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Leperflesh posted:I'll take San Francisco's brand of smug and insufferable yuppies over Texas's brand of poo poo-kicking, wannabe-cowboy, hyper-Nationalist, bible-thumping racist conservatism every day of the week. I won't deny San Francisco has a lot of terrible people, but at least our terrible people aren't joyfully electing governors that execute more prisoners annually than the rest of the country combined - including the mentally disabled - and are proud of that fact. Many Texans aren't the bible-thumping cowboy racists, that's just the countryside. If you look at pretty much any political map of Texas, you can see where the divides lie. The cities all vote Democratic, everywhere else is Republican. There are other issues in the Texas cities, but too many rednecks generally isn't one of them.
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May 16, 2014 15:38
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AshB posted:My disclaimer is that I don't know much about these issues, so I'm just asking questions out of genuine curiosity here. I don't think the legal reasoning in that opinion is very strong, but if it's upheld, why would it be a bad thing to pass legislation with more objective criteria for firing teachers rather than basing it on seniority? I mean I guess the "objective criteria" they would look at first is test scores, but would it be so bad if they forewent looking at test scores and used other criteria for assessing teachers? Seniority seems pretty arbitrary too. From my own experience working within these educational reform movements, it doesn't really come down to firing the ineffective teachers. The older teachers get run out on a rail, generally targeted aggressively by administrators from the beginning of the school year. After that, everyone that doesn't fit the mold gets the axe. Once you start getting 50% turnover within a school year after year, it's very easy for administration to sort of break the preexisting culture of a school and replace it with something else. It usually seems to come down to culture rather than student achievement. An older teacher with successful students will get run out long before a younger, more tech saavy teacher with unsuccessful students, in large part because the upper level administrators (district managers) will be walking classrooms looking for specific styles of teaching and for compliance with district initiatives rather than actually looking at test scores. Now, at the end of the year, your pay adjustment for next year may be based on those test scores (and things like student surveys to see if the kids liked you).
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Jun 11, 2014 18:19
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FilthyImp posted:So the question to ask is, why does the lawsuit look to punish bad teachers, instead of find ways to promote the actions of good teachers? You've gotta be careful with this too, because often the reform movements try to conceal their punishment-oriented regimes by couching them in vocabulary that claims to promote good teaching. For example, the Teacher Excellence Initiative in Dallas ISD is a program designed to alter the pay scales for teachers. Rather than basing pay on years served and education level, it will be based on performance evaluations, student test scores, and student surveys. When discussing this initiative, proponents will carry on about how the top end of the TEI scale allows for skilled teachers to make far more money in a shorter time period than the previous system, which ideally would encourage skilled teachers to work for the district. You dig a little deeper and you realize that there are quotas on each level of pay, and the top several categories combined have a quota of 2% of the teachers in the district. Beyond that, it requires numerous observations from people who are rating you based on adherence to district rhetoric rather than any real achievement. Realistically, hardly anyone is going to reach those high pay levels, and thus the carrot part of the initiative is an illusion.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:26
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Northjayhawk posted:As far as your objections to cutting the worst teachers, we can't wave our hands and say thats not important right now, the courts are still going to insist that "grossly incompetent" teachers not be lumped into the poor schools due to equal protection concerns. The only reasonable way to do that is to somehow make it reasonably possible to fire those teachers. Poor schools often have the highest numbers of emergency and alternative certification teachers working in them (as well as TAs given classrooms like full teachers). An emergency or alternative certification usually means you have a bachelor's degree (in anything), you get trained for 0-14 days, then are placed in a classroom and called a teacher. At the end of the year, if your principal signs off on your certification, you become a full, qualified teacher. Why would a poor school want a completely unknown, untrained teacher? Well, if the prospective teacher requires your signature at the end of the year, then they're under your thumb. If you're in it for ideology, that's ideal. If you can't find any candidates because, as part of a reform movement, you've fired off tons of teachers and everyone is running scared, then it may just be your only option. I question how many of these grossly incompetent teachers aren't trained teachers at all, but rather random people with degrees that wanted to play at teacher and got the opportunity to because the districts can't find anyone qualified to do the job.
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Jun 12, 2014 17:26
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Smythe posted:Dude, I'm sorry but this is freaking insane. Like, I get that it's possible - but I don't anticipate people spinning up a TMNT Foot Clan style subterranean factory lair to manufacture their diabolical weaponry. All of these mass shooting guys seem to try and make bombs and poo poo, although they rarely seem to get anything effective. That's way harder and way riskier than ammo making.
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Aug 3, 2016 01:15
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