I agree. There is no way, in my opinion, to completely do away with formal education. A teacher is an invaluable commodity in that they can offer suggestions and tips that might speed up the learning process or help you over a hurdle. The internet is a great tool and will only get better but it isn't the be all end all of education, just as teachers and books aren't the only answer. The great thing about a private education market is that there will be hundreds of different solutions to choose from, instead of the one size fits all model of public education.
So Much of a good education depends on where you are. I have taught in 4 different districts in 3 different states. The bottom line is teachers do their best. (most of them), are underpaid in most spots. School is so important for socialization purposes. Strictly having an internet only option of schooling would be a hinderance to the social value of public education, and privatizing it would leave a lot of people out. IF you go to private school, you got the means, if not, you go to public education and hope the school is good and the teachers care. HIgher standards, practical and fair incentives, better pay, and effective regulation of these standards by qualified school personnel (principals, achievement staff, leadership, etc. would be a good start to improving the quality of education. At the end of the day the most important thing is the guidance of family, involvement of community, and teachers as supporters along the way. Education will forever be debated.
a well rounded education touches on all aspects of life, programs in that community used to spark interest in kids who aren't so good at standardized tests, etc is a very effective way to stimulate kids educations. art clubs, music clubs, sports, traditional and non, chess club, outdoor adventure classes, science clubs, math clubs, community service clubs, student council. band, choir, orchestra, drama, journalism, on and on and on. The social value is huge but I agree with someone who said not all people are into the traditional model of ed. Some places are more diverse than others. It's not all lecture and quiz everywhere on the planet. vocational programs for high schoolers, practical stuff that interests kids would be a good start. I don't know about ya all, but I had a million different opportunities to shine at something else, other than just exclusively standard traditional model of teacher teach, kid sit there, take the test, get the highest score, move on.
I think you've highlighted the problem well. Most teachers want to do a good job, and most try hard at it, but they are restricted by the one-size-fits-all system we have and the rigid controls the schools place over them. In my opinion increasing the quality of education is important and using what you brought out would be a big help. But how can we have higher standards or practical and fair incentives under the current system? If we look at the reality of the problem principles, teachers, leadership, etc. are not actually held responsible for bad performance. In school after school after school there are kids who did not receive the education that they should have and were moved on. They fall further and further behind the other students because when it comes to public education you've got to stay in step with everyone else, at the same pace. You have no real options to slow down or even speed up nor do you have the ability to branch out and pursue other things of more interest to you. Public education, while providing education for everyone, does so poorly. No one is really held accountable and I blame this on the fact that it is not a market solution for delivering a very marketable service. If we began making the moves to privatize the education market, that is, creating the tax incentives that would keep the education tax dollars in the hands of parents to choose what school to send their kid to, then you'll start seeing schools that truly are accountable to the parents. Private schools will become affordable for everyone, there is no doubt about that. We just have to take away the states monopoly over education and we will start seeing the cost drop. And accountability will go up as well. As a market actor a private school must do what they have to do in order to keep customers and price is just half of the equation. Yes, School A might have the best prices but their track record is terrible. School B cost a couple hundred dollars more but they have the best programs available and their record is stellar. School A is going to have to clean up its act or it will go out of business, especially if School B starts lowering their prices to match School A's. Parents that are unsatisfied with whatever school they put their kids in can easily pull them out and put them in something better. I don't know. Just sounds so much better than the system we have.
I always here this argument about underpaid workers. Only in government can you demand higher pay for doing a worse job, and doing it less. Did you know that public school teachers on average make 61% more per hour than private school teachers? And yet, private students out perform all the public school kids! So obviously the pay logic is flawed. And yet, once upon a time, teachers were volunteers...
Imagine the reaction if this were a song about Jesus being taught in school. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMxOPvIohcM]YouTube - More Obama Indoctrination going on in schools[/ame] (ignore the intro/outro)
Pay doesn't always equal success, but try and get someone to work for you for free. Good luck. It is fairly obvious that pay can increase work ethic. Money motivates people. There are a lot of other contributing factors as to why private school students do better, in many cases, academically. The parents that care enough about education to send their kids to private school; probably do a better job encouraging learning at home. Private schools are better funded with newer books, and more computers. The "pay teachers more" argument isn't just saying the higher you pay a individual teacher the better he'll preform. The argument is some people that grow up and want to be a doctor, lawyer, or scientist might go college for an education degree if the pay was more comparable. We need some of of best and brightest teaching the citizens of tomorrow.
Read that article I cited. Public teachers make more than most. The reason public school teachers suck is because they aren't held accountable. Pay really has nothing to do with it, as made evident by what successful private school teachers take as pay.
I did read your article, funded by The Department of Education Reform, and i read several others claiming the opposite results. Numbers and statistics are easily skewed to match the results that the person paying for them wants. Did you notice there weren't actual numbers, and just percentages? Why not give us actual figures so that we can do the math ourselves; Instead of vague percentages we can't double check?
You must not have read the entire report, but only the summary. Detailed graphs and numbers are there, you have to keep reading. Show me several others claiming that public teachers do not get paid as much.
As a kid i was expelled in high school twice so my mother put me in a private school. We didn't have much money so it was a really small school (<20 kids). The school consisted of 2 teachers. One teacher, one helper. I can remember my senior year the helper was ecstatic when she started getting $40 a week. The main teacher remained unpaid BUT I can guarantee you that if it wasn't for them so deeply caring about me, i wouldn't have graduated. When I got all pissed off in school they'd sit me down and ask why and talk to my mom instead of suspending me. I just thought I'd share this. My point being that it's the teacher that makes the teacher, not the money. If I gave a teacher a raise after 20 years and his students scores rose, I'd be forced to fire that teacher for the 20 years of kids he cheated. I mean that would be like saying firemen should work harder when they get pay increases. NO. It's just too important. If you care so much about what you make, don't pick such a passionate career. Open a business or something.
Yep: "The Bureau of Labor Statistics found teacher salaries to be 32 percent lower than those in other occupations." Source- Bureau of Labor Statistics "Teachers only earned $43,250 in the 2000-01 school year; mid-level accountants earned $52,664, computer systems analysts $71,155, engineers $74,920, and attorneys $82,712." Source- American Federation of Teachers "we estimate that raising teacher wages by 10% reduces high school dropout rates by 3% to 4%." Source- http://www.stanford.edu/~sloeb/Papers/loebpage.pdf "In that study we found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience" Source-http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/book_teaching_penalty/ Text from a book called Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground "States vary widely in the extent to which public school teachers are paid less than other college graduates. In 15 states, public school teacher weekly wages lag by more than 25%. In contrast, there are only five states where teacher weekly wages are less than 10% behind, and no state where teacher pay is equal or better than that of other college graduates." Source The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground a book by Sylvia A. Allegretto Lawrence Mishel Sean P. Corcoran You ought to make less assumptions. It is redundant at best continuing to point out the same article that i read when you first posted it! I did read the detailed graphs and saw for myself how they skewed the numbers. Then I decided to seek out several articles to see if they were in agreement, just like i said i did. They were not! I have already responded to your article twice only to have you implore I read it again and again.. please understand me this time.. I read it! Do you have no basis for your opinion besides the arguable data of one article? News flash! People care how much they make. Deciding to be a teacher shouldn't be a choice between money and passion. It should allow for both. That would be the point of increasing wages for high quality teachers.
I call bullshit on your study. I bet it doesn't differentiate between public and private school teachers, and private school teachers make considerably less than public school ones. And they don't get all the benefits that public school teachers get that the article was pretty good at pointing out. Yet, how you go from pointing out disproportionally better benefits than other professions, and then say in light of this teacher pay should be raised doesn't really make any sense to me. Have you ever attended, or somehow know about college courses for an education degree? You have to be a complete idiot to not pass. It's total bullshit to compare the education required to be a computer system analyst to that of teaching. Most of my teachers were mediocre at best. I can count the good teachers on one hand.
You left out one IMPORTANT fact...teachers work PART TIME. Many have 180 day contracts. They work less than half the year... Full time jobs are closer to 250 days. So, a teacher works about 80 days less. Teachers work 1/3 less than most professions...don't you think they also deserve 1/3 less pay? Context my man...context...
Even that blogger admits: When compared with those of similarly educated professionals, teachers' salaries are competitive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found teacher salaries to be 32 percent lower than those in other occupations. However, the pool of non-teachers also has more high earners, who throw off the average. Podgursky examined the median salaries of the two groups and found the median teacher's salary to be $29,000, compared to $32,000 for non-teachers. That's a difference of only 10 percent. The 31 percent shorter work year puts the variance in the teachers' favor. And that still doesn't account for the added teacher benefits I've already discussed. Besides, she's comparing ANNUAL salary (teachers don't work a full year) to the entire labor sector. Next: Groovy estimate, dudes! They listed the 50% of researchers that disagree with them in the article, so I'll consider this a weak argument at best. AAAAND, that study says here: "To facilitate a comparison of the prior results to our new results, we examine ALL teachers, rather than just public school teachers", and they used an arbitrary list of "comparable" occupations based on education level, which is college. This is comparing teachers to college graduates, again another arbitrary occupation set. It doesn't reference private school salaries either. The study I cited also discusses state funding: The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour. (See Table 1A.) The average public school teacher in the San Francisco metropolitan area is not far behind, at $46.70 per hour. The third-highest average public school teacher pay is in the New York metropolitan area ($45.79). The top ten metro areas in terms of average public school teacher pay can all be found in California, Michigan, or the Northeast. The lowest-average public school teacher pay for metro areas with data available is in metro Greensboro, North Carolina, with the mean hourly earnings at $21.67. The Raleigh, North Carolina, metro area is second from the bottom, where public school teachers made $22.38 per hour as of 2004. Orlando, Florida, had the third-lowest average public school teacher pay, at $25.03 per hour. The ten lowest-paying metro areas could all be found in the South or the West, with three in North Carolina or South Carolina, three in Texas, and one each in Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alabama. But these rankings are strongly influenced by the different cost of living found in various metropolitan areas. If we want to know how well teachers are paid by metro area, it may be more useful to look at the pay of the average public school teacher relative to the average white-collar or the average professional worker. The cost of living in a metro area affects all types of workers. So public school teachers are relatively better paid if their pay is proportionately higher than that of other workers in the same metro area. In Table 1B, you can find metro areas ranked by the ratio of the average teacher pay to the average white-collar worker pay. My study, which you still haven't read, is done hourly rather than annually, and compared to Bureau of Labor Statistics approved comparable professions, not some arbitrary set. List of comparable professions and their hourly pay They even go further and compare teachers among a smaller subgroup. They also make the distinction between public and private school salaries, which was the whole point of my first statistic: That private school teachers are paid less and perform better. None of your 'studies' did so.
There enlies the problem: Low cost / public schools = low paid teachers Low paid teachers = high dropout rates and dumbass students Hence: Good education will always cost money.
No i didn't leave that out. It is in the articles cited my man. I am with you that statistics don't mean much. The first article i posted explained why. Originally by By SCOTT MARTINDALE The Orange County Register April 9, 2009 At the core of the conflicting analysis of teacher pay is the difficulty of accurately assessing salary information itself. Economists generally agree that salary must be considered on a weekly basis because unlike in most professions, teachers are contracted to work for less than a full year. Economists also agree that teachers on average work "at least" as many hours a day as other comparable college graduates, according to published information. But weekly salary information, as reported by the federal government, can be skewed depending on how teachers and their employers report earnings. If teachers' annual salary is divided by 52 weeks, it will be lower per week than if it's divided by the portion of the school year teachers are contracted to work. Thus, economists don't even see eye-to-eye about how to analyze raw salary figures – and that leads to continued public debate and frustration.
All I was trying to do is show that private school teachers get paid less but produce better results. This certainly puts a hamper on your theory that low pay is why public schools suck, no?