The Glade 4.0

Coro, I think you're failing to take into account that by the hiring standards applied to education, you're grossly overqualified to teach High School math or physical science. And that's what's costing us $80k a year as is.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I'd love for you to teach my kids Coro, and I'm sure you'd be worth the 80k. However, I'm also certain that you could pass whatever performance based initiatives are thrown at you and that you understand the concept that if you do a lousy job (which I don't see you doing) you should get canned. Also I think you understand that local government resources are finite and maybe when you are at 80k you may have to skip a raise now and then so we can make budget

in short good teachers are fine, deserve all the money they make. I can't put a value on the great teachers in my life. However, I've seen several darn lousy teachers that the districts can't/wont get rid of because its too much of a hassle, he's gonna retire in two years anyway, the fact he's sleeping in class and lets the students destroy the lab computers is irrelevant.

we need a way to reward merit and punish loss, and the take them all or leave them all approach by the unions doesn't work.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I'd let you teach my sons. My daughters? Not so much.

With that said, I'd be more than willing to sit down and hear your individual argument as to why you're worth 80k/year on merit on an individual basis with the understanding that if you sucked at the job I hired you to do, you'd be fired.

I wouldn't tolerate it if you banded together with a bunch of less qualified goons and demanded they share your rate of compensation, however.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

If these are people that could make the same amount of money doing a more rewarding job, **** go do it. No one is stopping them. Unfortunately they're not, and they can't, so they ***** about not making enough.

Education is a complex problem, and there's far more involved than needing a way to reward merit and hold people accountable for failure. Those are just cool sound bytes. You guys are arguing over whether teachers deserve a particular level of compensation and what they should be allowed to do to procure it. I thought a change of perspective was in order: for a certain amount of money, you could have someone else who is more qualified, and who may not have otherwise been interested in the job.

Maybe it's still not worth it. Maybe it's just not worth that much money per teacher, and you'd rather pay half that salary to get twice as many less qualified people. Maybe you'd rather have your talent doing something else, such as providing electricity to your house. That's fine. That's a decision you make as voters and tax-payers.

There are a few fundamental concepts that need to be rethought to fix our problem with education.

1) As a society, we need to embrace the idea that knowledge is important. Right now we don't. Society fawns over athletes and entertainers, not scholars. How often do people go to history or science museums? Now think about attendance at concerts and ball games. Everybody wants to be captain of the football team. Nobody even knows the school has a chess club. (Recent Marvel movies have actually been good for this - Hulk, Iron Man, and Spiderman are all huge science nerds).

2) Capitalism works. This is a hard and bitter pill for a lot of people swallow, especially in the educational system. Capitalism isn't broken, and it doesn't breed inequality. In fact, you can see capitalism at work in the decline of math and science in our schools. The talent in those two areas is going where the money is, and that's not schools. This isn't even a private/public school issue. The people with the talent just aren't becoming teachers at all. They're doing other things. If you want talent, you have to pay them.

3) We have to abandon the notion that all subjects are equally important and valuable. This is the real problem with teachers unions. It isn't just that some teachers are worth more money than others, but entire fields are. Which fields are worth what amount of money will fluctuate from decade to decade, but at any given point in time some are simply more valuable than others. There is less you can do with an History degree compared to a Chemistry degree, so it's going to cost more money to get the people with good Chemistry skills.

4) You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. How responsible is a teacher for what a student learns? Education is self-improvement. You are the only person that can make you learn. You don't have to be a genius, but the less intelligent a person is, the more focused and disciplined they need to be. A teacher is like a trail guide. They can lead you through the woods, but you still have to walk yourself.

5) The sense of entitlement needs to go. Your children are not entitled to a high school diploma just because you pay taxes. Right now, your children really do get a diploma just for showing up. You will flip your **** if your child doesn't graduate, so they squeak by with a C in classes they should have failed. Your kids know it, so they don't bother learning anything. This is also why schools can't get rid of behavior problems. The parents feel entitled to have their kids in a school, and the schools are forced to keep the problem children.

6) One-size-fits-all doesn't work. Right now, your teachers all have degrees in Education. It seems like a good idea on paper, but there's very little to differentiate a Math teacher from an English teacher or an Art teacher. If you look at the local state university, you'd get the idea that they're all vastly different, but most people don't realize that the bulk of the teachers have their degrees from local no-name universities. Those schools offer Biology 101 and Chemistry 101, and call you a science teacher. The teacher who has a M.S. in Biology from am established university will be teaching Physics, because she's the only person in the building that's even taken it. (She also won't be teaching Biology. That will be taught by a guy who has only taken Biology 101, and can't teach anything else.)

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I laugh. Coro is one of the few of you that has a clue.

_________________
The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I disagree, Micheal. That's how most fields work. People create demand for themselves with their accomplishments and credentials, and then bid themselves out to those who wish to compe

te for their services.

The problem is that education in this country isn't a capitalist endeavor.

It's not that noone has thought of this before either. It's that it's been rejected by the unions who took over education after women's lib.

While Coro is 100% correct, his ideas will never be tested; so in terms of real policy we're stuck having an argument over merit based pay.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

You are correct, education is not a capitalist endeavor. Training is, you can train someone and they can test to show whether they learned and acquired the skills they were trained to do.

Education is not most fields. The product is not easily defined. Outcomes may not be known for years. As such, teaching people to think and use their mind properly, such as in critical thinking, is an evolving process.

Until we return to an environment where teachers are allowed to teach, they are not teachers, they are trainers, or even worse, babysitters.

I wouldn't teach in the public school system, it is all politics and programming the kids to pass the standardized tests which prove pretty much nothing. I wouldn't be willing to teach in a private school unless I had more control than teachers are allowed to have today. The soul eating system of teaching these days makes the job extremely unattractive to those inspired to develop the young and bright enough to do it well. Some do it anyway. Until the current depression there were many jobs much easier and better paying than teaching.

Also, as said above and I haven't verified it, Chicago is the highest paid public school system, not the average. A lot of places pay about half that. Others top out at various levels, $60k is good pay for most elementary through high school teachers. Most will never see it. Most teachers pull out of their own paychecks to provide supplies for the kids.

There is no easy answer. Trying to pretend there is one is naive. Blaming the teachers for trying to make more money is ridiculous. Look at the school district's administration, that is where most of the problems lie in all the districts I've looked closely at.

Why is a do nothing administrator worth three times what the top paid teachers are? The lack of new books is easily traceable to bad decisions on the part of the administrators, not the teachers.

_________________
The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I don't see that getting someone who could design missiles for living into high school would improve things any. We don't need that level of knowledge. More importantly, as things stand now, most of those people couldn't teach anyhow because they don't have a degree in education or a teaching certificate. We've previously disucssed here the fact that teachers spend too much time learning "Education" and not enough time on the subject matter.

Teachers are also needed in large numbers. We don't have enough qualified people to both do things like design missiles or skyscrapers or whatever AND go teach high school math, and we aren't likely to ever GET that many people qualified at that level no matter how good the pay is. Teaching is one of those jobs well-suited to people that can get a college degree but who are not prepared (for whatever reason) to go through a program of study as rigorous as engineering. Those people are quite plentiful compared to the ones that can handle engineering. Some teachers are there because teaching is what they truly love and care about, but that is the exception; for most teachers it's job and kids for them range from "likeable enough" to "tolerable only because I'm getting paid." This is more true (in general) in the most urbanized areas.

Third, the issue is not teacher pay in and of itself, but the habit of going on strike to get more pay. This is done at the expense of the kids they claim to care so much about, because while individual teachers care about kids, teachers unions care only about teachers and their unions. When the economy gets bad, and people start losing jobs or taking pay cuts, the unions pull out all the stops to prevent that for their members because teachers are no more willing than anyone else to take pay cuts when the source of money (tax base) is shrinking, and they are quite willing to force it through by striking and holding children's education hostage, which is particularly effective when directed at juniors and seniors.

Fourth, the systemic education problems in this country are not primarily an issue of pay, or even of money at all. No amount of teacher pay, or even education money in general is going to help until and unless the poorer populations of the country start making their kids perform. That won't happen until and unless those parents stop themselves being poor, uneducated, often much younger than is suitable for parenting, and generally disdainful of the idea of getting an education. In a large part, this circumstance is created by people who complain about money for education. The excuse "well, the schools we have are underfunded and suck, so why should I go at all?" is all too easy to make, even though it's very much like saying "well, I'm starving, but if I can't have roast beef then I don't want bologna either."

Teachers are paid more than adequately in this country, and have been for a long time. Chicago's teacher pay scales are quite comparable to the pay for teachers back where we lived in Ohio, and that particular city was rife with unemployment, business closures, and all the attendant problems endemic to the rust belt. Chicago does not represent the highest-paid teachers int he country, by any means.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm



Somehow I don't think the economy in Detroit justifies the highest teacher salaries in the country, nor does it have educational performance reflective of those salaries. It illustrates just what I'm saying; teacher's unions endlessly demand more money regardless of economic realities or performance.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Ever see the failure rate for Chicago schools? I wouldn't want merit raises based off that either. That being said I get Coros point, you get what you pay for. However there comes a point where the more money you throw at a job the less return you get.

_________________
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

The only people qualified to define "shitty job" is the one working it. Obviously, they have issues. Maybe not with the pay, but with something else.

Nobody thinks its a good idea to force people to work, that's slavery. So what do you do, outlaw free association? I have heartburn with that. It's ok because it's a government enforced monopoly? Maybe it shouldn't be - outlawing unions is just painting over rust, then. It's not solving the problem. Fire all the teachers and replace them? Not really practical.

The only thing I can think of to solve the problem is to work over time to marginalize the union. All new hires shall sign a contract stating they will not join the union. Bonuses for those that leave the union. Fire as many union employees as you can get away with. And so on. There will be more strikes, obviously, so have to balance that out as well.

You don't need to eliminate the union, you just need to eliminate teacher strikes. Heck, even just requiring that Juniors and Seniors continue to be taught in order to make their deadlines would probably be enough.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."