So sad, this is America today.

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
It may seem surprising, but I am happy to hear people disagree with what I thought the "standards" of education were. I do remember, The Adventures of Dick and Jane. See Spot. See spot run!

and I did.

As soon as I could read, I devoured every book in sight.
Apparently, very few others did, or the children that could were lucky enough to be sent to better schools.
I know that I am not the only person here that gathered their real education after school was dismissed. To those that had better schools than I, congratulations!
 

C64

Joined Mar 22, 2015
7
Your statistic doesn't seem to help though, does it? People who are driven and rewarded for their drive do not get burned out. Those who would like to get shit done but are not rewarded and see their co-workers surviving while doing nothing get burned out. They leave teaching (like I did) and move on to other things. Therefore, the 4-5 year churn is the good ones leaving, not the bad ones - the bad ones stick around forever.
Fair enough, but I would point out that the ones who remain aren't just the bad ones -- many of them never get re-upped after their probationary period ends. There are more than a few good teachers who stick around because their dedication to their job borders on clinical insanity. I'd say most of the folks with whom I worked fell into that latter category (I left the profession due to health problems rather than burnout).
 

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,159
What a silly comment, Papabravo.
...
It's not really my comment, but the proposition put to us by our conservative elders nearly 50 years ago. There are things we don't like, question is what do you do about it. We marched and we protested and stopped a war. It may not have been an efficient process, but it eventually succeeded. Only to have the pendulum swing back the other way, to fight a new war based on a lie, personal animus, and because Poppy didn't have the cahones to finish Saddam the first time.
 
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joeyd999

Joined Jun 6, 2011
5,237
It's not really my comment, but the proposition put to us by our conservative elders nearly 50 years ago. There are things we don't like, question is what do you do about it. We marched and we protested and stopped a war. It may not have been an efficient process, but it eventually succeeded. Only to have the pendulum swing back the other way, to fight a new war based on a lie, personal animus, and because Poppy didn't have the cahones to finish Saddam the first time.
You will not draw me into a political debate -- my thread-closing days are over.

Nice non sequitur, though. I find your lack of intellectual growth since your hippy days to be highly amusing.

Best of times, huh?
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Those who would like to get shit done but are not rewarded and see their co-workers surviving while doing nothing get burned out. They leave teaching (like I did) and move on to other things. Therefore, the 4-5 year churn is the good ones leaving, not the bad ones - the bad ones stick around forever.
Hey now that strongly sounds like you are describing my school!

Those that can go elsewhere to succeed. Those who can't get tenure in public education. :(
 

tracecom

Joined Apr 16, 2010
3,944
The angry young man has been around a long time; in the late 19th century, he was called Invictus.

Oh, and here's a link to "Help, I'm Turning into My Parents."

 
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tracecom

Joined Apr 16, 2010
3,944
Hey now that strongly sounds like you are describing my school!

Those that can go elsewhere to succeed. Those who can't get tenure in public education. :(
I was tenured in public education. In fact, I am certified to teach seven different subjects. But then, I was only financially able to work my way through public colleges.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
I was tenured in public education. In fact, I am certified to teach seven different subjects. But then, I was only financially able to work my way through public colleges.
I'm not saying all tenured teachers are bad, I have had many good ones, but given my personal experiences from high school through college twice I can say without hesitation that by far those whose actions sat the worst with me were usually tenured and damn near untouchable.

The majority of my college classes had student reviews of the teachers and professors and by far what always stood out to me was the good untenured faculty seemed to have constant reviews and the ones who needed to be drop kicked out the door for the good of the educational system never got reviews done by students because, well, they were tenured. :mad:
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
A lot of this stuff happens because of the ever-present danger of lawsuits. Funding for education always seems to be one of the first things that gets cut
I sure wish my income could get cut the way funding for education gets cut!

In the U.S., public spending on primary and secondary education has been outstripping inflation for about a century with very few localized and short-term exceptions. Just since I graduated from high school 30 years ago it has roughly doubled in real dollars.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
Exactly! People forget that at their most fundamental level public schools exist to provide everyone, no matter how poor, a tuition-free basic education. That may not matter to folks who have money, but my ancestors were poor as hell -- without free public schooling, my parents (and by extension myself) would have been effectively designated by lottery of birth to be uneducated, semi-literate worker bees. I'm damned grateful I was given an opportunity to prove I could be more than just a morlock, you know?

Are public schools perfect? No, no they're not, and there's a great many things I would fix, starting with paying teachers a competitive wage in order to attract more of the best & brightest (seriously, compare their salaries to those of other professionals with graduate degrees) and overhauling the way undergrad teaching programs are set up (the way they're built now, content courses are gutted to shoehorn in more and more ed courses, so you end up with teachers who can write lesson plans in their sleep but only have a shaky grasp of the subjects they're supposed to teach).

And I know charter schools are a popular idea at the moment, but so is not vaccinating your kids -- charter schools are a terrible, ridiculous fix for what ails the public school system (and yes, I know that a few decent charter schools exist, but even a broken clock is right twice a day). What they do in practice is pull even more funding away from public schools, thereby compounding their financially-caused problems (which are both numerous and crippling), and they are not subject to nearly as much oversight as regular public schools. Among other things, that means they don't have the same state testing requirements, they don't have to run background checks on their staff, they can push religious instruction in the classroom, and there are no qualification requirements for hiring teachers.
And yet, in most states, they adhere to the same state testing requirements, the run background checks on their staff, they do not push religious instruction in the classroom, and they find substantially better qualified teachers who often work for less pay.

In many states, a student that goes to a charter school only gets a fraction of their support (typically about 80%) with their assigned public school getting the rest. So the public school gets HIGHER effective per-student funding as a result while the charter school manages to, generally, produce far better results on less money.

But here's the real question that you can never get anyone to answer -- how much money for public education is enough? The national average annual per-pupil funding is currently around $12,000. For a class of 30 students, that's over a third of a million dollars. Where is that money going? Why isn't that enough?
 

Brownout

Joined Jan 10, 2012
2,390
Judging from the fact the students are using Oreos for studying plate tectonics, (which is the only real sad part of this story) I'd have to say that very little money is spent on education. What should really be the focus is ensuring those dollars are being used to educate.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
I'm not saying all tenured teachers are bad, I have had many good ones, but given my personal experiences from high school through college twice I can say without hesitation that by far those whose actions sat the worst with me were usually tenured and damn near untouchable.

The majority of my college classes had student reviews of the teachers and professors and by far what always stood out to me was the good untenured faculty seemed to have constant reviews and the ones who needed to be drop kicked out the door for the good of the educational system never got reviews done by students because, well, they were tenured. :mad:
Most schools review all of the faculty, but the reviews for tenured faculty don't count for much.

Tenure is a problem, but not the big daddy. Poor teacher pay is a problem, but not the big daddy. On the financial side, the big daddy is how much of revenue used for education, at K-12 or higher ed, is spent outside of the classroom. It is not uncommon at all for teacher pay to sit absolutely unchanged (in nominal dollars, not inflation-adjusted dollars) for decades. A few cases in point -- when I first started teaching honoraria at the nearby college in 1998 the pay per course was $2000 and had been since about 1990. That was still the pay per course up until about 2010, despite a 1994 report from the CCHE (Colorado Commission on Higher Education) specifically stating that the school needed to double its honoraria pay in order to be competitive. Yet, throughout that time, tuition and fees have been going up at three and four times the rate of inflation (sometimes even more). Things have improved somewhat, after a couple of near-revolts, and the pay is presently $3600/course (so still 10% less than what CCHE said they needed to be at more than 20 years ago!). Tuition/fees for a 3-credit hour course is currently $1300 in-state and $2300 out-of-state. Typical class sizes are 30 to 40 students. So for a 30-student class with all in-state students the school is receiving $39,000 just from the students (that doesn't include any funding from any other sources), yet the instructor gets $3600 (and zero benefits of any kind, not even parking which they have to pay for themselves) or less that 10%. Where is the rest of it going? Yes, there are other costs that have to be covered, but 90+%?.

As another example, in the 2004 time frame I was asked if I would be interested in the first full-time instructor position offered in my department. The pay was $50k/yr. I could afford to teach a couple of classes honoraria each semester because my industry gig more than made up for it (even though I was earning about $20k/yr less when I taught compared to when I didn't), but I couldn't justify leaving my "real" job in order to teach even though that was what I very much wanted to do. The last person they hired for that position, last year, is getting paid $50k/yr. Yet during that time tuition/fees have roughly tripled. Where is the money going? One place it is NOT going is to the departments, and that is something that you see at school after school. The departmental budgets are seldom more than 20% of the revenue that those departments bring in just in tuition.

If that isn't bad enough, consider the case in which a grad student is teaching a freshman lecture course with 200+ students. That course is pulling in a quarter of a million dollars and the grad student is getting about somewhere in the range of $6k to $10k even if you take into account the value of a tuition waiver they might be receiving. Where is the money going?
 
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WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
Judging from the fact the students are using Oreos for studying plate tectonics, (which is the only real sad part of this story) I'd have to say that very little money is spent on education. What should really be the focus is ensuring those dollars are being used to educate.
For one of the rare times, you and I are in complete agreement. Very little money is actually spent in the classroom educating kids (or college students). The underlying problem is that throwing more money at education very seldom results in actually spending more money on education -- nearly all of any increase gets sucked into pockets before it ever gets close to the school building.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
FYI -- I've reported this thread to the mod team to let them make the call on whether it is too political and should be shut down -- or perhaps just kept an eye on for a while. Since I am participating in the discussion I don't feel it would be appropriate for me to be involved in that discussion or decision.
 

C64

Joined Mar 22, 2015
7
And yet, in most states, they adhere to the same state testing requirements, the run background checks on their staff, they do not push religious instruction in the classroom, and they find substantially better qualified teachers who often work for less pay.

In many states, a student that goes to a charter school only gets a fraction of their support (typically about 80%) with their assigned public school getting the rest. So the public school gets HIGHER effective per-student funding as a result while the charter school manages to, generally, produce far better results on less money.

But here's the real question that you can never get anyone to answer -- how much money for public education is enough? The national average annual per-pupil funding is currently around $12,000. For a class of 30 students, that's over a third of a million dollars. Where is that money going? Why isn't that enough?

I'm going to be polite here and just skip over the whole charter school thing, because I have a sinking feeling that any more said by me on the subject is going to start a huge, ugly fight. If I want that I'll go post somewhere like NFL.com.

As for the money issue, you're right that the national average is ~$11k-$12k per student, but that average masks huge inequalities in spending. Half or more of any school district's funding is tied to property taxes, which means some places are only able to spend about $6k-$7k per student while schools in wealthier areas can spend $30k+ per pupil (and artificially raise the national average in the process). You want better results? Find a way to even that money out across the board.
 
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