FormCritic wrote:
Critical thinking, Dude!  

"fire incompetent teachers":  This happens already.  The question would be who decides which teacher is incompetent, and why.

Maybe in the NW they do fire incompent teachers, I can speak for the DISD, they instead alibi the incompetents and fight like hell for their jobs (note this is true of all unions....no one gets the full backing of my brother's airline union except for those caught using drugs or stealing on the job). We recently had a school district (Wilmer Hutchins, right south of Dallas) eventually shut down because the teachers were basically cooking the books to get their students TASS test scores up (taking the tests and filling them out correctly before mailing them off for evaluation).  None of them were fired (when the school district shut down, some lost their jobs, but many were just placed in DISD schools), and all were blatantly incompetent.  Would "Cheating to pass students" make your list of whether a teacher is incompetent or not?  We could start there. Im sure we could brainstorm a few more (dating students?  drinking on the job? sleeping during class?).  The question I would ask is "Why would teachers be so afraid of having standards for incompetency?"

Note that this is a tactic of teacher's unions trying to retain marginal teachers....say there is no way they can objectively or subjectively grade bad teachers.  Can you imagine if we decided there was no way to grade, say, environmental standards?

"pay for performance incentives":  Who decides which teachers are performing well?  How will they decide?  If you dis-trust whiny liberals, just wait until they get control of merit pay!  Oh my God!

You have 30 kids in your class.  At the end of term, they all can all recite the alphabet, count to 100, and point out an apple.  The teacher in the class next to you, his entire class can't recite the alphabet, can only count to 10, and point at a fire truck when asked to point out an apple.  And you make the SAME salary.  Dude, if that sounds good to you, you really don't need to be around kids...that's like a cop not on the take looking the other way when his partner is taking bribes.  Aversion to performance pay is another way to reward incompetence. Why are teachers any different from police officers, sanitation workers, firemen, etc, or other professions where a MINIMUM standard of competence is required?

BTW, in the last 30 years, EVERY SINGLE JOB I HAVE EVER HAD HAS HAD A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION!!!!  I fail to see why teachers should be exempt.  Despite what they think, there ARE standards to measure their performance...

"prevent automatic tenure":  Teachers who are incompetent get fired before they get tenure.  All tenure does is make it just barely, maybe, slightly harder to fire a teacher.  (Essentially, you have to have cause, rather than just a whim.)

I doubt all of them get fired.  Every teacher I know has several stories of a worthless piece of flesh that can't be fired.  Hell, I doubt MOST incompetents get fired. Do you teach in Utopia, Mark?  You are going to tell me that ALL tenured teachers you know are paragons of education that would star in their own "Stand and Deliver" type TV movie? That except for a teacher's union, all the "good" teachers would be fired on whims of psychotic school administrators? If they are good, they simply go to a much better school system and improve that school's standing, probably making more money in the process.  It's like a company firing their best salesman...good luck to them if they keep doing that.  Tenure is the single biggest heist ever perpetrated on the learning system. It postulates there are hordes of talented educators whose career would be hanging by a thread if there were no tenure.   Hey, the way the government is setup it's pretty much a "tenure" system, and that works so well.  

"the district's scores are rising":  Oh God.  Says who? How do they know?  What does "rising" mean?  Rising relative to what? Rising for how long?  Who is being counted?  How are they being counted? Who is counting them?  Take that with a massive grain of salt.

Once again, unfortunately we have to apply criteria.  The criteria in this case is graduation rates and test scores. Perfect?  I can't say. I know a lot of teachers would rather not "grade" things and instead give ratings of "Very Good", "Excellent", and "Tried Really Hard". Things like "grades" just get in the way of their artistic temperments, I know.   The DISD was just busted because it turns out you cannot get a grade lower than "50" no matter what you do. If you hand in a blank sheet of paper to a teacher for an assignment, you get a "50". Their explanation was that A. It's hard to pass a class when you get a ZERO for a grade if you just happen to not want to turn in an assignment that day; and B. a ZERO hurts their poor self esteem while at least a "50" will still get them in the classroom trying.  I wish I was making this up.  So I agree criteria is selective, but you have to try SOMETHING besides good intentions.

"The DC school system is near the bottom of all developed AND non-developed countries in test scores"  Exactly.  Could that be because DC itself is a community well below some non-developed countries in lots and lots of social problems?

Why is that a excuse for sub-standard teaching? And why is that an excuse not to fire incomptent teachers?  Once again, it's always everything but the teacher's who are failing the students, per teacher union propaganda.

"where child molesting teachers can get paid for years and years merely by showing up each day"  Read more carefully.  None of them are child molestors.  They are teachers who were accused of anything from sexual mis-conduct to small violations of policy.  It is the school district which is dragging its feet.  The reasons for that program are political, not educational.

Not all, but some of them are in the "rubber room" for irresponsible behavior towards their students.  This includes sexually suggestive text messages sent to underage students.  Sorry, that's "child molesting".   A couple might have been railroaded, but I doubt all the inmates of the rubber room are poor, crusading, misunderstood educators who "the man" is putting down.   Defending the rubber room is the type of insanity that causes those not in the teaching community to question what the hell is going on there, and only reinforces the view that "those damn teachers are making too much money".

"I  read somewhere that Pittsburgh has lost population every Census since 1950."  Which leads to the very obvious conclusion that long-term economic realities are shaping those cities...and causing the social problems that lead to poor school performance.  People point these realities out all the time.  But, if teachers point out that poor school performance is linked to long-term social problems, it is the teachers who are whiners?  If teachers decline to be held responsible for things that are completely out of their control, why does that make them automatically wrong?  Are the police responsible for crime?

FormCritic wrote:Mark you may be one of the good ones.  But if your only solution is "Is not our fault, it's the family/community/politics", and deny teachers have any responsibility, then I have to say you are far too close to the situation to be objective.

*Wasn't actually trying to zing you, Mike.  Just talking shop.*

You're right.  I don't think it's teachers' fault.  There's a difference between fault and responsibility.  

Socio-economic status is the most reliable predictor for academic achievement or failure.  Poor district/poor performance.  Exceptions only prove the rule.  Teaches do not control socio-economics and their ability to counteract it at school is extremely limited.

I would say that I'm too close to the Pacific Northwest to be objective about the whole country.

My travel experience is quite limited.  

What I have seen of the East (which is everywhere east of Nebraska in Western Talk) has not been encouraging.

My suspicion is that the social problems in a city like Detroit, Chicago or DC are magnified ten-fold compared to what one might find in the worst part of Seattle.  Probably, those same social problems are present in the teaching population to a lesser, but noticeable, extent.

Ironically, it is political conservatives who most often call for merit pay.

Trust me, as a rational person you don't want merit pay.  (God no!) You will be handing a political football to the nutcase pressure group people quoted in that article about Detroit.  Just wait until those people get even a tiny bit of power...or have an excuse for a lawsuit over who is found to be meritorious.

You will find that teachers are virtually unanimous in opposing extra pay for supposed "merit."  Teachers know, from brutal experience, how that will play out.  Uuuuugly.

Logic would suggest that the best teachers would love merit pay.  The fact that these are the teachers who sneer at the very concept of "merit" should be instructive.  The idea of objective "merit" in education sounds great...unless you actually know about the teaching profession.

You have to remember that half the people who read that article from Detroit actually thought the statements made in it were based on some sort of objective reality.  It is axiomatic:  Do not give a gun to an infant.

Prufrock wrote:King,

Their mistake was that they apprehended the man first then beat him severly.  If they had beat him severly in the attempt to apprehend him, I think things would have been different.  You cannot subdue a person and then beat them.  The judge's decision is correct.

Martin