Yesterday, breaking a self-imposed ban on reading Reason magazine, I popped over there briefly. I say briefly, because the first item I ran across pissed me off so much I thought “Why the hell are you doing this to yourself?” and immediately left. I didn’t even bother writing about it because what is the point? They’re all paid in full, bought and sold, so why even bother? But someone sent me something via email today, so I figured I’d bring it up. Here was the offending post:
So basically, their big plan to improve American education is gleaned from some idiot at one of Rick Berman’s (60 Minutes piece here) interconnected, self-serving, industry funded union bashing websites (EFAC, LaborPains, and the Center for Union Facts) regurgitated by some Daily Caller flunky passing himself off as a glibertarian until a better wingnut welfare writing position opens up. Peruse those sites for a bit and you can practically see the concern for education oozing out of every kerning. Or maybe that is just the slime of industry stooges.
I bring all of that up because of this post at the Great Orange Satan:
But then one Thursday, on the eighth day of my 35th year of teaching, I suddenly thought for the very first time ever, “I don’t want to be a teacher anymore.” It’s so weird how it just came over me like that. I don’t know if it’s like the challenges in Survivor where they keep adding water until the bucket finally tips over and the slow leak of problems finally made my bucket tip over. Or maybe this is how it happens for all older teachers.
It wasn’t a single thing that gave me this feeling. I’m hoping it doesn’t last. Maybe it was the severely autistic boy who showed up at my door the first day with no notice, but I don’t really think so. Maybe it was the rigid schedule the principal passed out for everybody to be doing the same subject at the same time of day, or the new basal reader we have to use that we aren’t allowed to call a basal reader.
Maybe it’s the look in my student’s eyes when we’re reading the newly required dry textbook when I’m used to wild and crazy discussions about amazing novels.
Maybe it’s that for the first time, our school didn’t meet AYP because two few English Language Developing students in the entire school didn’t pass their reading benchmarks.
When I heard this, I instantly thought of the two English Language Learners in my class who hadn’t passed their reading tests last year and how unfair I thought it was that they even counted on our test scores when they came to our school in January and were absent at least twice a week from that point on. I was wondering how I could possibly have gotten them to benchmark level in three days a week for three months. I was thinking how if only those two students hadn’t counted on our scores, we would’ve met AYP as a school. When I mentioned it to my principal, she just said there are no excuses. We aren’t allowed to have any excuses. We have to get kids to the level they need to be no matter what the circumstances. I thought of the little boy I had with an IQ of 87 who could barely read. I thought of the little girl in a wheelchair who’d had 23 operations on tumors on her body in her eleven years, and the girl who moved from Mexico straight into my class and learned to speak English before my eyes, but couldn’t pass the state test. Somehow it doesn’t feel like making excuses to acknowledge that they had good reason not to pass their benchmarks.
Maybe it was the e-mail I got saying that the department of education in Oregon has raised the cut scores again this year by six or seven points per grade level, even though they just raised them a couple of years ago. I found out that if they would have used these new cut scores last year, over half of the students in grades 3-8 who passed their benchmarks wouldn’t have passed. That led to a realization that as a school we have very little chance of meeting our adequate yearly progress this year, but of course I’m not allowed to say that because there are no excuses. It’s hard not to feel discouraged.
Maybe it was one of the two parents who contacted me in the first few days of school to tell me that their child doesn’t particularly love my program this year. I’m so not used to that. I’ve always had kids achieving highly and loving my class. I’m just not sure how I can use the mandated materials in the required time periods, focusing on the required skills and still get kids to really love it.
Maybe it’s the fact that I lost a third of my retirement when they reformed our Public Employee Retirement System a few years back and now I keep reading about how they want to slash it even more because of the greedy teacher unions and how this is the main reason for the budget problems in our state.
Maybe it’s that I haven’t gotten a real raise in a really really long time, or that we had to cut eight days again this year to solve our state’s budget problems. So I’m taking a big hit again, and nobody seems to notice or care.
Anyway, whatever the reason, for the first time in 34 years it hit me, I don’t want to be a teacher any more. I want to sit on a rocking chair on my porch and drink tea instead. Maybe if they offer $20,000 for me to retire next year, I’ll take it. It’s so weird because never in my wildest imagination did I think I’d feel this way. I wonder if I’ll still feel this way when I close my classroom door tomorrow. I sure hope not because it makes me really sad.
Clearly, the problem with education is that that person has too much job security.
Michael D.
When I first saw the name Rick Berman, I was thinking, “The Star Trek guy works at Reason?” It’s almost as bad as liking Chuck when that whackjob Adam Baldwin is one of the co-stars.
Nutella
This one-sentence proposal isn’t quite long enough. Who’s going to have the power to fire the incompetent administrators?
Walker
All of this educational “reform” crap irritates me to know end. Yglesias posts about “leveraging productivity gains” to improve education all the time. It is clear that neither he nor most of the reformers have any clue at all about pedagogy or how the psychology of how students learn.
It is like all the bad things from the days of New Math (or when I am not feeling charitable, SIGCSE). It is all tricks and gimmicks with no understanding of how students actually learn.
NobodySpecial
My one sentence proposal for solving America’s education problems:
Shoot every Republican who wants to slash education funds to go play toy soldiers.
Every bit as viable, and replacement shells will create jobs.
Mr Furious
Why does that teacher hate America?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Fine, as long as the administrators have the authority to give any teacher they hire the salary they think the teacher deserves, and the ability to automatically raise the revenue necessary to pay for it, including the ability to automatically adjust local and state taxes.
FlipYrWhig
@Walker: Yglesias is HORRENDOUS on education.
Jewish Steel
I’m calling for the re-branding of public school teachers: Child-Janitors.
Hang on. Child-Janitors®
There.
Loneoak
Sheesh, you need at least three sentences to explain any viable school reform proposal:
1) Fire all the teachers and sell all the schools.
2) ???
3) Profit.
Lit3Bolt
When do politicians and CEOs and glibertarians have to pass state-sponsored required tests to see if they actually know what they are doing/are learning anything?
The way we treat children, and those who care for children, in this country is an abomination.
Loneoak
@Jewish Steel:
Rarely is the question asked, is our children cleaning?
geg6
Another national disaster courtesy of that motherfucker Bush. And Ted Kennedy’s worst political legacy, sadly.
All I can say is that teacher has my sympathy, as do most teachers. Best and worst job on earth.
MikeJ
@Lit3Bolt: Yglesias, and I would guess the Reason(sic) gang too, are against testing for people who put dangerous chemicals that can cause severe burns on your head. Too intrusive.
JCT
I will never understand all this teacher-hate. Sure, my kids have had a few not-so great ones, but virtually all have been dedicated professionals.
We once lived next door to a very religious family with 7 kids. She insisted on home-schooling them leading to a number of hair-raising discussions where she would talk about trying to minimize math lessons for her son (it was apparently *his* favorite subject) because she thought it was useless and boring.) My husband and I are university professors and never in a million years could I imagine being good enough to adequately home-school my kids.
So yeah — lets demonize those folks who have the wherewithal and dedication to do this increasingly thankless job.
FlipYrWhig
I certainly had plenty of bad teachers in my life. But the thing is, if you fire the bad ones, who gets the job instead? It’s not like you’ve got a surplus of better ones just itching for their shot at Major League Teaching. It’s fucking cruel to take a job that’s already high-stress and practically thankless and then make its structure more punitive and take away the few things that make it feel worthwhile in the first place. Damn.
R-Jud
@Jewish Steel:
Child jailors, sir.
When I was with Teach For America in Chicago, we had to take courses at a local university [ETA: not one of the good ones!] to earn our regular certification (this was a condition of our emergency certification).
One of the classes was child psychology and development. The instructor was a nutcase who believed the moon landings were faked, that AIDS was created by the military, 9/11 (which happened during the second week of our course) was an inside job, etc., but he did say one thing that stuck with me:
“The powers that be do not want our schools to be schools. They want them to be day jails.”
On my very worst days, that’s how I thought of myself: as a guard at the day jail. Not because of the kids, but because of the way we were expected to treat them. That’s how it’s set up.
MobiusKlein
@FlipYrWhig: Yglesias is bad, but not Reason-bad. I’d say he’s merely wrong.
FlipYrWhig
@MobiusKlein: I disagree. He’s wrong _and_ dogmatic about his wrongness. MikeJ pointed out his views on hairstylist licensing, which aren’t just odd, they’re absolutely set in stone. He does that a lot. IMHO he does that with public education, too, which, like with barbers, he has precious little experience with.
Brian S
I say Mike Riggs ought to spend a year in a typical classroom as a teacher, but let’s not tell him it’s a year, because lots of people can tough out a bad situation if they know how long it’s going to last. Make him do it a year but tell him this is his career for the foreseeable future. He’ll be crying like a kid with a skinned knee in 6 weeks, I guarantee you.
Makewi
Yes, clearly this one teachers self serving lament about how changes to the job have affected them are PROOF that one libertarians comment is worthless (and probably evil).
Clutch414
Sweet Tull reference.
Judas Escargot
@Walker:
WTF is that even supposed to mean?
Productivity implies a hard metric, which could very well be possible for education, but I just don’t see how industrial-style optimization is supposed to apply here.
“Average Educational Productivity this month went up by 0.374 Child-Tests per Fortnight-Dollars. Success!”
Walker
@JCT:
I have been on admissions committees where we looked at home schooled kids. It is very bimodal. It is either religious families, or disenfranchised educated families in bad/rural communities. As a general rule of thumb, if both parents have graduate degrees, the kid will be better than just about anything you see form traditional schooling. Otherwise, not so much.
Roger Moore
@Nutella:
I’m very glad you asked that question. There’s an excellent answ… wait! What’s that over there? [disappears while your back is turned]
Edison
I want to know when we can start directing the money lost to tax breaks for Big Oil towards those more deserving. It’s not as if we don’t have enough money to pay teachers!
danimal
It’s all so depressingly predictable. The budget-cutters will succeed in cutting salaries and benefits to barely more than minimum wage, at which point the best and brightest will simply move on to become bank tellers or loan processors.
Then, when the schools continue to struggle, someone will point out that the abysmal salary structure is failing to attract qualified teachers. Salaries increase, better teachers are recruited, schools improve until next tax cut reduces revenues, budget cutters slash salaries, rinse and repeat.
kindness
When they changed teaching from programs to test taking in the name of being able to evaluate everyone on the same basis, they shitcanned the art of teaching.
I hear it from my spouse all the time now. And the Administrators all all gung ho to the point where the teachers think they just want to use the program to get rid of the older/higher paid teachers. That may be cynical but that’s the way glibertarians think now days.
poco
@Makewi: You the new troll?
Roger Moore
@Loneoak:
I think you got that wrong:
1) Give away all the schools to private enterprise
2) Get a job at the company that you gave the schools away to
3) Profit
I even know what the middle step is! Take that, underpants gnomes!
Bobby Thomson
@JCT: I’m ambivalent about home schooling. On the one hand, it means I don’t have to run into those fucking whack jobs at school events and my kids don’t pick up their insanity from their kids.
On the other hand, I’m scared for what it means for the future crazification factor. It’s literally a generation of kids kept out of schools because their parents are too racist and/or wingnutty to let them go to school with brown people and learn that the world isn’t 6000 years old. And after a decade or more of that crap they probably never will learn.
poco
eta: Or did I misunderstand you?
Jewish Steel
@R-Jud: You union thugs and your conscience.
In my capacity as a freelance music teacher I never cease to be amazed at college aged kids who haven’t the foggiest idea how to go about learning how to do something. It ain’t their fault; nobody has ever taken the time to get into their heads and show them how knowing stuff works. They are usually pleased to be given the tools to do so on their own.
@Loneoak: Any variation on “is our children” will make me laugh. Every time.
PurpleGirl
For 15-odd years I worked for a non-profit organization that recruited, trained and placed volunteers to work in NYC public schools. Our volunteers provided extra help to teachers, working with children one-to-one. Our programs reached over 250,000 students in close to 1,000 schools. The organization was largely independent of the Board of Education and raised its own operating funds. (The organization did have a contract to train parents to be involved with their children’s schools besides training them to be volunteers.)
When I lost my job I decided not to work in education if I could help it. The politics of it is just horrendous; whether considered from the City administration, parents, politicians, whoever. Teachers try to do their best under some vary bad circumstances. And we do not value them appropriately. (Yes, when I attended the public schools, I had some bad teachers but I also had some wonderful teachers.)
Makewi
@Roger Moore:
The actual formulation is:
1) Throw money at the problem
2) ???
3) Profit!!!
Rinse and repeat
Loneoak
@Makewi:
The point is that the glibertarians really have nothing to contribute to the problems this teacher identifies. Their “solutions” are consistently … glib.
MikeJ
@poco: No, it’s been around for a long while.
poco
@MikeJ: Ah! Thanks. Good to know. I guess.
Warren Terra
One of these things is not like the other.
I mean, first of all, this is silly, in the sense that the first half of it is already true. I’m pretty sure that if a teacher is proven to be committing felonies, or not showing up for work, or sexually abusive, their ass will be canned.
So the only question is whether the education system will be fixed if we fire teachers for “failing their students”. And keep in mind: such firing are also completely noncontroversial – as long as you can agree on definitions. Which is no little bit tricky in practice. If a teacher is supposed to be teaching arithmetic, and the students enter their class ready and willing to learn and emerge not knowing simple addition, sure, bounce them. But if it’s a matter of high-stakes testing, and arbitrary cutoffs, and disruptive students, and mainstreaming the special-needs kids, and fluctuation – who’s to say that the teacher isn’t doing a good job of teaching and is being failed by their school?
And even if we were to grant total credibility to high-stakes test results for the sake of argument: does anyone really think that simply firing the teachers thus identified as sub-par is sufficient? That no other social support might help students be ready to learn? That no other training or income support might help teachers?
This whole screed is simply hate-the-teachers disguised as education reform.
Roger Moore
@poco:
Nah, Makewi is an old troll who’s back for some more trolling.
trollhattan
@poco:
Nah, is old, tired troll and evidently from the loopy, poor grammar–home-schooled.
TenguPhule
1) Throw money at the
problemRepublican2) ???
3) Profit
4) Blame Unions and return to step 1
Corrected for depressing accuracy.
gwangung
Pretty much, yes. It shows solutions don’t match to problems.
Walker
@Judas Escargot:
Ygelsias believes that we can solve everything with technology, and reduce the number of actual instructors. He sees Khan Academy as the future of formal education.
R-Jud
@Jewish Steel:
I never cease to be amazed at the adults who don’t know how to do that.
What do you teach, specifically?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Makewi:
You can start that when parents no longer have to do fundraisers for their kids’ schools.
Makewi
@TenguPhule:
Lord knows the public school systems are bastions of Republicanism.
Johnny Coelacanth
OT: ABL is back and taunting the readers from atop a no-comments-allowed front page post. Hmmm. Way to go from “alright in my book” to “kind of an asshat” in one post.
Ah well, sister’s got a brain tumor, whattayagonnado? She’s still less of an asshat than Johnnie -Wanker- Walker.
gwangung
This only works if teachers don’t interact with students and students are passive receptors who need only to have their heads filled with knowledge.
That does not have any relation to the real world.
delosgatos
@FlipYrWhig:
This.
JC
Off-topic, but since BJ is a talkative place, on ABL’s latest (gotta post somewhere about it!)
a. Funny, I was chuckling at her post. Great sense of humor, and intelligence.
b. Hey, Prince in concert – saw him a couple of months ago, Oakland Coliseum. Dude is bad-ass. Awesome concert.
c. ABL should know, Cole is slave to Tunch. He MUST feed Tunch, otherwise VERY BAD THINGS will happen to him. Poor Cole is a Gamorrean guard, to Tunch-Jabba. We all know that.
d. So many short phrases to sum that post. A few come to mind:
“Kiss my Grits!” (Hey that’s the first thing I thought.)
“How’s about a nice hot steaming cup of STFU?”
“Neener neener neener, I’m still posting! TPHTTTHT!!” (Loony Tunes Sylvester raspberry.)
and her chosen variety “KMBA!”
Fun all around! Not to mention, hot photo, if I’m allowed to say that.
However, must also be observed, ABL does get worked up, when people are wrong on the interwebs. Same with the trolls giving her crap. It’s all a bit silly, in my opinion.
Joe Beese
Is that@Johnny Coelacanth:
If that’s an actual picture of her, I’m in love!
Mnemosyne
@poco:
Oh, Makewi’s not a new troll. More like a yawn-inducing, played-out troll.
Citizen Alan
Every day, I thank the FSM that I got out of teaching after three years. The last straw was a principal who told me to my face that he wished the band program I ran was less successful so that more kids would go out for football. This in turn would cause the football team to have a better record, resulting in higher gate receipts at home football games. I started working on my application to law school the next day.
Warren Terra
@Johnny Coelacanth:
I’m a bit with Johnny on this. I like ABL (and haven’t read the “ABL made people feel hurt” thread from this morning). But I don’t like threads without comments; the whole idea seems antithetical to the usual style here. Popping up a closed-comments thread just to taunt the haters is dickery, and her doing so makes me like her a bit less. I still like her – buta bit less, now.
srv
@JCT:
Imagine you’re in your freshman class with the Fonz of Freedom and Rush. They probably both have heavily dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged, and are regularly beaten up by the jocks they so much want to hang out with. What kind of attitude do you think they’re going to have for the adult in the classroom?
Roger Moore
@Johnny Coelacanth:
Yeah, it goes completely against the Balloon-Juice ethos. You’re supposed to
trolltaunt your readers and then proceed to argue with them in the comments. If you’re JC or DJ, you’ll win a lot of the arguments in the comments, too.gelfling545
@Walker: I want to thank you from the bottom of my retired-teacher heart for that comment.
JC
There is something off – for THIS site – about not allowing comments. I remember when everyone here was reaming E.D. Kain, worse than with ABL, because he would drive-by post. It doesn’t quite fit with the ethics.
However, her neener-neener post, is really funny.
So I’m conflicted.
Citizen Alan
@Jewish Steel:
A very good friend of mine recounts how, when he was Physics TA at the local university, a freshman came up to him in the lab class he was overseeing to ask how to use a ruler. Not how to use a ruler to perform this specific experiment, but, in general, how to use a ruler. Not only had she never seen one before, but she could not even conceptualize how a flat surface with marks on it at regular numbered intervals could be used to measure distance across a flat surface.
I often wonder if the fall of Rome was preceded by an epidemic of contagious abject stupidity.
Loneoak
Closed comments are bullshit.
cleek
@JC:
it’s cheap, lazy and lame.
Judas Escargot
@Walker:
Must be a fellow fan of The Prisoner.
Johnny Coelacanth
I did read both, entire, ABL kerfluffle posts and was with her right up until the “nyah nyah fuck you” post just now. I’m under no illusion that anybody gives a shit what I think, but bad form is bad form.
John Cole
@JC: I find it amusing. It was obviously done to just piss people off, and it is working!
slag
Well, there’s one nice thing about glibertarians…you know they’ll never put too much thought into their positions. They’re cogitationally conservative.
danimal
Oh gawd, who’s on the lookout for johnny w?
freelancer
@Loneoak:
Seconded. I <3 ABL more than most people here. But trolling haters (Yay!) and then locking comments is ridiculous.
Carrie
JoooooooooooooOOOOOOOHN!
ABL’s thread has closed comments and this upsets me and yaddah yaddah and she’s laughing when she should be crying and well, never mind. I’ll just send you an email.
Joel
I found the succeeding post hilarious.
Loneoak
@freelancer:
Yeah, I like ABL a lot. We even had a brief email conversation last week about the Texas cheerleader rape case. I agree with her like 95% of the time and always like a good rant.
But closing comments is bullshit.
PIGL
@Makewi: “self serving” does not mean what you think it means.
MikeBoyScout
Any person in 2011 who is either thinking about entering teaching as career or or willing to continue their career in teaching is either a hero or a masochist.
Alternatively, standardization to the lowest common denominator combined with low wages for and demonizing of the people who instruct our children is bound to produce the type of society our Galitan Overlords and their RandRoid lemmings dream of.
slag
@JC:
I had the same response. But in this case, I thought that closing comments worked like a good punctuation mark. Valuable when used sparingly.
Johnny Coelacanth
@John Cole: Yeah, and it’s also alienating people who were sympathetic to her. Does it matter? Not really. It does dampen my enthusiasm to read anything she writes in the future, because petulant twits are boring, even if they are “on my side.”
Corner Stone
@John Cole: So sad.
JC
John Cole:It IS amusing, no doubt. I’m only commenting today, because it was funny. Still a drive-by trolling post. Since I didn’t participate in the prior 500 comment plus meta-thread, I’m assuming this one will be shorter, since meta-about-ABL has to get played out at some point.
Her markup of Greenwald using scribd was sweet though.
opal
@Mnemosyne:
Makewi hails from Protein Wisdom, nowadays a 24/7 plea for free money from Jeff Goldstein and his imaginary Classical Liberal family.
Mr. Poppinfresh
Honestly, people- she’s not a very good writer with an enormously high opinion of herself. Trolling you and getting a strong reaction is just feeding into that.
Just scroll on by. DougJ will be along soon to post something interesting. Don’t waste your anger on someone who feeds on it.
poco
@Citizen Alan: I had a student who proceeded to staple each of her three separate pieces of paper separately (each page was stapled to itself) before handing them to me. I was speechless.
JC
Slag:Good point. SPARINGLY is key.
And, while a site like this doesn’t have ‘rules’ per se, but if all of ABL’s posts don’t have comments, then, in as much as an anonymous opinion on the internet is worth anything, I’ll be less interested.
freelancer
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
ABL writes good and does other things good too! Also, don’t confuse self-respect with over-inflated ego, mister poopinfrosh. So there.
Makewi
@PIGL:
No, I think you are thinking of “self servicing”. You should stop that.
Jebediah
@Makewi:
Well, here is one data point that shows some are. Check it out.
(For those who don’t want to linkfollow, it’s to a story about a school board ordering conservative viewpoints to be included in science courses.)
Makewi
@opal:
Actually I “hail” from a loosely affiliated collective of semi autonomous meatpacking glitterati. I am also considered something of an excellent musician amongst the didgeridoo community.
gwangung
@MikeBoyScout: Seriously.
Education is a labor intensive process. Home schooling is labor intensive. And labor intensive means money. Lots of it.
I can’t take anyone seriously if they ignore that.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@freelancer: And that’s a valid opinion that you’re entitled to. You can click on her stories and read them. Go hog wild.
For me, though… not the least bit interesting. Forced, obvious, and trite. As I said in another thread, “trying too hard”.
I’m simply advising the people who fall more into my camp than yours, to save their anger for someone who doesn’t get off on the ‘persecution’. Troll-derived rage was old back when I was using a 14.4k modem to dial into BBS’s. It will be better for the site overall if people simply ignored it altogether and got on with their business.
JC
Freelancer:Well, this is the question, isn’t it? IS WE LEARNING I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?
Cole writes well, and funny – but also doesn’t mind admitting he can be hilariously wrong sometimes. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember ABL holding a STRONGLY HELD OPINION, and then, based on evidence, changing it. But doesn’t ABL just double down?
I could be wrong, feel free to correct me, and point to some counter evidence.
E.D. Kain, also, willing to learn via evidence – (after much pounding). Same with DougJ, Tim.
That’s the difference between self-respect and ‘enormously high opinion’. and one of the differences between trollin’ (and we’ve got a lot here in the comments), and good BJ front-paging.
opal
@Makewi:
How’s Jeff’s retarded kid?
Jewish Steel
@J-Rud: I teach the bitch-empress of instruments, the guitar!
@Citizen Alan: Ah, very sad. Still, how you get that far and never encounter a ruler? I’d like to blame the parents but that can lead to an infinite regress. I do my best to fix ’em.
ppcli
Well, if ABL keeps including photos, I can live with the locked comments. Hubba-hubba!
MikeBoyScout
@85 gwangung:
People tell me I possess great erudition. I had 3 teachers from K-12 who put forth a LOT of extra effort on me and 2 parents who supported all my teachers.
It ain’t me babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me babe.
It was the effort of my teachers and parents who taught me to be smarter and better than I ever could have been on my own.
freelancer
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
Concern is Duly noted. You’re awfully serious about the “business” of people reading goofy shit on the web. When this site wants to do activism, it does; but mostly it’s a group of people who’ve come together to think quirky shit and offer opinions or jokes about things happening in the world. The people in “your camp” as you describe it act like she’s sullying the prestigious name of a long heralded and sacred publication. BJ ain’t the freakin’ Crimson. It ain’t even the same ballpark. Lighten up, FFS.
slag
@JC: Agreed.
opal
@Makewi:
Further proof that conservatives are never funny.
Lord Kinbote
@opal: I hadn’t heard that about Jeff’s child. Sad. I’m guessing it was the trauma of being repeatedly cockslapped.
Carrie
@Johnny Coelacanth:
Oh noes! Qu’elle horreure!!!!
Seriously people, this is a fucking blog not a death race.
Go outside and pull some fucking weeds if you’re feeling all ornery and shit.
dollared
@srv:this. 90% of Glibertarianism is “don’t tell me what to do, my dad makes more than you do, and I’m really smart, so I don’t need you!”
It really is the Moral Philosophy of Arrested Development.
JC
Freelancer:
Hey, F*CK YOU, buddy! How dare you drag the exalted Balloon Juice site through the muck, comparing it to that trash, the Crimson??!?
Go to hell, scumbag.
Jewish Steel
@ppcli: Seconded.
Betcha someone will have a problem with it. Any takers?
Socratic_me
As touching as the teacher’s post is, it is unnecessary to the argument. The Reason post is dumb because principals already have that power. They have to show their work, of course, because someone’s livelihood is at stake, but all the reasons given would be sufficient reason for a principal to fire a teacher.
waratah
Good post John, while I watched the teachers in Wisconsin I wondered how many teachers with enough time to retire will do so this year. How many teachers with not enough that will decided to they have enough time for a different career. How many college students will change a education major.
Johnny Coelacanth
@Carrie: Hey, I _said_ it didn’t really matter. I’m just some asshole on the intertubes. You should go back in time and try that “go outside” shtick on Johnny Walker, or ABL, or somebody who really needed it.
Roger Moore
@Socratic_me:
And that’s what the
union bustersreformers want to change. Making the principal show his work and go through due process takes time and is annoying. Bosses should be allowed to fire any employee at any time for whatever reason they want. Only when teachers spend every waking minute looking over their shoulder wondering when they’re going to get fired will they be properly motivated to teach our kids.JCT
@Walker: That’s an interesting viewpoint. I just wouldn’t have the balls to take on what I consider to be an incredible responsibility. Now, my husband and I step in and broaden our kid’s views when we felt the teachers were not going into sufficient detail (especially regarding science and math)? Yes. Teach the whole shebang? No way.
@Bobby Thomson: In this particular case, the parents didn’t believe in vaccination nor evolution. Try to imagine the fateful day when she discovered I was a physician-scientist with a genetics degree. Fun stuff. You would have thought she met the anti-Christ. I’m Jewish too — Trifecta!
Martin
Here’s the current state of my son’s middle school. This is in one of CAs top rated school districts:
+ The PE teachers may not be back next year. For the last 2 years they’ve been self-funded, with parents paying extra to allow their kids to take PE before school in exchange for an additional elective during the regular period. Further, the PE teachers offer after-school intramural sports for a fee. Good for 2-income households. They don’t yet have enough commitments for next year to ensure the PE teachers salaries will be covered, but the taxpayers are getting a free ride on PE in exchange for the PE teachers starting at 6:30AM and working until 5:30PM.
+ The music teacher may not be back next year. Similar deal – afterschool programs in jazz band, string orchestra, percussion, etc. Also a free ride for the taxpayers as parents pay 100% of his salary. He has 450 students playing approximately 30 different instruments, organizes at least one concert per week, and records and produces MP3s of everything the various groups perform.
+ The art teacher may not be back next year. Again, similar deal. She covers 3 middle schools on a rotating basis and hosts afterschool classes in various art media types. She works tirelessly to get student artwork displayed everywhere from city hall to exhibits in local galleries, which my son benefitted from last year and even caught the attention of two local artists who helped him do some bronze sculptures.
+ The science budget is gone. Teachers are still employed, but no money for equipment or supplies. We’ll be fundraising for that.
+ The textbook budget is gone.
+ The honors math and history courses will probably be canceled so that the school can take over 6th grade instruction from one or more elementary schools that will be laying off their 6th grade teachers.
Maximum class size will increase to 45. Everything but science will hit the max. Science is stuck at 36 due to fire code. The vice principal is a history teacher and he combines his class with another history class on some days so that he can do his administrative duties. The other teacher for those periods has 75 students.
The schools have no cafeteria, no gym, no auditorium, no pool or other amenities. No lockers. No buses. There’s a single multipurpose room. There’s effectively no heat or AC. The hallways between classes are outdoors, so only classrooms have lighting, and they only turn on in the winter in the mornings. There’s solar on the roof that turns a profit for the school, so it actually generates income. There’s no kitchen or lunch ladies. There’s a centralized food service for the district with the equivalent of roach coaches that bring everything to the schools, so the staff can cover multiple schools simply by running different lunch schedules. Not since little house on the prairie one-room schoolhouses have schools had so little overhead and cuts are still coming.
So, with nothing left but teachers, what will the ability to fire teachers accomplish?
mclaren
As with all far-right psychoses, this sounds like a good idea provided we reverse it.
So what we really need to do to reform public education is give the teachers the right to collectively fire any self-serving sociopathic power-freak fringe lunatic principal or vice principal or school board member for any of the following reasons: gross incompetence, anti-intellectualism, hatred of creativity, stupidity, lack of basic administrative skills, sexual perversion, grifting, etc.
Makewi
@opal:
You have a dark soul apparently.
PurpleGirl
@Martin: Many, many public schools in NYC have to fund raise to have things like art and music (and probably sports). Some schools used an art program my former organization has to fill the art area and it wasn’t doing art, it was more concepts of art and expression. This is something that I found horrible. If a school’s parents can’t get the money together, their students don’t get special programs. And Bloomberg is talking about laying off some 4,000 teachers for next year. But he refuses the idea of raising taxes on NYC’s richest residents.
Carrie
@Johnny Coelacanth:
You are absolutely right. You said :
it didn’t really matter.
So everybody fuck off (except for Johnny Coelacanth, of course)
Corner Stone
@Martin: My “exemplary” school in the ISD has already reduced PE, Library, and Nurse to “aide” positions. And killed the G&T program.
The state of TX is looking at firing up to 100,000 teachers.
ETA, forgot – Art is gone and Music is one day a week.
And “Music” is learning songs by rote. Not actual “music”.
gwangung
Two things occur to me:
A) This approach deliberately neglects cultivating part of our children’s brains. And apparently reformers don’t care that this is happening. Which basically makes me wonder: how the hell do they expect to compete with the rest of the world if they’re deliberately not developing one part of a kid’s brain. They can’t be considered true reformers if they neglect that part of a person’s development.
B) This approach, by default, means almost all of children’s exposure to the arts is pop culture, i.e., rap music, TV, blockbuster movies and TV. Hm. Methinks that reformers wouldn’t like that. Me-also-thinks that these are the same geniuses who are all hot about cutting the NEA, NPR, etc. where the BULK of the funding goes to higher and more sophisticated culture….
poco
@Martin: This is fucking messed up.
Joel
When I think about it, the wingnut obsession with destroying education stems from the paranoia that their idiot sons won’t be able to survive the competition. So they have to bring everyone down to that level…
opal
@Makewi:
Yes. And it belongs to me.
Yukoner
@Martin:
It’s when I read things like this that I wonder just where the US will end up.
I also wonder how long we in Canada will hang on to the rather basic and important idea that we need to pay taxes in order to have a decent society.
Robert Waldmann
I hate to pick on the English of an English teacher* but I think that “two few English Language Developing students” should be “two too few English Language Developing students.”
*I’m lying
Barb (formerly Gex)
Bah. The only lernin you need is a good lesson or two from that there Bible, amirite? And if them wimmin folk would stay home like they are sposed to then we wudn’t have to spend no money on edumacation and mah taxes will be lower.
Tonal Crow
The Republicans’ object is to increase the rate at which students fail so that:
1. They can point to the failure as a reason to end public education (and cut taxes for the rich);
2. They can point to the failure as a reason to end our right to unionize;
3. They can point to the failure as a reason to subsidize religious “schools”; and
4. Students will become increasingly unable to tell bullshit from fact, and thus increasingly likely to vote for Republicans
Can you say “evil”? I knew you could.
hamletta
This just breaks my heart. I feel kinda guilty for having grown up when and where I did. I got a fantastic K-12 public education, with music and art and field trips and week-long retreats. Some of my teachers had PhDs, and they were all well-compensated.
What is wrong with us?
My Truth Hurts
Some of you are really using this space to whine about ABL shutting off comments to her post and how it hurts your wittle fee fees? Really?
I don’t think I have ever seen such a group of precious babies. Get over yourselves. If what she has done alienates you against her she didn’t need you on her side in the first place, splitters.
jefft452
@15
“… if you fire the bad ones, who gets the job instead?”
The nephew of the Mayor’s campaign contributor, The Principal’s golfing buddies, and the mistresses of the City Councilmen
Jebediah
@Martin:
But Heaven fucking forfend that the rich pay a few more bucks in taxes.
Caz
The problem with education is govt interference and control. After all the billions and billions of dollars spent on education over the last couple of decades, we have not seen one iota of improvement in educational results. Test scores and graduation rates have remained stagnant. Doesn’t that tell you that perhaps we should try a different approach than throwing more federal dollars at education? How about letting localities control their own educational systems? When something’s broke, you try something new to fix it, you don’t keep doing the same thing expecting new results. That’s called insanity.
opal
@Caz:
Do you believe in evolution Caz?
Jebediah
@Caz:
If by “local control” you mean shitcanning that ridiculous NCLB boondoggle, sure. But I think state and federal dollars might always be required to help even out per-pupil spending between richer and poorer districts, or to help accommodate, for example, special needs students. One of my professors was a superintendent in a small district. He was legally required to provide an appropriate education for any student who came along, but not given any extra money to cover expensive special-needs kids. He had to find the money in the already-stretched budget, which meant deciding what else to cut to cover it.
The idea that kids might lose art, music, PE etc. so Charles and David Cock can keep a little more money… well, visions of them swinging from lampposts dance lige sugarplums in my head.
PurpleGirl
@Caz: Localities do control their own educational systems. Or didn’t you read that Martin was writing about California and I was writing of NYC?
roshan
Dude, paying lower than average wages and having the right to fire any teacher without constraints is a surefire way to make any school a market leader in their district. If you throw in a gladiator style survivor championship held in the school yard for teachers then that would be an added incentive for the parents to send their kids to that school.
PurpleGirl
@gwangung: Yup, you’re right. Cutting the art, music, sports, library and other special programs does reduce the exposure kids get to a more diverse culture and world. Maybe that was okay in the 1800s but this is 2000+ and the world is larger and more complex.
Sasha
I’ll take these idiots seriously when they also insist on giving teachers the ability to fire administrators who deserve to be fired.
Little Dreamer
Correct me if I’m wrong, Caz, but I don’t think it was broken when George W. Bush decided to take it apart and then couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. What we need to do is put it back the way it was! It may not have been a perfect system, but it was much better than the alternatives we’re looking at now.
DPirate
Who is they? This is one sentence. Do you base everything you believe in on each and every or even any sentence written by, say EDKain or ABL or SarahTallandProud? Get a grip.
And don’t plagiarize, either. Excerpting so much that it’s basically your entire content is not fair use.
Daulnay
With three kids going through the public education system in a relatively good district California, school reform has been on my mind. None of the proposals I’ve seen deal with all the critical facts:
1. You cannot teach what you do not know. We have teachers who don’t entirely know their subject.
2. Some subjects require mastery, they build on what’s gone before. If a child does not master certain parts when they are taught, the kid will be forever struggling. This is especially true of math.
3. Children of the same age have widely differing abilities in language, math, social and behavioral skills, etc. Yet our system is structured to give them all the same education at the same time.
4. People learn better when what they have to learn is given structure and organization, and presented clearly and simply.
5. People learn better when they’re interested instead of bored, and when they’re not despairing about being able to learn the material (see #3).
6. Some teachers stay in the profession because teaching lets them indulge desires or acts that are detrimental to their students. They’re teaching to gain access to kids, to have authority over someone, to be able to torment someone who can’t or doesn’t know how to fight back.
7. The world economy is moving into the information age. The skills needed for information-age work are different from those needed for manufacturing-age work. For instance, programming well requires long periods of focus.
8. Other countries educate their children better than we are educating ours. We could look at what they are doing, and copy it.
When I consider these facts, I cannot see how American education can be fixed without a radical overhaul.
Mike Schilling
Maybe it’s that for the first time, our school didn’t meet AYP because two few English Language Developing students in the entire school didn’t pass their reading benchmarks.
The guy who wrote that sentence is an English teacher? Fire his ass.
Daulnay
When I look at the education debates, I’m seeing people arguing over who gets which deck chair while the ship is sinking. And that’s not counting the people who are really interested in destroying the political base of the Democratic party, not in improving education.
Right now, the institutional structure is adversarial, pitting the administration (management) against the teachers (employees). This is a fairly unusual structure for a professional field, although medicine is also shifting this way. Other countries have a structure which is more like a law firm (head teacher, who still teaches, rather than principal), and this seems to work better.
Our current system doesn’t handle failures well at all. When a student is very ill and misses a huge chunk of school, there’s no mechanism to fix the gap. When a student comes in from somewhere else, with gaps in their education, nothing special is done. As far as I can tell, schools don’t even try to figure out what new students know.
I home-schooled my son between first and third grade, because he was very high energy, and I did not want to have to medicate him. He’s spent the last three years of education in this ‘good’ school system.
When he went in, his math was excellent. He was thinking, having fun with math, and knew it very well. Now, after three years of public education, he is struggling with math, and does not want to do it any more. He no longer delights in playing with numbers and math ideas. He no longer presents me with math puzzles for fun. He wants to be an inventor and engineer, but he’s not building the foundation for it any more.
My oldest daughter said to me the other day, how much more quickly the time went shopping and running errands than going to school. That school was so terribly boring, and the school day seems to stretch out very long. Many, many of our children feel this way.
What we’re doing in the schools is not working. It’s not a matter of not having enough money, and it’s not bad teachers, even though both are cause problems. I think that the root of the problem is that our system of educating, the way we go about educating kids, just does not work well.
Most of the proposals just tinker around the edges. “Let the bad teachers be fired, and all will be better.” It will help, but won’t fix the fact that no matter what pace the teacher teaches, many kids will either be overwhelmed or bored. It won’t change that our kids are being taught work habits for an obsolete world. It won’t change the fact that kids come in a wide variety of skills, abilities, and energy levels.
Turn it over to the private sector, and quality will suffer even more as the entrepreneurs try to wring profit out. Public education costs a lot less than a good private school, at the moment. Privatizing is just a good way to make ordinary people struggle more.
whatsleft
I would LOVE to know what “money” we have been “throwing” at the “problem” of education? Here in Florida, our most-excellent CEO-governor and the hard-right super-majority in the legislature are cutting our per-student allocation by $500, taking it to 1976 levels. Really? A $500 cut will bring a 35-year cost parity? Caz – you might want to investigate exactly what the “billions and billions of dollars” were spent on, because the schools certainly are not seeing that money.
Daulnay, I am sorry your children are experiencing such a tough time in the school system. I hope that they will encounter some gems next year that will ameliorate or even obliterate the bitter taste you have described. As a teacher myself, I really hate to hear about those situations. My own children describe those feelings to me as well, but only since secondary school.
And for the trolls – I made my mark in the business world as a first career, including having my own business. I decided to take the substantial pay-cut for a multitude of reasons, which include both an affinity for and a love of teaching. Although the lack of income certainly pinches, the satisfaction I get from making a difference in the lives I touch makes me a much better, if less affluent, person.