[Lego05]

[ QUOTE ]


The educational establishment is EXTRAORDINARILY resistant to change. For
example, lectures became obsolete when the printing press was invented five
centuries ago, but they are still the primary instructional method.

Teachers and administrators are EXTREMELY opposed to anything that improves
performance or even allows it to be measured. The teachers’ unions were the
most vociferous opponents of the proficiency tests, and they absolutely
insist that teachers’ compensation should be based on non-performance
criteria. In fact, they have fought against nearly every attempt to improve
American students’ abysmal performance on tests of math, science, etc.

Textbooks are purchased by bureaucracies, and the decisions have almost
nothing to do with how well a book teaches. It is an extremely centralized
and politicized process, which is completely different from the way 2+2 has
sold books.

[/ QUOTE ]

I wrote a long post and then lost it.

But David your ideas about the educational system are absurd. I'll give you that choosing textbooks is a very political process.

However, lectures are not obsolete and I don't see why you'd think that unless you think that everybody can just read the material now that it can be printed. I'd like to welcome you back to reality though. I don't know anything about you and perhaps you were just lucky and had great parents, went to a great school system, and associated with very motivated and talented students. However, I'd have thought that by the time you reached your age you'd realize that kids don't like to read. The kids won't read anything. Teachers are encouraged to lecture less today, but some lecturing is necessary because the kids won't read it on their own. Not to mention some kids that function a lower level and need the teacher to repeat and further explain the information.

I don't know why you think teachers oppose improving performance. What exactly were these attempts to improve performance that teachers fought so hard against? Note: Standardized tests don't improve performance.

You are right though that measuring performance is very important. However, the politicians set this system up very poorly. Inner cities and other poor areas are doomed to failure. The kids simply don't have the background or the family support to pass these standardized tests in large numbers and after they fail and the state takes away funding things get...better? I'm just waiting for the first district to fail the required number of years in a row so the state has to go in and take over. What magc wand is the state going to wave that will all of a sudden make the students capable of passing these tests in the required numbers. And a 100% passing rate by 2010? Please. Since when can 100% of people do anything?

As for teachers being rated based on performance of course they fight against this because it is an absurd, stupid, ridiculous way to rate teachers. You wouldn't rate a dentist based on the average number of cavities his patients have. The reality is that more students in inner cities will fail these tests and will get more cavities than students living in rich suburban areas. If every teacher was teaching the same kids in the same situation then this rating system would be fair. However, with all the variables just looking at the students' test results is an absolutely terrible way to determine how good a teacher is at his/her job.


I'm a college senior history/secondary ed. major in my last semester and am currently a student teacher at a high school.
I actually plan to go to law school and not teach, although plans can change as we all know, but your views on the education system were so horribly skewed and smeared an entire group of people called teachers that I felt it had to be answered.