Comments on: ‘Child-centric’ schools

By: Jerry

Jerry — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:53:58 +0000

Sure I’ve taught–law in colleges. But do I also have to be an oil rigger to be qualified to critique the price of oil? Since educator wages are set primarily by political forces, every citizen is qualified to critique educators’ salaries.

By: DLF51

DLF51 — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:13:46 +0000

Have you ever taught? Anyone with a college degree can become a substitute teacher. I suggest you teach for a few days or more in Albany, Schenectady, or Troy. Then you will be qualified to critique our pay.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:13:10 +0000

Steven, I’m wondering whether you think it’s possible to have a thesis that isn’t prejudiced and slanted if the conclusion is that teacher salaries are too high? I take it that your position on the issue is neutral and objective.

By: Steven Scharf

Steven Scharf — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:55:55 +0000

Why are you attacking teacher salaries and not other public servants.
Police and firemen make good salaries and get similar or better benefits than teachers. But no one attacks them. Why? Because the budget that pays for these workers is not under the direct scrutiny of the general public. You quote studies that show that having a master’s degree doesn’t make one a better teacher. Well, experience makes you a better teacher, a masters degree makes you master your subject better. What the problem is, until recently, it didn’t matter what you got your masters in, whether is was related to what you taught or not. I have a masters degree and then some, all in physics. I teach in one of the better schools in New York City. My students always do well on the NYS Regents Exam. Many teachers work hours beyond their regular day. There are two young earth science teachers in my department that arrive at school 7 AM in the morning and usually don’t leave before 3 PM and then take work home with them. Over my career I have accepted jobs that added many hours to my work week. Sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn’t. In fact, most of the time I didn’t. So, there are many things all your studies miss. The hours teachers put in, the effort they put in to their students, the handholding, the teaching after and/or before school are not accounted for with your arguments against teachers’ salaries. Granted, there are a few bad apples, but you have that in any profession. The key to getting better qualified teachers in the classroom is to make requirements more rigorous and uniform. The system is to blame for many of the bad apples as well as administrators who give bad teachers good recommendations to get rid of them. Your study on the subject of teachers’ salaries is basically a statistical one with nothing more than a collecting of data you can get from the internet. Try visiting schools, talking to teachers, parents and kids. Statistics can be used to prove almost anything if there is premeditated agenda behind the study. Your thesis is prejudiced and slanted.

Sincerely yours,

Steven Scharf

By: Jill

Jill — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 15:58:26 +0000

Sounds like “unschooling” on a large-scale, community-sized level. Can a community succeed at that? Montessori is one attempt in that direction–it’s awfully hard for one teacher to motivate a classroom full of kids to pursue independent learning. Maybe what we need is more incentive for parents to homeschool. Isn’t that the way God designed the family? To “train children in the way they should go”?

Really, it’s not about motivating kids–they’re natural scientists. It’s about not killing their natural curiousity so early in life. But kids these days have had traditional school pumped into them from before they could write their own names–it will take more than a well-lit school building to re-ignite their ability to think for themselves.

But who really wants that? We adults are afraid that we’ll lose our grip on power if we free our children to think independently. Government certainly doesn’t want its citizens thinking outside the box. Employers don’t want employees getting fed up with their situation and going off to do their own thing. Our schools train our children to be “good citizens” who don’t rock the boat and “good employees” who will slave away for decades and then be satisfied with a small but regular pension check. We don’t want to have to face problems ourselves–we want government and bosses and insurance companies to shoulder all the risk, but then we’ll raise a meek objection when they get all the potential profit.

As long as adults aren’t ready to accept both the risk and the payoff of thinking independently ourselves, we will continue to imprison our children in schools that are literally designed with much the same floor plans as penitentiaries, and praise these minors for conforming enough to get an “A”, so they can go to the right college and make more “A’s”, so they can get the right job and work quietly for the rest of their lives.

From a homeschooling mom…

By: daniel

daniel — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 06:22:26 +0000

Why is it that these futurists and so many other forward thinking educational reformist all assume that students will be interested, motivated, disciplined, etc to such a degree that they’ll want to / be able to study independently in libraries, parks, museums and other venues?