$33K/year for prisoners, $9K for students: Teacher's comments on 'Waiting for Superman"

[Hannah Bell]

(The writer debunks some of the claims from the movie, then tells a story about a child in the movie that moved her - the father died of drugs, etc..., then continues....

****

I have known countless children who share his story, I have had the privilege to teach many, to love them all, and one of them, who I’ll call Junior (who is now nineteen), came to visit me last week. At first he talked about how he was looking for a college to go to. He clearly wanted me to be proud of him. But then put his head in his hands and said, “I can’t lie to you, you was my best teacher, I dropped out of school before I finished.”

My heart sank. All of the deformer attacks on teachers rushed through my mind. Does this make me a bad teacher? Through my tear filled eyes, I asked him why. He told me that his parents had been in and out of jail, on and off drugs, and in and out of shelters from the time he left me in fifth grade. He explained that it became too difficult to keep up. He said he had been waiting for a transfer from a high school in the Bronx. He waited for the DOE to take care of his paperwork for two months, and eventually he gave up. I checked with a few contacts, found him a program that will support him with getting his GED and job training, and reminded him, as I do with all of my students, that I am always here, whenever and if ever you need me.

I have worked in one of the neediest communities in Brooklyn for over ten years as a teacher of children with learning differences. I have students in jail. Students I have never heard from again. Students who come to see me regularly. Students who got scholarships to private schools. Students who scored high on tests. Students who scored low. Students who are tickled with their job pushing shopping carts at a local store. Students who shed their special education label and navigate or navigated their way through general education programs.

What is the measure of my success as an educator? ...Junior may not be a success in the so-called reformers eyes, but given the insurmountable odds he has faced and the countless adults who have disappointed him in his life, the fact that he found me again after all of this years and felt safe enough to tell me the truth, to make himself vulnerable, and to ask for help to improve his life highlights the narrow lens with which this film, and we as a people, view education in our society...

It’s complicated. There are no easy answers. Charters are not a panacea. Teachers and their unions are not villains, nor are we superheroes. It is true Junior is a “drop-out”, but I do not consider him to be a failure, nor do I consider myself to be a failure. As a teacher, there are many factors I cannot control. While I cannot be superman, my students have shown me year after year that to the vast majority of them I am their hero, and they are mine. That is all the ‘data’ I need.

If we want to begin to have a real dialogue about real reform, we must address the economic benefits for some that come by excluding large portions of our population from economic access via equitable educational opportunities. If I believed for one second that the current reform agenda held the promise of equalizing educational opportunities for all, I would embrace it, and would be the first standing on the front lines fighting for it. Instead I find myself firmly planted on the other side; the side of real reform with the belief that we can have great community public schools for ALL children if only we stopped waiting and started taking authentic action. We allocate on average $33,000 a year per prison inmate while we allocate an average of $9,000 a year per pupil in our public schools. Something is gravely wrong with these numbers. If we can hold teachers accountable to data, shouldn’t we hold our policy makers to the same standard? It is time to take the long view. Will the Real Reformers please stand up?

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/

[dkf]

1. Policy makers ARE held accountable by the voters. It's called an election.

How are teachers held accountable if it is next to impossible to fire bad ones? The thing is that one bad teacher in a child's lifetime can mess them up enough that the rest may not be able to fix it. Instead of defending bad teachers why don't you all help to identify them so that kids can have a better future?

[Hannah Bell]

2. you keep repeating the bullshit about how it's impossible to fire teachers, even though it's not.

and conveniently ignoring the fact that administrators grant "tenure" -- it doesn't come automatically, and teachers don't give it to themselves. if the teachers are so shitty, how did they get tenured in the first place? if admins are giving tenure to shitty teachers, whose fault is that?

plus, not all districts have "tenure" either.

if one bad teacher can "mess a kid up for life" it's because the child's parents weren't paying attention, & no one else was either.

teachers as a group aren't the problem.

it's just a bullshit talking point for the deform propagandists.

[dkf]

12. How many teachers do you know who wanted to keep their job but were let go for performance?

[Hannah Bell]

13. way to ignore the content of my post. let me repeat.

not all districts (or even states) have "tenure," & those that do don't grant it until after several years which gives ample time to weed out the "bad," & it's granted at the discretion of administration, not teachers or the teachers union, & after you get it all it guarantees you is the right not to be fired arbitrarily/at will.

so if "bad teachers" with tenure aren't being fired, that's an administration problem (gave the wrong person tenure, aren't willing to hassle with gathering the documentation & going through the steps leading to a firing, can't make a good case because the teacher isn't really "bad", etc.), not a teachers' problem.

plus the #1 correlate with school performance = parents' income/socioeconomic background.

now i know this won't stop you from spouting the same talking points elsewhere, but perhaps you could refrain in this thread at least.

[dkf]

14. Is the typical Chinese person better off than the typical American?

Why can Asia take their poor and educate them so well while we can't? The connection between socio-economic status and education exists but it doesn't have to. I doubt it exists for Asian immigrants. Those kids are impressive.

[Hannah Bell]

15. wtf? you don't know shit about china's education system. they *don't* "take the average person" &

educate them "so well". and anyone immigrating from china isn't "the average person," because "the average person" in china is still a farmworker peon.

you really don't know what you're talking about. get a clue:

The first problem is caused by the concept of "education commercialization" raised by some of the regime's leaders. Schools of each level have kept raising tuition fees and other fees. Even the "free" elementary schools charge students several hundred yuan (US$ 50) as well. The fees are even higher in middle schools.

According to the surveys conducted by the related associations in the cities of Chengdu, Chongqing and Xi'an, about 43 percent of low-income people think that they cannot affect their social status through their own efforts. The nine districts in the city of Chongqing contain around 1.4 million farm workers, and the number of farm workers and their children who have entered the mainstream society is not even five percent. In 95 percent of the families, both generations of father and son are shoe-shiners or street vendors. According to the survey in Chengdu, among government workers, only 2.8 percent of people's parents are farm workers while 26 percent of people's parents are average employees.

Lin Mu thinks that the root-cause for all those problems in education is due to the large rich-poor divide in today's China. "What will occur in the future is that 'workers' sons will always be workers, while farmers' sons will always be farmers." He thinks another problem is that the government doesn't treat education as a right of the citizens, but as the privilege of a few. Therefore, education is regarded as a profit-making enterprise. In addition, the political and cultural environments are forceful and autocratic, not allowing room for changes. Professor Sun stated that the CCP firmly controls the education system and inculcates students with communist ideology. The CCP is naturally fearful of education and has sent its leaders to schools, wanting to monopolize those who have access to it.

China is the most populous country in the world, with an undereducated labor force that will become a heavy burden on the nation for a long time to come. China also has the largest illiterate and semi-literate population in the world. Among people over 15 years old, 0.18 billion people are illiterate and semi-literate, which is nearly 16 percent of the entire population.

Labor is China's primary resource. Education is the prime means by which to develop this resource, but the current system is actually destroying this resource. Only a complete overhaul to the current system will further the lot of the masses. The development of China will thus have hope; otherwise, the hope for China's economic and social development will be gone sooner or later.

Click here to read the original article in Chinese:

http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-6-6/42392.html

[madrchsod]

5. do`t worry about teachers being fired...

duncan,obama,and the oligarchy will see that the teachers won`t have a union to grieve for them.

next up the rest of those pesky public servant union members who want a decent working conditions and benefits.

[The Straight Story]

3. Prisoners are there 24x7x365 so obviously they would cost more (nt)

[Hannah Bell]

7. cost that out per hour and you'll find there's not much difference.

[planetc]

4. I have a story from my own short-lived teaching career

In the early 1970's, I was teaching Freshman Composition at a large midwestern university, and several people in the class were from the same high school, and had had the same English teacher at that school. In the discussion that I constantly tried to stimulate, "Mr. Prescott's" name came up, and the general opinion was that he was terrible, mean, a martinet, and so on. What had he done particularly, I asked. He had made his students go over and over grammar, spelling, and sentence structure until they were exhausted. All right, I asked them, how do you feel about him this year? A grudging voice said that he was glad he had had Mr. Prescott.

I assume the reason for the late-blooming gratitude to Mr. Prescott was that the course I was teaching assumed a good preparation in spelling, grammar, and sentence structure was in place, so the students could concentrate on composition rather than remedial grammar. Many were still working on sentence structure and grammar.

All this happened in ~1972. I did not teach Freshmen again until 1984, and by then, teacher assessment forms were given to students to fill out about all their teachers. I can't remember the results in detail, but I remember that no students felt that I had graded too easily and none felt that I had been unfair, and I was grateful for that.

I think that an assessment of Mr. Prescott, given to his high school seniors, might have had different results if students had not been surveyed until a year or two into college, or into the work world, for that matter. And an assessment of me might better have been given a year or two after I had done my best for the Freshmen.

My best judgment is that the art of teaching is not easily graded: not by students, although they often have sharp insights, and not by standardized tests. Believe me, you can't test skill at composition with a multiple choice test. I remember one Freshman, to whom I was handing out a list of topics for the final three-hour exam in composition. I told "Mr. Martin" that he should give it his best shot, as he was working on an A for the course. He gaped at me in disbelief, and I reminded him that my assignment was to grade him on his writing skill at the end of the course, not the beginning, and that he had received A's for his last two revised essays. Mr. Martin inhaled deeply, set to work, and wrote an A essay in three hours. It might astonish you to know how much confidence is needed to write adequately, or well. Every student is different, and every teacher is too.

I salute Hannah Bell for teaching human beings, not education consumers, and for her many successes.

[Hannah Bell]

6. i agree. at the college levels i was surprised by the variance in the way students

judged their teachers -- there were always one or two that "everybody" loved or hated, but there'd be some that one person would think was the absolute worst -- while somebody else thought they were the absolute best. it had to do with how well something meshed with the student's interests, personality, goals, etc. not measurable. but because the student liked or hated the teacher (or the subject), that probably affected their motivation, effort, performance.

but i'm not a teacher. i taught at the college level for awhile too, though. it's a bit of a different game than public school, though there are some similarities.

[planetc]

9. Thank you for the correction. I salute Norm, and

you for finding Norm's story for us.

Although I'm confused that you taught at the college level but aren't a teacher? Do you mean you're not currently working as a teacher?

It's my guess that the instinct for teaching is constant and inborn, and can be applied to students at many ages.

[Starry Messenger]

8. k & r

[TBF]

10. K&R nt

[blindpig]

11. Money reflects priorities..

nuff said.