Democrats and Schools

Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers’ unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools. . .

Research has underscored that what matters most in education — more than class size or spending or anything — is access to good teachers. A study found that if black students had four straight years of teachers from the top 25 percent of most effective teachers, the black-white testing gap would vanish in four years. . .

Half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, isn’t it time to end our “separate but equal” school systems?


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/opinion/15kristof.html?th&emc=th

Curing disease depends on access to good doctors. Reducing crime requires access to good police officers. Good nutrition requires the existence of good farmers.

Since we still have sickness, crime still exists, and there are hungry people even in the U.S., then we must conclude that the medical profession is incompetent, that policemen are unqualified, and farmers are no good.

As a former teacher, I can tell you unequivocally that class size is very critical in student learning. Teaching is a little more complex than attaching parts on an assembly line.

Having enough text books so that every student can have one, which depends on how much money the school has to work with, has been shown to affect a student's ability to learn.

Other research has shown that hungry kids have a harder time concentrating on their studies than well-fed kids. The big city schools that I taught in had plenty of kids who lacked breakfast or lunch, or both, because of poverty.

Then, there are poorly designed curriculums, poorly written text books (even when there were enough to go around), and department heads who micromanaged the teachers, and stifled "innovative" teachers. Add to that, mandated idiotic programs such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which, whether designed to or not, prevent good teaching practices, and blaming the "testing gap" (whatever the hell criteria that is supposed to be) and blaming lack of learning exclusively on the teachers is a total fraud.

I didn't even get into the petty politics foisted on schools that insure that students learning something useful becomes an irrelevant side issue. Just think of the battles that go on over teaching evolution in the schools, as one example.

Then, there are the colleges of education in which professors, who don't know any more about children or teaching than their newest students, pass their ignorance along, so that the most common complaint I heard from new teachers was that education courses didn't prepare them for the classroom experience.

You can make classes so small it would be hard for even a bad teacher to fail or so big it would be hard for a good one to succeed.

and bought by privatizers.

Why are teachers earning starvation wages?

And tho I haven't checked recently, where's it 'starvation?'

If the gop cannot make money off of it they want to kill it.
Why would anyone listen to gingrich?
The contract on America started this unmitigated greed festival that is prevalent now.

and note that we may have never 'funded' education as it should be funded, and keep in mind that historically its a State matter, how public schools receive funds. Each state has its own formula, in several states the formulas have been subjected to lots of litigation, and none of this is simple. Its a big country.

My partner lost his job and I can tell you we are literally living check to check on my teacher's salary.
And that's with two Masters degrees and 15 years service.

different types of practice, like there are lots of different medical specialties. If all the public thinks of is the TV lawyers, they're VERY limited!

that some have a vested interest in their failure like those who want an excuse to not support them with tax dollars, break their unions, and privatize them then profit from them once they are for-profit?

Conservatives also have a more basic reason to dislike public education: the more educated people are, the less likely they are to be conservative. As Karl Rove himself said,

“As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing”

NOT on 'media portrayals.' And I know that rover targetted ill-educated people for the '04 election.

I DO NOT BELIEVE that public education suffers where it does because conservatives have planned it that way, but conveniently, funding for education has been a major hurdle for many states for many years. And facts such as these cannot be ignored:

'It’s difficult to improve failing schools when you can’t create alternatives such as charter schools and can’t remove inept or abusive teachers. In New York City, for example, unions ordinarily prevent teachers from being dismissed for incompetence — so the schools must pay failed teachers their full salaries to sit year after year doing nothing in centers called “rubber rooms.”

A devastating article in The New Yorker by Steven Brill examined how New York City tried to dismiss a fifth-grade teacher for failing to correct student work, follow the curriculum, manage the class or even fill out report cards. The teacher claimed that she was being punished for union activity, but an independent observer approved by the union confirmed the allegations and declared the teacher incompetent. The school system’s lawyer put it best: “These children were abused in stealth.”

The effort to remove the teacher is expected to cost about $400,000, and the outcome is uncertain. In New York City, with its 80,000 teachers, arbiters have removed only two for incompetence alone in the last couple of years. We tolerate failed teachers — and failed arbiters — as long as it’s not our own kids who suffer.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/opinion/15kristof.html?th&emc=th

with those described by Kristoff? I don't think anyone is manufacturing these stories. Maybe we could try to understand what has happened in several places.

they can, principally, making the job attractive and livable in terms of pay, benefits, and job security.

What they are less effective at doing is stopping bureaucratic bloat, which eats up money before it makes it to the classroom, and even less effective at countering conservative anti-tax propaganda that has lead to budget cuts for enrichment programs like music, drama, and sports that keep some kids in school, and more importantly, that make districts expand class sizes even though smaller classes make it harder for a bad teacher to fail and bigger classes make it harder for a good teacher to succeed.

It might be instructive to look at what private schools for the wealthy(not the private charter school scammers who are going to deliver the educational equivalent of mortgage-based derivatives).

Some guy who got a teacher of the year award wrote an excellent article about this a few years back. He wanted to find out why public school didn't work, and what he found out was it did--most of us just don't realize the mission is to produce compliant workers who follow directions and can endure boredom rather than creative thinkers and problem solvers.

http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

He needs to get out there in the rubber rooms of NYC and find out the truth about public education. If anything, teachers' unions are in cahoots with administrators, and the leaders of these social clubs as I call teachers' unions don't want to rock the boat. They're toothless.

thus, abysmal teachers can't be fired. Its we the public/parents/students who are toothless. Kristoff is no ignoramus, and spends much of his time on boots on the ground research.

teachers are conformists who believe in hierarchy, so their natural tendency is not to rock the boat. Your local union leader can't do much to administrators in that situation.

teachers are conformists who believe in hierarchy, so their natural tendency is not to rock the boat. Your local union leader can't do much to administrators in that situation.

What about the other workers' unions? Are the Democrats "cowed" by them as well? Or just the stupid old teachers' unions?

I am sick over what DU has become about education.

Teachers are treated with contempt here.

The shape they're in goes back to St. ronnie and his politics of greed.

already does from the endless testing scam.

The testing nonsense is like a nurse who comes in and takes your temperature every ten minutes, but doesn't have enough medicine to treat you, so when you get sicker or die, the nurse is fired for doing a poor job.

1. There is a very wide perception (mostly true) that principals and higher up administrators are either bad teachers or those who didn't like the job very much who promoted themselves out of the classroom by taking a couple of night classes. Making pay dependent on their judgment is like having a deaf guy judge American Idol.

2. Good teachers do their job well because they want to, not for extra rewards. Some good people don't enter the profession because they could make much more in some other field, and those people are sharp enough to know that merit pay will end up meaning toady pay.

3. Merit pay is pretty close to an old union busting trick: divide and conquer. Treat a minority of employees well and they won't care about the majority who are treated like shit.

In the community college system, they do this by only hiring a third or less of instructors as full time tenure track. The rest are part time, temporary, paid a fraction as much per class, and often have no or inferior benefits. If the faculty has a union, it's very easy for the administrators to saying helping one will hurt the other, and if the union tries to close the gap between the two, full timers resent the greater gains given to part timers even though it is just correcting an injustice.

That's what this right wing reform will do to K12. Instead of improving the quality of education, it will be used as an excuse to economically abuse the vast majority of teachers, withhold pay raises and degrade their benefits.

Smart people may still come into the system, but if they don't get that special blessing from their administrator, they will struggle to survive and eventually leave.

in education for students. You're exactly right about the divide and conquer.

Even the idea of merit pay is flawed: For instance, if the merit pay goes to teachers with the best test scores, then all teachers will fight to get last year's best students, because they likely will repeat this year. Poor performers? Screw 'em; nobody would want to teach those losers.

Or you could make merit dependent on improvement. In that case, screw last year's perfect testers - they have no room for improvement. Give me the kids who scored 0. If they can answer just one question this year, that's 1 divided by zero = INFINITE improvement!!! I win, because my kid answered one question! Yahoo!

I believe you can see that neither of these will answer the goal of free and appropriate education for each student.

Gaming the system means games will be played. We don't need that. We need professionally trained experts using appropriately differentiated instruction and appropriate reinforcing, including meals and supplies when needed, as well as safe spaces.

don't have to bother. All Texas teachers are on one year contracts with no tenure or retention provisions. If you are not liked, you don't get a new contract for the next year. You were not fired, you just were not hired. Nice, eh?

I've taught three decades at the high school level, and biggest problems in schools are:
poverty, both at the family level and the district level in terms of lack of resources;
inflexible teaching programs which demand that all teachers of the same subject say the same words at the same time in every classroom where that subject is taught;
inflexible multiple choice testing to ensure that the inflexible schedule is being followed;
massive boredom and apathy created by the talk, test with dots, and talk some more educational model being used currently.

Taking resources away is not the answer, but that is the current policy. "Oh, look, your school didn't do well, so we'll take some resources away, and we'll put them back when you're doing better." Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? "Oh look, you only have two eggs, so your three egg omelet was deficient. We're going to cut you back to one egg, and that will help you make better three egg omelets."

Teaching is the only profession I know where it is expected that you will take some of your work home with you. See how this would work in other occupations: "Hey, fast burger employee, pick up some hamburger on your own dime on your way in tomorrow, k?" "Hey, assembly line worker, take some components home and preassemble them on your own time, k?" "Hey, doc, take some of these X rays home and give 'em a look on your time, k?"

I teach and will continue for only one reason: I live in the neighborhood I teach in, and many of my former students live and work here as well. I see many happy families, beautiful babies, and successful, comfortable lives. I get many kind visitors who claim they got one good idea from my class, or that they remember me fondly from that time.

Raving egotist? Probably. Quitter? Nope. Particularly hopeful about education in my lifetime? No. The corporatists are sinking their teeth in too deeply, and I highly doubt that the simple crashing of a system for rich profits will deter them. Heck, they can probably get big money when they've really completely destroyed it, ala the recent bank and investment meltdown. Hopefully, I'll be dead before that actually occurs.