Higher Pay for Math and Science Teachers 471
Coryoth writes "Following up a previous story, it seems that the Kentucky effort to provide increased pay to teachers with qualifications in mathematics, physics, and chemistry has been gutted. Teachers objected to differential pay, and that portion of the bill was removed. At the same time California has just put forward a similar measure, with differential pay for teachers qualified in mathematics and science. Shockingly 40% of mathematics teachers in California are not fully qualified in the subject — a higher percentage of unqualified teachers than any other subject. Is the Californian effort any more likely to succeed, or is it destined to be similarly gutted? Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"
paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.
Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a question of priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
Two types of teacher (Score:3, Insightful)
There are certainly plenty of "those who can't", but there are a small subset who believe in the importance of what they are doing to forgo industry and take the lower pay. I was lucky enough to have a few of them in my high school and it probably encouraged me to head into the field i'm in now. One of our math teachers taught us advanced courses that covered things like Number Theory and Abtract Math; he had us demonstrate how to implement and break RSA encryption and why it could be done in a reasonable time. Our two man chemistry department was entirely staffed with Ph. D's, my favorite Physics teacher could at least explain the basics of quantum theory.
I'm not convinced that salary is everything. It'll certainly solve the "we need more science/math teachers" problem, but it'll probably entice people who were otherwise going to become teachers to specialize in teaching a different field.
This kind of effort will surely cause rifts in the teaching staff, but offering slightly more money isn't going to entice any experts away from industry or tertiary academia.
What about language? (Score:3, Insightful)
Short answer (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Because among the Teachers' Union's membership there are 40% of mathematics teachers who would become unemployed if a solution were found. A good solution would help two groups of people: Qualified people who are not currently teachers, and students. Neither of those groups is a part of any Teachers' Union.
My fiancee was a math teacher in california (Score:3, Insightful)
They can hire an intern for half the price and just get rid of them every year or what they do is put in a permanent sub and recycle them just to meet quotas so they don't get sued. Its disgusting.
The problem really is paying more for math and science teachers. If the schools must pay more for these teachers then they will fire them to save money and use interns.
So why should a teacher get a credential in a subject that could damage his or her career?
Also whats great about unqualified interns is that they do not have to comply with no child left behind. They can claim they could not find enough qualified teachers to fill the position and the schools will no longer have to be held accountable.
As a result she plans to teach in Texas next year. Pay is only a few thousand less a year and the bean counters do not run the schools and do borderline illegal things like what I described above or putting 50 kids to a class room and then change all the teachers in October so they can get away without paying teachers salary for 1 whole year. My jaw dropped when I heard about that.
The Union is hardly the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
In a nutshell, the way you get elected in those parts is to deliver relatively cushy government jobs to your friends and supporters*.
Since funding for schools is already pitiful, the usual strategy is to have lots of low paying teacher jobs, rather than fewer good paying positions. If you pay less per job, you create more porkbarrel positions that will bring you votes.
Kentucky really isn't interested in spending more on schools, and is just using teacher unions as a convenient excuse.
* or hand out fifths of whisky on election day. Or indulge in good old fashioned vote buying. [newsbank.com]
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay people more, they'll become qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Short answer (Score:5, Insightful)
It might also provide incentives for the 40% that aren't qualified to take the courses necessary to become so.
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:1, Insightful)
quoted for emphasis, because it sounds like you missed that part.
Union's don't reward excellence... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course not. Union's don't reward ability. Union's tend to focus on the lowest common denominator holding onto their job. Pay for performance usually increases performance. Paying someone equally for less performance usually discourages people from using their abilities. I've never understood why teacher's aren't paid for performance, especially considering the responsibility they have. So long as excellent scientists and mathematicians are paid the same as incapable football coaches, there will be no massive rush to enter high school teaching.
Mod me troll if you like, but rewards based on abilities and performance usually yield better results.
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:3, Insightful)
Test scores? Student evaluations?
The problem with comparing education to the "real world" is that education is not a business. Teachers have to take every student that shows up in their class. Businesses get to define their own market.
Re:It's a question of priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you rank the "usefulness" of someone's study? By time spent in school? Well then my Ph.D. in Linguistics is more "useful" than your MBA. Just because you're good at differential equations doesn't mean that the world needs to pay more for math and science than art. I can influence the masses a hell of a lot better with good writing than with a carefully deduced solution to a differential equation.
I think what you're trying to say is that people should be rewarded according to the market value of their work. That makes sense, but the guy who read all those novels can still turn around and write one himself. If it's a best-seller, he'll do better than the guy who hasn't solved a differential equation in 10 years.
Re:Two types of teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
2. They are very enthusiastic, and spin their wheels with enthusiasm.
3. About 5-10 years into it, they get cynical. But with that many years behind them, they are not going to switch careers.
2. It generates a lot of (fake) steam, then is loopholed and "special-ed"ed out of commission, at which point everybody forgets the name.
3. The program is about to expire, and everything will go back to traditional mode. This creates a lawsuit hazard, as tens of thousands of students suddenly must pass a test or miss their diploma.
4. A new program is hastily implemented to keep the scores inflated and keep to the students rolling through (read: no lawsuits).
2. Parents roar at the teacher, and send their kid to the school shrink. At this point the student pays attention and dons his worst intellect, in order to pass the evaluation.
3. He is assigned a monitor who is specially responsible to keep an eye on his school (read: make sure he passes).
4. The student has a lot less work to do (the basic package is 1/2 the homework, and it gets worse as you go along), and the teacher is given a dossier (they have some politically correct name for it) on the kid's "condition", and he is required to tailor his lessons for that child's benefit. (There is naturally no way a teacher can tailor the class for a dozen individual kids.)
5. The student passes with good grades, and gets his diploma. He got by with minimal work, the parents are happy, and nobody got sued.
5. Since you can't discriminate against the handicapped or retarded, the diploma has no mention of the fact that the student didn't actually do the work, or that he has any condition.
As for classroom discipline:
2. You cannot dock their grade without the parents getting zealous.
3. You may only send them to the office, where the overworked principle (who spends "half his time making sure we comply with regulations") tells the student to behave or face staying home from school (sounds silly, but it really irks the parents, who suddenly have a kid to babysit).
4. If the teacher saw the kid's drugs, the principle calls the students mom to come (no way will he tell the kid to drop his pants for a search without a parent present). The kid is then sent to the school police officer, and I don't know what he does with him.
5. There isn't much else to do.
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:4, Insightful)
But you don't understand. The schools aren't about the students, they are all about the teachers unions. In exactly the same way the big three automakers slowly morphed from being about making cars into social programs for union autoworkers. It is what unions do, and when it is a union in control of a government monopoly like education it gets insane. The schools now exist for the benefit of the teachers, students are at best a useful prop for lobbying for more money. Reality has long been divorced from what goes on inside government schools. Untested fads by fashionable marxists intellectuals get rolled out into classrooms nationwide without any sort of testing, political correctness runs rampant, etc. Accountability is almost non existant. Unless a teacher gets caught in a politically incorrect belief or having sex with a student their odds of being fired for malpractice isn't measurable.
And yet the beauracy is so wretched that no sane person wants to teach even with the fairly good pay (and it IS fairly good pay in most states for the hours worked and the level of education required) in most states and the all but certain job security mentioned above, A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession.
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a matter of "merit" or "fairness." It's a matter of acknowledging that most people who leave serious technical jobs to teach incur a serious opportunity cost. Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price is not really a good idea.
The reason they're protesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Any even more endangered position (such as being known to be worth less salary than others), is much too close to the low-end job market to be comfortable. So - the union isn't protesting just to spite us. It doesn't prefer inefficiency without a cause. It just has to fight for the very future of its members.
Us relatively high paid IT guys, who haven't seen the poverty line from below in most cases, and who can always train themselves something new, tend to ignore how soul-crushing the lack of a professional perspective is. You know what? The job market isn't free. There are huge barriers to entry, especially for people who are, neurologically, too old to learn a new profession. So what the union does isn't protection of assets, it is fight for survival. You need not respect that, but you'd gain insight into their actions by understanding that.
The solution? Why, on-job qualification programs for teachers, of course. But that's a long-term solution. We don't do that unless re-election is certain.
Not a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the No Child Left Behind debacle? Slowly, county by county, districts are telling the Department of Education to "shove it". My county is among those who have done so, and I'm proud of that.
For now, the federal government only funds like 2% of school budgets, so schools can defy the feds relatively painlessly. But what if the federal government provided 20% of the funding? 80%? You'd get the same mess we are in with the highway funds. As it stands right now, all congress has to do is tell a state, "Change XYZ state law for us, or you can build your own damn roads." I don't want to see that happen with education.
Why does the union have to step in here? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to see unions kill the 'free' job market for everyone and keeping our children dumb. You get paid according to your results, not according your title (although that ideology reverses itself throughout higher management). 'Think of the children', anyone, now you DO have a reason to and you don't.
And I would also like to see (more) practical mathematics in school. Currently most students get it shoved down their throats as a merely theoretical 'boring' lesson while mathematics has much more interesting and practical uses which during my time in school, I never or barely got to see (I got to see them a little in my practicum for electronics, but that's about it).
Re:Only 40% unqualified (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's a question of priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the perception of equality more important? Or is the education of our children more important?
--
I almost became a high school science teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wanted to teach, but giving up nearly half my potential income was simply too much. The kids lost out. I met plenty of other students in grad school who felt the same way.
Re:Education (Score:3, Insightful)
Empathy (Score:3, Insightful)
The federal government may only directly fund 2% of the average school budget but through their control of the distribution of money they can influence the other 98%. All money (well, a vast majority) goes to DC before it comes back to the states and the money which doesn't go directly to DC is controlled by DC through any number of other systems.
Ideally, yes, we taxpayers keep our money and use it to locally decide how things are done. That was the spirit of the 9th and 10th Amendments and the restriction of the authority of the federal government. Until we can move back to that system, though, we can at least hope that the money comes back in salaries.
Re:The task of teaching (Score:3, Insightful)
All I seem to hear is that paying teachers more money will repair the educational system in america. I think efforts would be spent better ensuring teachers are doing their best to teach and can't rely on unions to keep them secure in their jobs.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why math and science? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Education (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:3, Insightful)
1. The schools have been a void of academic activity for a generation, long before GW (shrub) Bush & Ted (drunken murdering basterd) Kennedy smiled together at a lectern to announce NCLB.
2. The sort of mental defectives who Ariana Huffington lets blog at her asylum are part of the problem, not the solution.
The idea behind NCLB was great, but of course after it made it's way through Congress, where the Democrats in the Senate would have fillibustered any bill that actually reduced the power of a key source of campaign funding, the end product was somewhat less.
Please explain your objection to the core ideas behind NCLB? The one most often railed against by the union thugs is the testing. It isn't fair, now we spend most of our time just prepping kids to take the test. And the problem with that is? If the test represents a valid set of the things a student should know before exiting a grade level then where is the objection? If it doesn't correctly represent the knowledge required wouldn't the better course of action to be pushing to revise the question pool or the examination procedure believed to be defective?
Or is it a case of political correct theory, i.e. no subjective test is possible. Which I read as "Don't you dare presume to judge what we, the annointed few in teachers union, deign to teach your children. If they can't balance a checkbook after graduation that isn't important, we felt it best to enhance their self esteem."
Sorry, without testing no improvement in quality is possible. And of course the next logical step is that until we are willing to sack teachers and whole schools who consistently underperform little progress is going to be possible.
The problem is not lack of money. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the reason American students are falling behind in subjects like math and science is not because teachers aren't getting paid enough, or is it because of a lack of funding. The problems students are facing are far more elemental. They're not being taught basic responsibilities. They're not being taught a work ethic. And they're not being taught to respect anyone or anything.
Instead educators are trying to turn education into entertainment. Lessons are reduced to wacky fun facts. Everything has to be packaged into bite-sized chunks. It isn't just the curriculum. Compare what schools do in the US compared to schools in Asia, for example.
When I was living in Taiwan I observed that school and academics virtually encompassed a student's entire life. It's not like here when kids are looking to get out of school at a nice early hour to go play. First of all, students arrive at school at 8am, if not earlier. Again, unlike the US where some schools have delayed opening until 9am to let students sleep later.
More importantly were the responsibilities Taiwanese students are given. They spend the first half hour, maybe longer, cleaning the school. They actually have them sweeping the floors and cleaning bathrooms. They didn't necessarily do a good job but rest assured that they were much more reluctant to engage in vandalism knowing that they would be cleaning up the mess the following day.
Imagine the uproar if a school tried that sort of thing in the US. I'm sure lawyers would sweep in with their claims child labor laws were violated. But the fact is that this instilled a sense of responsibility in students.
And it's something that followed them through the school day. They often got out of school late in the day, 4pm or 5pm. And many, mainly those in high school would then go to cram schools in the evening to study for graduation exams.
The problem is, if the schools aren't reinforcing the value of education nobody else will. They sure aren't going to learn anything on the streets. Kids in the suburbs can be as bad as those in the cities. And I know people who've experienced these kinds of problems first hand. It's just that wealthy communities are better at sweeping problems under the rug. But there's a very big distinction. Regardles of what those kids in the suburbs do they're constantly exposed to people who are successful. Eventually it gets drilled into most of them that they need to take school more seriously. So it's the environment outside of school that is one of the biggest factors why many more kids in the suburbs go on to college and end up doing reasonably well.
The lack of interest in some subjects comes down to a lack of work ethic. No amount of money or salary increase is going to resolve these problems. The US already spends money on education than any other developed nation and students in those countries still outperform American students.
Re:Education (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, teachers should probably make more money across the board, but the idea that you pay somebody with a highly marketable education the same as somebody who doesn't have nearly as many job prospects simply doesn't work in the real world. I'd be more than happy to consider teaching math or science as a career. I like teaching, I'm reasonably good at getting ideas across, and I have the technical background. As it stands, though, going into teaching could cost me tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost income. That's just too big of a jump to make, so I don't consider it a viable option.
Re:The task of teaching (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd respect the teachers a WHOLE bunch more, if they'd work on removing the bad teachers from teaching. But No, it is next to impossible to fire a teacher. I think the only way now, is to fsck a student or two, not sure though, since many just leave quietly to go to the next district.
Seriously, until the TEACHER UNIONS become about TEACHING rather than EMPLOYMENT and socialistic ideals such as "equal pay for equal work" when we know that not all Teaching is the same.
"We currently have a very limited number of people put into that formal role, and they collectively are not doing what we would consider an acceptable job at it. What should our response be?"
First? Fire the bad teachers, so that people of quality aren't ashamed to be called "Teacher" again. The responsibility is upon the parents for not demanding teachers who teach instead of six hour babysitters. The responsibility is for Schools to hire quality teachers, fire bad ones, and not bow down before Teacher Unions.
If I were running a school district, I'd offer two pay packages, one for Union Teachers, and a better one for teachers who aren't part of the problem. I'd tell the union to take a hike on making it a union shop. Let the members really vote.
I'd create one, two, five, and ten year contracts, based upon previous performance. First year teacher - one year contract. If they do good, next year, they get two year. If they do good, Five year, if they do adequatee, two years, if they do poorly, one or even gone. Ten year contracts are for consistant and excellent teachers.
I can't think of a better way to say to teachers that deserve it, "we value you" than merited contracts with good pay. Right now, all teachers get the same regardless, good teachers don't get rewarded, and bad teachers don't get fired.
"So, is this the best way to get the job done? Is this the way we respect our children's need for education, and the people who are put into the role of opening doors for the children?"
Right now? Children are the last people on everyone's mind. Everyone knows there are big problems with the system, but any suggestion that actually is good for the kids is summarily dismissed by the Unions and other special interest groups.
"Merit Pay" (Score:2, Insightful)
First, 50% of new teachers will quit in the first five years.
Second, all beliefs to the contrary, all classes are not created equal. Each 'batch' of students will vary from year to year. What some are clamoring for is 'merit pay' - the real problem is no one wants to define merit. Merit is NOT test scores, but according to the government, it seems to be. What happens when somebody brilliant opts to limit special education kids to one class (as to maximize the amount of time kids are included under the supervision of a special ed person and a regular teacher) - the average test performance drops, but it's obviously the teacher's fault, right? Cause he's the teacher.
And a final word on unions: before you start thinking about whether unions are bad, you need to understand, the administration of a school is not interested in the wellbeing or the benefits of being a teacher. The administration is there to side with parents, to prevent public outcry and lawsuits, but a principal is not on the side of a teacher. So when a teacher is accused of inappropriate activity with a student (didn't happen to me, but happened to a fellow teacher who was six feet away from the girl at the time), the administration shows you the door, and has no choice but to take the word of a juvenile delinquent over somebody with a Masters Degree. The teacher involved was eventually cleared, but he left teaching and I lost contact with him. Nobody in school will look out for a teacher except a union.
The better question is if you value education so much, why aren't you teaching?
Re:Education (Score:3, Insightful)
At the university level, this has long been the standard, each department has a different pay scale which is heavily influenced by the market for that profession. Science, engineering, and business professors make more than arts and humantities professors because that is what they have to pay to attact good people -- even so, qualified people in those fields usually have considerably higher paying options outside of the university.
I would like to pay all qualified teachers more, but I suspect that having separate pay scales is also likely to be part of a successful solution.
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:5, Insightful)
1) "But you don't understand." - Sophistry.
2) "The schools aren't about the students, they are all about the teachers unions." - Opinion.
3) "In exactly the same way the big three automakers slowly morphed from being about making cars into social programs for union autoworkers." - Exaggeration and opinion. The Big Three are having issues for many reasons, one of which happens to be the unions.
4) "It is what unions do, and when it is a union in control of a government monopoly like education it gets insane." - Opinion.
5) "The schools now exist for the benefit of the teachers, students are at best a useful prop for lobbying for more money." - Opinion. Sorry to hear you feel this way.
6) "Reality has long been divorced from what goes on inside government schools." - Opinion.
7) "Untested fads by fashionable marxists intellectuals get rolled out into classrooms nationwide without any sort of testing, political correctness runs rampant, etc." - Opinion. While you might have the basis for some sort of legitimate argument here, I'd argue you've got the same thing in most corporations. What's the latest management fad or catchphrase these days?
8) "Accountability is almost non existant." Groundless opinion. You have almost no idea what you're speaking of with this one. Read up on NCLB and learn some.
9) "Unless a teacher gets caught in a politically incorrect belief or having sex with a student their odds of being fired for malpractice isn't measurable." - Opinion, although close to reality. More of the problem with teaching comes from the fact that teaching and administrative jobs are often political in nature, which is the heart of the problem. Most good unions will work with administrators to get bad teachers out of the classroom, but they will insist that the administrators do it the right and legal way. More than a few administrators, though, because they're incompetent political hacks, don't know how to build a case to fire a teacher. Before a teacher receives tenure, he's got little protection, and administrators should do a better job of culling the bad ones sooner.
10) "And yet the beauracy is so wretched that no sane person wants to teach even with the fairly good pay (and it IS fairly good pay in most states for the hours worked and the level of education required) in most states and the all but certain job security mentioned above," - Opinion. I'm quite sane. I enjoy teaching. I love my job despite some of the stupidity that goes on. However, I hear similar complaints from friends and relatives in the corporate world, so it's a wash. I will not argue that the pay is bad because it's not. Still who wouldn't want to be paid more for what they do?
11) "A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession." - Opinion. Terribly misguided opinion. Just because you know "math" doesn't mean you know how to teach it. Just because you've got a PhD in Molecular Biology doesn't mean you should be in a classroom with special education or ESL students. A few semesters of 'mind-numbing teaching courses' along with some child/adolescent psychology can do wonders for adults who have never worked with children before.
You've written nothing that petulant high school students haven't written before (all you needed to include was "boring teachers" and you'd have pegged yourself as a 17-year old whose Republican or Libertarian daddy filled his head with ideas about evil unions and abolishing government.
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:3, Insightful)
The more complete answer is that the list of people who know math well enough to teach high school level math isn't limited to pure mathematicians (although the idea that mathematicians are unemployable isn't exactly right either). Unfortunately, the set of people who can teach high school math and science also happens to be an expensive bunch. There are *lots* of people with engineering degrees for whom any high school level math or physics course is child's play who might be qualified to teach those subjects, and they're simply not applying for the job because they can make tends of thousands of dollars more per year working as engineers. I'd definitely consider teaching math or physics as a viable career if it didn't have such a high opportunity cost. As it stands, though, leaving engineering to teach is simply too expensive.
Re:The task of teaching (Score:3, Insightful)
They get what level of respect that their collective performance in the classroom dictates. They have made it impossible to distinguish individual outstanding teachers and dismal underachievers so we are forced to judge them as a group and that judgment, as you say, has been harsh indeed, although not entirely undeserved. There is really nothing that we as a society can do, under the current system that is, to encourage the teachers and their union to make the kinds of changes that would merit an increased level of performance and by extension respect. This is precisely why the system as it stands now is completely broken to the point where it cannot be fixed without changes that the entrenched interests are not prepared to accept.
There is a job to be done, a job some would consider a somewhat sacred task: Ensuring that an entire generation can learn and grow in the best way we know how to do it. That is not an easy task.
The free market has provided goods and services that are equally difficult to produce in great abundance and there is every reason to expect that market forces can provide for the creation of institutions that will effectively educate our children provided that there exists the political will to unleash those forces for the benefit of society.
We currently have a very limited number of people put into that formal role, and they collectively are not doing what we would consider an acceptable job at it. What should our response be? If our response is to punish and cut resources from that role in general one way or another, then we will be left with even fewer people to fill that role, and those that are left will have an even harder job to do.
Our response, as parents, should be to take back control of the education of our children and that means taking back control of the money that we pay in taxes for this purpose. Who is better motivated to seek out the best education possible, voucher in hand, for their child if not the parents? If we were serious about fixing education then we would put the money in the hands of the parents and let them decide who is and is not fit to teach their children via the marketplace.
More than that, the level of respect for these teachers will continue to fall. This isn't such a bad thing, if collapse of such a system is an acceptable result, except that there will be much of an entire generation of children in the lurch.
If there was money to be earned via the voucher system then I can assure you that there would be plenty of private firms offering to provide a high quality of education immediately to willing parents in exchange for those vouchers (i.e. cash on the barrel head). It would really blow the whole system wide open and massively improve quality and efficiency in our educational system.
The recent response to this issue is to push for very strict testing as a way to punish the teachers with the weakest 'performance'. That does improve the measured response, but it has also changed the way we measure the result. I would assert that by doing this, we have left behind the idea that we are trying to truly teach a generation the best way we can, but instead have minimized what we teach in order to assure high scores on a system we invent for ourselves, all in an effort to find someone to punish.
There would be no need for such rigorous measuring and enforcement if the marketplace was providing the education because if a particular institution was failing to provide a quality education then their competitors would step in and do it for them. There could even be private organizations handling the testing like the Educational Testing Service which administers the SAT exam for college admissions. The competitive pressures of the marketplace are what keep everyone, from the test administrators to the educational providers, honest and the end result is a high quality education for our children...or at least it would be if we were sincere about fixing the system.
Re:How Bout Higher Pay for Teacher's Not in Unions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well, maybe it SHOULD be gutted. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:paying based on seniority encourages laziness (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. I'm not the original poster, but I'll try to amend some of what he said:
I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world *is supposed to* work. I basically agree with your correction Pork3Ways, but the fact that your private sector boss gives preference to his incompetent golf buddy shouldn't negate the idea of fighting against seniority-based systems. I'll try to fight crony-ism when confronted with it. And I'll also try to fight seniority-based systems when confronted with those as well. Right now, it just seems that unfair seniority-based systems are the easier target, after all they're institutionalized and probably even written down. Take racism for example, racism was much easier to fight when it was institutionalized and written down somewhere, then now when most of this stuff isn't written down anymore -- but racism still occurs.
Re:Well, maybe it SHOULD be gutted. (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply put, the set of potential calculus teachers who don't have more lucrative options (or opt not to take those options) is apparently pretty darned small. Restricting ourselves to that subset is why we have so many sub-standard math teachers.
Re:How Bout Higher Pay for Teacher's Not in Unions (Score:3, Insightful)
Repeat after me: correlation does not imply causation.
Schools in the South have been in sad shape for a long time because the states themselves are financially in bad shape. Further, states with greater percentages of teachers in unions also tend to be more liberal, and tend to vote Democrat more often. Democrats tend to spend more on education. There are plenty of other factors that more than adequately explain that statistic that are not in any way resulting from the unions.
For the unions to have an appreciable effect on the quality of education, they would have to make it so that educators are not the most poorly paid educated profession in their state. They have not done that. I've watched as unions make it harder to get rid of bad teachers, cause disruption of education via strikes, etc., producing salaries that are not significantly higher than equivalent salaries adjusted for cost of living in non-union areas, and then taking union dues off the top of that. I have watched the unions utterly fail to have any positive impact over and over again, and I'm not impressed.
Here's the math. California spends on the order of $7000 per student per year. Multiply that times 30 students in a class, and you come out with $210,000 per class per year. If only $40,000 of that goes to the teacher, where does the other $170,000 go? I would argue that most of that money is wasted, and that is the reason why despite having the highest education spending of any industrialized country, we have one of the worst education systems. Unions can't fix that, though. Unions can't throw the incompetent administrators out on their backsides or force the sorts of sweeping restructuring that is needed. That can only happen through legislation. Thus, unions are nothing more than a band-aid on a severed limb. They don't fix the problem and they cause more problems than they solve.
Want to fix our education problems? Here's how. Teacher salaries need to literally double overnight, and ideally quadruple. Anything less is going to show no real benefit. It has to be a very large change to catch the attention of young people who are considering going into education. They need to say, "I could become a lawyer, but if I become a teacher, I'll make more money." To be competitive with other fields, a K-12 teacher in the Bay Area, CA should be making $120,000 out of college, and $150,000 within five years. Instead, they make as little as $42,000 starting out. In spite of unions, they are only making about 30% more than a teacher in Tennessee, where food costs about 30% less, buying a house costs 90% less, renting probably costs about 60% less, and so on. Yes, I'm pulling those numbers out of my backside, but they're in the general ballpark. You'd be hard pressed to live on $42k a year in the Bay Area. You could live on $30,000 in Tennessee much more comfortably. You could even buy a house if you saved your money wisely.
The biggest problems our schools face are, IMHO, redundancy, wasteful spending, and obscenely poor administration. We have a cafeteria at each school in a district. To cut costs, why not mass-produce the food at one school, then send a driver out in a truck to deliver it in bulk to the others, preheated and ready to serve? To cut costs, why not lease facilities in places where leasing is cheaper than buying (e.g. the Bay Area)?
For that matter, do you know how much money we waste by pumping funds into corporations that provide textbooks? Why do we do that? So that someone can get rich off our education system? If the teachers know the material, USE THAT. Engage the teachers on a statewide basis to collectively write and electronically publish their own statewide textbooks. Each teacher could contribute an article on a subject that they are familiar with, citing primary and secondary sources. Then, pay someone to compile those and turn it into a finished textbook which the state then OWNS. Better, if you organize it in such a way that the tea
Re:How Bout Higher Pay for Teacher's Not in Unions (Score:3, Insightful)
How does an inept teacher get tenure? Were the once good, and now they are bad, or were they given tenure while being a bad teacher? That seems to be the problem to fix. But I've never been in a place with a strong teachers union. There was no concept of "tenure" for public school teachers in Texas. I believe it was also illegal for them to strike, so no one would take their demands seriously.
Re:How Bout Higher Pay for Teacher's Not in Unions (Score:5, Insightful)
In spite of that, it's not the low pay that bothers me. It's the hours and the working conditions. I get to school at 7:15am. I leave at 5:15pm. If I've had 20 minutes to sit down and have lunch, I'm lucky. Most days I get absolutely no break. And I take homework home every weekend.
I just want fewer students and fewer preps. I want to get to know my students. I want to be able to talk with them. I want to know what they know and what they need to learn. I want to help them when they're struggling, and lift them up when they're having a bad day. I want to get in their face and challenge them. I want them to see that failing is not okay.
I want control over my curriculum. I want my students to decide what's important to them and study math through their ideas. Any curriculum abstracted away from the individual, any curriculum standardized to what some corporate suit things is important will fail to inspire the majority of students. Give me that job. I want to inspire my students. And I have an idea how to do it. But your all-important testing is holding me back.
That's what I want. I'm okay with the money. I'm not okay with the huge number of disengaged students and marginalized teachers.
Re:They think they're all worth the same??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Please explain how you're going to get anyone a decent education, if all the best & brightest take only the high-paying jobs for the high-end classes at the end of the education tunnel.
Really, I'm all ears. Tell me how these kids are going to get effectively taught 1-10th grade if they are only getting teachers who are only taking those low-paying teaching jobs because they are incapable of performing at a higher level. Tell me about how those high-paid qualified teachers are going to have any students worth teaching at their high-merit high-pay jobs. Tell me how they'll teach calculus instead of basic arithmetic to students who haven't had a decent teacher up until that part.
Short sighted "PAY EVERYONE BASED ON MERIT" monkey howling is pretty useless if you can't see that there is a process where every step IS actually valuable. I would even suggest that 1-5th grade general-education teachers are _more_ valuable than some wanker with in-depth knowledge in one subject. If you get poor teaching at that stage, you're going to be playing catch-up all the time in the newer, more specialized subjects.
I'm surprised this has to be explained.
Strange rant (Score:1, Insightful)
Also, there is not a strong correlation between money spent on schools and quality of education. Anyone doubting this should look directly at our nation's capital. Washington DC spends more per student than any other state, yet has the worst schools in the nation. Yay DC.A decent rant, but save it for another discussion where it's more relevant. No one is talking about privatizing schools. Sure, there are private schools, but this whole discussion is about public schools.The US Minimum wage is $5.15/hr and teachers work roughly 3/4 of the year which works out to roughly 1500 hours. Multiply that by 5.15 and you get a little less than $8,000. So if US teachers were paid minimum wage, they would earn roughly $8,000.00 per year. The median salary for a US middle school or high school teacher is $40,000.00 per year [payscale.com], or roughly 5x the US minimum wage.
So what was your point, again? It sounds like teachers in the US and Australia are similarly compensated. Why should competent US teachers get up and emigrate to Australia where everyone has a supersize chip on their shoulder?
Re:The task of teaching (Score:3, Insightful)
Good teachers have a right to be respected, bad teachers deserve to be shunned. Just like with say, doctors.
Teachers are one of the most important forces in shapeing tomorrow's adults, their work is not only important, it's essencial to assure continued prosperity in any society.
And yet, while good teachers can help shape a child into a successful, productive adult, bad teachers can contribute to turn a child into an inept and immature adult.
I'm all for paying good teachers more, as long a bad teachers get payed less or get fired. The thing is, teacher's unions are against any sort of selection or pay-per-performance in their profession. This has made sending your kids to public school a bit like playing russian roulette - there's always a risk that they come out of it inept and even thraumatized.
It's not by chance that those that can will send their kids to private schools.