Highly Qualified Teachers Need Not Apply -- Bush is trying to weaken teacher credentialing

The New Jersey Teachers Union ^ | President of the NJ Teachers Union

[summer]

in common people = in common with people here

[summer]

Hats off to ya!

BTTT! :)

[summer]

FYI. Another thought-provoking education thread here... :)

[Triple Word Score]

Oh, gosh, have you seen MANIAC MCGEE? Won a Newbury I think. My son's teacher gave it to him to read for a book report. He didn't want to read it, and once I read it for myself I found out why. It was awful. There was even profanity in it. I marked the sections I found most objectionable with post-its and sent the book back to the teacher with the comment that none of my children would be reading that in their elementary years, and there was nothing in it of value to older children anyway.

[SoftballMominVA]

Maniac McGee by Jerry Spinelli, did indeed win a Newbery.

It is the story of an orphaned boy who is able to bring together two racially torn towns. It is considered by many to be a very good book, although I am not crazy about it. It's a little too formulatic.

You did exactly what I have done in the past. When my daughter was assigned The Giver, I previewed it and notified the teacher that I did not feel it was appropriate for my child.

If my students had involved parents like you, many of them would be far, far more successful.

[Tribune7]

ping

[samtheman]

Most private schools I've dealt with hire ex-real-world employees as teachers.

Sounds good to me.

[Tribune7]

ping

[Triple Word Score]

I think I have enough confidence in your discernment that I can add THE GIVER to my blacklist. It's not a book I'm familiar with.

"Appropriate" varies from child to child. My daughter probably could have understood MANIAC MCGEE if she were interested. I wouldn't have forbidden her to read it but would certainly have wanted to discuss the offensive aspects of it. She's reading these Tamara Pierce books as fast as we can find them, and Nancy Drew books as well. We talk about the things in the Tamara Pierce books that conflict with our values.

She wants to be a knight and is convinced that sheer determination can make it a viable career option. I remind myself that I spent most of my childhood determined to be a jockey--something everyone around me must have known would never really suit the bookworm I was, and am! My daughter is the same way. She can read about riding a warhorse in plate armor, and swinging a sword, but she wouldn't enjoy it as much as she thinks!

My son is HFA and is so concrete-minded that any sex, violence or racism in a book makes no sense to him. It upsets him and he won't read it. He'll read about snakes, astronomy, earthquakes, and other real things all day long, but he generally detests even good fiction.

[SoftballMominVA]

Check out the Anne McCaffrey books when she is ready for something other than Tamora Pierce. My now 8th grade daughter LOOOOOOVED Tamora Pierce and is now reading the Dragonsinger series.

Your son's tastes are very typical for a HFA. Fiction is another word for lie for many of them. I have one that I work with and she is an absolute joy, but flat out refuses to look or listen to fiction. This will soon be a distinct problem for her when she goes to take the VA Standards of Learning. It contains short fictional essays and poems that have specific questions attached to them. More than enough to fail her, even though she reads well above a high school level.

Sad isn't it? She reads as well as any adult in college, yet according to the NCLB, she MUST be tested and her scores will count in our school's totals. I tried to get her exempted, but was told no, since we would have to test a TMR student in her place as we can only exempt 5% of our student population. I was told to "make it happen."

Uh huh.

[Dianna]

Are you getting an "ed" degree in Texas, or another state?

I'm in Kentucky. If there had been an alternate route for elementary ed, I would have taken it. They do have alternate paths for middle and high school certs (for those with degrees in HS subjects).

[Triple Word Score]

What are the consequences to that student for failing that exam?

We are fortunate to have our kids in a private school that can ignore (to some degree) bad testing results that they know are due to these other disability-related factors.

On the McCaffreys--we discovered that she had written more than just the six Dragonriders and Dragonsinger books this past Christmas, and went nuts at the bookstore. There are a few things in some of these later books I don't want my daughter dealing with till she's older. Why McCaffrey had to get more explicit about the relationship between green riders and blue riders (etc) during mating flights I'll never understand. It wasn't necessary--we got it, and I'm positive that most of us didn't want to hear any more about it!

[SoftballMominVA]

In VA, students are required to pass at least 6 specific SOL's in high school. There are no substitutes for those tests. One is a reading test in 11th grade.

Obviously the goal is to get her to accept fiction enough to tolerate it long enough to pass the test. So much easier said than done.

Over the past year she has become just a hair more acceptive of humour and last week she played a very small trick on me. It was a trick only to her. That gave me an idea that maybe in the future we could persuade her to "play a trick" on the writers of the tests and make them think she LIKES fiction when she really HATES it. But that is a suggestion for another teacher 2-3 years from now. It might work though if she continues to develop a sense of humour.

Oh, and the trick she played? She wrote her middle name instead of her first name and chuckled because she thought I wouldn't figure it out. Okay, not much of a joke to anyone else, but I was elated!

[Triple Word Score]

Last year my son played a trick on his class. He pretended to be sick in a trash can. He had everyone running to get him something to throw up in, paper towels to clean up, etc. Now it's pretty low humor (of course, he IS a boy) but it was the first time he'd ever done anything like that. Quite a milestone for him. It's probably what we deserve for encouraging him to read Calvin and Hobbes!

We were having a yard sale and we had a great big empty cardboard box out there that had been full of old toys. He took the box and made it into a transmorgrifier using my permanent marker collection and some other odds and ends. We were delighted to see him being so creative, but we were busy with customers, and so we didn't really think about what he was doing. Suddenly he was screaming and throwing the first serious temper tantrum he'd thrown since he was 4! Right there on the sidewalk. He was furiously angry. It took a long time to calm him down enough that he could begin to tell us what had happened. He had set the transmorgrifyer he made to COBRA, got inside, and had his sister push the button.

But when he came out, he was not a snake. He was so angry that the comic book had tricked him....and he was about nine years old at the time.

I finally convinced him that it's a very good thing he hadn't been turned into a cobra because I'd miss him so much! And he'd forgotten to label the transmorgrifyer with his name so I could turn him back.

It's hilarious and it's also extremely painful...we're constantly surprised by this because most of the time he functions so normally. Then he does something like this and WHOOOMPH we are confronted with the reality that his brain will ALWAYS function differently.

It's sometimes a good thing. He's 100% resistant to peer pressure. Nobody can make him do anything he believes is wrong.

[Old Student]

Summer, There are a lot of yahoos who post on FR. Some of them are sincere, some are trolls, some are yahoos who just wandered in off the info superfootpath.

I am not yet a teacher, but I will be. I'm going through the program here at my college in Oklahoma for Social Studies, Secondary Education. I worked in one of the local high schools for nearly 5 years as a teacher's assistant, doing in-school restriction, and attending night classes. I quit at the end of the year last year to start daytime classes so I can finish the degree.

I kind of hope I'll be considered "highly qualified" by the time I get into the field. I have 258 semester hours of credits right now, sixty of them in social studies subjects, mostly history. I've still got a year to go, for the bachelors, and 18 semester hours for the graduate component without which I cannot get the recommendation of the college to become a teacher. I'm also a retired Air Force Master Sergeant, with 24 years of service. I started a bit before we got out of 'Nam, and stayed until they threw me out for getting too old on them.

I don't post very often here on FR, because of the yahoos, and how busy I am jumping through hoops for the College of Education, but whenever the discussion is about teaching, I tell the folks who think public schools are so rotten that if they know anything useful, they should go into teaching, and help fix it, instead of just griping about it! Mostly, if falls on deaf ears.

I'm glad to see there are some passionate conservative teachers out there, I was starting to feel lonely. I was supposed to be on a ping list for teachers and education some time back, but it apparently never actually got started, so if you start feeling you need someone to watch your back, feel free to ping me. Might take a while, though, I'm still quite busy. ;)

[DaughterofEve]

Actually I think one of the objectionable ones I saw was by the same author!!! (I haven't seen "Maniac" itself...but it's probably the same breed)...good for you!!!

[Sloth]

These "highly qualified" standards aren't all that difficult to meet. Basically, (in VA at least), a teacher is highly qualified when she's certified to teach her subject.

I think it varies a lot by state. In Alabama, my mother-in-law got her Master's in order to be 'highly qualified' to teach third grade.

[Old Student]

"The average public teacher's salary is quite high. "

Can you support that? And in relation to what is the average public teacher's salary quite high?

I live in Oklahoma, where the average teacher's salary is on the order of about $35K. The median income for Oklahoma is about $25K. Starting teachers make about $24K or so, unless they are Special Ed qualified, in which case they start around $26-27K. Most of the teachers in the $35K range have 10-15 years teaching experience. As a teacher's assistant, (only requirement was a HS diploma)I made $8.5K to start, up to about $11K (based strictly on seniority) when I quit to start daytime classes.

I understand that in NYC, teachers make more than $90K, and in Texas, across the border from here, starting salary for teachers is about $35K. Cost of living is a factor. Oklahoma has a rather low cost of living, even compared to Texas, and especially when compared to NYC.

So far, I have accumulated $35K in student loan debt, which will probably take me a decade to pay off. A Chemistry major of my acquaintance has about the same student loan debt load, and the potential to start at $100K. (I will admit her courses are much more difficult than mine.) ;)

I should also like to point out that according to the rules here in Oklahoma, my 24 years experience as a military teacher and trainer count for nothing, officially. Most other states are the same. The experience did actually count for my teacher's assistant job, and probably will when I become a teacher, but not according to the state rules. I'm also male, and not particularly small, and that counted, as well.

" Why can't we relax teaching credentials, enact the vouchers and use standardized testing to fix our children's education?"

I'm going to start at the end, and work backwards on this one: Standardized testing means you can identify either a) the exact wording used in your class, or b) the most similar wording to that used in your class. It is good for recall of facts, and specific information, but not so good for finding out if someone understands the concept(s). Multiple choice (or multiple guess, as most college students call them) or true/false questions are what is meant by most people when they talk about standardized testing. You can randomly fill in answers and have aobut a 50% chance of getting it right. I consistently get better than 70% on "standardized tests" on subjects I've never studied.

You might know that the Civil War started at Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861. You could not easily explain why on a standardized test.

As far as enacting the vouchers, I'd really like that! It's costing me about the monthly payment for a good luxury car to keep my three kids in private school. My school district (not the one I worked in, but the one I live in) is a money pit. There are many people in the school district, both at the administrative and classroom levels who care about the kids, and are trying to help them all, but something gets lost somewhere, much of it is money, but on two seperate occasions, it was my son. Ain't happening again.

I don't know about your state, but in Oklahoma, the state tells the schools what books to use, within a rather limited range. The Algebra I book they've been using in the school I worked in is wonderful! I wish I'd had it when I was taking Algebra I. I might have actually learned something, and not had to spend $1000's of buck to learn it as an adult. Their history books are ok, but not great. They have some very good books, and some very cruddy ones, as well. Some of their technical books are terrible! One of their books on the Internet was published in 1997, and hasn't been updated since. There have been a FEW changes since then.

Finally, the school districts here get their money allocated to them for specific purposes in specific amounts. If they didn't spend all their "salary" money on salaries, they'd just lose it. Last year, due to the economic slowdown the district I worked in had to fire 120+ teachers, and quite a few of the teacher's assistants, to meet the budget shortages.

Fortunately for me, I'd already given notice, or I'd have been in trouble, but my job truly was disposable. It's much cheaper to just send the bad kids home than imprision them with the Dungeon Master, as I was sometimes called. They lost over $6M before I left, and were expecting more cuts later. Other programs were cut, as well. Some of the teachers were still using Mac IIc's in class, and that won't change anytime soon. The state also mandates how many teachers they must have, and how many students per teacher, yet they were telling them to cut staff. It got rather hairy. My principal was really happy I'd given that notice, as she didn't want to have to tell one more person they weren't coming back in 2004.

[metesky]

Why are they all ticked off at President Bush? I thought he let Fat Boy Kennedy write the education bill. (Well Fat Boy's staff anyway.)

[Coleus]

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