For those wondering how teachers feel about their working conditions, here are some results from a 2006 teacher working conditions survey, sponsored by the Kansas National Education Association, among others.
Among the findings for the Wichita district, where half of teachers responded:
– 61 percent said administration isn’t doing anything to reduce the amount of routine paperwork teachers must do.
– 58 percent said the noninstructional time provided for planning and conferences, etc., is insufficient.
– 51 percent said they need additional help in dealing with students with disabilities and closing the achievement gap.
– 72 percent agreed that “my school is a good place to work and learn.”
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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37 Comments
If all teachers were invited to respond, but only half the teachers responded, the reported statistics are unreliable. The responders were a self-selecting group. (If the educators don’t understand principles of statistical measurement, or do, but ignore them, this is a bad sign.)
The non-responders could hold very similar views to the responders in aggregate, so that the reported statistics are pretty accurate, or they could hold very divergent views, which would make the reported statistics totally wrong. Or something in between. But we cannot tell which of these is the case.
Heartlander…………
Before you start your bashing, at least look at the results of the survey: http://www.kansastwc.org/
For a district the size of Wichita, the percent of respondents was very good for a voluntary survey. In fact, three facilities had 100% of their licensed staff respond.
I know you think little of educators in general. I’m sure you think this survey was something devised by teachers and therefore irrelevant. Before you spend the day on a diatribe, at least research what consortium actually commissioned this survey:
Governor Kathleen Sebelius
Kansas National Education Association
United School Administrators
Center for Teaching Quality
I think you should spend more time looking at the results rather than your opinion of the statistical methods utilized on the survey.Do you think maybe either the Governor or one of the other sponsoring organizations might have had a statistician look at the methodology?
Questions I have:
1) When in 2006 was this questionaire administered? For example, I believe non-instructional time has been increased this school year.
2) What other questions were asked and what were the answers?
3) I believe teachers agree the #1 problem with today’s students is lack of adequate and knowledgable supervision of students by parents. Books could be and are written on this subject. Could Wichita do something innovative in this area? My suggestion is a parents academy.
The only way a questionaire like this could be helpful is for teachers to discuss the questions/answers in some organized fashion and develop recommendations and an action plan.
Maybe someone ought to actually talk to teaches and find out how they really feel instead of asking generic questions, that solicit the answers pollsters want to get.
In my local schools I find that teaches run the gamut from very satisfied to morosely dissatisfied. When a school holds open a position in the history department for months because it’s looking for a coach to hire, who will then teach history, something is very wrong. As a teacher I would feel that an administration that runs my school this way, care little for the educational needs of the student, and little for the job satisfaction of it’s teachers.
1) When in 2006 was this questionaire administered? For example, I believe non-instructional time has been increased this school year.
This survey was given in the Spring of 2006 and yes there has been some non-instructional time added to the work week, outside the previously contract day.
2) What other questions were asked and what were the answers?
Read the questions:http://www.kansastwc.org/
3) I believe teachers agree the #1 problem with today’s students is lack of adequate and knowledgable supervision of students by parents. Books could be and are written on this subject. Could Wichita do something innovative in this area? My suggestion is a parents academy.
Good luck with your “parent’s academy”! (However, this wasn’t the biggest concern expressed in the survey results)
My respects to ANYBODY who teaches in this day and age. Teachers are tasked with one of the most important jobs there is. I can’t imagine why a person would want to enter such a career with all the sniping and back-stabbing they get from the public.
Public education needs to be reinvented.
Let’s start with parents. We have a large percentage of two parents working full-time. Moms are no longer at home when their kids get home. Moms have to scramble to get dinner on the table and do household chores. They don’t have time or energy to help their kids with homework. They’re too tuckered out. So are dads.
We have single-parent families, not just impoverished out-of-wedlock-birth mothers, but middle-class divorcees. The uneducated can’t even begin to help their kids do homework, while the latter are stretched to their limits.
The “TV babysitter” is ruinous. Even if kids only watched “Discovery”, “History”, “Animal Planet”, “National Geographic” channels, or PBS for four hours a day, this would be bad. This is passive absorption, not active learning. But that’s not what they’re watching. They’re watching the action, violence and sex stuff.
Do we want public education to work, or not? If so, we need radical changes.
We need to provide full-time working moms the opportunity to get off at 3 and be home when their kids arrive. Options include tax-credit incentives to employers, or laws requiring early-exit allowances, with penalties to employers who do not provide them.
We need to transform schools into 13-hour education-operations centers, offering nightly sessions inviting parents and their children the opportunity to work with district teachers and community volunteers on homework assignments (not every night for every student, but once or twice a week). Build rooms with comfy chairs and tables, and soft-light table-top or chandelier lamps. Provide food and refreshments. Create an inviting atmosphere.
For many kids, particularly severely socio-economically disadvantaged ones, we need to implement Asian countries’ model of weekdays plus Saturday morning instruction, and an extended school year. A 4-week summer vacation is more than adequate “R&R” time.
As LA teacher Ramona’s cited NY Times article pointed out in the NCLB thread, children from middle-class families are exposed to larger vocabularies and more complex sentence structures than poor children. They have extramural advantages. Closing the gap will require that schools provide compensatory instruction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&en=f88b748bf061ed7e&ex=1182142800
The pioneering research on at-home language-pattern differences was done by two KANSAS researchers, Betty Hart and Todd Risley. Kansans need to utilize this critically important research information.
We need computer-science-expert teachers in every elementary and middle school. Computers are ubiquitous. Computer Science isn’t a “New” field. The first electronic computers were built during the Great Depression. Mainframes were marketed in the 1950’s. A handful of top research universities began offering CS degrees in that decade. In the late 1970’s, a few hundred universities offered either CS degree programs, or else math or electrical engineering degrees with CS concentration.
It is backwards to try to have regular teachers try to “teach” children and young adolescents how to use computers. These kids are “digital natives”. They’ve never known a time in which PC’s didn’t exist. They’re better off figuring things out on their own, but the BEST course is to give them computer-experts’ instruction. So our ed schools need to develop a new major, and in the meantime, schools need to hire non-ed-degreed CS experts as specialist teachers.
We need to give every child a $500 laptop and we need to build an education-resource-only Wi-Fi network for them to tap into at school and at home. Amortize the costs, and at less than $200 per year per student, this is readily affordable out of a $10,000 per student budget. It’s not 20%, it’s less than 2%.
We need to get serious about mathematics instruction. Understanding mathematics is essential to understanding all modern sciences. Last year, KBOR disqualified middle-school Algebra I as a “qualified admissions” core-curriculum course for state university admission. The problem: we have many well-qualified middle-school Algebra I teachers, specifically those who have secondary (6-12) math major degrees. But we have too many elementary-ed-degree teachers in our middle schools who don’t understand algebra, or pre-algebra at the level required to teach the courses properly. KBOR universities have statistically determined that too many students who have “B’s” and “B+’s” in Alg I/IIhave to retake algebra at university, which is to say, their actual incoming algebra knowledge is at the “D” and “F” level.
I know a student whose father majored in math and whose mother is an elementary school teacher. He got “B’s” in middle school Alg I and high school Lag II. He was placed college algebra, Math 101 at KU in his first semester. Flunked. Had to take it again. This is no dimwit, and he’s not lazy. He just received abysmal “college preparatory” instruction. His busy parents saw ” good” math grades and assumed he was learning math. Now he is paying the price. His parents are paying the price (for the non-state-subsidized part of the cost of remedial math). Taxpayers are paying a double price, for his middle and high school course costs and for university remediation, for a student who, properly educated at the middle and high school levels, should have been prepared to pass calculus in his freshman year.
Had this student received “C-”s or “D”s his parents would have been alerted to DO SOMETHING, and they had the personal capacities and monetary resources to act. But the school system “lulled them to sleep”.
Apophis rants that I am trying to destroy public education. But I’m not the Kansas post-secondary PUBLIC-EDUCATION board that disallowed middle school Algebra I for admissions credit. Public education is fighting against itself: K-12 vs. post-secondary.
Kudos to the WE for getting the word out about this survey.
Heartlander, you noted, “We need to provide full-time working moms the opportunity to get off at 3 and be home when their kids arrive. ”
Why not give that opportunity to working fathers? You’ve often opined that men are better at math and all things mechanical; why not let them get home earlier to help with the math homework?
Does the KS Board of Regents accept any coursework taken during middle school toward admissions credit? I wonder if their fear is that the middle schools would start offering dumbed-down math and calling it “Algebra I.”
An eighth-grader who takes honors freshman English won’t be able to count that course toward graduation, and will have to take a college English course as a senior to get the required credits for graduation.
Having laptops themselves is no panacea. They’re just tools, and until teachers can learn to use them effectively in their instruction they’re just an expensive toy. Any such one-to-one initiative *must* be accompanied by extensive teacher inservicing that covers everything from chatting to simple hardware repairs to re-thinking how curriculum should be delivered. All of this inservicing should occur months before the laptops are actually delivered to the students, to give the teachers time to learn and experiment and devise new lessons. IMN-S-HO!
Teaching is no longer merely a matter of imparting information; it’s also about helping kids learn how to sort through the high-volume traffic on the information highway and not end up as intellectual roadkill.
Being from out-of-state, can’t comment too much but to say this…
Just how satisfied with your TEACHERS are YOU?????
As usual, the bloggers are straying off thread. If we can get back to the central topic, “Just how satisfied are our teachers?”, maybe those who choose to emphasize the negative aspects of public education will stop bloviating.
First, education is not going to be “re-invented” in the image any blogger here wishes. I infer from the thread topic that there is an impending crisis brewing in regard to finding new teachers to fill positions based on some of the results of the survey.
Basically, working conditions suck. It’s not so much about the salary or health care to support and care for the families of educators.What the dissatisfaction is centered on is the CRAP required of teachers in the form of unnecessary paperwork, the lack of collaborative time and the pressures of asinine standardized testing just to name a few.Veteran teachers are leaving the profession in droves. There are fewer new teachers in the pipeline. Alternative licensure programs are not working out as many have hoped.We bring teachers in from overseas as a stopgap measure.
It might be time to look at this problem a little more analytically than “it’s the union’s fault”.
SolDevVB…………….. and what exactly to you propose if bloggers here aren’t “satisfied” with their teachers? Do you propose to just “fire them”?
Apophis, the following question is not intended to be “loaded”; if you feel it is, please say so and I’ll try to reword it if I can.
You mention the crap, including the unnecessary paperwork, inter alia; what paperwork, if you can identify the same, do you feel is unnecessary and to what program(s) is the same related/required?
Thank you in advance.
Apophis doesn’t understand how statistically-valid surveys work.
I read his link. The survey was an anonymous-response type. This is good, because anonymous reporting is more accurate, because such allows respondents to feel more free to say what they really feel.
However there is no independent cross-verification method to determine some facts as self-reported. As for opinions, these are valid for the people who expressed them, but overall these are not statistically meaningful.
Apophis’s statement that at 3 district schools 100% of teachers responded is statistically irrelevant for a 90-school survey. The survey shows these schools to be Heights High, Stucky Middle School (RM’s school), and Washington Accelerated Academy.
This means that in Wichita’s OTHER 87 schools the aggregate mean response rate was 45.2%, LESS THAN HALF. At three schools, the response was UNDER 8% (South High, Gardner and Chishom Trail elementaries). This is 1 respondent per 12 teachers or fewer. Actually Gardner had 1 respondent among 35 teachers.
Let’s do some statisticians’ statistics. The 90th percentile band eliminates the bottom 5% and top 5% extremes. This band shows that the bottom of the band response was 14%, and the top of the band response was 93%. This means the survey is statistically invalid: the range of response rates, i.e. variance, is simply far too great to generate a meaningful “mean” or “average” for specified answers given to survey questions, as REPRESENTATIVE OF MOST TEACHERS’ VIEWS.
Let’s take the bottom quartile response rate: 29% or lower response rate for 22 schools. In these schools fewer than 1 out of 3 teachers returned questionnaires.
Top quartile response rate: 68% or higher for 22 schools. So even among the top 25% of reporting schools, respondents were as low as only 2 out of 3 teachers.
Median response rate: 49%. (Close to the mean district response rate of 50.3%) In other words in half of Wichita schools, slightly less than 1 out of every 2 teachers responded.
I could go further and perform rigorous sigma-(standard-error) and z-factor computations, but it isn’t necessary.
So what does the survey reveal, first and foremost? In 3.3% of Wichita schools, EVERY TEACHER TOOK THIS SURVEY ABSOLUTELY SERIOUSLY by responding to it. In 11% of Wichita schools, this survey was taken reasonably seriously with 4 out of 5 or more teachers (80+%) responding.
In one third of Wichita schools (34%), the response rates were less than 1 out of every 3 teachers. These schools demonstrated, as institutions, that 2 out of 3 or more teachers didn’t think the survey was worth their time or effort to answer the questions and send their information in.
For all Wichita schools combined, half the teachers in Wichita did not feel that answering the survey questions was worth their time and effort. The Governor, Kansas NEA, United School Administrators and Center for Teaching Quality thought it was important, but half the teachers in Wichita thumbed their noses at our governor, their union, et al.
This constitutes a statistically invalid survey.
If 80+% of every school’s teachers responded that would be suggestive of teachers’ perspectives. If 95+% did, that would be statistically meaningful. It would not necessarily be accurate in some reported facts such as teachers’ self reporting of after-school-hours work performed, but it would give the public some idea of most teachers self-perceptions. But this survey doesn’t reveal anything, except the perspectives of 1 out of 2 teachers. The other 1 out of 2 makes no representations of any kind. Would their responses be in accord with respondents’, very different, or somewhat similar? No one has any idea, because half of Wichita teachers declined to say ANYTHING.
I don’t want to destroy public education. What I want to do is see a public education system in the 21st century that WORKS.
That means teaching math correctly. This in turn means having educators who understand math. This survey shows, and Apophis the asteroid-nic middle school geology-specialist science teacher corroborates, along with last year’s KBOR disqualification of middle school Algebra I, that Kansas pre-collegiate education in math is abysmal.
If USD 259 wants to invite engineers, WSU math faculty, active or retired, and people like me to teach the teachers mathematics, and Wichita’s most-mathematically-gifted and willing to work really hard students, we’d be happy to help. But they’re not asking us. They don’t want us. They just want to muddle through on their own, even though they don’t understand mathematics. Too bad for Wichita kids. Too bad for Wichita’s economy. But go ahead and invite us to help, and see what can happen.
Do you feel good about yourself today heartlander? Does your self esteem have that surge now that YOU have declared the KTWCS statistically insignificant? It is obvious that you don’t even understand the purpose of the entire survey. Let’s look at one of the data points YOU pointed out in your diatribe above.
Gardiner, with only 1 of 35 teachers responding to the survey shows me something very significant. Why only 1 respondent? Why only 1 respondent when the Superintendent of Schools for USD 259 mandated that building level administrators MAKE TIME within the work day for teachers to participate in this on-line survey? This tells me a great deal about the working conditions at this particular school. What about the other schools you mentioned? What is going on at those schools that would keep teachers from participating? Could it be a less than favorable working environment? Contrary to what you might think heartlander, you cannot quantify everything. You did an impressive analysis of the statistics of the survey. But, your line of reasoning attempts to quantify everything. That is the major flaw of the NCLB law as well.
What is your obsession with me heartlander? Is it because I am one of a group of educators who actually make decisions and you do not? It seems to me that you vent on me because you cannot have your way. Your view of reform isn’t going to happen. Why can’t you deal with that and get on board with some realistic, positive comments? Maybe we should just meet over a beer and hash this out once and for all.
I tried a few years ago to get a taskforce of parents and other people to go on day to day with teachers, but it was disapproved for liability reasons?
The purpose was to see what teachers have to do daily, what the paperwork issue was and how the discipline issues are handle.
The idea was, if the teachers are unable to teach because of administrative hand-tieing then it needed to be investigated.
Having known dozens of people that teach I had no problems with their ability, but was curious what was going wrong.
Anyway, I tried to get into the inner workings of the system, but was denied.
CSA,
Dads too should be given early-leave time. You’re absolutely right.
On laptops, this has to be combined with CS-expert instruction. The machines alone are not an answer. As you say, they are a tool. All tools require instruction in how to use them well.
We need to connect schools with families in ways that were never previously considered. Such as evening sessions with teachers, parents and students working together.
Most of our community’s parents received a semi-literacy education based on the premise that manual-labor jobs could provide a decent living. They can’t help their kids with homework. So, let’s teach parents. The old premise is obsolete.
We need for families to get rid of their “boob tubes”. We need to encourage parents to say, “I’m not watching TV, you have to do your homework, and I’ll sit here with you.” We have to encourage parents to read to their young children at bedtime, and when the children are older, have them read to their parents at bedtime. And “I’ll read some, and you read to me some.”
On teacher unionization, that’s a dead end. Teachers need to take a lesson from the UAW. Union autoworkers viewed the corporate bigwigs to be greedy pigs. Good observation. But they pressed the Big Three too hard for wage and benefit increases. The Big Three execs felt that this pushed cost-points too high for American consumers. They came up with productivity-enhancing robotics. But this was beyond autoworkers’ abilities, so UAW rejected this. So the execs cheapened cars, creating junk cars in the 70’s and 80’s. Which opened the door to foreign competition. And the Big Three have never recovered.
In education, conflicting agendas are bad news. We need cooperative, collaborative action involving non-parent taxpayers, parents, administrators and teachers.
Any good math or science teacher would love 3 classes with 20 students. Go home after lunch, take a nap, have dinner, come back in the evening for a few hours to work with some students on their homework. Or come to school after lunch. No necessity for NCLB.
heartlander’s suggestion – “If USD 259 wants to invite engineers, WSU math faculty, active or retired, and people like me to teach the teachers mathematics, and Wichita’s most-mathematically-gifted and willing to work really hard students, we’d be happy to help. But they’re not asking us. They don’t want us.”
Are you not willing to work with the kids who have trouble with math, or with the kids who just don’t care?
Aren’t these the kids in need of more expert help? After all, you’ve said yourself that such experts could bring in reality-based problems for them to solve, so they’d be inherently more interested in what you have to offer, right?
You could perform a great public service by organizing such an initiative. I’m certain there are grants available to help fund this, and I’d even help you write up a proposal if you’re *truly* interested in helping these kids.
Don’t forget that public school teachers have to work with *all* of the kids; they don’t get to pick and choose either the quality or the quantity of students they teach.
As long as parents keep believing that ‘little Johnny’ can do no wrong, there will be problems.
As long as parents keep pushing little Johnny thru the grades even though he cannot read, there will be problems.
If a teacher, just like any other professional, can not perform his duties, he should be terminated.
Do y’all have a teacher’s union? I loathe unions and what they stand for, but they might actually have a place here. If you have been paying your dues, then it is time that those dues work for YOU. Get your grievances out.
Okay, Apophis, email me and we’ll get together for a beer. You want me to teach you some math? I’m pretty good at it. You can teach me a lot about geology. I don’t know very much about geology but I’d love to learn.
Yes SolDevVB, we do have a union here. It is a very strong association that works collaboratively with the school district yet will file appropriate grievances when the negotiated working agreement has been violated. Do you have a problem with this arrangement?
Like anything, teaching fundamentals is key to success. Ever hear a sportscaster talk about that player really knows the fundamentals of baseball, basketball, etc. Or what trips up a Space Shuttle launch, it is usually something simple, a frayed wire, some type of glue for tiles or a checklist item that didn’t get checked.
The same applies to math and science specifically. Most of the young people I’ve worked with have trouble with the very fundamentals of math. They’ve taken College Algebra, but still don’t get the basics of factoring, using signs in algebraic expressions and in using the correct rule when it comes to figuring compound expressions of math problems.
Part of the math teaching “failure” in my humble opinion is also not giving everyday problems to students. You know, make it fun. Go to the schools shop or a construction sight and figure how many board feet of lumber will be needed to make something. Or have a recipe for a cake and leave out some missing ingredients and have the students figure out what quantity is missing.
Giving everyday problems would greatly enhance the relevance of math to most students.
I mean, talk to a person who says, oh yeah I’ve taken College Algebra and then tell them to figure out a mortgage on a house or even a simple interest – they will look at you like a deer caught in headlights.
It’s getting rid of the fears of applying math that needs to be done. But hey, that’s my humble opinion.
sight=site
I have a problem with unions as a whole. If you have intolerable working conditions and the union hasn’t’ stepped up, then shouldn’t you too?
I know some of what teachers go through. Not in today’s standards though. I am a software developer and as far as the paperwork side of things goes, I can think of many many ways to ease the burden on teachers, administrators, and students. It would also allow a portal for the parents into the world of their children and their children’s teachers.
I also see a lot of parents that don’t want to be parents but BARELY babysitters and expect the school system to pick up the slack.
I see these problems and the problem that me my little self has with that is that if you have a problem and don’t try to solve it with the tools you have, then don’t bitch about it. Make your union do what it gets paid to do and get some reform in place. Go to the PTA conferences and demand that parents/students/administration get things right. And if things are so bad, why didn’t the teachers stand up and say so with the questionnaire?
In the same breath, teachers are on the firing lines as well. Not everyone is cut out to be nor should be teachers.
Here’s the thing SolDevVB, if you don’t like unions, don’t join one. That is your right. But, until you are a member of my union, don’t try to tell me how our union should operate.
This one is very funny: “Go to the PTA conferences and demand that parents/students/administration get things right.” What kind of a dream world do you live in? It is obvious to me that you are just another one of these “self-made education experts” who think they have the answer to everything. I don’t try to tell you how to do your job (develop software), don’t try to tell me how to do mine.
You are correct; I don’t know how to do your job. I don’t bring complaints of my job to an open forum either. I would have to ask you though, if you work conditions are so poor, what is the union doing for you?
Have you seen me personally complain about my job? I am commenting on the thread topic one of the editors posted.You also fail to see what a union can and cannot do. We can negotiate a contract and then grieve breaches of this agreement. What the union cannot do is to mandate administrative changes that need to be made at various buildings that would obviously make working conditions more favorable. That would be nice if we had that type of power. I don’t know any type of union that actually does yield power of that magnitude.
The bottom line is this: either working conditions need to improve rapidly or there will soon be a crisis in finding ANY teachers to fill our classrooms.
CSA,
You present a worthwhile idea.
You ask, “Are you not willing to work with the kids who have trouble with math, or with the kids who just don’t care?”
Every kid has trouble with math. It’s different from other subjects. It’s a foreign languge with unique symbols (Hindu-Arabic numerals, for example, operations symbols devised by Greeks, Latin-writing Medieval and Renaissance scholars, and German, Russian, French, English et al. modern mathematicians). Mathematics has its own symbology, grammar and syntax, which is completely different from our everyday English oral and written language.
It combines visualizable spatial concepts, invisible entities, uniqueness and nonuniqueness, rationality and irrationality, logic, analogy, discrete and continuous entities…
Fundamentally, learning math well requires struggle. Even kids who are perceived to be “naturals” often have to read passages, read them again, read them a third time, sleep on it, and let their unconscious brains process the information. “Oh, now I get it!” It’s hard work. These Asian kids who are math wizzes DO A LOT OF MATH. They could become English wizzes with the same effort, but their parents see better future career prospects for them in math, science and technology, so that’s what they encourage their kids to work towards.
Instilling the principle of stick-to-itiveness is difficult, but critical aspect of mathematics learning. If you’re tired and can’t concentrate, take a break. Take a nap. But come back. Don’t just slough it off because it’s “too hard”.
There are things we can do to make learning mathematics more interesting to more kids, as suggested by others here, and schools are working in this. Manipulatives, field trips, bringing engineers, carpenters, nurses, and chefs into classes for demonstrations of what they do, connecting with NASA (as has been done in Wichita) are all good things.
Society needs to decide how much of a commitment do we want to make to math education. Just in time commitment alone, to help most kids develop solid grasps will require 2 hour instruction blocks, best in the morning, when brains are most alert and able to absorb new, difficult information. (Of course a good night’s sleep is essential.) After lunch, students go into post-prandrial lethargy. You don’t want to try to teach math at this time.
Why 2 hours? Because math involves so many complex foreign elements, it takes time for kids thinking processes to be adjusted, for them to get “in the groove”, solve enough problems correctly for their brains to realize, “Okay, I’m doing this, this is working, I can do math!…” and for teachers to be able help kids get to this point most days, before the bell intervenes.
Morning math for all students is easier to do in elementary schools with single multi-subject teachers, but currently very hard to conceive in middle and high schools.
I bring up this last matter, because if I were to try teaching math, I couldn’t just go into a standard 55-minute routine setting. No one can actually, which is one reason our schools don’t teach math well.
It would have to involve team-teaching, to coordinate in-school and after-school programs. People would probably want to visit KIPP academies because they have been working in intensive education for minority students for many years, and have been able to test and separate out things that didn’t work from those that did.
It would be a big and long undertaking. Getting it “sold” to teachers, parents and funding providers would require a prolonged major public relations campaign, and dedicated attention by the press.
“…there will soon be a crisis in finding ANY teachers to fill our classrooms.”
With the average salary in Kansas at more than $1,000 per week, I don’t think finding teachers should be too much of a problem.
Is that so fleettie? I suppose that is why Wichita is traveling all the way to the Phillipines to find teachers right now? Get your facts straight before you shoot off your right wing mouth.
“Get your facts straight before you shoot off your right wing mouth.”
I consider myself a moderate independent. You are mean.
The Phillipine teachers were hired to fill Special Ed, Math and Science positions.Special Ed is difficult to teach with it’s own problems. Math and Science positions are difficult to fill because the needed teachers were taught in Public Skools and didn’t learn Math and Science properly. It’s a circle of failure. A $1,000 a month ain’t bad, though.
I think Apophis is having a bad hair day.
May I recommend watching the John Edwards video with the accompanying song of “I feel pretty.” :D
fleetwood sez, “Math and Science positions are difficult to fill because the needed teachers were taught in Public Skools and didn’t learn Math and Science properly.”
Got any evidence for that claim?
1. fleettwood, I am mean never forget that. If you don’t want to be labeled “right wing”, don’t post crap that puts you in that camp.2. Repug, it would be difficult for me to have a “bad hair day”, literally.3. CSA, the bloviaters on this blog don’t need any stinkin’ evidence to support their claims! You should know that by now.
Apophis,
Multiple choice question:
Do you have:
a. more hair than RM?b. less hair than RM?c. about the same amount of hair as RM?
;-)
Anyway, have fun at NSTM. Bring back some good stuff to Wichita. And you too, CSA.
Correction NSTA