Detroit Schools Shuttered as Lawmakers 'Illegally' Withhold Teacher Pay

a reply to: peskyhumans

The problem with the sick out is that coordinated sick days like this cause widespread disruption. We're not talking about someone being sick and taking the occasional day to recuperate; we're talking about them all taking their days at the same time and causing a bunch of other people to have to re-order their day.

I work part-time, so I don't have sick leave, but in this instance, they would be costing me time and money to take care of my child who would not have school because they are taking their paid sick time at my expense.

If the money isn't there, it isn't there.

This is one of the problems with public employee's unions particularly ones like the teacher's union which is always much larger than the entities it negotiates against. It spends tons of money to elect friendly politicians who then negotiate plum contract terms. The tax payers are cut out of the loop and always on the hook, and they're the ones who are then inconvenienced in terms of lost time and money of their own when the contract terms cannot be met.

originally posted by: KnightFire
Why should they get paid if they are not teaching? I'm sure for some of those teachers, that question is an oxymoron. But seriously, Why should they get paid if they are not in the classroom teaching?

It wouldn't be any different than summer vacation. At least in the state I'm in, most school districts do not pay their teachers during the summer when school is out. Only the administrative staff gets paid.

The teachers I've spoken to get paid over the summer, that was 10 years ago though maybe things have changed now. Basically they're technically only paid for 9 months but their salaries are still set over 12. It's pretty much a necessity because if teachers go unpaid for 3 months out of the year it's not a viable profession and then you don't get good teachers.

a reply to: ketsuko

I fet what you are saying but as corny as it sounds the kids who are getting screwed have little to no control over the adults...so they are screwed

originally posted by: chrismarco
a reply to: ketsuko

I fet what you are saying but as corny as it sounds the kids who are getting screwed have little to no control over the adults...so they are screwed

If the nation abandons the school district in Detroit, it will create consequences that run for genertions and ripple outward into the rest of the nation. That can't happen.

But before a single penny of my tax dollars go to Detroit, I want to see prison sentences being meted out. There is no reason federal bailouts shouldn't come with a pound of flesh. And that should be the expectation going forward. Uncle Sam can be your sugar daddy....but its gonna hurt.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

I'm torn on this. On the one hand I agree that the money should come with stipulations, but on the other hand I don't want the federal government to get even more control over what are currently state level problems unless we officially decide to nationalize the sector.

I think that long term that just creates a back door for the state to lose all control without actually putting proper laws in place to give structure to the feds. With the way things are going right now there's going to be a lot of bailouts of a lot of different sectors in the coming years, Michigan, Kansas, and Illinois to name a few all have serious and systemic issues. Texas, California, and Kentucky aren't too far behind.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

I'm torn on this. On the one hand I agree that the money should come with stipulations, but on the other hand I don't want the federal government to get even more control over what are currently state level problems unless we officially decide to nationalize the sector.

I think that long term that just creates a back door for the state to lose all control without actually putting proper laws in place to give structure to the feds. With the way things are going right now there's going to be a lot of bailouts of a lot of different sectors in the coming years, Michigan, Kansas, and Illinois to name a few all have serious and systemic issues. Texas, California, and Kentucky aren't too far behind.

Texas only problem is we can't build fast enough for the explosion in our overall economy. Labor is hard to come by throughout the state, although its a bit more cool in the west due to the lower oil prices.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Texas looks to be doing well on paper, but a large part of the economy is reliant on the oil boom which is only going to be temporary (though how long it lasts remains to be seen).

Additionally the tax laws have caused much of the tech sector to move there (and more every day), but the people moving from California are also starting to vote more and more towards increased state spending which isn't sustainable under the current tax structure.

Last, Texas is currently one of the largest welfare states returning only 50 cents of every dollar spent on the state. It's an outright bad investment and the states tax laws are causing the rest of the country to support them. When we have another bubble burst, there's not going to be money to continue to subsidize the state and combined with the above two issues Texas will end up with some major changes.

Basically, the state is over extended, it looks manageable if you assume the economic climate doesn't change, but since that change is all but inevitable they have problems on the horizon.

a reply to: Edumakated

Correction, republicans are no fans of funding for public education. Just look at what republican Governor Scott Walker did to the teachers in Wisconsin. Funding for public education has been under attack by republican governors and legislatures across this country.

A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study released Thursday highlights significant cuts in public education spending since the Great Recession. The data in the report also shows a clear pattern: the states that have made the deepest cuts in public education are dominated by conservative lawmakers who have imposed an ideology of enriching the wealthy through tax breaks even as they starve public schools.

link

originally posted by: chrismarco
a reply to: ketsuko

I fet what you are saying but as corny as it sounds the kids who are getting screwed have little to no control over the adults...so they are screwed

We're already there. Over 50% of Detroit's adults are functionally illiterate now. It's not like the education system was working to begin with and now it will suddenly all come to a screeching halt and the kids coming out of Detroit will suddenly exhibit a shocking lack of education; they were already there.

This is a problem that has been years, decades in the making.

a reply to: WeRpeons

No, Republicans are not fans of wasting money.

Look. In Kansas the public education system spends an average of $15,000 per year on each student, but in Kansas City, St. Thomas Aquinas, a very fine parochial school with an excellent reputation, does the same thing for about $9,000 per year per student.

How is it that the parochial school does better than the public schools with so much less money?

You see the same pattern more or less repeating in DC with DC Public schools and Sidwell Friends. At one time, there was only about a $3,000 to $4,000 per year difference between what DC had per student and what a person spent to send a kid to Sidwell. You cannot tell me that there was only about that much difference in the quality of education received.

Clearly, money is not the whole issue or the only issue at work in education, but leftists simply continue to shovel more money at it as if that is the answer.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: WeRpeons

No, Republicans are not fans of wasting money.

Look. In Kansas the public education system spends an average of $15,000 per year on each student, but in Kansas City, St. Thomas Aquinas, a very fine parochial school with an excellent reputation, does the same thing for about $9,000 per year per student.

How is it that the parochial school does better than the public schools with so much less money?

You see the same pattern more or less repeating in DC with DC Public schools and Sidwell Friends. At one time, there was only about a $3,000 to $4,000 per year difference between what DC had per student and what a person spent to send a kid to Sidwell. You cannot tell me that there was only about that much difference in the quality of education received.

Clearly, money is not the whole issue or the only issue at work in education, but leftists simply continue to shovel more money at it as if that is the answer.

I went to a private Catholic high school.

They did it by lowering teacher standards and paying them less. They accepted teachers who didn't have degrees, and in return paid the faculty less across the board. They also had lower administration costs being just one school, textbooks were purchased rather than borrowed, all school lunches were purchased, and they had rigorous testing standards to be admitted which allowed teachers to focus only on bright students who wouldn't disrupt class, plus the ability to kick out any troublemakers. Last, they relied pretty heavily on donations from wealthy graduates, again because the testing and learning environment made it the best school in the state for those who actually had a chance to learn.

Those last two factors are what lead to people being willing to pay for their children to attend, it was a better learning environment. It's also not something you can viably do in the public sector.

a reply to: Aazadan

I have to ask ... if the teacher standards were so low, how did they manage to turn out some of the best educated kids?

It seems a contradiction to say that they can accept bargain basement teachers (those with no degrees and those who aren't being paid commensurate with what other teachers are paid) and still turn out kids who are much better educated.

This is part of the private v. public argument that has always bothered me.

After all, if the only difference between what separates a public v. a private kid is what the parents can pay (and having one in a private school myself I can attest to this), then it's a false assumption that only the smartest are in private education meaning they get educated in spite of the teachers. Not all of those kids are the sharpest tools and they still have a better than average chance of getting educated to a higher degree than their public school peers.

originally posted by: ketsuko
I have to ask ... if the teacher standards were so low, how did they manage to turn out some of the best educated kids?

It seems a contradiction to say that they can accept bargain basement teachers (those with no degrees and those who aren't being paid commensurate with what other teachers are paid) and still turn out kids who are much better educated.

This is part of the private v. public argument that has always bothered me.

After all, if the only difference between what separates a public v. a private kid is what the parents can pay (and having one in a private school myself I can attest to this), then it's a false assumption that only the smartest are in private education meaning they get educated in spite of the teachers. Not all of those kids are the sharpest tools and they still have a better than average chance of getting educated to a higher degree than their public school peers.

I don't think the standards were low but rather they took people without degrees. To this day some of my best teachers were from this school, but then again so were some of my worst, it probably averaged out. I think a large part of it was that they were able to offset the low salaries with a better work environment in order to stay competitive.

Lets be honest, no teacher wants to work in a school where they have to worry about their safety or where students are disruptive, I think there would be a lot of draw in working in an environment where the students are bright, motivated, and orderly. Where class sizes were no more than 15 students in a room. Where a teacher wouldn't be forced to work some crummy inner city job in order to get tuition reimbursement for a degree. Being a religious school I think that many of them were also working out of a sense of giving back to the church.

I can say however that everyone at this school was pretty smart. In order to be admitted we had to take a test that would only accept the top 5% of students, we also had to requalify on a test every year and we had to maintain a GPA above 3.0 on a grading scale where the cutoff for a D- was 90%. For a point of reference, my graduating class was something like 113 students and when we took our ACT's we had 5 or 6 perfect scores out of 30ish total across the entire state that year. I actually remember one class where my score of 34 had me as the lowest scoring student in that room of 12 or 13 students.

It was a great school, and I'm convinced that if I ever have children I will do whatever it takes to send them to private school but I can also see where the model just can't be applicable to everyone. These schools are good because they have the power to be selective. They're able to remove the slow students, the problem students, and the disruptive students leaving only the high achievers. My current college program is the same way, it's ranked 6th in the nation for the program I'm in and it gets these numbers by weeding out all but the best people by attaching a high degree of difficulty rather than through having exceptional teaching methods.

When you remove the bottom 95% from any group whoever is left will look excellent, make your teachers look like superstars, and make your school look amazing. To a degree I suppose that's true, but as a society we need to find a way to educate the bottom percentages of society as well. I go back and forth on solutions to that all the time, right now my current favored method would be to make less school compulsory. Provide free (by which I mean paid for by the state/feds) education all the way up through college but go back to the days where people can legally drop out after 8th grade. Maybe the schools will be better if we simply let the people who don't want to be there leave, and then further push GED programs for those who get their act together later in life.

Double.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: WeRpeons

No, Republicans are not fans of wasting money.

Look. In Kansas the public education system spends an average of $15,000 per year on each student, but in Kansas City, St. Thomas Aquinas, a very fine parochial school with an excellent reputation, does the same thing for about $9,000 per year per student.

How is it that the parochial school does better than the public schools with so much less money?

You see the same pattern more or less repeating in DC with DC Public schools and Sidwell Friends. At one time, there was only about a $3,000 to $4,000 per year difference between what DC had per student and what a person spent to send a kid to Sidwell. You cannot tell me that there was only about that much difference in the quality of education received.

Clearly, money is not the whole issue or the only issue at work in education, but leftists simply continue to shovel more money at it as if that is the answer.

The problem with public schools is that they are public. They operate to the lowest common denominator. The schools reflect the communities in which they serve. Schools in poor areas perform poorly because most of the students come from broken homes. The schools cannot fix the home life of the students. Public schools that serve poor areas will never be great.

I attended a piss poor public middle school. However, I was a great student. I didn't come from a broken home and parents care about my education. I got ZERO attention at school. Teachers had to spend all their time focusing on ghetto kids. I didn't realize how bad my middle school was until I got into a busing program to integrate public schools and got sent to a mostly white public school serving a wealthy suburb. It was like two different worlds.

This is why parents who can afford to move to wealthy suburbs which almost always have good PUBLIC schools. The schools reflect the overall character of the community. Those with higher incomes tend to focus more on their kids educations.

a reply to: Edumakated

Yes, so throwing money into those situations won't fix them.

Kids in a one room schoolhouse would be better served than some of those kids right now because the kids in the one room schoolhouse had communities that cared about education.

Money might be a wonderful tool, but absent any real plan for change, there is no worth to it.

Until the people in Detroit are changed or the methods to the schooling in Detroit is changed, we are simply wasting money to pour in ever increasing amounts.

So I want an answer beyond "money," and it needs to involve the entire community.

originally posted by: Aazadan

I went to a private Catholic high school.

They did it by lowering teacher standards and paying them less. They accepted teachers who didn't have degrees, and in return paid the faculty less across the board.

Interesting.

Can you show details and anything that supports the claims?

Not doubting, just inquiring.

a reply to: Aazadan

Not all private schools do this, and they STILL have better outcomes.

My son isn't going to be tested every year as he goes up through the program, but I'll bet he gets a much better education than most of the kids in the city outside of some of the other private preps.

The difference is that private schools do have some measure of control over their curriculum and over their discipline. Since they aren't public they can decide to not accept or remove the child the child who simply refuses to behave and whose parents make no attempt to correct the situation. However, since they are also beholden on the parents for their livelihood, it's not like they don't do their best to work it out, either. Tuition is a lot of money.

originally posted by: xuenchen
Interesting.

Can you show details and anything that supports the claims?

Not doubting, just inquiring.

Just the conversations I remember with my teachers at the time. I'm not the type to follow up on people so I've never looked any of them up on social media to see if they ever completed degrees, and I'm even less the type to do it now and let you line up education dates with their work resumes.

Some were working on their masters at the time while others only had bachelors. I suppose I should have clarified that early, but not having a degree I meant they lacked their Masters to teach, they all had at least a bachelors.

In the end though it's like both I and Edumukated have stated, private schools excel because they have the luxury of being exclusive. Public schools cannot do this.

I wish the US weren't quite so rural, if we were more urban it would be possible to do what several Asian nations have done and do away with school districts, instead grouping students by ability which effectively weeds out all the trouble makers. Such a system doesn't work in many areas of the US though because travel to school just wouldn't be viable.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: Aazadan

Not all private schools do this, and they STILL have better outcomes.

My son isn't going to be tested every year as he goes up through the program, but I'll bet he gets a much better education than most of the kids in the city outside of some of the other private preps.

The difference is that private schools do have some measure of control over their curriculum and over their discipline. Since they aren't public they can decide to not accept or remove the child the child who simply refuses to behave and whose parents make no attempt to correct the situation. However, since they are also beholden on the parents for their livelihood, it's not like they don't do their best to work it out, either. Tuition is a lot of money.

I would bet your son gets a better education too. Remember that the threat of kicking a student out isn't just a threat to the students, it also serves to make the parents step in and do a better job of raising their child so he/she doesn't become a disruptive student. I think it also helps that if you're in a culture where such students are rare, that fewer try to emulate each other and also act out.