From what I understand: No, they weren't owned by the customers.

In order to own the book, it needs to be obtained legally from a seller who had a legal right to sell it. If Amazon didn't have the right to sell it, they didn't have the right to make a copy to sell to a customer, and the customer never purchased a license to use that copyrighted work. Since Kindles on a service model where you can distribute multiple copies to different devices, allowing the book to exist on the customer's account is a continual violation of the author's copyright.

Now, this does mean that those customers should absolutely be refunded the cost of the book that was taken away.

Yes... let's look at the past.

If we can just duplicate the education system of the 1920's we can finally get the the misogynistic, racist, and aristocratic society we've all been dreaming of.

Granted, our scores would see a big bump. The secret, you see, is preventing anyone poor, non-white, or disadvantaged from actually getting an education. Bonus points if you successfully segregate women into "women-only" subjects.

This sort of non-interactive learning works fantastic for about 10-15% of the population.

I suppose we just ignore the rest, yeah?

Seriously, if this was all teaching was, we wouldn't have any problems at all. Even the most simple-minded bureaucrat would have figured it out a long time ago. Sadly (for those people pushing such simplistic ideas), this is a naive view, to be kind. Reciting facts and stories is the easiest part of teaching. Actual quality teachers (in the K-12 range) do everything you describe but monitor the students in real time to try to get everyone --not just the 10-15% who can learn by hearing something once-- to understand.

Furthermore, straight lectures are a poor mechanism for teaching a wide variety of things. Yes, Slashdot is a horrible place to try and get this message across because, despite the high average IQ here, most people have very little experience with people who think about the world in fundamentally different ways. Some of the very best lessons are interactive in nature, challenging students understanding and perceptions at the very moment that it begins to develop. Your pre-recorded lectures just can't do that.

So yeah... your ideas would be fantastic... at creating a broken education system that only serves a small number of students.

Note that its not the union that's forcing these them to stay employed. That's the rules of their contract that say they can't be fired without documented reasons. Most of them there will probably be fired as soon as the city figures itself out and finished the hearing. The others are being forced to not work while false/fraudulent accusations are leveled against them.

Those rules (requiring termination have a substantial basis) are there to protect tax payers just as much as they protect teachers.

The problem is a screwed up court/mediation system that cannot process them fast enough.

You'll find that teachers (the ones who are actually teaching) hate the teachers in those rubber rooms just as much as you do. Yet, you're quick to paint them all as scheming and lazy.

The same way you fire anyone else: By firing them. The "tenure" everyone talks about isn't "tenure". The only difference is that after two years, the school has to document a reason for the firing. Before that, they can fire the teacher at any time, for no reason at all.

Here's another example: Northern Virginia

Starting pay for a full-time teacher: $36,000
Monthly Pay: $2,500 (after taxes)
Average Apartment Rent: $1,300
Average Mortgage on Condo: $1,600
Average Car costs, monthly (small sedan): $230
Average Utility costs, monthly (electric, water, phone, cell phone, internet): $310
Extra money per month: $660

That's just over $600 a month for food and other living supplies like soap, paper towels, and clothes. Meanwhile, my salary as a coder was $62,000. And I have less education than most starting teachers. And I work 8 hour days, unlike teachers who commonly put in 10 hour days. And I don't have my customers calling me and emailing me at night to explain why their computer is broken and can't run my code.

And sadly there is no "time off". It's a two month furlough. During that time, you still have work that needs to be done, you just aren't paid for it and are given no resources to help. Additionally, its your best time to do the classes and training required for the continuation of your license. But yes, I suppose you might be able to find some fast-food joint that would hire you to drop fries for two months. And that's a totally reasonable thing to expect someone with a college degree to need to do on a regular basis.

Welcome to "No Child Gets Ahead"!

The problem here is that this burns out the best teachers faster, and limits the amount of collaboration and mentoring that the high quality teachers (who are now handling the lowest performing kids) can do for the new teachers.

At some point we have to start asking what all of this is accomplishing. As someone who's been watching the internal interactions of schools for twenty years, No Child Left Behind has done nothing to change how bad teachers are removed. Nothing. In many ways, its made it worse, as crappy teachers can hide behind decent scores, which are based on the quality of the student's parents, not their teaching.

No. It's actually quite common for the same teacher to be given lower-performing students year after year.

Since people can't seem to get this through their skulls: Students are not randomly assigned to classes.

My wife teaches history. Starting this year, her scores are going to go down and stay lower than all of the rest of the teachers. Is it because she suddenly started sucking this year? Or is it because she volunteered to take on a class of students who only learned to speak English in the last couple years? While the students are probably smarter on average than the rest of the school (as their parents worked very hard to live in an area with good schools), their test scores are invariably lower. They know how to speak English, but don't recognize all the vocabulary used on tests, and lack the cultural framework to understand other things. She can't even show improvement with them because they don't have any previous tests to compare to.

Also, a few years ago, a new history teacher was hired. She turned in the highest scores for the grade. Is it because she was the best teacher? Was it just luck? Or was it that the administration decided to give the majority of the students on special education plans to the other two teachers? I know people think that was wrong, and that she should have been held accountable for the fact that she couldn't handle it. That's fantastic, as yet again, we've lost sight of the actual goal here. Those students were moved in order to ensure they got a better education. Yes, the other teachers could have complained about the fact that their scores were going to go down, but they didn't because unlike the majority of people pushing for test scores as evaluation metrics, they actually care about the students.

And I can already see the argument: "Well, those shouldn't be considered for the metric..." Maybe not, but federal laws say that those students' scores cannot be treated any differently than any other student. This, in the end, is the biggest difference in quality between private schools and public schools: private schools hide the scores of their special education students -- or simply expel or refuse to admit them. Most of the charter schools and private schools in this area simply won't take special needs students. When they do, they put them in special programs, which basically means: The same classes but with a tutor paid for by the parents and a stipulation that the student's scores aren't part of the rest of the school's statistics. Oh, and they usually make the county pay for the psych and disability evaluations (~$40K a kid, if I remember right)... because they can do that.

You see, when you have zero experience in this, it's easy to say "Well, a mediocre system is better than nothing", but that's just because you don't know what you're talking about and you can't see that the variance in scores among groups of students is greater than the variance produced by the quality of teacher. This means that no matter how you try to do it, if you base your metric on student performance, what you are measuring is trends in student grouping, not teacher quality.

I live in a right to work state, too.

Why should we require reasons to fire teachers?

Sure, my employer can fire me tomorrow. But I can also leave tomorrow.

Teacher's can't. They are on contracts, contracts which say they cannot leave without penalties, but they can be fired at any time for either misconduct or performance, with only the need for documentation.

Furthermore, as a taxpayer, I don't want my local school administration firing a bunch of teachers because (s)he doesn't like them, making me foot the bill to hire a bunch of new teachers.

You still don't understand.

Scores are arbitrary. At the very least, you can't accept the scores set by the teacher. Bad teachers would simply pad their scores with easier work/questions. If you try to standardize the scores, you're left with standardized tests. That means that you ignore any students who take tests well, regardless of what concepts they might be missing. You instead focus on the lowest students because its easier to raise a student from 60 to 70 than 90 to 100. Instead of teaching kids to understand, you focus on pointless facts, talking points, and simple word triggers because those are the only things that standardized tests are good at measuring.

And that's just the start. Let me blow your world: Teachers don't know what's on the test. Not in any of the states I've been in, anyway. All they know is that the test is taken from the curriculum. As a result, they focus on teaching the curriculum, intensely.

I won't hide the fact that my wife is a history teacher. Her yearly test scores are in the area of 94%. That means that if more than twelve students fail the test, her scores drop and she gets labeled a "sucky teacher". So, how is she supposed to justify teaching her students about the Harlem Renaissance when its not part of the curriculum? That's a day spent on a topic that isn't going to be on the test, and those twelve kids need as much time to study the stuff that will be one the test. How about the Homestead Act and how it shaped the western part of the country? Nope. Not on the curriculum. The Red Scare? Nope. The Korean War? Nope. The effect of atomic weapons on the culture of the late twentieth century? Nope. Not on the test. Don't waste time talking about it.

That is what the idiots pushing for numerical evaluations have given us. In their desire to find someone to blame for the US not being able to pretend like we are the only country that ever succeeds, they have latched onto the idea that learning can be quantified. They then claim that teachers should be judged by these quantified measurements, completely ignoring things like variance, bias, and simple statistical relevance. And in response, teachers are forced to teach only knowledge that can be quantified.

To her credit, she ignores the curriculum and tries to shove all of those things into the class anyway because both of us absolutely despise the fact that ordinary students are being robbed of actual knowledge just so some politician can spout percentages to a bunch of idiots who think that any of it matters.

Let me be more blunt: If you honestly think that test scores of any sort are an accurate reflection of the quality of a teacher, then you are either willfully ignorant or in need of an actual education.

Quit making the education system suck. You're the problem.