ivan

think i've been pretty flame-low on this thread. i don't see the union as being your biggest opponent or enemy on many of your listed items. i don't happen to put a lot of stock in a teaching certificate either, mostly b/c the process of getting one is pretty bureaucratic and meaningless, as is the process of re-newing it. most education classes are circle-jerks and utterly worthless. so, to your list: 1. i don't run rough-shod over my admin now, here or in any state. my last school in particuliar had a very strict, command/control style leadership taht was highly effective for the inner-city environmnet it operated it. do you think teachers/unions are in charge? the reality varies from school to school. in my current school, the rich parents pretty much own/control everythign. 2. i don't mind being evaluated by my peers, but they'll have to come in for observations, which is extra work for them and will require substitutes. the reality of a teacher's life is we pretty much all work in obscurity - that is, no one really knows what the hell i'm doing or how good i am b/c they're all busy working in their own rooms w/ their own kids during the school day. 3. i don't mind some small evaluation from my students/their parents either 4. i've already said standardized tests are fine as a part of evaluation. 5. i already take on "project kids" each year, and for that to be meaningful, it can't really be evaluated - the kids i try to take special interest in are deeply damaged or deranged, and the succes of any strategy of dealing w/ them heavily governed by chance. if you evaluate someone on this, they'd game the system and pick easy targets, ignoring the kids who truly need them. 6. you're mistaken if you think all kids are being pushed towards college. the esd i'm in has a very strong skills center program, and our career center in my school works very hard to put kids in all kinds of apprentice programs and highlight non-college pathways. that said, i believe the stats show an increasingly huge divide between the eventual salaries of folks w/ college degrees and those w/o. 7. you want teachers to have the right to strike their kids? i certainly wouldn't mind whaling on some of my charges, but in case you haven't noticed, society at large has turned its back on CP as a discipline tool, for better or worse. 8. you want to pay male teachers more than female teachers in order to recruit them more heavily? uhhh, okay. i'm sure that won't piss off a huge # of folks. at any rate, i don't see the need. at least in high school, there are already a large # of males. my humanities department is more than 50% male. assuming we're still somewhat stuck to that 20th century notion as the male in a family being the chief bread-winner though, it makes sense that men would prefer something more high-paying then teaching. 9. WA state already requires all teachers to have credentials to teach w/n their subject area. 10. cut admin pay? okay. their high pay is necessary to attract competence too of course. even if you pay them the same as teachers you're not reintroducing that much money into the system. i don't see that much "fat" walking around my school. most staff members are doing something useful that directly involves kids. that may not be as true at the district level admin, but then i have no real sense what the hell at all those folks are doing. 11. this point is not a suggestion, but does explain why schools are always going to have problems, no matter what you change. schools are mirrors - they reflect society. you can distort the mirror all you want and it doesn't change reality. 12. i'll take 100k$ a year and certianly think i'd be good enough to earn it. someone more math-happy then myself can figure this out, but assumign that salaries for teachers makes up the principle cost of education, adn seeing as how 100K is at least twice as much as the current average, are you prepared to increase spending on schools that much? regardless, unless the compensation is made more attractive to attact a much larger pool of qualified teachers, you're not going to improve a damn thing. no one will swim through an ocean of shit for a pair of plastic earrings. my recommendation, at least for high school - make the kids have to earn their place. kids who can't maintain an acceptable gpa or discipline record should be shown the door. public schools are instead essentially jails, housing a huge population of disaffected, disinclined dipshits who divert me from my purpose. feel free to have "work camps" on some sorta ccc-model for those who can't make the schools work for them so you don't have a large teen-gang element on the street. i'm tired of having classes where 50% of the kids are failing and damn near 90% are proud of never studying and never working.

do you make the sytem then one that's just based on a kids ability to think and reason critically? shit - the dirty secret about that, i've realized after a decade of teaching, is that no one can really "teach you how to think." it's pretty much an inate ability that a teacher can encourage, much as a farmer waters a seed. but if a kids a goddamn stone, you can water and fertilize all you want and it's still jsut a fucking lump at the end of the day, no?

other questions re: merit pay how is it a fair system if the students and parents aren't held accountable too? if you're going to base my pay on the kids passing a test, then they damn well better have a serious incentive to pass too, like tying it to their graduation. but, as i've found in the states i've taught w/ that have such barriers, there becomes a huge incentive for the state to lower the bar for passing, so they aren't barring thousands of kids from graduating - the last year i taugh in virginia was absurd. i was proud that i got 100% of my 120 kids to pass a standardized test in world history (especially since the school was 100% free/reduced lunch, therefore very poor)...until i found out the state had decided that any score higher than a 35% would be considered passing! for fucks sake, if you just put "c" down for every answer you should get at least a 25%!

i agree that the concept of merit pay is anathema to many in the union world, but that is not the case w/ me, in part b/c i've taught in states that had merit pay systems and i'm in fact quite good at getting kids to pass standardized tests, which is what they base the merit pay on. that said, i don't know if you or anyone really has a good functional idea of what you really want to base your merit pay on and not end up w/ more of a monster than you started with. for example, if you make the standards based on just passing the class, don't i respond by just passing everyone? if its getting kids to memorize facts, don't i do just that to the detriment of writing essays or working on cause/effect thinking skills? how is this a fair system when i pull a group of students one year who have totally shit parents and shit attitudes that are impervious to my best teaching methods? how is this fair when i teach in a shit district or shit state? how are you going to make your merit system fair, meaningful and manageable? and just how lucrative are you going to make it? i am not opposed to the theory of merit pay - far from it. for fucks sake, i was a fantastic student. i'm good at doing academic stuff, so if that's the standard i'm paid on, i'll embrace it wholeheartedly b/c i stand to profit from it. but how is it going to work?

hey, there you go - higher standards -> higher pay. but most private schools aren't elite, and they pay less. uh, SC - did you sleep through your russian history classes? when they weren't busy fucking their lifestock or killing their children, they were busy making war on all their neighbors - the vikings and mongols were excellent teachers.

or better, didn't call for this kinda thing to be done to their awful teachers (for making them question god too there, kk!)?

Article regarding GAO Report on D.C. Voucher System

there's been some decent tr's...my eloquence has waxed

nope - the last time i rode a bike was 7 years ago - it was san francisico - 3:15 a.m. - 14 hrs in the bars - a sport bike w/ tiny pedals and a nut-crushing seat - me in flip-flops - hadn't been on a bike in a decade before - hills - rain - cold - vomiting in the presido ah, freedom...

how do you consolidate schools in the sticks? or even really give them a private school option when there's not enough customers to warrant entering the market? what happens to neighborhood schools, especially for little kids, when you consolidate? private schools generally pay much less to teachers - are you really expecting that will improve their quality? are there examples in otehr industries of workers taking pay cuts and responding positively? the kids who are getting the worst schools are suffering not so much b/c the schools suck, but because they're living in demilitarized zones w/ awful economics. take the d.c. example - they've just finished a big experiment w/ vouchers and it didn't do a damn thing towards improving kk's vaunted ROI

man - sucks!

my objection to vouchers is much more based on 1st amendment church n' state concerns than on union ones (but then i am a radical christian-hater). assuming the total pool of money invested will be the same though, its really hard to see how a public school is going to get any better when its funding is cut.

the union doesn't send folks around to watch me teach for certain, but they do work w/ the state to establish qualifications to get/maintain a teaching license the union does work to offer/make us aware of professional development opportunities and agitates with the state to get us funding for it the union really only seeks to eliminate those who are grossly damaging their students (say by abusing them) ultimately, my union is a very remote and rarely-glimpsed organization to me, and is mostly important only when our contract is being renegotiated the bottom line is, neither the union nor state can have much of a culling effect on teachers. personally, i'm embarrassed by a # of social studies teachers i work with - they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, have no inate interest in the subject, don't read anything (that i can tell) and teach in a way that is utterly boring and off-putting. great - so we fire them. i won't complain, though what the process going to look like and how will it be fair? and anyway, now who's gonna take the job? there's not exactly a stampede of qualified applicants eager to do a better job. getting an education degree isn't necessarily easy and unfortunately there seem to be an awful lot of folks who look to get one not b/c they love learning, but because they don't know what to do. my last school had a us history job unfilled for more than a month. the job doesn't pay well, lend much prestige and it sure doesn't get you laid (well, ethically anyhow ) you can fire a baseball player who bats .200 and makes 3 errors a game b/c the major leagues, whihc offers a powerful wealth incentive, produces tons of guys who can do better. the current supply pool for schools is more like the little leagues though. another thing to remember - teaching/education is far more an art than a science, especially at the level of a classroom teacher - it doesn't submit well to the tyranny of metrics. i don't mind standardized tests, and in fact i was incredibly succesful in getting kids to pass them in my last state, but the results don't necessarily mean what you think. the defintion of "the welfare of students" is therefore itself rather fuzzy.

uh, hate to rock your world, but for kids this is true of everything that happens in school, excepting lunch and the dismissal bell you should come on in and teach a lesson to my class dude, you seem like you got it all figured out! if you hang around for the test to proudly measure your ROI you might be a wee bit suprised too. having spent a ton of time on all the things you mention in that last line, i'd still guarentee you a large # of my kids could not point out tibet, tell you who the DL is, or anything sensible about buddhism. and yes, i fail them for it. and yes, the rich parents go right on buying them bmws. the dirty truth is, you can lead a horse to water... field trips are inevitable "fluffy" as you say - montesorri schools though, which are private and enjoy incredibly high reputations as effective schools, base their entire curriculum on the constructivism school of learning, whihc stresses real world, "experiential" learning, which is exactly what you get from field trips a field trip can be a incredibly useful teachign tool - as w/ any tool, it all boils down to how it's wielded - if you have shitty teachers, you get shitty product. duh.

I am curious how teachers fighting for more pay makes the school system worse or un-good? I work for an increase every year, and I do not see a connection between that and the organization I work for needing to be "fixed". i would also ask, given that i'm in a union you dislike, despite its stated top priority being the welfare of students, how exactly do you think my organization is an absolute roadblock to your solutions?

i wasn't spraying...i think its flat ass rude to reserve cliffs... wasn't talking to you

so, out of curiousity, is there anyone you think WOULD be worth kids seeing in the glorious pursuit of ROI?

hardly radical - radical was french/chinese/russian revolutionaries burning down churches, raping nuns and crucifying priests, no? you have not elaborated more on the double standard, nor on why the other reasons for facilitating school children in seeing/hearing the dalai llama are bullshit

regardless, and while i like mountie-bashign as much as the next guy, the original post said "no spray" muthafuckas!

so he's not a world leader? i'd take my kids to see the pope, the patriarch or moqtada al sadr, though i think they're all full of shit. they and their ideas undeniably shape the world. i don't see a double-standard - please elaborate - christianity most annoys me in its "pushiness" (i know you don't need me to list historical examples of christians forcing their religion on the weak) - the dalai specifically discourages americans from turnign to buddhism and encourages them to pursue the values he talks about through the faiths they already understand.

That is the best! picard/riker'08 - MAKE IT SO! Worf can be Secretary of Defence. Fuck it, let's rename the DoD back to the Dept. of War. would a screaming liberal like picard ever have so conservative a secdef?

That is the best! picard/riker'08 - MAKE IT SO!

he is a world leader, he is a major figure in world events that directly impact the usa, the religion he represents is poorly understand by americans and thus seeing him speak on it is educational from a social-studies perspective, his is not an evangelical faith nor is his visit to make converts or really even talk about buddhism at all. BULLSHIT. care to elaborate, your worshipfullness?