UNSACKABLE TEACHERS IN NEW YORK

Report lifted from a comment thread on Tongue Tied

My mother taught remedial reading at a school in Hamburg,NY which is a suburb of Buffalo. (Not Hamburg HS, by the way, but a rival HS). I remember her talking about the inability of the school to terminate some of her colleagues for behavior which would have gotten them fired from other jobs. I graduated from the same system, and had firsthand experience with some of these bozos. Some shining examples:

#1) A male music teacher who was a convicted sex offender. He was "encouraged" not to live in the district, and actually lived just across the Canadian border. Frequently smelled of booze, and was verbally and physically abusive. But, he had tenure.

#2) A male chemistry teacher who frequently spent entire class sessions discussing not chemistry, but rather on the best way to rob a bank. One afternoon in the early '70s.....he robbed a bank. He was also apprehended immediately. Guess he should have asked the regular students instead of the honors class. Naturally, this relieved the school system from having to deal with that tenure issue.

#3) A male Spanish teacher who drank in the classroom in full view of the students (including me) and who was verbally and physically abusive. He got nasty with me...once. He didn't do it again. (No, I didn't go crying to Mom. I.....dealt with it. Myself.) The year after I graduated, he hit a bridge while driving drunk at high speed. Once again, the system didn't have to deal with that sticky tenure problem.

#4) Another male chemistry teacher whose stepson dated my older sister for a while. He used to follow them around and harass them. Also very verbally abusive to students. I remember him telling one girl in my class that she was,"so ugly, you could make a maggot jump off a gut-wagon". Hell of a nice guy, huh? But...he had tenure. Couldn't touch him.

#5) A female Health teacher who dressed very provocatively, and used to lean waaayyyy down over the male students' desks to answer questions.

I never had a problem with her......just couldn't understand what the issue was. Or why I couldn't take her course again........ :)

I graduated in 1975 (I'm 48). Back then, the teachers were allowed to hit the students with wooden paddles for failing marks on exams, being late, or just because they felt like it.

Guess it's a whole different ballgame now with all the PC b.s. ...... but there are still stupid people teaching our children...... and it's still next to impossible to get rid of them.





MORE MONEY! MORE MONEY!

Comment from Hawaii

I have received dozens of letters from students at Kaiser High School using the familiar rhetoric of the Department of Education. "Why does the government want to take away our creative outlets? Why don't you put more effort into getting money for education?" It seems the weighted student formula spending scheme is shortchanging schools like my alma mater, Kaiser High.

Ironically teachers and administrators from the DOE were the primary drivers for Act 51 which devised the spending formula. Now they have driven their students to do the political dirty work, demanding to know why I want to get rid of school librarians. It is laughable that a decision that is wholly the Department's is being used to draw unsuspecting students into the DOE's favorite past time, chanting "mo money, mo money!"

Education was the hot issue 2 years ago in the legislature. Scores were low, teachers were frustrated and parents were irritated. The DOE had been saying for decades that they needed more money, but where does the money go? Records show that the number of non-teachers employed by the DOE has increased over the past 30 years from about 7,000 in the early '70s to 23,790 in 2003. Sadly only 6,362 were teachers. In other words, only 1 in 4 employees of the education system is a teacher. Look more closely and you'll find that while DOE staff increased 236 percent, student enrollment increased only by 3 percent (178K to 183K).

Per pupil spending was close to $11,000. In 2003, a study entitled "Financial Analysis of Hawaii Public Schools," showed that Hawaii was in the top fourteen of all states in per-student spending on educational operations. The same study went on to report that only 49 cents of every dollar makes it to the classroom.

The political battle of 2004 was between the Republican effort to decentralize the system into locally elected school boards for greater accountability. The DOE/Democrat effort was to "reinvent education" with new layers of complicated bureaucracy which could pass for accountability. They won. The weighted student formula that emerged seemed promising, but I was skeptical knowing it would reward lower performing schools at the expense of those with higher performing students. For instance, Kaiser High School budget has been cut by $813,000. And where have school officials decided to cut? The Library and Fine Arts.

In an historic move Democrats called for the Superintendent of Education to speak in the Legislature. In her bicameral speech, Pat Hamamoto said, "Give us both the money and the authority and.hold me accountable." (http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Jan/28/ br/br06p.html ).

If my child was being politically manipulated to do DOE dirty work and to shift the responsibility, I would be livid. This is one reason my wife and I homeschool our children. Why are teachers misleading students into a political debate? Shouldn't they be teaching them? Maybe this is part of the problem.

Source






Australia: School assessment goes full circle in Queensland

Back to the old ways

The report cards of almost all Queensland students will use an A to E grading system from the end of this year. An overhaul of the school reporting system will give parents of all students in Years 1 to 10 twice-yearly assessments in plain English and access to two parent/teacher interviews a year. Education Minister Rod Welford said the changes meant that all students from Years 1 to 10, but not Prep, would be graded from A to E in each subject, with clear explanations of what each grade meant. Year 11 and 12 students are already assessed on a five-tier rating system (Very High Achievement ranging to Very Low Achievement) as part of the Overall Position (OP) process. The measures will apply to state, Catholic and independent schools and take effect at the end of this year in many schools and in all by the start of 2008.

"We want clarity and consistency so parents can understand their child's progress," Mr Welford said. "The reports will be more understandable." The Minister said reports had become too confusing with wide variations in styles. Some schools grade students by numbers such as 1 to 7 or 1 to 5, others use measures such as VHA (very high achievement) or SA (satisfactory achievement), while others use codes such as AV (achieving well) or ED (experiencing difficulties). Some schools assess students according to three different grades, others four and some five. And while some schools offer two parent/teacher interviews a year, many offer only one.

Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Association spokeswoman Wanda Lambert said it was vital that gradings were consistent between schools. "We need to feel confident that . . . an A in Cape York is worth the same as an A for someone of the same age in Burpengary," she said. Queensland Teachers Union President Steve Ryan said teachers had no problem using the A to E grading system in most year levels. But he said the union did have problems with its use in early primary years. "We believe it could be categorising children very early," Mr Ryan said.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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