Reading this Carl Bailik article in the Wall Street Journal about the merits of merit pay for teachers, I am struck by the notion that teachers require government-instituted merit pay evaluation programs in order to improve their performance. There is no such program for us PHP developers – nor was there any such program for press-brake and punch fabricator operators when those were my professions – but I don’t think anyone can seriously accuse me of soft-peddling my job as a result.
But granted, those professions I’ve held have all been in private industry: there’s no tax money going to pay for my salary. Fair enough. What, then, of other government professions? DMV clerks? Postal workers? Congressmen? And what are the benchmarks for those professions?
The truth is that professionalism cannot be quantified. And a lack of professionalism will certainly – as indeed the article notes – breed dishonesty. And either way, the only real test of one’s professional ability and ethics is personal observation. The fact is: you know who at your job is a fuck up and who isn’t.
So to what end are we imposing merit systems to teachers? What will it accomplish? The answer is: it makes politicians look good and taxpayers feel good to discuss the possibility. It might even make them both feel better once instituted: people might get a sense that they’ve accomplished something and made the world a better place. But really, its just a political football that is of more importance to the feelings of the players than it is of substance to the children being educated. mh.
The big story coming out of this weekend has been the discovery – or rather, the announcement of the discovery – of a trillion-dollar mineral resource in Afghanistan. The Obama Administration is trying to paint this as a potential game-changer and a way out of the mess. Many others are painting this as an excuse to prolong our stay – especially since one of the major mineral deposits is lithium, a critical resource in the development of energy-efficient rechargeable batteries in a post-fossil world. So, is the Obama Administration looking for a reason to stay or a reason to leave? And does it matter one way or the other for the people of Afghanistan?
Because to me, the problem I see brewing with the new mineral deposit cache is one which the Saudi Arabian people have been dealing with for nearly a century, which is that having resources in the country does not do the people any good unless the people can actually work in the jobs that those resources produce. Even in the most coopted countries, common people often do the manual labor that comes with international economic success, but this is not the case in Saudi Arabia. In that country, the Wahabi imams run the schools, which teach a strictly Koran-based syllabus. Such an education does not really help secure a job as an engineer or even as a forklift operator, since math, science or writing are not on the agenda.
The result is an angry population from which many Taliban and al-Qeada recruits are plumbed. Even without the international terrorist scene, riots and hunger are common place problems for the House of Saud. To compensate, the government creates “make busy” projects building monuments and water fountains which do nothing to enrich the people, let alone lifting them from their primary intellectual poverty.
In Afghanistan, literacy rates are around 34% for men and 10% for women. This does not bode well for the economic boon that the mineral deposits supposedly represent. Even if the Afghan government weren’t corrupt, the chances are slim that any real work can be found for the majority of Afghans. So, do we make a commitment to stay and educate a generation of Afghans? Or do we leave them to the fate the Saudi people face? Do we, in finding the exit strategy both the American and Afghan people want, end up leaving behind an even more economically-striated place than we went into?
Jon knocks one out of the park with his latest installment, breaking down the specifically corporatist background and inspiration of Superintendent of Schools Jean-Claude Brizzard.
To those who insist that all things can be run better that are run like corporations I ask: what profit is there in education? I don’t mean those ethereal “values,” I mean the cold, hard profits on which corporations are based. Because if you cannot find an intrinsic profit margin in something, then there is no profit motive. And if there is no profit motive, the natural course of action is that a corporation needs to either manufacture one arbitrarily or else fail.
The O’Blog is one of the blogs featured on my sidebar in the RocWriters Blog Updates section of this site. It’s the blog of Dennis O’Brien which I’m only now just catching up to. He ran for City School Board a while back and reflects on the things that he’d had as a platform then that might help cure the problems there are with the School District and the Board now. Seems like fairly straight-forward changes, but unfortunately, disfunction is the engine that drives itself.
I don’t claim to know a whole lot about education in Rochester, so I reserve judgment. With luck, a friend of mine who knows a lot more about it will be here to help me out, soon. But if there’s anyone who resents the state of Rochester schools, I do. Just the threat of having to send a kid through middle school in Rochester was enough to push my wife and I into the ‘burbs. I fucking hate the goddamned ‘burbs. East Rochester is cool, but damn. I miss the city.
I find this strange: Channel 10 News is reporting today that two school districts have approved huge renovation programs. I’m all for improving schools, but apparently folks in Irondequoit and Churchville-Chili know something about the economy and the state budget the rest of us don’t. Either that, or they are possessed of an irrepressibly sunny disposition.
CNN.com has the story of ten middle schoolers who, whilst on a field trip to Washington, DC, decided to have an orgy in one of the hotel rooms. Clearly, this is not something you can tolerate on a school class trip, but interestingly, only eight kids seem to have been punished. . . and they were expelled from school.
This seems weird on any number of levels. There is nothing in the article that discusses what punishment – if any – was given to the remaining two kids, which is the kind of reporting I think we’ve all come to expect from CNN. What happened to those kids, and why was their punishment not the same as everyone else’s? Perhaps the two kids were simply not very effective at having sex – or even remarkably ugly – and therefore technically not guilty of the same crime. . .
And one has to wonder what the punishment would have been if these same ten kids had gotten into a fight. Would they have been expelled for that? I guess it would depend on the severity of the fight. If so, this must have been some very severe sex.
But as usual, those of us who like to think and stuff are left scratching our heads over another story broadcast on CNN.
John Sacheli turns in a great – if highly verbose – rant, filled with observations on daily life. But hands-down, this one’s my favourite:
» An observation of our society » Pissin in the Wind
They’re even pushing drugs on your kids now. If your kid acts out at school a few times they immediately jump to the conclusion that they need psycho-analysis and the need to be on temperament medication. Little kids shouldn’t be depressed enough to need a pill. Acting out on occasion doesn’t justify giving a kid Ritalin. Maybe some kids need that stuff but there’s a whole lot of them that really don’t. We are creating a society of numbed out legal drug addicts.
You know, maybe they should invent a pill for making you a good parent. Then your kids will turn out fine and maybe all the world’s problems would start to turn around. (Who am I kidding, there’s no money in that anyway.)
I guess goofballs and Ripple Wine don’t count as a drug that makes you a better parent. There goes my master plan. . .
I know those of you who are either teachers or administrators in schools will probably not see the humor in this that I do. Never the less, it’s freakin’ funny.
Apparently, someone got a hold of both the letterhead and the mailing list of Portland, OR’s Lincoln High School and sent out a nominally official letter to all the parents actively encouraging them to open their liquor cabinets to the attendees of the prom as a way to promote “a safe, secure place for students to have fun.” Condoms were included in the letters.
OMG, whomever pulled this off is my freakin’ hero.
Carla Palumbo is reporting in on her blog to say that the batting down of the F.A.I.R. plan may be much, much worse than I’d thought, because the county may be stuck with the intercept plan without having the benefit of the F.A.I.R. plan’s school tax offset (which is the part that was ruled illegal).
w00t! This could be bad.
NYSUT is fighting to keep the state’s share of special education funding for elementary school kids the same, whereas Spitzer’s new plan aims to reduce state funding. This is in addition to the slipping promise of additional funding by the state. The NYSUT blog picks up the story:
“Union: Pre-K cost shift another unfunded mandate.” March 07, 2008. NYSUT: A Union of Professionals. www.nysut.org
Under current law, the state reimburses counties for 59.5 percent of approved costs for preschool special education administration costs. The governor’s proposal would require districts where each special ed child resides to reimburse the child’s resident county — adding a $46 million cost burden onto districts already set to receive less state aid than promised last year.
