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Bizarro Kanyon posted:I guess I was wondering what the Teach for America set up is all about. Teach for America lures in college grads with flowery idealism, gives them one month of educational training, and then sends these barely-trained kids to the worst schools in the nation to carry out a two-year teaching commitment for a salary that's low even by teachers' standards. Once they've worked the two years in a lovely school for lovely pay, they have a high chance of quitting teaching, if they didn't already burn out or have a breakdown during the two years. Not to worry, though, as they'll just be replaced by another fresh-faced barely-trained TFA teacher. Some school districts have even taken to saving money by firing their decently-paid experienced teachers (whose experience is included in their salary, and who are likely union) and replacing them with amateur TFA grads who have so little qualification to teach that the district can get away with paying them less than entry-level.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:07
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Luigi Thirty posted:Wait you're telling me there's teachers that are paid even worse than recent grads? My friend just got a teaching position at a low-income elementary school and she had to put up an Indiegogo page to pay for classroom supplies for gently caress's sake. TFA grads are paid by the school district, not TFA, so salaries vary, but since they've got no teaching experience at all and less teaching education than even the entry-level-est of entry-level teachers, their pay is often less than that of real teachers. On discipline, remember that the US is loving huge and has an absolute ton of schools, and that our system is so decentralized and fragmented that even the basic curriculum isn't really consistent from school to school. There's no single universal same way that discipline is enforced in every single US school; punishments and policies are often decided differently by each school. TFA is authoritarian as heck because, be honest, you can't learn to really handle a class in five weeks; it's faster and easier to learn to order kids to march in lockstep and apply collective punishment to any behavior than it is to actually train teachers on how to really handle misbehavior.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:54
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The problem with teacher assessment isn't the standards or methodology, it's the actions taken based on the results of the assessments. The dominant forces in school reform policy right now don't want to assess teachers in order to help them improve, they want to assess teachers so that they can fire a bunch of "bad teachers". It's not too much different from how No Child Left Behind addresses failing schools by cutting their funding and then firing all the staff. As long as reform policy is centered around punishment rather than helping to improve, teachers are going to resist teacher assessment to their dying breath, because it's being pushed in order to hurt them rather than help them.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:30
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Slobjob Zizek posted:I think the narrative lot union-busting/teacher resentment/etc. is implicitly tied to the idea that the profession of teaching (or medicine or the academy or whatever) has some intrinsic value. But does it? Do teachers really "know what's best for their classroom"? Can you explain how firing experienced teachers and replacing them with poorly-trained fresh-faced interns will somehow fix social issues or improve the lot of students? I'm not saying that teachers "know what's best for the classroom"; after all, the original topic of this thread was largely about how teachers are failing to properly adapt to new teaching styles thought to be more effective. I'm saying that rather than addressing those problems and helping teachers to improve their teaching style and fix their problems, most "reform" attempts primarily concern themselves with firing and replacing teachers every year till test scores go up. In addition to completely ignoring the non-teacher-related factors in education and being unlikely to actually have a positive impact on teaching quality, it turns teachers into a reactionary group by teaching them that "education reform" is just a code-word for "screwing over teachers".
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Jul 29, 2014 17:42
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Slobjob Zizek posted:How would you run things differently, given these constraints? It would be as if you ran Subway at the corporate-level and franchisees were free to use your branding and products, but turn down certain directives as they saw fit. Obviously, this would lead to some Subway locations being shittier than others, and the brand might sag as a whole. Maybe great for certain franchisees, but not for the whole company. Same thing happens with US education as a whole and the individual schools that is composed of. How about increasing the amount of federally-provided mandatory training to go along with the new curriculums being sent out? Regardless of which Subway location you work at, Subway requires all newly-hired franchise employees to go through a corporate-run online training program. Subway employees are also required to follow certain procedures and policies, and inspectors from both Subway corporate and the government are regularly sent to Subway locations to ensure that employees are following government rules and Subway policies, ranging from "wash your hands after you take out the trash" to "put the right amounts of food on people's sandwiches and follow the corporate recipes". It's not at all difficult for a centralized authority to influence semi-autonomous locations not under their direct control.
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Jul 30, 2014 20:12
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