-—You are free to have your own opinions but not your own facts.
Of course, you may be getting your (uncited)facts from charter-school hostile union sources...
The highest quality studies have consistently shown that students learn more in charter schools. In New York City, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby found that students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and were forced to return to district schools.
Florida State economist Tim Sass and colleagues found that middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than their peers who returned to district high schools because charter high schools were not available.
The most telling study is by Harvard economist Tom Kane about charter schools in Boston. It found that students accepted by lottery at independently operated charter schools significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery and returned to district schools. But students accepted by lottery at charters run by the school district with unionized teachers experienced no benefit.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123985052084823887.html
-—In fact, I think that our current military leadership is an example of the Peter Principle.
Granted. The military is government-socialistic. But with all the crippling ineptitude it is light-years ahead of the educational system in terms of mission accomplishment. Probably the only organization of government that could be considered effective. Indeed, the military runs the world’s largest, most effective system of education.
——I wouldn’t mind you or any other citizen making disinterested assessments of teachers and firing the bad ones. The fact is that firing descisions are inevitably made by fools for opaque and bureaucratic reasons.
(you misspelled ‘decisions’)
This is where you demonstrate that accountability to educators is like kryptonite to Superman.
Alex Padilla, a Democratic California state senator, has sponsored S.B. 1530, which would make it easier for school districts to dismiss teachers accused of sex, violence, or drug offenses involving children. The bill was a response to a scandal at Miramonte Elementary School, where the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) paid a suspected child molester $40,000 in a settlement when it tried to fire him.
The bill passed the state senate with bipartisan support, but an assembly committee stopped it. How could it do such a thing? An editorial in the San Bernardino County Sun gives the answer:
Debate in the Assembly Education Committee took on an ominous tone when the opposition — teachers union officials and a busload of local teachers — took the floor. They said there already are sufficient rules to protect children, that the bill lacks due process, and that the bill was meant to give cover to the LAUSD officials who are to blame for the recent Miramonte scandal. Someone even called it un-American.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner?page=1
The video, taken by Wisconsin’s conservative MacIver Institute, shows students from Madison‘s East High School claiming their teachers brought them to protests at the State Capitol and also openly admitting that they really don’t know why they’re there:
http://www.maciverinstitute.com/
Voces de la Frontera - an anti-Walker immigrant rights group - enlisted the help of Racine high school students to canvas highly democratic neighborhoods for the June 5th recall election. Voces’ student arm called Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES) had actively recruited students at Washington Park, Case, and Horlick High Schools by sweetening the pot with volunteer credit for classes and free pizza and T-shirts afterwards.
Protecting child abusers, taking kids out of school to join in political protest, giving kids credit to walk the street during an election. Whining about ‘teaching to the test’. Demanding a utopian work place where hiring and firing decisions are made by philosopher kings ‘with experience on the ground’.
Fantasy world.
Somehow your profession has gotten the idea that it is above measurement, above the judgement of the taxpayers, administrators and even the law. Sorry if you don’t like it but there is no one who isn’t accountable for performance and contribution. We have a clear record of forty years of education system failure, continuously proclaiming that performance cannot be judged and demanding more money to fix it and taxpayers are fed up.
One of my friends runs an ER in a big city and has shots going of in her ER. Should she tell the staff ‘oh don’t worry if you get the dosages right in the hypos, we’re in a war zone’,’oh, don’t worry about entering treatment notes in the treatment records we’re in a war zone and after all these people won’t know if we’re treating them acceptably or not’?
—when we refer to ‘industrial’ age schools we refer to kids being grouped in year groups and processed through a learning block despite the wide range of individual differences. Measurement of education via seats in chairs, running the school via bells etc. TREATING TEACHERS AS INTERCHANGABLE ASSEMBLY LINE WORKERS. Inputs and outputs, just like you would run a factory. Pretty comfy to stick with a turn-of-the previous century model -huh?
http://www.janebluestein.com/handouts/info_age.html
I’m sorry you work in such a dangerous environment. Frankly that is something I think about when I tongue in cheek talk about drafting teachers. Your exposure to danger (and yes to kids from a no-learning culture) has to cause burn-out and extinguishes what you went into teaching for in the first place. There should be a way to rotate you to a safer place and continuously bring in ‘fresh troops’. I am concerned that you unconsciously transmit your burn out and that you have no expectations for your kids to them to their detriment. I don’t blame you, it is a natural result of the government and union dominated industrial system that has been developed. But if we are going to continue to spend vast sums of money, then we are going to have to find a way to make it work, else blow the thing up entirely.