Finding the Next Generation of Teachers With "Innovative Microsoft Ads" 122
theodp (442580) writes "Back in 2011, the U.S. Dept. of Education delegated teacher recruitment to Microsoft (RFP, pdf). 'The decision to turn over TEACH to [Microsoft] Partners in Learning serves to expand the already outsized influence Gates and his fortune have on public education,' wrote the Washington Post at the time. So, 'what happens when a public institution in a democracy — the US Department of Education — outsources its goal of recruiting good teachers to a private industry?' Well, in addition to Teach.org and redundant social media efforts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Linkedin, and YouTube, the U.S. is now relying on 'Innovative Microsoft Advertising to Recruit the next Generation of Teachers'. From the press release, 'The Ad Council and TEACH have formed a unique outreach campaign with Microsoft's Advertising team in an effort to recruit the next generation of teachers who will drive innovation and redefine teaching in K-12 classrooms. Microsoft donated over 125 million impressions across Xbox 360, Windows 8, and MSN in order to encourage consumers to rediscover teaching through interactive ad units. This media effort is an extension of the Ad Council and TEACH's public service advertising (PSA) campaign, Make More...Throughout March, consumers were able to engage with TEACH "NUads on Xbox", via gesture, voice or controller on their Xbox 360 consoles...Most recently, Microsoft leveraged their Windows 8 platform to provide a unique experience to consumers, enabling them to navigate through a series of questions to help "discover their true passion," along with the opportunity to play challenging mind and word games, such as a word scramble and tangrams.' Check out the demo of the Windows 8 platform experience [YouTube], in which a person is advised 'You'd Make a Great Science & Tech Teacher,' on the basis of a 'Personality Quiz' consisting of five dragged-and-dropped photos."
Gates wants your children (Score:5, Insightful)
M$ shouldn't be allowed anywhere **near** children.
Gates is trying to end public education with his charter school fund.
This stupid, reductive, publicity-focued initiative is just another in an expensive line of turds M$ has dropped in the education punch bowl
Get these data-gathering, exploitative, anti-user businesses AWAY FROM OUR KIDS
As a former teacher, the problem is that people want to spend money on ***EVERYTHING*** other than what will help educate children: public schools with the highest-paid, best trained teachers in the world
Without the above, no ammount of tech, "social media" or "big data" will ever make even a dent in the problem
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As a former teacher, the problem is that people want to spend money on ***EVERYTHING*** other than what will help educate children: public schools with the highest-paid, best trained teachers in the world
How highly do you want them to be paid?
The average teacher salary in Michigan, for example, is in the 60Ks, for nine months of work (and so really in the upper 80Ks adjusted for working nine months).
Without the above, no ammount of tech, "social media" or "big data" will ever make even a dent in the problem
Now tech not being a panacea and often being a waste, I agree with.
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Check your math, 60K for a teacher for 9 months work, means no money for 3 months.
Re:Gates wants your children (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm wrong; maybe US teachers just sit on the porch and drink beer all vacation long. I doubt it. The violent jealousy you show toward their "3 months of no work" perhaps shows how little you know about the educational system. If you want to fix it, get your politicians to change the school system so that classes go on all year, just like regular work does.
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Cause subjects taught in K-12 change yearly. /sarc
Preparing the syllabus is copying it. Tests are graded before grades are issued. Educational trips with students are paid.
Teachers usually work a summer job. They are generally adequately paid. If they weren't, there would be a shortage. See economics 1.
Science and math teachers are underpaid, but politically it is impossible to pay them fairly without overpaying the rest.
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Hmm. Well, somebody sounds violent here, but it ain't me ...
I'm making a reasonable mathematical adjustment to their already nice (though not as nice as mine, if you must make this personal; I wasn't) salary. That's all.
You can doubt it all you want, but the only summer school I've ever seen around here (major metropolitan area) is maybe two or three weeks, a joke. Maybe one or two teachers stick around even for that. Better not forget anything in the building, because you'll be very lucky even to get a mai
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To you and the GP: don't know about other states, but in California it's just a hair over two months off during the summer, not three. (There are of course winter and spring breaks as well.) It's very common for teachers to have their paychecks spread out across 12 months rather than 10, but it's the individual's choice how to do it.
Also: when you see the averages, take into account that they include both teachers a year before retirement and those fresh out of college. From what I've seen, the pay is usual
Re:Gates wants your children (Score:4, Informative)
Most teachers spend the summer teaching summer school, or attending conferences or continuing education, a lot of summer related educational expenses are also unpaid. I know one or two teachers every year (our of the hundreds I deal with) that take a two+ month long holiday, but I'll be that those numbers are the same for most people in most industries, with the difference being that you can expense your educational conferences and continuing education in the non-public teaching realm.
60k is good but not great and if you're intelligent enough to be able to teach my child, you're intelligent enough to know you can make more for less work in a field that doesn't subject you to abuse a good portion of the time.
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I have friends who are teachers - most summers they aren't doing anything education-related, since the CE requirement is on the order of once every 3-5 years.
Some of them just take the summer off. One guy I know works construction in the summer.
Decent teachers deserve to make decent pay; but at least in my state (Washington) they actually do make a good salary nowadays. The stories about poor starting salaries are from 20-30 years ago. However, like most of us, they still would like to be paid more than the
order of magnitude more (Score:5, Insightful)
you're splitting pennies for one of the essential functions of human existence: teachers to our young...
however we just pass MILLIONS$$$ and BILLIONS$$$ around when discussing business executive pay or defense contracts
it's absolutely ridiculous, from a free market capitalist perspective, to expect to get the best people for a fraction of what they typically can earn in other fields
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you're splitting pennies for one of the essential functions of human existence: teachers to our young...
however we just pass MILLIONS$$$ and BILLIONS$$$ around when discussing business executive pay or defense contracts
Nobody is "splitting pennies", you think they should be paid more so he's asking how much they should be paid, very simple. And you can stop crying poor in comparison to defense spending, the US spends more on Education annually [usgovernmentspending.com] than it does on defense, in excess of $1 trillion in fact.
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Well that is down to stupid management practices much like the US's dysfunctional law enforcement. Instead of managing these once at state level, with Federal funding simply going direct to the state to distribute. You have this idiotic broken up model, with management repeated again and again and again and well, hundreds even thousands of times at county level, with those same management costs spent, again and again and again. Want to fix it, start taking more stuff out of the counties hand and pushing it
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the answer is (still) in the subject line:
"order of magnitude more"
do you know what "order of magnitude" means?
just in case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]
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the answer is (still) in the subject line:
"order of magnitude more"
And how exactly will that help? Is it that all existing teachers are just bad at their job and need to be replaced with competent ones? Is money the only driver here?
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i already addressed this...
you pay teachers more for the same reason you pay NBA players or Goldman-Sachs VP's...you fsking moron...this is the end of this conversation...I've proven you wrong
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i already addressed this...
you pay teachers more for the same reason you pay NBA players or Goldman-Sachs VP's...you fsking moron...this is the end of this conversation...I've proven you wrong
Bullshit, you demonstrate your utter ignorance by suggesting the only way to get better people is to increase wages, this is patently false you braindead imbecile, obviously you have no experience in the realworld so your suggestion that this conversation is over and that you fuck off is a pretty good idea. Improving wages will not necessarily result in getting better teachers just as corporate VPs with larger salaries aren't necessarily any better than those with lower salaries, but of course you think the
increase wages AND reduce work load (Score:2)
you can do **all of those things** you moron
1. raise salary
2. reduce workload
I ADVOCATE FOR BOTH
you're using teacher's own idealism to **justify paying them less**...it's bullshit and it's ruining education
you can pay more AND reduce workload!
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DO BOTH (Score:2)
you can still do both increase pay dramatically AND reduce workload & class size
and you can cover your ears and say "la la la" all day, but **paying teachers what they deserve** (an order of magnitude more) is the way our economy has always shown the value of a position
simple/complex is different than easy/difficult
the solution to our education woes is simple...but that doesn't mean it is easy! first we have to shut down morons like you forever!
stop denying teachers the pay they deserve in the name of d
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You say the existing teachers deserve it (I'm not disputing that, though I think 600,000-800,000 is a bit hefty) but why would they do any better job just because you pay them more? Do you do your job to a capacity determined by your salary? Do you do a better job if you get a payrise? Or do you just do a crappy job until somebody gives you more money?
Increasing salaries will only work to attract talent if existing teachers are all just doing a shitty job, but reducing class sizes and workload increases the
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the answer is (still) in the subject line:
"order of magnitude more"
do you know what "order of magnitude" means?
just in case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]
Why stop there? Why not some sort of asymptotic curve, since money is apparently no object in your unicorn land?
tax magic unicorn reality 1950 (Score:2)
have you looked at executive pay or defense contract figures?
look at the tax rate on those executives...and on those military/industrial complex corps
all we have to do is take tax rates back to 1950 levels
it's a simple fix...not *easy*...it's difficult...simple but difficult...because of jerk-offs like you
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you're splitting pennies for one of the essential functions of human existence: teachers to our young...
Huh, I am? I don't run a school district or levy taxes.
Growing and selling food are essential to human existence too, and not everyone who works in that field makes upper 80K/year. So are driving ambulances, being a police officer, and countless other occupations. We don't pay all of them based on emotional outbursts either (well, not consistently - sometimes we try for awhile, until the city goes bankrupt).
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You may want to watch the following video from an *actual* teacher...
So You Want to be a Teacher? -- Time [youtube.com]
It is only one of his "So You Want to be a Teacher" videos that give an insider's perspective on the teaching profession for those of you who think teaching is a normal 8a-4p job, I have never heard of another job that requires so much mandatory, unpaid, extra-curricular work in my life.
Just ask yourself if you would take this job for say... $60k/year.
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There is no group in the world that bitches and complains as much as teachers. Take it with a huge grain of salt.
Rich Republicans bitch more (Score:2)
Rich Republicans are the bitchiest people in human history...
they pay next to nothing in taxes and then yell and scream 'fraud!' at Pell grants or Medicare
Re:Gates wants your children (Score:5, Informative)
Before I met my wife, a teacher, I might have assumed the same thing you did -- 9 months of pay, with 3 months vacation (actually it's only 2 plus a few extra days; school years usually start in late August here now). She works 3-4 hours, on average, extra each day -- getting up super-early to get supplies (she teaches TWO 'prep-heavy' classes -- horticulture and art, since no one wanted to teach hort and she had to revive the school's program single-handedly). It's like every class is a science lab. Then she stays late to do more prep that she won't be able to get to the next morning.. organizing field trips with reams of paperwork (at our school board the teachers have been getting more and more of the paperwork duties, admin used to do it but now the board is in full CYA-mode after some field trip incidents -- oh did I mention she had to get her school bus license since they cut all of the drivers?)
She pays for snacks out of her (our) own pockets a few days each week, so the kids have something before lunch as many of them don't get a good breakfast -- they are impossible to teach otherwise. None of this gets her any overtime or time-in-lieu or counts against her yearly class budget. Honestly with all the extra time she pulls she has legitimately banked up that 2-month vacation.
Teachers should indeed be paid well. Or, get many, many more teachers so the workload isn't a total burnout, and the teachers can work regular hours. Either way, more needs to be spent (in the RIGHT places, not administration or 'metrics' bullshit). If the paperwork, workload and class sizes were reduced, perhaps teachers could be you know, teachers.
In Canada BTW.. I can't imagine how it must be in the US.
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Mind you, that's three months in the summer ... plus two weeks for Christmas, one week for Spring Break, a four day weekend for "mid-Winter break", oh, and every other conceivable holiday, and some that aren't conceivable.
My point was that they are well paid. They aren't underpaid. I posted facts - the actual average salary. That's a good salary for twelve months, let alone less than nine (counting all those breaks).
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Maybe your acquaintances are the exceptions.
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How highly do you want them to be paid?
The average teacher salary in Michigan, for example, is in the 60Ks, for nine months of work (and so really in the upper 80Ks adjusted for working nine months).
Well; if you want to have decent people then the answer is much more than that. Currently the average IT person is probably earning about $100k. This is someone who can barely communicate and often doesn't have a higher degree. Certainly not someone who you would want in charge of the future of your country, educating it's children. Then let's take the hell which is being a teacher and having to deal with the demands of the various parents and the risks that some mad people are going to come around blam
Re: Gates wants your children (Score:2)
Meanwhile, in the real world, 50k is already a pretty good salary.
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Re: Gates wants your children (Score:2)
50k is the median household income in the US.
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Theoretically a great teacher is worth more. But to get their we would start by firing all the current teachers.
You have to remember that teachers hold education degrees, not real ones. There are exceptions.
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But to get their we would start by firing all the current teachers.
To get their what?
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Sure, some states pay well for teachers. However, the national average is $53k and the average for my home state (NC) has finally increased to a whopping $45k. The 2013-14 salary schedule (PDF link below) indicates that entry level teachers (0-2 years of experience) are paid only $30,800/year. In the same state, CS graduates with no experience can expect to be hired by Cisco, Fidelity, IBM, and other local big companies for no less than $60,000/year. You'll note on the same salary schedule that after 36
Re: Gates wants your children (Score:3)
Salary is very dependent on where you are. $60K for an entry level CS job was the going rate in Boston in 1993. In California near the Bay Area, high school teachers are paid in the $70k-$80K range for 9 months.
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> The average teacher salary in Michigan, for example, is in the
> 60Ks, for nine months of work (and so really in the upper 80Ks
> adjusted for working nine months).
Where did you get that number from? This page [nea.org] says it's only $35k for Michigan. Feel free to point me to a better source.
And as for the old "summers off" bullshit, 1) teachers often go to conferences or work on their curriculum during the summer, or come in to do admin work (due to budgets always being cut) or move the library around etc
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From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are.
http://slashdot.org/~Jeremiah+Cornelius/journal/747463 [slashdot.org]
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As a former teacher, the problem is that people want to spend money on ***EVERYTHING*** other than what will help educate children: public schools with the highest-paid, best trained teachers in the world
That's good for the few who can afford the best trained teachers in the world. Good teacher are unfortunately an inherently limited resource. You're right that in the short term big data will probably not help our children to learn much. In the long term however I think that it can help students by understanding their needs better than their teachers ever could. Check out what CGP Grey has to say about this [youtube.com].
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basicly as a former teacher, all a shit you care about is how much you get paid. See this is the fucking problem.
The other problem is that entire debate about education revolves around how money is being spent and where.
The biggest problem with our education system is the prussian style obediance traini
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citizen of a suposed free democracy.
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You start running into the gold rush problem then. Pay too well for a job and you get people interested only in the pay, not doing the job well. This is especially true in jobs where it's difficult to measure performance.
In any case the best teachers in the world are usually the child's parents. There's a direct correlation between how well kids do at school and how much time and effort their parents put into helping them at home, not to mention the general happiness and security of the home.
If anything fun
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That's the most imaginative reason I've heard of yet for continuing crappy teacher pay. But that must extend to other professions, no? Better cut the salaries of software engineers to $35k a year, stat, before the greedy people hear about it!
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Pay too well for a job and you get people interested only in the pay, not doing the job well.
Do you include CEOs?
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CEOs often get paid largely in stock options rather than cash, and so are incentivised to make sure the company does well in the short term at least. Which leads to its own set of problems, but the headline grabbing corporate salaries are often not what they seem.
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Get these data-gathering, exploitative, anti-user businesses AWAY FROM OUR KIDS As a former teacher, the problem is that people want to spend money on ***EVERYTHING*** other than what will help educate children: public schools with the highest-paid, best trained teachers in the world
Wait, so as a former teacher, you don't want them to gather data that might discover the best teaching practices, and the only thing that could possibly work is to pay teachers as much as possible? Seriously?
Not that you're biased or anything.
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The real question would be what kind of transparency is there about this data? What are they collecting, exactly, and what do they do with it? I can't think of anything Madison Avenue, or wherever the marketing firms lurk around in, would love more than a huge trove of child behavioral data, especially if there's even a hint of it being personally identifiable.
Much data is likely already gathered by the government run schools, but the constant push to completely privatize schools raises the same issues as
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As a former teacher, the problem is that people want to spend money on ***EVERYTHING*** other than what will help educate children: public schools with the highest-paid, best trained teachers in the world
And exactly how much do teacher salaries have to be in order for them to properly educate children? I constantly see this crap bandied about that the only way to solve the issue of education is to throw money at the problem and pay teachers more...oddly enough this comes from teachers or former teachers or spouses of teachers. Throwing money at the problem is not the solution!
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Neither is repeating a talking point that was baseless 30 years ago.
How much would you want to be paid to have a teachers job? Tens of thousands in student loans to get a masters degree, 50+ hour work weeks, playing babysitter/parent/disciplinarian/counselor/doctor for a bunch of kids before even starting the teaching part, putting up with shitty parents and
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How much would you want to be paid to have a teachers job?
That's just throwing the question back because you can't answer it. The suggestion was that the answer is to increase teacher salaries so naturally I'm asking how much they need to be at for the education system to be fixed.
Tens of thousands in student loans to get a masters degree, 50+ hour work weeks, playing babysitter/parent/disciplinarian/counselor/doctor for a bunch of kids before even starting the teaching part, putting up with shitty parents and administrators, spend your summers continuing your education, and finally be judged on student performance when the #1 correlation for that is what kind of home the student goes home to at the end of the day.
Yes all jobs have shitty aspects to them, some more than others so obviously those that don't make up for it in some way (and no, not everybody's job satisfaction is rooted in their salary) will have fewer people willing to work in them. Effectively what you're saying is the system is fi
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That's you projecting because your stance is unjustifiable. This isn't hard: attracting top talent requires good pay, same as any other profession, and students perform better with smaller class sizes and more teacher-hours per pupil, instead of more pupils per teacher. Which requires....wait for it...more money than skinflint social darwinists have been willing to spend.
tl;dr you get what you pay for
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That's you projecting because your stance is unjustifiable.
Wrong, I'm not projecting anything and I don't know what you think my "stance" is.
This isn't hard: attracting top talent requires good pay, same as any other profession
So the problem is the teachers, not the system.
and students perform better with smaller class sizes and more teacher-hours per pupil, instead of more pupils per teacher. Which requires....wait for it...more money than skinflint social darwinists have been willing to spend.
Yeah it's totally not like they spend over a trillion dollars on education per year...but you just blame the teachers while demanding they be given more money rather than considering that perhaps there is a lot of mismanagement going on.
Yes and again, you wouldn't touch this shitty job unless it paid six figures.
Wrong, unlike you I'm not totally driven by money. But obviously that's what you are totally consumed by which is why the only way you can come up
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what MS/Apple/etc want to teach, vs what we should (Score:4, Insightful)
MS, Apple, Facebook, etc: "Buy from our stores! Don't mind being locked in! Don't dare to want freedom and openness, it's scary and not good for you!"
They all want to teach kids to grow up to be good little consumers. Spending all their money at the locked-in store. Giving all their personal information to the company. Develop an app of your own? Too bad unless you want to give 30% to Apple and be under their control for whether you can even publish it or not.
Why can't we just teach openness, freedom, and having control over your own computing experience? A TRUE social internet, not the data-mined and controlled garden those companies all want us to have, so people get locked into their marketing and advertising engines, and their ecosystems.
Apparently Bill Gates wants to make money. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The percentage of income the wealthy give to charity is miniscule compared to the middle class.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/4872514... [cnbc.com]
Donations linked to schemes to make money. (Score:3)
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How about (Score:4, Informative)
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Oh, and no, they don't take summers off. Most of them spend summers either tutoring for extra money or getting yet another degree (Masters, Doctorate) in a desperate attempt to earn a little more money :(.
I work for a major airline, and a lot of our seasonal summer help (working 40hours/week all summer) are actualy teachers looking to make some extra money. Can make over $4k and you get flying benefits for the year.
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Some of my HS teachers worked construction over the summer.
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Perhaps you have put your finger on the problem.
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finding the Next Generation of Teachers with more financial ad programs, better wages and an actual career path?
Out of curiosity, what kind of career path do you have in mind?
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>becoming
>implying it isn't already
whatever they're doing..isn't working (Score:2)
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I think those first years are the most critical. A couple good teachers at the start can immunize your kids against several turkeys down the road.
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I think those first years are the most critical. A couple good teachers at the start can immunize your kids against several turkeys down the road.
I think they're all critical. Without some good teachers in high school I might not be here today at all. Too bad nearly all the ones I had in my first high school (Harbor, in Santa Cruz) were shitheels or useless. Either they contributed to bullying or did nothing about it, which is itself a kind of contribution.
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Where I went to school the average GPA in education was a 3.85. They also had the lowest average SAT/ACT and HS GPAs of any school.
Take the 4.0 in education with a big old grain of salt. I knew one who drank to falling every night and carried a 4.0.
Linux and Apple users need not apply (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't that the obvious ploy of this move.
Embrace the education establishment
Extend the curriculuim so that ONLY MS tools can be used
Extinguish all non compliant teachers as being obsolete
Barriers to teaching (Score:1, Interesting)
kids suck (Score:2)
the ability to put up other people's worthless ass kids is a calling and if it's not your calling you're going to do a shit job and the kids will continue to be worthless. there, their, and they're!
Want A Job? Buy an XBox (Score:4)
Microsoft donated over 125 million impressions across Xbox 360, Windows 8, and MSN in order to encourage consumers to rediscover teaching through interactive ad units. This media effort is an extension of the Ad Council and TEACH's public service advertising (PSA) campaign, Make More...Throughout March, consumers were able to engage with TEACH "NUads on Xbox", via gesture, voice or controller on their Xbox 360 consoles.
Masters in education, good experience in other districts, just moved to the area, you may be a good candidate. Now, if you really want the job, go out and buy some Microsoft products, and then we'll give you a shot. You should also probably make sure you have created a rich and carefully crafted demographic footprint on each of the incumbent cloud surveillance networks:
Well, in addition to Teach.org and redundant social media efforts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Linkedin, and YouTube,
Prostrate yourself before the oligarchy or be unemployed! Our nation cannot afford to have teachers who have any awareness of the value of attenuating corporate rule or pervasive surveillance! Young minds must be formed only by those who do not question the oligarchs!
Sounds like MS is trying to get government money (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is going to pay for all this crap? Remember, LA Unified school district just shelled out something like a billion dollars for ipads. So there is big money to be made here.
The danger for the public is that it might not accomplish anything.
If all the promises of the technology pan out then its money well spent. If not, then its an unforgivable waste of finite public resources.
So You Want to be a Teacher... (Score:1)
So You Want to be a Teacher? -- Time [youtube.com]
Just one in a series of videos about the realities of the teaching profession.
I think schools like this one should be nominated (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.linux.com/news/feat... [linux.com]
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Oh no! Neither MS nor Apple? What has the world come to? How are the students going to be good software consumers? They might even begin to write their own programs! Heavens, they'll al become evil hackers!
Welcome Oligarchs! (Score:2)
This is just another instance of oligarchs taking over government functions "because they know better". There is also more profit in it.
The oligarchs and their Republican enablers have been transferring public assets and functions to the private sector for years and the result is fewer public resources and higher costs for everyone.
All hail the Oligarchs! Capitalism triumphs!
Pay highly effective teachers more (Score:1)
Research shows that highly effective teachers (teachers whose students regularly make more than 1 year of academic progress
Need Security, Not Marketing (Score:2)
There are plenty of people who have just graduated high school who want to be teachers. There are plenty of people in college whose collegiate experiences inspire them to teach. The problem isn't finding teachers (or good teachers for that matter), but making sure they don't get lost in the complicated morass of certification, continuing education, and the bureaucracy of tenure. They also are, typically, willing to accept the likelihood of lower wages, but need to have proper support, small classes, and the