Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How like the teachers, and their union

I teach low-end urban, because I'm cool like that.

Now I teach high-performing kids in the morning, low-performing kids in the afternoon. According to my State ratings, I am a wonderful teacher in the morning, I am a horrible teacher after lunch. I also have to work three times as hard to get anything achieved in the afternoon.

The BEST predictor of how kids will do, private school, charter school, magnet school or private, is the income level of their parents. We have schools in our area falling into all four categories. Most often kids merely reflect the norms of where they grew up and most often well-to-do parents value education.

Some poor parents value education too, including a disproportionate number of immigrants, their kids tend to do well too. Private, magnet and charter school kids are often predispoosed to do better because of the simple fact that they have parents who are involved in their education at all, that and the fact these schools sometimes have competitive entrance standards.

Although I teach where I do out of idealism, I would NOT recommend such for new teachers starting out today. At present we are stuck in the fallacy of rating "schools", and of rating teachers mostly by test scores (politically much more expedient than rating parents and communities). "Schools" as entities do not exist, individual students do. Recently we had the daughter of Korean immigrants, who attended "low performing" schools here her whole career, get outstanding AP and SAT scores and get accepted to Harvard, West Point and Yale: Same schools, same teachers, different parents.

I'm thinking those mistakenly-rewarded teachers cannot immediately pay back the money because it is already spent, disappeared into bills due, the teachers themselves too busy to take notice.

Merit pay? I don't want a nickel of it because a) schools and districts at present do a poor job of evaluating teachers and their impact and b) the best teachers ain't motivated by monetary concerns anyhow.

Barakistan? Maybe this was addressed, but what to do about parents who wouldn't send their kids to school AT ALL if it weren't already free (for them) and the fact they got hauled into court and fined? A lot of parents fall into this category.

Do we want an illiterate underclass? Yeah? I know... "They're illiterate already"... Um, no they ain't, you want to see what REAL illiteracy looks like? Go to a country where school attendance ain't mandatory.

Birdwatcher