Teacher's Strikes.

[Playball40]

I think you missed the sarcasm in this one.......

They only work 9 months in the year, and just 7 hours a day. They are even told how to teach via the testing requirements. How much easier of a job can it get. #signmeup

Yeah, right.... 7 hours a day 5 days/week in a room full of kids, many of whom require special attention for one reason or another, plus:
* 1-3 hours a day after class preparing curricula for the next day
* Write and submit reports of myriad types and kinds
* Try to budget for their families on $36k/yr while having to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket
...and much much more
Sign you up? Gladly - I think you're brilliant, and could help a lot of kids learn how to think analytically. Go for it, PLEASE! (If you can afford to)

 

[Playball40]

Here's a thought! Pay teachers that work with disadvantaged, disabled, disenfranchised children MORE!!! The "worst" performing schools get the MOST resources and the BEST PAID teachers. Who's with me?

And progress is measured student by student.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We have Republicans trying to get them paid as little as possible, and we have Democrats trying to get them paid the same regardless of merit.

With the Democrats I think it's more a matter of not penalizing them for factors beyond their control. I have yet to see a proposed merit pay system that comes remotely close to basing it on merit rather than the quality of the students they get.

There's also the problem that even if it is based on how much they learn how accurate is the measurement. You get a major case of teaching to the test if not outright cheating.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

A big problem with all of this is that what is important in many states is that the conservative politicians can claim to have taxes low. Never mind if their red state is then on the lower end of the educational achievement scale. Case in point, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I remember in years past, Haley Barbour, governor of Mississippi, practically begging the voters to allow tax increases to improve Mississippi's bottom of the barrel education system. The voters wanted taxes to stay low. That won. Red state voters often don't care, not even a little bit, about education. The problem is that over the years, the GOP has exported that as a winning political move to as many states as they can. And it's not just the public schools that get hit. Higher education in Louisiana has taken great hits due to Jindal's low tax policies. And this has also happened in other red states. It is creeping brain rot from the right. GOP tax policies are easy to sell, but long term are harmful, and too many voters just do not care and cannot be made to care.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Completely true. If there's an issue with who gets benched on a sports team, you'll have 200 angry parents ready to take it to the Supreme Court. Curriculum issues? How to get your kid up to speed on his algebra? A select few parents care (and their kids generally don't have a roadblock with algebra) but for the rest, you can hear the crickets chirpin'.

 

[rousseau]

A big problem with all of this is that what is important in many states is that the conservative politicians can claim to have taxes low. Never mind if their red state is then on the lower end of the educational achievement scale. Case in point, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I remember in years past, Haley Barbour, governor of Mississippi, practically begging the voters to allow tax increases to improve Mississippi's bottom of the barrel education system. The voters wanted taxes to stay low. That won. Red state voters often don't care, not even a little bit, about education. The problem is that over the years, the GOP has exported that as a winning political move to as many states as they can. And it's not just the public schools that get hit. Higher education in Louisiana has taken great hits due to Jindal's low tax policies. And this has also happened in other red states. It is creeping brain rot from the right. GOP tax policies are easy to sell, but long term are harmful, and too many voters just do not care and cannot be made to care.

This wraps up the the decline of the U.S. in many areas in a nice tidy package. Conservative Culture. Your culture leans conservative, conservative ideas don't work, and they also make the culture become more conservative.

The only opposing force is history's march of social progress.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Here's a thought! Pay teachers that work with disadvantaged, disabled, disenfranchised children MORE!!! The "worst" performing schools get the MOST resources and the BEST PAID teachers. Who's with me?

And progress is measured student by student.

So, their motivation is that as the performance of their school rises, they get less money?

I don't think that's a very good incentive.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

We have Republicans trying to get them paid as little as possible, and we have Democrats trying to get them paid the same regardless of merit.

With the Democrats I think it's more a matter of not penalizing them for factors beyond their control. I have yet to see a proposed merit pay system that comes remotely close to basing it on merit rather than the quality of the students they get.

There's also the problem that even if it is based on how much they learn how accurate is the measurement. You get a major case of teaching to the test if not outright cheating.

The metric is how well did each particular student learn. A student that isn't the smartest, but overperforms their baseline is not really measurable. In my time in public school, the worst teacher I had wasn't remotely a bad teacher. The worst teacher I had was in college... one was young and learning the ropes of teaching at the collegiate level, the other was disorganized and I barely got through that prerequisite course (Calc III).

 

[Politesse]

What "metric"? All you've cited here is your personal evaluation as a student that your failings are the fault of your professor. What objective measure shows that this was a case of a bad teacher, rather than you being bad student?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

What "metric"? All you've cited here is your personal evaluation as a student that your failings are the fault of your professor. What objective measure shows that this was a case of a bad teacher, rather than you being bad student?

You seriously need to try and re-read my post. Then try to comment on it again. You couldn't be further off.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/ok...house-offering-free-beer-protesting-teachers/

Officials in Oklahoma raided an ale house and confiscated two kegs of beer that were intended to be delivered as gifts to protesting teachers. Local news station KOKH reports that the Patriarch Craft Beer House and Lawn this past weekend announced that it had prepared two kegs of beer as a gift for Oklahoma teachers protesting for greater education funding for public schools.
...
Authorities also said it was illegal for ale houses to give away beer above a certain alcohol content under state laws, so Patriarch had to resort to giving protesting teachers cans of “light” beer instead.

----

It is so nice to see Oklahoma has their priorities straight.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We have Republicans trying to get them paid as little as possible, and we have Democrats trying to get them paid the same regardless of merit.

With the Democrats I think it's more a matter of not penalizing them for factors beyond their control. I have yet to see a proposed merit pay system that comes remotely close to basing it on merit rather than the quality of the students they get.

There's also the problem that even if it is based on how much they learn how accurate is the measurement. You get a major case of teaching to the test if not outright cheating.

The metric is how well did each particular student learn. A student that isn't the smartest, but overperforms their baseline is not really measurable. In my time in public school, the worst teacher I had wasn't remotely a bad teacher. The worst teacher I had was in college... one was young and learning the ropes of teaching at the collegiate level, the other was disorganized and I barely got through that prerequisite course (Calc III).

"How well did each student learn"??

1) Are you accurately measuring it? The tests only cover a small portion of the total.

2) What about students who don't care? Teachers can only lead students to knowledge, not make them learn.

3) Are the expectations reasonable? You have a class with 15 who are one grade behind and 5 who are at level. Teach the assigned subject matter and 15 automatically fail at it. Teach the previous grade and 15 learn while 5 are basically idle. The latter produces far more learning but shows up as a zero at testing.

4) When you confront teachers with #3 expect rampant cheating.
4a) They quite rightly don't want to see their jobs and likely their careers ruined because of things they had no control over.
4b) The ones with decent students know that if they don't cheat they'll suffer because of the other cheaters.


Before we can hope to make a meaningful merit system we need to ensure the students who are entering the class are prepared. No social promotion and their learning is checked by means outside the teacher's control so they can't be pressured into passing a student.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What "metric"? All you've cited here is your personal evaluation as a student that your failings are the fault of your professor. What objective measure shows that this was a case of a bad teacher, rather than you being bad student?

When someone singles out one teacher as bad there are two possibilities:

1) The teacher is very tough and the students don't like it.

2) The teacher really is bad.

In my experience it's almost always #2.

Note that this is a different scenario from a student who thinks many teachers are bad. Then it's probably the student, not the teacher.

If I wanted to find out who was good and bad I would survey the top 10% of the students and ask them why they were selecting a particular teacher as bad.

I have yet to find a teacher that I considered bad that any other decent student I asked thought was good. They either agreed they were bad or didn't know. (However, I have known one teacher who I had considered good but who went bad the last semester I took a class with him. Some fellow students saw the same pattern--what we saw wasn't what he had been like. I suspect some major personal issue but all I know is the next semester he wasn't teaching.)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The metric is how well did each particular student learn. A student that isn't the smartest, but overperforms their baseline is not really measurable. In my time in public school, the worst teacher I had wasn't remotely a bad teacher. The worst teacher I had was in college... one was young and learning the ropes of teaching at the collegiate level, the other was disorganized and I barely got through that prerequisite course (Calc III).

"How well did each student learn"??

1) Are you accurately measuring it? The tests only cover a small portion of the total.

2) What about students who don't care? Teachers can only lead students to knowledge, not make them learn.

3) Are the expectations reasonable? You have a class with 15 who are one grade behind and 5 who are at level. Teach the assigned subject matter and 15 automatically fail at it. Teach the previous grade and 15 learn while 5 are basically idle. The latter produces far more learning but shows up as a zero at testing.

4) When you confront teachers with #3 expect rampant cheating.
4a) They quite rightly don't want to see their jobs and likely their careers ruined because of things they had no control over.
4b) The ones with decent students know that if they don't cheat they'll suffer because of the other cheaters.


Before we can hope to make a meaningful merit system we need to ensure the students who are entering the class are prepared. No social promotion and their learning is checked by means outside the teacher's control so they can't be pressured into passing a student.

Thanks for saying what I said in one sentence in several paragraphs.