Nerd Pride Radio

Why does it need to be easier to fire teachers? That implies that it's harder than it should be, harder than it is for others, or that there's something about teachers that just makes them more in need of firing quickly. I have no evidence of any of this, and neither do you.

By definition all unions have the interests of their members in mind; that's what it's for! But if anyone has the best interests of students in mind, it's teachers. I don't see any reason to doubt it; you would kind of have to give me a reason to break me outta that naive, fact-based thinking.

But that said, I like that we're talking like this, near the fireside, with our scotch.

The future is a moving target. So educating for the future is also a moving target. For all the kids I taught how to balance a checkbook, that's getting to be obsolete info. Did they manage to internalize it sufficiently to adapt to the new modes of behavior?
So many of the jobs and skills that run the economy today are less than twenty years old. Any hints that that pace of change is going to slow down?

So what do we teach and how do we teach and where do we teach it? To be fair, it's an impossible job folks have been doing for thousands of years.

So, yes, closing all the schools would be a terrible idea. Imperfect as they are, they offer something to folks who didn't win the birth lottery.
BTW nobody hates bad teachers as much as good teachers hate them. And yes, most of the problems of this country are actually leadership problems rather than worker problems. Poor ethics, selfishness, general shortsightedness and misguided priorities squander productivity, in every industry. Sadly, leadership is hard to teach effectively, and too often we measure qualifications in cash. This is the root cause of most of the disasters we face.

Not a comment about universities, but a general comment about unions: I'm mixed on their usefulness. While I love the concept of collective bargaining for employees, and do believe there is still a good purpose they can serve in today's labor environment, my personal experience with unions has been less than stellar. I worked at a unionized ag plant in a temp job, and a large portion of the people there were unmotivated to work hard, because they knew they were guaranteed, thanks to their union membership, to keep their jobs and get their annual raises based solely on seniority rather than job performance. After my temp job ended and a friend was still working there, I heard those same union members were actually, rabidly excited to go on strike over the littlest things, without regard to how that would affect the company or the non-union employees of that company (including my sister, who works as a secretary for one of the managers at that plant).

I get the argument that the company might not be in the financial straits it is in were it managed better (and I'm speaking of "companies" in a general sense, not necessarily the plant I worked at). That certainly may have been the case with Hostess when the bakers union refused to renegotiate their contract and forced the company into bankruptcy. But in the case of the plant I worked at, it felt like more the opposite, where management was doing the right things and the union members were just being petulant and throwing their weight around.

And I'm a bit with Dan Carlin with regard to unions for public employees. It seems odd that public employees are collectively bargaining, but the people, the citizens, who actually employ them have no real seat at the bargaining table. I don't know what the answer is, and it very well may involve collective bargaining with a union but changing who sits on the other side of the table. But the way it's currently handled does seem odd.

I'm also ambivalent about unions. But I'm more sympathetic to public employee unions. Many gov employees have extremely specialized, esoteric jobs, so it's not like they could just quit and find the same job in the private market. Thus, there is no free market of salaries. Public employees also often work with mostly fixed salaries and conditions - the only way to improve their conditions is unionizing.

ok I got lost in the weeds bringing up unions which is entirely my fault.

I would like teachers to get better, in my experience with public schools I had a significant chunk of burned out/useless teachers from K-12th grade. I would like our schools to get leaner and meaner and not be categorical failures. Admittedly I'm not sure how that can be best accomplished but that would be ideal.

Here is one small reason why schools suck, even though I don't think they usually suck:
Because textbooks sometimes suck, and so do the types of assessment being used nowadays, where everything has to be boiled down into some pithy (but often misleading and hopelessly limited) learning outcome, and each question on each test paired with the learning outcome in a giant game of poorly-conceived dominoes. Let me give you an example: Scott Foresman social studies. Apparently in Scott Foresman social studies, direct democracy does NOT mean that the people make each decision rather than electing representatives to do it for them. Apparently the President is not the chief executive who runs the government. Apparently important shared beliefs have no role in culture. All of these three fuckups occurred directly due to the effort to analyze each piece of information into little component outcomes and then devise questions targeting that little piece of information. The real "outcome" is that I have to teach my 10 year old some damn social studies today so she isn't screwed up by her school.

Also grimly humorous, but understandable in light of rapidly changing circumstances: the correct multiple choice answers about the significance of the national anthem may be somewhat changed in light of people taking a knee...

Yes, modern textbooks are a HUGE issue. The fact that a few states drive the content of the textbooks that are used all over the country and there is little other choice from the large publishers is ridiculous. While it's a concern from a math and science perspective, it is a BIG concern for social studies, civics, and history. I take every opportunity I can to talk to my kids about those areas, because I know what they are learning in school doesn't reflect the real world.

Ya, textbooks uniformly suck, and I know because I tried to help write one that didn't. Mediocre success.

So many big conglomerates have their hooks in schools and the folks who make school decisions that it's a marvel that they operate at all.

Fixing them? We don't have time here, but it begins with leadership and real goals. (not parsed multiple choice goals)
Just wrestling through curriculum is hard. Take AP US History for example. They have to ask questions on that test in such a way that the answers about the civil war are the same in Massachusetts and Mississippi. So, there are few substantive questions of any kind.

And unions....my personal experience with unions is uniformly bad. That's because they're not really unions anymore; they're a separate business. They, as much as any other industry have lost sight of who the customer is and what their purposes are.

For me the unions have always been good. Could be luck. Never really had a bad experience with one or knew of anyone who actually did, except for someone who ran one and was kicked out despite being effective. But that's democracy.

Anyway, I think we're going to see many, many universities close down - we're already starting to see this. I don't think it's for the good. Shutting down universities is a great longing of the conservative, religious right for decades now, so it's hardly an unpopular opinion in some quarters. To be fair, I suppose some DeVos/Trump-style conservatives would be glad to see private, for-profit universities proliferate. No idea why that could ever be a good thing, since we already have plenty of pudding to test.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. C. S. Lewis