School districts run for the proletariat are hardly places where the taxpayers and their politicians are going to pay well. The prole students are not the kind of people you spend lavishly on. They are not in Piedmont. Too bad, so sad.

Saying otherwise substitutes fantasy for reality.

If you want to pay higher wages you need to do so at a school that justifies higher wages. That would be a school with more elite students, being taught higher level subjects.

Like Piedmont High School, Merritt College, Cal State East Bay, and maybe UC Berkeley.

Teachers deserve more money. Much more.
AND
Principals need to be able to let go of ineffective teachers.

In what industry or field do workers keep their jobs no matter their effectiveness? Orphal, I think you would agree that Skyline would improve if the 20% least effective teachers were lovingly let go of and replaced by effective teachers.

This is not teacher bashing–this is logical and the current situation makes no sense for kids. Effective teams, companies, organizations run on merit and a strong leader’s ability to add people to the team and remove them from the team. Support and culture building and getting behind teachers and building capacity: this is the big work–a small part of the work is the accountability for off the team / on the team.

Ineffective teachers hurt: kids, parents, society, other teachers. They waste principals’ time, they hurt everyone including themselves because they are in the wrong profession!

COME ON PEOPLE.

The problem is not the students who escape the bad ghetto schools – the problem is the students who don’t. Bad students who stay in the bad schools are missing out on their last chance to be corrected and trained on American civic life. These unfortunates will turn 18 without a working knowledge of middle class values, standard english (not spoken in bad schools in favor of dialect and foreign languages) and the basics of passing into society in favor of underclass mores. They will not even know that they don’t know things. They will be unemployable and unacceptable in society, trapped in low prole existance. It’s one thing to deliberately be “bad” and break the rules. It’s another to have no clue of what the rules are.

The result is a shorter life expectancy, diminished marriage prospects, and being wedded to poverty and all the lifestyle that goes with it.

I don’t care how well the Charters do, I want the public schools to add value to their students especially the black students (I’m partial – so what), so that they have what I consider a fair chance in American Society. The chance they had in bad old 1959 – which for some black folks was a terrific party (every day and every generation was going to be better and have more). It doesn’t matter how wretched their mothers and sperm donors are, “good” public schools can allow nearly everyone to rise although it will not be pleasant and it will not be done their way.

The problem is the pacification programs we have now that have supplanted education, the indiscipline, the teaching of nonsense rather than solid subjects.

Teacher ratings are illusory for ghetto schools because by definition the students are so bad. You can’t grade the teachers on how Johnny reads (not compared to white/jewish schools), there is much more to a ghetto school – literacy etc & deportment, attendance, and better employment rates of it’s graduates.

I am betting that within a few years the civil service will fall apart due to financial collapse of the municipalities. The public schools as we know them will simply close (pension issues alone…). They will be replaced with something else – charters – without any civil servants. Maybe that was the plan all along.

The process of Balkanization will continue in Oakland because the problems of poverty cannot be solved in the classroom and we must train our students for jobs that actually exist rather than those that used to…

You bring up a great point for teachers collaborating with one another, designing their assessments with one another, then analyzing the student scores with one another. You are perfectly right that if I work in complete isolation, I have no idea what I could be doing differently that would help my kids learn the material better.

The thing is, the marketplace is already rating them. Their pay doesn’t seem to be tied to whether or not decent people would allow their children to be placed in their care. Los Angeles Unified is an example. 6% white is a “rating”. Los Angeles is full of whites and they won’t send their kids to that district, they pay for private or church schools or enroll in charter schools. I have jewish friends there who laugh about LA Unified and spend huge amounts to send their kids to middle level private schools. The school they use is not a jewish school but has over 40% jewish students. The kids go to jewish temple religious training on their own time periodically.

Jewish students are (laughably) counted as “white” but they are most definitely not “white”. They are an ethnic to themselves, and they give the whites a fit.

Yes I’d love to see the school districts threatened with dissolution if they didn’t clean up their act and provide a set of schools within the district that allowed competitive students of any color to go to competitive/exclusive schools. This would force the districts to have real schools again, not just dumping grounds with nice payrolls for the attendants. It would also mean that your address would not determine whether you could go to a real school or not.

Will this ever happen? Not till the Tea Party is in power. Will that happen? I would have said no, but the factors pointing to some kind of revolution coming are actually visible in the economic indicators. I believe this is all tied to economics more than the election cycle. When having marketable children is required for (social, economic, military) survival you will see changes in public education. Right now people thought their clan could make it with the kids growing up like topsy. I feel that that thought is diminishing. The more people are afraid of the future, the more they are going to look to their children for the future. When people realize the government will allow them to suffer (seriously diminishing standards of living) they will be more careful with their kids. We are seeing this come to pass. People are beginning to realize the government is selling their futures out. The more that sets in the madder the population will get. It is only beginning to set in now. Most people have little concept of the public rage that is to come.

Not only is Sarah Palin increasingly likely to come to power, but someone much more facist will appear. And I’m not saying she’s facist at all. What will follow her into public life will be. The USA is moving towards dissolution into warring factions with no common core values. The last 50 years of public education has a lot to do with the reasons why. I think the trend is accelerating. I think public education was allowed to decline in the name of pacification to the point that the population is one of separate nations now within the same borders. They will be willing to war upon each other.

Back to the thread. I am seeing poor people (especially poor whites) and minorities chasing the Charters to enroll their kids. The public districts will collapse if the enrollments continue to fall due to Charters peeling off all the whites and then all the competitive minorities. These large districts can’t make it as they are now operating with just the ghetto dregs remaining. Desperate to stem the flow of families seeking “quality” they will try gimmicks like Michelle Rhee and teacher evaluation/pay schemes. That is not going to save them at all. These moves are just gimmicks.

Brave New World.

What if the principals, administrators, school board members and superintendent were also rated in the same fashion, using the same student test score criteria, average daily attendance, etc. Of course our superintendent would be rated against other urban school principals and I think we should include the two finalists for the position of superintendent last year in the mix.

Then, with the ratings, salaries, satisfaction levels posted, we would be able to make our choices. If it turns out that our principal, administrators and/or superintendent do not rate very highly, OUSD allows us to have an inter-district transfer to any district that will accept our children and they will not interfere, stall, lose or otherwise hinder the process. I believe this would be more than fair.

Unless and until the public schools structure themselves so that education is possible It’s less the teachers fault we have all the failures than the school boards and administration. If the failures continue the school boards should be dissolved and the schools taken away/merged into somebody else’s control. Yes that means stripping the electorate’s control of the schools also. If they elect such failures the electorate shouldn’t be controlling schools.

So now look at the emergence of the Charter Schools. Funny how things work out. The Charters are free to be tailored to the needs of particular groups of students, leaving the Public School District as the lowest common denominator. Are we watching the publics become darker and more disfunctional while the Charters are progressive, innovative and segregated? And is this a problem anyway? If everyone gets what they want, we should be happy, right?

Brave New World.