With two key state panels urging the Legislature to fund all-day kindergarten and higher teacher salaries, both should be marquee education issues for the 2008 session. “It’s the two areas where we could make the most difference,” said Rochelle Chronister, who chairs the 2010 Commission. Earlier this month, the Kansas State Board of Education approved similar legislative recommendations.
About two-thirds of Kansas kindergarten students now attend all-day programs, in districts that have made it their own budget priority. Implementing all-day K statewide would take an estimated $75 million. And Kansas teacher pay ranks 38th among the states, $39,351 a year compared with the national average of $47,602. “If we’re going to make progress toward moving the average teacher salary up to the national median, we are going to have to put some more money in our schools,” said state school board chairman Bill Wagnon.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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43 Comments
I agree, being a elementary education major, I’m not going because of the money. It is the children. Those teachers put so much work into what they do. They for sure don’t get paid what they deserve. They should be making more than Bill Gates!
Hell! That’s a good salary.
………..and THAT is an asinine comment Joe W.!
To compare wages on a national level you must also take in to account the cost of living.
$40,000 is pretty good for 8 months worth of work.
……..and another asinine comment!
Have you seen the work teachers do? That salary is nothing. Plus that is without taxes.
Instead of paying for all-day kindergarten which latest research tells us any advantage fades by 3rd grade, use the money for teacher salaries.
asinine? What do you think teachers should be making?
$40,000 a year is a lot more than the national average of any salary. Millions of students graduating out of College could only wish to make that much out of school.
For some odd reason, people or teachers believe that fresh graduates make more than them, which is far from the truth. Police and Firefighters make less than teachers.
There are plenty of skilled personal, college graduates and even engineers that don’t make $40,000. And teachers aren’t exactly rare either. There are millions of them, so supply and demand takes a effect.
Don’t misunderstand me, a good teacher is a good teacher and worth it’s weight in gold to the children they are teaching. But to have teacher salaries higher than that of pretty much a vast majority of skilled professions is in fact asinine it itself. Teachers are valuable to our society, but so is everybody else that is contributing.
A regular teacher from the Public School system wouldn’t never get paid as much as they do in the private sector if they left the school system.
So if you are a government school teacher Apophis and complaining about only making $40,000 a year because you think you are worth $100,000 a year, just remember that if you weren’t a teacher you would probably make only $28,000 a year working like millions of other people with degrees do.
“Teacher” –
;-)
Seems to me the job title is “Teacher,” not “Indoctinator.”
That seems to be the critical conflict of every education debate.
Somewhere midway through my college career it dawned on me that education is supposed to teach you *how* to think, not *what* to think.
I suspect we Liberals will always be at a disadvantage to the Cons. We keep looking for answers, they think they already have ‘em all.
Joe………….with my years of experience and education, I make somewhat more than $40k a year. That doesn’t include the supplemental I work outside my regular job and the consulting fees I earn outside of my district.
Do I think that I deserve $100K annual salary? Yes, I do. Will I ever see that, probably not. This is why I work a lot more than 8 hours a day. I also work more than the regular “10 months a year” most people assume that teachers normally work.
Stop comparing what teachers earn with what over college grads earn; it is an “apples and oranges” comparison.
Your derogatory use of the term “government” tells me all I need to know about you.
Apophis,
You’ve contradicted yourself. $40,000 isn’t enough? But on another thread you bragged about how much you’ve accumulated. Open Thread 10-27-07 8:31 AM
The truth is, most people that I, you and everbody else knows, have husband-and-wife working families. So two average-income married Kansas teachers can make $79,702. If they elect to teach adult night-school and summer courses, they can approach $100,000. Two 55-year old married teachers in Wichita can make $100,000 without extra teaching assignments.
That’s a really good family income– 96th percentile for Kansas– would you not agree? Especially for a job that is termination-proof, provides excellent healthcare benefits, excellent retirement benefits and low-interest loans through the credit union.
Also Apophis, you took a hiatus from teaching, so you don’t get the salary of someone your age who stuck with teaching. Is that fair? You learned some lessons that could very well be applicable in the classroom, but under union-dictated salary rules, you didn’t get any credit, but were instead subjected to, “You left, and are now coming back, we’re going to screw you.” That’s not how things work in the educated-employer/employee real world.
So, Kansas teacher salaries rank 38th in the USA.
Guess what the Cost of Living in Kansas rank is in the USA?
42nd.
Teachers in Kansas then, should get their salaries DECREASED to the point of being ranked 42nd in the US.
http://ded.mo.gov/researchandplanning/indicators/cost_of_living/index.stm
Oh, and we don’t need a Nanny State to raise our kids in the guise of All Day Kindergarten.
$75 million for daycare, paid for by TAXPAYERS!
What we need is Pro-Choice for Parents.
A voucher in the amount expended per child for public education should be given to the parents to pay for tuition at the school of THEIR choice. They may send their kids to public school or private school – Parent’s Choice!
A little competition will drive-up the quality of our education system.
Every year, the NEA cries about the urgent need to raise teacher salaries. And every year, we fail to see any improvement in the quality of our education.
Surprise? We are simply paying more money to the SAME teachers for doing the same low quality work.
Under competition, the highest quality teachers would get paid the most.
And don’t tell me every teacher is high quality. I went through public edukation myself you know!
MPS
You’ve contradicted yourself. $40,000 isn’t enough? But on another thread you bragged about how much you’ve accumulated. Open Thread 10-27-07 8:31 AM>>> I guess you missed the point of my post. It was not bragging as much as a response to the trollboy’s assertion that only republicans can accumulate wealth. It was nothing more, nothing less. What I have is nothing to you, living in your .5 million dollar + house out by Andover.The truth is, most people that I, you and everbody else knows, have husband-and-wife working families. So two average-income married Kansas teachers can make $79,702. If they elect to teach adult night-school and summer courses, they can approach $100,000. Two 55-year old married teachers in Wichita can make $100,000 without extra teaching assignments.>>> $100,000 isn’t really a lot of money for professionals is it? The issue isn’t what a 15 year+ teacher with a Masters Degree makes is it? What is needed really is a competitive starting salary and for working conditions to change. Why are we losing half of the new teachers in the first five years?That’s a really good family income– 96th percentile for Kansas– would you not agree? Especially for a job that is termination-proof, provides excellent healthcare benefits, excellent retirement benefits and low-interest loans through the credit union.
>>> There are many disingenuous statements here.1. There is no such thing as “termination-proof”. If a teacher is not performing, an administrator can get rid of them if they aren’t too lazy to go through the due process procedure. That’s really what it boils down to.2. We, in Wichita, do have excellent healthcare benefits. It comes at the expense of salary though. There is only so much money in that pot. Teachers in suburban and smaller districts do not have “excellent healthcare benefits”. They are really caught up more so in the national healthcare crisis.3. I suppose one might consider KPERS “excellent retirement benefits”; I do not. This is why I have made a point of having some back up investments.4. “low-interest loans through the credit union”……………where is this coming from? There is no credit union that gives exclusive rates to teachers only. CUA was originally founded by teachers, but the institution is open to the general public.Also Apophis, you took a hiatus from teaching, so you don’t get the salary of someone your age who stuck with teaching.
>>>I make the same salary as I would have had I NOT left the profession for 7 years. While working in industry, I earned roughly twice what I would have in education only. Also, the retirement account I brought back with me is worth at least twice as much as I would have earned for those seven years of service through KPERS. I think I came out ahead.Is that fair? You learned some lessons that could very well be applicable in the classroom, but under union-dictated salary rules, you didn’t get any credit, but were instead subjected to, “You left, and are now coming back, we’re going to screw you.” That’s not how things work in the educated-employer/employee real world.>>> The main lesson I learned to bring back to the field of education is to NEVER to be NOT REPRESENTED by a UNION. The company I worked for in industry was not unionized. The money was great, but the legal and human rights violations were horrible.>>>FYI………….. Wichita gives full credit for years of service now, up to the maximum on the salary schedule. To address the follow on ramblings of Max and his “vouchers” nonsense; Education is not a business, we don’t build widgets. Your “almighty competition” will not work. Give it up! If you want the most highly qualified teaching, pay them a highly qualified wage.
>>>Get this in your head also; the NEA is NOT going away! We are 3 million + strong and our voices will be heard. You feel the impact more and more often of our political power in upcoming local, state and national elections.
Apophis,
Are you saying that even though you left the district for 7 years, they hired you at the same salary as if you hadn’t left? Let me clarify:
Assume you had taught for 5 years. You left for 7.
You returned with 5 years of teaching experience.Right?
I cannot believe that the district would have paid you the same salary as a teacher who originally started in the same year you did, but at the time of your return, had 12 years of credit for teaching in the district, compared to your 5.
In order for this to happen, the union-imposed salary scale would have to be violated. On the other hand, if the district did pay you the same as the other teacher who had 7 years more experience than you, then it would mean teacher salaries are subject to discretionary factors, which would mean that outstanding teachers could “leapfrog” ordinary ones, by negotiating higher personal salaries. But this would violate collective bargaining rules, no?
On “termination-proof” you actually supported my contention in saying that teachers can be fired for low performance, but administrators are too lazy (or wish to avoid complicated conflict), to make this actually happen. In the past there were cases of sex predators who were not fired until multiple complaints were filed, and lawsuit threats were made. You mentioned human rights violations in the private sector. Predatory sex is a human rights violation of children.
Maybe you deserve more money. I don’t think $100k is plausible, because senior KU full professors who have Ph.D.s and larger class loads than you, who do research in addition to teaching, have a $103.9 k salary average. Tenured associate professors who typically have 20-25 years experience only make a $72.3 average.
At KSU, full prof and associate prof averages are $87.3k and $68.1k.
Most of these teacher/researchers work 8 weeks in summer and take a 4 week vacation. Their grad students don’t just go home for a long holiday, or work without supervision for three months.
Suppose your salary should be raised, say to $60,000, i.e. close to $7000/month. The problem is, the public isn’t going to buy the proposition of raising ALL teachers salaries to that level. If you want $60,000, you’re going to have to support a performance-based pay system. But as union leader, you don’t want to do that. So you’re stymied, unless you decide to leave the classroom and become a principal.
If you had a performance-based pay system, and by performance I would include not just the relative quality of teaching any given subject, but also a differential for math and science teachers, because it’s easier to hire a qualified language arts or social studies teacher than a qualified math or science teacher, at any given salary level.Math and science people are in short supply in our economy, and their skills are highly valued. Public schools are the only institution that require math and science people, but deny these people’s value, i.e. they have special skill sets that need to be conveyed to students; if you have to pay them more to attract them, it’s not an extraordinary expense, it is a wise community investment.
If you pay them the same as social studies teachers, but you give them reduced teaching loads, such as three classes a day, under the principle:
We know teaching math and science are hard. Really hard. These fields have THEIR OWN LANGUAGES that are different from the common lexicon. This is why a social studies teacher can assign 20 pages of reading to smart students, while the same smart students can only get through 4-5 pages of math reading in the same period of time.
A smart student can read a social studies textbook and absorb most of the information in one pass. The same student reading a math textbook thinks, “I don’t get this. I don’t understand what they are saying here.” So it requires looking back at previous sections, and re-reading the current material until one has an “Oh, I get it! Why didn’t I see this before” epiphany.
So, suppose administration says, We want to give you time to figure out how to teach this very, very difficult subject, carefully grade your students’ homework, and meet with students individually to ensure that they learn this stuff. We know they aren’t getting it now. Truth be told, I didn’t get it when I was in school.
So under this scenario, where all teachers are paid the same salaries, you’d have to hire more math and science teachers if they only taught three classes, being paid full-time salaries.
But then would the language arts and social studies teachers torpedo this on the simplistic “fairness” judgment: We all have to have EQUAL teaching loads, i.e. as to the number of daily classes taught? This position denies the difficulty of math and science courses’ teaching as being a major component of a teaching load. That’s not a soundly reasoned position and it is unfair to students.
It is interesting that the unions are declining in almost all private industry and business. Only in the public sector, where politics and taxpayers dollars are at play – have they advanced.
And don’t forget the AFT represents teachers too. One of every nine delegates to the Democratic national conventions that nominated the Clinton-Gore ticket in 1992 and 1996 was a member of the NEA or AFT, and former union staff members hold key positions in the Democratic party and the Clinton administration.
They are to the democrat party what the religious right and NRA are to republicans.
MPS
Here is the link to the current salary schedule. I have 15 years in this district. As you can see, it wouldn’t matter about those 7 years I was out. There is no “year 22″ on the schedule.
http://www.usd259.com/employees/humanresources/certified/Teaching+Salary+Schedule.htm
We’re not going down the “pay for performance” road MPS. We (the district and the Union) were studying this option up until 2005 when the district started unfair negotiation practices. I wasn’t sold on the fairness of the concept then, I’m sure not sold now.
You will not get me discuss whether or not one teacher deserves more salary than another. You and I both know what it takes to be a scinece or math teacher. It’s best that we leave it at that. Degrading the Social Studies and English teachers serves no puropse other than to cast a shadow of diviseness in the profession. I will not do that. If there is to be a salary differential, I’d rather see it come at the state rather than local level so the poor quality building level adminstrators have little say in the matter. NO, I do not want to ever work in administration. I went into the profession to teach.
American way……………….use the party name correctly or don’t use it at all. It is the “Democratic” Party.
You are correct about the power of the AFT and NEA. Wichita teachers are members of BOTH unions. We will be heard. Our political power will be heard in upcoming local, state and national elections!
MPS
The salary schedule is NEGOTIATED. It is not actually put together by the DISTRICT based on the percentage salary increase we can negotiate on the base salary.
Conservatives are so liberal on this subject of education.
All you hear all day is how our education system is failing us. How other countries are so much better and how American students are at such a disadvantage. They say that the teachers are failing and blame them for drop out rates in inner city schools.
What happened to personal responsibility and good parenting? Teachers are expected to educators and baby sitters in today’s school in many cases, filling in for parents who haven’t taken the time parent their students. Inner city schools are failing because the inner city family is failing! You can’t teach if you have to spend all of your time disciplining. It’s time to address the real issue, and not expect teachers to have to be parents for these students also.
That’s very profound thinking jb.
It’s too bad few people see that obvious reality. I share your views.
“You are correct about the power of the AFT and NEA. Wichita teachers are members of BOTH unions. We will be heard. Our political power will be heard in upcoming local, state and national elections!”
I am woman, hear me roar!
mock all you want troll, political power is reality……..deal with it.
A declining power. One that will be shattered when the LOCAL taxpayers get tired of your games.
We don’t owe you anything. All your gains are ONLY because you control the tickets. Taxpayers are your patsies.
You cannot survive without them.
Must suck to be you.
A declining power……..we’ll see.
Really, it doesn’t suck to be me. I am a member of the Democratic Party and I know our philosophy is right.
You repukes are pathetic, true “haters”!
I hold suspect anyone NOT in a union.
By its very nature, union membership is a commitment to ones profession and fellow professionals in the face of management goons with a magnifying glass on the bottom line.
Ramen JR!
anyone NOT in a union.
By its very nature, union membership is a commitment to ones profession and fellow professionals in the face of management goons with a magnifying glass on the bottom line.
Posted by: J R |
A view shared by less than, less than, 15% of WORKING Americans.And declining as I post.
Enjoy your perceived power.
Interesting indeed! Whereever unions try to establish themselves, or push their products they fail. EXCEPT where they can use political POWER to ensure their survival.
But that is perceived power. And even the liberals know, they are catering to a dying breed. They will do all they can to use the judicial and legislative branches to support the unions well-being. But in the end, unions have died under their own weight.
They can no longer survive – where workers VOTE for representation without government interference.
Only teachers unions are growing. The free and non-suckling workers of private industry are on the way out.
Those sucking on nanny’s tit are all the survive.
Interesting indeed! Whereever unions try to establish themselves, or push their products they fail. EXCEPT where they can use political POWER to ensure their survival.
But that is perceived power. And even the liberals know, they are catering to a dying breed. They will do all they can to use the judicial and legislative branches to support the unions well-being. But in the end, unions have died under their own weight.
They can no longer survive – where workers VOTE for representation without government interference.
Only teachers unions are growing. The free and non-suckling workers of private industry are on the way out.
Those sucking on nanny’s tit are all the survive.
Apophis the salary schedule is too hard for me to figure out, and it’s too hard for me to reconcile with you’re self-alleged salary. I guess I’m not that good at math.
But I said before, that’s the way math is, “I don’t get this. I don’t understand what they’re saying.”
Instead of pondering the matter for an hour, can you give me some quick tutoring?
I’m looking at the Excel spreadsheet you linked. I disabled macros because my computer warned me that macros could have viruses. But this shouldn’t affect the spreadsheet data.
Readers here should download the spreadsheet to follow my statements.
Initial Placement “0″ being aligned with Step 2 doesn’t make sense to me, because I don’t understand how 0 =2.
$36,927 for a BA holder at the 0=2 level appears to be the entry-level salary.
You said you make somewhat more than $40,000. Assume this is $44-47,000. For 15 years experience you are only paid less than $10,000 more than the 0=2 entry level. (Your starting salary was lower than $37,000 but dollars were worth more back then due to inflation.) Bottom line: it would appear that you haven’t really advanced much–IF your stated salary is a true statement.
But let’s follow your link. In fact, the Initial Placement column, we see that at year 11–which you should be at, with 15 years experience–teachers who have an MA+ degree, which you have, pays $52,121.
When you said you were paid “somewhat more than $40,000,” did you actually MEAN you were paid “somewhat more than $50,000″? Those are two very different numbers. In other words, were you being disengenuous?
For “Ed. Sp.” with a B.A. degree at year 11, the salary is $54,139. At year 13+ it’s $56,483. Unless “Ed. Sp.” means “Special Education”, i.e. if it means somebody with a subject-relevant specialized major, such as a person with a secondary-ed bio, chem, math, physics or geology major, it would appear that you make $56,483. If that’s the case, shouldn’t you have said that you make somewhat less than $60,000?
Oh, you poor guy. You “only” earn $56,483 for 40 weeks/1200-1500 hours of annual work at school, plus you do private work on the side and “only” make, all together, maybe $60k, $70k a year. Your wife has a business, and assuming a modest small business profit, you have a ca. $100k, or more, family income.
I’ll not attack a fellow worker.
Mangaement? I got no issue with the most dark of tactics…
What’s your point with that last ramble MPS? Th salary schedule is a public document, I cannot help if it is “confusing” to you. I was at no time bring disengenuous. If you look at the link, there is also a hyperlink on that page that lists the “supplemental salary schedule”. It depends on what “other jobs” the teacher does as to what, if any, supplemental contracts they have. I have a few, so that adds onto my base salary. it is really very simple. Note that this is a SCHOOL DISTRICT document, not a UNION document.
I guess I fail to see your entire point MPS. My wife and I earn a middle class wage and living. We own our home, have few debts and are active in the community. Does that mean starting teachers don’t deserve a $40K+ starting salary? This is what you always do MPS; you take the topic of the thread when it comes to education and turn it into a personal attack on me. I have pondered a few times why that might be. Could it be that I actually will go toe to toe with you about education issues. You seem to want the other bloggers here to look up to you as the “EXPERT” in all things to do with education just because you claim to hold an “MD”. You do have some great thoughts but almost everything you post has a slant to it. That slant is invariably “looking down your nose at them”. That irritates me to no end. Maybe that’s why you do it, but I doubt it. I see you as one who thinks they are right because you’ve “put in your time, 12 years of college” and no one could conceivably be as smart as you are.
Stop the personal attacks and look at reality.
Reality is that all teachers are going to be paid the same. I would stand to gain financially if I joined your “we have to pay math and science teachers more becuase they have a harder job” cult. I will not do that. That is divisive. If the Feds or State were to institute differential pay to fund additional salary for math/science, that might be worth looking at. At the local level, NO.
Apophis,
You’re always taking things off track.
The lead-in cites a $39,547 salary average for Kansas. That may be a true factoid, but:
A. With a salary ceiling after 11 years, and most Wichita teachers having more accumulated years than this, the MEDIAN Wichita teacher salary is $56,483. It may be that 70-80% of Wichita teachers earn $56,483, due to the teacher-age distribution.
Do I object to this level of salary? Not at all. I just think that some “edstats” represent less-than-adequate disclosure, whose purpose is to create an appearance of teachers’ earning far less money than they actually do.
B. Census 2000 reported the median male income to be $36,457. The median male worker age is approximately 40. In essence 23 year old teachers earn as much as the average Wichita male who is nearly twice as old. By age 35, they’re earning middle-manager salaries. Actually, if we consider a 39 week teachers’ work-year compared to a 50 week work-year in the “real world”, $56,483 /39 weeks = $1447/wk, which is equivalent to $72,357 for 50 weeks! There aren’t that many jobs held by 34 year old people with bachelor’s degrees that pay this kind of money.
If we go back to the KSU Associate Professor average, $68.1 k for 48 weeks per year, that’s $1410/week. If a Wichita teacher with a bachelor’s or masters earns more money per week than a PhD faculty member at KSU, it is hard to consider Wichita teachers to be underpaid.
At Fort Hays and Pittsburg State, associate professors of average age 40-45, earn $57.3k and $58.0 k. Thirty-five year old Wichita teachers make very close to what older university professors make. At Wichita State, the AP average is $67 k. Let’s think: shouldn’t teaching masters who have PhDs and EdDs who typically started out as K-12 teachers and were selected to be the teachers of teachers, be paid more than their students? These are very talented people who not only train tomorrow’s teachers, but convey new knowledge to K-12 teachers of all ages, to improve their capabilities and performances.
Finally long summer vacations are money-making opportunities, including teaching summer school classes, teaching teachers’ workshops, writing or proof-reading textbooks and workbooks, and even working in educational software.
These money-making activities are “off the books”. Do I have a problem with this free enterprise? Not at all.
But the real deal is the average Wichita teacher isn’t making $39,457–he/she is making $17,000 more than this. This is for a 39-week work year, and in teachers’ off-time, there are plenty of opportunities to generate “off the books” income to earn more than $60,000/yr, which ambitious teachers achieve.
And more power to them. For those who find they have enough money to allow them to rest and recreate from the last days of May until the last days of July, that’s cool too.
I’m just saying, stop weaseling. Single-parent teachers are in the middleclass. Teachers in dual-income households are in the upper middle class.Nothing wrong with that.
Is the union necessary? I don’t know. I had a girlfriend whose parents were teachers. Pre-union. They had a beautiful home in one of my hometown’s management-class neighborhoods, and sent their daughter to a tony private school, then to a private college, plus a trip to Europe when she was 16.
Our teachers’ teachers at our state universities aren’t unionized. How do they do it? Clearly, their administrators have cost-control urges.
Stop trying to compare what teachers make with what “could” be made if school was a year around proposition. It isn’t. Teachers are forced to take classes during the summer for professional development, salary schedule advancement and licensure requirmens. That cost is out of our pockets, not from the taxpayers. Some teachers do work during the time that classes are not in session. I don’t think they should have to do this.
Also, leave higher education out of the discussion as well. This is comparing apples to oranges when discussing K-12 salaries. Those people, many times, have never been in a classroom outside of the university setting. That is their chose and if they feel they are not being compensated fairly, they can negotiate a better contract (Pitt State is NEA, I don’t know about Ft. Hays) or teach in a K-12 school.
What you don’t get MPS is that your opinion isn’t going to matter. All you do is write lenghty tomes on a blog about how you are right and the system is wrong. For once try doing something in the real world about your perceived problems in public education system. I have some ideas that I think you could be a valuable asset as a volunteer. I don’t share them with you because of your belligerent attitude toward teachers and public education in general.
I said teachers average 39 weeks of work, even though the school year per se is 36 weeks, because: A. They have to take summer courses, but this can be done once every five years, by teachers who choose to earn the required credits in one fell swoop, and B. teachers spend a week or two in late summer preparing for the fall semester.
On continuing education / professional development coursework, the state should pay for this. I don’t know why it doesn’t. This should be a high-priority subject for the union to tackle.
Let’s consider analogies. The airplane was developed about the time that universal compulsory education was developed. It was shown in the 1920s that a propeller-drive airplane could fly to 48,000 feet. In the last decade the late Paul MacCready developed a solar-electric prop-driven reconnaissance aircraft that exceeded 100,000 ft.
But to do spaceflight required completely different technologies.
Or consider the internal-combustion petroleum-fueled automobile, another contemporary of universal public education. It has served humanity for more than a century, but won’t last another half-century. Society has to come up with new ideas, and/ or revisit old ones, such as electric cars and fuel-cells, both of which worked, but couldn’t compete with gasoline because the latter had a far higher energy density, and was extremely cheap.
Teacher unionization is old too, dating back to the first quarter of the twentieth century. It didn’t get started in Kansas, much less Wichita, but rather in New York City and Chicago, where the chief role of public education, the preparation of low-cost industrial labor, was understood by all participants.
Here is the problem: industrialization was developed to enable a small portion of the population to become extremely wealthy and powerful, by a peculiar mechanism: the relatively- low-individual-output of thousands of workers employed by an industrial corporation could translate into high aggregate outputs. Mass public education was designed to produce, in the form of the great majority of its students, low-output-workers.
The system also possessed a higher-vocation channel, for a minority of students. They didn’t receive a great education, but those who did well in the “preliminaries” were sorted into more challenging classes, leading to high school enrollment, and for the better-performing students in high school, college enrollment.
Students who made it through the sorting machine and came out on top, and poor-performing students who had independent minds that enabled them to become wealthy by luck and pluck, once outside the system, generally placed their own children in private schools, following the example of public education’s capitalist instigators, who didn’t use their public system for their own children.
Let’s consider the oft-expressed teachers’ complaint that parents are unsupportive, and even counterproductive.
Let’s see, they went to public schools that forcibly took them as children from their parents. This prevented them from learning ancient parenting skills.
Public education aggressively used sorting routines that punished children by issuing low grades, and created inadequacy feelings and antipathy to public education. These children became parents, who don’t want to cooperate with a system that abused them by imposing a narrow regimen of things to learn, and had no interest in discovering and nurturing their latent talents, because these were outside its mission field.
Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat” recounts a vignette about Indian kids who had never seen a computer, who were given a computer with cursor without a keyboard who coaxed out of it meaningful textual statements.
We don’t need technophobic teachers receiving training in computer usage to convey their misunderstandings to kids. We need to give kids an hour of computer time daily, with appropriate filters, to allow them to play with technology and figure it out.
Five years ago, a biology teacher at Piper High gave an assignment to the class to collect some leaves and write reports on the plants from which they were collected. Approximately half the students smartly used the Internet to obtain relevant information. They didn’t cite their sources. She gave these students “F’s” on the assignments for plagiarism.
Was this rational? Absolutely not. These kids had studied TEXTBOOKS FOR YEARS that were plagiaristic, because the textbooks contained information with no reference citations. When the teacher of this class presented information to her students, she didn’t cite the original sources.
This teacher could have correctly said to the students, “You got the right scientific information, now rewrite your reports with citations to tell me where you obtained this information. If you do this, you get ‘A’s’.”
Kids who were smart enough to get the information the teacher wanted, but didn’t know how to cite, were flunked. They weren’t given a chance to revise their work.
I did a report on Puerto Rico in 6th grade. I personally wrote a letter to the Puerto Rican government to obtain information. They sent me an info packet, including several brochures. In my report I didn’t cite the materials by footnoting, although I did write a bibliography list at the end.
My teacher said, “This is plagiarism,” and gave me a “C+”. WTF? I had to go to a dictionary to find out what plagiarism was, because I had no clue.
All he had to do was sit down with me and say, “Tell me where you got your information, step by step. Take this paragraph, for example. This information isn’t known to everybody. You got this information from one of your bibliograph sources, right? Which one. Put quotes around this, and a number at the end of the paragraph, and then at the bottom of the page, to identify your information source.”
I could have done this. I was never given the chance. Instead of being a REAL teacher, this individual was a punishment-inflicting s***head. Just like the Pelton High biology teacher.
We need REAL teachers. Not teachers who say, “You committed plagiarism, but you get an ‘A-’ for finding the information, but not attributing it.” We need teachers who say, “You committed plagiarism, and here is what you need to know, and you get another chance.”
In publishing, agents and editors guide writers. First manuscript, “Interesting, but not publishable. Work on this, this and that. Then resubmit.”
That was one long diatribe that has little to do with the thread. You dredge up an incident five years old in an attempt to proof a futile point. Your information, those HS students at KC Piper HAD been educated on referencing information retrieved from the internet. They chose to pass it off as their own and suffer what may have been a consequence that was too severe. Using internet derived material has very few “rules” when it comes to crediting citations. We’ve all done it. I work very hard with my students to adequately give credit where credit is due. Will I fail a student who blatantly submits copy/pasted material as their own when they have been counseled not to do so? Absolutely. I think it is more important to address citations and references BEFORE work commences on a particular project or research begins. When this is done, they can’t claim “I didn’t know”.
I might also caution you in referencing Freidman’s book, “The World is Flat”. The book is the current “Bible” of the Kool-Aid drinkers in the “Department of Learning Services” here. It’s a good book, but the afore mentioned people warp and distort the ideas of the book. To that end, when the book is referenced, it is ignored because of the messengers here.
Again, you are making a big dealm out of one small aspect of the system. What real solutions do you have to offer, or do you intend to keep up with your usual drive by bashes of teachers?
Apophis, wake up to reality.
The only people now reading our statements are you and I. I’m going to wait for another thread so that others can read and think.
You have a really hard row to hoe. I know that. I want the system to change so that you can love your work, and not worry about the money.
Do you deserve more money than your school’s principal or the superintendent take home? I don’t know. My neighborhood’s home owners are business owners, senior engineers, lawyers and doctors. Should it have some senior teachers who are excellent at what they do, and are correspondingly compensated as primary breadwinners? Absolutely. But with union-prescribed equal pay for all teachers at given seniority levels, that can’t happen.
You need to learn to support and reward excellence. Promoting underachievement isn’t going to work. This is an anti-public-education stance. Your ideas are undermining public education, in a 21st century framework. I am FOR public education in the 21st century. You’re an agent of public education destruction, because what you want to do corresponds to the ideology of the 1900s.
You have to decide whether teachers in this postindustrial 21st century are professionals, or bachelor’s degreed , or master’s degreed industrial-economy blue-collar workers.
This is my last comment on this thread.
earlier MPS stated “If we go back to the KSU Associate Professor average, $68.1 k for 48 weeks per year, that’s $1410/week.”
Most profs are on 9- or 10-month contracts, which brings up the weekly salary. During the other months, those profs can pursue consulting gigs and grant-writing to supplement their incomes.
I was talking about norms. At WSU only 8 departments offer PhDs. At KSU 49 departments do.
So, you can make an argument that at WSU, the average professor’s contract is 9-10 months–some are on 12 month contracts–while at KSU the norm is 12 months, because you can’t supervise PhD students 9 months of the year, and send them home for 3 months. This isn’t how PhD education works.
Correction to previous calculuations:
The Associate Professor salary data I gave are for 9-MONTH EQUIVALENTS. KSU and WSU report their faculty salary-average data to the Association of American University Professors Annual Faculty Salary Survey, for 9/10 and 11/12 month appointments in separate columns. AAUP converts the reported 11/12 month salaries (essentially year-round contracts with 1 month vacation) to 9/10 month equivalents by multiplying them by .863.
So, essentially the mean weekly salary for KSU Associate Professors is $1700/wk, not $1410.
This however does not give a complete picture. Colleges and departments that bring in federal and state research grants, and corporate-funded research contracts, are allowed to offer higher salaries.
So Engineering faculty have a higher salary average than English faculty. If this differential were not in place, KSU could not attract engineers who bring in research dollars and provide Ph.D. training.
In the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the scientists have higher salary averages than the liberal artists.
Other value judgments are made. College of Veterinary Medicine faculty, whose focus is graduate/professional education have a higher salary average than College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty who mostly teach undergraduate courses.
Let’s apply this to K-12. The feds give Title I money, whose only purpose is to better educate socioeconomically disadvantaged children. Should teachers who are working in Title I schools receive higher salaries than teachers who aren’t? Yes. At the same time, their performance must be evaluated to ensure that their higher salaries represent money wisely spent.