No “Redistributing Teachers” to Bad Schools Won’t Work

professor-blackboard

Politico has an entire article discussing the redistribution of teachers without considering a few minor possibilities.

More than a decade ago, Congress ordered states to figure out a way to distribute qualified teachers fairly, so low-income and minority children weren’t so often stuck with inexperienced and unlicensed educators.

As it turns out, they’ve done a lousy job.

Actually it’s people who don’t want to work lousy jobs. That’s something Socialist planners never seem to understand.

1. Bad schools get bad teachers because they’re bad places to work. And vice versa. Trying to force good teachers into bad schools won’t change that. It will however burn out good teachers and turn them into bad teachers.

Vice versa, bad teachers may not be that bad, they often are limited by the problems of the student body or have simply burned out.

 

2. Qualified teachers have invested a certain amount of money and effort into their education. They’re likely to have seniority in a union. And they tend to have a family, children and other reasons that make them want to protect their own safety, live in a nice place, earn more money.

The 38-year-old teacher with a masters and a lot of time spent memorizing the educational theory gobbledygook that impresses yuppie parents has a mortgage, two kids and zero interest in going to teach in the ghetto, which she isn’t even actually qualified for. She will, despite her liberal views, do everything possible to avoid that fate.

The 23-year-old however will be stupid enough and hungry enough to take that lousy gig until she took is a 38-year-old with a house, a car, etc…

 

3. Whatever grants states get to attract better teachers to bad schools will be nullified because in a free market that just means better schools will spend more money to get good teachers.

Teachers in good schools will always earn more because of organic demand. Subsidies are an artificial demand and can never keep pace with a free market.

 

4. Any system in which teachers have a good deal of control through a union will mean that they pursue their own interests. Breaking the union will erode the political support that the planners who want to redistribute teachers need in order to stay in power.

They can’t get from here to there, in other words.

  • Texas Patriot

    The educational crisis in America will not be solved by reforming the existing system. We need to start over from scratch using the latest internet and interactive learning systems so each American, of any age, has an opportunity to receive the best education in the world. Sal Khan of the Khan Academy has the right idea. http://www.khanacademy.org

    Sal was a venture capitalist with three degrees from MIT who retired to make internet math videos for kids free of charge. He is now funded by Google, Microsoft, and Oracle among many others. Eric Schmidt of Google says Sal’s approach has more potential than any other for turning education in America around, and Bill Gates now has a separate computer screen on his desk only for watching Sal’s videos. It’s amazing. Here’s a video of Sal appearing at one of Google’s genius seminars. It’s well worth the time it takes to watch it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUHRaoD7d34

    • Boots

      Respectfully disagree. The educational crisis won’t be fixed until we get rid of liberal policy designed to destroy the two parent family. As long as we have liberal run enclaves (ghettos… think Detroit, Compton, Chicago, Stockton… any HUD Housing project) where you have over 70% out of wedlock birthrates and gangs are raising the young males… children won’t show up to school in any way ready to be educated. This is by design. Liberal leaders understand that if you destroy the two parent family you’re that much closer to creating enough government dependency to ensure a voting base that has to keep voting to receive free stuff. “Immigration reform” serves the same purpose in that it suppresses wages and increases unemployment by creating a labor surplus. Welfare was sold as short term help but for some strange reason we have fifth generation welfare families and made it so women didn’t need a man in the house. That was LBJ’s goal with the “War on Poverty”.

      • Texas Patriot

        As you suggest, the problems with America’s educational system are political as well as procedural, but it will be much easier to solve the political problems if we solve the procedural ones first.

        • objectivefactsmatter

          The root problem today is unquestionably about politics.

          • Texas Patriot

            Perhaps. But the solution is procedural. With the effective and widespread use of computers and interactive teaching materials, we can make sure that every student has access to the best minds in a particular field and each student is brought along at his or her own best speed. It’s a revolution waiting to happen. The “schoolhouse model” we use today has its roots in 17th century America, and is outdated and long overdue for a complete overhaul, and the need for change is critical. As it stands now, we have the most expensive and least effective educational system of any major industrialized nation, and we need to do something about that if we want to remain competitive in any way for the foreseeable future.

          • objectivefactsmatter

            I agree except that you must solve the political problems first or else the content will be just as destructive as it is now or probably worse.

            The people responsible for raising children are their parents. Schools are supposed to be there to help provide quality tools to make education more widely available and so forth. Instead they’ve turned in to childcare, indoctrination and “social justice” institutions where the gold standard is equality of outcome rather than helping each child reach his greatest potential. All of these philosophies need to change.

            I’m not suggesting a Utopian standard. I’m suggesting we start informing parents who first to blame when they’re unhappy with their children’s results. For people that are truly disadvantaged, IOW parents truly are unable to formulate winning strategies, these parents should again be encouraged to seek help from local churches or other organizations that can take a hands on individualistic approach to solve problems.

            Top down solutions almost never work. They make things worse.

          • Texas Patriot

            We need to take the political element out of education as much as possible and emphasize skills development, i.e. language, mathematics, science. Let’s face it. America is drowning in a tsunami of lies and hatred, and it’s coming from all sides. Unfortunately, the toxic influence of politics and political propaganda has poisoned and destroyed what was not so very long ago, the finest system of public education in the world. At this point, the only way forward is to scrap the old system completely and rebuild with a new system designed to meet the competitive economic and technological challenges of the 21st Century.

          • objectivefactsmatter

            We’re not far off in our thoughts. I just don’t think you can come up with new technology, no matter how great, without completely rebooting our philosophy…getting rid of politics and political agendas in our public schools. If we want things to improve.

          • The March Hare

            unfortunately, after several generations of poor schools, fewer parents are capable of being much help to their children or understanding the situation. It will take several generations to get out of this, assuming we can implement the right changes without a long protracted fight.

          • The March Hare

            It’s the politics that prevent any fix to the procedural. As far as the “schoolhouse model” goes, the cure you advocate only works for the self motivated, self starters who have parents that are interested and encourage their young. Just getting parents to send their kids to school was a problem until the laws required it up to a certain age. Other than that, the state only needs to facilitate the schools, not control the curriculum. That needs to stay local. While everyone’s back was turned, the leftists packed the school boards with their own.

        • The March Hare

          The procedural ones stem from the political ones.

    • http://raycaruso.com/ Ray Caruso

      For a very large part of America, learning is “acting white” and whites are portrayed as uncool, murdering scum, so why would youngster from that part of America want to learn anything? In the past, children attended one-room schools out on the prairie and even the best urban schools did not have anything beyond books with no illustrations and blackboards, and yet children learned. They learned because of no-nonsense teaching methods, because they were expected to do so, and because there were no EBT cards, no Section 8 housing, or any of the rest. Whoever couldn’t read, write, and do arithmetic would spend his entire adult life doing heavy manual labor.

      • The March Hare

        And, at that time, even if the parents didn’t have much education they understood the value of education and applied pressure to learn on their children. That is a large deficit today, getting parents to understand and care.

    • Gamal

      Want to fix the educational system? Throw out the trouble makers. Reinstitute discipline. Don’t punish schools for disciplining bad kids.

      • phoebeintheforest

        Exactly. In our current system, the troublemakers and their parents, know that they can never really be expelled from school, no matter how bad their behavior is. They might be moved to a special program some place else in the district, but they are never truly kicked out of school. If the bad kids were sent home and the parents had to put up with them 24/7…or fork out money for private school…you might see some improvement in the kids’ behavior.

  • Gamal

    Redistributing teachers will mean that good schools will get lousy teachers and get worse and bad schools will get good teachers that can’t teach because of the violence and chaos in those schools.

  • Dan Knight

    Outlaw teacher’s unions.
    Impose vouchers.
    Shut down D.O.Edumacation … leave all funds with the states.

    Let natural and logical consequences run their course.
    When the Libtards go nuts: Scour them with the light of day …

    • PI by Nature

      You still have the problem of the students. Nothing will change until that is fixed…but schools can’t really fix the student problem because that is a nurture issue.

      • Dan Knight

        Hi Pi, No, I disagree.

        Actually, I strongly disagree.

        The ‘nuture’ issue and the ‘student’ problem’ cannot even be ‘addressed’ until the reforms mentioned above are taken.

        Until the Unions no longer exist, and parents can move their children to the schools they see fit: The most violent, stupid, ignorant, and bigoted students and their parents will be the only ‘student’ and ‘parent’ input.

        Why? It should be obvious, but if say, 98% of the students are ‘fixed’ culturally to attend and participate in a civil manner:

        1. The Unions will abuse the behaving students with nonsense, gibberish, and hocus-pocus . Just as they so abuse the still large number of good students in the system now.

        2. The disobedient and uncivil students will determine the manner and procedures and policies and organization of the classrooms.

        Good parents with good students will go to the bottom of the barrel where they are now. Good parents will problem children will continue to be ignored. Bad parents with good children will be rewarded with a child who is ignored. And bad parents with bad children will be the parents who drive ‘parental input’ if any parental input is offered or used.

        In other words: Any actually successful program to encourage better parenting (as if we haven’t had over a 100 years of such programs), would make only an insignificant difference. It will be (at best) getting worse less slowly than it is now.

        And since ‘bad parents’ are being rewarded waiting for the ‘nurture’ problem to be solved – and it never will – it’s no surprise we continue to see more ‘bad parents’ and their unruly off-spring setting the agenda.

        Peace! ;-)

  • T100C1970

    The outcome of an educational endeavor is proportional to the PRODUCT of teacher quality and student quality. Using a scale of 0 – 100 you can put a 100 teacher in a room full of 0 students and the outcome will still be 0. Student quality is proportional to the PRODUCT of aptitude and motivation. The typical student from da hood stands at the far left end of the the aptitude bell curve and within epsilon of 0 on the motivation scale. The lack of motivation is reinforced daily by family and peers who say that education is useless because the man is going to keep you down anyhow. Any student who shows motivation is ridiculed and sometimes physically abused by peers for “acting white”. Most of the “bad” teachers in these schools didn’t start out that way… They just got beat down by the system and pretty much gave up. Even if you could put high achieving teachers into those schools it would make NO DIFFERENCE.

  • reyol

    Haven’t we already redistributed the students through forced busing? That turned out so well, now we’re contemplating redistribution of teachers. Perhaps we’ve been watching too many of those movies we like to make about teachers that somehow “reach” the gangsters and thugs and inspire them to learn. Those movies are fantasies; it is rare for someone who has grown up in a culture of “keepin’ it real” to suddenly, because someone said the right thing to him, want to get all uptight and learn. The culture has to be changed. We’re burning out teachers trying to do it in the classroom.

  • tagalog

    Evidently Politico has yet to discover Gresham’s Law.

  • Maynard Hirsch

    AS a teacher who has taught in the inner city, I can tell you redistributing teachers won’t work.

    In Chicago, they have turn around schools. These are “failing” schools were the have replaced all the staff, teachers, administrators,even the janitorial and lunchroom people. The schools still fail. Why? Because the students have not changed. It only takes one or two disruptive students to destroy the classroom environment, and the administration is loathe to remove these students.

    The facts are that even a mediocre teacher can get the basics across to his students if the students are willing to learn. Unfortunately, too many students are in school for the wrong reasons. They are there because school is the only place they can get a meal, or to socialize, or saddest of all, their parents’ do not trust them to be home alone.

    The schools can be improved almost overnight if the disruptive students could be removed easily and quickly. I’m not saying abandon them, but rather assign them to an alternative type school where they can get the help they need.

    Yes public education is a right. But just like every other right we have, I believe that a student can lose that right through proper judicial actions. No one student has the right to prevent others from learning.

    Of course the cures in the previous two paragraphs will never happen until we have a statesman (not a politician) that is willing to stand up ans say to his constituents: “The schools have enough money, but too much of it spent on non-classroom items, like repairing vandalism, disciplinarians,and truant officers. Are teachers are qualified, and for the most part competent. The administration does a good job. The problem is the parents. They are not doing their part.