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It's almost like these administrators hesitate to lay off teachers and stuff kids in classes of 40. Ridiculous!!!!! These administrators should be excited to get rid of teachers and have huge class sizes. School administrators need to realize that budgets are way more important than kids. It really is as easy as Tidesoftruth, cman, justsaynottonewtaxes, and jbird say it is. They've done extensive research on this and know that every dollar spent by a school district is wasteful.
I believe lawyers would make better doctors than people in the medical profession. I believe philosophy professors would make better plumbers. I believe professional(not college) football coaches would make better counselors than psychologists.
It's simple...I just believe that no one in their own profession is competent...besides myself. I'm not being arrogant, I just think everyone in this world does a crappy job...other than me.
To begin with, teachers salaries have been essentially frozen over the last couple years. No one has received merit pay. I teach across the hall from someone who had 98% of his kids pass the ISTEP- he didn't get any merit pay.
Furthermore, most teachers feel merit pay was never meant to reward good teachers. Instead, most feel it was meant to disguise the real goal of the salary restructuring done at the state-level... saving money. The state didn't want to say "we want to pay teachers less", it wanted to say.."we want to pay good teachers more." In reality, judging by the way merit pay has been implemented, a few teachers(10%?) will make what they would have made before the new laws. Most will make far less. Merit pay was really just a way to freeze everyone's salary for a couple years and save money.
While I do understand the need for fiscal responsibility, most teachers get irritated because they feel merit pay was about paying teachers less, not about rewarding good teachers.
You continually label teachers as "the least educated laziest group of people" and compare their exam scores to engineers and other professions that pay more. I know you're a huge fan of competition, but a teacher's salary doesn't compare to an engineer's.
So what's your solution to the "stupid teacher problem"?
Pay them less? Make their jobs harder? The "reform" solution to education is to get the best teachers in the classroom. They then lower the pay, increase the class size, and add on bureaucratic tasks(See RISE evaluation). Explain to me how this solution will get a talented 20-year-old to pursue the teaching profession rather than go into business? And since you are a huge fan of statistics, I should point out that colleges in Indiana have seen their education school enrollment drop to their lowest levels in 5 years. The reform movement, if it continues, will lead to a talent drain in education.
To clarify- I'm not arguing that teachers should be paid like engineers. I'm not even opposed to adding on days in a school year or a longer school day. As a teacher, I think these reforms might be beneficial to kids. However, the Bennett/Daniels policies in education (bigger class sizes, lower teacher pay, and maniacal emphasis on standardized tests) will not help kids. It's amazing to me that these people can be seen as experts in the field of public education when their policies show they really just don't care.
There is some truth to idea that Bennett's loss was partly due to his brashness. I can understand people's concern that this was a popularity contest. However, teachers didn't feel Bennett was asking a lot from them, they felt he was setting them up for failure so he could justify his(and Mitch's) agenda. And no one was remotely convinced that Bennett was "in it for the kids".
It should be also be pointed out that administrators seemed to hate Bennett every bit as much as teachers. And...administrators are not big fans of the teachers union. While the teachers union did play a role in organizing opposition, Bennett's loss was caused by more than just union politics. Let's not forget that the union opposes the vast majority of the people who were elected two days ago. To act as though it's just a case of union mobilization would be an oversimplification.
Exactly why are these comments allowed on your website? They have been up for 5 days now, and they are clearly about as offensive as they get.