raising teacher's pay

In a perfect world, all teachers are good and they contribute to the well being of society. Therefore their pay should be raised. But in reality, there are some no good people in that profession who were content to get "good government jobs" and have no real intention of teaching the students for real. The question is that it is true that teachers are undervalued in general, and should their pay be raised to reflect that?

I'm totally with you a.Scott.

Have you read Plato's "Republic"? I strongly recommend. You won't be disappointed.

Teachers should get a pay raise only if they're good teachers. I had a bunch of shitty teachers in high school who were worth shit, I could have done a better job than they did. But then again it would be tough to measure how "good" a teacher actually is. Crappy teachers would give away free grades and flaunt how smart their students are, just to get a raise.

Esco wrote:

Teachers should get a pay raise only if they're good teachers. I had a bunch of shitty teachers in high school who were worth shit, I could have done a better job than they did. But then again it would be tough to measure how "good" a teacher actually is. Crappy teachers would give away free grades and flaunt how smart their students are, just to get a raise.

I agree 100%. I had a 4th grade teacher say that he really didn't like kids, and that he was in it for the money, but that wasn't enough. Then he went on to tell us that he couldn't wait to retire so he could go to Hawii.

That's when I decided that I didn't want to be a teacher.

I also had a teacher who I thought was a good one until we had a substitute come in. The substitute was appauled when she opened up the lesson plan. That joint was empty as hell, so we ended up reading a story out of the textbook and answering the questions that followed.

Esco wrote:

Teachers should get a pay raise only if they're good teachers. I had a bunch of shitty teachers in high school who were worth shit, I could have done a better job than they did.

In high school, my social studies teacher would shut the door, turn on the TV, and go to sleep. He was an alcoholic so, when he was awake, he'd just slur his words or show us camcorder footage of his trips to the strip club.

I had a very nice looking History teacher by the name of Mrs. Graham. She only taught black history, though. Also, if you didn't know much about sex, she was more than willing to give you the walkthrough. Boys didn't snitch because, well, they liked getting laid...

My basketball coach was also my English teacher. Since Phys Ed and English were back to back for me and then followed by the 1st lunch period, I basically had 3 periods to do nothing but play basketball. I ate during 2nd lunch after 20 more minutes of b-ball. Basically, 1/2 my day was spent in the gym. My high school was less like school and more like a minimum security prison.

If not for my math teacher and the guys down at JROTC, I don't even know that I'd have graduated. They got involved and they refused to let me fail. That said, it all starts with adults (parents AND faculty) giving a fuck and getting involved. If you don't have that, no government programs or guidelines will change a thing, IMO. I don't even think raises would help...

Keep your children away from D.C. public schools, people...

"I had a very nice looking History teacher by the name of Mrs. Graham. She only taught black history, though. Also, if you didn't know much about sex, she was more than willing to give you the walkthrough. Boys didn't snitch because, well, they liked getting laid..."

Lol, my 12th grade English teacher was like that sort of. On the last day of school, she told us that her brother called her when he was about to lose his V-card, asking her what to do haha

Teachers like anyone else will show bias. I went to a prodinantly White high school. Teachers will never check the students when they stepped over the bounds racailly. When my History teacher was talking about world poplation and migration she said humans started off in Europe and got darker when moving to certain climates. Yeah she said that.

Teachers will never get paid enough because too many people are willing to do the same job for such little money. Supply and demand...

Dang! Trotter wrote:

Teachers like anyone else will show bias. I went to a prodinantly White high school. Teachers will never check the students when they stepped over the bounds racailly. When my History teacher was talking about world poplation and migration she said humans started off in Europe and got darker when moving to certain climates. Yeah she said that.

SMH...
And they really wonder why Black kids are dropping out of school so much. If you are continually fed bullshit, then you're going to notice after a while. Some notice sooner than others.

You made a good point on pay raises Norf. It doesn't matter how much money some people make, they will find a way to make money while being as lazy as possible. But now I wonder if there is a way to weed out those types of people, and do it effectively.

What's funny is that the higher you go up in the school system (pre-college) the worse the teachers are. The last two years of high school forced me to become an autodidact.

Kendrick Davis wrote:

What's funny is that the higher you go up in the school system (pre-college) the worse the teachers are. The last two years of high school forced me to become an autodidact.

Once a teacher gets tenure then their egos get out of control. The professors feel that the students have already paid for the class, therfor, that money is already in their pocket. I had a professor who shamelessly used the textbook and other "learning materials" he wrote, plus we were paying for his class. It didn't help due to the fact that he was a very crappy professor. In fact, he was so bad that he gave everybody C grades because he didn't want anybody to "bomb his classroom".

Kendrick Davis wrote:

What's funny is that the higher you go up in the school system (pre-college) the worse the teachers are. The last two years of high school forced me to become an autodidact.

That sucks man, I had a handful of good and bad teachers throughout middle and high school.. It just all depends on whether you get a teacher willing to do their job properly.

Break my Pops off some that big dough ya heard!?!

its kinda long, but an interesting article...

A teachers strike has shut schools across South Africa just weeks before year-end exams, compounding the failures of a state education system that has left more than half the country’s black youths unemployed.

Unions representing about 1.3 million state workers started an open-ended strike on Aug. 18, after the government rejected their demands for an 8.6 percent wage increase. The government offered an increase of 7.5 percent today to end the deadlock.

The strike has highlighted the government’s failure to improve apartheid-era educational levels that have left South Africa one of the world’s most unequal societies. A doubling of the education budget to 165.1 billion rand ($22.4 billion) in five years has failed to reverse a decline in exam results or to improve the standard of teaching.

“We are not getting return for our investment,” said Anne Bernstein, director of the Center for Enterprise Development, a Johannesburg-based research institute. “Some 75 to 80 percent of South African public schools are dysfunctional.”

Final-year pass rates fell to 61 percent last year from 67 percent in 2006. South African grade eight pupils came last in math and science in a 2007 study of 41 countries by the U.S.- based National Center for Education Statistics. Local students scored 326 in science, below Colombia with 411 and Iran with 470. The average was 516.

“While we are doing relatively well on enrolments, our weakness is in the quality of education,” Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said Aug. 25. “This is revealed time and time again.”

Pay Offer

Under today’s pay offer, teachers with one year’s experience will earn about 230,000 rand a year, 50 percent more than four years ago, the Education Ministry says. Unions said they will consult their members and give the government a reply tomorrow. They previously said that the government overstates average teacher’s earnings by about 29,000 rand.

“I can’t survive,” said Nonyameko Mdludlu, 48, who says she has been teaching for 15 years and takes home about 4,300 rand a month after paying her housing loan and other deductions. “That’s why I am on strike. They are just oppressing us,” she said while attending an Aug. 26 protest march to Parliament in Cape Town.

The National Treasury says wages account for 32 percent of the country’s 850 billion-rand annual budget and it needs to reprioritize spending and rein in the budget deficit, which reached a 17-year high of 6.2 percent of gross domestic product in the year through March.

Backlog

Besides higher wages for teachers, the increased education budget has been used to cover the costs associated with the growing number of students in the education system.

The education ministry says it still needs about 140 billion rand to refurbish and equip existing schools and build new ones, a backlog that it says will take 20 years to address given current budget constraints.

A substandard education has left 51 percent of blacks aged between 15 and 24 without jobs, and contributed to a wealth gap that sees 22 percent of the population surviving on less than 283 rand a month. South Africa’s Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, is 0.66, the second highest in the world after neighboring Namibia, a CIA Factbook ranking of latest available data shows. The coefficient measures inequality in a range from zero to 1, with zero referring to total equality.

Industry is starved of skilled workers, even in a country with an unemployment rate of 25.2 percent.

“We need our youngsters to study math, science and accounting at university” and the schooling system isn’t enabling them to do that, said Fezekile Tshiqi, human resources director of Johannesburg-based Nampak Ltd., Africa’s second- biggest packaging maker. The problem “starts with the quality of the teaching and the leadership in the schools.”

Apartheid

Under all-white rule, which ended in 1994, black children were condemned to schools that lacked books, desks, electricity and running water and were largely staffed by teachers who had sub-standard education themselves. Many of those teachers remain in the system and minimal progress has been made in retraining them.

In a September 2009 report, the Treasury said teacher training programs were poorly coordinated and the quality of courses was “questionable.”

Bernstein says there is a lack of “accountability” on the part of teachers. “Many teachers fail to teach and don’t get results, with no consequences whatsoever,” she said.

It's going to take 10-30 years to fix this problem. They let their shit go to seed too long. You can't leave more than half your population uneducated properly then expect this not to have consequences later.

They lack materials, quality teachers, and facilities. They are going to have import help willing to work in such conditions. They lacks funds seriously. They are also going to have to unfortunately triage this situation. Which areas can they make the most progress in the shortest amount of time. There is also a lack of interest in being a teacher as well due to this situation. No matter what happens someone is going to get screwed. You may even triage potential students based off behavior and aptitude (that will get ugly). They are going to have to figure out how to get the community involved as well to account for the deficit. They are also going to have to root deadweight (non-teaching teachers). And that will get superugly!

This is another reason why segregation and apartheid is bad.

In deriving the majority of school funding from local property taxes, the establishment has successfully undermined class mobility thus far. Don't expect to witness any changes to this anytime soon.

Kid Joe wrote:

In deriving the majority of school funding from local property taxes, the establishment has successfully undermined class mobility thus far. Don't expect to witness any changes to this anytime soon.

Suggestion?

(But I do understand if a neighborhood is broke, what do they really have to give? Rich neighborhoods don't have this problem for a reason.)

Level the playing field. A socialist approach. All property taxes to the state, equal didtribution.

Kid Joe wrote:

Level the playing field. A socialist approach. All property taxes to the state, equal didtribution.

I was thinking the same thing.
They ain't gonna go for that. Them rich folks would raise hell like Run-DMC and then some.

Kid Joe hits the nail on the head here. It's in the best interests of the rich to keep poor people stupid, unorganized and ignorant. As long as the working class is more worried about Obama's religion and Mosques near ground zero than they are getting out of the recession, republicans will have a shot at winning back power. It's fucking ridiculous. We fight over race, religion, and other garbage that really is just a waste of time instead of workin together for a better situation for all of us. My wife's family members bitch about paying taxes for welfare when MOST OF THEM DON'T MAKE ENOUGH MONEY FOR THEIR TAXES TO EVEN GO TO INTO THE WELFARE PROGRAM. People are just too fucking stupid.

They should raise level the quality of education in public schools alltogether. Its no secret that private schools sprung up when schools start integrating. So our school system is controlled by Capitolism which aint right.

Exactly.

Dang! Trotter wrote:

They should raise level the quality of education in public schools alltogether. Its no secret that private schools sprung up when schools start integrating. So our school system is controlled by Capitolism which aint right.

Your are correct on that one sir. And the fact they are disproportionately monochromatic is no mystery either. History is badly neglected. I hate how in TX that tried to give it a conservative slant by rewriting the books. That seriously pissed me off!

TheHazardous wrote:

Dang! Trotter wrote:

They should raise level the quality of education in public schools alltogether. Its no secret that private schools sprung up when schools start integrating. So our school system is controlled by Capitolism which aint right.

Your are correct on that one sir. And the fact they are disproportionately monochromatic is no mystery either. History is badly neglected. I hate how in TX that tried to give it a conservative slant by rewriting the books. That seriously pissed me off!

In Iowa there's serious consideration about history being taught strictly from newspapers and the internet, because our teachers are refusing to teach that TX bullshit.

Jeff wrote:

TheHazardous wrote:

Dang! Trotter wrote:

They should raise level the quality of education in public schools alltogether. Its no secret that private schools sprung up when schools start integrating. So our school system is controlled by Capitolism which aint right.

Your are correct on that one sir. And the fact they are disproportionately monochromatic is no mystery either. History is badly neglected. I hate how in TX that tried to give it a conservative slant by rewriting the books. That seriously pissed me off!

In Iowa there's serious consideration about history being taught strictly from newspapers and the internet, because our teachers are refusing to teach that TX bullshit.

Glad to see somebody has a spine. That shit is newspeak 1.0, welcome to 1984, Big Brother is watching you.

It's not gonna matter in 10 years anyway, because there will be no more dogma about history. Soon all classes will be taught from iPads and shit like that so it's not gonna matter what some school board in TX says, because they will be on the same ground as people like Trotter.

The world will be gone in 10 years.

Thanks for reminding me, Kid Joe.

Jeff wrote:

It's not gonna matter in 10 years anyway, because there will be no more dogma about history. Soon all classes will be taught from iPads and shit like that so it's not gonna matter what some school board in TX says, because they will be on the same ground as people like Trotter.

No it won't. Then parents would have to be responsible for their own child's education. NO FUCKING WAY THEY ARE GOING FOR THAT! Teachers are used as babysitters, unfortunately. Vending machine folks and contractors would be against it. Enough money is tied into the education system that it would be blocked. Where are these kids going to be playing with these ipads and where will the parents be.

The only way schools will go that route is if the corporate sector gains control over the information...something they are trying very hard to do...which is why it's not mentioned on their television stations or in their newspapers, homepages, etc

You are talking total privatization and commercial education. The Dems would have to completely fold or the libertarian party would have to make serious political gains edging either the Dems or the Repubs. Neither Titan likes to share. One of the reasons neither the Green or Libs have gained enough is because members on either side of the aisle fear weakening their party therefore making their opponents strong. This is why the Tea Party Club is bad for the Repubs because it risks schism. If the TP become a separate entity altogether then they'll have the Libs and TP poaching their members.

Dems......Repubs.....same devil biiiiiitch