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A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Kepler said:
Teaching is substandard because salaries are low.
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Where are you located? Teachers in NY and CT have better-than average salaries, even before you factor in their far-better-than average fringe benefit packages.

That's the problem when you generalize too broadly: it doesn't always fit the actual facts.
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Teachers on average don't get paid a lot of money from my personal experience with them. To me the biggest complaint I hear is class size. Keeping an eye on 40+ little bahstids every class is a bit much for even the best of teachers.

The problem with teacher evaluations is what people have brought up, namely the quality of students. In public schools if you get indifferent kids who only occasionally show up for class and parents who can't be bothered, why should you get sh !t canned because of that? Its not your job to parent the kids.

I'm all for teacher evaluations, but I just haven't seen a good system for ranking them over time.
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Rover said:
Teachers on average don't get paid a lot of money from my personal experience with them. To me the biggest complaint I hear is class size. Keeping an eye on 40+ little bahstids every class is a bit much for even the best of teachers.

The problem with teacher evaluations is what people have brought up, namely the quality of students. In public schools if you get indifferent kids who only occasionally show up for class and parents who can't be bothered, why should you get sh !t canned because of that? Its not your job to parent the kids.

I'm all for teacher evaluations, but I just haven't seen a good system for ranking them over time.
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Agreed that it's tough to find a good way to rank teachers. We all know who were our good teachers and bad teachers as we went through school, but to capture that in some quantifiable way is no easy endeavor.

My experience in talking to teachers is that they aren't paid a whole lot, but they aren't paid that bad. It's ok, and if as a society we valued teachers instead of athletes and other such professions, teachers would be compensated better. Undoubtedly if the job paid better, you'd see some increase in the quality of teachers, but that still wouldn't address numerous ills that hamper public education.
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Bob Gray said:
Agreed that it's tough to find a good way to rank teachers. We all know who were our good teachers and bad teachers as we went through school, but to capture that in some quantifiable way is no easy endeavor.

My experience in talking to teachers is that they aren't paid a whole lot, but they aren't paid that bad. It's ok, and if as a society we valued teachers instead of athletes and other such professions, teachers would be compensated better. Undoubtedly if the job paid better, you'd see some increase in the quality of teachers, but that still wouldn't address numerous ills that hamper public education.
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Most of the ills are centered around our insistence that everyone is equal and the same when we all know they are not.

In fact that is nothing more arrogant than legislation called "No Child Left Behind".
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Bob Gray said:
Agreed that it's tough to find a good way to rank teachers. We all know who were our good teachers and bad teachers as we went through school, but to capture that in some quantifiable way is no easy endeavor.

My experience in talking to teachers is that they aren't paid a whole lot, but they aren't paid that bad. It's ok, and if as a society we valued teachers instead of athletes and other such professions, teachers would be compensated better. Undoubtedly if the job paid better, you'd see some increase in the quality of teachers, but that still wouldn't address numerous ills that hamper public education.
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I dated a teacher a long time ago, and she was upfront about knowing that she'd never be well off, but didn't mind. Obviously an altruistic person, which maybe you could figure out if she was going out with me. ;)

Having said that, I don't get some of the solutions thrown about. I have no problem whatsoever with vouchers. The problem is, they will have an extremely small impact on the problem. In my region growing up, there were probably 10,000 public high school students (excluding the vocational schools). There were two private high schools, both Catholic, in the region. So the question becomes, how much capacity did those two schools have if you instituted vouchers, and how easy would it be to even get to these schools every morning for class even if you did get a voucher as some kids could be a good 20 miles away. I doubt those schools could take in much more than 100 kids, out of the 10,000 total in the region. Massachusetts is a pretty compact state. How would this work in Kansas or Alaska?

Same thing with unions. I really don't care about them as I don't know anybody in one. However, say you eliminate teachers unions tomorrow. How does that help in assessing who's a good teacher or not? Answer: it does nothing for that one way or the other. So what's the point? Say they're all outlawed. Is it still fair to fire teachers in classrooms with absent parents and indifferent students?
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

ScoobyDoo said:
Most of the ills are centered around our insistence that everyone is equal and the same when we all know they are not.

In fact that is nothing more arrogant than legislation called "No Child Left Behind".
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That certainly plays a part in it.

Vouchers work well if you've got an active charter school environment that provides a lot of viable options. Here in Arizona there's a lot of charter schools, at least here in the Phoenix area, so there are a lot of potential options out there. The charter schools come in all sorts of flavors, with options to choose a school that emphasizes art, a classical education, science, etc.

I think a lot of the objection to unions is that they've gotten involved in politics a good bit, which is viewed at least by some as not really part of what they should be doing in representing their teacher members. I think there is some truth to the fact that they oppose most types of reform that come around, but I agree that eliminating the unions wouldn't somehow magically make everything work well.
 
Critical Thinker said:
Spend all you want on education, but nothing will change if students continue to not pay attention in the classroom. Teachers have virtually no control over students. The disrespect shown to teachers by students is unbelievable. And what can schools do about it? Can't damage their fragile self esteem. So can they tell the parents? Doesn't do much good if dad abandoned the kid and mom is just struggling to get by. There's virtually no disincentive to breaking school rules. Unless the money is going to straightjackets, it's a complete waste. Kids are better off in a private Catholic school full of ruler-wielding nuns.
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This sounds like it was written by someone that hasn't had children go through the system yet. My sons will be in 5th and 6th grade this fall and we've yet to experience a single extraordinary experience in all these years so far.
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Slap Shot said:
This sounds like it was written by someone that hasn't had children go through the system yet. My sons will be in 5th and 6th grade this fall and we've yet to experience a single extraordinary experience in all these years so far.
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Inner city schools are insane, but they were always insane. My dad went through a predominantly Italian, segregated school system in DC in the 30's -- kids had knives, teachers were attacked from time to time, many parents didn't give a crap and blamed the teachers if there were problems. When the war economy took off in the 40s the parents got jobs and suddenly the kids calmed down and the schools were great. What a shock.

This is a classic comparison of today's reality with the sepia-toned Norman Rockwell portraits of yesteryear. There has never been a golden age in poor areas -- it has always sucked. The only difference is now we know exactly what goes on in poor areas and we're shocked at both the brutality of the life and the disinterest of the rest of the country to do anything about it. But it's always been the same.

If you improve economic conditions and fund schools well, you get great results. If you're laissez-faire about it, you get great results where the money collects and crap results everywhere else. People who come from where the money collected never want to admit this, because it calls into question their exceptionalism, but it's fact.

As for the cray-cray in schools: 98% of the drama is caused by 2% of the students. That's why reform schools were invented.
 
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You can throw all the money in the world at schools, if parents don't care, students don't care
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

walrus said:
You can throw all the money in the world at schools, if parents don't care, students don't care
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This is true, which is why any improvement has to start with serious improvement of the material conditions of the neighborhoods. People with nothing to lose act like they have nothing to lose.
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Kepler said:
This is true, which is why any improvement has to start with serious improvement of the material conditions of the neighborhoods. People with nothing to lose act like they have nothing to lose.
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Parents aren't going to care about their kids all of a sudden after a pay raise. If the kids' community improves, but their family doesn't, the kids are still screwed.
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Critical Thinker said:
Parents aren't going to care about their kids all of a sudden after a pay raise. If the kids' community improves, but their family doesn't, the kids are still screwed.
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I'm not sure what you're saying. Do you think culture is some sort of First Cause that can't be affected by other factors?

Parents naturally, biologically care about their kids. It takes a huge contrary force to counter that, and our system creates that force by pushing people into ghettos, poverty, drug abuse, and incarceration. Some of those things are addressable, and fixing them relaxes the tension in the network and allows culture to move back to where it normally resides -- supporting family.

I think you're falling into the Biological Fallacy, where culture is viewed as some sort of living organism that has its own will. That's not true at all -- a culture, like an economy, isn't really a thing at all, it's just the sum of forces brought to bear on individuals from tensions throughout society. Relax those tensions and the warping effect on individuals will dissipate.
 
Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Subscribed because you couldn't build a fence large enough to keep me out of this thread.
 
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