NP - "What's the question about your question that you dread being asked?

[alice wellintown]

Well, if we want to attract the best prospective educators and hold on to
them, we need to raise salaries. How can an educator in NYC afford to live
in the city where she teaches?  So salaries were raised.


Under the current system of mayoral control in NYC salries have been
raised, but not enough to attract and ratin the best people.
Moreover, the loss of job security, collective bargaining power, benefits,
and the assault on teachers has offset the gains in salaries.

The US is an anti-intellectual culture, so the respect given to educators
in  other nations is not a benefit here.

I could never, not could most of the excellent educators I know, work an
education for 25 years. My hat is off to those who have and those who can.

As a professor I was paid less than entry level wall streeters. No, the
salries are disgraceful. In this nation, where we pay athletes and movie
stars, banksters and political crooks, millions and billions, where we
waste billions on wars, we can pay our teachers better and we need to.

Off the soapbox now,

A


On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 4:30 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:

> "The salaries suck. Raise them and we will see the best and brightest
> in education." Salaries suck? compared to what? I know people that work in
> public education and they are not in the poor house, of course neither are
> they very wealthy. However, it is true that teaching is a profession whose
> pay has not matched the growth of other professional occupations in the
> 20th c.
> Alice, paying someone that is incompetent or unmotivated more will not
> change their behaviour. Have you looked at pay scales in the Scandanavian
> countries? They don't make more than bankers. THe big difference is that
> the society respects teaching and teaching is seen as something of great
> value so being a teacher is valued in terms of symbolic capital. There the
> joke about those "who don't know how teach", doesn't work. Norway and the
> rest get the best of the graduating class as teachers not because they
> offer lots of money but because teaching is viewed very differently there.
> When people in the U.S (and elsewhere) start to value education in itself
> and not as some means to a lucrative job then you will ahve the socail
> change that will help educators
>
> As for phonics, it has its place. I use it in my ESL work. That said, to
> rely on phonics alone is an error. Vygotsky is an interesting addition to
> the study of language acquisition, check him out. Had he lived longer he
> would have likely had more influence than Piaget, but that is a speculative
> comment.
>
> ciao
>  mc otis
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Sunday, April 7, 2013 4:03 PM
>
> *Subject:* Re: NP - "What's the question about your question that you
> dread being asked?
>
> As Dewey sez, "there is no educational value in the abstract," and, by
> this he means that what works with 5 year old native speakers of English
> in England may not work with 5 year old native speakers in the United
> States. We can even say that what works with rich children in the Bronx,
> NY, USA won't work with poor children in the Bronx, NY, USA. So, if in
> Finland or Denmark or Norway, often the oranges compared with our apple,
> children start school at age 7, and this is quite successful, applying this
> idea to poor children in the Bronx, or even to wealthy children in the
> Bronx who live in a house and in a neighborhood where English is not the
> first langauge, would be malpractice. Phonics, as the debates and studies,
> often with whole language advocates, may be quite appropriate given a
> particular learning population. Pragmatism, as Dewey stressed in his
> writings on Education, is that something that doesn't suck in US education.
> But the workers, that is, the pedagogues, are being stripped of their
> freedom to use what they know works with the pupils they know learn best
> when the methods they have created for these particular students are used.
> That said, there are too many weak and poorly prepared teachers in the USA.
> The salaries suck. Raise them and we will see the best and brightest
> in education.
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Prashant Kumar <
> siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Interested in your answer. Is it just that the metrics used to measure
> "accountability", "progress", etc. are coarse averages? I mean, for all
> your failing schools you're still the intellectual and scientific centre of
> the world, so you know, *something* doesn't suck.
>
> Also, what do you think of teaching via the "Phonics" method? Had a debate
> re this today.
>
> P.
>
>
> On 7 April 2013 21:38, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> Why are US schools behind much of the world?
>
> This is way more complicated than tax-slashers or "accountability experts"
>  or "higher standards"  folks want to think about.
>
> Bekah
>
> On Apr 7, 2013, at 1:17 AM, Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > What question about your field do you dread being asked? Maybe it's a
> sore point: your field should have an answer (people think you do) but
> there isn't one yet. Perhaps it's simple to pose but hard to answer. Or
> it's a question that belies a deep misunderstanding: the best answer is to
> question the question.
> >
> >
> http://www.edge.org/conversation/whats-the-question-about-your-field-that-you-dread-being-asked
> >
> > Various responses there; any p-listers willing to chime in?
> >
> > Prashant
>
>
>
>
>
>
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