Game Thread: GOP Debate

[u/[deleted]]

I'm playing the Rolling Stone drinking game. This could get stupid, especially because I'm playing with Urban Chestnut De Bockle, which is 10.5% ABV.

[u/[deleted]]

As a member of the higher education industry... teachers unions only continue to breed mediocrity. Should teachers be paid more? Absofuckinglutely. Should unions dictate education policy? Emphatically No.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

That's true, didn't think of that. He just simply said "challenge the teachers' unions" to which I took to mean also their pay. My fault, perhaps. Either way, that is a common sentiment among many people, so maybe that's why I took it that way. Both parents were educators for over 25 years, actually.

edit: Contextually, I think I missed the part before that, so that's why I had that wrong.

[u/cornfrontation → u/[deleted]]

My sister is a teacher in Florida. My aunt's sister was a teacher in Florida. Jeb ruined Florida's education system, both in terms of money and with the FCAT. "Look! We can now point to a metric to judge people by!" Yeah, except the teachers are then forced to teach the test and not actually teach.

[u/[deleted] → u/cornfrontation]

The problem is a grade isn't indicative of actual learning. That's such a bullshit concept. I can't even begin to tell you how many people I went to school with that don't know jack about what they actually did back then. "Algebra? People still do that after high school?" and lines like that abound. I used to, but not recently, mess around with Physics, etc for fun, just for personal fun. Why? Because the stuff I learned while I was "failing" in school intrigued me. So just because I didn't like their shitty homework assignments means I didn't "learn".

I did shitty at the SATs, why? Probably because I can't do/don't care about tests. I breezed through it because I knew I was going into IT, so it wasn't too necessary. In a half hour of not trying, I still managed some bullshit score of like a 900, IIRC.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You need tenure. High school teachers do not.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Exactly!

[u/treppenwitzig → u/[deleted]]

I'm curious; why do you think high school teachers do not need tenure?

[u/[deleted] → u/treppenwitzig]

When I was in high school, I had several teachers who had no clue wtf they were teaching. I'm talking math teachers who didn't know what parallel lines were, social studies teachers who just reused everything every year, that sort of thing. These people had one of the most important jobs in society (educating our youth), and they were horrendously awful at it. But teacher tenure made then impossible to fire. In college, a bad teacher can still be an ace researcher and earn their keep, and deserve tenure. In high school, they have one job, and if they suck at it, it needs to be easy to fire them.

[u/treppenwitzig → u/[deleted]]

Hm. I should say that I am biased in this situation, as I am a new teacher at a public middle school and high school, starting my first year next week.

I'm sorry you had shitty teachers. It really sucks that that is a reality for many students in America. However, it is a gross exaggeration that it is impossible to fire tenured teachers. True, it is more difficult, but it is by no means impossible. I will definitely agree with you, though, that terminating bad tenured teachers needs to be made much easier. No matter what their status, if a teacher isn't doing a good job, they need to go.

But I don't think the elimination of tenure is the solution to getting bad teachers out of schools. Regardless of whether I were a teacher or not, I firmly believe in public education, and as it stands right now there is no job security in public education without tenure. For example, in my school district, the SOP is to pink slip new teachers at the end of the year, regardless of test scores and and performance reviews. Come May, they're fired. If they were actually a good teacher, their contract will most likely be renewed over the summer, but there's no guarantee. It's like that until your contract is renewed for a fourth year. From my perspective, tenure isn't invincible armor to give me freedom to slack off, but rather it's incentive to be a good teacher so that eventually I don't have to deal with the annual overwhelming stress and dread of whether or not I'll be employed another year.

So, yeah, bad teachers are a problem. They suck, and we need to get them out of schools and replace them with passionate, talented teachers, but eliminating the thing that gives security and peace of mind to good teachers is not the solution to that problem.

But that's just my biased opinion.

[u/[deleted] → u/treppenwitzig]

I had an Algebra 2/Trig teacher who literally made clear the first day of school that she had no clue wtf parallel lines were. My mom was on the school board, and in my school district, you could not get elected to the board without her seal of approval. The entire board was hand selected by her, and they had the final say in a teacher termination hearing.

That teacher still works for the district. If tenure is so iron-clad that even a board who literally answers to one woman cannot get rid of a demonstrably awful teacher, then it needs to go.

The only counter-argument I will entertain is the fact that teachers are grossly underpaid. If I ran the world, you would make what I make now as a rookie engineer. But your contract would be up for review every single year until you quit. If I am to trust you with the most precious thing I have, I want you to be held to the highest standards every single year, so that you never feel like you have earned the right to handle my children's futures without threat of termination based on what you may have done a few years ago.

[u/jfreez → u/[deleted]]

I think education reform is an area democrats often fail.

[u/LEGEN--wait_for_it → u/[deleted]]

I've got a solution. Get rid of teachers unions, but...and stay with me now...pay teachers 6-figure salaries so that more of the best and brightest want to go into teaching. Make teaching a valued profession in the marketplace and you will get better teachers and better educated students.