"Werner" <whetzner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:8de4f33e-f10b-490f-b281-773ddf1b7ba2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
May 5, 11:49 pm, Bob LeChevalier <loj...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Werner <whetz...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
....
> >...
>
> >surely you don't maintain schools are equal.
>
> Yes.
>
You must live in a special universe.
> >Paying for the system is also not equal.
>
> That's life.
>
exactly.
> >Teachers have tenure. Most people don't.
>
> They call them "contracts". Those people who negotiate contracts have
> whatever protections are built into them.
>
I know. Some contracts are more equal than others.
> Public school "tenure" is pretty minimal protection.
>
I keep reading that it is very expensive to sack a tenured teacher.
----
The only thing tenure does is mean that before you can fire someone, you
have to show cause. That can be as simple as, in October, calling the
teacher into your office and saying "here's where we see deficiencies.
Here
is where you need to improve". And guess what? This evaluation cycle is
already part of an administrator's job. If the teacher does not improve,
they can be non-renewed at the end of a contract year. Not expensive at
all,
except in administrator time, because you would have to SHOW that the
administrator did the observations and had the meetings and gave the
teacher
a chance to improve. Honestly, I think the protection against mid-contract
dismissals has more to do with making sure that principals don't, in a fit
of pique, get rid of half their staff requiring immediate replacements
that
aren't there. By having a several month process before someone is
non-renewed, there's plenty of time to line up a replacement. Since
teachers
are in short supply in many subject areas, that protects the school.
Incidentally, that same contract makes it quite difficult for a teacher to
quit, and almost impossible to look for a job while still teaching EXCEPT
at
the end of a contract year. We had a teacher who had a degree in chemistry
and had taken a teaching job her first year out of college as a stop-gap
measure. She was already on an improvement plan (and since she was
non-tenured, the requirement for non-renewal was very weak) when she was
offered a dream job in January. Despite steps already being taken to get
rid
of her, she still had to "buy out" her remaining contract in order to take
the job she'd wanted in the first place.
The cases that get into the news are ones where they want the person out
of
the classroom NOW. Since the contract is in force, the "hatrack clause" is
called into play-which pretty much states that you can be used as a
hatrack
as long as your salary, benefits, and job title remain intact. Therefore,
if
a teacher is accused of ***ual misconduct (which is the most common reason
for this to happen), that teacher will be immediately reassigned out of
the
classroom, often to something like the infamous NYC "rubber rooms", or to
a
central office position where they then make photocopies of non-critical
materials for months until they're convicted or acquitted. Since our
justice
system moves slowly, and we have an "innocent until proven guilty" belief
built into it, the schools cannot fire someone based on suspicion.
> >Teachers have lots of things that many other people don't get.
>
> Yeah. The chance to pay for the supplies needed to do their job out
> of their own pocket when the school district doesn't budget enough.
> The op****tunity to get among the lowest starting salary of any
> profession that requires a 5 year degree program in order to get in
> the front door.
>
Are you one of them? Give us a break! Last time I checked teachers in
my district were averaging about $65K plus generous benefits for a 5
or 6 hour day and lots of vacation.
---
Let's see- 7:00-3:00, with students from 7:15-2:45, plus meetings after
school at least one day a week. That doesn't sound like a 5-6 hour day to
me. And that's what the contract hours in my last full-time teaching
position were.
Oh, and as far as "lots of vacation", a teaching contract is written for
a
number of days in the year. In my case, 200. The number of paid sick days
in
200? 8. The number of paid personal days, which were the ONLY paid
vacation?
2.
Yes, there are a lot of days when schools are closed, but saying that
teachers have lots of vacation is like saying that construction workers
have
lots of vacation because they usually don't do much during the winter.
Rather, both jobs have periods of known unemployment, for which there is
no
income coming in. Teachers usually have the option to have their salary
paid
over 12 monts vs 10, but in that case, you're still not making money in
the
summer. Instead, you're getting less in each check so you still get a
summer
check-and school systems LOVE this plan because it means that they can get
interest on that money instead of you.
> >Why not have a law permitting vouchers that is equally available to
> >all?
>
> Because "we the people" don't want one.
It would be more correct to assert that teachers don't want them.
---
This teacher could care less from a personal standpoint. The number of
kids
is pretty much fixed, as is the number of teaching jobs needed. In fact,
since I'm a music specialist, and it's typical to hire one per school, the
more physical job sites available, the better things get for my industry.
However, from an educational standpoint, I realize something-the
distribution of kids is NOT fixed. You can't pull the top 10% of children
from PS A and send them to St. Joseph's Academy without affecting the
education for the remaining kids at PS A. And St. Joseph's Academy
probably
doesn't want all the kids from PS A. I've been looking at preschool
programs
for my daughter, and since we'd like her to stay there through
kindergarten
(public schools in this area are quite big, and my daughter is small for
her
age and not very physically coordinated. I think she'd do better with a
smaller campus), they're tending to be affixed to elementary schools.
Every
single school we've looked at does entrance testing, and doesn't take
children with "special needs beyond our ability to serve"-which usually
translates to "any child who is below the 60% on a nationally normed
test".
That is, private schools truly are Lake Woebegon, where all children are
above average. Vouchers will do one of two things. Either it will
accelerate
this affect, because if private schools are allowed to keep their
admissions
criteria, they'll then be able to just take the top, say, 20% instead of
the top 40%, or they'll lose many of the reasons parents want to send them
there.
And I'm not going to even go into the ethics of asking Jewish, Moslem,
Hindi, Sikh, Buddhist, Scientologist, Jehovah's Witness, and all the rest
of
the world religions and even Christian denominations with varying world
views to make choiced between, say "Second Baptist Academy" and "St
Joseph's
Academy", both of which will teach theology inappropriate to what their
family practices. Every single religious school application has questions
about a family's faith life and beliefs, and some of the applications get
downright personal where the parents are concerned. And most are quite
blatant that if your child attends here they WILL be trained in accordance
with that religion. I decided against one Catholic school, even though
it's
a very good school, because if my daughter is still there at age 6, I
didn't
want to have to explain why she'd have to go through all the steps for
preparing for First Communion, which doesn't exist in our church.
There are two non-religious private schools in our area. Both have price
tags of about 20K a year. I'm not paying $280K for PreK-12th grade (and
that's before tuition increases and inflation), and I seriously doubt any
voucher program would.
> Vouchers on the ballot have
> been voted down dozens of times in numerous jurisdictions.
>
> Why should we? It gets us nothing that we don't already have.
>
We have expensive and lousy schools. Why does that not bother you?
----
Every single private school I looked at, even those with heavy religious
subsidies, cost more than the average student spending in our public
school
district for a non special ed student, which, right now, runs about $3000
a
year. The per student spending figures of 8-9K all include special ed and
various other programs which are federal mandates and are not evenly
distributed. It is quite possible that a special ed student can cost over
100K a year to educate-and that this is a bargain because the other
alternative would be a taxpayer paid residential program which would cost
more.
ANd the only reason that the cost for a non-special ed student is that low
is an economy of scale. Reduce the number of children, and the cost per
child goes up, because you have to pay the same amount for a teacher to
teach 15 kids as to teach 22-but you can't, per state law, put 30 kids in
one classroom in the elementary grades, except for music and PE. Not in
TN,
anyway, where class size caps were set by the legislature. Class sizes in
most private schools are now larger than in most public schools in TN.
> I have no interest in paying for someone to go to religious school. I
> got a good public school education and so did my kids. Those who want
> something else can find the money themselves.
>
I have no interest in paying for expensive lousy schools.
---
Then you wouldn't like a majority of the private schools I've visited.
There's an awful lot of "put the kids in the room, hand them Abeka
materials, and let them work on their own" programs out there. And they're
the ones who really, really want vouchers, because their main selling
point
is "We're private and they're not". There are recent rulings in TN which
pretty much say that a diploma from some of these schools literally is
worth
only the paper it's printed on-that in order to hold a government funded
job
(the initial court case was a police officer), the individual would have
to
pass the GED.
The traditional private schools I've visited, the ones which often are
heavily sup****ted by their home church, and usually provide a solid
education in the academic basics, with larger class sizes, removing
children
who are problematic, so good behavior, and all the things that are
normally
thought of as features of a parochial school? They generally don't want
vouchers, and on campus visits, several principals and school heads said
flat out that they wouldn't accept them, because they don't want their
curriculum, testing, and the like dictated. They're well known, well
respected schools precisely BECAUSE they're allowed to educate their
students without interference, and they have no trouble getting parents
who
want to pay for what they offer.
> lojbab
> Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist
> loj...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Lojban languagewww.lojban.org
|
