BHO: "We need more teachers."

[haileydavey]

So how do standardized test results portray results in real life?

 

[Rozman]

the Dems answer for EVERYTHING.......BIGGER....BIGGER BIGGER...MORE GOVERNMENT,MORE SPENDING.

 

[Madeline]

So how do standardized test results portray results in real life?

Man, there's a good question. Seems to me, teaching to the standardized test is a form of anti-education.

 

[Trajan]

Conservatives want better teachers, and their plan to get better teachers is to

make teachers' education less affordable,

I am not sure I understand your point here, so they want to make it cheaper to get a certificate?

pay them less as teachers,

depending on where they are teachers are fairly recompensed I believe.

make their jobs less secure,

how so?

take away or reduce their bargaining rights and powers.

they didn't have that before the 60's...looking at the data, I'd say that if you use that as one of the benchmarks, it has not had a postive influence on test scores etc.

As far as it being a negative influence, well, it appears to me that the roadblocks that now exits as to administrations ability to sit out, fire or shuffle teachers has been restricted not based on the ultimate benchmark , student-teacher performance but due to organizational rules put in place and backed by their unions.....Obama himself recognizes this.

In short, conservatives think that the best and brightest in this country will become teachers only if we make the teaching profession as unattractive a career choice as we can.

How are they making it less attractive? So they need a union and life time unfettered employment and defined pension plans in order to draw talent?

Again history doesn't seem to back that up, in fact it appears that the more secure , financed teaching has become and the greater hand gov. has taken in the mechanism, the worse it has preformed until by now its just lagging along in a sustained sate of mediocrity despite HUGE additional funding over the last 20 years.



and ......you might find this interesting;


* APRIL 25, 2009

Teach for (Some of) America
Too talented for public schools.

Here's a quiz: Which of the following rejected more than 30,000 of the nation's top college seniors this month and put hundreds more on a waitlist? a) Harvard Law School; b) Goldman Sachs; or c) Teach for America.

f you've spent time on university campuses lately, you probably know the answer.

Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. More than 11% of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35% of African-American seniors at Harvard. Teach for America has been gaining applicants since it was founded in 1990, but its popularity has exploded this year amid a tight job market.

So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly. Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year's applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of Teach for America teachers they will accept, typically between 10% and 30% of new hires. In the Washington area, that number is about 25% to 30%, but in Chicago, former home of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is an embarrassing 10%.

This is a tragic lost opportunity. Teach for America picks up the $20,000 tab for the recruitment and training of each teacher, which saves public money. More important, the program feeds high-energy, high-IQ talent into a teaching profession that desperately needs it. Unions claim the recent grads lack the proper experience and commitment to a teaching career. But the Urban Institute has studied the program and found that "TFA status more than offsets any experience effects. Disadvantaged secondary students would be better off with TFA teachers, especially in math and science, than with fully licensed in-field teachers with three or more years of experience."

t's true that only 10% of Teach for America applicants say they would have gone into education through another route, but two-thirds stay in the field after their two years. One program benefit is that its participants don't have to pass the dreadful "education" courses that have nothing to do with what they'll be teaching. Those courses are loved by unions as a credentialing barrier that makes it harder to get into teaching.

Some districts may be wising up. Mississippi's education superintendent has asked Teach for America to double the size of its 250-member corps in the poor Delta region and is encouraging local superintendents to raise hiring caps. Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has also sharply increased the percentage of corps members among its new teachers, to 250.

But why have any caps? Teach for America young people should be able to compete on equal terms with any other new teaching applicant. The fact that they can't is another example of how unions and the education establishment put tenure and power above student achievement.

Teach for (Some of) America - WSJ.com

 

[Samson]

Conservatives want better teachers, and their plan to get better teachers is to

make teachers' education less affordable,

I am not sure I understand your point here, so they want to make it cheaper to get a certificate?
[/I]
Teach for (Some of) America - WSJ.com

Interesting article....actually most teaching salary structures are designed to discourage anyone from making a serious "Career" in teaching. After 5-6 years, your annual salary may not increase, or if it does, it is incrementally with inflation.

The ideal is and has always been, for the teacher's salary to supplement family income. This is why teachers medical benefits suck: so few choose to be on them because their spouces family medical benefits are so consistantly superior.

The question seems to arise: Why pretend that teaching is a "profession?" Tens of thousands of graduates VOLUNTEER to do it for a couple of years!

My concern, as a principal bringing in recent College graduates (age 21) into a rural MS school of Horny Students (ages 13-18) would be that the volunteers not really have much appreciation for ......erm......

"Distancing Themselves from the Students."

The volunteers have much less to lose should they "know" their pupils too well.

 

[saveliberty]

Interesting article....actually most teaching salary structures are designed to discourage anyone from making a serious "Career" in teaching. After 5-6 years, your annual salary may not increase, or if it does, it is incrementally with inflation.

The ideal is and has always been, for the teacher's salary to supplement family income. This is why teachers medical benefits suck: so few choose to be on them because their spouces family medical benefits are so consistantly superior.

The question seems to arise: Why pretend that teaching is a "profession?" Tens of thousands of graduates VOLUNTEER to do it for a couple of years!

My concern, as a principal bringing in recent College graduates (age 21) into a rural MS school of Horny Students (ages 13-18) would be that the volunteers not really have much appreciation for ......erm......

"Distancing Themselves from the Students."

The volunteers have much less to lose should they "know" their pupils too well.

This is total crap. In Michigan, health care benefits for teachers are only exceeded by government employees in coverage and low deductables. Retirements seem to be at a much youger age with a better payout than almost anyone else. Salaries, particularly when figured on a 9 and one half month basis, are huge.

 

[Trajan]

Interesting article....actually most teaching salary structures are designed to discourage anyone from making a serious "Career" in teaching. After 5-6 years, your annual salary may not increase, or if it does, it is incrementally with inflation.

The ideal is and has always been, for the teacher's salary to supplement family income. This is why teachers medical benefits suck: so few choose to be on them because their spouces family medical benefits are so consistantly superior.

The question seems to arise: Why pretend that teaching is a "profession?" Tens of thousands of graduates VOLUNTEER to do it for a couple of years!

My concern, as a principal bringing in recent College graduates (age 21) into a rural MS school of Horny Students (ages 13-18) would be that the volunteers not really have much appreciation for ......erm......

"Distancing Themselves from the Students."

The volunteers have much less to lose should they "know" their pupils too well.

This is total crap. In Michigan, health care benefits for teachers are only exceeded by government employees in coverage and low deductables. Retirements seem to be at a much youger age with a better payout than almost anyone else. Salaries, particularly when figured on a 9 and one half month basis, are huge.

it depends on how pliable your state and county gov. is.

Surprisingly here in cali. (my wifes best friend is a teacher, and we go to plenty of clannish teacher get togethers) , she teaches 5th grade, her medical coverage isn't as good as I thought it would be, but ist not that bad, BUT she has 17 years in and makes over 80K.

 

[Ozmar]

I'll admit the results indicated by that graph are bad. The only plausible idea I can think of is better teachers. How on Earth is hiring more mediocre teachers considered a solution? Throwing money at something doesn't necessarily make an improvement.
While training better teachers should be a priority, perhaps it's also time to realize that with such an immense population, no other country in history has ever been tasked with trying to maintain a high standard of education for such a population. Any other country with a comparable population to the U.S. often has a small core of educated people, and a massive population of illiterate uneducated masses. All the other "educated" countries of comparable wealth to the United States have but a fraction of its population, with very few exceptions. European countries: Small geographically, with a fraction of Ameirca's population. Australia: 20 million people. Canada: 35 million people.

There are only several exceptions, such as Japan and Korea and a few others. For the most part, countries of this size will have a core of educated people, and that's it. I wonder how maintaining a reasonable education level among the populace is sustainable in America as the population continues to balloon.

Another note, most other countries on comparable size and population are developing countries: Brazil, Russia, China, India....