Are Teachers Headed For Obsolescence? 570
dstates writes "One Laptop Per Child reports encouraging results of a bold experiment to reach the millions of students worldwide who have no access to primary school. OLPC delivered tablets to two Ethiopian villages in unmarked boxes without instructions or instructors. Within minutes the kids were opening the boxes and figuring out how to use the Motorola Zoom tablets, within days they were playing alphabet songs and withing a few months how to hack the user interface to enable blocked camera functionality. With the Kahn Academy and others at the high school level and massive open online courses at the college level, are teachers going the way of the Dodo?"
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Informative)
are teachers going the way of the Dodo? (Score:5, Informative)
1. See Betteridge's law of headlines.
2. No. But the current methodologies of teaching are. Unfortunately, teaching methods do not adapt fast enough, and this in turn causes a lot of trouble, e.g. kids not having enough and up-to-date knowledge and information about certain fields so as they can properly choose their further study fields, which can even result in badly planned and chosen careers (yes, this is a bit on the extreme side, but true nonetheless).
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:3, Informative)
Try New York City, for one. You do need to eat if for a few years and get your Masters degree, but the pay does become quite good.
Particularly when you consider that it comes with a three month vacation. And before you start with how teachers are doing work during the summer, date a couple of teachers, especially the lower grades.
I'm a teacher . . . (Score:5, Informative)
The thought that children will be able to learn anything by watching a video is just laughable...
I teach middle school math, and the level of apathy and carelessness in work is very high. There is no substitute for students being in a classroom, actually doing work.
However, if all you want to do is compare a LECTURE to a VIDEO, then sure, "teachers" can be replaced. However, "Teacher" in that context really is just "Lecturer".
There's a lot more to teaching than being on a stage and talking at people. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, selling something, or both.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:2, Informative)
1 Canadian dollar = 1.0003 US dollars
Things are a bit more expensive in Canada and don't forget the taxes. On the other hand, teachers have a great pension plan.
Scientific Data or STFU (Score:4, Informative)
Current issue of American Educator has an interesting article -- 10-year study in Philadelphia, comparing rich and poor sections of town, in libraries where a multimillion dollar grant allowed them to provide equivalent resources in books and computer learning software. The results seen by those researchers are that the rich kids were guided by their parents in using all of those things, while the poor kids without any assistance or background knowledge failed to use them successfully. End result: poor kids actually fell more behind the rich than when they started out.
"Over the 10 years we spent in these two libraries, the gap in the amount of time adolescents spent reading increased substantially. Regardless of technology (books or computers), reading tends to predominate in Chestnut Hill but not in Lillian Marrero. After years of technology improvements, there is now a larger gap between these two communities in the amount of time spent reading than before. In fact, our rough estimates indicate that 10- to 12-year-olds at Chestnut Hill were reading more than twice as many words as their peers at Lillian Marrero." [p. 23]
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall2012/Neuman.pdf [aft.org]
These are dedicated researchers studying the issue for 10 years. This is not the head of OLPC pitching questionable and unverifiable extraordinary claims, in the quest for more funding (“If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said, FTA).
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:3, Informative)
Do you actually _know_ any teachers? Teachers do get some vacation in the summer, but they also have to prepare their lesson plans for the fall. They work long hours during the school year because they have to grade papers and be prepared for each day's lesson. Imagine teaching from 8am to 3pm every day—that's five hours of teaching. How much time would you want to prepare? Now add in correcting tests, quizzes and papers. How long does that take? Yes, they get two and a half months off in the summer, during which they may spend time doing useless things like taking professional improvement courses to keep up with new material. But the notion that they are getting an incredible deal is simply untrue.
My upstairs neighbors until recently were school teachers. They do not get $80k/year—if they did they would be buying a house, not renting, and driving a BMW (or maybe a Prius), not a tiny econobox. They certainly wouldn't have put up with their upstairs neighbors for six months (yelling, swearing, loud music, doors slamming, garbage in the basement). We only put up with it because we knew we'd be moving into the house we were building on our geek salaries and parental largesse.
The idea that people should don a hair shirt in order to do useful and important work for society is deeply fucked up.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:80k for living in NYC? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, 80k with teachers' benefits is great pay for someone who is average at their job, even when living in New York City. With teachers' pensions, extra time off, and other benefits, that amounts to more like 120k-150k in the private sector (depending on how you value about 15 paid weeks off per year). That is plenty of money for New York City (not much for a single income family, but very few careers offer enough salary for that).
I do agree that this salary doesn't match what a truly exceptional employee with a Masters degree could make, but that is the teacher unions' fault. I would love for the top 10% of teachers (not based on years of experience) to average $150k in salary, but that will not happen any time soon. Until the unions get out of the way, you can only pay teachers based on what an average teacher is worth.
And forget about comparing salaries to people in other careers with a Masters degree. With only one exception, every person I know that got a Masters degree in teaching just found a diploma mill so they could easily bump their salary 12k per year. They didn't have to worry about the school's credentials or wonder if their degree would actually help further their career. Just pay $30k for a degree, and get back a guaranteed $350k in inflation adjusted lifetime earnings and an extra $10k on top of your pension. (the one exception I mentioned earlier was an SLP, and she was underpaid because her pay scale was tied to the same average teachers that went to diploma mills)
Also, it is rediculous to tell people they should just be a teacher if they think the job is so great. For one, this is tax money paying for teachers' salaries. As long as the government forces people to pay taxes, people have a right voice grievances over how that money is spent. And secondly, being a teacher only really pays off if you start at the age of 22. Their pay is based on years of experience, not competence. I shaped up my career when I was 29, and doubled my salary in less than two years. Someone in their 30s cant just switch over to teaching and enjoy the same benefits as everyone else, as opposed to most other professions where after a few years of experience it doesn't really matter if you have 5 years or 20. Oh, and third, starting a career in education right now is really really tough. Even those who aren't just in it for an easy career can't find jobs because school districts are still paying the outrageous salaries of more tenured teachers.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Informative)
It's easy to find teachers in North America making $80k. Sometimes that's just handling cost of living in an area like New York, but frequently it comes from a trick education "reformers" have pushed over the last few decades to gut the unions.
1. Offer teachers per student overage fees to handle larger than normal classes. Teachers agree because, hey, the district is going to screw us on class size anyway, might as well get paid for it.
2. Lay off/make redundant/fire every second teacher, dumping those students on the first teacher, who now makes not-double their salary, but quite a lot more. Bitching and moaning ensue, district makes noise about saving taxpayers money, parents who voted in Republicans say "at least our taxes didn't go up..."
3. Wait a couple years.
4. Run for office on a platform of cutting teacher's salaries and point to the gym teacher making $90k/year because he's got a class of 60 students. Cue outraged parents exclaiming "why does my kid's teacher make more than me! I'm a manager!"
5. Salaries are frozen, or experienced/high paid teachers are laid off, and inexperienced teachers hired in their stead who don't get the overage fee originally negotiated.
Unions are the front lines of the class size debate. Every administrator wants to increase class size to economize on the number of teachers. Teachers want to keep class sizes sane so they can actually teach as opposed to doing crowd control. The union negotiates class size limits. This is how districts con the union into breaking class size limits, and it's a trap.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:4, Informative)
Standardized tests correlate more strongly than any other measurement with later academic success, college graduation rates, and later life success.
Not true. According to Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, the one factor that correlates most strongly with achievement on standardized tests is family income. This is the consensus, unchallenged by people who follow the data.
Some standardized tests are validated, like the NAEP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educational_Progress [wikipedia.org] However, the NAEP measures aggregate scores for groups of students (and for small subsets, it isn't valid). It will tell you how well the school system as a whole is doing, but it can't tell how well individual teachers or students are doing. It doesn't have statistical power to evaluate individual teachers and students. That's the best test we have.
The standardized tests that are used for rating teachers are not validated. That's the big argument against them. A science teacher at Stuyvesant high school ran some standardized statistical tests on the NYC teacher tests, and the tests reported literally a random distribution. Principals were complaining that the tests were giving low rankings to teachers that were doing an excellent job, that they wanted to rehire the next year.
Standardized tests are worthless for rating teachers. They're worse than worthless, because they're used to fire perfectly competent people and reward people who are at best skilled at teaching to the test. How would you like to be a principal, and have a system that removed 5% of your teachers at random every year?
Standardized tests give the greatest rewards to teachers and principals who cheat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee#Test_erasures [wikipedia.org]