OT: Thomas Sowell and School Teachers

The best way to determine whether or not a teacher is compentent in the subject being taught - is take away the teacher's edition of the textbook; you know, the one with the answer key in the back. If they can't EASILY solve the problems, they're out of there!

I attended private elementary school, but public high school. I knew things were different when the English teacher on the first day of class introduced herself and said "I teaches English and I's gonna learn youse to read and write better."

After four years in public high school, I figure no more than 10 percent of the teachers were really interested in seeing that their students received an education. Another 10 percent had no business being anywhere near a school, and to the majority, it was just another job.

Anyway, I never could understand school finances. Say there's 30 kids in a class, as there was when I was attending. The district spends 7 grand per student - that's $210K. Teacher gets $50K, $1K per student for new books every year (a gross exaggeration), $10k to heat the classroom - there's still $120K left. Do the public areas of the school (hallways, gyms) along with the administrators & janitors suck up that much of each student's school dollars? If, so . . . why?
 
kjm,

Good luck with summer school. I don't know of any teachers (except one officer's wife I knew once) who don't work in the summer. My students go year round, so it's not an issue for me any more.

To those who would cry that we have "short hours," I was at work until 7pm Friday night. Why? Because one of my tasks as English teacher is editing the other teachers' educational reports, which usually read something like "Billy have not improved in history" and on and on and on..... :mad:

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*quack*
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by duck hunt:
kjm,

... one of my tasks as English teacher is editing the other teachers' educational reports, which usually read something like "Billy have not improved in history" and on and on and on..... :mad:
[/quote]

duck hunt, are you writing that you have to do the work of OTHER teachers, as well as your own? I'd either a) refuse or b) file a grievance with the union or c) allow the grammatical errors through, since it would be unethical for me to write a report for a class I hadn't taught. (Is correcting the poor grammar of your colleagues part of your official job description? In any case, I'd think that the parents ought to be informed that most of Johnny's teachers need to attend remedial English classes themselves...)

[This message has been edited by HankB (edited June 19, 2000).]
 
Hey Hank,

Unfortunately, since I work for a private facility, we are not unionized. Usually this means everyone does a *lot* more than what they're hired to do. I am actually pretty much thought of as the resident b**ch because I *won't* do 75% of the stuff they ask me to do (such as working the floor when they are short on security staff). Editing the reports is one of my few concessions...and one they know I will always do, since I will have no truck with improper grammar from my students or my contemporaries!

However, after Friday night, I did gripe so much that our principal photocopied some of the worst reports and took them to the director. Someone's gotta know how bad this stuff is.


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*quack*
 
It would seem to me that gun owners/pro RKBA should understand better than most the dangers of stereotypes.

enough said...?
 
I find very little in Sowell's columns to disagree with--the man is sharp! With two kids now in college, I would NEVER entrust my children to a public school system again. Although there were exceptions, most of their teachers were tenured drones, pushing values that we as parents disagreed with. I suspect that we did at least half of the work involved in home schooling either doing damage repair or making sure the subject was in fact being mastered. We got them through all right, but looking back we can see where we were robbed blind. In short, SNAFU.

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kjm, I think one of the problems with the school boards and higher-level administrators, at least in my area, is that they ignore the expectations of the large numbers of parents who want a better school system. They seem to be focused on avoiding lawsuits from the parents of "bad apples" rather than the other 95%. Its hard to change the system when its primary goal is risk avoidance rather than teaching.

And in a lot of areas, including my current locale, the primary expectation of the local populace is a winning football team, not a quality education system. The locals are economically depressed and they are doing everything they can to stay that way. The good schools in my area are in cities/counties that are mostly populated by "come-heres." So the general population has to shoulder a lot of blame as well.

This is why I am so in favor of the voucher thing. Let a market system provide good education to those parents who want it, and babysitting to those parents who want that. At least there would be a sizable fraction of the total student population getting a good education, as opposed to very few as it now stands.

HankB, don't try to understand any public school system (including universities!) from a logical income-and-outgo basis. Therein lies madness. I tend to assume that a large portion of the money goes for administrator salaries, trips to conferences, and payouts to consultants. Aside from teh football coach's salary what else could there be? (I'm conveniently ignoring the two or three houses owned by the city that are rented out at negligible costs to the families of the football stars...)
 
In rethinking this topic I realized our Federal Government is pretty well messed up, but not all public servants are idiots. Just got a little steamed back there because I am a self proclaimed non-idiot as far as teaching, but not as far as some of the gun deals I've made... :)
 
Two issues are at the core of the problem with the schools. One is the standard monopoly problem. There is no significant competetor to the public school system. They offer their services "free"; private schools have to charge. No viable competetion exists, hence none of the improvement that competetion creates is realized.

The second problem is that the public school system _is_ a government agency, with all the attendant waste, intrenchment, and government worker (bad) attitudes. As long as we have government workers teaching our kids we have no reason to expect any more satisfaction than we recieve from, say... the DMV or the Postal Service.

That's really what it boils down to. Do we want our children treated like a piece of anonymous junk mail, shipped out into the world with a "Bulk Rate" government stamp on it, or a Fed-Ex priority overnight package, individually tracked, handled with care, and guaranteed to get there on time?
 
I am all for the Tax Credit program or maybe even vouchers. I would like to see the Federal Government pay for what they screwed up in the first place. Comming from a whole family of PS teachers, they are all in a tissy about destroying the institution of public schools. This in itself is proof that even the professionals know that Public Schools suck and can't cut the mustard. If all public schools were like our little school in my town, everyone would be happy with them. Of course our graduating classes never exceed 26 students. We have a high quality public school. Most are not like that. Ours could compete against almost any private school system.
The big arguement that you'll get when discussing vouchers/tax credits, is that you'll destroy the public school system. It seems like if a private school is accepting public tax money that would've been used for educating a child, then that private school is just a semi-public school. Kinda like a government contractor. Eventually we will have vouchers. Too many people are demanding it. At least you'll see vouchers in the large urban areas like DC where more money is spent per child than the rest of the nation, yet they still fail to produce a decent product. If we wanted to help the poor, we would start with giving them a good education, not with welfare.
 
I picked up this idea from freerepublic. I no longer refer to them as "public" schools, I call them "government" schools. People blanch at first, but then they realize it is just as accurate a term as "public" school.

Public Housing
Public Schools
Public Bathrooms
and now they want to give me
Public Healthcare... No thanks!
 
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