Comment Re:You make it... (Score 1) 519
OK, OK,
Let's calm down, boys and girls. Back up a minute and think about the full panoply or facts involved in the questions here.
First: Teachers get paid shit for their masters degree plus of education
Second: Teachers have crazy hours impressed on them through an evaluation system that you would not want to contemplate. If you are not working 50-70 hours a week you aren't keeping up with your responsibilities. Trying to get tenure with bad evals is impossible.
Third: The evals are not based on skilled evaluators who actually watch and eval what you are doing, no, most of the eval comes from students. Students who have a different world view than their parents or the education system.
Fourth: teachers are highly restricted by the ir contracts in terms of what they can do at work and outside of work. How many teachers have been fired for being gay or lesbian (obviously not on the face of it, because that would reflect on the super who hired, but never the less)?
Fifth: Look at the numbers for teacher turn-over up until the last unemployment increase, people don't stay teachers by choice anymore.
Tenure is a dead issue really. The only people who want it shouldn't have it and the people who don't care are leaving anyway. The reason schools give it so easily is to try to hold on to teachers who might end up being good, but will leave without it (or anyway).
So let's get off our high horses and recognize that the issues that we face in the education of ourselves and our young are greater than this issue, which is relatively small in the larger view.