<p>In a former life, I spent many years in the school reform business. It is possible to reach almost every child and have them succeed. We did it, and did it where 0% of the students were at or above grade level in a K - 8 school. I will never forget rushing over to a teachers' meeting to present the year-end data, students who had never gained more than half a year academically in any given academic year had on average gained over two, with no one gaining under one. When I was finished, the principal asked if he could speak with me. He said he had bad news, the teachers had decided to go a different direction the next year. Incredulously, I asked why? He said the majority simply considered it all too much work, and he was powerless to do anything. The next year the school was right back where we found it. This scene was played out numerous times over the years. We did an Oprah. My wife now puts in her efforts abroad where teachers and students work very very hard and are actually getting even better results.</p>
<p>idad:</p>
<p>Almost everyone could get better results if willing to work 16-hour days, seven days a week. But everyone has a limit. It differs from one place to another, but there is a limit. A model that requires substantially more work from people is doomed unless there is a commensurate increase in pay, and for every erg past a certain point, it takes more and more reward to get the extra effort.</p>
<p>My wife is actually getting similar reading results in a manner that requires teachers to work less. Not surprisingly, the teachers love it.</p>
<p>idad, </p>
<p>If the problem was mostly about grade level, I would be fearless to handle it myself. I teach below grade level all the time & happily get kids to meet my expectations, which are far beyond their own (& even farther beyond their parents' expectations, sadly). </p>
<p>I'm not denying that some teachers do not want to work hard, but it has not been my experience. Teachers I know do work, and do want to work, extremely hard. It's important not to generalize about lazy teachers, because each of us has different experiences. I've met the occasional lazy teacher. But more often I meet either ill-trained teachers, well-meaning but ineffective teachres, and many, many more lazy students & parents than lazy teachers.</p>
<p>One of my jobs is administering a public homeschool program. The parents are required to do less than in any other homeschool program I know of or have taught in. Yet most of the parents will not manage the extremely few requirements we make of them. (It is a very technology-driven school.) By contrast, all of the teachers work like dogs. When we find the occasional parent who does meet their responsibility, the student makes phenomenal strides because they are guaranteed to have a professional level teacher & staff backing them up at evey step. (i.e., We work whether or not the parent works, but in our program, that could never be enough.)</p>
<p>I agree with blue. The typical classroom teacher is not in a position to buck the principal, union or no union.</p>
<p>epiphany:</p>
<p>My experience with teachers is that they're pretty much like every other group. They fall out on a bell curve for talent, work ethic, intelligence, social skills, and just about every other human trait one can name.</p>
<p>I agree with Tarhunt's Post 22, & that is precisely my point about Mother Teresa. Which one of you, in different professions (and NOT independently wealthy), consider it perfectly fine not to be paid for your work, daily, weekly, monthly? Now, I do lots of pro bono work in other educational roles, but it's astounding to me how no one questions that teachers should essentially be doing volunteer work (multiple, non-licensed roles, 16-hr. days, etc.), and should do so cheerfully & miraculously.</p>
<p>Damn right I'd "do an Oprah" if I had the means & weren't still parenting a child. I'd just do it in this country, not overseas.</p>
<p>Tarhunt, it's very possible that I meet a different quality of teacher, overall, because I do not belong to a union & have a variety of educational roles. I select with whom I work, for one thing. One of the teachers on my team is really bad, i.m.o., but because she's not very bright, & she was licensed in a very sub-par teaching program.</p>
<p>Ephiphany, for me, teachers aren't paid low. In fact, the quality teachers I've known usually agree with me. The only way teachers aren't paid well is when they're new. Then they get paid horribly. But otherwise, I'd expect a teacher getting paid 70 a year (what a 15 year veteran gets in my school district) to at least fill an emotional role for students, and grade some essays. Especially since they get 3 months of vacation.</p>
<p>I can only speak from personal experience, but what I feel is that most of the time, the teachers are horrible. It's true that sometimes the kids themselves make the teacher's life difficult, I once had a great German teacher (2 in fact) who both quit because of the students. However, I've known far more teachers that didn't know their own subjects and were completely incompetent. If we didn't pay them we'd have so much more money to spend on new teachers.</p>
<p>Haha - wow... </p>
<p>I don't quite understand why Jobs is asking this question in the education when he should really be asking this to his own company. Sure, he's key to the company's success, but seriously, he's the man that claimed that he works for a dollar a day (or something like that) and in fact was back dating his stock options.</p>
<p>WOOOOOOEEEEE!!!!</p>
<p>There are many potential impediments to learning including teachers, leadership, parents, and the kids themselves. The inability to fire teachers is one of them and IMO a major one as is the inability to pay teachers according to their performance. If forced to function with the constraints imposed by the teachers unions private businesses would fail since they'd have incompetent workers stay and good workers leave to seek higher wages. There are many excellent teachers who should be paid higher than the lower performing teachers and I would imagine these good teachers must experience frustration when they see completely incompetent teachers be able to not just stay at the school but also receive pay increases.</p>
<p>Regardless of the fact that some teachers are great and work hard the industry would clearly benefit from the ability to get rid of the low performers and reward the high performers.</p>
<p>My wife, a principal, regularly over the last 10 years takes kids in her school almost all have given up on, including special ed kids, and in a couple of years has them on track for college and academic success. She just received a heartfelt letter from a parent whose kid the public schools said was not teachable who was accepted with a full scholarship to a well-known and highly selective private HS. What is remarkable about this is not this instance, but that this is the norm. She has complete control over her teaching staff, she has let teachers go in the middle of the year. She runs continuous staff development, requires daily report cards, and accepts no excuses. Offers to help local schools, for free, go unaccepted. About 30 teachers and others a year do come for training from all over the U.S. Not much, but its something.</p>
<p>ucladad:</p>
<p>I agree. You've quoted basic equity theory. I would love it if teachers weren't simply sent on the "turkey trot" around a school district until they quit. The issue of peformance-influenced pay (there is no such thing as performance-based pay) is far more knotty.</p>
<p>Having done research in a number of large, US companies, I think I can say with some degree of confidence that practically everyone (90% +) thinks that having performance influenced pay is a good idea, and fewer than half (36% the last time I looked) believe that actually happens in their organizations. The reasons are legion, and range from traditional rater biases to restrictive systems and the influence of pure luck. Deming demonstrated this during his lifetime quite effectively, I think.</p>
<p>Education would benefit from being able to get rid of the truly awful performers, no doubt. But rewarding the "best" teachers is rather more difficult than identifying incompetence.</p>
<p>I know that I have at least one teacher that is aweful. He may know the material, but he doesn't teach it. On the other side, I have teachers that could easily teach a class, but are "not qualified" to teach it. I don't know the fix.</p>
<p>Why does a discussion forum which practically (as a whole) worships private colleges miss the obvious problem in primary and secondary education? There is no economic connection between the provider of the service -- the administration and the teachers -- and the purchaser of the service -- the parent and taxpayer. A voucher-based payment scheme with an open chioce of schools makes so much obvious sense that it could only be opposed by a lunatic bunch like the teacher's unions and entrenched public bureacracies. Even home-schooling, rarely conducted by someone with an education degree, prepares students for life better than public schools, as a whole.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Almost everyone could get better results if willing to work 16-hour days, seven days a week.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No one was asked to work longer hours, grade more homework, or work weekends. They were simply asked to teach during normally scheduled class time. My wife's school actually has a shorter school year and a normal teaching day. Kid's usually do no homework (until they are taught how to do it).</p>
<p>Absolutely no teacher I know gets 70K a year. They mainly get around 35K a year (NOT beginning teachers), including at Private pricey elegant schools. They cannot afford to live near these elegant schools. Perhaps, again, my experience is different: all the great teachers I know work for very little pay. (Already!) That's why it's extremely insulting to me that much of the public, and some of you on this thread, have the audacity to insist that the poverty-level wages we earn are too much, & that we should open schools like Oprah, do more after-hours work for free, take on multiple roles, etc. Again, who the hell are you to tell me this when you would undoubtedly never consider it for yourselves unless you are already obscenely wealthy with a generous retirement plan? (As a part-time teacher in the capacity in which I work, I have zero retirement.)</p>
<p>In my <em>service</em> educationally-related jobs -- such as Boards on which I VOLUNTEER, of course I expect no remuneration and do it for service, as service.</p>
<p>WashDad:</p>
<p>I've got an idea. I'll start a voucher-supported school aimed at a gifted student market segment. I'll market to helicopter parents, making sure to talk about the "rigor" of the curriculum and touting my guidance staff's professionalism in getting kids into the "right" colleges. Naturally, my school's standardized test scores will prove that my teachers, curriculum, administration, etc. are better than everyone else's, which will cause more parents to apply to my school. I'll take only the most able ones, of course, which will further bump my test scores.</p>
<p>Eventually, I'll be a national Blue Ribbon school, which will aid my marketing efforts tremendously. And the beauty of all this is that I don't actually have to worry about teaching all that well because my students will be so bright and motivated that practically any curriculum will do. </p>
<p>An exaggeration? Uh-uh. My youngest attends one of these schools right at this minute. The teachers aren't bad, but it wouldn't matter if they were. The kids are so gifted that you could stick them in the corner with some books and probably do about as well.</p>
<p>Interestingly, your reference to private college education disproves your point. People who were accepted at elite schools tended to do just as well when attending non-elite schools. Diamonds in, diamonds out.</p>
<p>idad:</p>
<p>You said they didn't want to work so hard. Where's the disconnect?</p>
<p>Um, Tarhunt, I sense you are disagreeing with me, but I've completely missed the point of your argument.</p>
<p>epiphany:</p>
<p>70k is pretty close to the top teacher salary in my district. I think it might be 75k, but that's for people with Ph.Ds and many, many years of experience. We're a pretty rich district. I'm not saying the poster who quoted that number was wrong, but it must be a pretty rare thing.</p>
<p>The worst thing about public schools is not the teachers, but THE KIDS. In private schools, when the kids behave horribly, they ARE GONE. It is way way WAY WAY WAY too difficult to get rid of troublesome kids in the public schools. They wreck it for everyone.</p>
<p>Teachers unions seem to have one primary goal in mind - protect teachers jobs at all costs. They oppose enabling management to get rid of poor performers, oppose paying based on (I agree - really influenced by) performance, oppose any kind of voucher system which they see as a threat since they don't want to allow people to actually have a choice, and oppose any kind of competency testing of teachers.</p>