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Old 03-31-2019, 09:23 PM
 
Location: VA, IL, FL, SD, TN, NC, SC
1,417 posts, read 727,597 times
Reputation: 3439

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Quote:
Originally Posted by chiociolliscalves View Post
Where did I dispute the right of parents to act foolishly and make poor choices for their progeny?

Yet another person who cannot distinguish between rights/legality vs. morality in a discussion.
Before you go making accusations that someone cannot distinguish things, please read what I wrote and note I never stated nor implied that you disputed anything. All I wrote was a simple declaration. Your response is rather over-the-top given the benign context.
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Old 03-31-2019, 09:50 PM
 
2,448 posts, read 884,475 times
Reputation: 2421
Quote:
Originally Posted by GhostOfAndrewJackson View Post
Before you go making accusations that someone cannot distinguish things, please read what I wrote and note I never stated nor implied that you disputed anything. All I wrote was a simple declaration. Your response is rather over-the-top given the benign context.
Apologies, but why even make that statement, particularly in response to the quote of mine that you use?
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Old 03-31-2019, 10:57 PM
 
Location: VA, IL, FL, SD, TN, NC, SC
1,417 posts, read 727,597 times
Reputation: 3439
Quote:
Originally Posted by chiociolliscalves View Post
Apologies, but why even make that statement, particularly in response to the quote of mine that you use?
To be clear, I thought the purpose of these forums is someone makes a comment, then I add my thoughts to it. I understood it does not have to be in the form of an argument. In this case I just used your comment as a spring board to remind people that their children are exactly that, theirs.

Families have values, traditions, heritage, religions, ethnicities, and beliefs that are separate from the basic citizen framework and laws of the State. If the State become the harbinger of what a child's belief system should be than the children are not the children of the parents, rather they are the children of the State and the parents are really cuckolds (see footnote #1) of the State. That is why parents should ride herd on their school districts and be in the classroom, without the parental check, invariably they will have children of the State. That may or may not be in keeping with the parent’s intention.

I hope that makes sense.

Cheers.

Footnote #1

Cuckold in the traditional sense of the word, deriving from the old French word cucu which equates to the Cuckoo, a bird that lays its eggs in another birds nest, leaving the birds who made the nest to raise an offspring that is not theirs.
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Old 03-31-2019, 11:16 PM
 
5,401 posts, read 6,483,050 times
Reputation: 12016
1. Pay teachers 25% more & offer 3 year contracts.
2. Dump tenure, but allow pay steps for longevity to carry across all districts in that state.
3. Allow save your spot teacher sabbatical option every 7 years.
4. Consolidate & centralize administration & finance & purchasing.
5. Employ satellite learning for electives & advanced programs.
6. Year round school with 4 one month breaks would improve skill retention.
7. Use Mastery model, regardless of age advance up the ladder for each subject at proficiency. & if not proficient no advancement.
8. Employ team teaching.
9. Build mentoring programs.
10. Dual college credits available for every class above HS proficiency.
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Old 04-01-2019, 08:21 AM
 
4,359 posts, read 4,202,005 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by heart84 View Post
Real-world skills like learning the basics of finance, learning the basics of establishing credit and the expense of servicing debt, learning the consequences of student loan debt, the need to pursue a marketable skill-set after high school that the job market demands, learning basic marketable skill-sets while in high school, more trade training in high school, more computer programming in high school, learning more about nutrition and health, also learning about life consequences since parents aren't doing their job (consequences like having children too early, not maintaining health, incurring debt, not attaining a marketable skill-set), etc.
I wholeheartedly agree with your list of knowledge and skills. Most of them are addressed in classes like economics, health, and other classes that are currently being taught. Unfortunately, as most of us in education know, what is taught in class is not always learned by the students.

I have been exhorting my students to get the best education they can for over two generations now, but I still see students in my classrooms whose parents did not follow the lessons I taught, and now they too are growing up in generational poverty. Fortunately, many of my students did follow the lessons that I taught and they have now broken that cycle, becoming taxpayers rather than taxpayer dependents.

I'm about at the end of my career, and there are few teachers in the pipeline to whom I can pass the torch. Few people at the top of the class are interested in becoming teachers, and most of the ones willing are unable to (literally) make the grade, as they can't pass the licensing exams. I fear for the next generation of students who will have an increasingly substandard faculty of teachers and administrators.
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Old 04-01-2019, 08:27 AM
 
4,359 posts, read 4,202,005 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tnff View Post
I would require degrees in the discipline with pay commensurate with what the discipline makes in the market. This means however that not all teachers would be paid the same. Something the education industry does not want to give up.
Pay is only one part of the equation. The poor working conditions are another.

I am skeptical that legislatures and other funding bodies would be willing to pay first-year math teachers upwards of $60,000/year. Our state legislature recently voted to grant teachers a $1,500 pay raise over two years, not even getting Mississippi off the bottom ranking for teacher pay.

There is a quiet walk-out of teachers going on around the country. Not a mass, coordinated movement, but a slow departure of people willing and able to do the job. Replacing them is nearly impossible, especially at the current funding level.

Enticements only work so far. Our district offers a $5,000 signing bonus, but at every job fair, there is no bustle of excited, eager teacher candidates. All you hear is crickets. chirp chirp No takers.
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Old 04-01-2019, 09:02 AM
 
12,657 posts, read 8,875,450 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lhpartridge View Post
Replacing them is nearly impossible, especially at the current funding level.

Enticements only work so far. Our district offers a $5,000 signing bonus, but at every job fair, there is no bustle of excited, eager teacher candidates. All you hear is crickets. chirp chirp No takers.
No argument there. One thing that I think would help is to make it easier for experienced professionals to transition into teaching later in life. There are many who either want a change in career or who have finished there careers but aren't ready to retire. But the barriers to entry are designed around a one size fits all (common theme in education) 18 year old goes to college to become a teacher process that doesn't fit experienced workers very well. I ran into such a barrier after getting out of the service. And now that I'm approaching retirement and want to pass on what I have learned, once again find a resistance that just isn't worth fighting.
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Old 04-01-2019, 09:09 AM
 
10,497 posts, read 6,957,707 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CortezC View Post
Here is the main problem with America's public education system:

YOU ALL SUCK AS PARENTS.

Let me guess. Teacher?

In truth, the real problem is this: Our educational system is an anachronism. We are in the Digital Age where knowledge is ubiquitous and decentralization and flexibility is the norm, yet we're continuing to teach children as if it were the Industrial Age. Why? Because the educational system was designed to churn out factory workers and, at best, middle level managers. Yet we continue blundering on with this archaic, Rube Goldberg way of preparing kids for life.

The very use of the word 'system' is revealing, because it speaks to mindless orthodoxy. It is the method that entails kids of all abilities and talents slogging through twelve years at the same pace essentially learning the same things to fulfill mindless bureaucratic requirements. Progress is not measured by mastery of material, but rather through how many days a child sits in the desk. Regardless of how smart or how motivated a child is, he or she must sit in the same classroom doing the same assignments as his or her counterpart.

This is great for the educational system, but it's a really crappy way to instill knowledge, teach critical thinking, or foster creativity. If anything, the entire mind-numbing process turns people away from learning, not towards it.

Teachers love to rail against standardized testing. And they do so with some justification. At the same time, they don't like to acknowledge that testing is a symptom of a disease, a reaction. Quite ironically, education as an institution seems incapable of learning. Instead, it keeps going back to the same well over and over again, expecting different results.

Since 1985, education spending per student -- adjusted for inflation -- has doubled. In 1985, we were told that if we'd just ramp up spending, it would solve all our problems. Yet this massive investment has yielded little improvement. It hasn't even given better pay for the teachers. Nope. It has done little more than create entire new layers of bureaucracy. So standardized testing was the shot across the bow. It was the statement that, "By gum, you asked us to spend this money. We kept up our end of the bargain. Now keep yours."

I don't care how much self-congratulatory language educators use. How our children are taught is nothing less than an atrocity. And blaming the parents is the laziest cop-out of all.
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Old 04-01-2019, 09:16 AM
 
Location: New York City
1,943 posts, read 1,474,327 times
Reputation: 3316
Quote:
Originally Posted by tnff View Post
No argument there. One thing that I think would help is to make it easier for experienced professionals to transition into teaching later in life. There are many who either want a change in career or who have finished there careers but aren't ready to retire. But the barriers to entry are designed around a one size fits all (common theme in education) 18 year old goes to college to become a teacher process that doesn't fit experienced workers very well. I ran into such a barrier after getting out of the service. And now that I'm approaching retirement and want to pass on what I have learned, once again find a resistance that just isn't worth fighting.
Being very knowledgeable and good at something is entirely different than actually being able to teach it. So many college professors are proof of that.
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Old 04-01-2019, 09:32 AM
 
2,634 posts, read 2,655,328 times
Reputation: 6512
My guess is that most, if not all, of the increase in education spending is to athletics and technology. Neither of these will necessarily increase the performance of schools.

MinivanDriver, you made some broad generalizations, but nothing concrete. Those are the types of things I might have said before I set foot in a classroom. 90% of kids would like to do nothing more than spend all their time on Instagram or playing Fortnite. Every day is a struggle for a teacher to get Fortnite/Instagram addicts to care about something like algebra or Shakespeare. Kids are innately curious about what interests them, not the state standards or skills that will make them productive adults. Some of the other comments are so vague it just seems like they were pulled them from a book.

I’ll go back to the fact that we have worked our way into the top 10 countries in math performance. Most of the countries ahead of us have nothing in comparison to our population. Every international student group you look at in the U.S. performs better than their peers in their home country using our educational “system”. The flaw in all of these rants is that we presuppose that public education in the U.S. is not good to begin with. I reject this premise until it’s been proven. It’s a premise used for political purposes, such as dismantling public education in favor of a free market private system where wealthy parents don’t have to send their kids to school with the poor ones, or where wealthy parents can pull their tax money out of public education and keep it for themselves.

You’ll notice people typically trace the decline in education to about the time schools were desegregated. This might speak to the ulterior motives of the push against public education.

Last edited by TXRunner; 04-01-2019 at 09:47 AM..
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