dajafi wrote:

lethal wrote:

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/10/grand_ol_pagan.php

This guy won

What a country

Cool. I was hoping he would.

I was rooting for his opponent cause of the subtly anti-Asian xenophobic they're invading our living areas scare tactic campaign Halloran ran.

Didn't know that. In fact, I knew nothing about this campaign other than that the Republican was a pagan, an idea I liked. (Also, I'd love to see a Republican revival in the city, provided it looked something like the Tory comeback in England... a friend and I were joking last night about re-registering as Republicans and trying to take over the Brooklyn party. So long as jh kept his mouth closed, it could work!)

To be fair, based on what I did read, it seems like his flavor of paganism might not be very far from some of the weirder, faintly Nazi-ish northern European cultish stuff. Which I guess would fit with the xenophobia, though I'm surprised at the idea this would play very well in NYC (at least outside of Staten Island).

There was also this mailer:

Basically, it says that if you elect Kevin Kim, you risk the district turning into Downtown Flushing (which is not in the district) and is pretty much 100% Asian (Chinese and Korean mainly).

The piece of campaign literature featured a picture of Kim which had been superimposed on a photo of downtown Flushing, which is predominantly Asian. The mailer read,

“Will your community be the next one to be hit by overdevelopment? With Kevin Kim in office, it will be.”

I mean, really? This guy got elected in New York?

Okay, that's pretty fucked. I regret being glad that he won, even if he is a pagan.

So marriage equality in Maine got narrowly voted down, again. it's like we're 3 points away in many many states

pacino wrote:So marriage equality in Maine got narrowly voted down, again. it's like we're 3 points away in many many states

That's true. It takes 50.0001% of voters to discriminate against neighbors who are a little different, but 60% to get anything done in the Senate.

Civil rights might not have won on the ballot in the '60s either.

But hopefully the gain of democratic legitimation--once it wins (and it will) it'll stay won--will make up for the fact that it's taking longer than many of us want.

I just did a big presentation on merit systems for teachers. I went in being strongly in favor of a merit system, but came out feeling very different. It seems intuitively good, but there a many factors that I never really thought about until, well, I really thought about them. First, I never realized that there is a very long history, both in the US and Europe, of attempting merit systems for teachers, and they always fail. Merit systems have been in vogue in the business world, but those systems have been disappearing for a decade because they don't improve performance outside of sales, etc. Teacher merit systems end up destroying morale, cause infighting between teachers for resources and the best students, cause a lack of cooperation between teachers for activities and successful methods, lead to unfair assessment systems that favor those who are friends and families of those doing the assessing and those who are from good schools or districts, encourage cheating on testing, causes conflicts with administration, cost more, etc.etc.etc. And here's the kicker, they don't work. Students don't perform better in those schools, so why do something that is more expensive and is a Pandora's box of problems?

Research shows that teachers are poorly motivated by money, as are most people (money ranked 16 out of 20 on a poll of reasons why people take a job). And those that are motivated by money aren't necessarily the best teachers. There's also a slew of psychological research out there showing that rewarding extrinsic factors leads to a loss of intrinsic motivation, which is what really drives good teachers. In the few times that short-term gains were realized they soon disappeared and things actually get worse than the starting point, a fact which is explained by the Hawthorne effect and the loss of intrinsic motivation in the teachers at the school.

Bottom line, I think we can probably agree that teachers want their students to do well. Given that fact, why has merit pay repeatedly failed in all its forms? Every generation or so, it rears its head and it's tried again, but it never works. Why?

I also think people forget that the present system is already a merit system to some degree. Teachers with more education and training and experience get paid more. These same teachers tend to score better on merit pay assessments. Neither system works very well.

Doing something different doesn't mean that it's better. I agree that something needs to be done to get better teachers, but I don't think merit pay is it. If it was, it would have worked by now.

allentown wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:

Uncle Milty wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:

Uncle Milty wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:if you really think that i feel sorry for you.

Was this for me? If so we might need a breakout thread.

yea, good teachers arent lazy. that is really a terrible stereotype that is not true.

You're right. Good teachers aren't lazy. I commented on the overwhelming proportion of teachers to good teachers.

lazy people exist in every profession. you dont really have a point.

Yes, he does. Teaching is the only profession in which you really can't be fired, your compensation is totally unlinked to performance, and no matter how bad you are, you are guaranteed customers.

I kinda agree, but principals can make things pretty hard on the teachers who don't do a good job. My prof was a principal in the Nashville school district and he sad that he would get people to quit by giving them the worst assignments and making their lives hell. Of course, that's easier to do in a major urban school district.

I do think there needs to be a way to fire teachers who are burned out and not doing the job, but I think you are exaggerating a bit. It's not like the school district has no recourse. A burned out teacher isn't going to hang around in a school when they get the worst assignments all the time and are evaluated twice a year and forced to fill out tons of paperwork. That person will usually quit and take the retirement.

dajafi wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:

dajafi wrote:What makes a good lawyer, doctor or engineer? It's a mix of objective and subjective factors. Similarly, determining teacher quality is difficult but not impossible. Obviously no one standard gives the answer, so you use a bunch--academic performance, improvement over the course of a school year, the opinions of students, parents, peers and supervisors--and weight them accordingly.

there are so many things that could go wrong in that though.

academic performance= student chooses not to do work, student speaks spanish and struggles, student has learning disability

improvement of the course of the year= a student's mom dies and their performance drops off

student/parent opinion= student gets lazy and gets a D on a paper and that is the teachers fault so they hate the teacher

That's why you use a bunch of factors and measure it over 2-3 years, rather than one.

Have to say I'm not shocked to find you making excuses for mediocrity.

He's raising legitimate concerns, not making excuses for mediocrity. If a person's livelihood is going to rest on student achievement, then you have to find a way to evaluate that achievement fairly. Pointing out things that can can affect achievement outside of teacher control is pretty reasonable, imho.

CalvinBall wrote:

Woody wrote:What about the fact that the kind of people that aspire to teach generally overlap with the kinds of people that are kind of lazy and love summers off and 50 holidays a year and being done work by 4. If we make the school year longer, maybe we'll attract more folks that are a little more serious about making a difference

i feel like you are kidding around with this a bit but as i said before teachers are planning, coaching, grading, running clubs, answering parents emails, taking graduate classes, and a lot of other things outside of the 7-3 work day.

i know a lot of teachers that get other jobs over the summer too.

I actually think the really lazy people are those who work 9-5 for "12" months a year, get an hour for lunch each day, tons of personal leave and sick days, 4-8 weeks of paid vacation, and get to go home at night without a pile of work. And many of them are crappy at their jobs, but get to hide behind a series of subordinates.

TenuredVulture wrote:

Woody wrote:What about the fact that the kind of people that aspire to teach generally overlap with the kinds of people that are kind of lazy and love summers off and 50 holidays a year and being done work by 4. If we make the school year longer, maybe we'll attract more folks that are a little more serious about making a difference

I'm all for making the school year longer. But in fact I would say the real problem is that those attracted to teaching tend to be mediocre students themselves, and see teaching as a profession where unlike medicine or even law you don't have to be especially smart.

Actually, I would say the problem isn't just unions, it's the entire education establishment--the university departments of education, the so-called education experts who come up with curricular ideas and implement them without doing basic research demonstrating its effectiveness, and the testing industry. Too many teachers lack basic content knowledge because they've spent most of their undergraduate careers in "education" courses.

well, I do agree with a lot of this. I met with the science mentor this week and she couldn't name newton's laws of motion or several other basic science things. And this was someone with 18 years of experience in a science classroom. Of course, it's the south, so it's not surprising.

That's part of why I joined the teaching fellows program. It's filled with people who come from industries (journalists becoming english teachers; scientists becoming science teachers; statisticians becoming math teachers, etc) who wanted to go into an urban area to try to make a difference. They have a long application process and you have to do a sample lesson, so most of the poor communicators are weeded out. I slipped through the cracks -- don't tell on me.

swishnicholson wrote:I sympathize with Calvin's point of view ( I was a teacher for a short period of time, although not a very good one) even though I generally agree with the benefits of merit pay for teachers. It is pretty easy to tell a very good teacher from a very poor one, the top ten percent from the bottom ten percent, and I think everyone would benefit if these top teachers were rewarded and used where they could do the most good, while the bottom ones were weeded out. But for the other eighty percent, no matter how scientific you might make it look, the standards for evaluation are going to have such a large margin of error that they are nearly useless, since they are affected by many things other than teacher performance and it would be like using RBI to judge baseball players. To pretend that we can make fine distinctions between teacher performance is arrogant and misguided, and it's no wonder teachers get riled up.
s.

This. Something needs to be done, but I don't like the idea of merit pay.

Nobody said laziness is the norm in teaching, just that there is some overlap.

4 weeks sounds like a lot, but it usually takes 5 years or so to get above that. So if you're not laid off, or there are unfair reasons for a dismissal, or 100 other factors, there's a pretty good chance you don't get to that 5 years and have to start over at another job.

But a lot of the problem in this argument was CB's refusal to see that we're all under a merit system of sorts with unfair factors, many out of our control, and teachers wouldn't be different in that regard. At every job I've been at, there also weren't unions, so I could get a 3% raise if I was lucky, or 0%, if the company felt like it was suffering.

The last two places I worked at also got rid of the carrying over remaining PTO days to another year. And I've been so busy at these last two jobs that I didn't get to use all my days.

Most people I know also take work home with them at night, or work late, and go in on weekends. So many companies are so short-handed with layoffs that there's no other way to get your work done.

So I think a lot of the backlash was the way in CB presented his argument, and the fact that he thinks the rest of us are just rewarded all the time and treated fairly.

The Dude wrote:Nobody said laziness is the norm in teaching, just that there is some overlap.

4 weeks sounds like a lot, but it usually takes 5 years or so to get above that. So if you're not laid off, or there are unfair reasons for a dismissal, or 100 other factors, there's a pretty good chance you don't get to that 5 years and have to start over at another job.

But a lot of the problem in this argument was CB's refusal to see that we're all under a merit system of sorts with unfair factors, many out of our control, and teachers wouldn't be different in that regard. At every job I've been at, there also weren't unions, so I could get a 3% raise if I was lucky, or 0%, if the company felt like it was suffering.

The last two places I worked at also got rid of the carrying over remaining PTO days to another year. And I've been so busy at these last two jobs that I didn't get to use all my days.

Most people I know also take work home with them at night, or work late, and go in on weekends. So many companies are so short-handed with layoffs that there's no other way to get your work done.

So I think a lot of the backlash was the way in CB presented his argument, and the fact that he thinks the rest of us are just rewarded all the time and treated fairly.

Ok, I guess I have lucky friends. Most of them started at 4 weeks. Since we have a lot of people with very professional jobs on this board, I figured we had a high number of people with 4-8 weeks vacation. I could be wrong about that.

It sounded like some people were saying that teaching is easy, that teachers have tons of free time, and are lazy. I'm a first year teacher, which is the toughest year of teaching, but I work 7 days a week on stuff, including evenings. I start early and I end late. I also get paid next to nothing. I'm sure I am on the lower end of salaries on this board. I made more money waiting tables. So when you look at compensation to work ratio, teachers are treated pretty poorly. A person with 25 years of service and a masters degree makes 56K in the Nashville school district. That's pretty bad.

I'm certainly not saying that everything is fine. Something needs to be done to get better teachers. I just don't think merit pay works, as history and research has shown. Current teachers are rewarded for experience and training/education, and those teachers show the same behaviors that do well on merit assessments because they have the pedagogy down and know that the evaluators are looking for.

Let's put it this way, the Phillies could use a new closer next year. We agree that the bullpen needs fixing, but that doesn't mean we should sign Curt Schilling to be our closer. Change for change's sake is worthless, and less than worthless if it's more expensive and leads to tons of other problems.

No, I'm saying you start at 4 weeks, but that doesn't change for about 5 years at a lot of places. But I can't remember the last time I was actually able to use all 4 weeks. That includes staying in the office until 8, then going in on Saturday, and if you travel a lot of that happens on the weekends. I went 21 days without a day off this year, including weekends

Like any other job, salary all depends on where you work. I'd expect somewhere like Nashville to pay a lot less than somewhere like Abington does. The cost of living in Nashville is a lot less than Philly (25% less) so I'd expect you to make less than people here

OK, so lots of people get treated bad by their employers. I really don't doubt that. But I still think the pay scale for teachers is about as bad as you can get for someone with an advanced degree. I still don't like merit pay for all the reasons I mentioned, mostly because it doesn't lead to better student outcomes, which is supposed to be the whole point.

I am looking forward to my first summer off though. My wife and I are going to have our honeymoon and I plan on going camping for a few weeks, probably by myself. I used to do that in college and grad school and I really miss it. But I don't think looking forward to my time off makes me lazy. Other than a 4 day trip to Puerto Rico, I haven't had a vacation in 6 years, unless you count the week around my marriage, which didn't feel like a vacation.

Monkeyboy wrote:OK, so lots of people get treated bad by their employers. I really don't doubt that. But I still think the pay scale for teachers is about as bad as you can get for someone with an advanced degree. I still don't like merit pay for all the reasons I mentioned, mostly because it doesn't lead to better student outcomes, which is supposed to be the whole point.

I am looking forward to my first summer off though. My wife and I are going to have our honeymoon and I plan on going camping for a few weeks, probably by myself. I used to do that in college and grad school and I really miss it. But I don't think looking forward to my time off makes me lazy. Other than a 4 day trip to Puerto Rico, I haven't had a vacation in 6 years, unless you count the week around my marriage, which didn't feel like a vacation.

I don't see why you would conclude that merit pay would not lead to better student outcomes. I think it almost certainly would do so. And you are deluding yourself if you equate years of service and number of courses taken with merit.

The Dude wrote:Nobody said laziness is the norm in teaching, just that there is some overlap.

4 weeks sounds like a lot, but it usually takes 5 years or so to get above that. So if you're not laid off, or there are unfair reasons for a dismissal, or 100 other factors, there's a pretty good chance you don't get to that 5 years and have to start over at another job.

But a lot of the problem in this argument was CB's refusal to see that we're all under a merit system of sorts with unfair factors, many out of our control, and teachers wouldn't be different in that regard. At every job I've been at, there also weren't unions, so I could get a 3% raise if I was lucky, or 0%, if the company felt like it was suffering.

The last two places I worked at also got rid of the carrying over remaining PTO days to another year. And I've been so busy at these last two jobs that I didn't get to use all my days.

Most people I know also take work home with them at night, or work late, and go in on weekends. So many companies are so short-handed with layoffs that there's no other way to get your work done.

So I think a lot of the backlash was the way in CB presented his argument, and the fact that he thinks the rest of us are just rewarded all the time and treated fairly.

The company I worked for is still at 3 weeks vacation after 5 years, 4 weeks after 10 years, and 5 weeks after 20 years. Although the work week was 40 hours, I didn't know anyone who worked that few hours.

Monkeyboy wrote:

allentown wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:

Uncle Milty wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:

Uncle Milty wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:if you really think that i feel sorry for you.

Was this for me? If so we might need a breakout thread.

yea, good teachers arent lazy. that is really a terrible stereotype that is not true.

You're right. Good teachers aren't lazy. I commented on the overwhelming proportion of teachers to good teachers.

lazy people exist in every profession. you dont really have a point.

Yes, he does. Teaching is the only profession in which you really can't be fired, your compensation is totally unlinked to performance, and no matter how bad you are, you are guaranteed customers.

I kinda agree, but principals can make things pretty hard on the teachers who don't do a good job. My prof was a principal in the Nashville school district and he sad that he would get people to quit by giving them the worst assignments and making their lives hell. Of course, that's easier to do in a major urban school district.

I do think there needs to be a way to fire teachers who are burned out and not doing the job, but I think you are exaggerating a bit. It's not like the school district has no recourse. A burned out teacher isn't going to hang around in a school when they get the worst assignments all the time and are evaluated twice a year and forced to fill out tons of paperwork. That person will usually quit and take the retirement.

I can assure you based upon experience that many, many burned out or really bad teachers do cling to their jobs for dear life.
In a school district with 900 teachers, an intermediate unit with about 100, and a vo-tech school with about 70 teachers over the course of 20 years, I saw exactly 1 teacher lose a tenure hearing based on incompetence, and he was too debilitated by alcoholism to effectively defend himself. Talking monthly with school board members from 9 other school districts, there was perhaps 1 other firing for incompetence over that time period.

One of the problems with tenure is that it is 'earned' after two years on the job. Hope springs eternal and adminstrators are still hoping they will be able to coach a failing teacher to success at the end of that two year period.

The Onion two weeks ago

While authorities maintained that the gathering was largely peaceful and most of the fires were set purely by accident, demonstrators appeared visibly angry about a range of topics, including war, peace, food, music, money, baseball, cars, the people following them around as if this were some kind of rally, siblings, animals, plants, colors, and movies.

"Come on out of that precious little palace of yours, Mr. President. We're right here waiting," Pennsylvania resident Kip Callahan yelled toward the marble-columned State Insurance Building. "I didn't come all this way to be ignored. I got kids!"

"No Social Security for Medicare!" Michigan idiot Kevin Liston added. "Not in my backyard!"

Throughout the day, the number of protesters grew to include not just morons, but more than 6,000 nimrods, 3,500 dunderheads, and approximately 12,000 of the biggest fucking dipshits known to man.

In all, 75,000 of the simpletons turned out, though dozens were killed after walking out into traffic, and hundreds more were lost after wandering into nearby Trillium Park.

"I'm against things," longtime North Carolina resident Pam Beucher said. "I'm for things."

"America!" she added.

The NYT today

Mr. Hershberger, who has health insurance through his employer, said that he believed some changes were needed to the health care system, but that Democrats were going about the process all wrong. “Scrap all this, start from the beginning, bring in the conservatives, the Republicans and the Democrats and see what we need to do to care for the 12 to 14 million people who really need insurance.”

Asked what he thought about the three-month effort by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, work with Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee to draft a bipartisan bill, Mr. Hershberger dismissed it, saying the resulting legislation proved the process had failed. “It doesn’t reflect what we want,” he said.
...
Ms. Garloch, who has a combination of Medicare and private coverage, said insurance should be sold across state lines to increase competition.

But Ms. Garloch, like many in the crowd who while visibly angry. could not articulate the main problems in the health care system or how they should be solved.

Some of the same people warning of too much government spending also complained that Medicare does not provide sufficient coverage.

Ms. Garloch dismissed suggestions that some hospitals, like the Cleveland Clinic in her home state, had figured out ways to provide higher-quality medical outcomes at lower cost, indicating that there might be ways to cut costs without sacrificing patient care.

Her brother-in-law worked at the Cleveland Clinic for several years. “There’s a lot of bureaucracy there,” she said. “You don’t get everything you want.”

I weep