Disincentives

Great. The US is worried about its level of education and here's what is pushed:

-- Michelle Rhee and her "Students First" initiative want to push a removal of tenure and an implementation of merit pay based on test scores. This, of course, removes one of the incentives (job security) to become a teacher and actually pushes teachers to teach solely to the test in order to get high scores, which means better pay. So, job security=bad, high test scores, which have been PROVEN to reflect no serious data about learning=good. Blue Jersey lists several sites here that demonstrate that tests don't work.

-- Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education for those who've been asleep for a while, says that advanced degrees for teachers don't demonstrate any significant difference in the classroom with no data to support it. Thus, he says, we should stop paying teachers for higher education. So, basically the SECRETARY OF EDUCATION is pushing for LESS EDUCATION of TEACHERS. Here's where the quote is posted.

-- Teach for America is becoming more popular and more college students are being pushed to enter it with the "incentive" to make poor schools better by sending these young, driven teachers to teach their children. This sounds good at first, but here's the problem: Teach for America is sending these teachers out with a salary of $37,000 per year. That's below the national poverty line. So poor teachers are going to poor cities just out of the goodness of their hearts.

--Finally, all three of these sources of "better education" want to push young, less experienced teachers to stay in the profession, while making older, more experienced teachers want to leave. They claim we want to keep better trained, younger teachers who will be able to connect better with students. But the bottom line is: YOUNG TEACHERS ARE CHEAP. So, we no longer have to tax people as much, because teacher salaries come out of property taxes. We no longer have to tax the rich, because we can cut so much money from the system with these three programs. And who wins out? Not the children because they are being pushed into larger classrooms with young, less experienced teachers. Not the teachers, because the hundreds of thousands of them are now being paid less and many of them are too old to go and start a different career, and they can't retire because their pensions have been altered to make them work more years before they get a fair retirement deal. Not the economy because now a whole generation is graduating with a worse education than before so they don't work as well in the workplace and thus produce LESS as well as the hundreds of thousands of middle-class teachers who are now tightening their belts and spending less so they can survive, so they aren't putting as much money INTO the economy. Not public schools because the leaders of this country and "education reform" are pushing for corporate sponsored charter schools instead of funding public schools, which culls the best students from public schools and then, as public schools fall further IN TEST SCORES because the student population has been reduced to underachievers and special ed, the pushers for charter schools will say they "told us so."

So, who is gaining here? Rich people and corporations. The rich get to keep more and more of their money and can afford to send their kids to expensive private schools, which teach according to proper education research and not some statistical analysis. Corporations finally get to privatize the only public area left in this country -- schools -- and start making profits where they hadn't gotten them before. Good job, America.

Meanwhile, there's Finland. A fully unionized teacher base with one of the best public school systems IN THE WORLD. Read about what they do and compare to our system. You may be SHOCKED or DEPRESSED or both.

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