[quote]pookie wrote:
Here, while it might at first appear reasonable to give more funding to schools that perform well; teachers and school administrators rapidly discovered that it was much easier to produce better results on the standardized tests, than it was to provide a better education to the kids. The end results is exactly the opposite of what was sought: the kids learn less than ever. The schools all appear to be doing great, though.
[/quote]
So by your reasoning, because the administrators and teachers decided to teach the test, instead of teaching the skills, the NCLB system is bad?
Don’t get me wrong, I think NCLB is a poor implementation of a decent idea, and could definitely be improved. But if you curl every day instead of squatting and deadlifting, and don’t make progress, who’s fault is that? I mean you look like you are working out, but you are avoiding the hard stuff.
Is it wrong to expect teachers to teach skills and not a test?
As for the parents, I agree, many use school as a free daycare, and don’t participate at all. This makes it much more difficult. Unmotivated students don’t help the situation, either.
I believe that standards have to be applied. I also believe that teachers should be paid more, but we also have to consider that the average teacher work year is 187 days, and per hour, teachers make comparable salaries.
references
http://www.educationnext.org/20033/14.html
http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/EWPA/approved/teacherpay2.html
[quote]
Michael Podgursky,
Department of Economics, University of Missouri-Columbia wrote:
Plaintiffs in school finance “adequacy” lawsuits often claim that teacher pay levels are not sufficient to recruit or retain teachers of sufficient quality to deliver constitutionally-mandated levels of educational services. These claims, and the more general policy debate about teacher quality, have raised concern about the “adequacy” of teacher pay. In this paper I considered three notions of “adequacy” concerning teacher remuneration. The first considers the relative pay of teachers. If teacher pay were substantially below that of workers in other professions with roughly similar educational training, that would at least provide prima facie evidence of underpayment or inadequacy of teacher pay. In fact, when adjusted for annual weeks of work, teacher pay and benefits compare favorably with those of other college-educated workers. A second approach focuses on school staffing. Given the per-pupil resources provided to schools, are they able to fill vacancies with qualified teachers? In fact, the vast majority of public school classrooms are staffed by teachers who meet state licensing and federal NCLB requirements. The fact that compliance is not one hundred percent is largely due to the bureaucratic complexity of state licensing regimes combined with the dynamics of teacher labor markets and seems to have little relationship district resources. A final approach treats teacher qualifications as a continuum and asks whether public schools are under-investing in teacher quality relative to other inputs. In this view, teachers are “underpaid” if the social benefits from raising teacher pay exceed the costs. At present, scientifically-valid education research simply cannot define an “adequate” level of school spending on teachers, whether in the form of pay, benefits, or professional training, that can with even minimal levels of statistical reliability predict a target level of student performance. Research simply cannot tell us how much money to spend on teachers to produce a given outcome for students.[/quote]
-folly