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<p>Minority and low income have nothing to do with it – the fact that they and their parents chose to switch to the charter schools is the (self-)selection effect being referred to.</p>
<p>JHS, I agree - there will will be good and lousy charter schools. However, if we had a voucher-based system where parents could choose from a variety of schools and if we allowed poor performing schools to go out of business, I think the market would impose the necessary discipline to ensure high performance.</p>
<p>JHS, maybe I am indulging in fantasy, but I truly believe teacher unions are the single greatest impediment to improving our schools. I don’t know about you but if I was a great teacher and I worked in a system where my performance never got recognized with either more money or more responsibility, I would have easily gotten discouraged and probably have left the profession for a career where I would have been properly rewarded or recognized for excellent performance. To me, this is nothing more than human nature.</p>
<p>UCB, okay, there is some self-selection. Who cares. I do believe that most parents, even in our most challenging neighborhoods, want their children to get a good education. I have much more faith in these parents to do the right thing for their children than any impersonal, disorganized, unresponsive educational bureaucracy run by unions and politicians. </p>
<p>Goldenpooch, I think you are making the common mistake of attaching capitalist thinking to the mindset of teachers. Most teachers don’t work hard because they want more money or responsibility (although of course those are nice benefits when they happen). They work hard because each year brings a new crop of kids they can influence in a positive way. That is their reward system.</p>
<p>Sally, I wish I could believe your noble sentiments but any system where the best and most talented employees are treated no differently than the most ineffective employees is encouraging mediocrity and is bound to fail. It’s even worse than this because an ineffective teacher who has been there for many years is paid more than a great teacher who has less seniority. This is exactly the opposite of what should occur.</p>
<p>That may be. I am just saying that the motivation that gets teachers into the field of education in the first place is not profit- or status-driven. I too would like to see changes but I am opposed to a system that allows charter schools to cherry-pick the students they want, leaving the toughest kids for the public schools to educate and thus ensuring their failure. </p>
<p>If you have cherry picked the students with the most involved parents with the time and resources to shop around for school and transport their kids to some facility other than the one in the neighborhood how will you know it the teachers are good or just the students are “better”? Teachers and schools are called “failing” when they get a cohort of kids who are less prepared coming in, mobile, hungry etc. Do you leave those student to public school then say, “See . . . public schools are failures compared to charter school.”? </p>
<p>My daughter taught in a NYC public school for several years. One of the interesting things about the experience was that her attitude about the teachers union pretty much did a 180-degree turn. </p>
<p>She went in believing, as Goldenpooch does, that the union was one of the most serious impediments to quality improvements in the school system. However, after working as a teacher in a failing school with a series of weak principals, she saw the union as a valuable part of the system, necessary to protect good teachers from office politics. She didn’t see weak teachers being disciplined. The people who came into conflict with the administration tended to be long-term, committed, and high-quality teachers who were not immediately on board with whatever the management fad happened to be that week, from the principal who had arrived the week before and would probably be gone by the end of the year.</p>
<p>She had plenty of work experience, but she had never been in a work environment as vicious and arbitrary as a New York City public school, and it wasn’t coming from the union. Her own self-assessment was that she was an OK teacher, not a great one, and that certainly contributed to her decision not to stay with teaching. But watching teachers she respected get undermined and beaten down was a huge reason not to hang in there and try to improve.</p>
<p>I don’t think there is one greatest impediment to our schools performing well, but the strongest correlating factor for excellent school performance by children is how educated and wealthy their parents are, so I think the growing income inequality in the United States is going to mean our schools are going to continue to under-perform. The greatest teacher on the planet is going to have problems teaching a kid who is only in school sporadically, or has a parent in prison or doesn’t live with their parents at all, or is more worried about where their next meal is coming from, or has undiagnosed learning disorders because the parents don’t have the resources or the knowledge to get their child assistance, etc., etc. </p>
<p>Another problem is that we have a cadre of school reformers who have either never taught in a classroom or have MBAs and try to treat schools as if our children are widgets who need to be stuffed with just the right combination of ingredients to succeed. Success is driven by motivation and a host of social qualities, either internal or external, and highly individualized. </p>
<p>It is a problem if an administrator fails to identify and deal with bad teachers - we experienced this ourselves with our daughter’s first grade teacher - it was a completely wasted year with a teacher who didn’t even know which child was ours (a spring conference - 7 months into the school year, and she talked about another student!). We complained and complained, but the principal was retiring and didn’t want to deal with it. </p>
<p>What if there is no single biggest reason for the failure of the school system for many students? What if there are multiple reasons? And what if the radical changes proposed by each of multiple factions would improve schools by only a couple of percentage points?</p>
<p>I do not exclude principals and superintendents from my criticism of the public schools. There are too many principals who don’t have the correct skills to do the job well. The number one priority for a principal is to hire, nurture, train and evaluate teachers (and fire the bad teachers). The principal has to be held accountable for the performance of his/her teachers. It always seem to me that unless principals are culled from the ranks of our best teachers, I don’t see how they would be able to identify or develop great teaching. Most high performing schools have highly competent principals. Principals also need the authority to collaborate with teachers to alter and/or tailor curriculum and instructional methods for their student population. </p>
<p>In all fairness to those responsible for the administration of our schools, when you do not have the authority to remove ineffective teachers because of tenure and you can’t reward the best teachers because of seniority, you are asking to them to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their back. Unless we give them the tools to run their schools so we can hold them accountable for the performance of their schools, it is not likely you will see highly competent people in these positions.</p>
<p>PS. The first sign of a failing school is when all those who work at the school are blaming the parents and the kids for the failures of the school. </p>
<p>I’m not sure why you think there’s no way to remove bad teachers and no way to promote good teachers. That’s just not true in my experience and I don’t think my school district is that exceptional.</p>
<p>I also don’t think “blaming the parents and the kids” is “the first sign a school is failing”. Why CAN’T you blame kids for failing? Sorry, when my son doesn’t do homework and gets an F, I don’t blame the teacher. And yes, if I didn’t care that my son got an F, or if I encouraged him, or told him (as happened) that reading is for girls anyway, yes i’d be responsible too for his failure. </p>
<p>I used to think the worst about teachers’ unions but in the end I’m not quite sure why they’re so hated. Being a teacher is HARD; people get into it because they want to help and then they are scapegoated on TV, talk shows, forums, because we all deal with teachers and it’s easy to blame them for whatever; add to this being poorly paid and underappreciated rather than being treated like a professional and an unconscionable number of teachers (good or bad), just LEAVE the profession. Teaching looks very easy but honestly I’ll leave it to teachers.</p>
<p>Those other countries have better schools because they hate our freedom.</p>
<p>I do believe that most parents, even in our most challenging neighborhoods, want their children to get a good education. I have much more faith in these parents to do the right thing for their children than any impersonal, disorganized, unresponsive educational bureaucracy run by unions and politicians. </p>
<p>Goldenpooch- the data suggests otherwise. How do you explain huge rates of truancy if parents really wanted their kids to get a good education? Parents take their kids out of school for all sorts of reasons- in high income neighborhoods it’s because they’re leaving for Disney or a ski trip three days before vacation starts. In low income neighborhoods it can be because the 12 year old has to stay home to take care of the 6 year old with the ear infection so mom can get to work on time. And there are parents at all income levels who are too drunk or hungover or strung out to get the kids to school (or even get them out of bed.)</p>
<p>I think we have a fundamental difference: I don’t think humans can be dealt with like objects and therefore free-market principles don’t apply to them. You can’t “compete” for children, nor can you “produce” them etc. Competition between schools doesn’t work if ALL children have to be in school, it only works if SOME get to go to schools and others</p>
<p>I also don’t get why there’s a talk of “government schools”. The only “government schools” are the DOD schools. They work very well, with no competition between them (they’re basically all the same) and no vouchers.</p>
<p>The Orthodontist!!! Why don’t they have more evening hours? Try to get through braces without having the kid miss school. There simply isn’t enough respect for school, let alone teachers, in the U.S. system.</p>
<p>DS had two really terrible teachers during his k12 career. </p>
<p>One was his 2nd grad teacher at a private school. She was bitter and mean, and if I had it to over again, I would have pulled him out of the school to avoid the damage she did. She had been there for years. I didn’t really believe the scuttlebutt about her, because I couldn’t believe the well-respected private school would keep someone so terrible, but they did. </p>
<p>The other one was a teacher in a public high school who was too lazy to teach the class. He would spend the class period in his office and let the kids do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t set the building on fire. It was his first, and only year at that school.</p>
<p>But to get away from anecdotes, there are plenty of places in the US where there are no teachers unions. They don’t have significantly better schools than places that do. </p>
<p>You can take a national benchmark test that’s often discussed here on these boards.
These are the 15 top scoring states for the ACT, from 15 to 1. To the best of my knowledge, all have teachers’ unions (I’m no specialist, so I may be wrong.) I’m not sure which of these states allow vouchers. At the very least, one can say there is zero correlation between academic success and presence of teachers’ unions or use of vouchers.</p>
<p>California 26 22.2 21.6 22.8 22.3 21.5
Maryland 21 22.3 21.8 22.3 22.7 21.9
Virginia 26 22.6 22.3 22.5 23.1 22.2
Pennsylvania 18 22.7 22.2 23.0 23.0 22.2
Rhode Island 14 22.7 22.4 22.4 23.3 22.0
Washington 21 22.8 22.1 22.8 23.3 22.5
Delaware 15 22.9 22.5 22.8 23.4 22.4
Minnesota 74 23.0 22.2 23.1 23.1 22.9
New Jersey 23 23.0 22.5 23.6 23.1 22.2
Vermont 26 23.0 22.7 22.8 23.4 22.6
New York 26 23.4 22.6 23.8 23.7 23.1
Maine 8 23.5 23.4 23.3 23.8 22.9
New Hampshire 19 23.8 23.6 23.6 24.2 23.2
Connecticut 27 24.0 24.0 23.9 24.4 23.3
Massachusetts 22 24.1 23.8 24.4 24.4 23.2
(That’s from the ACT website)</p>
<p>I love MYOS1634’s message, but I have terrible news for him or her: A glance at that list indicates that, with the exception of Minnesota, it’s a list of Northeastern (yes, including Virginia) and West Coast states where historically the SAT test dominated over the ACT test. Almost certainly, those are the top-scoring ACT states because they are states where the only students taking the ACT are those good enough and ambitious enough to be applying to selective colleges and wanting the slight advantage an ACT score might provide relative to the SAT.</p>
<p>Minnesota does have teachers unions, though. And so does Finland, strong, powerful ones.</p>
<p>Finland’s teacher unions are way different than what you see in the US. They act as professional associations rather than as monolithic entities that collectively bargain every important aspect of the working relationship between workers and management, and they don’t provide tons of extortion money to politicians to ensure the process is favorably tilted toward them.</p>
<p>There are many reasons for the dysfunctional state of our public schools, not the least of which are too many people defending the status quo. I think we could do way better than what we have now, but it means making a lot of people who are benefiting from the current system very uncomfortable. The question is do we have the resolve to make these changes. I am not hopeful.</p>
<p>Arhg, okay, I’ll look for other charts! :s
I think that in MN everyone takes the ACT junior year. I’ll try to find other test scores (either ACT or SAT!) per state.</p>
<p>Are you sure Finland’s unions don’t do collective bargaining? Because I thought that’s what unions were for. Why are they called unions? Perhaps their collective bargaining practices are different from ours.</p>
<p>Goldenpooch, changes upon changes have been piled upon schools in the past 20 years, some of it contradictory. I don’t think “not enough change” is the problem. And everyone disagrees on what “good change” would be. So the issue isn’t that “there’s no resolve”. It’s that no one agrees and there have already been lots and lots of changes. Lots of resolve to change things, sure. Leading to lots of changes. Seriously, the schools today aren’t anything like they were in the 80s or 90s. There have been whole language learning, child centered learning, learner centered learning, back to the basics, what your 5th grader needs to know, big deal multiple choice tests, tablets for all, interactive whiteboard learning, cutting recess, lengthening the school day, shortening the school day, school year round, school 4 days a week, 18 student caps… and that’s just random stuff I’ve picked up, I’m sure teachers could tell us about some technical reforms that have been passed in their subject, content, approach, teacher training, or what have you. I don’t know whether any of that stuff was good or bad or improved anything or made things worse but there has been change for sure. </p>
<p>However if we look at other countries, your solutions don’t seem to be what made them successful. Or, if you look at developed countries that made a turn around in international testings, I don’t think your solutions were what worked. What you’re suggesting is the end of public education for all (the consequence of it, even if you don’t say the words.)
You may say that just because something worked, say, in Germany or Canada or Ireland or Japan doesn’t mean it’ll work in the US.</p>
<p>Can you tell us which states have vouchers and no union? I think Georgia has no teachers’ unions but I’m not even sure. I think there was a big deal about unions in Wisconsin but I don’t remember what that was about.</p>