To add insult to injury, of the five administrators the district "let go" last year along with all of the teachers, 3 came back and bumped non tenured teachers out of teaching positions. Governor douchelord also accelerated the phase out of corporate property taxes for school districts (from 5 years to right the fuck now) leaving an even bigger budget hole in the poorer more industrial districts, then waved that as a flag about how teacher pay and benefits were casung budget shortfalls.

The conservatives around here are obviously thrilled at how they stuck it to the teachers. America makes me sad.

 

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They need to get rid of ALL these administrators. When I was growing up we had a principle and a vice principle. That's it.

 

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And you failed to learn how to spell principal.

 

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Well that's my fault not the teachers.

 

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There's some really good studies out now on why the public K-12 education system in the US is so fubar. It has nothing to do with there not being enough money. It has everything to do with teachers sucking and administrators being forced to accept the suck. I still don't understand how k-12 can be so messed up when they can just look at public universities for guidence.

 

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Lack of money is not a huge element. But people like Paul are stupid. The kids have not remained the same over the past 30 years and most importantly the parents have not remained the same. We now have to spend a lot more to get the same results because students and parents are less engaged than they used to be. Average parents have turned over more and more of the responsibility for educating their kids to the schools so of course it's going to cost the schools more.


The big problem with K-12 education is too many parents are disengaged. You can be the best teacher in the world but if the parents arn't interested in their child's education or worse actively teach their kid not to care, you arn't going to get through to most of those kids. The proof in this is easy enough to show by comparing districts with parents who care to districts with parents who don't care. In districts where parents are engaged public schools produce good results. In districts where they arn't, they don't. Regardless of the money spent.

Actually the worst results tend to be when you send a kid from a poor district to a middle class one. The major reason is that the teachers struggle to adapt to the needs of the poor student and blame it on the parents.


Critical failures like failing to teach a child to read is the fault of the school and the teacher. Schools that accept their responsibility tend to do better than those who play the blame game.

 

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There's only so much guidance you can get from a semi-private model designed for teaching voluntary students who are generally old enough to think for themselves. It's been stated before that many of the problems (not necessarily all) with public education stem from a lack of parental involvement. That's probably not on any university dean's top list of student learning issues. Also there's going to be a huge difference in the quality of candidates for available positions. Universities usually hire doctorates, and at a minimum, Master's, for their positions. Depending on the job and the school they may expect that the professor is published in his or her field, too. Public education requires a bachelor's and a certificate from DeVry or any other local technical school to get your foot in the door.

 

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I've spoken on this issue before and the problem has a number of major components:

Problem: Public Education in America is very expensive relative to the mediocre results (objectively proven) obtained with respect to students' education and academic abilities.

Reasons:
1) Administration and "overhead" nonsense. Example: New Jersey - a great deal of expense goes into administering school districts. In New Jersey, just about every zip code has its own school district with its own superintendant, its own principals, its own support staff, and of course its own teachers. Now, the important number there is the number of teachers. Many of these districts could be consolidated and savings realized and/or turned around and put back into the system in the form of other resources and/or teaching staff and/or compensation for teachers to attract better teachers.

2) Parental crap. Yes, parents are less engaged nowadays than they used to be, but I have a hard time putting a huge amount of emphasis on that problem. From probably grade 7 to 12, I don't think my parents spent more than 40 hours total helping me with my work - that's over the course of 6 years of schooling. Prior to that in grade school my parents helped me with various projects and whatnot that were more like art projects than actual academic pursuits and their time spent was greater of course, but certainly not as great as what I see schools requesting in the way of direct parental involvement and assistance with out of class work for students. Surely parental disengagement has some part to play, but it's a small one relative to the others.

3) NCLB, removal of tracking, standardized delivery of education product - the No Child Left Behind thing is just a freaking mess. Tracking is mostly gone, classroom content is diluted by virtue of teaching to the standardized tests as well as by mainstreaming. My nephew in 9th grade has a period every day devoted to teaching to the standardized tests ffs, that's absurd! No two children are the same, no two children will learn the same way. The more we pigeonhole students AND teachers with standardized training the less we allow teachers, the ones who are supposed to know how those individual children learn the best, to actually do their jobs and handle the students individual needs effectively. There are a million shades of "right" when it comes to the "right way" to teach children and if we try to turn those million shades into 3 or 4, you just aren't going to get the same results. NCLB is a disaster for American public education on every front and has created unrealistic expectations on the part of parents, school administration, and the government.

4) The Teachers Union - the intractability if the teachers union is legendary and in essence holds the public hostage to get what it wants. It is as irrational and unreasonable when it operates as an entity as any parent, or nutjob at either end of the political spectrum can be and frankly, is holding education back. Nationally we need to commit to compensating teachers properly, that's an inescapable fact, however the public deserves to have some accountability on the part of the teachers. The union is all about the compensation but won't discuss the accountability. That will never work. Of course using things like the standardized testing from NCLB as that accountability is equally ridiculous. There needs to be give and take between government, the teachers union, and the public on this matter and as long as the teachers union does things like publicly call for the death of elected officials, it will not make a lot of friends in either the government or the public.

 

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