I don't think there's different versions, just different visions. I've never been in the DC area so I have no clue what that looks like. I guess maybe we'd be considered somewhere between rural and suburb? Not sure. Dee can answer that.



I agree. Teenagers become adults at 18. That's when they are legally allowed to make life changing decisions so it makes sense. That would take away the option of dropping out of school. I still blame parents though. It's our duty as parents (well when I actually have kids) to raise our children and teach them wrong from right. It's not the teachers duty to raise our children. It's their duty to TEACH them reading, writing, arithmetics, etc. It's not the community's duty to raise our children, it's their duty to provide activities and recreation to enhance our children's senses and involve them in things other than the TV. It's not the law enforcers duty to raise our children. It's their duty to serve and protect.

When it comes to a student who's parents just don't care, then perhaps others can step in. I don't know what the real solution is. I was raised that if I failed a grade or class, my parents would be seriously disappointed and I'd be grounded. My friends who's (am I using that right? lol the irony) parents didn't care about their schooling excelled on their own.

oh yeah, I completely agree with you. I guess I just see how it is here in my community. A kid is allowed to miss 9 days of school a semester, and after the 9th day, the parent can be taken to court for truancy. Yet once a kid turns 16, they are allowed to drop out and no one cares anymore. I don't think it's right. The parent of the 16 year old should be taken to court just as much as the parent of the 1st child. But that happens soo many times here. In fact, there is an initiative here (forgot what its called) where the MAYOR goes to the houses of kids who have dropped out and encourages them to go back. Does it help? Ehhh, maybe when the news station goes out to cover it, but IDK if it helps that much.

The biggest thing that our community could do here is to change our mentality. A lot of parents are stuck in the "old way" and its hard to convince them otherwise. As long as you reach the kids, that is all that matters.

But my whole thing is that the teachers shouldn't be held responsible for drop outs. But with NCLB, they are.

Lol then we're agreeing completely on this. I think that's awesome that the Mayor is doing that. Things at your school were pretty similar to mine. I think we started out in 95 with 160some students. By graduation in 99, we graduated about 120ish. I'm sure the school system would cringe if that were now.

There was a girl whom I had known since kindergarten. Bright student, but then started hanging out with the wrong crowd. In high school, our Spanish teacher made a deal that if she came to class every day for a week, we'd have a pizza party the next week. She didn't make it. Eventually she dropped out. Her sister who was a year younger than her, although the biggest pothead I know, graduated in the top 5 of her class.

Our truancy policies are similar and parents are often taken to court before the child is 16. There have been a few changes made recently to help encourage the 16-18 year olds to stay in school. To get a driver's license, the 16 year old has to be in school. I don't know that they take it away if the kid already has it and drops out though. There has been some push to change the drop out age to 18 or graduation, whichever comes first, which makes a whole lot more sense to me. I don't understand why a 16 year old would be able to drop out of school when they're not allowed to do much of anything else without parental permission, including seeing R rated movies. That's definitely a way that society can help.

The mass transportation issue is pretty unique to Detroit. Most big cities have good mass transportation. This one I'll blame on the auto industry dominating our culture here. It's not in the best interest to implement something that will hurt the industry that 60% of your economy relies on. As a result, we have really crappy mass transportation. I have had co-workers who re-located here from other places be pretty surprised just how far people generally commute to and from work and how far apart we can live from each other. It's not unusual to work with someone who lives 100 miles from you because you each commute 50 miles from opposite directions. I guess we're more spread out than many metro areas. I mean, I'm dating someone who lives an hour and 15 minutes away and we both live in "Suburbs" of Detroit. You do have to get pretty far from the city to get to anything that I'd consider rural, especially to the north or west. To the south, it's more rural.

I agree, AGDAlum that it's interesting to look at the breakdowns in different districts of the sub groups scores. It's even more interesting that the Detroit area is so segregated that in the "best" districts, there are no subgroups. In the most affluent county around Detroit, all of the special ed kids go to one district, so the other districts don't have their scores included. Oh wow, they all go to the same district that the impoverished kids live in too. It's shady, really shady. So these really affluent districts send their learning disabled kids out for special ed and there are so few minorities in these districts that don't have to separate them out. So, those districts always make AYP and get the funding. Then the district that provides all the special ed for the county and is one of the few districts in that county that has poor kids doesn't make AYP ever and loses its funding. That's definitely a flaw. That's not as true in the two other Detroit area counties though. The other two are much more integrated.

I expect our graduation rates are going to dip drastically in Michigan in 2011 when the new graduation requirements go into effect. There are just some kids that won't be capable of meeting those requirements no matter how good their teachers are or how spectacular the curriculum is. Some kids aren't going to "get" Trig no matter what you do. Unless, of course, they just get passed through. I think that's why teachers are starting to do this "100% on homework" as long as it is finished, whether it's correct or not, especially in math. If you have all 100s on your homework, you can't fail the class, even if you fail all the tests. I didn't even realize that was going on until I noticed that my son was getting 100s on all his homework but 80s on his exams. I asked the teacher at conferences about it because I was concerned that he wasn't retaining concepts and wondered if I should get him extra tutoring. That's when I found out his 6th grade teacher gave 100 on homework if it was complete, even if every answer was wrong. My bright but very lazy son figured out that if he didn't feel like doing his homework, he could just put down anything and it didn't affect his grade. However, he didn't learn the material either so he wasn't working up to his potential on tests. I wasn't letting him get away with that so I told him I was going to start checking his homework every night and that if he was doing it incorrectly, I would show him how to do it right and he would have to re-do it. Then he started getting As on tests too. I don't know whether that teacher just started doing that or if that has always been his style. I wasn't impressed with that particular teacher though.

I do think that too much pressure is being put on individual teachers to ensure that their kids perform well. Can you blame the 8th grade math or English teachers for a child who cannot read at grade level or do higher level math? It's likely that they fell behind back in 1st or 2nd grade. That 8th grade teacher can't be held responsible for what was lacking in 2nd grade.

I don't know what teacher certification requirements are in other states. In Michigan though, it's all based on years of education. Teachers get their initial certification and have to complete 20 credits of grad school classes in 5 years to keep their certification. While that does require effort on a teacher's part, I'm not sure it measures how a teacher actually teaches, does it? It seems like more of a measure on how well a teacher can do in school rather than how well a teacher can teach children.

I have always felt that our society is very messed up with our priorities and pay scales. I've said this before on this board... we pay day care workers, who care for our children, and nursing home aides, who care for our parents, some of the lowest hourly wages. While teachers are better paid than them, they definitely aren't paid enough for the importance of what they do every single day. If we really want to make educating our kids a priority and we want quality people to do it, we are going to have to look at what we pay them. Although, I guess one could argue that nobody goes into teaching for the money, they must go into it because they have a passion for it.

To go with the graduate class thing and how well they are teaching... One of my friends who is in one of Downriver's better school districts has the principal coming in and out every so often. They have review days or something like that where the principal will spend the day or a half day in the classroom watching the teacher and how the kids react to the teacher. I think this is something that was implemented with NCLB. Although I do remember in high school our principal would lurk in the hallways and sometimes sit in the back of the room but I don't think there was an evaluation or anything.

I remember the principal coming in to observe even way back when I was in elementary and I somehow understood that they were evaluating the teacher. Performance appraisals are part of any job. We always behaved perfectly when the principal was in the room though! He was scary.

That was done long before NCLB. Principals have always had to do evaluations.

We were always well-behaved when the principal was in the room, too. But he wasn't scary... he was my dad. :p

My proof? Just look around at the school systems. I can speak from experience in my own state, and I'm sure people in other states can attest to the same thing. What the federal government says is a high quality teacher is someone who has the right credentials on paper. Anyone can go through certification requirements if they pay the money and enroll in the classes. That is NOT what makes someone a good teacher. It takes years of dedication and working to hone skills before someone really becomes a quality teacher.

I know teachers who have the proper certification and can't teach worth a d@#$. They don't know how to do proper lesson plans. They don't know anything about pacing guides. They stand up and lecture for the entire class period with little involvement or interaction from the students. I could go on.

And it is interesting to me that despite the NCLB laws, they STILL push TFA.

This reminds me of our elementary school principal...he was so tall his head scraped the tops of the doorways. He was such a nice man. Awww, happy memory :)

This is all true. Anecdotally speaking, watching my wife attend education classes, it was truly befuddling how easy this profession was to enter. Really -- there were classes on how to do things like operate copy machines and overhead projectors.

If the teaching profession wants to survive as a viable profession rather than a simple vocation which anyone qualified in whatever subject matter can enter, it probably needs to reinvent itself, both in terms of training and maintaining good teachers and in terms of rewarding success in the classroom.

I know some universities are looking at reinventing their training processes into something more resembling apprenticeships. (I want to say I heard about NCSU doing this) I'm interested to see how that turns out.

Wouldn't student teaching be considered an apprenticeship?

I'm shocked by some of the people I went to high school with who are now teachers. But then again, they might be able to teach the material better than they were at doing the material 10 or so years ago.

I just remembered my junior year of high school we got a teacher in trouble for her teaching habits. No one understood her and when we'd ask questions she would get frustrated. Students who had the other teacher the first semester and then her were really confused. We had her students from 9-12 sign a petition and one by one got called down to our principals office. (our Vice Principal is the one who always dealt with problems, so you knew it was serious if you were going to the principal). We had to give our reasoning for signing the petition. It was kind of scary, but with the amount of students who signed, they actually took it seriously. I'm not sure if she's teaching somewhere else now, but possibly the same evaluations the students take in college classes could help in high school?

Yes, but some of these new programs are focusing on getting these teacher candidates into the classroom much faster and for a much longer period of time before they're off on their own.

That is awesome. And it is even more awesome that your administration paid attention. My experience has always been that those situations were unwinnable, thus were battles not worth fighting. Did you by any chance go to a school where teachers weren't tenured? I do think tenure is a blight on our education system (at least in the K-12 context) and needs to go. Before we can even talk about holding administrators accountable, we have to let them be able to hire and fire so that they can get the people they want so that they can implement their strategies for success. It's all about making education more focused on the students than on the employees and institutions which deliver it.

In my case, that would be even MORE scary! But, our elementary principal was really tall and really big. He was completely bald and had a mole right on top of his head. He was scary looking. I don't think I ever saw him smile. He walked slightly hunched, kind of like a woman with osteoporosis. I can picture his walk in my head. Lumbering is the word that comes to mind. He would lumber down the hall with a scowl on his face and kids would just scatter as far away from him as they could.

Don't quote my posts when you spout your crap. It implies that I'm on the same page as you and I most certainly am not.

I think that's what they do with the Early Childhood majors. They do an internship in the beginning, and then the student teaching at the end. I know UMD does that, but I'm not sure about other schools.



I'm not sure if our teachers had tenure back then. I know we got stuck with a HORRIBLE professor that was pretty suspect and they couldn't let him go cuz of his tenure. Boo on that.

As far as principals, our elementary one was loved by everyone. He made the school fun: we had a black cat named Angelo as a mascot. They let him roam the halls. He was Irish, so every St Patrick's Day he had this HUGE rock brought in and told us it was the Blarney Stone, so every year we'd go down and take pictures by it. He was really cool. I got along great iwth my high school VP and I was his assistant one year. I got along with my counselor too but I was the kid who liked being in school. I'd go back to HS in a second and do it all over again.

My dad's tall, big, and bald, but smiley, no mole, doesn't lumber.

Plus, the kids loved him. Every day he'd stand out in the lobby and greet the kids coming in, and they all gave him hugs. He also set fun goals for them. If the kids in first grade read X number of books in a time period, he'd wear a chicken costume to school when it was done. Another time he did something similar, but for math, and since the school was only two stories (at that time) he conducted business from the roof (no children were sent to his "office" that day) where all the kids could see him when they were on recess. He also (and this is the benefit of being in a small, rural school) knew each child by first, last, and often middle name, knew their parents names, and knew where most of them lived. He would take a lot of kids home if they missed their busses.

I realize I'm a little biased, but my dad was like the best elementary school principal ever. It was really really hard for him to let go and retire, but with all the sadness that happened in our family the year he retired and the realization that things really had changed since he started, he made the right move by retiring. Better to go out on top while everyone loves you than to hold on too long and become the old crotchety principal that everyone hates.

ETA: My MOM (God rest her soul and you know how I feel about her) was the one to be afraid of if we got into trouble at school. For me, at least, my dad is a total pushover. I'm pretty sure I could get him to sign the deed of his house over to me if I asked nicely enough. He wasn't that way for all kids (here comes the preferential treatment part) so whenever I got into trouble and got sent to his office, he had to call mom who would come in and punish me.

YEESSS! I was thinking the SAME thing.

Honestly back in the day in my school system, issues like this were addressed.

Now? Even if the students were diligent about how they approached poor teaching, they would still be "ignored." Allowing teachers to attain career (tenure) status in the public school system can be helpful, but when teachers are attaining career status in spite of their obviously poor performance in the classroom, then there will continue to be a problem.

Student teaching is an apprenticeship, but it really isn't always adequate. If the student teacher gets paired with a piss-poor teacher, the cycle will just continue.

And Kevin is right... many of these "training" programs? Yeah right.

Yes, there are probably certification programs that you can just pay money and get certified, but that doesn't mean that those people are gonna be piss poor teachers. Yes, not all teachers are gonna be "high" quality teachers, but you can't base that on anything except the person. And the teachers you mentioned probably came waay before NCLB. Like I said, NCLB didn't lower the bar on 'quality.'

And as to Kevin's argument that certification programs are turning them out as fast as they can, that is also not always true. I have to stay in my certification program for at least 18 months, and then do an "internship" for a whole year after. Not necessarily what you would consider 'fast.'

I'm not really saying anything about "fast." My argument is more along the lines of the fact that traditional educational structures and salaries are not attracting and retaining the best candidates for teaching positions.

There are some innovative programs out there, most geared at getting kids out of the classroom and into practicums ASAP. I'm not sure whether that's the answer.

Another model which has been somewhat successful (although I have veeerrrry mixed feelings about it) is Teach For America. My biggest issue with that program is that it seems to be a band aid for a bullet hole. First, the turnover for TFA positions is pretty high. Also, traditionally trained teachers don't like the program and its graduates because they feel (and I somewhat agree) that it deprofessionalizes their profession, and I think that does and should affect morale somewhat. But TFA admittedly has done good things.

NCLB is a good thing because it does help us to force accountability onto a system which was otherwise obsessed with preserving the status quo despite in many cases being by all accounts failed and going nowhere. NCLB helps us put the focus back onto serving the students rather than serving institutions and teachers. Ultimately, there will be thousands of good teachers and administrators who will probably be casualties -- and I feel for them -- but they need to know that it's not about them.

I've had mixed experiences with the NCLB. I was in Middle School (I think) when it passed and those years sucked. The administrators were incompetent and basically ran the school like a prison, the teachers (with the exception of one) taught to the test and could give a damn less about anything else, etc. They always got rated an A school but behind that veneer was (in my opinion) a broken system.

High School was the complete opposite. My high school had several unappealing nicknames, a past reputation for drugs and crime and low test scores (they've never been rated above C to my knowledge). Yet, in my four years there I met more teachers who genuinely cared about kids absorbing the material and learning something useful than I did in all my years of school prior. Maybe my experiences were rose-tinted by being an IB student, I don't know. But when you consider the students they had to work with (generally low-income, mostly minority, several first-generation and limited-English proficient, and bad home lives) and the dedication they put into their work, it's hard not to think of that school as a good one. I truly think that the measure of a good education is not what score one gets on an arbitrary state-mandated test but rather the dedication one puts into one's studies and the dedication put forth by one's teachers.

*steps down off soapbox*

But again, it's typically more the dumb reaction to the law by districts rather than the law itself that causes good teachers grief.

Something else to consider is that as the general economy stinks, teaching looks like a more attractive career. It would be a bad way to count on attracting people long term, but I think it could drive up quality in the short term, if coupled with new methods of evaluation and a stronger commitment from principals to explore removing bad or weak teachers.*


New York's "rubber rooms" are notorious, and there are some states where the unions are powerful enough to have compelled contracts clearly not in the students' best interest. However, in many states it's simply an unwillingness to consistently do the paper work that keeps bad teachers employed. Yes, you have "tenure" after so many years, but it doesn't guarantee employment if you are incompetent. And yep, a good principal could document incompetence if he or she wanted to and had the discipline to follow through. In fact, I suspect it doesn't require that much more work than most HR departments put into firing any employee in a big company that worries about lawsuits.

*I want to note that this is totally different than getting rid of unpopular teachers. Some of the absolutely most effective teachers are the ones whose classes kids try to weasel out of. Students are often very willing to sit through a bad teacher's class if it's fun or simply easy. (I don't say that because kids try to get out of my class as much as what I see with the preparation level of the kids in the grades I teach. The best prepared come from a teacher that the kids and parents cause grief about every year, mainly because she had high standards. If we had pay for performance based on student achievement, I think she'd be compensated very well. Interestingly, she doesn't even teach a grade that has a state test.)

THIS! I don't really understand the argument "oh teacher's pay sucks, that is why it's attracting bad teachers." Cause really, (bad economy aside) if the pay is so bad, why would people, who ordinarily wouldn't choose teaching, want to teach? It doesn't sound very logical to me.

I can however agree that teaching is becoming more enticing because of the economy, although it's a double edged sword too. Because of the economy many schools (at least here) are cutting down teachers, so you have more displaced teachers than I've ever heard of (thus why I couldn't find a teaching position this past year).

Not to knock the certification program I'm in (which is one of the strictest when it comes to accepting people in, and to 'pass') but I don't understand how some people could have gotten in. Things like answering this question: "What did the Bill of Rights mean to the people of that time" with this answer "it may or may not have meant something to them." Yeah that's a future teacher right there :rolleyes: But who knows, that lady could be an AWESOME teacher once she finally has a classroom.

All certification programs are like that because essentially you are enrolling in classes and paying for them in order to get certified. You can get a passing grade in a class and still not know how to teach. And the point I was making was NOT that those people are going to be piss poor teachers just because they went through the programs. The point is that NCLB seems to stand for the notion that making people get certified will ensure that they are quality teachers when that is most definitely NOT the case. I don't understand why you would try to construe my comments about NCLB as LOWERING teacher quality. I clearly said that it did not necessarily IMPROVE teacher quality and often deters people who would otherwise be good in the classroom from actually getting a job in education. The teachers I mentioned did not come WAY before NCLB. They came AFTER.

The fact of the matter is, unless everyone becomes infertile, we will always need teachers. Crap pay is better than no pay. It's the same rationale as becoming a nurse or getting into other fields of health care even if you'd rather poke your eyes out with a stick than do that particular job - there will always be sick people.

They're talking about training for student teachers - not regular teachers.

I agree, but you can't lump all certification programs together. Some aren't like you are describing.

You're right not all certified teachers are gonna be quality, just like all nurses (using 33girls example) are not all gonna be quality nurses. Besides, teachers always had to be certified to teach, this wasn't something new that NCLB did. NCLB just re-evaluated what it mean to be a "highly qualified teacher."

Are you seriously responding to mm?

Ok I'll bite. Any particular reason you think I am a father? you don't know anything about me at all.

NCLB changed the certification requirements for many school systems.


Interestingly enough, long before NCLB came into existence, my school system was making AYP. After NCLB, suddenly it became a struggle to make AYP. Yet we had all these certified teachers in the classrooms. I don't think this was unique to my school system either.

Didn't NCLB invent AYP? I thought AYP referred to Adequate Yearly Progress toward the NCLB goals. What were you all using to determine AYP before NCLB? Are you talking about Title I measures?

What I'm rather unclear on is what is an "unparent" and how can anything begin at a home if there isn't one, especially when there has been a historical systematic destruction of one?

I just am trying to understand because sure, blaming unwed Black teen girls having sex and getting pregnant as the problem, but since folks are so against abortion and barely believe in contraception or how to pay for it and how exactly should abstinence work with these "unparented kids", um, would blanket-statements like simply saying home-training as a policy work?

I can't wait to hear Dr. Harris-Lacewell's take on this on Twitter :)

huh?

Jackass.

Who is "you"?

You're addressing someone with a doctorate, idiot.

I'm waiting for him to insult somebody and it turns out that they are white, upper class and a doctorate. I think that would be entertaining to watch.

He already hit 2/3.

NCLB, AYP and AZ Learns are the reason I'm getting out of education. NCLB is a crock of "bleep". It is an unfunded and retarded mandate. I'm sorry, even if the stupid thing was funded, it would still be a crock. There are some amazing teachers out there (and there are some who just need to get out of the profession all together), but it doesn't matter how great the teacher is, some kids WILL NEVER be at grade level!!! To expect a special needs child with an IQ of 75 to take and PASS a test at GRADE LEVEL is asinine. Right now the kids aren't 'required" to pass but to take and have a score, but that will eventually go the way of the dinosaur as the whole point of NCLB is to have "all kids to grade level by 2013, which is a another crock of crap in itself).

There are lawsuits going on in AZ right now because our stupid superintendent of public instruction (who has never set foot in a classroom in his life!) is wanting to change the "law" so that those kids who do have an IEP and don't "pass" AIMS (our state high stakes testing needed for graduation), it will "say so" on their frickin diploma!! Talk about truly labeling a child!

I got so tired of the crap associated with everything. I spent more time "teaching" for some stupid district assessment or state assessment that I rarely did anything interesting or even remotely fun with my students. No wonder kids hate school now! Plus, how does it really show how "smart" my kids are in the first place? Prior to my kids taking the 3rd grade AIMS (in 2008), I spent like a month doing practice AIMS (which had the same standards and essentially very similiar questions).

I "taught" them how to "take" the stupid test. You know why I did this? Because whether I'm considered a "good" teacher or "not" is based on those stupid scores! They don't care about their work in class, their grades in class, their progress monitoring or DIBELS scores, all they (the district, state, government) care about is AIMS (or any other high stakes test). Yes, most "good" teachers actually have their students do well, but I worked in a low income district, where I would say 80% of the students were hispanic and of that 80%, 60% were monolingual English and of that 60% I would say 40-50% were illegal. You do the math on how well most of the kids in this district do on state high stakes tests!

Education has become more and more political due to NCLB and quite honestly it has taken the fun out of teaching and I think out of learning. Yes, there were problems in education when I was a kid, but I graduated from high school, went to college, got a Bachelors and even a masters degree. I have owned two homes, own my car, I'm pretty sure I turned out okay based on the education I got as a child. My parents are highly educated (mom has two masters, going for her 3rd, dad is working on his masters), I'm sure they turned out okay and education was so much more different when they were kids.

Okay, I'm totally rambling now and I'm not sure I'm making any sense so I'm going to "shut up". LOL.

By your logic, I guess your parents failed then, huh?

That's the least of asshat's worries. S/he/it is incapable of answering simple questions.

Anyhow, wassup with OU this year? And don't say the little QB hurting himself, cuz Game Day Football and Sports Nation follow me on Twitter. So, wassup? ;)