Obama wants longer school year, teachers want shorter work week

[opebo]

In the Police Theocracy, hot teachers that put out are sent to prison

[opebo]

As a teacher, I'm for minimizing teaching.

[opebo]

As a teacher, I'm for minimizing teaching.

You're a lazy?

Of course.  I'm offended you would think otherwise.

[opebo]

What we really need are teachers who did not get a teaching certificate with a C average from a third rate college, and the ability to hire the best, and fire the vast phalanxes of betas.  That is what we need. The rest is noise.

So you're proposing tripling the budget?

[opebo]

What we really need are teachers who did not get a teaching certificate with a C average from a third rate college, and the ability to hire the best, and fire the vast phalanxes of betas.  That is what we need. The rest is noise.

So you're proposing tripling the budget?

Opebo, I don't think it would be that expensive, since it would be a merit system with career track salaries for the best and the brightest.

You'ld still need roughly the same number of teachers, you'ld just have to pay them at least double.  Teachers nowadays make a pittance - in Missouri they start at an absurd wage - something like $25,000/year.

And then we could and should fire a host of administrators working in downtown offices shorting out their pencils from their pens. Finally getting rid of the teachers' unions would help, as well as this class size mantra that has no correlation with educational performance. Vouchers would concentrate the mind wonderfully of these monopolistic institutions (and that is what it effectively is for the poors, leavened a bit now, but only a bit, by charter schools). However, if given all of that, it costs more money, so be it. It is our duty to educate the young, and educate them well, even those in zip codes that I would never live in, or in same cases, even drive through.

These 'reforms' you mention are utterly inconsequential.  What makes people uneducable in those zip codes you so disdain is not the disfunction of the government educational system (which is in fact rather amazingly effective and even noble, considering what it is battling) but the capitalist oppression under which the residents labour.

[opebo]

... firing lots of terrible teachers would save a great deal of money as well.

No, you'ld have to replace them.  No savings there.

You sound just like my nephew Opebo. Now what I can't figure out, is whether he is channeling you, or you him, or each other, be it simultaneously or serially. I mean it is all about the evils of capitalism and the market system 24/7. My nephew's latest is to forgive all debt, and just start over.

Well, you should be glad the lad is honest.  If I were he I'd be telling you exactly whatever you wanted to hear. 

But Milton Friedman whispers to me sometimes at night from his new venue, that one one if free to choose, and to be of stout heart, and brave, in the face of the Marxist onslaught.

Well, you see, there's no such 'onslaught' - just a few powerless people (youths, poors, college professors) talking that way.  The actual onslaught is from your side - all the real power and violence is on the side of capital, the upper class.  But I do like that choice of words - 'onslaught'.  I think it is a very effective description of what is being done and has always been done to the working class.

[opebo]

Firing a teacher who's been working for 30 years, earning a cushy salary and doing a bad job and replacing them with a young teacher would lead to savings. Keeping the whole system more fluid, so that we don't have so many bad teachers working until retirement/earning high salaries would also save money.

Hah, perhaps so, but if you aren't offering any job security or any prospect of long-term employment/retirement to these young teachers you probably can't expect much in the way of commitment/performance.

[opebo]

...Outside upper middle class zones, it's secondary public school educational system largely sucks, and is way down in ranking vis a vis most other developed nations, and it is getting worse, not better, over time.  This we are developing a two tier system, where the top layer gets well educated and the rest get screwed. This is not a good policy road to go down.

Dude, you're making a criticism of your social hierarchy, not the educational bureaucracy.