Posted on 09/09/2011 2:30:22 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
A New York Times column about teachers (link below) appeared in my local paper yesterday, and maybe in yours. Here is the money quote:
"But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid, and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywide failure."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/blow-an-ode-to-teachers.html?_r=1
I've seen this spin a lot. (Leonard Pitt wrote the same thing a month or two ago.) They try to exploit the affection that most people have for teachers. And end up with a foolish statement (propaganda, really) about tearing down a profession and scapegoating teachers. Little of this actually happens.
I think most people have figured out that it's NOT teachers who are the problem. It's the arrogant, far-left professors and self-appointed commissars who run the system. People in schools of education at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, etc. (all aligned with the NEA and DOE bureaucrats) are the cartel I call the Education Establishment. THEY pick the failed methods, bogus theories, and secret agenda that have done so much to cripple our public schools.
This Times columnist wrote a whole column without even a nod toward the real culprits: the bosses at the top. The ones who pushed Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, and 20 other destructive gimmicks.
Here's a short YouTube video that lays it all out in a few minutes. "Good School, Bad School--How Do you Tell?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuihhEpQETs
As you reflect upon the bad ideas, consider that not one of them was ever put in place by a teacher.
Teachers are forced to use them. The public complains about the bad results. And then liberal columnists try to pretend that the public is bashing teachers. A cute little sophistry if they can get away with it. The goal is to shield the people who actually deserve bashing,
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Bruce Deitrick Price
Improve-Education.org
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Yeah, 7 hours a day for 35 weeks a year. Overworked.
I don't think these schools are going away anytime soon, if that is what the author wants.
Plus, they come out of the bottom 5% of college students.
Take stupid people, teach them stupid pedegogy, tell them they are over-worked and underpaid and you get generations of failed students. And they more they fail, the more money teachers want.
Screw’em. I can teach my own kid.
They aren't underpaid.
The average teacher earns far more than the average taxpayer in their district.
>>But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down?
The same way we have for at least 40 years: let the kids who are comfortable in the academic environment convince themselves that they need to stay there so they waste their college education by studying education and are locked in to a low-paying career with a bunch of student loans until they can’t do anything else.
Big Education helps keep the lie alive by demanding an education degree when a real education system focused on real-world application of knowledge would value expertise in a field of study more than expertise in the field of teaching.
I went to school in the 1970s and our teachers told constantly how overworked and underpaid they were. Despite this, many children went on to college and studied education. They still complain constantly and the kids keep filling the teaching programs in the universities.
“7 hours a day for 35 weeks a year. Overworked.”
This mantra has been repeated ad nauseum by every media outlet; if they repeat the lie often enough it becomes the truth. Here in NJ these parasites are our upper middle class; working 180 days/year would be the equivalent of us “little people” working Monday through Wednesday, with a half-day on Thursday, and off every Friday. That is what working less than half the year would look like.
Anyone who repeats the “underpaid” line around me is immediately exposed as a lying POS, with no credibility on ANYTHING. Here in NJ taxpayers were shocked at what Governor Christie exposed about the income of teachers; then they were furious. Many of them here either marry other teachers or rural/suburban cops; nobody else could even take them seriously.
“our teachers told constantly how overworked and underpaid they were.”
Back then they made less than many full-time jobs (teaching back then wasn’t, and still isn’t, a full-time job); the raises and concessions they’ve gained since then have made the argument absurd - they earn more than many people with more background in more difficult subject matter with performance metrics working many more hours.
You missed the point of his article, didn’t you. We have superintendents of middle-size school districts we get more in pay and benefits than the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We have education collages who take people of above average intelligence and dumb them down for four years so they they make “Good employees” of said superintendents. Then we put them in classrooms with classrooms filled with children from disfunctional families who are part of subcultures that have only contempt for “book larning.” Half of new teachers are gone by five years of graduation, because little in their own history or in the schooling has prepared them for the “inmates”of urban schools. Failed pedagogical theories are rebranded every ten or fifteen years, and almost nothing is learned from experience. The whole process goes back to the start of the last century when mass education became the norm, and John Dewey and his progressive disciples took over public education.
“The average teacher earns far more than the average taxpayer in their district.”
A lot of our teachers here in NJ work in one district while living in another (that preferably doesn’t have paid firemen - the parasites don’t want to bear that burden on their tax bill).
Yeah, 7 hours a day for 35 weeks a year. Overworked.
On top of that - that it's a part time job with full time pay - they don't even DO the job of educating the children.
...how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid...IOW, a pack of whiners who would rather be overworked (sic) and underpaid (sic) nine to ten months of the year, rather than actually overworked and underpaid in any other job in the US -- all the while complaining about how little they're compensated and how hard they work.
>>Back then they made less than many full-time job
That was part of my point. Teaching used to be a lot less lucrative than it is today and kids that thought school was their comfort zone because they had never tried anything else still flocked to it as a career.
It has been a long while since teachers were as a class underpaid. One reason being that since school districts began hiring married women, their salaries have been second incomes. Incomes in teacher households, as an average, put them well within the middle-class.
But there is a truth that keeps getting buried. Going back to the start of the 20th Century, there has been an unwritten rule that the top salary for a teacher can be no more than twice the beginning salary. Anothger rule is that the best paid teacher shall not be paid more than the lowest ranking administrators. So it is like the military, where the highest ranking noncom is paid just about what the lowest ranking officer receives. Teachers are the noncom class in the schools. The exception to all this are the coaches. In football mad states, such as Texas, the rule is generally this: the head coach will get paid less than the principal of a school. More often observed in the breach than in the observance, it has the “good” effect of making school boards elevate principal salaries.
“But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers.....”
I don’t expect the best and brightest to become teachers. I don’t think it would be a good thing if they did. In fact, I settle for “the reasonably competent.”
That said, there are some stinker teachers out there with tenure. One of my kids is in a well-regarded magnet school and even there about 50% are good, the rest are whack jobs or incompetent.
OTOH, another child is in a charter run on a reform agenda and it's wonderful. The teachers are enthusiastic and really believe in their program. Many are former Teach For America and they are uniformly good (at least the ones this school hires).
This has always been the case. If you can get hold of it, I suggest you read , The Schools, by Martin Mayers, a lawyer who did a number of popular works on the professions back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Its is based on his visits to the schools. Fifty years is not really a long while in the scheme of things, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I must confess that I once thought that the lack of money was the root of the problem. But it is always the WHO that do things. Does anyone dare say that any modern ball player is better than the men who made up the Brooklyn Dodgers or New York Yankees during the ‘50s? The game is the same.
School reform is the answer, but that is going to be a long, hard struggle against the unions.
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