Why does krazen hate unions so much?

[muon2]

Ideally the model should be more like law firms - much more individually based. It simply is not like a corporation producing widgets. It is more like attorneys, who have to perform in court. Sure there are roadblocks, but the ideal should be kept in mind, and be the loadstar.

Will it cost more money overall? Absolutely!  And you know what?  I have yet to meet one conservative, one, who would oppose going down this road, if teacher quality really improved. Some things in life are worth paying taxes for, and I can't think of anything more important than this.

With that model we would need teachers who had a significantly broader knowledge base and could act as mentors to students. Essentially we would then return to the one-room school but with parental choice so that slots would fill up until the teacher took on as many students as they were comfortable handling, like a lawyer taking on clients. Indeed this would be much more expensive given the breadth a successful teacher would need.

The difficulty I see here is due to the mandatory nature of education. Good teachers would have their pick of the best students or those willing to pay the most. This would go in exactly the opposite direction from your stated desire that teachers teaching the most challenging students would need to be the best of all. The best teachers would have no incentive to take on those students without significant compensation. If that compensation would come from the state, how is the rate set? Even the more aggressive school choice models have a fixed state dollar following the student to the preferred school, but that eliminates the distinction between more and less challenging students.

[Torie]

Muon2, you seem to be putting up a plethora of obstacles here. The goal is to get good teachers, particularly for kids in the "wrong" zip codes. No, not private tutors. I know what a good teacher is. I have had them. If you are saying it will cost 150K to get good teachers in those schools (the ones in your zip code and mine would get less), then we have to do it. Nothing is more important than equal educational opportunities at the secondary school levels. You and I, particularly I perhaps, will have to pay more taxes. We should. This is the most worthy of causes.

So, it seems to me, the teachers should be tested for their knowledge base, and evaluated for their classroom presence. The best overtime get promoted to higher classifications, and the worst get fired, and that can happen down the road too. Tenure must go. Sure there may be evaluation problems, but we have to do the best we can - and far better than we do now.

How do we get there Muon2, or are you telling me that it is hopeless, and we just need to give up on these kids, and consign them ala opebospeak, to a life of low paid toil, because our educational institutions failed them? Sure perhaps your constituents would not want you to vote for more money for kids in Chicago schools (money spent right as described above, rather than wrong as now), but on this one, they need to lose that political battle, or have their civic consciousness, and conscience,  raised. They need to be "educated." No man is an island. We are a community, and having a high percentage of poorly educated kids is not good for it - it's not good for anyone.

We need a plan Muon2.  

[muon2]

Muon2, you seem to be putting up a plethora of obstacles here. The goal is to get good teachers, particularly for kids in the "wrong" zip codes. No, not private tutors. I know what a good teacher is. I have had them. If you are saying it will cost 150K to get good teachers in those schools (the ones in your zip code and mine would get less), then we have to do it. Nothing is more important than equal educational opportunities at the secondary school levels. You and I, particularly I perhaps, will have to pay more taxes. We should. This is the most worthy of causes.

So, it seems to me, the teachers should be tested for their knowledge base, and evaluated for their classroom presence. The best overtime get promoted to higher classifications, and the worst get fired, and that can happen down the road too. Tenure must go. Sure there may be evaluation problems, but we have to do the best we can - and far better than we can now.

How do we get there Muon2, or are you telling me that it is hopeless, and we just need to give up on these kids, and consign them to ala opebospeak, to a life of low paid toil, because our educational institutions failed them? Sure perhaps your constituents would not want you to vote for more money for kids in Chicago schools (money spent right as described above, rather than wrong as now), but on this one, they need to lose that political battle, or have their civic consciousness, and conscience,  raised. They need to be "educated." No man is an island. We are a community, and having a high percentage of poorly educated kids is not good for it - it's not good for anyone.

We need a plan Muon2. 

I'm all for the goals you state.

However, I'm saying that the mandatory nature of education coupled with the relative uniformity of tasks for the educators regardless of location makes it harder to set a merit-based jobs hierarchy, except for the few teachers who leap to administration. Think about mandatory car insurance where the affordable option for everyone is a pretty minimal policy, and individuals pay more to get a more reasonable policy. If the state funded car insurance, then everyone starts to expect the same policy (Hello Obamacare). Once there's a state mandate, then if there's state funding the public will expect some kind of parity for that funding.

Three years ago IL launched an overhaul of teacher and school evaluation called the Performance Evaluation Reform Act followed by SB7 a year later. It includes standards for teachers, administrators, and school board members. It phases in over a period of years, so it isn't clear whether it will meet the lofty goals we have. But if there's a government mandate with the uniform application it implies, perhaps this is in the right direction.

[Torie]

Well we are making a bit of progress here, but let me say the notion that a few good teachers "leap to administration," and then don't teach much, is precisely the wrong way to go. We need the best in the classroom, and more of them, not in some back office.

As to rank differentials, heck, there are grades of trainers at my gym, and you pay $80 an hour for the lowest grade, and $125 for the highest. Somehow, they get evaluated. So this whole mentality that everybody gets paid the same, but for a few, because of unions, and because it is too tough, needs to be broken down and shreaded, sort of the way an addict needs to be broken down, in order to be built back up.

Do they test teachers to find out if they can read and write adequately, and do sums and such? Some of the prose I saw my nephew's teachers write, and that was in a middle class junior high (Foster City, CA), was just pathetic. The worst was what the principal wrote. His stuff was incoherent. My nephew marked up his prose with a red pen, and his step mother wrote a letter enclosing it, and the principal wrote back and thanked her "for sharing." He was not embarrassed at all. That cannot stand.

I wish I had the power to tear down the system with my own two hands, and rebuild it from scratch. But all I can do is whine, and fund to the max school voucher initiatives (and speak on its behalf, which I have done (I researched the heck out of the issue about 15 years ago, including contacting experts around the nation, professors, and think tank folks), and so forth). I plan to leave a substantial chunk of my money to some cause along these lines, be it an inner city private school, or scholarships, or a foundation or something. It is all I can do. Sad that it is so pathetically little - tragic really.

[muon2]

Well we are making a bit of progress here, but let me say the notion that a few good teachers "leap to administration," and then don't teach much, is precisely the wrong way to go. We need the best in the classroom, and more of them, not in some back office. 

So how does this get corrected. In a typical engineering firm, the talented engineers eventually move into management or they top out on their earning potential. Once they jump they might work on big-picture design, but they mostly supervise the new engineers and the ones that couldn't make the leap to management. What is the alternate model to apply to teachers?

[Torie]

Lawyers. The classroom is the courtroom. All the lawyers are courtroom lawyers. Some are partners, some are associates, they all make different pay, and all actively practice law full time except perhaps the managing partner, in the teaching case the principal.

I don't know why we are talking past each other here. The only difficultly other than political opposition, is the controversy about how to evaluate, but I laid out some metrics. We don't need that many folks managing teachers from above. We have far too many as it is. Under the current system with relatively flat and lowish pay, what happens is the best that you can get teach in comfortable zip codes and private schools, and even there, are sometimes thin on the ground. Not good. Under the current system, you get precisely the zip code bias that you don't want.

[opebo]

Part of your problem, Torie, is you think teachers can solve problems - the problems are caused by the entire society in which the kids are produced.  Your mention above of the 'zip code bias' should give you a clue - even if you put a lot of hyper-motivated geniuses making $250k/year in the poor working class zip codes, the poor kids will never get far in life, and you put a lot of lazy drones making $35,000 in the rich-kid zips, the privileged kids will almost all do just fine.  Face it man, life is a rigged game - you yourself are the best evidence of that.  Lay off the poor teachers, its a complete fantasy that they or anyone else other than the executioner can change anything.

[Torie]

I am evidence that luck and privilege = more privilege (I mean if you have a driven, competitive temperament, upper middle class extremely well educated and intellectually curious parents, a high IQ, and go to elite schools, yes the dice were loaded in my favor big time), but not that upward mobility is next to impossible. The game may be rigged, but it isn't fixed.

[muon2]

Lawyers. The classroom is the courtroom. All the lawyers are courtroom lawyers. Some are partners, some are associates, they all make different pay, and all actively practice law full time except perhaps the managing partner, in the teaching case the principal.

I don't know why we are talking past each other here. The only difficultly other than political opposition, is the controversy about how to evaluate, but I laid out some metrics. We don't need that many folks managing teachers from above. We have far too many as it is. Under the current system with relatively flat and lowish pay, what happens is the best that you can get teach in comfortable zip codes and private schools, and even there, are sometimes thin on the ground. Not good. Under the current system, you get precisely the zip code bias that you don't want.

But I view lawyers as having individual clients. That has me seeing a tutor-style system, which I know is not where you want to go. Help me see how I can model a partner-associate system into a state mandated activity. I know some charter schools go somewhat in that direction, but again I stuck with their ability to pick off particular students that they want to serve.

[Torie]

No, teachers don't get to pick the students that they serve necessarily. They will be assigned to classes just like now. Obviously, some will be better with some types of classes, than others. I think probably what we are talking about is some sort of GS rating, with a scale from from 1 to 5 or something, with maybe a head of department who also teachers close to full time, on the top of the heap. So then you need to fashion the algorithm, that has some objective criteria, to attend the subject evaluations, student feedback, classroom evaluations, etc. Student progress with measurements corrected for the appropriate variables as to what can be expected, ideally would be part of the mix too.

[opebo]

...luck and privilege = more privilege, but not that upward mobility is next to impossible. The game may be rigged, but it isn't fixed.

Of course it is, Torie.  The question is not 'are there rare cases of social mobility' but, what is the norm.  Devising social policy based on the one-in-ten-thousand case is idiocy.

In any case, socio-economic mobility is an absurd justification for capitalism.  Why would it matter if one can change classes as long as the purpose of the class system is abuse?  Its like supporting dictatorship just because there is a coup d'etat once in a while.

[Torie]

...luck and privilege = more privilege, but not that upward mobility is next to impossible. The game may be rigged, but it isn't fixed.

Of course it is, Torie.  The question is not 'are there rare cases of social mobility' but, what is the norm.  Devising social policy based on the one-in-ten-thousand case is idiocy.

In any case, socio-economic mobility is an absurd justification for capitalism.  Why would it matter if one can change classes as long as the purpose of the class system is abuse?  Its like supporting dictatorship just because there is a coup d'etat once in a while.

Perhaps someday, you will have an epiphany, and actually offer some data to support your little hypotheses. Of course, that would deflect you from more important tasks, like keeping up with, and speculating about, my sex life, and reporting on yours, along with what you are listening to and eating (the latter often attended with pics). But since you don't spend much time traducing the JBT Mods anymore, perhaps some of the time saved there could be used for activities a bit more empirically and data based. If the data is confusing to you, Muon2 and I are always here to help. We enjoy helping folks. Don't be afraid to ask now.

God I had fun typing that.

[Vosem]

This thread's second page is marvelous and full of my favorite posters talking to one another

[opebo]

...since you don't spend much time traducing the JBT Mods anymore

What the heck is a JBT Mod?

Friend, you know quite well that social mobility is (largely) a myth, hence - increasing inequality for generations.

[Torie]

...since you don't spend much time traducing the JBT Mods anymore

What the heck is a JBT Mod?

JBT.

[King]

It's convenient to frame the world's problems as one group's fault.  Unions, corporations, Jews, welfare recipients, the UN, Satan, the Catholic Church, and genetically-modified foods are just some of the usual suspects.

[opebo]

It's convenient to frame the world's problems as one group's fault.  Unions, corporations, Jews, welfare recipients, the UN, Satan, the Catholic Church, and genetically-modified foods are just some of the usual suspects.

Come on, that's just silly.  It is obvious that one group - the wealthy - are responsible for all the world's problems, because they clearly have all the power.  To blame 'unions' for anything is just bizarre, like blaming the janitor for a stock market crash.

[Joe Republic]

He loves and hates unions, just as he loves and hates himself.