Posted on 02/09/2014 8:41:07 AM PST by Arthurio
By Howard Blume
February 7, 2014, 6:39 p.m.
Black and Latino students are more likely to get ineffective teachers in Los Angeles schools than white and Asian students, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher. The findings were released this week during a trial challenging the way California handles the dismissal, lay off and tenure process for teachers.
In the study, professor Thomas J. Kane concluded that the worst teachers—in the bottom 5%--taught 3.2% of white students and 5.4% of Latino students. If ineffective teachers were evenly distributed, you’d expect that 5% of each group of students would have these low-rated instructors.
A similar pattern held when Kane looked at teachers rated in the bottom half: 38.5% of white students had such an instructor; the number was 48.6% for African American students and 52.2% for Latino students.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-unequal-teaching-in-la-20140207,0,3465389.story#ixzz2sqNofD1E
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Your suggestion is also that of an educational outsider. Each class is different. The “class” that your “best of the best” is teaching on the video is certainly made up of individuals who are different than those listening to such a video. More often than not, such videos are shot with a class composed mostly of white suburban kids. Or even if they are not, those kids are not your kids. There will be different reading levels, different abilities to grasp the information, possible physical limitations which require modified instruction, questions kids might be too inhibited or shy to ask, lest they appear “dumb” to their classmates. So a classroom teacher has to know to anticipate these questions the kids don’t even realize they need to ask and answer them. The teacher in the video is not speaking to your kids. They cannot be pitched precisely so that Jose in the back row will understand or Leticia in the row by the window will put away her mirror and pay attention. What will you do, keep stopping this exemplar video to address these kinds of issues in your classroom? Will the fully trained and licensed teacher in the classroom be reduced to a servant or other inferior of the teacher in the video? Wow, what a great feeling.
The ones that achieve in fragile schools might be set up with a select group of the best students.
As a white teacher that spent three years in an almost all black public school, the only thing that forced me to leave my mission of teaching those children was extraordinarily bad leadership in the form of a tyrannical assistant principal.
It was the combination of her verbal scourging of the white teachers (to the extent of putting a white tenured teacher on the track to being fired for disagreeing with the AP) and her outright inability to lead while blaming her own deficiencies on the veteran teachers around her that caused 50% of the white teacher at the school (some of which had been there for DECADES) to leave at the end of her first year as AP.
I have no doubt that this is being repeated in many of the “majority minority” schools in America. We, as white teachers, were told by this woman that “you cannot be as effective as a black teacher as you don’t share the same culture as our students.” Even the black teachers present gasped at this and protested, and she exploded angrily at them for daring to do so, as usual.
First of all I did have a teacher in the classroom and any subservient role to the video teacher is entirely up to them. I wasn't proposing the entirety of the course be video. If teachers are teaching to Jose in the back row, then Juan in the front row is being screwed. Jose in the back row is going to end up taking care of people's yards where Juan has a shot at college. By the way the teacher you are describing in your narrative is the best of the best and should not be confused with many of them.
Our local school district had one heckuva stinkstorm some years back when the Supt introduced, or tried to introduce,”Merit pay.” OMG! All the usual suspects got up in arms, stacked School Board, PTA, community meetings, etc. to block it.
I suggested at the time to a school board member that this highly organized opposition was rather ironic since teachers themselves spend their careers grading students, one from the next, acknowledging that some students really are better than others. Less so today, I suppose, when a class of 400 can have 20 Valedictorians.
From the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:
But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board's 2005 data on the SAT:The last paragraph above is key. Black students from middle class families, who presumably spent their lives having decent nutrition, lived away from the stresses of the inner city, and went to school in suburban schools with a mostly-white student body, STILL didn't do as well as low-income white kids who had none of their advantages.• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.
In order to be able to dispense patronage to your friends, you must first create vacancies to fill.
This administrator didn't want competent teachers. She wanted teachers who owed their jobs to her, and would be loyal to her as a result. Plus, failing black schools are more likely to get more money in order the help them, which translates into more opportunity for graft.
I also suspect that it was the administrators above her who encouraged her behavior, figuring she was deniable and expendable if there was any blow-back.
Did anyone ask why ineffective teachers are being hired?
I agree. Then government works it’s magic, and our competitiveness, and the owner’s business tanks.
I’m sure the outcome of this “study” was determined before the “data” was even examined. The study author just had to work with whatever data they could find until it supported the original hypothesis.
The biggest problem the race baiters face here is that teachers still have free will to leave a school with a bad social environment. They are not being good comrades for the greater good.
In order to be able to dispense patronage to your friends, you must first create vacancies to fill.
These schools have nothing to do with education and very little to do with children. They are patronage factories and seedbeds for corruption. Not only do the administrators want political control of their employees, they want a compliant and silent work force so that shadow employees can receive paychecks without ever making an appearance at the school. They want to be able to shift resources from the classroom to political activities. They want to use miserable results to demand more resources.
Competent teachers who are not part of the ethnic organized crime operation are threats.
I never even considered that the entire lesson should be pitched solely to “Jose”. I merely used that name as one that a teacher might find in their classes today in an inner city. You don’t find “Sally”, “Dorothy”, “Paul”, “Frank” or “Carl” in classes any more. By no means did I mean that “Jose” stood for all Hispanics. What I meant was that a classroom teacher would throw in a few clarifying remarks for Jose or any other kid who you know is not going to grasp the concept as originally explained. A few clarifying remarks does not an entire lesson make. Your “Juan” in the front row is likely to “get it” as originally explained, but will still benefit from having the concept explained a different way. It is also true that many students claim they understand something, when asked, when the actual situation is nothing of the kind. They were too shy, proud, intimidated to ask questions they should have asked to clarify the concept for themselves. So having a few clarifying remarks made for the sake of “Jose” will actually benefit everyone.
Plus its Super unfair that teachers in white schools don’t have to wear body armor
But that devotion is drained off when they find they can’t teach because the school is permitted to be a jungle."
Being a teacher in one of these "jungle" schools myself, I can wholeheartedly agree with the aforementioned statement. It's refreshing to see that some people on the "outside" understand our plight and don't simply rush to judgment.
The employee of some university or other who did the study reminds me that during the civil rights revolution era a racist group declared the problem of scholastic differences could be solved by teaching white children all the wrong answers until a certain age. Then release them to be on their own.
Like I said before, an hour course on history with maybe 40 minutes being taught on the TV with visuals and best of the best teacher followed by the classroom teacher clarifying to Jose what they perceive as questions is not a problem. I remember film strips back in the 50’s that knocked my socks off when it came to explaining scientific principles. To think that 50+ years later that this is not an integral part of the classroom experience befuddles me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.