i tend to agree with damon, but i find he suffers from a sort of "hot head syndrome", which forces him to lose focus in the midst of an argument. the reporter offended his moral sensibilities, and his emotions took over.
there are maybe some bad teachers, sure. the first question is "what does it mean to say a teacher is bad?", and the answer is generally to do with students' performance. arguing that they need incentives to work harder is basically reducing the problem of under-achieving students to an issue of lazy teachers. that's what the reason reporter is really saying: students have bad marks because the damned teachers are too fucking lazy and those lazy, good-for-nothing teachers should be fired. judging by his response, i think damon realized that, but it made him so upset that he couldn't respond reasonably.
of course, if such a policy were actually put in place then the state would no doubt interpret 'lazy' as 'not white, anglo-saxon and protestant'.
a real libertarian wouldn't blame student under-performance on teachers, they'd have students and parents take responsibility for their own behaviour. blaming teachers for student performance is very much collectivist thinking.
but, if we acknowledge that there is a problem (and it's not that teachers are lazy), is firing people going to actually accomplish anything? first, you have to ask what the problem actually is. is it a systemic problem? one to do with administrative policy? if so, firing and rehiring is a waste of time. the only thing that could justify actually firing is to focus on personal defects. if it's not laziness, what is it? drug abuse? so, again, the debate collapses to a baseless personal attack.
nobody debates that there's a lot of things that can be done to improve public schooling, but thinking that firing teachers is going to solve anything is a symptom of the larger problems we face, rather than a solution of any sort.
Ryan Darling
he didn't lose sight for a second.. you fell victim to it by missing it... that was total alpha/domination on the reporter... Through logic
deathtokoalas
c'mon. he was less than articulate when pressed....and obviously very upset.
keith hutchison
to be fair don't you see that from all ideologues?
deathtokoalas
i don't think that having an ideology necessarily blinds one to reason, or that people that tend to react emotionally are necessarily more ideological. nor am i suggesting that the reporter had anything worthwhile to say. i'm an empiricist, but i don't reject theory on that deep a level. theory is useful. the problem is when people refuse to allow evidence to alter it.
i think it's more about anger management. to what extent that's real and what extent it's an act, i don't know.
allixpeeke
You write, "Arguing that they need incentives to work harder is basically reducing the problem of under-achieving students to an issue of lazy teachers. that's what the reason reporter is really saying."
I disagree. Merely mentioning one important factor does not mean it is the only factor. If one infers that the reporter is claiming that the problem reduces entirely to unmotivated teachers, one misinfers.
There are multiple factors worth noting. A teacher may start off highly motivated and, over time, become discouraged upon seeing student performance. This may cause a teacher with job security to, whether consciously or not, put in marginally less effort. Would a teacher with no job security allow pessimism affect her or his performance? Perhaps, but one would have to suspect that such teachers would be marginally more inclined to be vigilant about not letting her or his performance slip.
Another factor is that teachers who start off appropriately suited to teaching one generation of students might not be as appropriately suited to teaching another generation of teachers. Naturally, some humans are better able to adapt to changing environments than others, and the same applies to teachers adapting to changing social conditions among students.
You write, "If such a policy were actually put in place then the state would no doubt interpret 'lazy' as 'not white, anglo-saxon and protestant'."
That's why we need to have a complete separation of education and state. The state should not be able to determine anything about education, should not even be involved in education. Parents, unlike the state, have the incentive to make sure that their children get the most out of their education, and parents will always prefer to hire teachers who are able to provide that quality education. Parents will always take performance into account before other factors, like race or ethnicity, whereas the state, having no capacity for empathy, will be more likely to let petty prejudices influence policy. Moreover, in completely eliminating government involvement in education, we will see new approaches to educating springing up and offering alternatives that, in many cases, will be far better for kids than the government's one-size-fits-all top-down approach.
You write, "A real libertarian wouldn't blame student under-performance on teachers, they'd have students and parents take responsibility for their own behaviour. blaming teachers for student performance is very much collectivist thinking."
It doesn't make one a non-real libertarian to acknowledge that the quality of the teacher's teaching ability can impact a student's ability to comprehend the material being taught. Teachers who do not care whether their students are actually understanding the material should also take personal responsibility for their role in the situation.
Allow me to present some anecdotal evidence. In high school, the one and only C I got was in trigonometry. I certainly wanted to understand trigonometry on a conceptual level, since I believed that understanding it on a conceptual level would help me understand it on a practical level. But, it was never taught to me on a conceptual level. Instead, it seemed we were expected to memorise formulas, not understand them.
Luckily, partway through the year, a student teacher came in to teach. The real teacher sat back and let her. I say "luckily" because this student teacher was actually doing a better job at teaching trigonometry than the real teacher. Thanks to this student teacher, I started to actually "get" it. I started to actually catch on and learn. Then, a few months later, the student teacher left and the actual teacher started teaching again. What happened? I went right back to not understanding. That's when I realised: this teacher simply didn't care. I spent the remainder of the year wishing the student teacher would come back.
It's pretty bad when a student teacher is doing your teaching job better than you.
Yes, students have to take responsibility, but let's not pretend that all teachers are equal, that they bear no responsibility.
You write, "[B]ut, if we acknowledge that there is a problem (and it's not that teachers are lazy), is firing people going to actually accomplish anything?"
Again, it's not entirely an issue of laziness. While that trigonometry teacher I referenced may be a good example of laziness or at least of apathy, some teachers might be better than others at relaying ideas, facts, and concepts to students through their individual teaching styles. Imagine a hypothetical history teacher who simply stands in front of the class lecturing, and imagine another hypothetical history teacher who finds interesting ways to relate, say, the Revolutionary War to events happening in the lives of the students themselves, or who finds fun ways to get the students interested in the Magna Carta. This first hypothetical teacher may say, "I don't understand. This teaching style worked very well for students in the '80s, why are today's students so different?" Adaptability to the changing needs of students is probably just as much, if not more, of a factor as marginal laziness or apathy of secure teachers.
But, in answer to your question, it's not about actually firing teachers. It's about having the <i>ability</i> to easily fire bad teachers. As long as teachers are <i>able</i> to be fired, they will be inclined to try harder than they would if they cannot be fired. (It's very similar to guns. Most of the time, when guns are used to protect a man from being murdered or a woman from being raped, no bullets need even be fired. There are documented cases where a woman has been approached at night by a guy that worried her, and where the guy turns around and leaves simply by seeing she has a gun.) Just knowing that I can be fired will make me work harder than I would if I knew I couldn't be fired, and this is true of any job, even if it's a job I love (or, especially if it's a job I love).
But, to change gears just slightly, in the Sudbury model of education, schools are run directly by the students. Every year, students directly elect what teachers they wish to work in the Sudbury model schools. Students naturally elect the teachers they think do the best job, because what student wants to take lessons from a teacher who is crap? If the teachers do well, they will be reelected in future years, and if they don't, they will not be reelected, effectively meaning they've been fired by their students. Can one imagine a better model for ensuring that teachers tailor themselves to the needs of their students?
While I highly prefer the Sudbury model of education, virtually anything is better than government involvement in education. Government should have no involvement in hiring, firing, funding, taxing, or regulating education. If you own a school, you're going to want to hire the best teachers you can, just as your competitors will want to hire the best teachers <i>they</i> can. Meanwhile, parents will purchase the services of those schools that they believe will do the best job teaching their children and offering their children things the children actually need to survive and thrive in society.
E.g., I wouldn't want my children going to a school where faith is being shoved down their throats, so that is a factor I'd take into account. I also wouldn't want a school that promotes intolerance toward homosexuals, etc. And, I would want a school that has a good reputation at teaching kids. These are three important factors to me. If we had more competition between schools, we would see so many different kinds of school, parents would have so many choices, it would be far better for everyone than what we have now. (Further, without government involvement in education, competition would drive education costs down, which means that we would be paying less than we have to pay for under the present tax-funded system.)
Respectfully yours,
Alex Peak
deathtokoalas
you're missing the point.
can you provide a cogent argument as to how incentives for teachers could possibly have any effect on grades? because that's what i'm rejecting off hand as a ridiculous idea. in order for this to make any sense you have to establish a connection between how hard teachers work and how high students' grades are. i'm going to demand you do this before you continue the discussion, because there's nothing else that can be said until that is demonstrated. and, yes, you have the burden of proof because it's a positive statement.
you provided an anecdotal response, but it doesn't make any sense to me. if you were understanding something better when the student teacher came in, it would have to coincide with an increase in effort on your behalf. the student teacher certainly couldn't make you understand something better by explaining it differently. if you didn't understand it in the first place, rewording it isn't going to magically make you understand it! it had to be something you did. perhaps your interest in the course increased as a result of somebody closer to your age group teaching it.
"Would a teacher with no job security allow pessimism affect her or his performance? Perhaps, but one would have to suspect that such teachers would be marginally more inclined to be vigilant about not letting her or his performance slip."
what performance? what slip? what does how teachers scrawl things on a blackboard have to do with whether or not students take initiative to control their own lives?
there's a much larger, underlying problem with this perspective, which is really very much nanny state thinking and not at all libertarian. it's the idea of blaming other people for your own problems. rather than taking responsibility for being subpar parents when their kids don't do well in school, millions of middle class americans want to blame somebody else. teachers become an easy scapegoat for a society that doesn't want to take responsibility for any aspect of their own lives.
there is a problem with student initiative, but there's nothing teachers can do about it. i return to my initial conclusion: thinking that these problems can be solved by threatening to fire them is a symptom of what is wrong with our society, not the kind of thinking that is going to provide us with answers.
regardless, even if i agree that some teachers have better methods than others (and i deny this - i think it's 100% up to the student, and it essentially doesn't matter who is teaching or whether they care or how hard they work), then the solution is greater training. i mean, if there's some magic trick that can get kids to understand things better and teacher A understands it then there's no reason that teacher B shouldn't be trained to use those methods as well. arguing otherwise reduces to something about the personality of teacher B - that they're incapable of learning the method, unwilling to learn the method or disinterested in learning the method. threatening to fire them doesn't teach them that method, it just creates an unhealthy teaching environment where teachers are more concerned about losing their jobs than they are about doing their jobs. it's consequently not a rational approach to deal with the issue of underachieving students, but a way to scapegoat teachers into taking the blame for students - and a way to put teachers into a precarious position where they are forced to make further labour concessions.
the reality is that there isn't a magic technique. students are going to respond to things differently. especially with math (and i have a master's degree in math, fwiw), there's no way to do it except to sit down and teach yourself. there's a bit of a quip from a famous mathematician of the classical era that, when asked by a king to be taught mathematics, said "there's no royal road to mathematics". that is to say that even the king was going to have to sit down and do the work. there's no shortcut. and that certainly applies to just about anything else, excluding a handful of arts that rely purely on talent - things you can't teach at all.
when you look at studies regarding private and public schools, it all washes out when you control it for class. that is to say that what students bring to class is the dominant factor, not who is teaching the courses. if you take an inner city public school and swap teachers with an upper class private school, the grades will not change to reflect the teacher. rather, the teacher's performance will change to reflect the audience.
what we learn from that is that we need a cultural shift regarding how we raise our children, not a way to beat teachers into submission.
