I’ve been avoiding writing about the Chicago teacher strike because I don’t like writing about education. I’ve never understood education very well, beyond the Socratic idea that all you can do is start a spark in a student, which is why it is good that I am at a small private school with sparkable kids and not trying to do something more difficult.
But some readers have sent me some very interesting observations. The commenter formerly known as matoko_chan notes that the so-called “merit pay” provision weights student performance on standardized tests very highly (pdf). It’s not unreasonable that teachers don’t like feeling pressure to teach to some idiotic standardized test.
Commenter Upper West notes that Bobo is being disingenuous (don’t make me show you my shocked-face) when he says:
The Chicago school system is a classic case of a bloated, inefficient … organization. The average Chicago teacher makes $76,000 a year in a city where the average worker makes $47,000 a year.
Upper West notes that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, since most workers are not college-educated. A better comparison (note that this is for all high-school teachers, not just Chicago high-school teachers):
The average primary-school teacher in the United States earns about 67 percent of the salary of a average college-educated worker in the United States. The comparable figure is 82 percent across the overall O.E.C.D.* For teachers in lower secondary school (roughly the years Americans would call middle school), the ratio in the United States is 69 percent, compared to 85 percent across the O.E.C.D. The average upper secondary teacher earns 72 percent of the salary for the average college-educated worker in the United States, compared to 90 percent for the overall O.E.C.D.
I do think that there’s reflexive hostility towards teachers among the TED class. Unlike Corey Robin, I believe that this hostility extends to professors (I also disagree with Robin’s assertion that people in general hate teachers — the assholes he went to high school with in Chappaqua are not representative of the whole country — but I recommend you read Robin’s piece anyway because it is excellent).
The TED class — which I’ll loosely define as establishment pundits, think tankers, and academics who have turned themselves out — likes to believe it lives in the REAL WORLD, MOTHERFUCKERS and that all sorts of teaching are a refuge from this world. We beat the pavement while you sit in your ivory tower masturbating to deconstructionism, or in a TAXPAYER-FUNDED classroom reading “To Kill A Mockingbird”. We know what it’s like to compete in the FREE MARKET.
All that bullshit. Even though they all work for outlets that are either themselves non-profits or money-losing divisions of some large company or magazines that whore themselves out with salons.
Maybe when papers and magazines made money, they had some kind of a point. Not anymore though.
BGinCHI
The TED class like to think they are Innovators. This means that for them, people who teach are drones who don’t do anything except what has already been done.
Unfortunately, this is a terrible version of innovation (turning one’s back on practice and skill and training) and a completely mistaken version of teaching (except for the minority of teachers who don’t care and aren’t any good at it).
Having ideas is a lot easier than grinding out the products of knowledge and practice.
Zifnab
Now let’s hear Bobo blow a gasket at the extraordinary pay allotted to CEOs – or, hell, how about regular old doctors? What? Oh, these people “earned” their pay by the sweet of their brows. :-p
I’ll say this. The problem with the modern American view of capitalism is that it basically glorifies inefficiency. If you can soak your neighbor for the most money, you earned it. Nevermind what you did or how long you worked, the only thing that *really* matters is that at the end of the day someone volunteered to hand you a paycheck with a very large number on it. Therefore, the folks that dedicate themselves to maximizing their paychecks get praised – no matter how that paycheck was obtained. And those that aren’t constantly trying to run the numbers or game the system are belittled or ignored.
It’s the Wall Street mentality written deep into the cultural ethos. Greed is Good might as well replace In God We Trust on our currency, if only as a disclaimer to anyone that chooses to do business with us.
eric
In the Sun Times today, one of the columnists notes that the local press was favorable to the teachers, while the national chattering class was predominantly anti-union, and that the parents strongly aligned with the teachers.
None of that is surprising to me as a CPS parent.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
__
The time has come for us to liquidate the
kulaksTEDs as a class./getting in touch with my inner Stalin
Roger Moore
What nym is it posting under now?
arguingwithsignposts
I have come to realize what TED Talks are:
For the presenters, a chance to do a stand-up routine for people who aren’t funny, or a magic show for people who don’t know magic, or an Apple keynote for people who aren’t Steve Jobs.
For the audience, it’s an opportunity to be entertained and think they’re smarter for it, all while paying a higher ticket price than they’d pay at a Louis C.K. show, and without the discomfort of naughty words and people who wear t-shirts.
arguingwithsignposts
@Roger Moore: She’s obviously not posting, because you’d recognize her verbal tics a mile away. It must be eating her up seeing FdB’s byline on all these discussions of education and human cognitive ability.
buckyblue
Every one of those assholes that talk shit about how easy teaching is, would be scared shitless (minus their shit talking) to stand in front of a room full of teenagers and try and teach them something that is important, but not necessarily on MTV. Tell me again how the Free Market is a tougher situation than that?
sparrow
@arguingwithsignposts: huh? Baloon Juice is against TED talks now? Many of them are very insightful and genuinely show information that badly needs to be disseminated. Of course, I’ve only seen a dozen or so, or maybe that has changed. Why the hate, just because the cool kids like them?
Thomas F
Matoko Chan (and the numerous derivatives) was a developmentally challenged commentor who couldn’t form whole sentences and had to be babysat by the moderators like a child with Down until he/she (once again) erupted with racism when challenged by Zandar. Not to mention that Matoko never found a massacre committed by Islamic fundamentalists that he/she couldn’t rationalize. Please forgive me if I have no interest in what he/she has to offer.
Pender
On the other hand, the average college-educated worker in the United States works 12 months per year, with probably two weeks of vacation and <10 holidays. Teachers work, what, eight months per year? Plus two weeks off in the winter and a week each in spring and fall? Plus the workday is six hours long? (I know, there are tests and essays to grade at home — but these days, everyone takes work home, and not everyone gets free periods in the day to get a head start on it.)
Also, the average college-educated worker doesn't get tenure.
Look, teachers do super-valuable work and deserve to be paid for it, but I wish it weren't an article of faith among the left that they necessarily should be paid more. They get paid a lot, and they get a ton of perks that are basically unheard of in any other profession.
the Conster
Teachers in Massachusetts where my daughter teaches have to have a master’s degree, and she hasn’t had a raise in three years, and I would estimate that she goes out of pocket $1000 or more over the course of a year for her students. The TED assholes can bite me.
Jewish Steel
I have been a private guitar instructor for almost 20 years. I am a free-market warrior in that sense. I think public school teachers should make 176K. It would attract the most talented people and pay them handsomely for a difficult job; manufacturing capable humans. I don’t see what’s so hard to grasp about this.
arguingwithsignposts
@sparrow: Opinions vary. Both Sides Do It.
I have no use for TED Talks, any more than I have for the Aspen Ideas Festival, or That Shit They Do In Davos.
There are others in the commentariat who have different views.
jl
I think there are similarities between analysis of US healthcare and education. The systems are so complex, and there are so many common features all across the US, that it is doubtful that statistical analysis and ‘races to the top’ done inside the US can tell you much, or make much difference.
Statistics really only produces information about variation around some overall measure of central tendency. So, you can only see what local variations are better than others, but everything might be quite bad (healthcare) or somewhat disappointing compared to aspirations (education).
I R statistician, so I guess I shouldn’t say it, but fancy shmancy statistics and high tech whizbangery are not the best tools for everything.
Cross country comparisons give qualitative evidence not amenable to rigorous inferential statistics about what can be changed that might make a big difference.
So, maybe just reading about how Finland transformed its educational system would provide more useful information.
Education in Finland, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland
Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?
The country’s achievements in education have other nations doing their homework
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html
The wiki article has some sections on early education that would make heads explode in the US, like “learning through play”. In early years, Japan has same approach to math education that includes noodling around with music and art, though for older students it turns into a standardized test hell.
Kerry Reid
@Pender:
Why, you’d think more people would be CLAMORING for the chance to do it and that retention would be a breeze. A mystery why such is not the case. Why wouldn’t a poor overworked midlevel manager at a finance firm BEG for the chance to teach math in an inner-city school, since it’s such a perquisite-rich environment and all?
gnomedad
Come again?
Darkrose
@Pender: The school year is 9 months long in most places. And you know what?
TEACHERS DON’T GET PAID FOR THE 3 SUMMER MONTHS.
I have no idea where this “summer is paid time off for teachers LOL” bullshit came from, but it’s exactly that: bullshit.
schrodinger's cat
Those who think teaching is easy have never taught themselves. I think it is actually harder to teach simpler, lower level courses, for example it is harder to teach Algebra than in it is to teach Calculus. It is harder to teach Algebra based Intro Physics compared to Calculus based Intro Physics. My mother was a high school Math and Science teacher and she had stuff to do even during the semester breaks, grading, attending workshops and so on.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Pender:
This is a talking point which has been debunked numerous times on the education related threads here. During those summer months teachers either go unpaid, or instead they have their paychecks pro-rated downward throughout the entire year so as to spread the lacuna evenly across all 26 or 52 pay periods. Other workers besides teachers have extended periods where they go without pay too. We call these “temporary layoffs” and most people do not regard them as an eviable perk.
jl
@Kerry Reid:
Everyone knows about the hordes of K to 12 teachers hitting Europe and tooling through the national parks in their motor homes during the summer. Everyone.
I mean, if they did not make much money, they would be working summer jobs, right? Who ever heard of teachers doing that?
Oh, right, they are lazy and pampered, so they sit in their hammocks all summer long.
Jeez, who ever heard of teachers scrambling to get those limited summer school teaching slots for some extra bucks?
Linnaeus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Not to mention that there is work that goes on during the summer, e.g., continuing education, curriculum planning, etc.
eric
I have the gift, but cant afford the pay cut….were i wealthy, there is little doubt I would teach high school anything….such fun
Yutsano
@Roger Moore: I think she got one too many bans and took her ball and went home.
Bizono
@Pender: I guess you don’t know any public school teachers, Pender. My mother was a high school foreign language teacher, and she probably worked between 8 and 10 hours a day, total, and even more at the end of semesters. Like most public school teachers, she could not take vacations during the school year, and had to work on certifications and retraining during summers every several years (which she had to pay for out of pocket).
Teachers in Pennsylvania, where I live, work 10 months out of the year, not 8.
Get your facts straight, please.
sparrow
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Also, as a friend of teachers, there are two things to mention. 1) They work their A**ES off during the school year (one friend was getting up at 5:00 AM, meeting with kids before school, teaching all day, meeting with kids after school, driving home, grading before and after dinner, prepping lesson plans, etc., basically until 11 PM when she fell asleep on the couch. It was a hell of a lot more than 8 hours per day. (2) In the summer, she spent time teaching kids that failed their regular courses, and getting training in teaching methodologies, etc. She was always busy, I never saw here sitting on her ass for even a week.
Basically, people are idiots.
batgirl
@BGinCHI:
However, I bet if you look at the salaries of the teachers that teach the children of the TED class (whether elite private schools or top notch wealthy suburban public schools) the average salary is likely quite a bit larger than the Chicago schools. Obviously they think paying the teachers that teach their kids is worth it. Why don’t they think other teachers and other children deserve the same?
Pender
Err, so you’re saying that it’s actually not the case that “the average Chicago teacher makes $76,000 a year”?
Who cares how it’s divided into paychecks as long as that’s the total amount for the year, including some four months off throughout the year (including all the vacations, holidays, snow days, etc.)?
Linnaeus
@sparrow:
A lot of people think that education work consists only of in-classroom time, but as you rightly point out, it’s a lot more than that. Prep time, for example, is not “free time”; you need to be able to plan, or your classroom instruction isn’t going to be effective. That’s real work, too.
jl
And also relevant to Pender’s comment, is fact that in many states, CA certainly, a great many teachers get a pink slip every spring after school ends, and are not sure whether they will have a job in the Fall. Depends on level of funding which is unknown until mid summer, if things go well.
I guess that is an enviable perk too. Hey, early retirement! Can’t beat that.
Turgidson
@Linnaeus:
Yes. Teachers keep working when school is out of session – at least a lot of them do.
And the 6 hour workday canard mentioned above seems like horseshit to me. I suppose this varies based on what grade level you’re talking about, but grading assignments for multiple classes of 30 students or so…takes time. Preparing the next day’s lesson…takes time. Putting together exams and assignments…takes time. Being available to help struggling students outside of class…requires time. I don’t know what this all averages out to as far as the median teachers’ workday, but in my anecdotal experience growing up, I got the impression the teachers at my schools worked 8 hour days and up. I had multiple friends who did Teach for America and they seemed to work harder, and at least as many hours at that than they did subsequently in the private sector. My good friend who’s a teacher works extremely hard.
This myth of teaching being a breeze needs to be put out to pasture. Mayyyybe gym teachers have it easy. That, I might concede.
JustAnotherBob
If the test is idiotic then the test needs to be replaced with an intelligent test.
Teaching to the test is wise if the test measures what needs to be learned.
To ask that our students make progress year after year in their reading and math skills is not an unreasonable request. They may not be “sparkable” during their first 12-13 years, but if they are literate when they leave school they will have the skills to acquire knowledge if they find a spark.
We do need to be careful that we teach skills other than reading and math, but realistically, those have to be primary.
We need to be careful an not penalize teachers who work with students who are less prepared to learn. But at the same time our students deserve teachers who are competent and that means we need a way to identify those who aren’t and replace them.
Zifnab
@Darkrose:
If you have an annual salary of $60k, and you get it twice monthly for 9 months or twice monthly for 12 months, you’re still getting paid $60k. That you don’t get a paycheck over the three-month period you aren’t working is irrelevant.
Beyond that, I know quite a few teachers that volunteer over the summer (volunteering pays $0/year, btw). Others I know hold down second jobs during that time because
$60k really isn’t a ton of money, particularly if you’ve got a mortgage or medical bills or kids to send to collegethey are greedy little bastards.The cost comparisons become silly in that light. If teachers got paid above the national college average, I wouldn’t be bothered by this in the least. This whole fight over the teacher’s strike is annoying because the argument isn’t about teacher pay, its about a teacher’s right to negotiate pay. I mean, how absurd is it to throw a fit at someone for the simple audacity to ask for more money? How do these people think free markets work?
Pender
Really? No time off around the winter holidays, and no other vacations in the school year? That doesn’t sound right. If, as I suspect, they also get two weeks in December and a week each in spring and fall, that’s an extra month. Then there are the holidays and snow days on top of that.
Look, I’m not saying they don’t work hard, but it’s crazy to think that a job would afford that much time off without changing the compensation at all.
arguingwithsignposts
One other thing about that pay comparison. A mid-level manager can fire a worker who doesn’t perform up to expectations or disrupts the workforce. A teacher, not so much. And john/jane factory worker’s mom and dad don’t show up demanding your head because johnny didn’t ace his/her widget assessment.
Okay, that’s two things.
Citizen Alan
@Darkrose:
Most school districts allow teachers to divide their annual pay into twelve equal installments so that they continue to receive paychecks during the summer months and don’t have to go to the hassle of setting aside money during the school year to make it through three months of no income. Idiots who don’t think assume that they’re getting paid for three months of doing nothing when their pay is actually based on a 9-month (or so) year.
Brachiator
@DougJ:
I came for some info on Chicago schools, and found another rant against TED. I just don’t get your obession here, but what the hey…
@Jewish Steel:
Can’t we just pay them what Finland pays their teachers? Supposedly Finland’s system is great. But here’s the odd thing. The US average teacher salary is $4,055. In Finland, it’s $2,311 (less if you adjust for purchasing power). And yet, supposedly, that nation delivers better outcomes.
Freddie suggests that the primary issue may be related to the poverty of the students. So why don’t we improve the incomes of all families, especially the most poor?
I got no problem with raising teacher salaries, and I have no patience, none for the union busting BS. Screw charter schools or private schools as ideal alternatives. But I reject the idea that a teacher cannot do a good job until she or he is making $175K.
Or shit, pay every teacher $500,000. And let the teachers come up with whatever system they think is reasonable to evaluate student performance. But then, if educational results don’t improve across the board, then I would fire every freakin teacher and administrator and start from scratch.
Calouste
Unless you are a pundit or in high finance, whatever you do is a waste of your college education, so you should be compared to workers without a college education.
/Bobo
Turgidson
@jl:
Also true. I know a handful of CA teachers who were on pins and needles as to whether they would have a job when school resumed, and it was unrelated to performance or aptitude. It was just the system and the money situation.
Pender
@Turgidson:
That’s normal. If they worked 8 hours a day for 48-49 weeks per year, that’s still a normal 9-5 job, and many jobs these days take 50-60 hours a week.
It’s on top of that that they get an extra 8 weeks off, and also tenure. No other kind of professional except I guess college professors gets those perks, so I don’t know why we should expect that they would get the same amount of pay.
I would certainly be willing to take a 33% pay cut if I could get tenure and two extra months off, plus having to be in the office for only 6-7 hours per day.
jl
Teachers’ work patterns: when, where,
and how much do U.S. teachers work?
Rachel Krantz-Kent
Monthly Labor Review, 2008
(PDF)
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
jl
Posted at 12:05 PM ET, 03/16/2012
Survey: Teachers work 53 hours per week on average
By Valerie Strauss
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey-teachers-work-53-hours-per-week-on-average/2012/03/16/gIQAqGxYGS_blog.html
eric
In my view, there are three major issues. The first is how to handle teachers that get laid off by school closings…the second, teachers rightly hate teaching to the test and getting measured by test performance because the tests are bs (not fixable through this labor stoppage) and third, there is a fundamental distrust between teachers and administrators that makes the notion of administrator discretion highly problematic for the teachers.
Darkrose
@Zifnab:
The argument seems to be that $60k is too much because you get three months of paid vacation.
The reality is those three months are only paid if you pro-rate your check. At $60k, pro-rating means that your gross pay goes from $3000/20 weeks to $2300/26 weeks. It’s a reasonable trade-off, but it’s exactly that: a trade-off.
jl
Number of the Week: U.S. Teachers’ Hours Among World’s Longest
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/06/25/number-of-the-week-u-s-teachers-hours-among-worlds-longest/
grandpa john
@Pender:Maybe you should spend a few minutes online and acquaint yourself with the real facts before spouting bullshit. it would do wonders for your educational level as well.
Teachers sigh a professional contract which call for a certain number of days per year including work days when students are not present, it has nothing to do with months. In my state that is 180 days of classroom plus 10 of in service. So those breaks at Christmas or at other times are not paid vacations, they are days excluded from the contract.
By the way that contract does not call for time during the work day to make lesson plans, grade papers or attend to the extra-curricular activities that are assigned, so guess when all of this gets done? How about after school , or at home at night, or on the weekends, all of which is not contract covered time which means you are not paid for this time.
And the doesn’t include the expected training and educational work, in other words, required seminars, or college level course hours which also are, you guessed it, not contract covered time but your time .
Zifnab
@JustAnotherBob:
No one is arguing against testing. The problem is “high stakes testing”, where a school’s funding or a teacher’s salary is pegged to how well the students perform. There’s this assumption that teachers – if given a monetary incentive – will do some magicking teaching dance that they wouldn’t normally do without the incentive. And there’s another assumption that if a class does poorly, the teacher or school needs to be punished or defunded to scare it into improving.
The problem with this logic should be pretty obvious. Student performance is influenced by teachers, not controlled by it. The teacher doesn’t just crank a “learning” handle and make the students smarter. If a school goes through a rough year academically for whatever reason, how does the next years’ students benefit by having funding cut? And what do you do with students that have learning handicaps or just make chronically bad grades for whatever personal reason? Schools don’t want to take these hot-potatoes. So you’ll see them try to get the kids transferred or prevent them from getting enrolled to begin with. Or you’ll find some loophole to get the kid off your grade-book, like an arrest or other excuse for expulsion.
And then there’s the cheating. We’ve already seen a fair number of teacher scandals where people have been busted forging answers on students’ tests, or simply turning a blind eye to the students themselves.
There are a lot of metrics you can use to evaluate performance. High stakes testing, set to exclude other metrics, is not one of them.
Darkrose
@Citizen Alan: Yeah. It makes me all ragey because I remember that when my mom switched to the 12-months thing, after summer school pretty much got eliminated in Chicago due to budget cuts, it made a noticeable difference on a month-to-month basis.
Not to mention that she was still doing work over the summer.
Zifnab
@Darkrose:
If you’d read the rest of my post, you’d see that was not my opinion at all.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Pender:
Other commentors here are already addressing the factual issues here (it isn’t four months off, etc.) so I’ll limit myself to addressing the rhetorical aspect of this claim.
There is some semantic slight-of-hand at work in the claim that “Teachers get X months vacation” because for most workers, especially salaried employees, “vacation” = paid vacation. In other words, while you are off sitting on the beach or backpacking or visting relatives in Phoenix or whatever it is that you do, money is still coming in. That’s a sweet deal if you can get even more of it, so who wouldn’t want a longer paid vacation, longer than the little they get now. It sounds great; why can’t I get that deal?
__
But the limited (and again, other commentors are addressing just how limited it is) time that teachers are not working during the summer months is not like that, it is more like a temporary layoff without pay. So when a speaker says “Teachers get X months vacation” that conjurs up in the audience unspoken assumptions and positive emotions associated with the word “vacation” which are not warranted in this case. We are dealing with Pathos, not Logos here, in this bit of rhetorical spin.
Jamey
Fix’t.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
There are times like this that I wish we had a “like” button.
Rafer Janders
I already noted this apples to oranges point when Doug Mataconis said this at OTB. Since the average Chicago resident doesn’t have a college degree, and includes many manual and service industry workers, while teachers have at least a college degree and in many cases a masters and/or Ed.Phil, and have to be state certified, it’s not a valid comparison.
The valid comparison would be to compare what Chicago teachers make compared to similarly educated and credentialed professionals such as lawyers, doctors, medical doctors, accountants, architects, certified financial planners, state college professors, etc.
Roger Moore
@Yutsano:
That’s why I was asking. The post made it sound as if TPFKAMC had made that point here recently. Since I hadn’t seen any posts that looked like TPFKAMC recently, I was wondering who it was so I could look for the well known verbal tics.
Walker
@Pender:
That ‘time off’ is often spent in class prep or mandatory workshops for certification. Learn what teachers do before you start belittling the work.
Turgidson
@Pender:
You came out with “oh they work 6 hour days…maybe they take work home but oh well, that’s life.”
OK, then stop framing it as if that’s some sort of data point showing how easy teachers have it. I also doubt that a majority of teachers head home after 6-7 hours – maybe technically they could, but they don’t. I certainly didn’t meet many who did when I was a student growing up, nor do I know any now as an adult. I’d routinely be able to find a teacher in their office/cubicle after 5pm. And they got to school at 8 or earlier. That’s 9 hours at the “office.” My adult friends who are teachers tend to be at work until 5-6, if I had to generalize. They often bring work home at that point. Teachers don’t have some cush low-hour gig – that’s bogus.
And your “time off” talking point is bunk, too. They don’t get paid for the “time off,” and many don’t actually have that “time off” in reality.
And, public school teachers? Tenure? Read the papers lately? They’re not immune from being laid off either. Seniority has its advantages in that profession just like most others. It’s not some unique thing only teachers get.
jl
Monthly labor review article says majority of teachers work regularly 11 months of year, not 8.
Doesn’t say what the FTEs are, or whether they were teaching or not. I suspect that most were working summer jobs unrelated to teaching, or were teaching summer school. Survey does not provide enough info to tell.
@Turgidson:
Thanks. If average workweek is 53 hours, for a five day week, that is more than 6 hours per day.
BTW: I am not a K12 teacher, but I do teach, and teaching takes a hell of lot more time than just what you spend in class.
Darkrose
@JustAnotherBob: The tests don’t account for differences in things like the income level of the district. A school where over half of the students have their only real meal at school, who are using out-of-date textbooks and lab equipment, are measured against the same tests that students in a school where everyone has at least two homes and access to bleeding-edge tech have to take. The students in East Palo Alto (median household income $44,006), and Palo Alto (median household income $119,046) take the same tests.
RSA
Excellent idea for a comparison by Upper West. (I don’t have anything special to add, except that I often find OECD comparisons illuminating.)
R-Jud
@Turgidson:
I’m a TFA Alumna, Chicago ’01. I was routinely at school by 6:30 and almost never left before 5 unless I had a master’s degree class to attend. In spite of being thrifty and resourceful and very good at begging for books and art supplies, I maxed out one credit card and burned through most of another one paying for supplies for my classroom during my two-year commitment.
$6500 that couldn’t be written off as a business expense, and wasn’t reimbursed, on basic stuff like pencils and crayons and copy paper (there were only three spelling books for 30+ first-graders, and we were required to teach lessons from those books).
I only had an assistant for about 20 minutes a day, which was enough to let me run to the bathroom or spend time with the profoundly learning-disabled kid I had the first year, or the seriously emotionally disturbed one I had the second (I have nightmares to this day about what might have happened to him).
I had kids showing up sockless and coatless in Chicago winters, kids who hadn’t been bathed, who hadn’t eaten a full meal since Friday on Monday morning, kids who would vanish for weeks and every contact number was disconnected– and I was still expected to move them up a year. And I considered myself lucky, because at six and seven years old, my kids were still young enough to want me to like them. They wanted to try. I had that going for me.
It’s been ten years since I quit. I have yet to have a single day that even approaches how tough the average day was when I taught. I don’t miss, nor do I resent the summers off that teachers get. Even the ones in nice, cushy districts or private schools, where they have pencils.
Linda
@BGinCHI:
Fixed it for you. TEDsters create stories that attempt to explain why some folks are economically gaining while others are in the dust, and lo and behold, both rich and poor deserve what they are getting. What grinds my gears is that teachers and other public employees (and I’m one–a librarian) do more useful stuff in a shift than the kewl kids pundit class do in a year. Especially Brooks, who pretends to be a social scientist by misappropriating social studies that he doesn’t understand fully to back up his fables. I avoid his columns so that my blood pressure doesn’t rise, but if I meet him on the street, I might lose it and kill him. And it’ll be all Balloon Juice’s fault.
Darkrose
@Zifnab: I realize you weren’t arguing that. I was referring to Pender there; apologies for not making that clear. I agreed with everything you said.
raven
@Turgidson: This is about a dumb ass thread.
Turgidson
Also too, good thread title.
raven
@R-Jud: But there are fuckers here that would do it immediately, right.
Comrade Dread
I think the point Pender is trying to make is that if:
1. You had an college educated professional working in an office for 50 weeks a year (theoretically for 40 hrs a week) that would translate to 2,000 hours in the office. And they had a compensation package of $80,000, they would be making $40/hr. Less any OT they weren’t compensated for.
And
2. You had a college educated teacher working in a school for 44 weeks a year (theoretically for 35 hrs a week) for a total of 1540 hours in the office. And they had a compensation package of $61,600, they would also be making $40/hr.
So they would be compensated at the same rate in theory. In practice, you’d also have to account whether or not teachers actually only stay in the office of 7 hours a day, factor in uncompensated OT for both professionals, the benefits each job offered (including the risk of bodily harm or injury), etc.
Frankly, I’m not qualified to make that assessment because I lack all of the necessary data points.
Though I do think we should pay our teachers significantly more to attract the more talented ones and try to reduce the social stigma that equates them as leeches or parasites on the paragons of capitalism.
grandpa john
@Turgidson: Yes 6 hr. day is bullshit also, When I retired, 20 years ago, the work day by contract was from 8 AM to 3:30 PM, Thirty minutes for lunch except on days when you had Hall duty, 13 min. During class changes you wer to stand in your door and help supervise the halls, so 71/2 hrs, is a little more than 6 hrs.
I would note that Mr Pender doesn’t seem to want teachers to be paid adequately for the time and money spent on our education, like other professions such a s medical Dr’s do. Teaching is considered as a profession , not a skilled labor job.
JustAnotherBob
@Zifnab:
Failed teachers and failed schools should be allowed to continue without consequences? I really don’t think you want to argue that line.
Let’s take it to the absurd. A surgeon who has 100% rate of patients dying on their operating table should continue getting hospital privileges?
Are there potential problems with transferring students, handicapped students etc.? Sure, but those are management/design problems which need to be addressed to make evaluations fair and meaningful.
shortstop
We’ve said a lot about the idiocy of tying up to 50 percent of a teacher’s salary to students’ standardized test scores. Not only does teaching to the test kill critical thinking and analytical skills; test scores are also highly affected by factors utterly outside teachers’ control: poverty, hunger. Instability at home, etc. (And the CTU is trying hard to get more social services into the schools.) But one thing I haven’t seen discussed here is the balls on Rahm for telling teachers they’ll be evaluated on these things they can’t control, but boo hoo, it’s super, super unfair to evaluate principals unless they get to pick every teacher in their respective schools. (The CTU wants laid-off teachers to be the first hired for open spots.)
Marc
@Pender: Bullshit. Public school teachers get maybe ten weeks off over the summer, at least one of which on each end will be eaten up by meetings. They get ten days off for winter break (counting weekends) if they’re lucky, one week for spring break, two days for Thanksgiving just like everybody else. Add it all up and they get maybe eight weeks more vacation than the average white collar worker… and they don’t get paid for those ten weeks of summer vacation. And they get paid two-thirds of what the average college graduate makes when they are getting paid.
If you really think teachers do “super-valuable” work, you wouldn’t bitch and moan about paying them fairly for it.
eric
@JustAnotherBob: there are two major issues: first is that the test is not a good measure of learning and second you cannot measure the teacher based on the test without understanding that different populations have significant barriers to testing performance well outside the control of the teacher. these are fairly obvious and long problematic — a testament to how difficult it is to solve the problems. so, you have students studying to do well on a test instead of learning critical thinking skills while another set cant even compete because of complex socio-economic inhibitors.
KG
there’s a reason why we will never “fix” education in our country. it’s the same reason we’ll never fix the tax code or immigration or health care or social security: it’s a very complicated system that has more moving parts than most people can contemplate and can’t be boiled down to simple slogans.
nor does it help that all of these things are inherently related in ways that people don’t necessarily understand.
grandpa john
@Pender: You really love exposing your stupidity don.t you? Snow days in States that I know of must be made up so at to meet the minimum number of days that the state requires for the year. Geez learn some thing before spouting or are you just being a troll here.
JustAnotherBob
@Darkrose:
That is a measurement problem and needs to be solved.
The solution is not to do nothing and let failed teachers/schools continue.
The solution is not to say “Oh, it’s just too hard to figure out a fair measurement system so let’s do nothing”.
Seems to me that the profession of teachers should be working hard to determine which in their ranks need to be retooled/dismissed and the best way to identify them.
And on a larger scale we need a way to identify schools which are not doing the job they should be doing so that we can make adjustments.
shortstop
@shortstop: Can’t edit–I meant to say tying up to 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, not salary, to test scores.
eric
@KG: add in the fact that the 1% exempt themselves from public education via mega-expensive private schools so that there is even less universal incentive to fix the system…plus the use of property taxes creates a distorted playing field…
KS in MA
@Pender: Try it yourself, if it’s such a great deal. And tell me where I can get tickets.
Dennis SGMM
@eric:
This.
@KG:
And this, too.
MikeBoyScout
A Wisconsin judge has struck down the state law championed by Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining rights for most public workers.
eric
@JustAnotherBob: you cannot measure fairly unless you address the systemic effects of poverty, race, and crime. you can say those things shouldnt matter, but they do and they skew any metric you want to use. the notion that there are just bad teachers in bad schools teaching bad kids is a pervasive myth that has a significant racist component. (not suggesting you, but i hear it regularly)
JustMe
It’s not unreasonable that teachers don’t like feeling pressure to teach to some idiotic standardized test.
I realize that teachers went into the field because they like being able to teach however they want with great amounts of autonomy to form their own curriculum and find that the most rewarding for themselves. However, it’s more important to teach towards a quantitative measure of competence demanded of the students.
Every day isn’t going to be about personal fulfillment and creativity. It’s not unreasonable to expect that a lot of teaching jobs are going to involve handing a teacher a curriculum and a schedule and telling them, “this is what you’re going to teach, and these are the tests and milestones your students are going to be evaluated on.”
JustAnotherBob
@eric:
And where did I say otherwise?
Measure those differences and use them to adjust the raw test score.
(Yes, I realize that’s easy to say and harder to do. But that does not mean that we should throw up our hands and accept failed teachers and schools.)
eric
@JustMe: but as i said, that presupposes that the tests are valuable barometers of learning — and by and large, they are not. teachers know that better than most. so you have a lousy test being used to assess students and teachers. it is jingoism — look at the numbers, look at the numbers.
i am sure there is a study out there on the amount of time students read with their parents and i would be STUNNED if it showed a sizable gap based on race and economics and if you cannot see how that skews test results, i cannot help.
eric
@JustAnotherBob: but testing to measure teachers is one side of the coin. you need to have a test that measures true learning and not artifical testing protocols (like the SAT). this is really hard stuff, if not intractable.
schrodinger's cat
@JustAnotherBob: Please define what you mean by a failed teacher?
Lyrebird
@sparrow: Agreed! Do not paint TED talks with Bobo’s brush… ew…
srv
Firebaggers abandoning Obama because he’s mean!
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/07/why-democrats-including-me-are-abandoning-obama/
Doug, I think you don’t want to talk about Chicago because there’s no Republican to bake, unless you’ve gone Firebagger on Rahm.
JustAnotherBob
@KG:
I’m going to call BS on that claim.
We are improving our schools. We are identifying some of the worst and either improving or closing them. Look back to the graphs posted yesterday. Math scores are going up, dropout rates are dropping.
Could/should we do a better job?
Always.
Are we at least moving in the correct direction?
Absolutely.
Did we just get a massive improvement in health care?
Yes we Did!
Is there a way to get from here to perfect in one single step?
Almost never.
Firebaggers would argue that last point.
Mike G
David Brooks is an egregious example of a bloated, wildly overpaid and worthlessly unproductive organization.
BGinCHI
@Linda: I could not agree more. Offing Bobo is a victimless crime. It’s right there in the Constitution.
Jamey
@JustAnotherBob:
If these patients are catastrophically ill, possibly physically brutalized, and not “prepared” to live, then yes. Further to the “absurd” part of your argument: Who are these teachers who have 100% failure rates? And if any exist, what proof have you that the students’ test scores are the results of pedagogical malpractice?
The Sailor
I’ve only checked the 1st 60 posts, but why hasn’t anyone noted that “The average Chicago teacher makes $76,000” is a lie?
The average salary is $57k, for an experienced college graduate, that has to live in Chicago.
terry buckalew
I do think Corey Robin was correct-teachers are pretty much looked down upon. I grew up in Arkansas as the child of teachers and relative of more teachers-and they are pretty much hated, or at least mocked. Thanks.
KG
@JustAnotherBob: I won’t disagree that there’s been some improvement, but it comes down to what we mean by “fix” (thus the quotes around it the last time).
My point was more that it’s way to complicated an issue to solve in the sense of “this plan will work for ever and ever”. You have issues like ESL in a lot of border/port states, you have attempts to mainstream disabled kid, you have funding issues (and allocation of resources), you have what should be taught (art and music? critical thinking skills? rote memorization items? science? math?), and then questions of how you measure success/failure, and so much more, and that just gets us to high schooll… it doesn’t even address the mess we’ve made of higher education (including community colleges).
It’s easy to say things like “make teachers accountable” or “test math and reading skills and then teach to the test” or whatever other bumberstickerish line you can come up with. But to actually make it work? It’ll take a metric shitton of luck if all parties involved trust each other, if they don’t trust each other? Well, talk to Nero.
Comrade Dread
@The Sailor:
The rule of 20.
Inflate the average union wage by 20% or 20,000 (whichever is greater) to stir up resentment in the serfs who are getting by on minimum wage.
If they have the temerity to question why they’re not making that kind of money, emphasize “union fat cats” in the union and “politicians wasting their tax dollars.”
Greyjoy
I don’t disagree with this statement, but I’d like to point out that we use the argument that a CEO, or an investment banker, or a professional athlete can’t do a good job until he or she is making oodles of money. That argument definitely exists and is usually supported by the exact same people who think teachers are greedy for getting paid mid-five figures and having a pension.
BGinCHI
So let me get this straight in terms of what the “teachers have it cushy” school are arguing.
Chicago teachers have it easy because they don’t work as many hours as people in insurance offices or porn production or bullet factories. This is of course wrong, since teachers take a lot of work home with them as well as working and coaching in the summer.
Do teachers at private and suburban schools make the right amount of money? They certainly make more (not Catholic privates and other religious privates, but they get into heaven faster so there’s that).
Do we hear rich people clamoring about Montessori salaries or Andover salaries or the Park Ridge schools district (alum: Hilary R. Clinton)? Why do public school teachers get the most scrutiny?
Resentment by those who can afford alternates, anyone?
Dennis SGMM
OT;
A friend of mine who is more connected than I am sent me an email stating that the Israelis are preparing for a near-future attack on Iran. I have no idea of how to verify this but, the motivation seems to be that Israel sees Iran as an existential threat and that they have given up on obtaining U.S. permission or assistance. The email contained enough detail to be credible.
Villago Delenda Est
I’ve about had it up to here with the TED class.
Bring on the tumbrels. These assholes are not part of the solution, they’re part of the problem.
Villago Delenda Est
@Dennis SGMM:
If they are stupid enough to do this, fuck them.
KG
@KG: I should add… I don’t mean this to sound like I think all is lost. I don’t think all is lost, I think we are capable of so much more, but I do not believe there are easy answers nor do I believe there are simple answers. These are complex issues that require a certain amount of serious thought, discussion, debate, and time to work through.
I would love to see our school system develop so that every kid graduates high school fluent in English and a second language of their choice; that art and music classes are available to all students for more than one quarter in the seventh grade; that we teach critical thinking skills so that we have an informed, reasoned body politic. Hell, I’d also love to see our teachers compensated as the professionals they are. I’d also like to see a world where a college education doesn’t set you up with the equivalent of a mortgage before you’ve had a chance to make any money.
But fuck if I know how we get there
Dennis SGMM
@Villago Delenda Est:
My thoughts exactly. The problem is that the ME is already seething. This may be Bibi’s way of attempting to bring Obama to heel. Hopefully, it’s no more than saber rattling. If it goes beyond that then things will get very ugly very fast.
Joel
@Thomas F: Yea, not a fan of mc either.
Joel
@Pender: The average worker with 3 weeks paid vacation works 239 days a year. The school year is standard 180 days a year. This means that teachers get paid 67% of the average salary for 75% of the days. When I went to school, which to be fair was two decades ago, the school day was 7-3, which is an 8 hour day.
I agree with Yglesias’ sentiment here. Teachers get compensated well. But they should be. Unless we want dumbfuck teachers, which I don’t.
Joel
@Pender: The average worker with 3 weeks paid vacation works 239 days a year. The school year is standard 180 days a year. This means that teachers get paid 67% of the average salary for 75% of the days. When I went to school, which to be fair was two decades ago, the school day was 7-3, which is an 8 hour day.
I agree with Yglesias’ sentiment here. Teachers get compensated well. But they should be. Unless we want dumbfuck teachers, which I don’t.
Darkrose
@JustAnotherBob:
Please explain to me how this is a measurement problem.
No one is saying “do nothing”. The primary reason the Chicago teachers are striking is because testing isn’t going to address the problem of endemic poverty that is preventing their students from learning.
Davis X. Machina
When did we ditch the eagle as a national emblem and go with a bucket full of crabs?
Did I miss a memo?
The Moar You Know
.
@Pender: You need a better union, son.
dogwood
@Citizen Alan:
School districts actually want this system because they get to make interest from the money they are withholding for those off month payments. On the other hand it benefits teachers in terms of the quarters they pay into retirement. A system where you don’t get paid for 2-3 months would mean a teacher would have to work many more years to be eligible for retirement.
I taught at the high school level for 35 years. People’s biggest misconception about the profession is that it is easy and therefore attracts lazy slackers. It really takes a sophisticated skill set to be successful in the classroom. it ain’t a job for wimps. Trust me, the job is exhausting.
Decrease Mather
@srv:
Holy crap. Foxnews has an anti-Obama article up which includes the following criticism:
Comrade Dread
Not the Christian school teachers I used to know. They got paid crap wages, had horrible benefits, and could be fired for any reason (including their private behavior, religious opinions [whether or not they shared them with students], and whether or not the administrators liked them.)
That’s probably closer to the model that Republicans are shooting for: Private system, low wage employees, higher profits for the company, higher bonuses for the CEO.
dogwood
@Joel:
This is the school year for students. For teachers it ranges from 190-200/year.
Davis X. Machina
The ‘problem with the public schools’ is simple — They’re public.
From this flows two things — first, there’s no consensus on whether that word has any actual meaning. Certainly there are enough people who don’t think it does to make an electoral coalition big enough to win elections, and govern the country.
Second, since they’re public schools, they’re the schools the public wants. They weren’t imposed from without by some invading foreign overlord. If they suck — assuming they do suck arguendo — the Great American Public is down with that — but doesn’t like being shown to be down with that, because that’s uncomfortable, and makes the G.A.P. look bad.
grandpa john
@eric: The people who benefit most are the few companies who pocket millions of dollars from the sale of these test .Millions of dollars a year that could be used to buy books ,materials, lab supplies, etc, instead go into the pockets of a few test publishing companies, tests that overall are useless.
Most any teacher with a few years experience can tell you which kids will excel and those that won’t because of many outside factors such as hunger, untreated illnesses ectra, factors that are beyond the students control and that are beyond the teachers control.
Some of them factors that exist because politicians know that tax cuts for millionaires that vote are more important than the need of the poor who don’t vote. Politicians who proclaim to be God fearing Christians, but don’t fear him as much as the do their wingnut constituents so then Gods commandment to care for the poor, the sick, the needy is ignored .
JustAnotherBob
@Jamey:
Jamey – have you ever been a student?
If so, did you ever encounter an incompetent teacher or administrator?
If you haven’t then you are one of the rare ones.
My career was largely in education and there, as well as while being a student, I encountered a small number of teachers and administrators who should have been given a chance to improve or fired.
grandpa john
@JustAnotherBob: n ice strawmen you constructed there
Dennis SGMM
I repeat; blaming teachers is a whole shitload easier than addressing poverty or the systems that don’t fund public schools equally.
BGinCHI
@Comrade Dread: That’s why I said “not” before the religious school teachers. They usually make shit money.
NancyDarling
@Mike G: Driftglass and Bluegal cover teachers and our attitudes toward them in their weekly podcast. His full throated and glorious defense of them begins at 46:40. (The whole podcast is worth a listen for its other topics.)
http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/
BGinCHI
@JustAnotherBob: True but mostly irrelevant to what’s going on in Chicago.
There is no crisis of “bad teachers.” You don’t try to fix a big troubled system by going after the 5 or 10% of dysfunction. When we have functional schools and good pay along with a sensible set of testing mechanisms, then we can go after underperforming teachers. It can’t be the first thing you do, unless you don’t understand the totality of the system.
JustAnotherBob
@eric:
If the test doesn’t work then create one that does.
If it isn’t fair to compare a group of affluent students against a group of underprivileged students then design the system to compare like to like.
I understand the value of teaching more than simply reading and math and I understand that some things are hard to measure. But I think we owe it to our children that they emerge the educational process about to read and do math.
Give them that and they have a chance to make up for our other failures if we must make them.
JustAnotherBob
@BGinCHI:
I spent most of my career in education, as a teacher, an administrator, and a teacher of teachers. And I put in way more than the average number of years as a student.
There are absolutely rotten people holding teaching jobs and administration jobs. They are, in my experience, a small to tiny minority but they are there.
I have some understanding of the totality of the system. Bad teachers are a part. Bad administrators are another part. Bad school boards and under-funding are also contributors.
We can work on all sorts of problems at the same time. A good measurement system tells us where we need to concentrate our efforts and if our efforts are working.
(In no place in my comments did I single out Chicago schools.)
Corey
Either teachers have significant influence over the learning and life outcomes of their students, or they don’t.
If they do, they should be paid like lawyers and doctors, at the very minimum, and there should be serious non-salary incentives to teach (student loan forgiveness, etc)
If they do not, they should be paid less and that money should go to programs that would actually help people learn more and lead better lives (anti-poverty programs, for instance).
I understand that a teacher’s contribution to student learning is absurdly problematic to measure, but if we can predict the weather (a much more dynamic and complex system than education) we can at least make some progress in figuring out which teachers are good and which are bad.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Dennis SGMM:
__
There are a lot of statistics which expose the grim reality of various social pathologies we are not doing a particularly good job on. But most of them are kept out of the public spotlight because (god-forbid) we might have to raise taxes or something. For some reason standardized testing scores coming out of our public schools do not fall into this category, and so it is OK to talk about them as long as we gloss over all the complex causative factors and just blame the teachers for something that is really at its root something we all share collective guilt for. Teachers don’t want to be left holding the bag for this, understandably so. I can’t say I blame them, I wouldn’t want to become the national scapegoat either, for problems that can’t be fixed because not enough Americans want to have an adult discussion of the subject, much less pony up to actually start fixing the problems.
BGinCHI
@JustAnotherBob: Oh, I agree completely. I have the same experience as you, though I’m in my mid-40s.
I was talking about CPS specifically, which is what a lot of people nationally are doing when they talk about the strike, which I think has been a mistake. So that was my reaction.
But overall, yes. Colleges of Education should be the first to go, I think. Go with the Canadian model: get a BA or BS in a specific subject. Then go to a 1-2 year program that is specifically about classroom practice.
That’s a good start. Then a strong mentoring system that weeds out folks who can’t handle a classroom and aren’t willing to commit.
Lojasmo
@Pender:
September to June, asshole. Count them up, then fuck off. And most teachers start spinning it up a couple weeks ahead of time.
Hob
Doug: Apart from the overly general headline, Robin’s piece doesn’t say that “people in general hate teachers.” He describes the people he’s talking about as “the chattering classes” and “journalists and commentators, many of them fresh out of the Ivy League.” So, basically what you’re calling the TED class.
But I do think that that attitude also spreads to people lower down on the ladder, because we’re hearing that message day in and day out from the media, and because we often identify with the upper middle class in ways that aren’t really logical. I see this particularly among younger people who happen to have good jobs (especially in tech): “Why should they be able to improve their pay or conditions by organizing – I got all this just by being awesome, and if I don’t like the conditions I can just quit.” They’ll say this even if they’ve had shit jobs before, and even knowing how capricious this industry is, because it’s nice to think that you don’t need anyone.
gelfling545
@Comrade Dread: This used to be true of public schools as well. You could be fired for any reason including the principal’s cousin needed a job or for getting pregnant or for your political views whether or not you shared them. Just can’t understand why those danged teachers went and unionized. Must just be greedy.
NonyNony
@Pender:
So why haven’t you applied for a job with the Chicago City Public School system yet?
If it’s such a cushy and well-paying position, why haven’t you thrown your hat into the ring with a resume?
Hob
@sparrow: It’s not because the cool kids like them. It’s because their massive success is based on having a small number of really good talks and a large number of misleading fluff talks, and their paying audience (which I take to be the class Doug is talking about, not college kids who look at a thing or two online) eats them all up uncritically. Even in the non-paying audience, the fluff gets way more credibility than it should, just due to the brand name; when I see “check out this cool thing I learned from a TED talk” messages from my 30something friends, the odds are about 60-40 that it’s either total bullshit or the worst possible oversimplification of a real thing.
Lojasmo
@Corey:
Your theory is intriguing. Actually much like what the ACA has done in terms of Medicare reimbursement.
DougJ
@Jamey:
Ha ha ha ha.
DougJ
@srv:
I probably have.
yopd1
It seems appropriate to post Taylor Mali’s spoken word on “What Teachers Make”
DougJ
@terry buckalew:
Thanks
AHH onna Droid
@JustMe: wow, just wow. The US used to be worldleader in science education. Creativity was a major component of the American teaching philosophy and it drove success and innovation. Now after the destruction of our middle class, the refunding and privitization of science research, the US is lagging from primary to postgraduate while lower gini coefficient nations drain away our best talent and kick our ass both k12 and in new research.
What ignorance. What rot.
jl
@JustMe: If that is not dry snark (and I hope it is) or a spoof (I see DougJ is around). Please read links about Finland in my comment at top of thread.
JustAnotherBob
@BGinCHI: I think we’ve done that in California. Been out of the system for a number of years.
I do agree, schools of education have historically been where students were sent when they couldn’t hack it in a regular BA program. I’ve seen that happen numerous times and those are not the people who should be teaching our children. Make them lab flukies or something where they can master repetitive tasks.
The Other Chuck
Barring nukes or a sustained famine, I really can’t think of a more effective way to eradicate a civil society than by undermining the institution of teaching. I find it boggling that teachers aren’t elevated to even the same level of firefighters and elite soldiers. Rampant anti-intellectualism is a cancer that really and truly is going to kill this country, or at least everything about it that was ever worthwhile.
JustMe
@eric: but as i said, that presupposes that the tests are valuable barometers of learning—and by and large, they are not. teachers know that better than most.
That is completely wrong! Of course tests are how we evaluate how students learn the material. Now, granted, it might be unfair to make students’ performance on standardized tests weighted very heavily on teacher evaluations, which is why the Chicago teachers are protesting, but it is 100% reasonable to have a curriculum that the students must master and test them against that curriculum to see how well they learned it. We do that all the time.
The problem is that some students are inevitably going to perform poorly and some teachers are going to have a hard time teaching the material, and the tests give quantitative evidence of poor performance, and that makes people unhappy. But that’s not a reason not to test and teach towards those tests.
JustMe
@AHH onna Droid: wow, just wow. The US used to be worldleader in science education.
And now we have lots of students that can barely solve a math problem because doing a lot of “drill and kill”, which is what it takes to learn and teach a lots of math, isn’t “fun” for the teachers and is derided as “teaching to the test.”
jl
@JustMe:
It surprises me how many people who claim to be numerate do not understand the difference between doing a calculation and solving a new problem in an applied setting, without prompts and hints. The latter is much harder for my students than plugging and chugging formulas, which being professional students, they love, since it indicates mastery of some sort, even if they don’t understand what the formula means or how it works.
But nothing is as terrifying as asking them to write a report (even a dinky short one), unless they can use powerpoint and do a presentation.
JustMe
@jl: Learning involves doing a lot of grunge work that isn’t “fun” or “creative.” That’s life. If you don’t want to bother teaching that kind of stuff, you’re never going to have students capable of the more difficult, critical thinking. If you only concentrate on the “solving a new problem in an applied setting” without the background, all you’re going to have is a bunch of students who barely pass the class, come away with only a vague awareness of what was required of them, and then don’t even have the hard math skills that only come with constant honing and practice. But, as I said, we don’t want to bother with doing stuff like that because it’s “teaching to the test.”
Sly
You know, I should be amused by now with the constant refrain that the only alternative to high-stakes standardized testing is to do nothing at all.
But I’m not.
jl
@JustMe:
The grunge is necessary, and I am blessed with professional students who excel and eagerly dive into grunge, if you make it seem high class and erudite enough.
But, at least in statistics, there are always concepts behind the grungy calculations and you have to teach the calculations and concepts hand in hand all the way from the beginning.
At least for what I teach, separating the calcualations from the concepts too much at any stage does not work well.
hitchhiker
Notice: FORMER TEACHER HERE.
You’ve been warned.
Some questions for those who think it’s a well-paid, plenty-of-days-off, no-accountability profession:
1. Why aren’t you in it, if the pay’s so good and the vacations so multiple and long?
2. Why do you think it’s such a low-status occupation, the last choice for anybody who can avoid it — except those incomprehensible fools who seem to WANT to do it?
3. Why do you think so many teachers don’t stay in it?
4. If you run five classes of 30 16-year-olds, five days a week, it’s a little like doing constant high-stress presentations. Would you be up for that? Every day, all day?
5. Do you see any problem at all with people who don’t work with your students designing tests for them and then judging your job performance on the basis of the results of those tests?
Jesus H Christ. Teaching is not stuffing facts into empty brains. It’s being present with the child sitting in front of you and remembering that it matters how that child takes in information, how that child processes information, and how that child works with information.
I quit. I went into the for profit world, doubled my salary, and learned what it’s like to only have to do a presentation once a month instead of 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. I learned what it’s like to have people assume you’re intelligent and worthy. I learned how much slack time there is in an ordinary business day (about a third) and how much forgiveness there is for all kinds of mistakes.
I just get so fucking sick of people telling me how great teachers have it, how well-paid they are, and how they should “be held accountable” via standardized tests. Most of the assholes I know in the business world couldn’t PASS a standardized test, much less prepare a horde of teenagers to take one — and ALL of them would scream about irrelevance all day long.
FlipYrWhig
@hitchhiker: Likewise, I would guess that the proportion of time a teacher has to be “on” while at work is much higher than the proportion a typical office worker does. It’s not like every moment of every day at CorpCo, Inc. is one additional moment of value added to the enterprise’s productivity. Most people who work in offices spend a lot of every day fucking around on the Internet. Teaching, being predicated on hours of face-time, doesn’t allow for that — and that’s before factoring in the other parts of the job that aren’t linked to face-time.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of compassion
Not to mention the fact that becoming a teacher means giving up your social security, no matter how many years you’ve payed into it, and relying instead on pension funds that are the first to be raided by panicky state governments. I am a teacher right now, today, in one of the poorest school districts in the nation, working with special needs and at-risk kids, and I would like to offer a hearty FUCK YOU to the various pseudo-intellectual fuckwits on this thread who have expressed your worthless goddamned, uninformed, vapid opinions on how great teachers have it and what “they” need to do to fix what’s wrong with the learning processes of the children of junkies, the homeless, child-molesters and prison inmates. I do this work because I love it. I do it with passion, with conviction, and I get to help change lives on a daily basis. I know managers at fast food joints who make more than I do. I have worked on factory floors, waited tables, turned tricks on Santa Monica Boulevard, held junkies while they vomited their way through withdrawal, and held the hands of the dying at various AIDS hospices, and I have NEVER worked at a more demanding job in my life than I do as a teacher. Seriously, those of you whose facial rectums have spewed your idiotic crap on this thread are welcome to die in a fire, and wake up in hell next to Ronald Reagan.
Kerry Reid
@hitchhiker: Your observation is too long to tattoo on the heads of the sneering anti-teacher folks I know.
But that may not stop me from trying.
Kerry Reid
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of compassion: And it’s astonishing to me how many people STILL think teachers get Social Security.
Bex
@JustMe:
Okay, so if we HAVE to have high-stakes testing, why not tie it to each teachers’ actual individual efforts? Because right now, we test a bunch of seventh graders at the end of the school year, and we say “this! this is the seventh grade score for this year!” And then, if the seventh grade score for the next year — for a completely different set of kids, with different problems, who started at different grade levels — doesn’t go up overall, we punish the school and the teacher! For not creating a sufficiently homogeneous end product, I suppose. For we aspire to live in Lake Wobegon, therefore all the children must eventually become above average.
I suspect that the good teachers — the ones we need to keep, not drive away — would, well, still be pretty fucking cranky about testing, but set to more willingly if instead of “take random children you’ve never dealt with before and make them magically better than last year’s random children,” the stakes were “take this class of children and raise their individual scores by an average of x points.” So the seventh grade english teacher with the kid who comes in at second grade reading level but leaves at sixth gets credit, rather than punishment because the kid “only” jumped four levels in one year instead of five or six.
Also, IIRC that $76K salary number from Chicago includes the City Colleges and similar, which will skew the average up a more than a bit even given the generally shitty situation for adjuncts and new hires.
currants
@Kerry Reid: Perfect.