Hey Um Atum

accordingtosami:

coeus:

Did you miss KWD’s entire post there? He didn’t say that teachers stop working at 2:30, or that they don’t participate in summer extra curriculars or whatever crap you insinuated he said. Here, I’ll quote KWD for you:

To be quite frank, and this is just me talking, the problem with schools isn’t insufficient funding or even bad teachers. The problem is a shitty, watered down curriculum that doesn’t really teach anything and shitty students whose parents have found incentives to outsource raising their children to television and the state. But leftists like  Mr. Damon don’t want to talk about that because it would involve deconstructing the massive tower of postmodern leftist cultural garbage that has poisoned the public discourse for the past fifty years. 

-KWD

What KWD thinks is wrong with the public school system is entirely different to what you think he thinks is wrong with it, and it’s most likely much closer to what you think is wrong with the system as well. Hah, go figure. He also said that teachers are people, and that by virtue of their being people, they respond to market incentives like, uh…. everyone else. This means one of two things: 

1. If every teachers of a school do a superb job, and the schools student are actually doing well and enjoying learning and education, they ought to be rewarded for their efforts with more funding, more pay, extra vacation days, etc. etc. You don’t have this in the public school system, instead, you have magical option number two:

2. If the teachers do a shitty job, and students are doing poorly as a result, then they cry to the unions how they’re underpaid and the unions makes a huge deal out of it about how the public system is suffering because teachers aren’t paid enough, and more often than not teachers get more money from, yes, the public teet because the media over-sensationalizes the issue. So basically, the public system gets more money as a consequence of poor results, what do you call this? 

But, again, KWD does not say teachers are to blame for this, it’s the inherent system and concept of public education that is to blame. When one person finds out that they can live at the expense of someone else, another person finds out that they don’t have to work as much because someone else is going to take part of their money anyway.

KWD isn’t saying teachers should work until they die, he is saying the system cannot afford to pay all these people all that money because of obvious reasons (uh, you guys are basically bankrupt), and they need to turn to other methods of funding such as, forgive me if I step on a few toes here, private schools. Or rather, privatising public schools. 

The public system is doomed for failure because everyone can’t live (or learn) at the expense of everyone else. 

Here’s the thing though: 

Education can’t be run like a business. Because the end result of education is producing educated people. And in a business, when you are producing products and some of your raw goods are shit you throw them out. If I’m a wine maker and I want to make superb wine and I get a batch of shitty grapes, I trash those grapes because I don’t want them spoiling my high-end wine.

If I’m a teacher, I can’t exactly throw out all my “bad grapes” now can I? As a teacher, you have to throw all the “good” grapes in with the “bad” ones, the slow ones, the ones that don’t learn the same way, the ones who’s parents don’t pay attention to their education, the ones who’s parents don’t understand their education, the ones who are too preoccupied with raising their little brothers and sisters to focus on their education, etc etc. 

So if we go to a merit based pay system where we reward teachers for having good students, what teachers are getting rewarded? Oh, the ones who are in wealthier school districts where the parents are more invested in a child’s education and can spend time and money on what their kids are learning. And those teachers do get rewarded - A teacher’s pay in a rich Orange County suburb is significantly higher than the salary of a teacher in the slums of LA. (and, you know, they get to live in OC.) 

But a teacher who is living and working in a poor district? They’re working with kids who grew up disenfranchised, often times whose parents don’t or can’t put as much time or effort into their education - It’s a lot harder for a single working mom raising her kids to sit down and ensure that her child is getting their homework done than a SAHM who can devote hours to helping her kid understand everything.

Not only are the teachers working with “bad grapes” in these districts, they’re also working with shoddy equipment. School books are outdated, buildings are shit, classroom sizes are larger, equipment is faulty… I went to a brand new school in a pretty nice area for high school. We had 3 computer labs, including a classroom full of macs for a web design class, and this was in 2001. The school across town (that was still in the same district) didn’t have one, and they had maybe 5 classrooms that had any computers in them at all. (every one of my teachers got a computer) Which school do you think had the higher graduation rates? Was it really because my school just had superb teachers? Because that’s not true, we had a lot of brand new teachers who made a lot of mistakes, whereas the poor school had an IB program that was linked to the university across the street that drew in some great college professors. 

So if we turn education into a competitive market, we’re pitting teachers who are working at schools with more money, better books and equipment, and students and parents who value education more and have the ability to put more time and effort into their schooling against teachers in poor districts, with shit equipment and students and parents who can’t or won’t put as much time and effort into their schooling, and we’re going to try and play that off as a fair fight? 

As for privatizing education - Sure that works great for students who excel. My sister goes to a great magnet school that she got in on a financial waiver because she tested high enough. She’s about to be a senior, and is applying to ivy league schools all across the country. I know her education is leaps and bounds above what I got at a public school, even though I went to a pretty good one. 

But what about the kids whose parents can’t afford private schools (like my step brother, who’s mom paid $10k a year for his education) and who can’t pass the tests to get into these schools (like my sister?) What about kids who just aren’t good at school? If you privatize education, there’s now a direct incentive to produce quality students. Where is the market there for putting in the time and effort to educate children who don’t learn well in the traditional education setting? Where is the incentive to focus on kids who, through no real fault of their own, don’t see the value of an education? Or are we going to start blaming 5th graders for having parents who dropped out of school and now work minimum wage jobs? Who is going to tackle “problem” children, when those efforts are more often than not going to fail? 

By no means am I saying the way the system is set up now is good, or the proper way to go. And I’m not saying that private or magnet schools are bad. But the issue comes from putting the pressure on teachers and schools to produce students who “perform” or “excel.” Because how do we measure that, exactly? With test scores? That obviously doesn’t work, because then teachers start teaching kids about how to test, not how to learn. My school was getting accredited my sophmore year. An entire quarter was spent in my Lit class teaching us how to do well on the accreditation tests. Why? Because if we got a good score on our accreditation, then it shows that our school and teachers are doing well and we got more money and incentives to do well.

So we learned how to take tests. I’m a great test taker now. Awesome. 

Thank you, Sami. I’m weeping with gratitude at your eloquence and fullness of thought. You just said everything in my head better than … everything.

(Source: keyneswasdrunk)