<p>After 26 years working at all K-12 levels I can see both sides. There are teachers who get their tests on line or from a book & never bother to check if they’ve covered everything on the test before giving it, & even when they realize they haven’t, don’t curve the grades to make up for their mistake. However, with all the negative publicity with education it is easy now to blame the teachers, which absolves all responsibility from the student & parent. When people complain about our high school my response is: “We have students who do well enough to get into Ivy league colleges & others that don’t make it out of 9th grade. Same teachers, same curriculum…what is the difference?” …obviously the student & the home they come from.</p>
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<p>Spot on. The way to measure teacher performance is by the highest ranked kids, not the median or the lowest ranked. My only gripe against the US public education system is the low bar. The curriculum can be made much more difficult. Kids can be asked to do far more work. Exams can be made far more rigorous. A national exam at the end of grade 12 wouldn’t hurt either.</p>
<p>Approximately two thousand high schools (about 12 percent of American high schools) produce more than half of the nation‘s dropouts. In these dropout factories, the number of seniors enrolled is routinely 60 percent or less than the number of freshmen three years earlier. </p>
<p>Eighty percent of the high schools that produce the most dropouts can be found in a subset of just fifteen states. The majority of dropout factories are located in northern and western cities and throughout the southern states.</p>
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<p>Mind-boggling!</p>
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Would you judge doctors by the patients who are already healthy?</p>
<p>Really, the kind of kids whose parents post on CC don’t get the really bad teachers–or at least, they don’t have them very long. We may get some teachers who aren’t great, but it’s the kids who need the most help who get the truly bad teachers (as well as a few great ones, of course–but it’s not the system that puts them there).</p>
<p>And I bet 80 percent (or more) of those “dropout factories” are located in the most economically-depressed, ethnically-diverse and poorly-funded school districts.</p>
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<p>No, but if I wanted to go back to school tomorrow, I would prefer to go to MIT even though most kids in the general population would flunk out of MIT if admitted.</p>
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<p>I agree. But the reason these kids need the most help is cause the parents are not doing their duty.</p>
<p>There is a lot of truth on both sides of this argument. </p>
<p>I would observe, however, that many teachers seem to enjoy the task of evaluating the children rather than teaching them. And it follows that they loathe the idea of being on the receiving end of evaluations…especially on objective criteria. </p>
<p>I’m not sure what the solution is. I have privately noted that many of our teachers would be fired if they were subjected to the same level of weekly testing that applies to our football coach. (After about 5-6 weeks anyone can readily discern the relative level of the teams’ preparedness.) That observation is complicated by the fact that you only need one head coach, but you need dozens of teachers…and its not easy to figure out which ones will be good ones on the way in.</p>
<p>From a parental point of view, the school has my children from 6:30 when they leave the house until 3pm or so. I have them after sports practices and their obligatory homework of posters and powerpoints or whatever. There is precious little time left to rectify what’s done at school which is certainly one reason that parents are so concerned about school quality when they choose their residence. Its also part of the reason that some parents prefer homeschooling.</p>
<p>“From a parental point of view, the school has my children from 6:30 when they leave the house until 3pm or so. I have them after sports practices and their obligatory homework of posters and powerpoints or whatever. There is precious little time left to rectify what’s done at school which is certainly one reason that parents are so concerned about school quality when they choose their residence. Its also part of the reason that some parents prefer homeschooling.”</p>
<p>…the home a student comes from is significantly more important in the areas of: work habits, value of education, character, honesty, etc. than what school the student attends!! “Rectify” what’s done at school? As I said in a previous post…In my daughters class they had students accepted to Ivy league schools and those who never made it past 9th grade…same teachers, curriculum, administration…what is the difference? Parents are WAY too focused on “school quaility” and underestimate their influence, be it good or bad, on their own kids.</p>
<p>Quote:
The way to measure teacher performance is by the highest ranked kids, not the median or the lowest ranked. </p>
<p>Would you judge doctors by the patients who are already healthy?</p>
<p>Or better yet, do you blame the doctor every time a patient gets sick, or dies? No. But I take great offense to ranking teachers by the highest performing students. Honestly, in my son’s case, he is where he is in spite of many teachers and the school system, not because of them. We have spent much money toprovide my son with opportunities out side of the school to make up for their shortcomings. That includes tutors that can teach subjects that teachers at our HS can’t. Including AP calc and AP physics. Why? Because no one in his school ever recieved a score higher than a 3 on those tests. He has the potential to learn those subjects, but not the ability to learn alone. So we hired tutors, and he did great. The rest of the class did not. So, is it the teacher, or the students? In these cases, it is definately the teachers. And the messed up system.</p>
<p>“And the messed up system”??? In the areas of higher level math & science it is VERY difficult to find teachers that are as bright as the top students they are teaching (in those subject areas). If they were truely superior in those areas they would have majored in careers that are much higher paying (engineers, chemists, Phd’s, etc.). n addition, even those who are gifted in these subjects may not be good teachers because great communication skills (needed to be a great teacher) are not needed to be a great student of calc. & physics.</p>
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I guess I would say that, to me, the way to measure teacher performance is their effect on MY kid. This is something I can observe, and it is certainly not the same for every teacher.
Once again, if this is the only factor that matters, what do we need teachers for? Why can’t we just have older kids do the teaching? It’s just not that black and white.</p>
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<p>So it’s the job of the school to make sure the easy-to-teach kids get into the Ivy League schools, and as for the rest of them, let’s blame it all on the parents?</p>
<p>Why not? McDonald’s needs people too.</p>
<p>If the not-so-easy-to-teach kids had parents who were worried about the prospect of a McJob and got involved, the kids would become easy-to-teach as well.</p>
<p>There is a middle school band teacher near here that is pretty much uniformly disliked by the students. He is very harsh, pushes kids to switch instruments in order to get a broader sound, etc., etc. But the band sounds really good, because he focuses a lot on intonation and makes the kids practice. Is he a good teacher? In some ways, yes–kids who are serious about music improve under him–and he pushes them to get private teachers. But for kids who are less serious about music, and see it as an extra enrichment-type activity, he’s not so good. Because it’s no fun, a lot of them quit. I mention this because I think the issue of whether a teacher is good or bad is complicated.</p>
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<p>And let’s sentence the kids whose parents were deficient to a lifetime of McJobs. Not to mention what effect on the economy of a vast, poorly educated underclass. And by “underclass” I’m not just talking about minority, inner-city conditions. Out here in bucolic rural America, we’re throwing away countless lives with our underfunded, crummy public education system. </p>
<p>The system of free, mostly good public education for everyone was the prime mover in creating the American century. Our abandonment of that so that we can consume, consume, consume, is the prime mover in creating the Chinese century.</p>
<p>There is no way to educate kids if the parents are not helping. Who do you think is out consuming, consuming, consuming? The parents.</p>
<p>Haven’t read the whole thread but here’s one story:</p>
<p>S2 had a 4th grade teacher who never gave hw. Ever. DS had lovely grades all year. Towards the end of the year DS told us he was having trouble with math. For 5th grade he was placed in the lowest math class in middle school. We hopped on the band wagon and taught him at home and he popped in standing and landed in honors math in H.S.</p>
<p>Now. We take responsibility for not having noticed there was poor teaching underway in 4th grade. However it took the placement in 5th grade for us to really notice how bad the teaching had been since DS was always given good grades.</p>
<p>The effect of that 4th grade teacher lasted until 8th grade.</p>
<p>We as parents corrected the situation. Had we not been attentive DS would have continued on low math track where he was so bored he became so inattentive the teacher thought he might be impaired. !!!</p>
<p>I have an interesting perspective in that I coordinate the foreign exchange students at our school. As a result I get to hear their take on our educational system as oppossed to theirs. In my years of doing this we’ve had students from Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, China, Japan, Demark, Brazil, Peru, Norway, & Mexico. A common theme is their feeling that our teachers were more personable & willing to motivate students. They viewed their home country teachers as being more “stand and deliver”. They are very surprised when they hear about parents & students complain about teachers and the school & feel it is the students responsibility to learn. However one important difference in systems is that in their countries less serious students are “weeded out” before they get to high school. They are tracked into vocational or trade schools and “basic” schools when in middle school. I really think that in the US we have overestimated the “everybody is going to need a college degree to get a good job” mantra. Yes our schools are failing some of the kids, mainly those who do not have the ability to be 4 year college student but we are telling them everyone has to take classes preparing them to be one. Just take a look at the jobs listing on Craigslist. There are hundreds of jobs listed daily in every city that do not require a 4 year college degree, but one could make a living doing.</p>
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<p>That’s simply not true. There are many examples of schools in high-poverty, low-education-rate neighborhoods that overcome those factors and provide a sound education to a high percentage of their students. Unfortunately, there are many more schools in high-poverty, low-education-rate neighborhoods where the so-called “professionals” peddle the excuse, “it’s all the parents’ fault and there’s nothing we can do about it” instead of doing the very hard work of overcoming the barriers.</p>
<p>Is it easier to educate kids whose parents are educated themselves and involved with their kids’ education? Absolutely. But if you want an easy job, you should not go into public education. Unfortunately, for the last 40 years we have been drawing the majority of our public school teachers from the bottom 25% of the barrel of college graduates, and excuse-making rather than hard work has become the norm in far too many schools.</p>