Obama Wants $1 Billion For "Master Teachers Corps" 561
theodp writes "The White House has unveiled a proposal to create a national elite teachers corps to reward the nation's best educators in science, technology, engineering and math. In the first year, as many as 2,500 teachers in those subjects would get $20,000 stipends on top of their base salaries in exchange for a multiyear commitment to the STEM Master Teacher Corps. The Obama administration plans to expand the corps to 10,000 nationwide over the next four years, with the ultimate goal that the elite group of teachers will pass their knowledge and skills on to their colleagues to help bolster the quality of teaching nationwide."
Reflections from the UK (Score:5, Informative)
I'm tring to work out from TFA whether this is aimed at recruiting new teachers, or developing existing ones. If it's the former, then there have been various similar schemes (or perhaps it's a single often-rebranded scheme) in the UK over the last decade or so. The focus hasn't always been so narrowly on the STEM subjects, but it has tended to be on "difficult" subjects, where recruitment and retention of teachers is usually difficult (and where pupil uptake and performance has been fastest to decline).
In fact, I have a friend who works in teaching who got into it via the scheme in one of its various guises. He's fairly open about both its strengths and drawbacks.
In terms of strengths, he quite openly admits that the salary supplement (which was less than the GBP equivalent of $20,000 when he joined - closer to around $8,000 equivalent) was a very attactive consideration, given that he was graduating with a fair old pile of debt. None of the other career options he was considering would have made it possible for him to move away from the parents and live independently in London quite so quickly. He's also noted that he (and others like him) actually know his subject (maths) to the extent that they can actually field questions from students that go away from the narrow syllabus. He was horrified by how many of his older colleagues were dependant on being allowed to stick to a very narrow syllabus.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of his intake to the graduate scheme dropped out relatively quickly - within the first year in many cases. The scheme was highly focussed on underperforming schools - which largely tend to be those which have the most severe discipline problems. It's no secret that many classes in those schools are more about crowd control than education. As my friend is the oldest of 6 siblings, he came to this with a natural advantage. By contrast, those who had gotten onto the scheme on the basis of academic ability often simply couldn't cope with the levels of misbehaviour, abuse and violence that are endemic in our less impressive schools and dropped out.
The other problem revolved around the reactions of other teachers - and particularly the teaching unions - to the scheme members. This is a profession where pay and career advancement had long been (and is still largely expected to be) determined by length of service, rather than performance or potential. Having a bunch of "bright young things" on additional pay and a fast track to Department-head and other management positions went down in most staff-rooms like a cup of cold sick. At the same time, the unions (membership of which is not mandatory, but is widespread) did everything they legally could to make life unpleasant for them. If you find yourself on a "Fast Track" scheme like this, you need to be prepared to be a bit of a staff room pariah.
So yeah, it's not a bad idea in theory, but expect results in practice to be mixed.
Re:Feh. Obama buys more votes with taxpayer $$ (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you're wrong. The national debt was roughly $10T when Bush left office in 2008. It's now pushing $16T, three years and six months into Obama's term.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57400369-503544/national-debt-has-increased-more-under-obama-than-under-bush/ [cbsnews.com]
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ [brillig.com]
Re:critical thinking (Score:5, Informative)
It was in the PDF available from the Texas GOP website.
They have since tried to distance themselves from it, but left it standing, because somehow they can't go back and remove it because of "rules."
The thing about the platform document is not just the critical thinking paragraph, it's the xenophobia and outright tinfoil haberdashery and millinery in the rest of the document. The opposition to critical thinking fits right in and completes the document.
I suggest you read the Texas GOP platform document itself. It's a laugh riot. You can't download it from the Texas GOP site anymore, because I guess someone figured out that actually publishing your stupid ideas and people identifying them as stupid leads to a backlash.
So let's go with this.
http://www.tfn.org/site/DocServer/2012-Platform-Final.pdf?docID=3201 [tfn.org]
Read. It doesn't disappoint. It's even more crazy than the 2008 platform.
Be fuckin' amazed that people actually think like this.
--
BMO
Re:Obvious money giveaway is obvious (Score:5, Informative)
so children, which type of fallacy does this response fall under?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies [wikipedia.org]
<me, me, me, me, me/>
In essence, the argument exhibits non sequitur dumbfoolery. Despite the pedestrian simplicity of it, however, it hides a masterful combination of the following (or variants, in whole or in part):
Re:once again, it's the parents, stupid (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sorry but if you can't help your kid in elementary school then you should be doing the homework with them. There is nothing hard or advanced in elementary school, that by the time your an adult you shouldn't know. If a parent can't assist there child in the courses there being taught then they should be going back to school.
You make a good point... Nevertheless, if I were your elementary school teacher, you would be getting an F for the 3 blatant errors you made in that paragraph. Are you trolling or did you really never learn the difference between their, there, and they're?
Re:Obvious money giveaway is obvious (Score:2, Informative)
You have to be really dumb fucking stupid to not see this as only a pandering, cynical move.
Three and 1/2 fucking years he's dicked around fucking things up and NOW he decides we need something like this?
He's admitting that he's either been asleep at the switch since he was elected or that he fucked things up so badly that we need to spend a billion dollars to fix it.
Re:critical thinking (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, there's a lot of people who want to use education as a way to brainwash children under the guise of "critical thinking" or "education".
Left-wingers were forced out of economics departments, because Marx and Keynes are evil (just ask Senator McCarthy). They switched to education and english, where they came up with stuff like Postmodernism and Outcomes Based Education. They became masters of obscurism and sophistry, because they couldn't publicly say what they meant without enraging the anti-socialist lobby (which is still pretty powerful).
There's right-wing education movements too, but they come from other quarters than mainstream academia.
So basically, students get told to learn weird cryptic left-wing stuff (which is designed to be incoherent enough to fly under the radar), and a bit of right-wing propaganda which gets forced in by the right (i.e. intelligent design).
Re:critical thinking (Score:4, Informative)
As international test scores indicate, America's children are the recipients of an increasingly rotten education. Meanwhile, the focus of their education becomes a football between elite establishment groups.
America's families and children are becoming pawns and worker bees to be manipulated through social engineering. The goal is to manufacture peaceful, docile citizens of a world corporate state. The individual is to be subsumed into the collective.
The same two ostensibly state government-associated groups (NGA and CCSSO) developed Obama's "Race to the Top" (RTTT ), as well as America 2000 under the Bush 41 administration that morphed into Goals 2000 in 1994 under President Clinton. Goals 2000 and that year's reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act combined for the first time to require that states and school districts comply with federal standards listed in Goals 2000 in order to receive federal education dollars. Those standards include expanding government schooling into the preschool years and a much greater emphasis on the mental health or social and emotional aspects. Many would rightly deem this psychosocial meddling indoctrination, instead of what parents want and expect as the traditional academic aspects of education - reading, math, history and civics.
Grassroots education activists were told that local control of education would be improved by George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind", that the hated Goals 2000 would be repealed. The summary of the bill states: "The proposal would remove all references to Goals 2000, outcome-based education, School-to-Work, Workforce Investment Act, and higher order thinking skills."
What is Goals 2000, you ask? It is an education dumbing-down package passed in 1994 during the Clinton administration after it failed to pass under former President Bush in 1991. It was supposed to "harmonize" the relationship between government and education by mandating watered-down, dumbed-down education standards that included a national curriculum, national test and national teacher's license.
Passed at the same time as Goals 2000 was HR 6. That bill stated that "voluntary" stipulations of Goals 2000 were mandatory if states wanted federal money. Thus, in essence, the feds would control education in all states.
While current politicians talk a good game, the fact is every Goals 2000 mandate was reauthorized in "No Child Left Behind," then reauthorized and strengthened in RTTT under the Obama administration.
The only things these bills improve are the power of the establishment and the disempowering of the states and individuals and the dumbing-down of American children.
Education grassroots activist, mother of three and physician Dr. Karen Effrem of MREC stated recently that "Goals 2000 has nothing to do with academics." She believes that eventually the federal leviathan will control the entire education system, which will include private and home schooling.
From Professor Allen Quist:
Re:Feh. Obama buys more votes with taxpayer $$ (Score:4, Informative)