The problem with tackling education reform is that doing so means working on the very pillars of society.
Educational outcomes are affected by family structure and parenting skills, predominant social and moral values and the physical, emotional and psychological health of millions of children. The status of public coffers also is an essential element: If taxpayers are demanding austerity, implementing change will be an uphill climb.
Reform is a never-ending job, the scope of which is enormous. And dragged into the middle of any discussion of how to proceed are some old, unresolved ideological battles. Those battles often pit tight-fisted taxpayers against educators. Taxpayers believe teachers have cushy jobs and are unduly protected and rewarded by their union, while teachers feel underappreciated if not downright attacked for doing important, challenging work.
In the midst of debates about open enrollment, merit-based pay and matching education to jobs, some truths are getting lost.
First, as Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent TV appearance, teaching is more of an art than a science. That means mastery comes slowly and depends greatly on qualities and skills that are hard to quantify. Just as the potter or sculptor must start anew with each batch of clay and each slab of stone, teachers face an incredible array of variables with each class. Did last year’s teacher cover the right material? How many children left for school that day from a chaotic, dysfunctional home? How many children have parents who expect them to excel?
A second truth is that teachers should not become defensive and intractable in their response to more evaluation of their work. If they accept that they are not assembly-line workers dumping knowledge into children’s brains, then they should accept that some among them will be very good at what they do, some will be adequate and some need help to improve. And some will have to be let go if they can’t succeed.
As teachers of the baby boom generation retire, Secretary Duncan sees job openings for 1 million new teachers. Preparing young (and older) adults to not only fill but flourish in those positions requires a financial commitment by taxpayers and elected officials.
Secretary Duncan believes teacher status must be raised. “What we’ve done as a country is we’ve beaten down teachers,” he said. “We should significantly increase teachers salaries. No one goes into it for the money, but you shouldn’t have to take a vow of poverty either.”
The U.S. Department of Education wants to create a RESPECT Project, or Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching. Secretary Duncan wants to “work with educators in rebuilding their profession — and to elevate the teacher voice in shaping federal, state and local education policy. Our larger goal is to make teaching not only America’s most important profession, but America’s most respected profession,” he said.
And the last truth is that teachers should not cling to an outdated school structure. Though some would-be reformers talk of blowing up the traditional school structure, the likely pace of change will be more deliberate. But change must come. Schools remain tied to a 19th century agrarian America that has little in common with the world today.
Much is at stake. By some estimates, 2 million jobs are going unfilled because employers can’t find educated workers. One million students drop out each year, dooming themselves, Secretary Duncan said, to “guaranteed poverty and social failure.” The U.S. is now ranked 16th in the world for college graduates, yet “a generation ago, we were first,” he said.
Surveys often show that most people believe the nation’s public education system is failing, yet those same respondents generally give their local schools high marks. This is because parents see their children’s teachers up close and appreciate their efforts. Though parents and taxpayers at large are right to demand more from schools, they should respect the profession and help build its status, not demean it.
I bet not one of the people in that photo could teach a dog how to take a dump…and here they are pushing for and signing legislation that deals with education.
17% of the kids in this state don’t graduate. There are some teachers who couldn’t teach a dog to crap. Tenure is a great system that perpetuates incompetence and a drop out rate that every Liberal Loser should be ashamed of.
Is Pingree preggers?
And what other profession gives one the summer off plus at least 3-4 weeks of school year vacations, as well as holidays off? Even the workshop days become half days in most instances.
What other profession requires that you stay in front of your work station for 3-4 hours with no hope of a bathroom break?
And your point is?
4life, you clearly do not know many teachers. First of all, at my school, workshop days are not half days. They are normal school hours, with a 20-30 min lunch. And saying that teachers get 3 weeks of vacation plus summers off is just silly. Teachers are not paid for the summer, for one, and furthermore, most teachers work a large portion of it anyway. I, for one, am ‘on vacation’ right now, and have spent the better part of 4 days correcting papers, planning lessons and researching instructional practices and strategies. I have lots of friends and family that work jobs where they can actually enjoy the weekend or a vacation and not have to bring work home, and do not go in to work on days off. I have to work 1-3 hours per night during the week, after my 9-10 at school without breaks, and I typically work for several hours one day per weekend. During vacations, I am usually at school 1-2 days of the 9 day vacation, and I also spend lots of time catching up on corrections that I can’t get done while school is in session. I know that I am not the exception, but rather the norm. I grew up with a father who was a teacher, and I remember how often he worked at home preparing lessons and activities for classes, grading papers, etc. Teacher friends and collegues of mine also work similar hours. Your comment shows that you are misinformed at best, if not completely ignorant. I’ll tell you what I have told others in the past that told me ‘it must be nice to get summers off”. You, too, can have summers off. Just get laid off for 2 months of the year. You’d get a nice little work-free vacation, and you’d be able to collect unemployment, too, which is more than we can say for teachers.
I used to believe this. Then my kids started going to school and I had an opportunity to experience teachers first hand, from a parenting perspective. Of the 10 primary teachers that have so far been assigned to my kids, one was good. The other nine were simply not. A couple of them were terrible. It sounds like you may be one of the few good ones.
As far as being ‘laid off’ for two months a year – that argument doesn’t work. Teachers are well paid for what is essentially a part time job. If you can’t understand that then you may have lost touch with the private employment world, where 50+ hour weeks are standard and weekend and evening work is necessary to keep up. At least your job is recession proof.
Actually teachers have been hit hardest in the recession. When I worked 50 or 60 hours a week as an engineer, I always got compensated for it. Lawyers get compensated for it (billable hours). Most professions get compensated for it. Teachers do not, unless of course you read the contract where it says that they are required to be at school from x hour to x hour but that it will probably take them longer than that to actually do the job and they are expected to be ready for the next day. If you feel that out of ten teachers your children had one was good, and the rest were not, I suggest you examine your own parenting, your children, and the opportunities that you give them at home. It isn’t the teachers job to prepare your children for everything in life, you must take some responsibility for your own children.
I agree. In fact I don’t want the teacher’s doing anything other than educating my kids – it’s not their role to ‘prepare them for life’. They are simply providing a service to my children. When I talk about one out of ten of our teachers being good, I mean that 9 of them were sloppy, poorly organized, absent from extra-curriculars, used the maximum number of sick days, taught from the workbook, applied the same lesson plan to every child they encountered, didn’t take time to understand kids and their individual needs. That has nothing to with my parenting, except that it requires me to spend more time than I care to monitoring what’s happening at the school and advocating for some decent teaching. Spare me the histrionics. Please.
I was highly involved with my children’s eduction and in a school district considered very good. I would say your 1 out of 10 teachers being good was about right.
As for those long days most teachers put in. I drive by the local schools regularly. I believe school gets out at 2:30 PM The parking lots are almost empty by 3:00 PM. The one or two cars left are either custodians or teachers involved in extracurricular activities such as coaching sports. And they get paid extra for that.
I used to be married to a teacher and much of our social life was with other teachers. One of the major reasons many chose the teaching profession was because of getting the summer off as vacation.
Well put. There is no more dangerous place in town that at the exit of the teacher parking lot at 2:31.
With all respect, you obviously have not a clue with regard to this issue. “One was good”? According to whom? You? By what criteria? By what complete, fair, and comprehensive evaluation? By what review of credentials? Or was it some issue with you? Or your kid? Is there something here that you are not owning to make such blanket statements? Have you ever taught school? Do you have a teaching credential? Obviously not if you think “teaching is a part time job.” Teachers spend countless hours “off duty” planning, grading, buying supplies, attending meetings of every shape and form, in professional development classes and workshops of every shape and form, coaching, advising, supervising, chaperoning, and on and on and on. Don’t think so? Then become a teacher, and enough of the arm-chair quarterbacking. My own teachers were mostly very good from kindergarten to college, and my child’s teachers are very good. How about a little credit for a change.
Sorry – but its not that complicated. Any parent can tell you who the good teachers at a school are, because we all do comprehensive evaluations. Two of the worst teachers I’ve come across were highly credentialed and I actually think that made them even worse, because they believed that they were always right.
The countless hours argument is bogus. Perhaps that argument would mean something if we actually counted the hours. If teaching was such an incredibly laborious difficult sacrifice, then more people would find a better job. But they don’t. Most folks keep their teaching jobs for 20-30 years. What’s that tell you?
Actually most teachers teach less than 5 years. Easier work and money in the private sector.
The absolutely worst teacher I ever had was a professor at the University of Maine and was head of the department. Brilliant man. And absolutely incompetent and a total failure at being able to pass his knowledge on to the students in his classes.
By what criteria were your and your children’s teachers “mostly good”? By what complete, fair, and comprehensive evaluation? Or is it just your opinion?
What a bunch of pure hogwash !!!!! Who do you really think you are fooling ???
There isn’t one public school teacher in fifty who even approaches working as hard as you want to have us believe. If they did, we would see a lot more commenters on these pages who knew the difference between ‘their’,’they’re’, and ‘there’.
They were taught it. Some don’t use it. Your reply, if serious, can’t be taken seriously.
All of the teachers that my child has had in four years work these kinds of hours.
Nights, Saturdays, you name it.
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink”. It’s especially difficult if the parents of the horse have told it that the water is poisoned.
I can assure you the differences between your and you’re and similar homonyms are covered every year and corrected in every student paper.
BTW the word among is more properly used when discussing differences among three things. The word between is used when comparing two things. LOL This also is covered almost yearly in school. :-)
What other preofession requires a BS, at the very minimum, and starts out with pay at less than $30,000?
What other profession has “morality clauses” that can get a teahcer fired for going to a bar in the town they work in?
What other profession requires a person to pay out of their own pocket for supplies necessary to do their job?
What other profession gets so vilified by the right wing?
Teaching does have its downsides, but so do many other professions. I was told by a teacher who just got tenure that, “You don’t know what it’s like knowing you can lose your job!”. The fact is that most of us do know that feeling and live in constant fear of it. The concept of tenure is alien to most of us.
Talk to the people working emergency services and law enforcement, public works and other vital jobs, we all know what it’s like to work demanding jobs with less than perfect working conditions. As for “morality clauses”, read the news and you’ll find many officers, EMTs and Firefighters who have been fired for “unprofessional conduct”.
Do not confuse two different issues. Most people respect teachers, they perform a vital function. Most of us can name a teacher who inspired us. What we don’t respect is the massive bureaucracy that has grown around the profession. The states are fully capable of handling education, there is no need for a bloated federal bureaucracy costing multi-millions of dollars.
Very nicely stated!
Didn’t we just go through an argument about employers imposing their morality on employees? I thought people were certain that an employer could not impose morality on its employees. And now you are saying there are such things as morality clauses?
Yes, we did. It was about an employers ability to fire someone for swearing. Most teachers have some sort of morality clause in their contracts that non-teaching positions do not. The severity of the morality clause varies wildly, depending on the location, from going to a bar in the same town as the school you work in to getting pregnant and being unwed to committing a crime.
I personally know of one teacher who was fired because he got into a fight at a bar that was not even in the same district as the school he taught at and that no charges were filed against him. How many women can get fired from most workplaces because they get pregnant?
There teachers who raped kids that are still on the UNION payroll. Look up lemming schools in NY to find the convicted felons still collecting a check
Give me a couple minutes with a search database and I can find rapist that are still getting paid in every profession, including family value, union hating Republican’s and religioius leaders of all sects.
This is absolute nonsense flatlander. In NYS a child molester is terminated immediately. That’s NYS law. There are no rapists on any school payroll in New York. There are convicted felons that are still receiving a pay check but most are not in the classroom. They continue to get a paycheck while their case makes its way through the NYS courts. This has nothing to do with unions. This has to do with NYS laws. The NYC school department has an unwieldily bureaucracy that has helped create educational problems, but unions have had nothing to do with this.
From the NYPost not a source of positive schools news.
“More than 500 teachers convicted of crimes in the last five years — from drunken driving to assault to manslaughter — are still skulking around the schools because the Department of Education is hamstrung from getting rid of them. Only those with sex-related convictions can be given the boot immediately”
Everyone should walk a mile in a Teachers Shoes!
Only then will they understand!
Every teacher should walk just a few hours in the shoes of computer programmer with an BS who has been laid off; a nurse with an MS who works the grave yard shift in an emergency room; a firefighter paramedic fighting to save the life of a child at 3:00 am auto accident. A mortgage broker with and a house in foreclosure. A reporter with a Pulitzer laid off because the newspaper has closed. Lastly, I’d love for you to try my shoes at 3:00 am when my company’s Data Center wakes up my MBA butt to solve a problem with data transfers. Life is tough for us all and few have it easy….we all need to deal with it!
Stop the bs with your 30,000; starting teachers make approxaimately 170 per day (30000/180); equivilent to 42,000 a year in the private sector (((52-3) x 5) x 170). I am not suggesting that it is great pay but if you are going to compare salaries with the private sector at least do so using a common denominator.
I did use a ‘common denominator, it’s called their yearly salary. You, however, used a made up comparison and even then a teachers salary is less than an equivilently educated private sector wage.
No my fine fellow you are incorrect. The only valid common denominator if you want to compare salaries is 1 year / 365 days worked; you my fine fellow are: 1/180 while your private sector counterpart is 1/245. If you are a teacher I hope for your student’s sake your subject matter is not math! LOL
And you, my fine fellow, stated that teacher’s were paid more than their counterparts in the private sector if you miraculously extrapolated their salaries out to a full year, which is just not good math. Period.
As for my math skills I will stand by them. I have passed 2 semesters of college level Calculus, receiving solid B’s, and a semester of Statistical Analysis, receiving an A. Granted it was over 20 years ago but I think math is still the same.
It is the application of those math skills that is in question here.
And yet it is the right wingers who are the first to screech when THEIR public schools are cut, when THEIR sports programs are cut, and when the TONS of PUBLIC services they use are cut. Such hypocrites.
I bet you got your information straight from Rush Limbaugh.
WOW….Chellie really needs to hit the treadmill…perhaps Michelle could help Chell out with that dumpy pant-suit look
I think you’d better tell your pal Chris Christie to hit the treadmill before he vaporlocks.
Could you imagine him “running” for President? Couldn’t fit him on the campaign poster. And old Paulie LeBuffoon isn’t looking too buff these days either.
You think teachers have it so easy why don’t you become a teacher ??
Education does need a complete overhaul.
1. No more summer vacations. Primary education should be year-round. The only reason schools had summer vacation was in recognition of the agrarian nature of early America.
2. Teachers teach year-round and get vacation times they can use at their discretion. Classes have co-teachers so students don’t suffer when teachers take their one or two week vacations.
3. Elimination of tenure, but recognition of primacy of date of hire when it comes to selecting vacation periods, classes teachers want to be considered for, etc.
4. Elimination of 504 plans, unless every parent who wants a school system to jump through hoops is willing to allow spot-checks at ANY TIME to ensure the child is home, being fed three squares a day, and in bed at a reasonable time.
That would be a nice start.
Great, where is the money going to come for increased teacher’s salaries (or are you assuming that a job that already has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country at 3.6% will all of a sudden become that much more attractive being year round) and where is the money for a second teacher per classroom going to come from?
Take a look at the REAL world. You will NOT have to raise salaries, as there will still be a path a mile long of people trying to become teachers. Secondly, the money we would save on special ed assistants (who get paid roughly $14,000 to “babysit” ONE STUDENT will easily pay for any increased costs to have co-teachers.
Great, so you are living in a fantasy world where an already hard to staff job (based on the 3.6% unemployment rate) will be easier to staff when you keep the pay the same and up the days worked? Also, not every class has a helper as I am sure you would be aware if you spent any time in a school.
1. The job may not get harder–it might get easier. Having summer vacation off does NOTHING but make a teacher’s job harder. Have to spend three months re-teaching what students forgot over the summer.
2. Having spent years in education, I know full well that NOBODY is irreplaceable. We can certainly figure out a way to have primary education be a year-round proposition and still allow teachers to take vacation time.
3. I repeat, you can make teaching a year-round profession TODAY and there will be no shortage of people applying for those positions if experienced teachers quit. I promise you.
Parents would screech holy heckfire, especially at the secondary level where kids need time to work to pay college tuition. Kids would be constantly out to accommodate family gatherings, vacations, etc. There are already myriad summer programs for struggling learners including learn-at-home programs IF the parents see them through. The costs of paying the staff, transportation, utilities, and any extracurriculars would be very high, and when is staff going to have time to change rooms, do large building maintenance projects and physical plant updates, etc. I am all for some additional time, but what you are suggesting isn’t taking all into consideration that needs to be taken into consideration. Not by a long shot.
Sure, Tinser, if you want to approach education in the same mold as we currently have, don’t tackle the ridiculous summer vacation schedule.
I bet most parents would LOVE to not have to worry about providing childcare in the summertime for their younger children. Perhaps if they banked the money they saved by not having to pay for summer camps or childcare, kids would have to come up with less money for tuition.
Secondly, there are lots of work-study programs that could be used as education experiences as well as opportunities to earn money for high school students. All it takes is someone willing to think outside the box.
You obviously haven’t spent any time lately inside a public school. Ask any teacher about the abysmal attendance rates for approximately 30-40% of the students anyway. It is now a completely acceptable excuse to tell the school that your child “slept in” or has homework phobia, or authority issues. For parents who want to take their child on extended vacations, there are always ways to prepare the student to keep up with classes, particularly since Bangor schools are all online with homework assignments anyway.
The only things this legislation accomplished was Nobama paying back an IOU to his UNION MASTERS. This has nothing to do with education only buying votes. NEA get rid of the TENURE rules, it is harmful to our children.
Why don’t the right wingers put their money where their hypocritical phony mouths are and go pay private tuition at private schools. But no, fake right wingers who numb themselves into oblivion with idiocy like FakeNews and Rush Limpmind are the first to screech when THEIR public schools are cut, and THEIR public football and basketball teams are cut. Right wingers who constantly moan and screech nonsense such as in your posts should be barred from using public roads and sidewalks, from using fire and police departments, from using the post office, from using public parks, and from using Social Security or Medicare when you get old. In fact, right wingers should consider moving to Somalia where they have extremely few public services, and they can bring all their guns and live in nice “ultra-private Utopia” right there in good old Somalia and where they can also spend all day worshiping at the feet of their corporate masters. And then they wouldn’t have to be ultra-hypocrites anymore.
Flat: go annoy someplace else. Adults are trying to discuss issues.
What “structure” change? First, if you are talking about different daily scheduling models, how it is done now works especially if you are going to accommodate parent schedules and extracurriculars. Or if you are talking class schedules there are already various models with extra time for struggling learners, resource rooms, advanced courses, vocational programming, co-op work programs, traditional methods, project-based methods, individual-based methods, group-based methods, and on and on. (Some “structure” fashions such as open classrooms and others have proved to be horrendous failures.) Kids do need some traditional structure because traditional structure is still very much a part of the world both in and out of the workplace. (Gotta be able to sit and watch a movie at the theater. Gotta be able to sit at a funeral. Gotta be able to deal with authority and rules in the workplace and everywhere else. etc.) Kids need to be able to function well in various environments including traditional ones. Schools tend to strike a good balance in the daily programming as well as in extracurriculars and specialized programs. If you are talking about changing the school year to year-round, then get ready to pay the huge extra costs. And what about kids, starting about 14 years old, who work summers to help pay for college? They need the work experience and the money. Schools also need time for large repairs and updates to the physical plant, and staff needs time to meet the professional development requirements which include summer courses and workshops. Can’t have a zillion requirements on schools and teachers but without time to do it all.
We already know what makes good schools and promotes student achievement. We have the examples right in front of us in Finland, France, Germany, Canada. We simply ignore them, keep wringing our hands about this terrible problem and searching for the perfect solution that will fix all schools, all students, all teachers in one day for no expense and no effort on our part. As long as we take that approach we don’t have to do anything real.