chungsun:

- The people I speak to most are 8 year olds, a woman in her sixties, and my cat.
- My big treat for the week is to go home and watch movies and go to bed early.
- I work a 61.5 hour work week, but only get paid for 14 of those hours because practicum is considered school… so instead of getting…

Wow, wait until you’re actually working 60 hours a week as a teacher. Good luck, I guess…

Andrew Sullivan posts this chart via the Chicago Tribune.

It’s unsurprising that the Tribune would spin this to make it look as bad as possible. The paragraph at the top of the chart describes the process of firing a bad teacher as “a legal process so cumbersome, so tangled in red tape, that many public school principals don’t even try.”

Charts such as this one are misleading for a number of reasons.

First, this chart only applies to tenured teachers. Bad teachers can be weeded out much quicker before gaining tenure. School officials need to use this time window appropriately.

Second, the point of tenure is to protect teachers from arbitrarily being fired. Teachers need protection from over-zealous bosses and ideological politicians. This is the same thinking behind seniority rules, which protect more expensive teachers (i.e. veterans) from being laid off due to budget cuts. Teaching is not a high-paying job compared to jobs in the private sector, and one of the benefits is some job security. Occasionally this means bad teachers take longer to fire.

But the answer to that problem is not making all teachers easier to fire. This would undermine teacher recruitment. If you take away pensions, job security, tenure, the ability to unionize, and basically all the other perks of teaching, what you’re left with is a very difficult job with no job security, mediocre benefits, and relatively low pay. This is not how you attract good people to a profession, or how you guarantee a good education experience for your children. Paying starting teachers more but making their long-term prospects in the career less certain is also wrong-headed. High turnover is not desirable for any business, teaching included.

Third, the chart claims that it take 2-5 years to fire a bad teacher. This is true, but also misleading. The process requires one year of remediation. Is anyone suggesting that a remedial period is unwarranted? Many private sector jobs require similar remedial steps for ‘unsatisfactory’ employees. These steps take longer and are more complicated as the job in question becomes more difficult to assess. Successful teaching is very difficult to assess.

Then there are a series of hearings. This is the due process period put in place to ensure that the actual reasons behind firing the teacher are legitimate. Is the Tribune suggesting that there should be no hearing process at all? Even then, the hearings only take place if the teacher requests them. Many teachers will not put up this much of a fight, but some do.

The hearings take about ten months. Much of this time is spent filing paperwork, setting dates, and so forth. At the end of the ten months, if the School board agrees with the dismissal, the teacher is fired. That’s just under two years, most of which was spent attempting to boost the teacher’s performance. So in just under two years a teacher can be fired. However…

…at this point the teacher can file an appeal in court. This is where theTribune is getting the vast bulk of time for its 2-5 years estimate. Again, any citizen who loses their job as the right to take this up in court. That there is a procedure outlined for teachers to do this is completely meaningless. Of course a teacher can file for wrongful dismissal in court. So can you if you are fired. This process can take years if you want to drag it out long enough, through appellate courts and a long and exhausting appeals process.

For those criticizing this process, would you deny Francisco Mendoza the right to appeal his termination? Mendoza was a 25-year veteran of the Chicago public schools, widely acknowledged as an excellent teacher. He took sick leave when he was diagnosed with cancer, and when he returned home he found a termination letter. Apparently the year of remedial work was overlooked in this case. Indeed, for every anecdote of bad teachers not getting fired, we can find others to show how excellent teachers were fired.

And if all that isn’t enough, a tiny bit of digging reveals that Chicago school district officials laid off 1300 teachers in 2010, including some tenured teachers who were recognized nationally for their quality – without any due process at all.

(Source: letterstomycountry)

secretjunk:

coketalk:

1. You should put on the best version of yourself when you go out in the world because that is a show of respect to the other people around you.

2. A gentleman today has to work. People who do not work are so boring and are usually bored. You have to be passionate, you have to be engaged and you have to be contributing to the world.

3. Manners are very important and actually knowing when things are appropriate. I always open doors for women, I carry their coat, I make sure that they’re walking on the inside of the street. Stand up when people arrive at and leave the dinner table.

4. Don’t be pretentious or racist or sexist or judge people by their background.

5. A man should never wear shorts in the city. Flip-flops and shorts in the city are never appropriate. Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.

It’s not that I don’t disagree with these things, because I do. But shouldn’t women adhere to most of these rules too? Even the shorts thing man, because shorts are just the worst usually.

I was thinking about this the other day on the bus, when it didn’t even occur to a bunch of girls sitting at the front (who all took time to meticulously groom themselves in the morning) to get up and give their seat to an old man who came aboard. So some beefcake guy got up from his NON-PRIORITY SEAT instead! I mean this could have been a unique circumstance but I’m fairly certain I’ve witnessed similar things in the past.

Have we become too focused on creating “gentlemen” and emphasizing these traits to young boys and have completely forgotten to let little girls know that being polite is also important for them as well? Is it some sort of “Miss Manners is repressive” thing? Because if you ask me, it really just comes down to respecting other people which should always be entirely genderless. I think this article should be renamed Tom Ford’s five easy lessons in how to NOT BE THE WORST.

(Source: coketalk)