Thread: What do you think about this???

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

I think she meant ... if the teacher is being paid extra to tutor ....

I guess you could see if from both points..I thought she meant the other...lol

I am also glad they are getting rid of tenure...Will rid the system of teachers that are only putting their time to retire..The ones that refuse to look at new teaching methods--are no longer creative..

As far as charging to stay after...I say she has every-right...If you worked at a factory and stayed extra to finish a job would not expect to get paid???

Teachers spend a lot of money out of pocket to make their class rooms fun for kids...I don't see parents coughing up any extra $$ for the special day costs...The school district sure is not giving any funds..

As far as charging for the reference letter..no problem there either..I recently had to go to the eye doctor and had to have a form signed for my insurance..and I had to pay an extra $10.00 to have is signed...So everyplace is charging you now a days..Look at the fees banks charge for what used to be free...

IMHO someone has got to take responsibility for the students that are failing. I can only speak from the experiences from my future DIL. She graduated from college with a teaching degree. Right now she is working as a substitute. She works 2 days a week for the district. She knows what school she is going to be at until the end of the school year. The teachers here pick what days they intend to use as personal days & what days they are going to be "sick" before the school year even starts.
The teacher she subed for last week left her a lesson plan which included the names of the "problem" students & named which ones are the "B-word".
The starting salary in our school district is $44,000. Once you get your Masters, which the district pays for, your salary increases to $65,000. Stay for tenure & you go up to $85,000.

The beatings will continue until teacher morale improves
Christian Science Monitor: Walt Gardner – Wed Apr 6, 11:45 am ET

Los Angeles – With so much riding on efforts to improve schools, it's a telling commentary that it takes a front-page story in The New York Times to finally get the attention of the public about the precarious state of teacher morale in this country.

Teachers don't choose a career in the classroom for fame, fortune, or power. The overwhelming majority teaches for the inner satisfaction of helping young people. That's why, for veteran teachers in particular, the vitriol hurled their way has blindsided them. Their younger colleagues have handled the vituperation far better, because they have never known anything else.

It's hard to understand what reformers expect to accomplish by their incessant attacks on what seems like all teachers in general. These reformers claim that only by holding the feet of teachers to the coals can educational quality improve. It's this argument that led to the publication in the Los Angeles Times last August of teacher ratings in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest.

Teachers are treated worse

Yet few other large organizations aimed at improving performance participate in this kind of large-scale naming and shaming, because they realize how counterproductive it is. The military, for example, has some of the strictest standards for promotion. But the details of determining who should be moved up are done behind closed doors. The top brass has long known how important it is to maintain morale among the rank and file. Large private-sector corporations know, too, that exposing and vilifying their employees will do little to improve performance. Even companies who pride themselves on transparent, broadly shared performance reviews share them internally, not with an unscrupulous, angry national public.

Teachers, however, are denied the same kind of treatment. Their performance, which is disproportionately judged by standardized test scores of their students, is broadcast far and wide. They are pilloried on all fronts as the chief culprits behind failing schools even though decades of research has shown that out-of-school factors are responsible for two-thirds of the variation in student achievement, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Just look at the turnover rate

The result is reflected in the turnover rate. Close to 50 percent of teachers nationwide quit the field within the first five years. The cost of replacing these teachers is conservatively estimated to be $2.2 billion a year, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education. California, which has the nation's largest population of public-school teachers, serves as a case in point. With more than 300,000 teachers serving more than 6 million students, the results of teacher exit surveys can't be ignored.

The main reasons teachers cite for leaving the profession are lack of support for the work they do and bureaucratic impediments, according to a study on teacher retention from the Center for Teacher Quality at California State University. The poor teaching and learning conditions exiting teachers described included lack of planning time, professional development, supplies and books, and support from the administration. They also spoke of excessive paperwork, classroom interruptions, and other restrictions that prevented them from doing their jobs.

Those who remain in teaching not surprisingly complain of burnout. When teachers feel unappreciated for the work they do, the constant bombardment in the form of OpEds and letters to the editor in newspapers eventually takes a toll.

Lack of respect for teaching in US

Sadly, this state of disrespect, turnover, and burnout is the antithesis of the situation of teachers in other countries. In Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, which are widely considered to have some of the best school systems in the world, teachers are held in the highest regard. That may be in part because these countries recruit their teachers from the top third of their college classes. But it's also largely the result of the culture, which reveres learning for its own sake.

The US has always been ambivalent about teachers. Some Americans recall with appreciation the ones who played an important role in their lives. Others, however, focus on the long vacations and supposedly short teaching day.

Yet there’s another factor at play that accounts for the negative attitude. Until the mid-1970s, the overall high grades given to teachers were the result of limited openings in other fields for talented women and minorities. When they were finally able to find jobs elsewhere, teaching was faced with new competitive pressures. Many talented professionals left for more lucrative, high-paying jobs. Teaching has never fully recovered.

Demands for improvement, little support

One chief factor that has exacerbated the flight of talent is the unrelenting demand of the accountability movement. Teachers are required to combat systemic school and community problems, address mass under-performance by students, and bring student test scores up by huge percentages in the span of a year – often with little support. Faced with growing numbers of students from impoverished, chaotic backgrounds, teachers are forced to perform triage almost on a daily basis. Little in their education and training has prepared them to play parent, psychologist, and police.

The result has been lack of time for teachers to teach the subject matter that they have been licensed to teach. Therefore, when the media focuses only on student test scores as evidence of teacher effectiveness, taxpayers are presented with a distorted picture. It’s a perfect prescription for demoralization.

It's time to realize that teachers are doing the best they can in the face of unprecedented demands. A pat on the back and a little practical support at this time can go a long way to help them and ultimately our students.

Walt Gardner writes the Reality Check blog at Education Week. He taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20110406/cm_csm/374816

comments

I teach at the post-secondary level, and used to teach at the high school level. I came from industry and while I disagree with some things in the education system, overall it reflects our country's values. We do not value education, children or the elderly. Hence we do not support them financially. I live in a state with the lowest paid teachers in the country for over 5 years now, and they cut education funding again. Tell me why any child would value education when our society does not. At the post-secondary level, many students do not have decent vocabulary or basic writing skills. Our country has gone down a slippery slope, and it seems it is too late to turn back. Teachers are not valued. Students often show disrespect because that is what they learn from their parents. Students are used to earning grades they do not deserve, and passing when they shouldn't. I didn't go into teaching for the money, But I'm tired of justifying my pay when I have two masters degrees and over 30 years experience in my industry. All you have to do is read blogs on the internet to see how dumb our country has become. There are days I have little hope for the future, especially when I see unethical athletes, business people, and untalented 'reality stars' earning obscene amounts of money and average hard working people unable to make ends meet.

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I taught Algebra/Geometry for five years. I assigned 15 minutes of homework every night. I made certain they understood the directions for that homework before class eneded. About 70% of my students did not make any attempt to do it, although I was available for tutorials every morning before school. So, many had failing or low six week grades. My principal called me in and asked me what the problem was. When I told him, he told me to quit assigning homework. I said nothing, I went back to my room and packed the materials I had bought and left. Within two weeks, I was in the business world with far better pay and much more respect.

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Teachers - adults - would probably be best served by permitting them to have physical control of the classroom. It may be hard to teach when you are afraid of your charges. Also, a recurrent theme is administrative incompetence; meaning the upper bureaucracy. Perhaps just we should have accountability on administrators.

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Low pay, inability to discipline kids, parents that fail to blame the kids for poor performance, and too much emphasis on sports (not academics) are also to blame. And academic standards are too low in the U.S. High school students don't have to read full books anymore. They don't have to write compositions, character sketches, or 2000 word essays. Most students can't count to 10 in a foreign language.

Everyone "worships" the football teams and cheerleaders, no one gives a @#$% about the debate teams or science and math clubs. But will the football players be solving the economic problems, coming up with cures, or design the next iPod? Value system is all wrong.

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There is no way in hell that I would become a teacher. Parents and society dump their children's problems onto professionals such as teachers. "Here you take them and fix them". How can a teacher be held ultimately responsible for a child's academic performance when there are other factors involved which are many times out of their control. These so called helping professions such as teaching - there is very little helping going on due to politics, bureacracy, and blind parents. My hat is off to those that remain in the teaching profession still intact.

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As a retired teacher, mostly in special education, the biggest flack came from parents of students. For some having a child with a disability was a strain on their life. Sure it is but taking it out on the school and staff which have to follow state and federal guidelines does not justify our failing to get their child up to state standards. Rarely do you get a parent that is a strong advocate for their child, from birth and all through school. Every teacher now has many masters to perform and dance for in order to survive. These include: principal, school board, parents, unions, state and federal regulations and requirements. It is no wonder many see 5 years before a burn out occurs and many find a different career path. Teachers were once considered the preparers for future generations. Now we are considered, pseudo-parents, overpaid babysitters, wardens and overpaid public servants.

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How much of the issue isn't the parent or the teacher, but the student him/herself? I can speak from experience here. My son, who is now 20, is lazy. He has been that way his entire life. He comes from a two parent home. He was never in day care. He was picked up and dropped off at school. We went to every PTA meeting, every parent/teacher conference and every school event until high school. We supervised his homework, when he had any(until high school) What we could not do was hand his homework in for him. He never turned anything in on time. He aced his tests without ever doing any work and flunked his classes by not completing in class work, or not turning in homework, or not bringing his assignments home. His teachers kept letting him turn it in late, even months after the assignments were due.

We tried everything with him. We offered rewards for good grades. He wasn't interested. If it involved any effort on his part, he would do without the rewards. We grounded him for missed assignments. He didn't care. We donated the tv to goodwill, got rid of the video games, removed the phone from the house. He sat in his room and read comics. we got rid of those. We finally went to the school when he failed all of his classes in 7th grade, but they were planning to promote him to 8th anyhow because he scored so high on his EOGs. We MADE them hold him back. They agreed that they would, but if he got straight A's the first quarter, they would move him to 8th. He did. He was promoted and promptly went right back to flunking his classes because he didn't want to do any work. He only graduated because his navy recruiter went to the school and had a talk with them. Of course, his navy career was only three days, because that was too much like work. So now he is at ECPI, where he is flunking out of his classes and is only just now starting to try to fix his grades because Uncle Sam won't give grants or loans if your GPA is below 2.0 and if he isn't in school, his grandparents (who he moved in with when we finally threw up our hands) will kick him out.

So... tell me... why should teachers be penalized for students like him? If I could have pulled him out of school instead of wasting everyones time, I would have, but I am required to have him in school. If teachers could say "sorry, your child is a waste of space." maybe they could spend their time educating those students who want to learn instead of having to constantly waste their time and energy on students who would rather not be in school. What should we do with those students? I don't know, but why should the students who are not wasting the teachers time be penalized? Maybe we could send the lazy ones to work digging holes, or picking up trash, or anything that might make them realize that without an education, this is the best future you can hope for...

Thanks, Jolie, for posting this. I think are teachers are so devalued but whenever I post something to that effect, I'm attacked by people who think they are overpayed for what they do. Of course there are bad teachers. But the majority of them go into teaching because they are committed to helping children learn. Many leave after they are beaten up and bruised (figuratively) in the effort. Our society does not revere teachers or respect them. As a result, our children can't help but fail.

Read : http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...g-boy-8-a.html

Here is an 8 year old who is disruptive on the bus, dangerously destructive in the classroom= throwing chairs, a TV, creating weapons while swearing, cursing, and threatening his teachers and fellow classmates until the teachers locked themselves into an office with the hellion trying to break down the door. And the MOTHER of said child goes on National TV to critize that the police didn't spend enough time to "talk him down". WHAT ????

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

Read : http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...g-boy-8-a.html

Here is an 8 year old who is disruptive on the bus, dangerously destructive in the classroom= throwing chairs, a TV, creating weapons while swearing, cursing, and threatening his teachers and fellow classmates until the teachers locked themselves into an office with the hellion trying to break down the door. And the MOTHER of said child goes on National TV to critize that the police didn't spend enough time to "talk him down". WHAT ????

I read that and saw a tape of them on TV. He goes to a special school for uncontrollable children and luckily, there weren't any other children in the area. But, he was screaming that he was going to kill the teachers when he got to them. The little boy even said on TV that he understood why the police pepper-sprayed him because he was out of control. He understood that he was out of control, yet, his mother was questioning the police actions? Yet, she will be surprised when he moves on to killing small animals and hurting (and possibly killing) others.