Importance of Teachers

An AP article, 'New CEO: Gates Foundation learns from experiments' discusses how much influence a teacher makes to students. A little blurb:

Raikes said the district found that putting a great teacher in a low-income school helped students advance a grade and a half in one year. An ineffective teacher in a high-income school held student achievement back to about half a grade of progress in a year.

Now our society needs to have the school boards, superintendents, and principals recognize the importance of the teachers. This means the people on the top of our educational system need to give more resources to the teachers instead of adding more meaningless chores to the overworked teachers.

I really wish that all superintendents, principals, and political figures were required to teach at least one hour each day.  Then maybe they would realize some of the tasks and limitations that teachers are forced to endure.

What's Wrong with Our Educational System

My wife is a teacher at an urban high school. Some of the policies in place are:

• A student's grade cannot be affected by behavior issues. Cheating, however, is considered a behavior and thus cannot be reflected on the student's grade.
• A student being present in the classroom is irrelevant. There are very few penalties for being tardy with some students being tardy 14-15 times for one class in one semester. Also, a student can be absent 80% of the time and still get credit.
• There is no due date for any homework. If the student wants to turn in all their homework on the last day of school, that is fine by the school's administration. (Boy, I wish my boss was OK with that).

With these MAJOR issues, it is the teacher's that are blamed. They are told they need better classroom management. They are told they need to be more positive. They are told to just say 'Yes' to whatever the student wants. They are told to influence the student's behavior since the administration will not use its backbone with a parent or student.

Maybe the school administration should fix the MAJOR issues before tweaking how the teacher teaches. How can we expect students to learn if we say it is OK to cheat, skip work class, no deadlines, etc.? What are we teaching our students? Do we only have expectations of teachers and no one else?

Schools should do what is best for the students...and that is not always saying 'Yes'

SCOTUS Nominee Sotomayor

This really doesn't have anything to do with Sotomayor since I don't know how she will vote, but...

Why does the Supreme Court members have to be an elite political party? It seems that you could throw any issue at the SCOTUS and predict 99% of the time how each judge will vote even before any arguments are heard. The way it is now, it just appears to be a smaller version of Congress and everything is political. 

Shouldn't the judges hear the arguments and make their decisions on the arguments and the Constitution? Not whether they are personally for or against big government, taxes, guns, abortion, immigration, etc.

Reason to become (or not become) a teacher

People become teachers because someone sparked an interest that grew into a flame that they want to share with others.

Once becoming a teacher they are ignored, treated with disrespect, and made into scapegoats from politicians, school administrators, parents and students--and the only spark left is of hope.

Literature Review: Research shows that close to thirty percent of new teachers leave teaching within three years and nearly fifty percent quit before five years; most shocking is that fifteen percent leave the profession in the first year (Ingersoll, 2002; Ingersoll & Smith, 2003). Linda Darling-Hammond (2003), citing a Texas study showing that teacher turnover costs the state around $329 million a year, reiterated, “early attrition bears enormous costs” (p. 8). source: Why New Teachers Come and Go-What We Can Do to Help Them Stay

Rights and Restrictions

The U.S. Constitution lists several rights that Americans have.  These might include freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and privacy.  Privacy is not directly mentioned, but it is generally interpreted that way from several of the items in the Bill of Rights.  These written rights are defended by all Americans...

...until something happens and then some restrictions are added.  You can't yell 'Fire' in a crowded room.  You really don't have the right of privacy if you are a celebrity.  You can't own a firearm until you are an adult.  Even the Constitution itself mentions libel and slander while also mentioning the freedom of speech and press.  The end result is that we have some restrictions and responsibilities on each of our rights.

So I am wondering what are the rights, restrictions, and responsibilities of some of our 'rights' that are not specifically written into the Constitution.  In particular, what are the boundaries to our 'right' to a quality education, our 'right' to quality health care, and our 'right' to an abortion?

Conservative vs. Liberal

The more I think about it, the root difference between conservatives and liberals is on how they view the U.S. Constitution.  

Conservatives look closely at the founding father's reasoning for their inclusions and exclusions.  Then they look at today's society and the original intent of the Constitution trumps today's desires.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that the Constitution is alive and always changing.  Since today's intent trumps the original intent, the liberal's view is that the Constitution is much more fluid and flexible.

While most Americans are reasonable and will agree that both components are important, the political extremist will only view whatever fits into their agenda.

Do you agree with this simplistic reasoning?

Update:  This was just discussed on Glenn Beck about Cass Sustein's comments.