Raise the bar for what we require of our educators, but in order to do that we need to restore both social status and the financial incentive to get good educators. It needs to not be a dead-end career that attracts dead-end individuals.
I remember back in high school I had the best physics teacher, who I want to say came to us from NASA or was otherwise a practicing physicist prior to ending up in the classroom. She knew her shit and was really good at teaching and keeping everyone engaged. Turns out a few years later she left the classroom to become an administrator because being a teacher just didn't pay well enough. That's an issue that needs to be tackled. You're gonna get a lot of knee-jerk responses about how we can't just dump more of the public coffers into a lefty captured public education system, but if you want better teachers you need to find a way to financially incentivize it. There's no getting around it, so people had best start brainstorming instead of digging their heels in.
Only problem is we need a way for it to be merit based pay so best teachers, best pay but how do you measure success in teaching?
You can say tests but you can easily teach to pass a test and still end up eith students with zero common sense. Need a good way to ensure good teachers have the pay they need, bad teachers not fit for it get zoned out.
Not by test outcomes, that's for sure. There's only so much a teacher can do when handed a classroom full of yard apes. My old man was high school biology teacher for over 30 years and his on the ground experience was that merit based pay didn't really work, so take that for what it's worth.
A lot of the hurdles classroom teachers have come from higher up the bureaucracy fucking with them. Stuff like adding more students into a class than is allowed or fucking with schedules and lesson prep materials without notice. It's not just the teachers that need to get sorted, it's the whole bloody system from top to bottom that is dysfunctional.
Raise the bar for what we require of our educators, but in order to do that we need to restore both social status and the financial incentive to get good educators. It needs to not be a dead-end career that attracts dead-end individuals.
I remember back in high school I had the best physics teacher, who I want to say came to us from NASA or was otherwise a practicing physicist prior to ending up in the classroom. She knew her shit and was really good at teaching and keeping everyone engaged. Turns out a few years later she left the classroom to become an administrator because being a teacher just didn't pay well enough. That's an issue that needs to be tackled. You're gonna get a lot of knee-jerk responses about how we can't just dump more of the public coffers into a lefty captured public education system, but if you want better teachers you need to find a way to financially incentivize it. There's no getting around it, so people had best start brainstorming instead of digging their heels in.
Only problem is we need a way for it to be merit based pay so best teachers, best pay but how do you measure success in teaching?
You can say tests but you can easily teach to pass a test and still end up eith students with zero common sense. Need a good way to ensure good teachers have the pay they need, bad teachers not fit for it get zoned out.
Not by test outcomes, that's for sure. There's only so much a teacher can do when handed a classroom full of yard apes. My old man was high school biology teacher for over 30 years and his on the ground experience was that merit based pay didn't really work, so take that for what it's worth.
A lot of the hurdles classroom teachers have come from higher up the bureaucracy fucking with them. Stuff like adding more students into a class than is allowed or fucking with schedules and lesson prep materials without notice. It's not just the teachers that need to get sorted, it's the whole bloody system from top to bottom that is dysfunctional.