DGS49
Diamond Member
A blanket statement that public school teachers are underpaid, overpaid, or paid about right is nonsensical. Every school district is different. Every teacher is different.
And just to use a comment above as a springboard, complaints by teachers of having to 'teach to the test' make me crazy. TEACH THE FUCKING SUBJECT! If you do a good job of that, then the test scores will reflect that. Study after study have shown that teaching to the test doesn't work anyhow, except in the rare cases where peculiar scoring protocols favor one STRATEGY over another (i.e., guess or leave it blank). I have taken SAT prep courses, LSAT prep courses, and Bar Exam prep courses, and every one of them was worthless; they just give you the feeling that you are "prepared."
If the Teachers and their Unions were really interested in EDUCATION, they would be trying to influence what goes in the tests, so that they reflect the substantive material they are trying to teach, SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO TEACH TO THE TEST. But teachers don't want the tests to be valid because if they were, then the teachers would have no excuse for their generally dismal results.
And just to use a comment above as a springboard, complaints by teachers of having to 'teach to the test' make me crazy. TEACH THE FUCKING SUBJECT! If you do a good job of that, then the test scores will reflect that. Study after study have shown that teaching to the test doesn't work anyhow, except in the rare cases where peculiar scoring protocols favor one STRATEGY over another (i.e., guess or leave it blank). I have taken SAT prep courses, LSAT prep courses, and Bar Exam prep courses, and every one of them was worthless; they just give you the feeling that you are "prepared."
If the Teachers and their Unions were really interested in EDUCATION, they would be trying to influence what goes in the tests, so that they reflect the substantive material they are trying to teach, SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO TEACH TO THE TEST. But teachers don't want the tests to be valid because if they were, then the teachers would have no excuse for their generally dismal results.