Comments on: Leading Off

By: Teacher's spouse

Teacher's spouse — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:34:42 +0000

Trey I have to tell you that new organizational paradigms and free market innovation have not moved us ahead. When we let free market innovators get involved what we get is No Child Left Behind which has been a miserable failure because it was just one more unfunded mandate.

The problem is that too many like you would rather buy into the false notion that our edcuation system is terribly broken as opposed to looking at how well it works in so many areas… or failing to demand that the education bureaucracy actually put some money into making the effort to address the drop out problem as opposed to noodling the books to hide it.

By: Trey Garrison

Trey Garrison — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:36:21 +0000

Teacher’s spouse, the reliance on that dated model is like thinking all businesses should follow the 1948 IBM model. There’s just no need given available resources, technology, new organizational paradigms and a little free market innovation. Horace Mann’s day is way past.

By: John

John — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:06:30 +0000

Daniel: I don’t think so. Bright, self-motivated kids tend to do well even under less than ideal circumstances. The reverse — giving the excellent teachers to the excellent kids, and not so hot teachers to the not so smart kids — almost certainly assures an ever-widening gap between the excellent and the not so much.

By: Teacher's spouse

Teacher's spouse — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:31:57 +0000

Trey that 19th Century Prussian, government monopoly model got us to the moon and created the internet…. something which will be highly questionable in the future given our eagerness to teach kids how to take THE TEST as opposed to educating them… the real problem is that education reform has made things worse, not better.
As to your claim of built-in assumptions, you must be lining up with the people who say the fix is not to throw more money at it…. if education were adequately funded in the first place I would agree, we have done a pitiful job of funding education from the very beginning. The only thing that is less of a funding priority in Texas is mental health, but we’ve got plenty of money to build prisons.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:26:50 +0000

Well John, it’s a Catch-22. On the other hand, it seems excellence would be better fostered by challenging the bright kids. The system you describe seems to “condemn” them to mediocrity.

By: John

John — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:41:05 +0000

Daniel, in many schools teachers are assigned precisely as per your question. Those perceived as the “best” teachers get the kids who need the most help; the kids who need less help get those teachers who are not so highly regarded. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are the “worst,” it may simply indicate that they may have the least experience, or lesser qualifications. That’s really not such a bad system, if you think about it. The “best” teachers may well lift those students out of the remedial ranks; doing the opposite could well condemn them to continued struggles.

By: brian

brian — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:14:25 +0000

how about instead of meaningless test scores, you let students (graduating only) vote on which teachers deserve merit pay. or are high standardized test scores more important than making a positive impact on somebody’s life?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:12:37 +0000

BP, I’m disturbed by your statement that the best teachers should be teaching the toughest students. Who, then, should be teaching the smartest students — the worst teachers?

By: John

John — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:54:53 +0000

I’m with Rev. Hayter’s first comment. There’s nothing wrong with merit pay in concept, the problem comes in defining “merit” by tying it to testing. I grew up in a family of teachers and there are plenty of other ways to measure “merit.” As BP suggests, one could attempt to measure the improvement of individual students from year to year. One could also measure things like preparation (are lesson plans complete and timely submitted); involvement in school activities/events; etc. Administrators might even observe teachers from time to time to determine how well those teachers are performing (subjective, yes, but so many “merit” evaluations necessarily are).

By: Trey Garrison

Trey Garrison — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:53:09 +0000

Actually, most responses have so many built-in assumptions it’s like they’re answers to questions on a different test.

So long as we’re locked into the 19th Century Prussian, government monopoly model that presumes education is something other than a service, we’ll never see any true change or serious improvement.