you get $59,800 per year, which averages about $28 per hour on average.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#198

Post by yummyfajitas »

saraid216 wrote: post #192
yummyfajitas wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? What did you think it was? > Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc? Uh, polling?

Polling is another form of standardized testing (unless you propose asking different questions of each participant).

It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system (conveying knowledge/skills rather than indoctrination).

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#199

Post by saintgimp »

justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

The problem of standardized testing has a direct analogue in software engineering that makes the situation crystal clear to any programmer - remember when our industry thought it was a good idea to measure programmer productivity primarily (or even solely) by the number of lines of code written? How did that work out for us? Terribly, of course. LOC metrics have a passing resemblance to the thing you want to measure in software engineering but it turned out to be horribly bad at predicting the thing we actually cared about - working software.

Standardized testing bears exactly the same relationship to the outcome we actually care about in education.

In both realms, there is no easy single metric you can turn to. In the end, you hire great people and get out of their way. The best measurements come from multi-dimensional feedback from managers, peers, and customers. No it doesn't scale very well but it's the only thing that works.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#200

Post by jseliger »

justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

>The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it keeps teachers honest. Without testing, how do you measure teacher performance at all? How can you tell if someone who is capable of teaching well isn't just being lazy or getting distracted?

The other issue is that value-added testing should be used in evaluating teachers, but only a single component of a larger evaluation process. On its own, it's almost as pernicious as the system we have now.

For more on these subjects, see

* "What Makes a Great Teacher?": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...

* "Why Kids Should Grade Teachers": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/why-kids...

* The collection of articles I listed here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-... .

>It's easy to point out problems. It's useful and important that people find flaws and fault.

The largest issue isn't identifying problems—it's that the people who benefit most from the status quo (teachers, unions) derive very concentrated benefits, while the solutions to the status quo are diffuse (students, parents, society). One sees this pattern in many fields (farm subsidies are the canonical example), and there's an extensive economics literature on it.

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