Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Next Big Thing
The war on poverty was declared in 1964 by President Johnson; how much progress have we made in the 45 years since? In his Op-Ed, Nicholas Kristof suggests that the best road by which to achieve gains in eliminating poverty today is through education reform. Organizations such as Teach For America have supported this approach for decades, arguing that by improving education on a personal level, disadvantaged students are better prepared to strive further overall. However, Kristof highlights the ways in which teacher unions prevent the dismissal of teachers deemed ineffective. In his article, "The Rubber Room," for The New Yorker, Joel Klein describes "fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, [who] have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent." Unions, by creating as many roadblocks to removal as possible, are draining money from state and federal budgets that could be used to reward good teachers and provide incentives for educators in low-income area school districts. Which is the priority: preserving jobs and income for bad teachers, or benefitting the next generation of Americans?
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4 comments:
I definitely do not agree with this. Unions are the backbone of our working class society. First we have to address which union we are talking about the PSEA (Pennsylvania's teachers unions) is one of the strongest unions in the country and any roadblock which they put in place for the firing of an incompetent teacher, while inefficient, is simply a negative externality of a strong system. Removing these externalities is a worthy task worth endeavoring on. However, all of the states do not have as strong a teachers union, and in many cases (such as states like North Carolina, and Nevada) the union is very weak which leads to low teachers wages which leads to a shortage of teachers due to the lack of an incentive for potential educators to seek a permanent job in those states. Thus, the need for a strong union is clear and rather than making sweeping generalizations about unions we should rather encourage unions to become more efficient in the small example which you are addressing
Teaching shouldn't be incentivized by the Unions, if it needs to be incentivized, it should be by the state and federal governments. I agree with Madeline, we need to be able to get rid of ineffective teachers, but we obviously need to fill those voids that will be filled. Here's a radical idea, instead of government incentive to join the military, government incentive to become a teacher. Sign a contract before attending state university. Finish your degree and teach for at least 3 years and the state and federal government will foot your bill for school. Yes, it'll cost some money. Yes, there are some potential problems. Yes, there will be abuses and pitfalls of the program, but the education needs to be overhauled not patched and only bold ideas can do that.
I agree with Cory that teaching should not be incentivized by unions but buy the states and local governments. I do however disagree with the way of doing it. To me teachers should be measured by how much the students learn. The best way I can think of to measure how much a student has learned is by testing them. So if a student's test scores on a year over year basis go up they have learned something. We should pay the teacher based on how much the kids have learned. While a perfect system of determining how valuable the students education will be to society it is imposible we can set some arbitrary numbers. But pay for performance should be introduced because it is an incentive beyond altruism for teachers to spend more time working on lesson plans and doing research into cutting edge methods for educating kids. While there will be students who do well no matter who the teacher is the fact that teachers have class sizes in some cases over 20 will smooth the effects of individuals who do very well and those who have trouble with standardized tests.
Stephen, Ideally that system would work. Paying for performance is actually something that was big in the last administration. Speaking with the many teacher friends I have, the only problem that arises is that it stifles teaching and requires them to teach to the test instead of allowing the kids to explore more. Granted, everyone should have some base knowledge, but creating uniformed teaching across the board won't help to foster creativity and innovation, two of the most important things learned at school, which are also the two hardest to test.
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