Teaching in english will prevent more than half the population from attaining some of these positions within a couple of decades. The averages are quite worthwhile. The aggregate of what we spend is what we spend. The per pupil amount is what we spend per pupil. If we spend $10K per pupil and allocate it as I suggest, then the one room school house with 40 total students would make do on a $400K budget and Lane Tech (Chicago) would make do on its 7K (students) x $10K each. What to do when sex is all the kids are getting out of high school? RHIP. Rank has its privileges. Do as I say, not as I do. I'm sure that Hispanic and Black and those of all races who can't afford it would want to send their kids to Sidwell because of the security, privacy, and contacts. No, just the politicians are corrupt. There may be other industries, but that's not that relevant. Go for it.
It doesn't speak to the policy working. 42% or 46% is a failure. The figures include 2 year colleges, and Hispanics from 3rd+ generations that only speak english. There's more evidence that simple "immersion" in a society that predominantly speaks english teaches english better than the schools do. It's also pretty obvious that a spanish speaking kid would do better on a reading test written in spanish.
I attended an above-average public school system as a young'un. For about ten years, I lived in perhaps the strongest public school district in the country--the four closest high schools to my house were all listed in the U.S. News "top 100" list. The closest high school had its own observatory, for instance. Last year, I moved to a new school district in a different state. The state is probably one of the bottom five in public education in the country. My immediate area isn't bad by national standards, and quite good for state standards, but not what was offered in my prior school district. My nearly-six-year-old daughter attends private school--she would NEVER have attended private school in our previous location. Here's why: My daughter turns six next week. Because her birthday is after September 1, she would have been ineligible to enter kindergarten last year--she would have been placed in glorified babysitting, and only this year allowed to continue in kindergarten. In our view, she was ready for kindergarten, and, in fact, would likely have been in kindergarten in our previous state. In this state, oh heck, Florida. It is FLORIDA. In Florida, there is no waiver mechanism--your birthday is the sole determinant of your readiness to enter kindergarten. In our pre--oh, heck. MARYLAND. In Maryland, the state was in the process of moving the minimum age requirement to September 1, but children could test out of it (which my daughter was likely to do had we stayed in Maryland). So we put her in a Montessori school. In Montessori, students of several ages are placed together, and they do the work that they are capable of doing regardless of their actual age. Her teachers assessed her during the school year, and they agreed that she was doing the work of a kindergartener, and so if we wanted we could move her up to first grade this year (which is the start of a different three-year classroom). Here's the rub: If we wanted to move her back into public school, Florida would make her REPEAT kindergarten, because she was born after September 1. Only after two years in private school would the school district allow children to "move up." How idiotic is that? She can read and do basic math, even play chess, and they would put her in kindergarten! School should be challenging! Why make her spend a year essentially holding her back an entire grade? [one additional reason we want her to move up is because we only plan to live in Florida for a few years, and we could move to a state where the cut-off is December 1, and then she would just be screwed--she'd be the oldest kid by three months and there would be nothing we could do about it] But there is more . . . my county is divided up into three or four "regions." Students do not attend the school closest goegraphically to them: It is determined by LOTTERY. As a parent, you can list your preferences, but other than that, you have no ability to choose. You could live down the block from the best school in the state, and one of your choldren could attend a school ten miles in one direction, and the other child could attend a school that is ten miles in the other direction. [The county is currently trying to return to normalcy, but it is a disaster, since students that have been attending schools that are better than the local schools want to continue to do so. It is unclear what will happen in the long run.] The idea is that the schools will be perfectly integrated, and that school resources will be divided more equally. Why the hell would I agree to that, when I bought my home in part because of the local schools? It turns out, of course, that no one really wanted it--everyone just wants to go to their local school, for ease, simplicity, and just so the kids can make friends that they can play with on the weekend. [you wouldn't believe the county-wide cost for bussing students] Regardless . . . to go back to my first story . . . let's say that I called the governor, and he had allowed my daughter to enter kindergarten last year. The lottery had already occurred byt he time we decided to move here! All the better schools (read: the closest schools) would have been filled up! They would have put her in a kindergarten ten miles away! How crazy is that? On the plus side, I don't have to worry what she will learn about biology and astronomy in a private school. So, she is the youngest student in her first grade class, and she is just doing awesome. Her reading and writing are just spectacular, and she can do math in her head without using her fingers. To the state, though, she is nothing more than a kindergartener. [my other daughter was born the first week of October, so you can see where this is going]
http://www.pbs.org/merrow/news/sacbee.html [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]California schools: Decades of decline: 'First to worst' for California schools [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]By W. Norton Grubb – Special To The Bee Governor Schwarzenegger's budget bore the good news that K-12 education would not be drastically cut. (The California Budget Project estimates that schools will lose "only" $175 per pupil, after inflation.) But that's the bad news, too, because the status quo is woefully inadequate. [/FONT] <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="2" width="100"> <tbody><tr> <td>[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][/FONT]</td> </tr> <tr> <td>[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger[/FONT]</td> </tr> </tbody></table> [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Last month a PBS documentary about California schools, "First to Worst," described the decline from the '50s and '60s, when the Golden State's schools were "the cutting edge of the American Dream," to the present. Howard Jarvis, initiator of Proposition 13, promises a supporter in 1978, "Youngster, we're not going to hurt your schools." But the portrayal of dilapidated buildings and inadequate textbooks, overcrowded classrooms and unqualified teachers, the litany of what other states have that California lacks - arts, electives, libraries, buildings rather than portables, summer schools, counselors, nurses, psychologists - are heartbreaking. "It's like you're in Calcutta", declares a former state board chairman. A middle-school student nails the right question: "How could a state so rich do so poorly?" Spending per pupil in California is now 44th in the country (considering its high costs), down with Idaho and Tennessee. Even after class size reduction, the average size in elementary schools ranks 48th; the proportion of high school teachers with degrees in the subjects they teach ranks 34th. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the "nation's report card," are abysmal: 47th in eighth-grade math (alongside Arkansas and Alabama), tied for last (with Hawaii) in reading, tied for last in science. In our high-tech state, only 21 percent of these students are proficient or better in math, 15 percent in science, 22 percent in reading and 23 percent in writing. We've become a low-spending, low-resource state, with low levels of learning. Every Californian concerned about the future should ponder these realities, and consider the ways to climb out of the cellar. Here's my five-point program: One: Funding must increase, at least toward the national average. We may have to revise Prop 13, the "third rail" of California politics, and to increase other taxes. Of course, we need to ensure that additional funding is wisely spent. But funding is necessary if not sufficient, and the educational consequences of low spending are ubiquitous and harmful to learning. Despite complaints about high taxes, California's tax effort ranked 40th among the states in 1997, before the high-tech bubble; we could increase revenues by 14 percent and still be only at the national average. Two: Learning takes place in schools and classrooms, not district offices or Sacramento. School communities - teachers, principals, students and parents - are the basic units for reform, and to be effective they must develop their own improvements. Rebuilding school capacity in turn requires new conceptions of leadership, teachers with broader skills, novel methods of funding, more supportive districts and an end to Sacramento dictating local practices. Three: State policy must be reshaped. The Serrano case, intended to equalize spending among districts, created "equalized mediocrity" rather than lifting poor districts to the level of wealthy ones. The expansion of categorical grants has tied the hands of schools, and made funding incomprehensible. The state has launched one expensive "reform" after another - school restructuring, class size reduction, Immediate Intervention for Under-performing Schools - with few results because of mediocre design and poor implementation. The current accountability system forces schools to think harder about learning, but it measures performance poorly and narrows what schools teach. We might need Educational Impact Statements, to compel legislators and governors to consider effects of legislation more carefully. We certainly need better implementation, with state administrators knowledgeable about how schools work. Four: We need to invest in school personnel, particularly teachers and principals. We need stable, long-term policies targeting attrition among teachers, the large numbers of non-credentialed teachers, the lack of disciplinary preparation and inadequate staff development. The preparation of principals, crucial to school-centered improvement, has never been strong, and now the state allows principals to be credentialed through a test that encourages quick-and-dirty programs. Rather than proliferating check-lists of standards for teachers and principals, we should invest in high-quality pre-service and in-service programs. Five: The decline has taken several decades, and so will the revival. We need a stable plan, with steady progress toward long-run goals - like a master plan. The 2002 Master Plan has many worthy recommendations, but we need an expanded plan to reverse all dimensions of decline and improve California's standing. Term limits foster short-term thinking, so perhaps they should be eliminated. And governors turn over regularly, each with new-fashioned ideas, so we should hold governors accountable to a longer-range vision. I've hardly gotten started: For example, I haven't said anything about low-income or immigrant students, in a state where inequality is growing. But even these points suggest an enormous agenda: substantially more funding, the modification of Prop 13, a revised master plan, better approaches to equalization, elimination of term limits, constraints on gubernatorial whimsy, restoration of local control, the overhaul of teacher and principal preparation, a revised accountability system, Educational Impact Statements, civil service reform to enhance administrative competence, elimination of Prop 227 and other constraints on teaching. That's the point: The decline of California education comes not from one cause - not just from Prop 13 - but from many independent decisions, often well-intentioned but collectively disastrous. Working our way out of the bottom will require undoing many of these. The alternative is further decline. California would become a state where no one trusts its workers, a first-rank economy that has to import skilled employees, a republic with citizens unprepared for civic responsibility and susceptible to circus democracy, a once-mythic place that others shun for its high costs, poor schools and unequal opportunity. We can resurrect the golden promises of California, but that will require our collective efforts over several decades. [/FONT]
When you point me to one thing I typed that said anything contrary to that, I'll respond to it. This is a giant red herring that has nothing to do with what I'm writing about Finding people that are both qualified (and I'm not talking about accreditation) and willing to do is much more than a case of simple probability. That is logistics and something you still haven't been able to successfully address. Being hispanic doesn't guarantee that a person is fluent in spanish. As an aside, one of my sister-in-law's neighbors is a HS teacher here in the PHX area. I asked him earlier if he knew enough teachers to fill multiple HS's around this area with a full slate (all subjects and expertises) of fluent spanish speaking teachers and he said no.
2/3 the population of Mountain View CA is hispanic. The school district has 3 schools. 2 of the 3 should teach its courses in spanish so the kids learn something besides english.
This whole time, I thought the thread title read: Physical Education, and why it sucks. Me = Mega Grammer Fail
Dumpy, I was just asking about the argument between Denny and cpaw. Threads, as always, go where they're taken. After hearing it restated I see no reason to agree with Denny on the Spanish language front.
Technically, I never argued against what Denny listed as the summary. I've only asked how in the hell something like that could be pulled of logistically across the US. How many years would it take to have a suitable pool of qualified teachers for HS subjects including advance math, science and history classes?
How many years? 3. Uncertified Teachers Performing Well, Study Finds By SARAH GARLAND, <nobr>Staff Reporter of the Sun</nobr> | November 20, 2006 http://www.nysun.com/new-york/uncertified-teachers-performing-well-study-finds/43827/ Uncertified teachers end up performing just as well in the classroom as certified teachers and alternatively trained teachers like Teaching Fellows, a study to be released today says. The study's results appear to challenge requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Act that every classroom have a "highly qualified" teacher, instead suggesting that schools should put more emphasis on weeding out bad apples after the teachers have been hired. "These are people who have no prior experience in teaching and they go into the lowest performing schools, and they do just as well," a Columbia University Business School professor, Jonah Rockoff, who co-authored the study, said. "Where you went to college and what your GPA was doesn't seem to tell you how good you're going to be in the classroom." In the study, researchers at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank affiliated with Stanford University, used standardized test scores to measure the performance of New York City students taught by traditionally certified teachers, uncertified teachers, and teachers who enter the profession through alternative programs such as Teach for America and Teaching Fellows. They found that while alternatively certified and uncertified teachers do worse at first, they appear to improve at faster rates than traditionally certified teachers in their first years on the job. By the teachers' third year on the job, students of alternatively certified and uncertified teachers are performing just as well as those of traditionally certified teachers. That's good news for New York City public schools, since the majority of new hires during the past five years have come through alternative certification programs. Currently, a third of all teachers in city schools received certification from an alternative program. Alternative certification programs have grown in popularity around the country since the No Child Left Behind law introduced a requirement that all school districts have a "highly qualified" teacher — meaning a teacher with a certificate — in every classroom by July 2006. New York City had already been under pressure to hire more certified teachers after the state education commissioner, Richard Mills, sued the city in 1999 for placing uncertified teachers in the lowest performing schools. To meet the requirements, the city invented the Teaching Fellow program in 2000 to recruit teachers from other professions and speed them through the certification process. The city has hired 9,000 Teaching Fellows since then. The study shows that uncertified teachers, who are more likely to be minorities than the other groups, end up doing just as well as the alternatively and traditionally certified teachers. Since the Teaching Fellows program was introduced, hiring of minority teachers has dropped significantly, a trend that can be attributed to the effort to remove uncertified teachers, Mr. Rockoff said. Statistics first reported by the Amsterdam News showed that in 2001, 27% of new teachers were black, while this year only 14% were black. The percentage of new Hispanic teachers has also dropped. The study's authors say they are not "proposing to open the floodgates into teaching" by saying certification doesn't matter. But researchers said the study results showed that school systems, instead of focusing on whether and how teachers are certified before hiring, should worry more about getting rid of teachers who perform badly during probationary periods. Currently, Mr. Rockoff said, large urban school systems like New York with dismal teacher retention rates tend to approve tenure for all teachers who decide to stay on, rarely giving out unsatisfactory ratings to teachers who perform badly. In New York City, half of all teachers — traditionally certified or not — leave after five years. To become certified, teachers must take a series of tests, have a bachelor's degree that includes education coursework, or complete graduate level education coursework. Alternative certificate programs often allow teachers to do the coursework during their first year of teaching. A professor at Stanford University, Susanna Loeb, who has conducted a study of teacher qualifications very similar to the Hoover study, said that certification status matters little in determining how a teacher will do in the classroom. She added that recommendations, interviews and grades that give information about a teacher's past experiences and educational achievement should remain important factors in hiring decisions, though. "I'm not ready to give up on resumes," she said. The Department of Education said the findings supported their argument that teachers who perform better should be paid more. The department said it would be allocating funds "to pay more to teachers who contribute more, including pay differentials that help make sure our high-needs schools get lead teachers as well as math, science, and special education teachers." The president of the city teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten pointed to another finding that supports one of the union's longstanding arguments: that experience is a defining factor in good teaching. "The most successful teachers are the ones who have experience and have been mentored or given other supports to help them learn how to teach in their earliest days in the profession," Ms. Weingarten said, adding that the study "also reaffirms that regardless of whether someone has been certified in the traditional way or in a new way, you can't just plop them into the school system and see if they sink or swim." The other authors of the Hoover study are Thomas Kane of Harvard's Graduate School of Education and Douglas Staiger, a professor of economics at Dartmouth.
A study based upon standardized test that are given in English... And of course, that article / study doesn't answer my question. It is talking about the performance of students, not about how long it takes to fill all of the open positions with the non-traditionally certified teachers. I'll wait for the next straw man instead of answering the questions.
Since my first set of logistics questions won't get answered, I'll move on to my next set of questions What percentage of the student body population has to be made of a single non-native english speaking language in order for a district to spend their money wisely and have an entire HS for these children? Where are these children going to go to college? At what point in their adult lives are these children expected to an english as the primary language professional job market?
I can see you've come to the conclusion you want to, no matter what evidence is present to you. The article clearly states that in NYC, they hired 9,000 teachers this way, recruiting them from other professions, over an 8 year period. About 1/3 were minorities. These teachers were as effective as the accredited ones after 3 years of experience and got better faster than the accredited teachers. The only reason there's a drop in minority teachers there is one of the top educators sued the city. Didn't like the job security implications, or maybe minority teachers. You decide. You can deny, deny, deny when the facts are presented to you, but it doesn't change the facts. The "strawman" comment is cheap and utter bullshit.
Asked, answered, ignored for your convenience. You're wrong, move on. The local school district should make the decision based upon their own criteria, studies, and findings. The students do learn english, even if you teach them in spanish. What I've been talking about all along is teaching the courses in spanish and teaching them english in a "learning to speak english" class.
One thing I learned and try to pass on to my students is that the only distinction between the "short-run" and the "long-run" in economics is the amount of money you're willing to spend. I think Denny is right that the resources are there if you're willing to pay for them and you're willing to throw out the systemic requirements that act as artificial restraints on the labor market (e.g. the various rules that say who's qualified and who's not qualified) and simply pay for performance. I just think he's wrong on what he proposes to do. And, of course, your retort is a strawman, since, if you can't have a study indicating the success or failure of the new policy you want to implement until after you try it. Just as a small example, I teach college level economics, which has competency in algebra as an explicit requirement. I'm quite confident I could teach algrebra, teachers for which are tremendously scarce, but according to the state licensing requirements, I'm not competent to teach it even at the high school level. I think you're just bastardizing Denny's argument by attacking to weakest part and the wording rather than getting at the underlying point.
