FWIW, I don't think that's a fair assessment of the thread as a whole. There's been disagreement and/or differing opinions on a number of things. More recently, though, I guess it has been fairly "pro-teacher".

This may still be true in the USA. It's not true in other countries.

This is true. Even in the highly paid NYC DoE district, there is a lot of turnover at the worse schools. At better schools, it's not unusual for there to be zero permanent opening (you'll find openings for stuff like maternity leave way more often) for a few years in a row.

And this is part of why the process of "Excessing" gets such a visceral reaction. Despite what it may sound, teachers don't get fired when they are "excessed." They are reassigned to a different school in the district. There have been excessed teachers that just quit NYC DoE altogether instead of accepting the new assignment. Some is because the new school is very difficult to commute to and some are just like "I can't teach there."

The pay to US teachers is extremely uneven. NYC DoE, LA DoE, Chicago DoE, and many suburban districts compensate their teachers well but you also have places like Oklahoma that don't pay their teachers anything close to a livable wage.

yeah. here as soon as you get recognized for being a good/great teacher you use that name recognition to move to Texas.


but that can happen everywhere. like my father and mother were both public school teachers, they taught at districts that touched each other, my father had less years than my mother because he was a police officer before becoming a teacher made something like 25k more than my mom when both at the max, because they were different districts in different states.

In general, there is way too much fascination with in the US with "elite" universities and prep schools. The whole country is littered with top notch universities with faculty and grad students far superior to average Harvard/Princeton/Yale undergrads. That's obvious, but seems lost on a segment of the upper class.

This Bari Weiss article, that almost reads like a parody of a Bari Weiss article, is pretty funny. It talks about how parents disagree with some of the curriculum at Harvard-Westlake, the best prep school in LA and one of the best in the country, but are afraid to speak out for fear their kids might end up at a substandard dining club at Princeton .

A lot of funny quotes, but one I thought was interesting

We don't know if the "decenter whiteness" thing is this upperclassmen's own analysis, but not calling them Newton's Laws seems like a good idea!

Robert Hooke, Galileo, Kepler and other all either discovered them independently or influenced Newton. And while there is no denying Newton's contributions, he also had his Trinity College mafia making sure his achievements were celebrated even to the expense of others. If the lesson that kids are coming away with is "there's more than just Newton in physics"..... that seems like a good thing. This is an ongoing problem. It's sort of ridiculous we call it the Higgs boson when it could easily be called be the Higgs-Anderson-Weinberg-Nambu etc boson.

Seems like stupid revisionist nonsense written by ignoramuses. It's as dumb as claiming Hilbert discovered the gravitational action.

I'll defer to your obvious expertise on stuff written by ignoramuses, but it's not remotely the same. Galileo wrote about how friction is what causes objects in motion to slow down before Newton was even born.

Oh man, I hear dumb people telling me this all the time, I hate it.

I think this is a bad take. I'm dating a teacher and while she makes a "livable" wage it's damn sure not enough to get ahead. The benefits are solid but by no means "world class" even working for one of the better schools in Los Angeles. She's working 10-12 hours a day too, so the hourly wage is pretty low and even with lots of time off in the summer she's still logging way more hours than most people. They may not have had the proverbial rug swept out from under them but I'd wager a rounds-to-zero percentage of teachers foresaw the job becoming as pervasive as it has during the pandemic. Parents and students calling or texting on nights and weekends is a regular occurrence. Frustration is taken to another level when you're dealing with early-20s parents who can't take care of themselves -- much less their kids -- over text message. It's awful. You're right that they don't need a pity party - they need (and deserve) much more than that.

If anything other developed nations have it much better.

Do parents really message their children's teachers?

I doubt my parents knew any of my teacher's names let alone had access to their private phone number

Yes. Or email them. But that is often encouraged, as parent-teacher communication is a lot more common now than it was when we all went to school.

Is there any benefit?

I've always held the belief that teachers are irrelevant to a student's learning but maybe that's just me

If the kid wants to learn they will learn

The material is all the same anyways

Having a class full of kids that want to learn with a **** teacher is better than the reverse

To me Always easier to learn with someone you appreciate aka teacher , shrug .

Wow. I sure hope it is.

That sounds like a truism if ever there was one. But...why do they want to learn? Their entire learning environment will have a huge impact on that.

The 1970s education system called; they wanted to thank you for keeping their dream alive.

Neither is good, but absent outside factors, neither is likely. Unfortunately, the latter is made possible if the kids aren't getting what the need outside the school, which is why schools sometimes find themselves trying to fill those gaps as well.

she would have known all these things long before getting into it, random and unknown hours are known - yes it's been exacerbated via pandemic but then again you could argue a lot on professions are adversely impacted regarding quality of life and this is nothing unique to teaching

you also gotta be aware, as a boyfriend, you are her default sounding board where she gets to dump all her work related stress upon so you're going to hear all the complaints and only some of the rest

but point is nearly all of that she would have known about before deciding to get into it - nobody tricked her, nobody led her to believe once the bell rung her time was up and she could hit the beach

that's my point, most people don't like their jobs, wish they had more money, had a better benefits package, had a more attractive partner, bigger house etc - i think a lot of these complaints are standard complaints you'd hear if she worked any profession but it gets filtered via the cookie cutter "teachers got it so hard" trope

yes, teachers are underpaid when compared to what they could earn leveraging the same educational input into another career output - i'm not arguing that - but they knew this ahead of time and chose that path anyway

what about all those poor college grads serving up lattes? what about all the poor poker players who went busto? remove the virtue signaling of supporting education and this notion becomes another blase "x people don't get enough y" which can easily be argued for most of society

thread still pointless

Are you bringing a more BFI 'libertarian' view of education to this forum?

Your view seems painfully naive.

To the latter point of course motivated students are always best but ignoring the nature of kids and disruption a few can bring to the masses and the role a good teacher can play in helping them focus and bringing compelling material and methods to the class so they will be willing to commit is just foolishness.

There have been countless documented examples highlighted in tough teaching areas such as the various inner cities, were good teachers and staff can turn an under performing class/school into a top performing one.

The factor there is not that they just went out and found a bunch of 'motivated students' and is because they got good/committed and talented teachers who could harness them allowing those who were motivated a forum they could actually apply themselves.

You would only get a comparatively tiny percent of students who could rise above and still succeed in Libertopia and excel despite the lack of structure around them all the while those in wealthy areas would be availing themselves of structured classes, prep schools, tutors, etc while extolling their bootstrapping and how it is merely their 'desire to learn' that makes the difference, thus give those other kids no other considerations.

You has shitty teachers, I’m afraid.

Very old video on why low-income students drop out of college more than those of higher income, even after adjusting for academic achievements and test scores. Saw the video today and realized almost everything in the video applies kids who ended in private schools on scholarships.

I don't see how you could possibly believe this if you ever went to school yourself.

I didn't even know school district secession was a thing. The NIMBY is strong.

Related article
https://www.vox.com/2019/9/6/2085309...isiana-alabama

How is this NIMBY? These schools are almost certainly already "segregated" but they want the ability to control their own curriculum and tax referendums and whatnot.

The bigger districts care not because of the potential impact on students, but the impact on their stats once those schools are no longer included in their averages.

Just wait until the ramifications of losing nearly two years of education catch up with some of these poor districts. How many hundreds of thousands of kids from already disadvantaged backgrounds are being shoved forward to the next grade after having effectively not participated in school since the lockdowns?

What could go wrong?

Simple solution would be to fund every school in a state the same, on a per student basis, with some supplementary funding for unique needs. Purely from an educational perspective, equal federal funding would be even better, but I assume that would be a complete non-starter.

Of course, this is far from simple to implement with an existing system that favours the wealthy and influential. But the current system is completely ****ed up. Pretty obvious that funding small districts primarily/strictly from property taxes would lead to inequities, and this district seccesion is complete nonsense.

That's insufficient. In a lot of districts, the problem schools already get more money.

I think that's pretty close to how it is already, though maybe not in every state.

If you look at the per-pupil spending for big city shitty districts like Milwaukee, Chicago, and Atlanta, they generally spend much more than the nearby affluent districts. State funding formulas favor the underperforming districts.

Look at how crazy the discrepancy is in Georgia, for instance: https://apsinsights.org/2019/02/13/2...-finance-data/

Milwaukee is undeniably terrible, but outspends all of the suburban districts here except Nicolet Unified District, which is actually just a single high school for the rich northern suburbs and they wear their per-pupil spending like a badge of honor.

If you equalized funding, the performance gaps would probably only increase. It's nauseating to see how often that trope about property tax discrepancies makes it into supposedly serious articles on problems in urban school districts.

Those big tax referendums go toward fancy auditoriums and football stadiums out in the suburbs.