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."
Re:How about the low hanging fruit first? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here;s my experience in education talking:
3. Remove any student who is constantly disrupting class. If they become a problem (and don't have a documented mental handicap), simply expel them and kick them out onto the street.
If they are a problem, the parents will just get them diagnosed as something. The kid could just be a little shit, and somewhere, someone will diagnose him/her as having oppositional defiance disorder.
"4. Establish a general policy of erring on the side of pacing the class to the speed of the top 50% of the class, not the bottom 50%. If the bottom cannot keep up, offer them tutoring; if they fail objectively, fail them for the year.
Tried that once - parents lose their minds. Remember - teachers have a class of 20-40 little special fucking snowflakes to deal with. Most parents believe that their kid is the most special, and that if little Johnny fails the teacher has done something wrong. It is damned near impossible to hold a student back - not because of the school, but because of the parents and their propensity to sue at the drop of a hat.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reflections from the UK (Score:1, Interesting)
Obama wants $1 Billion for public sector union jobs, so they in turn can donate to Democrats. You don't seriously think this proposal is about education, do you?
Re:Teaching excellence (Score:4, Interesting)
That's how it is here in Finland; it's pretty difficult to get into a teacher's education, and they all have Master's degrees. Sure, once you are a teacher it's a very steady government job and you also have lots of autonomy, but this tends to foster pride in what they're doing and a desire to do it well.
Re:Reflections from the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
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
There have been in the U.S. too. The National Board Certification program was started here to "make better teachers" and all that. States offered salary bonuses to teachers completing it, it was going to improve our schools, blah, blah. In the end, tons of teachers went through it for the salary bonuses (as much as $10,000/yr extra in some states), ballooning up education budgets across the country--all with absolutely no evidence that Board Certified teachers became any more effective in the classroom. I suspect this new program will be more of the same. Teachers will do it for the extra money, students will see no benefit.
Re:Reward good behavior? (Score:5, Interesting)
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days. The point is that as teachers reach tenure, some, not all, can become complacent, and just use their job for a paycheck, while others go out of their way to create interesting, stimulating lesson plans. Who gets rewarded more? In most cases, the complacent one, as they've achieved tenure, they get greater raises and it's nigh on impossible to fire them.
^^^ This. I'm also a conservative (though I will most likely be voting for Obama), and indeed the problem is not public school teachers, but how many unions (not all, but many) protect under-performing teachers. There are vested interests to keep the status-quo.
However, the other side of the coin to be fair is that many in the current conservative echelons attack the teaching profession, think privatization and education budget cutting (think Gov. Rick Scott) is the solution of everything, and worse, they pander to creationists (which is one of the reasons I will not be voting GOP in these coming elections.)
There is a lot to blame on both sides of the political fence. The important thing is to move past the blaming game, pick and plan and work from there.
As a direct reply to the AC, whenever someone says "conservatives X" or "liberals X", it is almost certain that one can ignore his/her words without significant loss of information. Generalizations are the bread and butter of the feeble minded fodder for the identity politics cannons.
As a realist, I think this program is a step in the right direction, incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
I agree. I think there will be significant problems, and unfortunately the current GOP leadership that panders to the far right will cry havock just because the plan was proposed by dark-skinned-socialist-with-muslim-sounding-name-who-of-course-is-a-manchurian-candidates-for-the-chinese-and-satan. There will also be elements in teacher unions
No plan is ever perfect, which is why there should always be opposition, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation. But one cannot wait forever for the perfect plan. We pick one and we move from there. We fix, keep or drop pieces accordingly.
However imperfect this might be, and regardless of the problems that will occur (and they will), at least in spirit, this is a move in the right direction.
Money isn't the Answer (Score:2, Interesting)
The best teacher in the world cannot teach in a classroom with no discipline. I taught school for 10 years. I was so beaten down from trying to teach with no support that I had to decide whether I wanted to just babysit, like so many of the other teachers were doing, or do something else. I am now doing something else.
The fundamental problem is that education is not valued in this country anymore. For some reason many people seem to wear "stupid" as some sort of a badge of honor. Many parents don't particularly care about their child's education. Just like administrators, they talk a good game, but when it gets down to it, they don't want to be bothered about their kids not behaving or learning in class. It's easier to go to the school and yell at the teacher for a few minutes than to do the work of parenting and teach their children how to behave and insist that they pay attention in class.
You could give these teacher $1 million over their salary, but that doesn't fix the fundamental problems.
Re:Reflections from the UK (Score:2, Interesting)
The federal government shouldn't be evaluating teachers at all. Schools and education are a state issue that the federal government can assist with but in no case should they be over it.
Each state and municipality within the state should decide the best way to evaluate the teachers serving their communities. In my idea world, their evaluations would pertain to the amount of knowledge retained by their students pursuant to the state guidelines and grade levels and so on.
As for a teacher teaching kids weird and strange things, that is something else that needs to be caught at a state and local level. The reality is that is exactly where they will get discovered should it ever happen.
Re:Reflections from the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing with parents is that there needs to be parental involvement during the school day, not just at home.
My sister has my nephews enrolled in a school in her area where one of the requirements is that the parent or parents of each child must attend training sessions (at least one nighht a month) and also spend one school day per month in the classroom providing assistance to the teacher per child they have enrolled.
The training covers a number of things, but one biggie is classroom management, and another biggie is dispute resolution between teachers and parents. This winds up vastly reducing issues caused by helicopter parents because they have to work with the teachers, not against them, and their children WILL be removed from the school if the parents cause a problem.
Just the fact of having a second adult in the room - who knows a parent of all the other kids in the room - will cut down hugely on discipline problems. And because the parents get some level of training in ways to assist the teachers, it means that if there is an issue a child has that would normally require a derail of the lesson, it can be handled without throwing things off too much.
It also means that the teachers can't slack off either - they have a parent there to see what's going on, so it's hard to phone it in which means bad teachers get bounced out fairly quickly.
It also means that the parents are much more involved at home, which makes for a be improvement in learning.
Finally, the school itself will have an administrator contact the employers of working parents and arrange for the parents to get the workday off each month to handle things, and in several cases have also gotten the employers to sponsor school events etc.
Basically, this school does everything they can to make educating the children in the community a true community exercise. It does require a bit of extra administrative burden, but it also reduces the administrative burden with reduced discipline issues and increased learning and retention, requiring material to be re-taught less frequently.
It's a charter school, though, but I really do think that this kind of thing could be done efficiently and effectively at any school, especially public ones where parental involvement is spotty. Personally, I think if you want to have your child educated in a public school, you should have to do volunteer work like this with the school rather than just dumping your kid off there.