What do you think about this statement: "most schools don't like great teachers because they don't fit in"?

It’s true, schools aren’t for profit, so when a real hotshot teacher comes along, the other teachers are threatened by the hotshot. They band against the hotshot and try to pull them down. In commerce, the hotshot has benefit to the company. They’ll make more money from the hotshot’s ideas or effort, so it’s encouraged.

Wow. Very interesting. I remember a math teacher in my high school who was excellent. He had been a college professor previously. He related to the kids extremely well, and he would go the extra mile with students. He got in trouble a couple times that I know of while I attended high school. I would bet he wasn’t good at abiding by the rules of the system, and was extremely smart relative to the other teachers.

I also remember several stories in the last 20 years in various school districts where teachers were taken to task for allowing discussions that did not directoy fit curriculums. In all cases it seemed obvious the teacher was not be onesided, but rather allowing a more balanced view, or opposing views, in addition to what was presented in the text. They dound themselves in trouble with parents and the school district. These particular teachers knowledge seemed better rounded and more informed in my opinion.

@Adirondackwannabe – You mean for-profit is the solution here?

@JLeslie – I had the same experience. I owe my love for cosmology and astrophysics my physics teacher in my final 3 high school years. He did what he thought was best and he ignored useless or counterproductive rules.

My wife got into trouble for providing her special ed. kids extra time than their IEPs dictate. When she first moved to her new school, a couple of teachers actually told her to stop working so hard because she was making the other special ed. teachers “look bad”. Our school system in broken.

There is probably some truth to it. Fortunately, great teachers persist in the face of it.

@mattbrowne I don’t know what the answer is. It just made me realize why commerce tolerates the mavericks if it makes them money. What’s the incentive in a school. Needs some more thought.

I totally agree. It is endemic to public management. The only way you can prove you are accountable to the public is to create metrics to measure performance of teachers, and then make sure everyone follows the rules. That way no one gets fired.

Public management takes both punishment for failure and incentive to risk excellence out of the system. Public management in combination with teacher unions makes this system set in stone.

How can we transform the system? LOL. You are kidding, right?

So much has to change. The whole culture of public education has to change. But we have models for better education everywhere—in private schools.

The first thing is to create smaller schools. The Charter school movement is allowing the creation of schools that emulate private schools within the public system. They have independent principles (to some degree) who have more say in who they hire as teachers and how the schools are run.

They need to address issues like the one @tinyfaery raised. Right now, there is safety for teachers when everyone is the same. So they discourage innovative teachers from working hard, and they protect the bad teachers. Many teachers don’t want to work as hard as the hardest working teachers work. They fear that if hard working teachers are allowed to survive, they will be expected to perform like that.

We need to get rid of this fear. We don’t need to expect everyone to work their hardest. People burn out if that do that. What we need to make sure is that hard working teachers are rewarded while at the same time not penalizing average working teachers.

The problem is that all reward systems are seen as corrupt. It’s all about favoritism. Yes, I grade papers honestly, but no one else does. They all have their favorites. Management does, too. They’re just like all the other teachers. hell. They were teachers once, too. Everyone knows that favoritism plays a role and everyone knows you can’t make any reward system objective. Everyone pretends that objectivity is possible, and most people fool themselves into believing it. But just ask a teacher if they they think their colleagues are all objective and see what happens.

Ok, so what do we do about that? Again, we have to be ok with favoritism. We have to find ways to compensate for it, but not to beat people up for it. I don’t know what those ways are.

There is much else wrong, but I’m not writing a PhD thesis here. So I’ll stop. But what I really think is that this is about us confronting our humanity. We want to be fair, but we can’t acknowledge that unfairness is built into us. Until we accept ourselves, we won’t be able to deal with excellence in a useful way. Not in schools, anyway.

Privatize them all, every one, and give people choice in where to send their kids to school. If we stop spending the monstrous amounts of money that we do to support failing (and already failed) public school systems then we will surely have the money needed to do what many parochial and other private schools already do better at lower cost.

@CWOTUS I completely disagree. I am still waiting for people with the idea you suggest to show me a country with an educated population, that is prosperous, civilized, and industrialized that has an all privatized system as an example of how that can work. Public education for all is found in countries that are the most prosperous. Moreover, countries with little emphasis on public education tend to have primarily religious education for those who can afford the education. Parochial school is generally not less expensive than public education in my experience for the parents, especially if they have 2 or more children.

@mattbrowne I wonder if this phenomenon is found in schools in general around the world.

@JLeslie

Once upon a time there wasn’t a country in the world that wasn’t ruled by a monarch, either. That was “the natural state of things” as far as anyone knew.

That country that does privatize and remove restrictions from its educational system – as ours have not and apparently will not – will blow the doors off of what’s now considered “the natural state of things”.

I understand that “parochial school is more expensive for parents” now, especially since they bear the total cost themselves and they usually get no break or voucher on what they’ve already contributed to the public systems they’re avoiding. But the per capita costs of educating students in those systems is totally dwarfed by the tens of thousands spent per student in many (in fact, in the worst) school systems in the USA.

@CWOTUS I don’t know why you think there will be voucher money available if the state takes no interest in educating the population? Then there will be no taxes paid in for education. While there is tax money, and if that money is given in vouchers, I would bet private schools will either raise their tuition (this is also a worry of higher education as the government provides loans and grants) so the schools get government money and additional tuition money. Generally the voucher would still not cover the balance of the tuition cost, even if private schools did not raise their fees, and so the poor would still not be able to attend the private school nor attend any school. I dare you to live in a community with at least 20% of the population is poor and take away all the public schools. Let me know what it is like over the next five to ten years living near those ghettos. How do you really see that working? Do you believe there will be education for all in that system? Or, do you not care (when I say care, I am not tryinng to imply you are heartless or don’t care about the well being of people) if the whole population has opportunity for education. I have a hard time believing a fully private system would be better, but I have been wrong about things before, certainly you are right that sometimes we do not know how something will work out.

I agree with that statement. Government is all about rules, following them, and punishing people when they don’t follow them. And there are so many rules that it’s possible to get in trouble for following one rule because you broke another.

Public schools are the same way. In general, if you work for the government, and you are a hard worker, you’ll get hurt by those who don’t want to work so hard to keep up with you, and sooner or later the system will crush you.

For me personally, all my great teachers were “eccentrics” It was really hard to tell who was passionate or not during high school but I’d say there were a handful of teachers who all seemed to teach AP or the advanced students. I could tell some of them were a bit odd, yet they were passionate. Upon graduating high school I learned a great deal about their personal lives as the, “student” + “teacher” relationship seemingly evaporated.

Now in college, I feel my most extreme professors are the ones who really get their message across. Of course I understand it’s up to me to soak in the materials but the eccentric ones, for whatever reason get a grip on me. And yes it’s a good grip. It’s not to say that I don’t like other professors for me this is just a random phenomena. I do remember my teachers in elementary and it seems they were always encouraging and positive. I remember being encouraged to catch bugs and stuff like that, you know, explore nature little did I know growing up meant getting in line and finding a job to serve society. With that realization I can imagine that some teachers can only hope for the best.

There are so many problems with school systems in the U.S. (which are the only ones I know about) that it is hard to think of where to begin. Teachers are not treated or paid as professionals. They are not required to have training in the subjects they teach. Teachers in poor school districts typically work in dilapidated leaky buildings and lack basic school supplies. It is not surprising that there should be a general expectation of mediocrity.

I think there is some truth to that statement, but as @mattbrowne said I had the same experience. I owe my love for cosmology and astrophysics my physics teacher in my final 3 high school years. He did what he thought was best and he ignored useless or counterproductive rules.

So I am guessing there are always going to be great teachers, crappy teachers and many, many in between. It’s the pay – it’ll always attract the average.

Not really on task, but I had to share it, as quite often teachers are undermined for the job they do. What people don’t realise is they are helping to create the next generation, They need to help produce individuals that can function in society, not robots who can tick boxes and memorise information. Too much emphasis is put on how much you can remember in a test rather than how you grow as a person and memories that can be made. Good teachers are hard to find, they are usually in a corner somewhere eating their dinner whilst others are calling the system, rather than trying to change it!
what teachers make

I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to make a blanket statement about the entire educational system. My wife has worked in public education for 20+ years. She has been in extremely innovative and experimental districts/schools, and some best described as “traditional”. I don’t think schools or organized education want to weed out great or innovative teachers any more than businesses want to weed out innovative employees. Like my wife, I’ve worked where policy was law, and rules were made to be followed. I’ve also worked where innovation and free thinking was welcomed and encouraged.

In privatized schools low-performing students might not flunk out of school because this might hurt shareholders. Isn’t this a problem? There are also numerous cases of people buying their degree.

I don’t think that’s a realistic fear, @mattbrowne. By the same logic, supermarkets may not discard outdated and unsafe food, because that would also “hurt the bottom line”. Fortunately, most well-run private companies I’ve ever been associated with have a strong commitment to quality assurance and quality control. (I seldom even look at “sell-by” dates in the markets where I shop when I pick products off the shelf, because I trust them so much – with good reason.) When you use appropriate metrics and collect and analyze them honestly with a view toward improvement of the product and consistency in results, “failed products” will be the notable exception, and not the rule.

I’d say that in American schools where a 30% dropout rate in high school is now common (in some Northeastern cities, and perhaps elsewhere, too), “failed products” are not at all exceptional. “Business as usual” is killing education.

Point taken, @CWOTUS !