kopphanatic wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Teachers unions are free to participate in electoral politics and can be as self interested as they want to be, but in doing so they should lose their mantle of doing things for the good of the children, as they always like to pretend, if they're really just out for themselves.

Has it ever occurred to you that some kids just don't do well on standardized tests? Or that there are multiple intelligences that can't measured through a test? It's really insulting that you paint teacher's unions(which virtually all public school teachers belong to) as selfish when the vast majority of teachers really do care about their students and put in many, many hours in and out of school to ensure that their kids do well.

Has it ever occurred to you that teachers and the teachers union aren't the same thing? The teachers unions are interested in protecting the minority of teachers who suck at their jobs and don't put in the many, many hours to ensure that kids do well, and are especially not interested in finding a workable metric, god forbid, that can differentiate between who sucks at their job and who is good. Of course some kids do better on standardized tests than others, but you can develop ways of measuring teacher performance through a host of different variables as they were doing in DC under Fenty/Rhee. This led to crappy teachers getting fired. And students doing better. Oh no better spend a million bucks to make sure this doesn't catch on.

The whole idea that teachers have an easy job is complete nonsense too. In just my limited experience in student teaching, I spent many hours working at night and gave up much of my weekends too, and my load was relatively light compared to what most teachers face.

kopphanatic wrote:The whole idea that teachers have an easy job is complete nonsense too. In just my limited experience in student teaching, I spent many hours working at night and gave up much of my weekends too, and my load was relatively light compared to what most teachers face.

No one said teachers have an easy job.

No one right here, but that is a common argument put forth by people opposed to teacher unions. That they have an easy job with summers off and have enough money left over to drive BMWs to school. Some teachers only get paid for the nine months they work in the building, even though the workload and stress they face certainly entitles them to paid for the full calendar year.

There's already a weeding out process of sorts. Teacher burnout, especially in urban districts. Not sure how to rectify that with any sort of quick fix

kopphanatic wrote:In short, the well-intentioned attempts at education reform have been largely co-opted by people and forces that just hate the idea of unions in general, and don't really like the idea of public education either. The better the keep the workers under the thumb of their employers and to keep the general public stupid and malleable.

All true.

kopphanatic wrote:No one right here, but that is a common argument put forth by people opposed to teacher unions. That they have an easy job with summers off and have enough money left over to drive BMWs to school. Some teachers only get paid for the nine months they work in the building, even though the workload and stress they face certainly entitles them to paid for the full calendar year.

well, to be fair 1 basically chills nonstop. Dont know how he does it.

kopphanatic wrote:The whole idea that teachers have an easy job is complete nonsense too. In just my limited experience in student teaching, I spent many hours working at night and gave up much of my weekends too, and my load was relatively light compared to what most teachers face.

YEAH I DO THE SAME THINGS TOO ONLY FOR 12 MONTHS INSTEAD OF 9

/bigfatjerksittingathomepostingonBSGundertheguiseofworking

jeff2sf wrote:Please. Just freaking please. EVERYBODY in the corporate sector has metrics that they are judged on that are not fully in their control. EVERYONE.

as someone who has worked closely in the area of performance measurement & management, let me point out that many if not most such corporate sector metrics are utter horseapples.

That stupid things go on in the private/corporate sector is no counter to Moz's mildly paranoid concern for student test subterfuge.

Correct. About half of all teachers quit within three years of entering the profession. There are bad ones out there, just like you find bad and incompetent people in every profession. 99% work their asses off for little pay and under high stress, only to be routinely disparaged and denigrated/

jerseyhoya wrote:Has it ever occurred to you that teachers and the teachers union aren't the same thing? The teachers unions are interested in protecting the minority of teachers who suck at their jobs and don't put in the many, many hours to ensure that kids do well, and are especially not interested in finding a workable metric, god forbid, that can differentiate between who sucks at their job and who is good. Of course some kids do better on standardized tests than others, but you can develop ways of measuring teacher performance through a host of different variables as they were doing in DC under Fenty/Rhee. This led to crappy teachers getting fired. And students doing better. Oh no better spend a million bucks to make sure this doesn't catch on.

You have a blind spot for institutional parallels,because what you've described teachers unions having as their organizing principle applies as well to political parties.

I'm sure you've noticed that this is something that really pushes my buttons. Especially fallacies coming from people that have no experience in education. And I've seen just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what teachers deal with every day.

jeff2sf wrote:

kopphanatic wrote:The whole idea that teachers have an easy job is complete nonsense too. In just my limited experience in student teaching, I spent many hours working at night and gave up much of my weekends too, and my load was relatively light compared to what most teachers face.

No one said teachers have an easy job.

Maybe no one has here, but I hear it all the goddamn time IRL.

kopphanatic wrote:In short, the well-intentioned attempts at education reform have been largely co-opted by people and forces that just hate the idea of unions in general, and don't really like the idea of public education either. The better the keep the workers under the thumb of their employers and to keep the general public stupid and malleable.

I pretty much totally disagree with this.

First off, "The people and forces that just hate the idea of unions in general, and... public education"--let's call them "Republicans"--actually have stayed on the sidelines, because 1) Obama and Duncan essentially are doing what those few of them who care about these issues would do, and heaven forbid they give those commies any credit; and 2) the Republican base evidently doesn't care about education reform, so there's not much political percentage to seriously engage with the issues.

My understanding of the reforms proposed by Rhee, Klein and others isn't that teacher performance be evaluated solely on standardized testing. I'm with [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05FOB-wwln-t.html]David Leonhardt, writing recently on LA's controversial evaluations.
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One way to think about the Los Angeles case is as an understandable overreaction to an unacceptable status quo. For years, school administrators and union leaders have defeated almost any attempt at teacher measurement, partly by pointing to the limitations. Lately, though, the politics of education have changed. Parents know how much teachers matter and know that, just as with musicians or athletes or carpenters or money managers, some teachers are a lot better than others.

Test scores — that is, measuring students’ knowledge and skills — are surely part of the solution, even if the public ranking of teachers is not. Rob Manwaring of the research group Education Sector has suggested that districts release a breakdown of teachers’ value-added scores at every school, without tying the individual scores to teachers’ names. This would avoid humiliating teachers while still giving a principal an incentive to employ good ones. Improving standardized tests and making peer reports part of teacher evaluation, as many states are planning, would help, too.

But there is also another, less technocratic step that is part of building better schools: we will have to acknowledge that no system is perfect. If principals and teachers are allowed to grade themselves, as they long have been, our schools are guaranteed to betray many students. If schools instead try to measure the work of teachers, some will inevitably be misjudged. “On whose behalf do you want to make the mistake — the kids or the teachers?” asks Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust. “We’ve always erred on behalf of the adults before.”

As jeff says, we're all subject to evaluation on grounds we can't control. I'm not defending the specific regime that mozart and others are criticizing here--but I'm strongly for the concept of measuring teacher performance by a wide range of student development metrics over the course of a school year. The point should be to reward excellence, develop potential (hopefully reducing the severe outflow of teachers in the early years of their careers who get the worst assignments, aren't supported, and ultimately throw up their hands), and forcefully encourage those lifers who clock in, clock out, enjoy summers off and don't give a shit about the educational mission to find another line of work.

Here's another good recent piece on the education reform battle, and a soon to be released documentary by the guy who did "An Inconvenient Truth" that's going to kick it to another level.

pacino wrote:There's already a weeding out process of sorts. Teacher burnout, especially in urban districts.

Right, but if you make it past the weeding out process, get tenure, and then start mailing it in, there are limited repercussions.

I know anecdotes aren't all that useful, but my old roommate's girlfriend was a Teach for America person the last two years in DC. Obviously she loves Rhee, worships the ground she walks on, and much of what has me fired up about this is from her, but the school she worked in was full of teachers who were so used to not having to work really hard to meet the challenging needs of a DC classroom, and they hated/resented Rhee for the reforms because they didn't want to have to put in the effort.

So Harry Reid makes a statement about Delaware's Democratic Senate Candidate Chris Coons and uses the expression "he's my pet" not once but twice. Is there a less politically astute man than Harry Reid? I mean seriously. If you Dems blow this in Delaware I'll never forgive you.

SQUIRE

Teacher's unions may not help, but I doubt they're the root cause. For evidence, consider much of the South where unions are weak to non-existent some of the shittiest public schools out there.

I suspect a big part of the blame lies with colleges of education, the utter lack of any real standards for research in the field and its grabbing onto trends with little or no empirical justification.

Learning styles is a huge trend, but there's little evidence suggesting that it works.

The researchers found that, out of thousands of studies purporting to show the effectiveness of teaching to different learning styles, none managed to prove scientifically that students learn better when taught according to their preferred modality.

There's all kinds of bullshit like this going on--the fact is that most kids need to work hard to do well in basic skills, and while there's nothing fun about memorizing multiplication tables and things like that, it's the only way to really build a strong foundation for learning more advanced math.

Or another ridiculous idea--the amount of money schools waste on computers. Every school today has computer labs, every class room has computers in it, but no one really has ever demonstrated how this helps kids learn anything. What problem are these computers supposed to solve?

jerseyhoya wrote:The teachers unions are interested in...

Having never been a member of, nor worked for, a teachers' union, how exactly would you know what we are or are not interested in?

I can tell you that the first time I met a real higher-up at the AFT, the first words out of her mouth to me were, "First and foremost, you have to do your job. If you don't do your job, we can't help you."

I work for the AFT at a local. Let me tell you, NOBODY hates bad teachers more than the people who work as staff for the locals. It's embarrassing to have to deal with them, especially when they get cantankerous and want to hide all their crap behind union representation. 10-15% of the people in our union are bad at their jobs, if that many. We don't represent 10-15% of us. We represent 100% of us. If we're to go with the majority, then, we need to go with the dedicated ones, who ALSO want fair working conditions.

In this job, I tell people all the time, I've learned what it is like to be a public defender. Public defenders HAVE to provide a reasonable defense for their clients, because they are bound to by the law. It doesn't matter if a public defender knows his client is guilty as sin, or a scumbag of the worst sort. He still has to provide a defense.

Well, the way the law is structured in this country, it's similar with unions when they have to go to bat for somebody. I've recently had a total asshole come here and ask us for help, after he was let go for his total assholery. I'd absolutely LOVE to tell him to piss off. But I can't, because the union is bound by law to advocate for anyone it represents. He could sue us if I told him to go jump in a lake.

So, defense attorneys and union reps have a similar situation, and serve a similar purpose. But there are two key differences: defense attorneys get guilty clients probably something like 50% of the time or more. Unions, on the other hand, get obviously guilty - i.e., "deserves to be fired" - clients probably 10% of the time. And the second difference is that a very, very small percentage of what a union does, on a day-in and day-out basis, is trying to prevent someone from getting fired. Mostly we do a lot of other stuff around much broader contracts, not picking fights over this or that employee. When we do get in those fights, in my experience, we have a "guilty client" about 10% of the time. Why only 10? Because we tell people, up front, when we think their case is a loser. It only goes to arbitration if the person won't back down, even on our advice.

There is one more difference between defense attorneys and unions: no right-thinking person would suggest defense attorneys should cease to exist. But people suggest this about unions all the time, even though a very tiny percentage of is advocating to let a "guilty" man go "free."

TenuredVulture wrote: What problem are these computers supposed to solve?

the need to consume budgets - networking is the new brix & mortar

Squire wrote:So Harry Reid makes a statement about Delaware's Democratic Senate Candidate Chris Coons and uses the expression "he's my pet" not once but twice. Is there a less politically astute man than Harry Reid? I mean seriously. If you Dems blow this in Delaware I'll never forgive you.

SQUIRE

Reid is amazingly bad with words.

Also O'Donnell raised a million dollars yesterday, which is really difficult to fathom.