These are a few of my most recent posts at George Rebane's Blog, in a discussion of improvements to society.
Are
you upset that I mention rewarding teachers? Golly, you want the best,
right? The best CEO's and other "leaders" in their fields, all expect
to get paid very well. Why? because that how you get them as
"employees." Why wouldn't the same human dynamics apply to teaching?
Maybe "American Teacher: should be the new reality show, with the winner
taking home $1,000,000. We just heard Gingrich or was it Paul wanting
the government to offer prizes for the best moves by private
corporations involved in space exploration, why don't they call for the
same for teachers? Why is the psychological makeup of a teacher so
different from the rest of us mortals?
I
also note that a certain "more educated than thou" poster has gone into
hibernation, now that he's been hoisted up by his own table of numbers,
that show gas under Obama at 2.90, and under Bush at 2.74, thus proving
that Gingrich LIED when he claimed gas price doubled under Obama when
compared to Bush. Said poster does not seem to risk a lawsuit for libel
and to be so stupid as to call my photo a fake either, so a few of his
neurons are still functioning, despite the shock of discovering the
Keach can and does use spreadsheet functions.
How do you identify a "bad" teacher?
Are "bad" teachers really that responsible for all the evils in the world as you post of 11:04 pm suggests?
Your article suggests "better education" as a cure for income inequality. You suggest getting rid of "bad teachers" as a means of achieving better edu8cation, and Obama and I think you rewarding good ones. I point out that "rewarding good K-12 teachers never happens. [You'll note I leave out higher ed, where there are countless MD professors in med schools to inflate public employee pension calls, I avoid that trap] Instead of saying anything nice about rewarding good teachers, you go off on a total tirade about "bad teachers" without ever quantifying the situation, mentioning where the replacements will come from, or most importantly, how your "better teachers" are going to be rewarded.
You also fail to mention how you are going to ID these teachers. Are you going to randomly yake every 20th teacher out behind the gym and shoot them? Are you going to use test scores? How are you going to avoid firing a very dedicated teacher, who, at risk to life and limb, chooses to teach in a ghetto school? I served along side a teacher in the heart of Hunter's Point, who choose to live there, walking distance to the school. After a bullet flew through her living room at chest eight, she choose to line all her outer walls on the inside with concrete blocks. Her kids, on average, scored well below your beloved norms.
You see, in a ghetto school, there are real disconnects between how some of the parents perceive society, and how you and I do. There are literally kids who are raised such that they believe it is the God given mission to go to school and disrupt it. These may not necessarily be the dumbest kids either. In fact, techniques of disruption, are learned, and strategies of of disruption have evolved into cyberbaiting* today. Their parents [in many cases, relatives of their parents, real parents separated, drug incapacitted, locked up, or dead] of several generations back have learned all the in's and out's of finageling the system against itself, and they pass it on.
Based on my experience in Hunters Point, I would say maybe 3 to 5 percent of the students fall into this category. Add in another 3 to 5 percent who have serious untreated medical conditions, another 35 who are willing to play along with the ringleader(s) [one to three per classroom], and you have a recipe for disaster for the remaining 55% who are desperately trying to anything and everything to learn and get the hell out of Hunters Point. Would you like to try teaching in such a zone?
Most importantly, would you like to be fired for not fixing what you never broke?
Teaching is about the only profession where if you are not hired by September, you will have to wait an entire year for another chance at a real paycheck. Substitute teachers make typically one THIRD what a regular teacher does, and there are no benefits, not even unemployment over the summer.
Once again, what real rewards are you proposing for good teachers? Will the "best" teacher in the nation ever make one one thousandth of a CEO making $25,000,000 per year?
And tell me again, is it the teacher who gives birth and raises all these abject rejects for the American Corporate machine? Or is it the parents, who earn a supposed living from the American corporate machine?