Whoever came up with the concepts of pensions and tenure - wow, that guy must have been some kind of BS artist

OK, how do we rate a teacher whose class is made up of neglected children versus a teacher whose class is made up of nurtured children.

Let me ask another simple question - how shall we pro-rate progress made for a student whose IQ is in the 80s versus one whose IQ is over 130? Should both show exactly one year's academic progress? And if they don't, perhaps because they've both begun to use drugs, what penalty should be exacted against their teacher?

hey qwerty, that wasn't the choice the previous poster mentioned. The choice is 3 teachers with 0 years experience or 2 teachers with decades of experience. The question is irrelevant as you want the best teacher for your children and experience does not equal success.And to the second poster of the thread who stated that workers have too many rights in todays workplace, please keep your dumb-ass ignorant comments to yourself, and if I had to guess you work in HR somewhere. Whoever convinced companies that higher boatloads of HR people was a good idea should be shot. They out monkey-f*^k IT and that is saying something.

asdfasdfasdasdfasdfasdfa wrote:

I would rather have my kid taught by 3 teachers each with 10 years of experience than 2 teachers with 30 years each since the class size would be a lot less (20 instead of 30). Your couple bucks is more like 50% and experience after a while (5-10 years in most professions) is overvalued.

When thinking about my school teachers, experience had pretty much nothing to do with quality. There were good teachers who were about 25 and mid 50s and bad ones that were 60 and 30.

new toys wrote:

SO, by all means, yank tenure and pensions from the teaching contract. I just hope you're ok with recent college grads with no experience teaching your children K-12, just to save a buck or two.

Without reading the other threads:

At any level, tenure gives you the right for due process if you are to get fired. If you are tenured, people must go through a process to show that you deserve to be fired. Unfortunately, many times this prohibits underperforming people from being fired. As somebody already mentioned, tenure does protect established people from being let go to be replaced by somebody who costs less.

Tenure at the college level = giving professors the freedom to pursue research without harrasment and the threat of being fired. If you are doing some weird controversial research that your higher ups don't like, tenure protects you from professionally being punished for doing so.

Tenure at the school level = encourages teachers to stay in a school district continuously and not be looking for a new opportunity in another school district at every opportunity. This provides stability.

Teaching IS different. It happens in the public eye. How often does someone start a thread here demanding that incompetent garbage collectors or cops be weeded out and fired? But you see this sort of thing all the time about teachers because nearly everyone in the world eventually becomes a parent of a schoolkid and many if not most of those parents will at some point get upset enough at a particular teacher that they'll complain about that teacher and possibly demand that the teacher be fired.

Want to teach evolution in a biology class in the Bible Belt? You may really need tenure no matter how competent you are. Want to teach anything if you're identified as a solid conservative in a really liberal school district or as a real liberal in a very conservative school district and you may need tenure no matter how competent you are.

In any profession there are always going to be people who are really good at what they do, most who'll be mediocre and some who aren't all that good. Get rid of your "bottom" tenth and replace them and there will still be a bottom tenth who someone will want to replace.

Teachers can be fired. Yes, it's a lot harder to do than it is to fire a grocery store clerk, but it can happen. And yes, teacher's unions will support and defend any teacher who is danger of being fired. That's what unions do regardless of one's occupation.

Correct. Most people, including apparently the OP, don't know what the majority of a university professor's job consists of... it's not teaching. Teaching doesn't normally have a significant impact on being awarded tenure; professors aren't hired because of their ability to teach. Discussions about tenure are certainly valid but certainly not if all they talk about is teaching.

Tenure-track wrote:

Tenure at the college level = giving professors the freedom to pursue research without harrasment and the threat of being fired. If you are doing some weird controversial research that your higher ups don't like, tenure protects you from professionally being punished for doing so.

Tenure at the school level = encourages teachers to stay in a school district continuously and not be looking for a new opportunity in another school district at every opportunity. This provides stability.

F***ING NEW GUY^

The OP set up a false dichominty. The choice isn't between none and a ton. The in-between is just as likely.

HRE wrote:

Teaching IS different...

Hellooooo! Every profession is different than every other one. Otherwise they would be the same one. No?

Get a damned clue. In every profession performance can be evaluated. Sometime good decisions will be made. Sometimes bad decisions.

Sometimes good teachers will be fired. Oh the horror! Guess what? Sometimes good civil engineers are fired!

Bottom line is that it is obvious to anyone but the brain dead that teaching can be evaluated and that evaluating and raising and lowering rewards based on evaluations overall has a positive impact on performance.

Sorry, but this notion that some teacher somewhere will get screwed just isn't enough to toss out the obvious overall benefit that comes from having excellence rewarded and incompetence weeded out.

Please just take a moment to take a look at how lame your arguments are. "If you weed out the bottom tenth there will still be a new bottom tenth..." Give me a break. I guess you better call up every damned private enterprise in the country and give them the news...Stop your evaluations! After all, you will always have a bottom tenth. Give everyone the same pay based on years on the job and education level! Never again fire your under-performers! This, you stupid business owners is the secret to success! Adopt these methods and watch your business thrive as never before!

Most private enterprises have opportunities for advancement via promotion, with accompanying raises. A major incentive, which surely attracts quality applicants.

How, then, do you structure some form of advancement (raise) incentive into teaching, which is by nature promotion-less?

Does evaluation need to have a part in education? Obviously. But to scrap the current salary schedule system that rewards experience and continuing education in favor of flawed, outcome-based evaluations being tied to compensation is ludicrous.

I guess if you view teaching the same as entry-level sales, then I suppose you "can always find someone." I'd like to think most people value education enough to offer stability, a fair retirement, and predictable raises that outpace inflation to those willing to man the front lines in a promotion-less, low-salary career with no profit sharing or Christmas bonuses.

You think there are bad teachers now? With your system in place, no one would want to teach. You'd get the dregs, and nothing else.

you tell me wrote:

OK, how do we rate a teacher whose class is made up of neglected children versus a teacher whose class is made up of nurtured children.

Let me ask another simple question - how shall we pro-rate progress made for a student whose IQ is in the 80s versus one whose IQ is over 130? Should both show exactly one year's academic progress? And if they don't, perhaps because they've both begun to use drugs, what penalty should be exacted against their teacher?

OK. Let's use your logic.

I run a consulting and custom software company. Alice and Dave are two of my associates.

Dave spent the last year on two different projects. On the first he was on a team of 4 working on a quasi-government contract. He had to do a whole lot of preparing government style reports. Some spreadsheet work. His project manager had to take a leave in the middle of the year to care for a sick parent so Dave had to take on some of the project management work for a time. He struggled with this a bit as he is not really experienced or trained in it. In addition he was doing a whole lot of spreadsheet analysis as well as research on environmental regulations and the purported impacts of VOCs. His primary client is a royal pain in the butt. I know, I have had to work with him myself.

Dave's other project was in house. He was helping a skunk works team develop a new offering that we think may be a big seller for us in the next few years among the airlines that are one of our core customer segments. Dave didn't really know anything about airlines to start off with but was added to the team to provide technical support. He didn't get as much executive exposure as he would have preferred and ended up a bit frustrated with the experience. The team, however delivered what was asked of them and helped to convince the executive team to move forward with our offering. Some of this success is definitely attributable to Dave's efforts in spite of his low visibility and not quite 100% enthusiasm as the project wore on.

Alice worked exclusively on one project for a major corporate client. The profit margins on the project were huge but the travel requirements really dealt a blow to my project team. Alice stepped up to the travel challenge. She was on road for 43 weeks last year. But it really made a difference. The client loves us and specifically named the work by Alice's team as one of the reasons for their own boost in profitability last year. On the other hand, the travel did wear on Alice. She gradually developed something of an attitude issue and may have spread this among the team to some extent. One team member has since left my company and in his exit interview he mentioned that Alice's negative attitude was part of the reason. Alice's strength seems to be in communicating to the client - at least at the mid-manager level. She did not seem to make that much of the opportunities she had with upper management. She also comes up with some truly original approaches to problem solving that sometimes pay off and sometimes....well anyway.

So, now, there you go. I have given a fair snippet of the information available about these two individuals. Go ahead and tell me how I should rate my employees.

A little difficult huh?

OK. Then let's follow your logic, shall we? Because you cannot o will not give some simplistic rating methodology for these folks here on a message board it stands to reason that nobody can reasonably rate them in real life. Right? Certainly not those who work most closely with them, have management responsibility over them, and whose job it is to rate them!

Now would you please stop being such a dumb ass. Your logic doesn't hold a single drop of water.

Check back in when you have something logical to say.

Thanks.

I am actually a professor and actually couldn't follow the last post... why is it so long? Is there an argument still taking place here? Who is Dave?

More importantly: teaching is the only vocation in service of the community that gets paid so little and (AND) comes under so much scrutiny. Firemen, Policemen, etc. are paid comparably and receive endless adoration, culturally (deservedly so, of course). Doctors, lawyers and so on are criticized routinely but get paid exorbitant amounts. Only teachers get the short end of both sticks. They are self-sacrificing ideologues. Amongst the best of them: the last ideologues of our working class.

My god you are dense.

1) "How, then, do you structure some form of advancement (raise) incentive into teaching, which is by nature promotion-less?

Ummm. They are called "raises". Most people like them. Now that wasn't too hard was it.

2) "Does evaluation need to have a part in education? Obviously. But to scrap the current salary schedule system that rewards experience and continuing education in favor of flawed, outcome-based evaluations being tied to compensation is ludicrous."

Really? So, you simply assume that any system must be "flawed" and "outcome-based" and then say "Oh, that is bad" Very convincing. No really, very convincing.

Now I suppose you are technically correct to say that some new system will be flawed. After all, EVERY system is flawed. Unless you are going to say that your beloved "current salary schedule system that rewards experience and continuing education" is flawless. Well, big fella - care to make that claim?

If yes - then you have demonstrated zero credibility

If no - then your argument basically boils down to how could we possibly use a new flawed system when we are currently using an old flawed system?

Not too convincing.

And if your wonderful current system "that rewards experience and continuing education" is so great at raising the level of the profession why do you think that all those folks out there whose businesses live and die by the efforts of their employees don't adopt such a brilliant method of attracting the best and the brightest and getting the very best out of them?

3) "I guess if you view teaching the same as entry-level sales, then I suppose you "can always find someone." I'd like to think most people value education enough to offer stability, a fair retirement, and predictable raises that outpace inflation to those willing to man the front lines in a promotion-less, low-salary career with no profit sharing or Christmas bonuses. "

You know what I'd like to think? I'd like to think that most people value education enough to want to get the best and brightest to go into the field and to raise the level of the profession. I'd also like to think that the correct next clause after "value education enough" would have to do with offering the best that we can to the children instead of "offering stability..." to the teachers.

4) "You think there are bad teachers now? With your system in place, no one would want to teach. You'd get the dregs, and nothing else."

Now that's funny, I don't recall describing a system. Did you make one up in your little imagination and assign it to me? Now that would be thoughtful of you. Unless, of course, you think saying that teachers can be evaluated and having substantial risks and rewards based on such evaluations constitutes an entire system. Or that simply having meaningful and consequential evaluations is so onerous that the rest of the system really doesn't matter.

"Heavens! They are going to evaluate us! The nerve of them! And imagine, our salaries and jobs will depend on these professional evaluations! Heaven help us!!!"

jag wrote:

I am actually a professor and actually couldn't follow the last post... why is it so long? Is there an argument still taking place here? Who is Dave?

It wasn't rocket science. He was describing two of his employees, and showing that it is a complex task to evaluate their job performance. But that is part of this job as a manager, so he does it. The same could be done in any profession.

Teachers are paid about right. It is s safe job, low stress job that you only have to work 9 months of the year. Compare teachers salaries to the sociology or psychology majors and you will see it they are right in line.

superjag wrote:

More importantly: teaching is the only vocation in service of the community that gets paid so little and (AND) comes under so much scrutiny. Firemen, Policemen, etc. are paid comparably and receive endless adoration, culturally (deservedly so, of course). Doctors, lawyers and so on are criticized routinely but get paid exorbitant amounts. Only teachers get the short end of both sticks. They are self-sacrificing ideologues. Amongst the best of them: the last ideologues of our working class.

That's a pretty quick judgment-- low stress? Nine months? Neither of these things tend to be true-- And my point is in reference to criticism and salary; when was the last time our culture levied criticism against our sociology majors?

There's some relevant details that the folks on the 'fire the bad ones' side of this argument are missing.

Teaching is the largest profession out there. By a lot. If you simply fire the 80% who aren't excellent (or even the bottom 10%) you're left with the problem that there won't be enough people to fill those position. Really. If you fired 10% of the teachers this year and convinced *all* college graduates that year to become teachers you still wouldn't have enough bodies to fill all the classrooms.

Sure you could hire completely unqualified folks out of the unemployed pool. But after a year's evaluation we'd see that most of them are awful (without good training most people would make awful teachers). So they get fired. You'd have huge churn and education will be worse off.

We can't improve teaching and get more for our money until there exist sufficient numbers of people who both want to be teachers and are competent at it. Those people don't currently exist.

So you can caterwaul all you want about the unfairness of tenure, or failure to evaluate and fire. But none of that is going to help.

You need to figure out a way to get those folks who are already interested in being teacher to be better at it.

you, sir, are a master of the analogy. well done!

When you say teaching is a low stress job that tells me one thing: you've never taught.