U.S. Test Scores Remain Stagnant While Other Countries See Rapid Rise

Most of this article is not surprising. There are many problems with education. Here are some things I believe would help:

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/03/us-test-scores_n_4374075.html
1. National curriculum. Sure this is a bold statement and I do not mean it to be. There would have to be variations of it and valid means to test it but this is a start.

2. Better testing. Quite simply, testing for improvement, not just a cut off level. Also handicaps which take variables like income, parents, IQ, learning disabilities, etc into consideration when looking at the scores.

3. Better teacher recruitment. At this point in time, our best and brightest do not want to be teachers. Heck who would for 30k a year?

4. Pay teachers comparable salaries that they would get in the corporate world. This is really the only way to get the best and brightest. Wanting to help kids only goes so far when the bank wants your mortgage paid. Many of my graduate students are teachers who are getting a degree in my field so that they can go corporate and make a better salary.

5. Get rid of under performing teachers. Now a good evaluation tool needs to first be put in place that does not solely rely on test scores but if a teacher is not doing well they should not be in the classroom. Tenure should be a non issue as it should be reevaluated with performance anyway.

 

Why men are choosing not to be K-12 Teachers

I saw this article posted on USATODAY this morning. Its an opinion piece but it attempts to address a very important issue we are seeing in K-12 education right now: Boys are not doing well in school and have do not have role models in school because there are not men in schools.

Article

As this article notes:

“…boys in particular benefit from the presence of male role models in the classroom. As Stanford University professor Thomas Dee has documented, in a study of more than 20,000 middle-school students, boys perform better when they have a male teacher, and girls perform better when they have a female teacher. If we want to do something about boys’ often sluggish classroom performance, more male teachers could be a useful step.” Source

While this article addresses some other issues as well and not all that I agree with, we do agree that more men are needed in K-12 education. Women are outperforming men in school by leaps and bounds. While this is great and we need to continue to do more to keep our girls performing well, we need to also start doing things to help our boys do well too. One of those is getting more men into schools. I have heard all kinds of stats but in elementary schools it seems like there is 1 male teacher for every 10 female (sometimes even more like 1 to 15). I have seen this first hand. I teach one undergraduate technology for education class and every semester there are 20 girls and maybe 1-3 guys. Some classes have no guys. Guys are not going into teaching. Why?

Well here is the main reason I would not go into K-12 education: low pay (there are others but if this happened I believe the others would be solved or at least we would going in the right direction). If you pay teachers 15k-30k to start, who is going to want to do it? Yes, I see my students getting offers for less than 20k a year to start. Heck my first job out of college was 50k with full benefits+401k in the corporate world. I was making 65k after 1 year out in the corporate world and over the course of a few more years my salary was significantly higher than that. The average teacher makes 46k a year at retirement in the US (source). How are you going to get the best by paying 46k a year? I dont even think I could pay rent on that better yet support a family, and that is the national average in retirement. Sure there are some districts around cities that pay teachers upwards of 100k, but that is not normal and not close to the national average. I often hear, well teachers get summer off. Sure they get 8 weeks of unpaid vacation. Guess what? I got 3-5 weeks of paid vacation at my various jobs. Yep, when I left the corporate world and went into higher education I had 5 weeks of paid vacation a year so that extra 3 weeks that teachers had was nothing special considering it was unpaid. You want men, pay for them. Here is a video that addresses this issue much better than I can:

Local teachers use website for teachers to ask for funding for gaming lab

Local Wilmington NC teachers (well really Pender county) are using the website Kickstarter to ask for funding for various technology projects (video game lab) they are doing in schools. I think this is an excellent way to inform the public about what projects we are doing and gives them the opportunity to support various projects in our schools. The website is kickstarter, check it out. To get to the local projects I am speaking of from West Pender Middle’s potential video game lab, visit the Kickstarter page at kickstarter.com/discover. Then, type “Warrior Gaming Lair” in the search field.

Here is a recent newspaper article about the programs in my area asking for funding: http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20120623/ARTICLES/120629866/1177?p=1&tc=pg&tc=ar

NYC passes social media law for K-12 Educators

I cannot say this is a bad law. While I wish it wasnt needed, unfortunately there are just so many problems that something like this needs to be in place. In fact, this probably just makes it easier for the teacher to say ‘no’ when their students ask because many students do ask their teachers to be facebook friends and it puts the teacher in an uncomfortable situation. Here is what the law says:

“NYC DOE Teachers cannot use social media accounts unaffiliated to the school on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Flickr to contact students regardless of the nature of the message.”

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/05/02/social-media-student-teacher-contact/

Now the good thing to point out here: These services can still be used as long as its for educational purposes. So the schools are not banning the tools. If they were, I would have a major problem with this. They are simply banning personal connections, which I believe is fine. I warn all of my K-12 pre-service to teachers to say ‘No’ to any student that requests them on facebook. Not that I think its bad in all cases but that it just avoids a potential future problem.

Here is a video on the topic: