THEY'RE TAKING OVER!!! politics thread

by **Squire** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 12:53:45

jerseyhoya wrote:
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.

If past experience is the measure, Christine should be able to live off that million for like 20-25 years.

by **pacino** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 12:54:06

On a local level, education reform is largely looked at as reducing and endi g property tax and the 'burden' on taxpayers. The latter comes up whenever a contract is up. This sort of talk grinds my gears because it has nothing to do with actual reform; the topic becomes money. I get what people are saying here, but there's a huge difference between incorporating some solid ideas and what a lot of proponentd eventually want. They want to enact the so-called free market, where teachers are on their own, private schools have the day, and funding is destroyed due to no reliable source. So yes, some have overreacted to small reforms in evaluation. I think it's more out of fear of the above than protecting crap teachers. Teachers i know hate the slackers, just as we all hate the slackers at our offices. The bad apples are always the ones that stand out.

by **pacino** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 12:56:00

Squire wrote:
jerseyhoya wrote:
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

that certainly pays for a lot of non-sex toys

Reid is amazingly bad with words.

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

If past experience is the measure, Christine should be able to live off that million for like 20-25 years.

by **jerseyhoya** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:05:30

mozartpc27 wrote:
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 asshat come here and ask us for help, after he was let go for his total asshat. 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 there 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."

My mom's in a teacher's union that she really hates. As a school social worker she has found that a disproportionate amount of the problems that her students face come from the same handful of teachers who are notorious in her department and around the school for not working hard at their jobs. They fail to educate their students year after year, and keep their job because of tenure and the clout of the teachers union.

I understand that teachers unions exist to help teachers organize and protects good ones against frivolous complaints as well as bad ones against legitimate complaints. That's fine I guess, but the point is in policy debates on public education teachers unions like to pretend that they are speaking for the children, when quite plainly they are speaking for themselves. The goals of a teachers union in many ways are incompatible with the ideal public education policy, in a similar way to how the goals of taxpayer groups are also incompatible with top quality education. Their targeting a top reformer for defeat in our nation's capital further cements that point.

by **kopphanatic** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:06:43

pacino wrote:On a local level, education reform is largely looked at as reducing and endi g property tax and the 'burden' on taxpayers. The latter comes up whenever a contract is up. This sort of talk grinds my gears because it has nothing to do with actual reform; the topic becomes money. I get what people are saying here, but there's a huge difference between incorporating some solid ideas and what a lot of proponentd eventually want. They want to enact the so-called free market, where teachers are on their own, private schools have the day, and funding is destroyed due to no reliable source. So yes, some have overreacted to small reforms in evaluation. I think it's more out of fear of the above than protecting crap teachers. Teachers i know hate the slackers, just as we all hate the slackers at our offices. The bad apples are always the ones that stand out.

Love the people that don't want to pay their share of taxes because "I don't haz no kids in the durn school system". They don't realize that their property value is increased if they live in a good school district.

Website · by **Wolfgang622** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:08:06

dajafi wrote: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 $#@! 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.

Again, the AFT (and I suppose the NEA as well, though, as I don't work for them, I'm not as familiar with their internal politics), is NOT - repeat, NOT - against various sorts of reform, including a teacher evaluation scheme. Apparently you've met Randi Weingarten and disliked her, but it's important to know that she was elected president of the AFT because of her efforts with local 1 (New York City), where she was known as a modernizer/reformer, someone who could make reform palatable to AFT membership. Hell, even The Economist gave her a decent write-up a few months back.

I do think the AFT needs to make their message clearer to the broader populous, but it's simply this: yes, reforms are needed to help evaluate teachers and, occasionally, to weed out ones who are gaming the system and not doing what they are supposed to be doing. And yes, the reality of America in the 21st century is that we probably need a longer school day, and maybe even school year (though the summer vacation industry would have a big problem with that, another matter) to help working parents if nothing else, etc.

But these reforms have to be respectful of the unique situation of education. It's not like other jobs. If I'm most any other kind of worker, there are tangible things I produce or help to produce that, once produced, are unchanging. If I'm a salesmen, I help produce sales. I can be evaluated by the number of sales I got against the average, for example.

But when you are evaluating teachers, you are looking at people who are SUPPOSED to have learned what I have presented. But maybe they don't, and, beyond presenting the material, offering help to students outside of class if needs be, maintaining or at least attempting to maintain lines of communication with students' parents, there isn't much I can do to FORCE them to learn the material I present. It's a two-way street, and teachers need to be evaluated on what they do ON THEIR SIDE OF IT.

by **jeff2sf** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:15:29

Nope, not the way it works.

Let's take sales.

Part of my job performance is how the sales people I support do on their sales. Now, I can prep all the stuff I want for them, get it all analytically shiny, but if they do a crappy job, I'm judged negatively for it. It's called life.

Or, they could do a GREAT job, the client could love what they're doing, and right before they're about to buy a million dollar deal from us, the client gets transferred out, and the sales team has to start anew with no credit for what they've done.

This happens all the freaking time. People have to be evaluated, get out of our damn way.

by **pacino** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:19:35

Good thing we're molding young minds and not working at popcopy

by **dajafi** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:21:48

mozartpc27 wrote:But when you are evaluating teachers, you are looking at people who are SUPPOSED to have learned what I have presented. But maybe they don't, and, beyond presenting the material, offering help to students outside of class if needs be, maintaining or at least attempting to maintain lines of communication with students' parents, there isn't much I can do to FORCE them to learn the material I present. It's a two-way street, and teachers need to be evaluated on what they do ON THEIR SIDE OF IT.

I totally agree, which is why context matters. You don't take the results at face value, as if the kids came into existence on the day they entered that teacher's classroom; you take them in the context of where the kid started so you can make an informed assessment of how much value the teacher hopefully added.

My mom is a teacher (and a union member). I well know that some kids are "unreachable," that the root of the problem is at home, and so on. But those kids are by definition unusual; and as jeff implies, they're probably either spread out relatively evenly or concentrated to a degree that you know what you're dealing with--the group that Bunny Colvin worked with in Season Four, whose initial test results wouldn't tell you much.

(Pretty much every public policy conversation can be related to The Wire, which is part of why it's humanity's greatest achievement.)

Website · by **Wolfgang622** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:42:19

jerseyhoya wrote:My mom's in a teacher's union that she really hates. As a school social worker she has found that a disproportionate amount of the problems that her students face come from the same handful of teachers who are notorious in her department and around the school for not working hard at their jobs. They fail to educate their students year after year, and keep their job because of tenure and the clout of the teachers union.

And, I'm sure, if the people who work for that local are anything like me, they're more than a little embarrassed by the bad teachers you speak of. I think NJ tends to be mostly NEA, so I can't really speak for them, but this is why the AFT IS -repeat, IS - in favor of reforms that would get bad or underperforming teachers out of the system. Just not on the basis of tests in which the people who are being evaluated have ALL the stake, but NO control, while the people taking the tests have NO stake, but ALL of the control. That is a bad system.

jerseyhoya wrote:I understand that teachers unions exist to help teachers organize and protects good ones against frivolous complaints as well as bad ones against legitimate complaints. That's fine I guess, but the point is in policy debates on public education teachers unions like to pretend that they are speaking for the children, when quite plainly they are speaking for themselves. The goals of a teachers union in many ways are incompatible with the ideal public education policy, in a similar way to how the goals of taxpayer groups are also incompatible with top quality education. Their targeting a top reformer for defeat in our nation's capital further cements that point.

Yes, I myself can become frustrated, occasionally, with the rhetoric - it doesn't take a genius to understand that unions are about working conditions, and that is their primary concern. I have to chalk that up to politics, however, and just grin and bare it, and besides, as someone who has taught now (for eight years) at the college level, I can say that it isn't just BS either. It stands to simple reason that if a worker is given too much responsibility and not enough help, then the quality of the work that they can deliver will slip. And yet, that is often what happens in the worst (read: poorest) schools: teachers have larger class sizes, with students who have more discipline problems because of absentee parents and other bad home conditions than are likely to appear in the suburbs. Teachers in these situations are behind the eight ball before they ever start.

Moreover, if teachers are also paid too little while ALSO being overworked, they are going to be unhappy. It's especially unfair, but also the nature of the stupid way education is set up in this country (based on property taxes: bad idea), that the "easiest" teaching jobs pay the MOST. You have a job in the Council Rock school district in Bucks County, PA, and you are doing alright: you get paid six figures at the top of the scale, and have a lot of kids with wealthy parents who may therefore be brats, but who are also usually coming from homes where there ARE parents who ARE invested in their child's behavior and education.

Meanwhile, if you teach in Philadelphia, you get a pittance by comparison to start ($38,500, which you need a POST-GRADUATE degree to make), and are consistently dealing with kids who are much less likely to have active and engaged parents. This trend, by the way, is absolutely exacerbated by the charter school movement: what this has done, more than anything else, is to separate all the kids who have invested parents from all the kids who don't. The ones left in the regular public school system are the ones who are most problematic, precisely because their parents didn't care enough about education, or weren't informed enough about how education works in Philadelphia, to get them into a charter school.

So teachers in Philadelphia public schools (and other urban areas) are facing larger classes of students than their suburban and charter school counterparts, and, worse, a self-selecting group of students who are much less likely to be motivated to be invested in their educations than their suburban and public school counterparts. And yet, it is this group of teachers - the least-paid, most taxed in terms of the difficulty of their labors - who are most frequently targeted by school-reform movements. Somehow, THEY are the problem, and not a system that ensures that rich kids go to rich school, poor kids with active parents go to for-profit schools, and poor kids with parents who are either unfamiliar with how the system works, or who just plain don't care that much, go to the public schools where the - ha ha - "bad" teachers all seem to be.

I mean, to take an extreme example, think about West Philadelphia high school. Back a few years ago, there were several - SEVERAL - incidents out of that school in which teachers were assaulted by students. In one case, a man's jaw was broken because he confiscated an iPod from a student, who wouldn't put it away and stop listening to it during class AFTER REPEATED WARNINGS. He only intended to hold it until the end of the period or until the end of the day, I forget which.

How the hell is ANYBODY else supposed to feel safe enough, in those circumstances, to challenge the students and giving meaningful discipline to them when they get out of line? And if you can't instill discipline, how can you teach? I am sure West Philadelphia's test scores were probably bad on all the no-child-left-behind stuff. Well no shit. And people want to fire the TEACHERS?

Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if there WERE a higher percentage of bad teachers in, say, West Philadelphia High School than in, say, Council Rock High School, because anyone who is really good at what they do probably wants out at the first opportunity. The whole system is set up so that the most difficult students wind up in a handful of schools, which probably tends to drive a certain percentage of the better teachers of those schools out.

But yeah, this is the fault of teachers' unions.

Website · by **Wolfgang622** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:44:01

jeff2sf wrote:Nope, not the way it works.

Let's take sales.

Part of my job performance is how the sales people I support do on their sales. Now, I can prep all the stuff I want for them, get it all analytically shiny, but if they do a crappy job, I'm judged negatively for it. It's called life.

Or, they could do a GREAT job, the client could love what they're doing, and right before they're about to buy a million dollar deal from us, the client gets transferred out, and the sales team has to start anew with no credit for what they've done.

This happens all the freaking time. People have to be evaluated, get out of our damn way.

That, to me, is an argument for why your job needs a union. If you can be fired because someone under you doesn't do his job, that's BS. Fire the guy who doesn't do his job, not you.

by **drsmooth** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:50:53

mozartpc27 wrote:That, to me, is an argument for why your job needs a union. If you can be fired because someone under you doesn't do his job, that's BS. Fire the guy who doesn't do his job, not you.

jeff seems of the opinion that performance evaluation is shit-ty, and so is acknowledging it.

or something.

by **jeff2sf** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 13:56:52

mozartpc27 wrote:
jeff2sf wrote:Nope, not the way it works.

Let's take sales.

Part of my job performance is how the sales people I support do on their sales. Now, I can prep all the stuff I want for them, get it all analytically shiny, but if they do a crappy job, I'm judged negatively for it. It's called life.

Or, they could do a GREAT job, the client could love what they're doing, and right before they're about to buy a million dollar deal from us, the client gets transferred out, and the sales team has to start anew with no credit for what they've done.

This happens all the freaking time. People have to be evaluated, get out of our damn way.

That, to me, is an argument for why your job needs a union. If you can be fired because someone under you doesn't do his job, that's BS. Fire the guy who doesn't do his job, not you.

Actually, smoothie, it's a combination of things. First, it's an acknowledgement that life isn't fair and that metrics aren't always fair or right either. But that doesn't mean people should start living in some kum-bay-ah world where we don't try to impart some metrics.

There's another point to it though. I, as a reasonable man can re-examine my performance with them. I THOUGHT I was providing the team great support. But perhaps I'm not, perhaps I can stretch more and make things more simple for the team or make things more persuasive to the client. Any metric is not going to be 100% perfect, but that's not a reason to get in the way and be an obstructionist to progress.

Website · by **Wolfgang622** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 14:06:04

jeff2sf wrote:Actually, smoothie, it's a combination of things. First, it's an acknowledgement that life isn't fair and that metrics aren't always fair or right either. But that doesn't mean people should start living in some kum-bay-ah world where we don't try to impart some metrics.

There's another point to it though. I, as a reasonable man can re-examine my performance with them. I THOUGHT I was providing the team great support. But perhaps I'm not, perhaps I can stretch more and make things more simple for the team or make things more persuasive to the client. Any metric is not going to be 100% perfect, but that's not a reason to get in the way and be an obstructionist to progress.

And no one, not the AFT or anybody else, is against more teacher training, etc. My point is if someone - you as a manager or me as a teacher - is making an honest effort, doing lots of work, trying his or her best to offer support to a staff or present material and offer support to students - then it can and should be difficult to fire that person. Be required to get more training, sure. Be required to perform more self-evaluation, or adjust his or her strategy, sure. Then you see how that additional training, how those new strategies work, and re-evaluate. Has the teacher (or manager) made an effort to get better? <- That should be the number one question in assessing whether or not he or she should keep his job. If the answer is yes, then they should keep their job, because, most of all, you want people who are willing to wrok hard and make the effort to do their job, and get better at it.

by **jeff2sf** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 14:10:52

mozartpc27 wrote:
jeff2sf wrote:Actually, smoothie, it's a combination of things. First, it's an acknowledgement that life isn't fair and that metrics aren't always fair or right either. But that doesn't mean people should start living in some kum-bay-ah world where we don't try to impart some metrics.

There's another point to it though. I, as a reasonable man can re-examine my performance with them. I THOUGHT I was providing the team great support. But perhaps I'm not, perhaps I can stretch more and make things more simple for the team or make things more persuasive to the client. Any metric is not going to be 100% perfect, but that's not a reason to get in the way and be an obstructionist to progress.

And no one, not the AFT or anybody else, is against more teacher training, etc. My point is if someone - you as a manager or me as a teacher - is making an honest effort, doing lots of work, trying his or her best to offer support to a staff or present material and offer support to students - then it can and should be difficult to fire that person. Be required to get more training, sure. Be required to perform more self-evaluation, or adjust his or her strategy, sure. Then you see how that additional training, how those new strategies work, and re-evaluate. Has the teacher (or manager) made an effort to get better? <- That should be the number one question in assessing whether or not he or she should keep his job. If the answer is yes, then they should keep their job, because, most of all, you want people who are willing to wrok hard and make the effort to do their job, and get better at it.

Sorry moz, but no, you're wrong as you've been throughout. You could really use some time in the real world when not protected by unions. Let's say I'm Janie's parent. And Janie has Mrs. Ignorant. Mrs. Ignorant has worked for 3 years and all her metrics say she's a terrible teacher. But she's sweet and she does work hard. I, as Janie's dad am supposed to deal with ANOTHER year of a bad teacher because she tries? NOOOO. Fuck no. She had her turn, she's not a good teacher, she needs to leave ASAP.

No one wants to fire anyone based on one year of bad results, but "an effort to get better" is not enough after continued poor metrics. Because of course, no one knows if her "sincere effort" is all that sincere.

You gotta bring some better ish to this debate bro.

by **Bucky** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 14:15:34

JUAN CASTRO tried REALLY REALLY HARD

:ce:

Website · by **Wolfgang622** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 14:24:54

Bucky wrote:JUAN CASTRO tried REALLY REALLY HARD

I knew, absolutely fuck-ing KNEW, someone would go there. And would use him as the example, too.

I'm sure Bucky is just funnin', but let me answer the point anyway, to head it off at the pass.

The differences between baseball and real-world jobs that depend on mental acuity and plain old hard work should be obvious.

First, there is no buffer between Juan Castro and the results of his job performance. He just wasn't good enough. He can't say, "I did everything I was supposed to do, but the ball was lazy and uncooperative." The ball has no will of its own, and can't be held responsible. So there's that.

And, more importantly, in the real world, when people get fired, it's usually interpreted - rightly or wrongly - as, at least partially, an indictment of their personality, work ethic, or both. In baseball, there just comes a point when someone can't do it any more, no matter how hard he tries, how great a guy he is, or how hard he is willing to work. No one thinks Juan Castro is a bad or lazy person because he was cut. They just think he was a player with a limited skill set in the first place, relative to his chosen profession, and who got too old, so that wht skills he had diminished past the point where he could perform adequately at t he major league level. When Castro -and, in truth, most athletes - lose their jobs, then, it is not in any way a statement about their work ethic. If it is, you hear about it.

But when someone gets fired from their job in the real world, that's the way it is often interpreted. Look at the form of even this discussion on the national stage - it's all about "bad teachers," teachers who are lazy or incompetent, etc. The idea out there is that there are people of low character among the ranks of teachers who need to be weeded out.

And, to the extent that there are, sure. No one disagrees with that. But when someone IS working hard, that needs to be taken HEAVILY into account, just as the fact the results he or she gets aren't necessarily a directly a result of the effort - or lack of it - that he or she makes.

by **dajafi** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 14:28:54

I don't want to distract from an ed-reform conversation I've wanted to see here for years, but feel like this is also important:

A few facts:

1. The nominations of Janet Yellen to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, as well as Sarah Bloom Raskin and Peter Diamond to be members of the Fed’s board, are languishing in the Senate. “We’ve got a limited amount of time here," explained Chris Dodd. "I don’t know if there’s going to be any appetite to deal with these Fed nominees." This means the Federal Reserve is critically understaffed: In the event of an emergency, the Board of Governors needs five members to authorize extraordinary actions to save the economy. Right now, there are only four.

2. The bipartisan -- and it's really bipartisan, with Sens. Mike Enzi, Richard Burr and Judd Gregg all signed on as co-sponsors -- food safety bill is in limbo again because Tom Coburn is obstructing its passage. Coburn doesn't have the votes to stop the bill, or even to stop a vote on the bill, but he does have the power to waste days and even weeks of Senate floor time.
...
So the Federal Reserve is understaffed and the food safety bill languishes. In other cases, that means things get done through unusual or ad hoc mechanisms that aren't accountable to Congress, as with Warren. The result of obstruction isn't just gridlock -- it's also evasion. And we need to think seriously about whether we're comfortable with a Congress that the executive branch increasingly goes around because it's too dysfunctional to go through.

The prevalence of obstruction as a minority strategy also has to explain in considerable part why Congress is so consistently detested, regardless of who's running it at any moment.

by **jerseyhoya** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 14:29:46

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RkhgqliSRI[/youtube]

Goddamn this is a fantastic ad

by **jeff2sf** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 14:30:19

So lame, moz, so lame.

He's trying hard. "Sorry sir, your father died. I'm trying real hard in the operating room, but I have twitchy hands."

"Look, we're sorry the food we served you tastes awful, we've got a kid in there who's totally busting his ass to serve you good food, but he doesn't actually know how to cook beyond his culinary school education where he got straight C's. But again, I hope his effort made up for everything else".

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