<p>You took the words right out of my mouth, thumper…</p>
<p>I’m pretty much NEVER on the teacher bashing side of these threads, but, well, teaching does have a pretty low bar for entry. Education has a reputation for being a fairly easy undergrad major, and is not offered at a lot of the best schools. To get into education graduate programs, you usually need a 3.0 average and a mediocre GRE score. That’s it. Try getting into a good law or med school with those stats. That doesn’t mean there aren’t loads of dedicated, very intelligent teachers, but it does means you’re going to attract a lot of fairly unimpressive candidates. My solution is tougher standards and more money for teachers, but I’m not holding my breath.</p>
<p>What I object to is “solutions” to the problem of failing schools that a) make even good teachers a scapegoat for much larger issues and b) overcorrect in ways that make it harder to attract qualified teachers and may not actually do a darn thing to help students.</p>
<p>It is possible to make it easier to fire an ineffective teacher without taking away all tenure protections. It is possible to mandate that FAILING schools adopt more stringent curricular standards without reinventing the wheel in districts that have been achieving near universal pass rates for years. It is possible to look at test scores, but also take into account the context in which those scores have been earned. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is just a symptom of a larger problem. </p>
<p>Teaching K-12, especially public and some private K-12 has become such a thankless task most topflight students and many above-average ones reject it. I know most HS classmates at my public magnet did though there are thankfully a handful of exceptions to whom I’d tip my figurative hat off to. </p>
<p>They do, however, have to put up with a lot of chickens&^t BS from both parents and educrats above them. </p>
<p>Well at least your D got crossword puzzles; mine got several word searches this year. In our state, teacher salaries are very high, and they get lots of prep time. At our high school, some teachers teach only 2 classes a day, or 3 hours. The other two periods are for lunch and prep. They can leave the building at 2:30 PM and they have their summers off. It seems to me that compensates them for any inordinate stress or thanklessness. (By the way, how often do you get thanked at work?) </p>
<p>This wasn’t intended to be a teacher bashing thread, but rather a discussion of the very real fact that there can be many school-related circumstances (as opposed to personal issues over which a student may or may not have more control) that can impact a student’s grades and there is no good way to reveal that information to colleges.</p>
<p>My kids each had a teacher or two who I was less than satisfied with. The worst was a chemistry teacher who did ONE lab the first month of school…and that was IT. Plus she never returned it to the students. You can bet that at the end of the year, I was IN the administration’s office with my kid’s “lab notebook” (which was empty) expressing my dissatisfaction with this course and teacher. The teacher was placed on administrative concern. Every lab needed to be presented to the department chairperson the following year…in a timely fashion. Students had to get their feedback prior to writing up the following lab report. She was held accountable. Good. </p>
<p>When my second kid had the same teacher, she actually taught a terrific chemistry course. </p>
<p>Or the Spanish teacher…when my kids were going to Mexico with us, they asked her if there was anything they could bring back from their trip (they were thinking Spanish newspapers or menus, or something on that order. She said “don’t eat the food. You will get poisoned.” Seriously. The admins got an earful about her as well. She retired at the end of that year, thank goodness.</p>
<p>But really, those were the exception at our school. And luckily, we had very responsive administrators!</p>
<p>Well, your oldest two got into an Ivy and Stanford, so they don’t seem to have been harmed too terribly by the incompetence of their teachers.</p>
<p>I’m not going to have a detailed argument about how much time teachers put in, because it isn’t productive.
Salaried employees aren’t generally paid based on how many hours of work they do or how strenuous the work is; they are paid by how much we value them. I will note, however, that most teachers are contractually obligated to come half an hour before school and stay a least half an hour later, so the idea that they are routinely high-tailing it out at last bell with the students is unlikely. More ludicrous is the idea that having some prep during the school day means they’re not doing work outside of school hours. </p>
<p>But if you’re right, I’m delighted to hear that teaching is such a well-compensated and well-respected profession. I’m sure that means that loads of highly qualified people will be chomping at the bit to enter it, which will solve all of your problems with poor teachers. </p>
<p>Apprenticeprof- folks aren’t paid by how much we “value” them, there is something called a labor market, and that market reflects many factors. Supply and demand being the most obvious. Neurosurgeons are paid more than nursery school teachers for a complicated set of reasons, but one of them is that it takes more than a decade to become a board certified neurosurgeon, and it takes much less training to become a nursery school teacher.</p>
<p>How much we “value” them as a society is tangential. I don’t know how much you “value” the work of an actuary for example- but if more kids decided to become actuaries, over time, the salaries would go down. The fact that right now, actuaries enjoy relatively high salaries reflect the fact that it is hard, time consuming, and requires strong mathematical skills (which are not spread widely across the population) to get certified. More people do it- salaries drift downwards (the market at play). Few people do it- salaries stay high.</p>
<p>In areas where teachers are in short supply the salaries go up. Teachers who can teach AP Physics in my area make more money than teachers who teach 3rd grade language arts. Nobody is valuing physics more than the ability to read. It just reflects market reality- most of the new teachers who apply for jobs are interested in/certified in K-8, a non-shortage area. The glut of all these teachers right now depresses salaries.</p>
<p>ESL, math and science-- get certified in a shortage area, and you will make more money than your colleagues who are certified in an area with a glut. Like any other “market”.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I guess it depends on the district. Ours wants to spend several million dollars to reroute traffic at our campuses so the buses have room to maneuver around all the teachers who routinely show up 5 minutes before the 1st bell and take off 5 minutes after the last bell. Apparently (according to our school board), asking them to arrive earlier and leave later would help alleviate the congestion and save us several million dollars (which could be funneled into programming and/or help keep our district from becoming insolvent), but it would violate contract terms to do so.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Is this in public school, Blossom? Do you mean teachers who are certified in one of those areas will get higher pay if they’re willing to go to a larger market? All our teachers are paid based on years of service, not by specialty. The physics teacher with 5 years experience earns the same as the kindergarten teacher with 5 years experience. To earn more, they’d have to move to a larger school district.</p>
<p>@Consolation, there was one bad teacher at our HS (same one), in geometry. She was REALLY bad. We went in to speak with her, and my husband had steam coming out of his ears when we left. If you knew DH, you would know how significant that was. I think she was just burned out. She’s not there anymore, thank goodness. DD had her replacement, an enthusiastic, sharp young woman who called me the other day - she wanted to discuss DD’s reintegration into the math program after her semester abroad. I was impressed! </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not around here. The low paying school districts remain low paying, but beginning teachers use these schools as a stepping stone…get experience, and move on to places where the compensation is better. Many of the low paying districts in my area have frequent openings…and even during the school year as well…because when a better position is offered to them, they leave.</p>
<p>apprenticeprof, did you read my posts? My H and I have spent hours upon hours daily teaching and re-teaching our children. Other parents in our district with more money than time have chosen instead to spend thousands on tutoring and outside classes. To suggest that the fact that my kids did well in college admissions means the teaching couldn’t have been all that bad, is plain false. My children are blessed to have parents who are willing and able to help them compensate for the school’s deficiencies. Kids are indeed being cheated, taxpayers are being cheated, and my family has been cheated of time and income due to the need for me to work unpaid to do the job other people are being paid to do. (Btw, private schools in our area are extremely expensive (due to the demand and our location), and homeschooling would have prevented them from participating in a sport they excelled at, since our state does not permit homeschoolers to compete and there are no club options for high schoolers.)</p>
<p>I read your posts. Some of what you are talking about is bad teaching, but some of what you are talking about is purely grade related; you didn’t, for instance, say anything that would indicate that your D didn’t learn the material in her science or elective classes, just that there were unfair policies that would have potentially harmed her grade. Given that you also suggest this experience is representative of what your two other kids went through, then yes, the fact that the nonetheless did very well in college admissions is relevant.</p>
<p>And sorry, unless your school district is particularly dysfunctional, I just don’t believe that the teaching in a relatively affluent suburban high school is so uniformly poor that the only way kids can come out with adequate knowledge is to supplement it with home-schooling and private tutoring.I’ll buy that a struggling or gifted student might need, respectively, more help and enrichment than someone responsible for teaching a class full of students can supply, but not that the material isn’t normally being offered in a reasonably effective manner. We’re never hearing more than one side of the story on CC, and this one seems pretty slanted. </p>
<p>I credit test scores and EC’s for their admissions success, rather than their grades which were very good but not great. </p>