Obama booed by some NEA teachers

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You are not going to attract the best and the brightest,

I don't see how trying to attract people with the highest academic qualifications will help the (or any) education system much. What matters far more is having people who can actually teach; and levels of formal academic achievement are often very poor measures of that sort of thing.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

People motivated mostly by money aren't going to be interested in becoming teachers, full stop. This is a good thing. Such people would make for awful teachers.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I'm not sure how firing a majority of the teaching profession would help the education system much. Sounds rather Soviet actually.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Most teachers suck.
[/quote

Rather a strong allegation. Prove it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

His plan also incentives the practice of fudging students' test results. Making pay contingent on higher test scores  reeks of the failed NCLB law.

Almost enough to make me stick a "Nader for President" sign of some sort in my signature.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If it were up to me, we'd start accelerate the pace of math and science in public schools, following the Asian model. Unfortunately, for a plethora  of reasons, most Americans youths aren't as focused on their studies as the majority of their Asian counterparts.

Just because the attitude of your society towards education is idiotic doesn't mean that you should aspire to change it to one in which attitudes towards education are borderline evil.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't agree with a thing you said.

I find myself not even slightly shocked.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

That's Nice Dearie.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Ah, yes, in the "good old days" of the nine-teen fifties when ev-ery street cor-ner had on it bakers hand-ing out fresh bread, when ev-ery one was happ-y and cont-ent, when ev-ery-day  things were id-yll-ic, when ev-ery one knew their place, inc-luding those bl-ast-ed neg-roes, wh-en, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...

Edit: that really *should* have been "fresh, crusty bread". Bah. I'm losing my touch.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Prove it. Go on. You're the one making the accusation. Go and find some proof that the quality of teachers (or nurses!) was better in your "good old days" than now.

(and by "quality" I don't mean how good their degrees or whatever look )

You must be logged in to read this quote.

This reads far too much like a parody of the most idiotic right-wing "thinking" on education that  I can't take it seriously. I did laugh a few times though.

Feel free to replace "right" with "left" and throw that back at me

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I find it interesting that you think you can blame the poor state of the education system in inner cities districts on the teachers.

Edit: but it isn't just you is it. Curious that such an odd position to hold has become so popular.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Personal experiences.

lol

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Of course you can't. That's because it isn't actually true.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

lol

[Filuwaúrdjan]

...of course the real dirty secret of the American public education is that, actually, it isn't nearly as bad as everyone inside America thinks. And, of course, its other dirty secret is that the major problems that it has are largely reflections of wider problems with the structure of American society. Two nasty little words now: White Flight.

I can see how blaming (in some way or another) the teaching profession is tempting (after all, teachers sometimes aren't as good at the whole public sympathy thing as perhaps they ought to be) but it's a dead end at best and needlessly destructive at worst.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Here is some data for you Alun, about the decline of the quality of teachers over time.

Not really what I was looking for; it's basically what you wrote here with a few statistics and bar charts thrown in for good measure. Of course I suspect that we may have very different ideas about what A Good Teacher is and how the numbers of them can be measured (if at all) so that's not a surprise.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Oh, but everything political is about ideology eventually

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Your positions on this issue are very right-wing. A fact that has little to do with how sincere or not you are on the issue.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Personal experiences.

lol

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Of course you can't. That's because it isn't actually true.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

lol

Prove it.

Haha. I'm not the one making the, rather extreme as it happens, allegation, am I.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Alun, what do you propose to improve the educational outcomes of lower SES students in the near to intermediate term? (Note the emphasis on the word "outcomes.")

More vocational education, more arts and activites stuff, better facilities, less testing, new or cleaned-up buildings, etc, etc. That kind of thing.

Oh, and make it easier for teachers and other staff to deal with troublemakers without fear of litigation or whatever (just to make that clear; that's not code for "allow teachers to hit children" or anything like that...)

The most serious issues can't be dealt with on a near-to-intermediate-term basis though.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Oh, no danger of going down that route

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The trouble with this board is that threads sink so fast that... anyway...

Putting aside vocational training for those not headed into a white collar profession,

A large majority of children from poorer backgrounds will not be headed off into the world of white collar professions.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

And I don't see how you can expect to get the most out of children (or teachers!) if classes are held in crumbling buildings, if the newest textbooks in the school were published in the early '80's etc, etc. It occurs to me that schools with better results tend not to have these sorts of problems.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I'm not opposed to all testing; it's just that I think there's far too much of it in most education systems. There's a line between testing progress-performance-and-etc and just testing how well the children have been taught how to take tests. I don't think that schools should be exam factories.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I prefer "practical"