Almost No Teachers In District's Low-Performing Schools Considered 'Ineffective'

Then the answer is to compete for better teachers and to train and support them better.

 

Yes.

And to get better teachers to go into teaching.

 

Geez, is that all? So simple, yet how come no one has thought of that? Brilliant!

 

That's a weird post to get pissy about.

 

Honestly, Dick, if your wife won't teach in an underperforming district, why expect others to step up?

 

I don't.

 

Let's cut wages and benefits. That ought to do it.

 

I get sick of hearing "let's get better teachers into teaching," when no one, besides raising standards to become a teacher, actually wants to do what's necessary to recruit people to the job. Such as, by creating pay and working conditions that would get more and brighter people to consider teaching. As a country, we're simultaneously asking teachers and schools to perform miracles while deriding them as layabouts who need the competition of less-trained, less-paid teachers in charter schools (preferably for-profit) to light a fire under their collective ass.

Every profession has its shit workers, and teaching is no exception. But as a country we either don't have the means or the gumption to do what it would take to improve schools for all, other than yelling at people to work harder, and testing more.

 

I'm not sure why you think I would fall into the latter paragraph and not the former.

 

Excellent post, Bob. The push to blame teachers and their unions is about nothing more than the effort to replace public education with non-union, government-subsidized private schools that generate revenue for the "venture philanthropists" who are investing in them.

 

Ding ding ding-a-ding ding.

 

I don't think it's poverty exactly. Stuyvesant High School (the New York City magnet school that admits students solely based on the results of an admission test) is filled with poor Asian kids.

But, the same problems that lead to poverty result in poor performing students.

So, kids whose parents are involved in drugs and/or crime are likely to be both poor, and poor students, with inattentive, uninvolved parents.

Single parenthood, early parenthood, and a lack of education are all contributors to poverty and to having children who are under performing students.