It’s hard to not see this as anything but a disaster in the making:
Swift and severe changes are coming to Detroit Public Schools.
State education officials have ordered Robert Bobb to immediately implement a financial restructuring plan that balances the district’s books by closing half of its schools, swelling high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidating operations.
I seriously would rather swallow the barrel of a gun than deal with 60 kids in a classroom every day. Even though McMegan thinks public school teachers “are fairly well paid for the number of days they work.”
A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum)
Clearly, cutting taxes and getting rid of unions will solve this problem.
And I’m with you on being in a classroom with 60 kids in it. Fuck it, just shoot me and put me out of my misery. It would be the humane thing to do.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If you’re a good teacher, it doesn’t matter how many kids are in the classroom.
I actually heard that on a local right-wing radio station about twenty years ago.
ed
Always remember who went to the hissy fit mat to ensure that gazillionaires, who have prospered much more than others for the past 30 years, had their tax cuts extended. Fuckers.
John PM
Holy shit! My son has 25 kids in his kindergarten class and I don’t know how his teacher manages it. We have a friend who teaches the behavior disorder class in high school and I cannot imagine having 60 kids in that class. It would be nothing more than a holding pen until most of the kids decide to drop out.
R-Jud
Jesus, reading that has spiked my blood pressure.
I had 40-47 kids during my first eight weeks as a teacher (it varied daily, and I always had about 10% fewer desks than students), and I spent half an hour throwing up before leaving for work every morning.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Wow. Wouldn’t doubling the number of kids in a class be a violation of some fire codes, if not Geneva conventions against torture? The physical rooms aren’t usually built to contain 60 kids.
YellowJournalism
I’m sorry, but does anyone else hear a strange whistling sound?
ETA: And I’m sorry, but the entire paragraph that contains the quote about how well-paid teachers are is complete and utter bullshit masquerading as giving a crap about the unemployed and under-insured. It’s just another way to gin up resentment of honest, hardworking individuals who receive benefits and pensions.
socratic_me
But John, McArdle already explained that it is more important that the kids have good teachers than small class sizes. And everyone knows that all the best teachers will stick around and teach 60 at a time. Thus, we kill two birds with one stone. We get rid of all the bad teachers and we decrease expenses.
Lord knows that teachers, who routinely give 5-6 major presentations a day to an often unreceptive audience, all while maintaining a massive throughput of paperwork and ongoing evaluation of all aspects of their
employeesstudents, have no marketable job skills.terraformer
Austerity for all, and conservatives are going all-in to realize their Galtian utopia. Laws that let banksters get away with anything are the very essence of being American, while teaching and supporting children and collective bargaining are jeered as anti-American. We are so fvcked.
John PM
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
So I am assuming that asshat would be OK with 60 kids in his child’s classroom? Oh, wait, I forgot, his kids probably go to private school or are home schooled (if he has kids to start with).
CF Oxtrot
I notice quite distinctly that Obama has done nothing to reverse Bush43’s NCLB legislation or its effects.
Keep blaming those Republicans! Keep turning a blind eye to the Democrats!
Well done! More semen spewing forth from the dangling balloons! OH GOD I MOCKED ANOTHER REPUBLICAN! Where’s the kleenex!
joes527
@A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum): I taught science to a class of 60 middle school kids years ago (Peace Corps) You can maintain order and move through the book, but in the end it is more of a sorting process (the kids who already have the skills pass, the ones that still need to develop the skills fail) than an educational process.
But that is probably seen as a feature and not a bug by the folks pushing this.
Campionrules
Kansas City, Mo just went through something similar in the last year. The new Superintendent of schools closed over twenty school buildings and consolidated districts.
Now: KCMO schools have been terrible for literally two decades and the majority of the schools were operating at less than 50 percent capacity. However, there has been some backlash and social issues arising with the consolidation and the meshing of distinct socio-economic groups and kids into one school program.
Overall, KCMO, had to do something as the current path was not feasible.
I’ll be interested to see how Detroit – still suffering from population loss and terrible unemployment – handles this.
Punchy
Really? Bob Bobb is running the schools? What, was Willy Williams, Franklin Frank and Debra Debb unavailable?
Ash Can
I wonder how many teachers will be driven out of the Detroit school system by this, which needless to say would only exacerbate the problem.
This nation is going to tax-cut its way to the stone age.
ETA: And forget whatever Megan says; she has no idea what she’s talking about, ever.
gypsy howell
Is it me, or is the rightwing assault on America really picking up speed? This is simply breathtaking.
Why don’t they just get on with it and shut down the schools altogether? Think how much money they can save then!
Yeah, I know — that’s next week’s news.
Steve
Detroit has no tax base. There’s nothing to be done. It’s very sad for those kids.
M-Pop
In florida, they just repealed a class-cap for public schools – it used to be 19 students and now I have no idea how many kids they’ll cram into my son’s fourth-grade class.
Zifnab
My god. I remember my parents throwing a fit at the idea of 30 students in a class. But 60?! They better do every last assignment on scan-tron. Paper grading would be hellish otherwise.
I mean, at this point, why even dick around? Just jam everyone into lecture halls, university style. We can divvy up teachers into “professors” and “TAs”, grade on a bell curve, and just pray the losers drop out gracefully.
gypsy howell
Adding:
My daughter was talking yesterday about going back to school to get a masters in art eduction, and then teach. I had to dissuade her — I told her I didn’t think most schools were going to have art programs anymore. It broke my heart to tell her that.
meh
I imagine it’s only a matter of time before someone on the right starts arguing that we shouldn’t mandate that kids attend public school (mandate = soshulism). I mean, if they don’t wanna go, why should the Galtian supplicants of nation FORCE them to go? Seriously, if the parents are interested in their child’s education (which obviously poor parents aren’t, amirite?) they would pay for private school…duh! That would literally cut bazillions from the school budget and besides, as Judge Smails once said, the world needs ditch diggers (and non-unionized child labor).
Nick L
So, whose capital gains taxes do we need to cut to make this right?
gypsy howell
@Steve:
If we were a civilized country intent on surviving to the next century, we’d be throwing federal dollars at this as fast as we could.
But we’re not a civilized country anymore, are we?
Zifnab
@Campionrules:
Oh MLK. If only you could have realized.
The solution to desegregation isn’t to integrate schools at the barrel of a national guardsman’s gun. It’s to bankrupt the entire public school program until all the little white boys and little black girls get jammed into the same class.
pangloss
They are merely trying to encourage home-schooling. Not to worry, it will all work out for the best. It brings families together and gets oppressed teachers out from under the thumb of union thugs so they can join the ‘productive’ workforce.
The Moar You Know
Wow, that made me pop a blood vessel. My wife’s a high school teacher. She works nights. She works weekends. She works and/or trains for most of the summer, and when it all adds up, she gets less time off than I do, and I get three weeks off per year. Time which just goes in the vacation bank, because I actually can’t use it because my workplace is so shorthanded we can’t let anyone take vacation time. We got married six months ago. We still haven’t taken a honeymoon, and probably won’t. Because we can’t. We don’t have enough downtime.
Fuck Megan McArdle.
PurpleGirl
I’m not absolutely sure but fairly confident that teachers and other support staff have to decide to have deductions taken from school year paychecks to get paychecks during the summer. There’s a little term used — full time equivalent or FTE — to show that the partial teaching year is equal in time to other full time positions. A full-time 35 hours a week position equals 1,820 hours a year; 40 hours a week equals 2080 hours a year. I wonder if Megan has to keep a log of her hours for The Atlantic.
(Back in my paralegal days, I had to be able to bill every one of those hours to a client and note what I did workwise, or the firm wasn’t happy with me.)
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
On the plus side, if they are forced to close these schools and merge them with the suburban ones, suddenly the GOPers will have issues with this plan.
SenyorDave
Stories like this are becoming common these days. I see that almost nobody at almost any entity (Federal, State, County or Municipal) is willing to mention the T word – taxes.
IMO, Obama has shown no leadership whatsoever on budget issues. It almost certaintly wouldn’t have worked, but last year I desparately wanted to see him go the mat on the Bush tax custs. He lost his chance forever, and I beleive he scarificed the middle class.
Now we’ll have either one of two things:
Voodoo economics – the Mutch Daniels (Mutch is intentional, that lying sack of crap who was Bush’s budget director is clearly a Mutch) brand of economics, that inlcudes theory that the whole world should be outsourced and it will save gobs of money.
Eliminate as much as possible in the way of services for the poor and middle class, while still retaining every tax break in the world for corporations or the wealthy.
Obama, in his continuing quest to be non-confrontational, ends up standing for nothing.
I’d love to see him issue a stronger statement of support for the unions in WI, or go there himself.
ET
They may as well just shut down Detroit public schools at that point. Oh wait, that’s exactly what they want….
If it didn’t have a real world result I would just say do it, shut it down. Then those that hate public schools and want them all shut down (with no alternative in place) can see what would happen. Of course since it is not their neighborhood the likely wouldn’t care.
Ekim
Sounds like Idaho. http://www.idahopress.com/news/article_3a50742c-3e55-11e0-98b6-001cc4c03286.html
JPL
stuckinred mentioned this yesterday on one of the education threads. There must be studies that analyze education and petty crime. Illiteracy does not serve us as a nation.
Years ago the state of AZ preferred educating children of illegal immigrants rather than have them roam the streets out of boredom. Now that philosophy has changed.
PeakVT
This would be a great time for the state of Michigan to come to the rescue with more revenue, but with a Republican governor it’s just not going to happen. So what else can DPS do? Personnel costs (past and present) are already 2/3 of the budget.
negative 1
The problem is that everyone isn’t thinking “free-market solutions” around here. Obviously there has to be one teacher who is better than the others, so what we can do is have that person teach all of the kids in one big lecture hall. After all, it’s more important to have better teachers than smaller classrooms. Then, we can have all the kids pay to hear the lectures, on some kind of hourly rate. If you’re smart and don’t need much instruction to pass the graduate-equivalency exams, then you won’t need to pay much. If you’re dumb, you pay more because you’re consuming more teaching. See? Realizing efficiencies and using more market based solutions. Heck, we could even outsource the instructors to private companies. University of Phoenix Online could simulcast into the auditorium. After all, why stop at 60? It only looks like a lot if you’re used to 30.
gene108
If the poor don’t want to have inferior schools, they should’ve worked and become rich. (/sad sad sarcasm, as many people think this way in America).
RossInDetroit
Detroit schools are in appalling shape. My employer was going to bid on some outsourced services as the district was eliminating some union jobs. They visited one school, saw 8 police cars outside and just drove away without going in.
The buildings, equipment and materials are all worn out past usefulness. Anyone still trying to do a good job teaching in that environment deserves a medal.
Marmot
FSM help us. Isn’t there some magic threshold, like 28 students, beyond which maintaining order in the classroom becomes much, much harder?
I remember thinking some of my teachers were overburdened with class sizes around 32. What the hell is the point of 60?
Smurfhole
It would be fun to see McMegan deal with 60 children in a classroom. Maybe reading them “Atlas Shrugged” every morning would sedate them enough to make the day-long naptime semi-tolerable.
gene108
@negative 1:
We could shutter brick and mortar schools all together, the same way brick and mortar book stores and video rental stores are being shuttered, because of competition from internet retailers.
We should give parents and students the choice of opting for on-line K-12 education.
I mean, what 8 year old really needs to be around other kids his own age and wouldn’t have the self motivation to log into lectures and pay attention, without an adult pressuring them to listen?
I think we underestimate the self-motivation of our children.
Another reason allowing 8 year olds to work full time would be a benefit to society. We could harness both their youthful energy and boundless ambition.
agrippa
Teachers are not respected. And, neither is education.
Dennis SGMM
Detroit has lost 50% of its population over the past few decades. Parts of the city have gone back to nature. With huge unemployment and a severely diminished tax base I don’t see how they had any other choice. With the deficit as the existential threat du jour and the word “austerity” echoing through the halls of government Detroit will not be the last city to destroy its future.
nevsky42
I’ve pretty much treated the statement “Public school teachers are paid too much/enough for the work they do” as “I am horribly misinformed but will still offer you my opinions unprovoked as if they’re worth listening to” and it has saved me a lot of time in unwanted conversations…
lou
Don’t forget that’s 60 kids in ONE class. High school teachers have a classload of at least 150 kids a week, usually. That’s a lot of grading. If classes are increased to 60, the load increases to what — 200 or more? I don’t see how an English teacher, for instance, can effectively grade essays or research papers with that kind of workload.
American students do way too much multiple choice as it is.
Gozer
I wonder if some yahoo in MI is going to attempt to gut child labor laws like in MO…easy fix to this whole problem right there.
The one’s that fail, put ’em in the mines!
…
Sometimes it seems like I wake up every morning in 1890. Can’t be because there’s a cell phone here and a laptop there and a cable modem there, but then I read the news and I’m like WTF!?
Hawes
I wrote the other day that the key to education in this country was “teacher mastery”. Mastery of the material, mastery of the pedagogy and mastery of the classroom.
Mastery of the classroom was partly about keeping well-meaning educational fadsters from mucking about and mouthbreathing yahoos from mandating “teach the controversy”.
But it’s also about being able to command the room.
Sixty students? No fucking way.
jwb
@Hawes: With 60 students, there is no teaching, only lecturing. Because you have to remember that each teacher would have a minimum of 5 classes, probably more like seven, so that means between 300 and 420 students per teacher to administer. Now look at the grading. Spending 5 minutes per assignment times 300 students is 1500 minutes, which is 25 hours for each such assignment on top of the time in the class room. So besides the lecturing, that means almost complete reliance on multiple choice exams that can be machine scored. Writing and anything but the most basic reasoning skills—good luck teaching that.
NonyNony
I seriously would rather swallow the barrel of a gun than deal with 60 kids in a classroom every day.
Dealing with 60 college freshmen in a class is bad enough – and with college freshmen you can actually kind of hope that the ones who show up to a lecture hall class of 60+ are motivated enough to at least sit there and not disrupt the class for everyone else.
I haven’t taught in front of a high school class in well over a decade at this point, but when I did teaching to 30 students – all going through various stages of puberty, all with their own personal teenage dramas, and most absolutely certain that they would never use Algebra again in their lives was hard enough. Trying to teach to 60 high school students is a nightmare I wouldn’t ever want to enter – you wouldn’t be teaching, you’d be refereeing and/or babysitting depending on the kids and possibly getting in a lecture where you talk at them every once in a while. Jeebus.
Rommie
It’s not just Detroit, although DPS is getting the full monty for sure. The proposed budget for next year takes a 6 or 7 digit chunk out of public school district budgets, so the chopping block will have a long line if it passes as worded. Jam-packed classrooms for all! ’cause most of us in Michigan have to accept shared sacrifice now – except for Bidnezz, of course.
And this is from the so-called moderate R gov. I don’t like to think about what one of the teabagger candidates would have on the table if they had won.
RossInDetroit
It really doesn’t matter now what party the gov and mayor are from. There’s red ink as far as the eye can see due to plummeting tax revenues. The school system is way over-sized for modern student population and some consolidation has to happen. Until now this has been resisted because it will mean many students spending a lot of time on a bus to a distant building after their neighborhood school is closed.
matoko_chan
this is one thing that is going to wake up the base.
one of the reasons Buck lost here in Colorado was a viral video of him calling for the end of federal student loan programs. Even conservatives want their kids to go college.
And we successfully mobilized the campuses here to turn out Obamas base and stop the “red wave.”
We joked that the Red Wave turned into beachbreak in Colorado.
Rasmussen was epically spoofed by the cell phone demographic, even in the land of Malkin and Focus on the Family.
parents wont stand for a class size of 60.
its republican overreach.
Max Peck
We don’t need public schools anyway. The wealthy will go to private schools and the rest of our labor is being educated in their home countries.
An idea: let’s stop discussing the reality they’re creating and get in front instead. We all know what their goal is so let’s talk about what happens if they get what they want.
cyntax
Ah, the old chestnut about hours/days worked. Which is always trotted out by people who have actually, you know, taught. Never any word about class prep, professional improvement, and the like. The time teachers should get paid for is simply the time they’re in the classroom.
I wonder if McMegan knows anyone who sends their kids to a public school. Or is she just talking out her ass, again.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Jesus preached to more than 60 people at the Sermon on the Mount, and you didn’t hear him whining about the class size, did you? Did you? Huh?
QED.
RossInDetroit
Look, not everything is a political issue. Detroit had 2 million people. Now it’s under a million. They’re in debt and have huge deficits everywhere. many schools are under-used because there are half as many kids. Look at the facts. Closing half of the schools in a place that lost half of the population doesn’t necessarily mean doubling class sizes.
The schools will still have to meet standards to keep their accreditation.
I’m not saying everything will be OK, just disconnect the knee jerking and consider the situation like thoughtful people.
Southern Beale
Heard on CNN this morning about a plan to raise class size to 60 kids in Detroit.
I mean, WTF? Who thinks this is a good idea? I guess the people who have pulled their kids out of public school and don’t give a crap about the education of poor kids.
Sandals
read the gd link ross
John Cole
@RossInDetroit: What part of “swelling high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidating operations” is confusing you?
satby
Every glibitarian, and most of the Republicans I know, were educated in public schools. Kinda makes you wonder….
dcdl
Here is a post from Facebook by Meredith Menden
Are you sick of highly paid teachers?
Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do – babysit!
We can get that for less than minimum wage.
That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan– that equals 6 1/2 hours).
Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.
However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.
LET’S SEE….
That’s $585 X 180= $105,300
per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).
What about those special
education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an
hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.
Wait a minute — there’s
something wrong here! There sure is!
The average teacher’s salary
(nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days
= $277.77/per day/30
students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student–a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!
frongoozi
We actually have 54 in a class at the “famous” Catholic Jr. High I teach at in Taiwan (though, ‘Thanks, God’ they divide into two classes of 27 for our English conversation classes, so as to be interactive). The way it shakes out is basically as commenters here have suggested – the very premises of a “well-run” big class are different. My Taiwanese peers stand at the front of the class with a microphone and lecture, and only stop class for egregiously disruptive behavior. The student who really loses is the spirited guy with smarts who sometimes needs a reminder to get his head in the game. No time in the big classes to gather him in. Essays for homework? Socratic question and answer? No way. Testing separates the wheat from the chaff and that’s it. It’s not the end of the world, but I don’t know any American who is familiar with the system who would prefer it for their own child.
matryoshka
@pangloss: Actually, a lot of teachers are mothers, so this will have the added benefit of getting those women out of the work force and back home with the kids, where they belong, in the world according to Bible-thumping.
RossInDetroit
@John Cole:
I understand that perfectly well. From here – Detroit – the situation is quite a bit more complex than that single sentence.
Litlebritdifrnt
@The Moar You Know:
What you said. My DH is a High School Band Director, he already has a class size of 75+ (the nature of the beast). These know nothings think that you just waltz into a classroom at 7:30 and start teaching. They have no idea how much prep time goes into that. Lesson plans have to be prepared and presented to the administration prior to the start of the school week. You get to do your grades after school finishes on Friday so guess what, that generally means grades on Saturday, lesson plans on Sunday. Not to mention all the other stuff.
The biggest thing that pisses me off is that none of these people realize that for the one or two months a year that they do not work TEACHERS ARE NOT PAID! They are basically unemployed for two months. How many of these people would be willing to do that?
gex
@socratic_me: One very skilled teacher. One large stadium. One classroom per state. Problem solved?
gex
@gene108: If the poor don’t want to have inferior schools, they should have been born to better parents. AMIRITE? God blesses, you see. And you can tell if you are blessed or not just by how your lot in life is in modern day America. Poor people are the original sinners.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Steve:
that’s horrible – imagine a whole class of 60 disappointed blonde-haired and pink-cheeked kids…
Oh, wait, Detroit. My mistake – I guess it doesn’t matter then.
Monala
I was too late to join in the post about only 5% of students in the Rochester school district graduating college-ready, but my thoughts about that post are relevant here.
Almost everyone seemed to miss the point about the Rochester schools, whether they were sympathic toward the kids (“why should they strive for something better when everything is against them?”) or not (“They all want to be gangbangers!”). The things happening in Detroit are probably happening in Rochester on a smaller scale.
I graduated from an inner-city “dropout factory,” and I’ve always worked for urban youth-serving nonprofits, so I can tell you that many of the assumptions made on that thread–that so few kids graduate college-ready because they’re discouraged about their future prospects or don’t care–aren’t true.
Like young people everywhere, most kids in urban schools are resilient and hopeful about the future. Survey after survey shows that the vast majority of low-income kids (70-80%) want to go to college. But most of them don’t make it, because they don’t have the money, they’re not college-ready, etc.
So what happens? Well, they might not graduate college-ready because their school doesn’t offer the courses they need to go on to college. Or their school only has a couple of guidance counselors for hundreds of kids, who only have enough time to focus on the superstars who will make it to college no matter what (the 5%), or the trouble-makers. The majority of students in the middle who are neither just get lost, often not knowing and therefore not taking the classes they need for college, if their school even offers what they need.
My siblings and I were part of that 5%. My mother paid for my brother to take chemistry in summer school at a suburban high school–our school didn’t offer it. She got up early to drive him there before work every day, and he rode the bus for an hour to get home.
After my guidance counselor looked at me blankly when I asked her how I could sign up for the SAT, I called around (this was pre-Internet) until I found a suburban high school that would let me sign up with them. Again, my mother drove me there on a Saturday morning.
So you have your 5% of kids who have the savvy, the ambition and the driven parents to hurdle all these obstacles. What about all the other kids, who have the same dreams but don’t know how to get there?
R-Jud
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Most people think that teaching just involves telling kids what you learned when you were their age. Or, at K-3, singing them their ABCs and making them memorize their times tables.
Monala
An added point: I now live in the Seattle area, and a group of organizations and schools recently banded together to try to double the college-going rates of students in the communities to the south of the city, where poverty is concentrated.
One of the first steps this group took was to schedule a meeting with the presidents of local colleges and universities to talk about how we can work together to accomplish this. A woman sharing about this meeting observed that, “This was the first time these two groups–local principals/school superintendents, and college presidents–had ever been in the room together. Wouldn’t you have thought that two groups with such common goals, one in attracting college-ready students, and the other in getting those students ready, would have met before now?”
Triassic Sands
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Edited for accuracy.
Svensker
@gypsy howell:
No.
I imagine a lot of the kids stuck in those 60-kid classrooms are going to be coming from single parent homes, homes with parents who have no jobs, or the single parent has to hold down 3 jobs just to survive and is never home. I imagine the ability of whatever parent might be around to help give those kids the encouragement and help they’ll need to get through that kind of classroom experience will be nil. And I’d imagine that those kids are going to come out even more broken, uneducated and unemployable than ever before. What is wrong with the US that it would allow that to happen, while shoveling money to bankers and spending billions a year on wars and supporting Israel? The US has really lost its way.
old fart
I cannot believe the number of “ideas” that were expressed above that indicate a total lack of absorption in a classroom. How the …. did you learn to keyboard? Let alone spell your insane theories into print?? You must have had something beaten into you somewhere, somehow,by somebody
!