Reply With QuoteBut he's not teaching, who cares if he fails? Maybe I'm just dense here (shut up), but it's not like I expect my manager to be able to write a stored procedure in Oracle. Still, he'd better fire my ass if I am unable to write a do-while loop.
This guy fires 24 teachers for not passing the English proficiency test and he has failed it three times. I don't care if English is his second or 50th language. There is no excuse for this.
Of course, our teachers do not have to pass any tests at all. The Alabama Teacher's unions have a lot o' pull with someone in the state capital because everytime someone even whispers about teacher testing, screams of racism and discrimination erupt and then about 48 to 72 hours later the issue is being put into the ground.
But he's not teaching, who cares if he fails? Maybe I'm just dense here (shut up), but it's not like I expect my manager to be able to write a stored procedure in Oracle. Still, he'd better fire my ass if I am unable to write a do-while loop.
If it was a history exam or physics exam, I'd be inclined to agree. Even if it was an advanced English exam or a literature exam. But a basic English proficiency test? You'd like to think that the superintendent of schools could pass a basic English test. Here's the quote on what the exam covers:Originally Posted by Mike Cathcart
I think this either means that the exam is too hard or that they need a new superintendent.Since 1998, all Massachusetts educators — from teachers to superintendents — have had to pass the Communications and Literacy Skills Test, which measures basic reading and writing skills, including vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, spelling and capitalization.
I'm curious to know the actual content of the test. Anyone know?
It says this guy makes North of $156,000 per year.
I think he should buy himself a copy of Strunk & White and study a bit more before he calls the test "stupid."
We don't pay school administrator's to write.
Of course, this little stunt by the teachers' union is just a way to fend off testing. God knows we wouldn't want them to be competent at their job.
I'm torn between "the union is extremely annoying" and "what do you expect to happen in education when you pay teachers crap." Apparently the average salary for a 15 year teacher is only 36,000.
You can probably top that being a receptionist at some places. The "pin money for old maids" approach from the 19th century just won't go away.....
Teaching is a lot like games programming. Many deluded youths think it would be cool to "work with kids"... sounds like an easy, fun job from the outside. So you have tons of candidates who are fairly incompetent but will work for little money. And considering that this profession doesn't produce an economic profit (outside of private schools) it's just too tempting to set the salary as low as possible, hire the ample supply of idealistic morons, and avoid any kind of competence tests. The unions just adequately represent those people.
I don't know Jason, if they're expecting every teacher from Kindergarten up through 12th grade to pass it, I don't think it's asking too much to expect the superintendent should be able to pass it as well.
Mind you I'm not defending the teacher's unions. But I do think it's rather pathetic that the superintendent couldn't pass an exam required of all K-12 teachers.
Man, that's harsh. And I thought *I* was harsh.
{Brian passes the Crown of Harshness to Christoph}
That was a bit harsh.
Christoph, on behalf of all those teachers who busted their arses teaching you so that you could better the world by grossly over-generalising their conditions: [size=6]FUCK YOU[/size].
There are too many points for me to froth at here but I'll try not to rant.
The whole question of teacher assessment opens up a can of worms. I knew a teacher who was a pretty atrocious speller. I had my reservations about her being a primary school teacher but most of the staff at her school believed that she was an excellent teacher because of the relationship she had with her students and because of the other things she did in class. It's a pretty hard call what is better for the student: someone with all the requisite academic skills but no people skills to deliver them or someone with nurturing skills but no advanced academic ability. So what should we assess in a teacher? And in all fairness, how does every other public servant get assessed? Most systems will remove teachers for gross incompetence- sacking someone for mediocrity is a bit difficult because it's hard to nail what it is.
In a perfect world all teachers would be intellectual demi-gods who also had the ability to inspire students and yet still provide a caring , individualised environment. Likewise, all police would be incorruptable, journalists honest and programmers able to create a game which didn't need frickin patches. It ain't gonna happen anytime soon. Everyone has flaws.
Despite Christoph's assertion that teachers are slack-jawed yokels who work for peanuts because they are useless in any other field of endeavour, may I instead suggest that there are people who still (quaintly) think that they may have to help other people. That they have a duty to care for other people and an obligation to pass on knowledge that they have learned. That sometimes doing your best for the world involves more than making money and thinking that your minimized tax bill is some form of personal largesse which makes you a wonderful human being.
And I don't think that the unions adequately represent the teachers. The worst thing about teacher's unions is that they are comprised of the most idealistic members of an idealistic profession. Instead of devising simple strategies to improve the conditions of their members, most of their efforts are spent creating a socialist paradise on earth. God knows how many times I've wished for a wharf-workers style union to step in and cause some genuine discomfort for people. At the moment we're too nice because, shrug, that's what we are.
My salary does work out to be a bit less than $36000 US. I was talking to my students today about how much teachers earned. Their comments quickly changed from 'Teachers get really good pay' to 'My father earns heaps more' when they started figuring out how much a week I took home. Also bear in mind that I teach in one of the lower socio-economic areas in town. You'll never see a brand new car in a teacher's car park unless it's a female member of staff who is married to a tradesman. :roll:
I think it varies dramatically. In my old hometown in CT we got the budget from the school board mailed to our houses....the average pay for high school teachers in that town in 1996 was 72000 dollars. With summers off and all the school vacations and incredible health benefits when compared to anyone who works in normal private sector jobs....
Geez Peter, of course there are some teachers who actually try to do good work. I've experienced some myself. Unfortunately, they were a minority among those who would rather talk about their private relationships or political viewpoints, or simply spread gross misinformation about the subjects they were supposed to teach. And this experience was confirmed at university when the laziest fools who recoiled at the mere sight of a book were invariably enrolled in paedagogics.
And why not? The parents apparently don't care if their children learn anything at school, as long as they're out of the way and get a diploma. The school system doesn't care. Most children sure as hell don't care. Competent academics generally avoid the teaching profession because they know it's nasty work that doesn't pay well (compared to the jobs they could get). Society at large doesn't care as long as the masses get sufficient education for menial work, and whatever elite is required gets sufficient education on their own time or at private institutions.
So we have a large number of idiots who can't or won't find any other work (as graller pointed out state employment does have some unique benefits), and a smaller number driven by naiveté or idealism. The latter either go into early retirement or develop stomach ulcers, trying to fight an intolerable situation with which much of the rest of society is apparently quite happy.
The concept of higher education for the masses didn't work out -- it's as simple as that. Most people neither need nor want higher education. For most kids aged 12-18, schools are simply a place where they hang out and kill time before joining the workforce. All other problems follow from this basic fact, the widespread incompetence of teachers as well as the lack of discipline that Peter has complained about elsewhere. Shrink higher education back to elite schools, and your problems are gone. Of course that's ideologically unacceptable so it won't happen.
Christoph Nahr: the new Brian Koontz.
My mother has been teaching for more than 30 years and she does not make that much. That has a lot to do with the region she lives in, a town of 800 in Nebraska, but I still feel we need to pay our teachers more than we do.
I like unions, its just that the teacher's union is far too powerful. I'd like english teachers to know english, thank you very much.
I actually don't think there's an oversupply of US teachers; states are always whining about how they can't find enough (persistent shortages tend to indicate they're underpaying).
Yes, it's funny that the administrator can't pass it, but we don't pay him to write - should we test his ability to work in a gas station? Do surveying?
Well, I guess we could also discuss which irrelevant politician would raise or lower some budget by a few dollars, and congratulate ourselves on proposing such a brilliant solution... maybe that's more acceptable to people who are scared to death at the thought of deviating one millimeter from officially sanctioned thinking?
You think it's some kind of accident that education throughout the West is fucked up, and has been worsening for decades? You think it's just because politicians are so much stupider than us enlightened folks? Maybe you have a secret conspiracy theory that you would like to share with us?
Schools are exactly as society wants them to be. If you find that statement unacceptable you should revisit your preconceptions about the society you're living in.
As much as I think the system needs work, education hasn't been worsening; virtually every metric of note has increased consistently.
Yeah, that's pretty normal for a tenured teacher in Connecticut, but I understand that we have the highest teacher salaries in the country (what's with tenure for an elementary school teacher, anyhow - - but that's another thread). I don't mind the high salaries, even though 95% of those salaries and benefits are financed by our local property taxes (about $5,000/yr for a $250,000 home, plus another $1000/year on our cars, as an example.) We get what we pay for. The idea of teachers making only in the low 30k's is horrible to me. Even with July and August off, the rest of the year they have to be "on" every frigg'in day. No flex time, no slipping in a 1/2 hour late, no cutting out early on Friday afternoon, and I imagine making a doctor's appointment is a PITA. And at the end of the day they are the most important humans outside of the family that my kids will interact with during their entire childhood.
But I do think they should be able to pass a simple competency test. The superintendent as well. We're not talking about matrix algebra and medieval literature for the American History teacher - we're talking about the basics. Someone who makes north of $150k / year as a professional educator must be able to prove they can read, write and add.
And the unions here frustrate me as well sometimes. Their refusal to even consider staples of our current economic climate such as 1-year wage freezes or a $100/month health insurance premium seem to me to be arrogant and insensitive.
Gramatically he's simpler and much more traditional, and he's style-less as far as I can tell, but I can see the comparisons. I thought both of his posts in this thread were impressive.
The issue I have with school teachers is that they are *teaching* students. They HAVE to be both moral and wise... if they lack in either there are problems in the development of the child both from an educational and personal standpoint.
I concur with Nahr that most teachers are mediocre. I concur that some of them turn teaching into a sort of soapbox where they push their personal issues. I'll add that many of them give up in a subtle way... they replace education with entertainment. Their attitude becomes, since students don't want to learn, why should we teach them?
I also agree with him about society's attitude toward it. Parents aren't pushing for better education, at least at the "masses" level.
All of this partially underlies the movement toward Private education... the parents who DO care see what is happening and want their kids OUT of the system. Privatizing the system holds teachers more accountable for their actions.
If you want to talk about problems that affect America as a whole, this is one of the big ones. And it won't be solved until Nahr is taken seriously.
What metrics are those, and since when have they been increasing? Are you sure they haven't just been lowered to accomodate the status quo? Grades are not necessarily comparable over time, and I'd find it hard to believe that any measure indicating discipline or social behaviour would have been increasing.
I do admit that my views are coloured by the German situation where the quality of education is dropping like a stone while violence at school is rising rapidly. I'll also reiterate that I'm not talking about the top students, they might be smarter than ever (and possibly keep up test averages).
Actually I'm not necessary talking about students -- ever noticed that whatever most people learn at school is apparently learned so superficially that it's all forgotten at the age of 25 or 30? These people might test well at school but isn't something wrong with the school system if they don't remember any of it? I'm sure you know some old folks who can recite entire poems that they learned at school, retained a perfect grasp of at least the local flora, fauna, and geography, know a range of classic authors and artists, and can make fairly complex calculations without even a piece of paper, let alone a calculator. Why is it that nothing learned in modern schools seems to stick? What and how are they learning if tests indeed show an improvement?
IQs keep increasing from generation to generation, for one. They have to recenter the test all the time.
And I don't think memorization is particularly useful; it's something people do when they don't have ready access to reference material.
If a school administrator is a "professional educator," then a manager at an auto plant is a "assembly line worker."But I do think they should be able to pass a simple competency test. The superintendent as well. We're not talking about matrix algebra and medieval literature for the American History teacher - we're talking about the basics. Someone who makes north of $150k / year as a professional educator must be able to prove they can read, write and add.
Uh..no. He (or she) is a "manager at an auto plant". If he were managing assembly line workers, then one would expect him to know that the engine goes in front and the wheels go on the bottom, and that he'd know the fundamentals of the 4-cycle internal combustion engine and how a transmission works. He would not be expected to be able to step up to any point on the assembly line and start welding away, nor would he be expected to design the transmission. But he'd have to have general competence in his field and be able to understand the lingo, and know what his people are up to when they stand on the line all day.
If the superintendent is not a professional educator, then he's a professional....what? Just a removed administrator with some accounting skills? I view them as the leader of the school system - - they help make the ultimate decisions on curriculum, teacher discipline, and how to allocate the money across a wide range of educational needs. Where I live, that's their job description. Maybe it isn't critical that they know how to use a semicolon properly. But they do need to be competent in the educational environment. A leader only become credible with competence. These exams are not rocket science. Passing does not mean having to score 100%.
I was objecting to you calling him a "professional educator"; he isn't. It's mislabeling to move the terms of debate. He's a school administrator, probably a subtype of "institution administrator." Is a prison warden a "prison guard?" A hospital administrator a "doctor?"
And I fail to see what being a "school leader" has to do with semicolon placement and grammar; someone who is barely able to read or write could theoretically be a *great* school administrator. The job's glad-handling politics, negotiation, and contracts.
Shit. I'm agreeing with Jason. I knew coming into this forum was a bad idea.
I'd just like to add that, given the fact that good teachers are so hard to come by, I think I'd rather have all of the people who can pass the test actually teaching.
Just to be sure everyone is clear on this, Jason, are you saying that your metric for the increasing standards and quality of public education is IQ tests and an opinion about memorization?
I'm saying that there's tons of metrics showing educational improvements over the years; the first ones of the top of my head are IQ tests, even though I don't put all too much stock in IQ tests.
The memorization thing was a side comment, but probably needs a whole other thread to discuss. I just don't like rote memorization learning in general, so don't think "people used to memorize stuff more" is a useful comparision.
So even though you don't really believe in IQ tests (and in fact most educated people don't), you quote it as a reason for your assertion? Come on dude.
I agree. That's why I pointed out that it isn't a good metric for what this thread is about.The memorization thing was a side comment, but probably needs a whole other thread to discuss. I just don't like rote memorization learning in general, so don't think "people used to memorize stuff more" is a useful comparision.
Anyways what are some of the metrics? I ask because I haven't seen them. No matter what political party everyone seems to think public education needs more money because its going to hell in a handbasket, so where are the studies that show otherwise?
Wow. You win. No wonder so many people think public education is going down the toilet. We have people believing that reading and writing is optional for those who run our schools.
The effects of "glad-handling politics" is pretty much the ONLY thing that bothers me about public schools, as I said in my earlier post.
Ok, smarty man: explain to me how the ability of the school administrator to read and write beyond, say, an 8th grade passing level will affect the education students receive. Make sure to note that he has a full-time secretary. As a bonus, explain how a school administrator who's a bureaucratic genius, *but gets 31 of 100 questions wrong on a teacher competence test*, is worse at his job than a bureaucratic incompetent who gets only 29 of 100 wrong. Why do you think grammar ability and management ability are correlated?
Touchy touchy: I'm ambivalent about them. You don't find many slack-jawed yokels who can run the board on the college entrance exams, which are disguised IQ tests, but I'm not sure about any stronger claims than that. I've known plenty of smart people who do atrociously on them; it's very domain-specific knowledge.
I'd say "SAT scores keep going up", but those are really just disguised IQ tests. Same deal with those exit-requirement tests states keep coming up with. How about:
The US share of Nobel Prizes is as ludicrously high as ever. I haven't heard businesses complain their employees have been getting less informed. Real dollar spending per student keeps going up. Productivity (strongly associated with education level) keeps going up, exploding recently. The level of college education the population has keeps going up.
Do you know of anything that shows it getting worse?
For everyone who thinks that in the good old days education was superior and that results were much better, I'd suggest that you recalibrate your memories.
Perhaps you can try and recall how many lower ability students there were. I'm thinking that most people posting on this forum were pretty well educated and located in the top classes of their cohort. Try and remember how many of those lower students could recite the Illiad or whatever it is that Christoph thinks was a benefit of classic education. It probably wasn't many of them. Most of you wouldn't have seen what happens in lower ability classes.
It seems like the public school system is under attack in the same way that individual teachers are. All I can say is that there are more variables to education than the school and teacher. It doesn't matter how hard a school tries- if the child and their family don't care about education, it won't happen.
All students who have a fundamental respect for education and the authority of the teacher will get something out of it. Unfortunately respect for education is a hard thing to achieve in some cultural groups. (I'm not talking race here- mainly the breed of welfare generations who don't realise that education is one of the few ways to pull their children out of economic misery).
Respect for teachers has also been undermined in so many ways. Our discipline methods have changed to make us appear less threatening, our salaries are a joke, there is more parental influence/interference in schools, there are more complaint mechanisms against teachers, our unions are hated by everyone, we are made to be more accountable, Hell most teachers in the media are made to appear as unfeeling, lazy fools.
All of these points may have people shrugging their shoulders and saying that they don't have a problem with transparency but unfortunately working with children and teenagers requires a fair amount of bluff when it comes to our powers. When students realise that we are adults with little authority over them, they will take advantage of it. If you want the good old days of education, give us back the good old values.
Also remember that the sort of student who left school at age 15/16 to dig ditches or stack shelves is now staying on because the jobs aren't there. We are dealing with a larger number of students who don't really want to be at school. Try teaching a class with some of them in it.
Despite all this I still feel that students nowadays are more confident communicators than students of my generation. They may not have the academic rigour but I suppose that that means they will be the administrators on $150 000, whilst the few that can read and write will end up teaching on $36 000. :roll:
BTW jason, I once had a Principal who had English as a second language (much like the administrator). It was awful because it was impossible for communication to occur without a foul-up happening. Communication requires proficiency in language. If the test was a tricky one based on grammar, I wouldn't worry about it. It seems that this was actually one that covered basic english. It's also not good for morale when people are being sacked for the same thing that he fails.
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