Posted on 07/04/2012 3:57:12 PM PDT by MichCapCon
I still don’t get how merit pay can work for teachers. The teacher who gets to teach AP courses filled with motivated and intelligent students will always look better on a merit sheet than the teacher who’s stuck with the sweathogs.
The push to privatize public schools by corporations and well funded foundatiions, is on. Unions will be marginalized. Tenured,mature,great teachers will be replaced by “Teach for America” newbies who are non-union, low salaried, short term,non-certified classroom” monitors “of the transformation of public education to an e-learning, computer generated top down system of life long learning (control) takes over.
You sound like a unionistsa. You want to keep education just like it is now?
That’s the problem - merit is extremely hard to measure in that field. The solution? I have no idea, and I’ve given it a great deal of thought. Even popular teachers who are liked by kids, by parents, or by the principal are not necessarily great teachers in the sense that their kids actually learn “better” (whatever that means for each field).
but the big problem I see is that merit pay is on top of already inflated wages/benefits/pensions....
people in business get bonuses...teachers and nurses and cops and firemen do not....(among that group, the only group that usually doesn't get a defined pension plan are the nurses)
A lot of planning will have to go into distributing the crack-babies and transients evenly among the classes in each grade so teachers have an equal shot.
Precisely why I don’t like the idea much. That, and knowing that any such merit will generally accrue to the teachers who kiss the principal’s butt the most. Or, those who are most left-wing, etc.
“I still don’t get how merit pay can work for teachers. The teacher who gets to teach AP courses filled with motivated and intelligent students will always look better on a merit sheet than the teacher who’s stuck with the sweathogs.”
Please quit being logical, you will give a lot of people heartburn. Didn’t you know that everyone comes to kindergarten these days can count to 100 and know their ABC’s. If you don’t the Federal/State government education experts say so. If not ask Bobby Jindal, he says so. It’s the fault of public education.
“will be replaced by “Teach for America” newbies”
That’s OK, we can get teachers from India...like we’re getting for freshman classes at universities. I’ve come to the conclusion that most to the business community that is pushing this have marketing or management degrees and couldn’t build a dog house with instructions. They think all starting materials are the same and give the same quality product if you market it right.
“A lot of planning will have to go into distributing the crack-babies and transients evenly among the classes in each grade so teachers have an equal shot.”
Their vouchers won’t be worth anything when they get kicked out of the private schools and sent back to the public schools so the teacher that gets them can be berated for not doing a good job.
There are many levels of Oligarchy.
You sound like a unionistsa. You want to keep education just like it is now?
Yes in principle, no in practice. A teacher stuck in a ghetto school with the spawn of uncaring “parents” will not look good on paper; a teacher in a neighborhood with citizens who value education and demand performance of their children can’t help but look good. Unless, that is, you use a baseline unique to each school. But that would require a whole new bureaucracy to establish.
Any doubts as to who is driving the reform, go to erinproject.org and check to see who the top ten funders are in nearly every catagory.
Public schools and teachers are soon to be a thing of the past.
Don’t care. The current system is broken. Any and all possible improvements need to be tried.
Who is driving the reform is people who aren’t going to take bullshit excuses anymore.
Who are the "TAKE NO BS FOLKS"?
Who are the "TAKE NO BS FOLKS"?
I don’t have a hard-on against anyone who seeks to improve the current system. It is a total disaster.
The charter schools answer to the parents who choose them. If parents choose unwisely, that’s sad but it may lead to self correction. They showed they care about education by making the selection to go with a charter.
Unlike the socialist innercity warehouses. As opposed to your statement, they are the institutions that truly answer to no-one. Who can fire a pedophile public school teacher?
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-02-04/news/31025909_1_lewd-acts-district-plans-child-abuse-case
Rubber rooms where teachers retire with millions?
You are on the wrong site if you think you can defend the national disaster that is education in the US.
We could improve the schools by instituting a draft for teachers. Random selection of college graduates would be an improvement over “colleges of education”.
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