
North Carolina teacher's resignation letter - bwsewell
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/27/nc-teacher-i-quit/
======
justin_vanw
It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests.

Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this
is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of
teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance
on tenure tracks.

The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is
good because it keeps teachers honest. Without testing, how do you measure
teacher performance at all? How can you tell if someone who is capable of
teaching well isn't just being lazy or getting distracted?

So, if you aren't a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher
effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having
any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have.

It's easy to point out problems. It's useful and important that people find
flaws and fault. In this case, however, just pointing out the deficiencies in
standardized testing doesn't help anyone unless it either leads to a more
effective alternative, or improvements in standardized testing. Standardized
tests might be very imperfect at measuring teacher performance, but it's far
better to use the tool we have than to just throw up our arms and assume that
all teachers are equally competent.

~~~
curt
"partly because of low pay"

Teachers are actually some of the highest paid people in society. When you
don't include benefits teachers make about $40/hr while engineers make $42/hr.
If you do include benefits, a teachers compensation far exceeds that of an
engineer due to their pensions. Source, BLS via Forbes.

~~~
sirmarksalot
I looked that up on the BLS website, and while you're not using the same units
as them, your numbers don't seem to match up.

According to BLS, the median pay is $53,230 per year, which would be closer to
$26.50 an hour, assuming a 40-hour work week.

[http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-
library/high-s...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-
school-teachers.htm)

Maybe the Forbes article you're referring to about is only counting classroom
hours, which is a pretty absurd notion. Teaching is a full-time job, and any
figure based on an assumption to the contrary is going to be flawed. Not
meaning to straw-man you, it's just that without a link to the article in
question, I can only speculate where your figures come from.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The correct figure is 38.5 hours/week for 9 months/year.

<http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf>

That's about $33.5/hour for wages alone. It also ignores the value of gold
plated health care + pensions, etc.

~~~
Bud
"Gold plated" (sic) health care?

Tuck in your pants. Your bias is peeking out.

(Edit after being downvoted, in an attempt to be more constructive):
Seriously, you seem to have an animus against teachers having decent health
care. What's your problem with that, and why do you feel it's appropriate to
label their quite average health care plans as "gold plated", as if they were
unfairly receiving more health care than they are entitled to?

~~~
hindsightbias
It's always easier to hate people in your own class who have fought for rights
than to fight for those rights yourself.

Sorry, I have to get back to believing whatever the 1% wants me to believe.

------
Osiris
My mother is a school board member in a rural school district in Northern
California. What I can from conversations with her is that it is often not the
district's fault when there are issues, but the state's.

The district is forced to come up with a budget months before the state
approves their budget, so they don't even know if they are going to get the
money they need.

When money is low, they have gone to the community several times trying to
pass a property tax to raise funds to keep teachers and maintain their
facilities. The community has refused to fund the school each time.

The district is constrained by their contract with the teachers which forces
them to keep the most incompetent and highly paid teachers and get rid of the
good but non-tenured new teachers (which are the ones that the students want
to have).

The way schools are funded are a major source of the problem. For example,
they are funded per student with no regard for facilities, transportation, or
other fixed costs.

Lastly, there are too many crippling regulations that don't allow for flexibly
to meet the various needs of students in varying districts. What works in the
large LA County district is just not going to work in rural northern
California.

Throwing more regulations, tests, money, etc. at the system is not going to
fix it. I really wish that a large group of educators (K-12, post-secondary),
administrators, parents, etc. could get together and work out something
different, perhaps even radically different.

~~~
cheez
TL;DR send your kids to a private school.

~~~
factorizer
right. why fix the system, when you can be part of an elite?

~~~
imbriaco
Because your responsibility is to your kids and not to some idealistic vision
of what you could be doing to improve the school system as a whole.

~~~
wpietri
False dichotomy. Your responsibility as a _parent_ is to your children. Your
responsibility as a _citizen_ is to run your government effectively.

Captain TLDR above is basically saying "fuck other people's kids", which is
abdicating his civic responsibility.

~~~
icelancer
>which is abdicating his civic responsibility

He pays taxes that goes to schools, doesn't he? Otherwise, I am pretty sure he
didn't sign a contract that said: "You are responsible for improving the well-
being of kids you will never meet."

~~~
wpietri
It's government of, by, and for the people. He is responsible for the health
of the country, just as every other citizen is.

~~~
icelancer
And he pays his taxes, outlined by said government. If there is a failure to
deliver on the goods/services promised by the government, it's not his
responsibility to make up for the shortfalls. It'd be nice if he did, but
that's getting ahead of ourselves.

~~~
wpietri
Government does not promise to magically take care of everything. And even if
they did, the citizens run the government. Any shortfalls in government are
ultimately the responsibility of the citizens.

~~~
icelancer
You're going to have to point out the contract with my signature on it where I
agreed to that. My attorney is gonna hear about it...

~~~
wpietri
It's not a legal requirement. It's a moral requirement. It's your country,
your state, your city. It's your government. You are legally allowed to shirk
some of your duties, although not all of them, but that doesn't make you less
of a shirker..

Parenting is similar: there are a lot of ways to be a shitty parent that don't
rise to the legal level of neglect.

~~~
icelancer
Whose morals? Kant's Duty Ethics?

You are making subjective judgments. This is fine. But don't confuse your
opinions on "fairness" with an objective reality.

~~~
wpietri
It's the nature of a community, of a democracy. The citizens, as sovereigns,
are ultimately responsible.

Don't like it? You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of
shame. Or you can move to someplace that isn't a democracy.

~~~
icelancer
>You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of shame.

I will. I don't lose sleep at night based on your subjective opinions,
fortunately.

~~~
wpietri
"Of, by, and for the people" is not subjective. Neither is the people
replacing the sovereign. Nor the nature of a community as a collaborative
enterprise.

------
Nate75Sanders
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy)

~~~
Xcelerate
Whoops.. I think I accidentally downvoted you. Someone vote him back up, could
you?

That's an interesting trend. I think it could be resolved by instead having
the ones doing the teaching decide on what sorts of standards and tests should
be used to appraise performance.

Some of my family members are teachers, and I hear more and more about how
they are given less freedom to teach creatively and are instead forced to
administer useless, rote-memorization tests that assess, well, nothing really.
It's getting kind of ridiculous.

~~~
debacle
The problem right now is that the bureaucracy in place is a result of the CBAs
of teachers unions preventing the firing of bad teachers or the introduction
of regulations strictly for the sake of the student.

In almost every instance of a public service, the right-but-left or left-but-
right mentality of Americans creates a bureaucratic Mexican standoff: "We'll
stop regulating you when you stop being shits." "We'll stop being shits when
you stop regulating us."

It's very easy to side with teachers as individuals, but teachers unions serve
the good teachers and the bad teachers, and I would argue (without statistics,
mind you) that teachers unions are just as much to blame for the current
educational fiasco as incompetent bureaucracies, politics, ham-fisted
regulations, and bad parenting.

~~~
001sky
_without statistics, mind you_

\-- You don't need statistics. There is no measurement.

This is the problem: Seniority rules. skill, virtue, talent are uncorrelated
variables. This is by design, au fait.

------
xaa
TL;DR: The writer, a math teacher, is quitting (edit: his) job because of
increased bureaucracy and standardized tests. Mostly, it seems, standardized
tests.

The problem is, math is the subject which is BEST served by standardized
tests. There is really no fuzzy aspect to K-12 math: answers are right or
wrong. And there are of course many benefits to standardized testing like
teacher and school evaluation, providing structure to the curriculum, etc.

His rant reminds me of another front-page HN article today
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712230>), where the author claims that
tough technical interview questions at Google bear no correlation with
programming skill. Sure....

~~~
DanielStraight
Consider the last few real-world problems I've solved (or attempted to solve)
with math:

If you have a widget (roughly shaped like a cone with the tip chopped off)
held at angle _a_ and the widget is tapered at angle _b_ and the tip of the
widget has a diameter _d_ , how far is it in x and y from the center of the
tip of the widget to the theoretical tip were the taper continued to a point?

If two 14" pizzas feed five people, how many 16" pizzas do you need to feed
eleven?

If a gallon of paint covers 400 ft^2 once, how many gallons cover a 12'x36'
room with a 9' ceiling twice?

And to counter your claim that it no K-12 math can be fuzzy, if you live in a
family-friendly neighborhood of _x_ square miles, how many pieces of candy do
you need to be prepared for trick-or-treating children? (This problem could
easily be approached by a high school student, has real world application, but
is a lot like the kind of interview problems that are often criticized as
being irrelevant.)

But even if you feel these problems fit with standardized tests, the more
important point is that none of these problems was presented to me the way I
am presenting them to you. No one told me that angles _a_ and _b_ and diameter
_d_ would be both easily available and sufficient to calculate the necessary x
and y. No one told me that comparing square inches would be the best way to
determine how much pizza to buy. I was certainly not given multiple choices
like a normal standardized test.

The real world mistakes people make with math are often more about knowing how
and when to apply math, than doing the math itself. Almost everyone knows that
Google can multiply and divide numbers. The real math skill is knowing what
numbers to multiply and divide to see how many gallons of paint, or pizzas, or
pieces of candy, you need.

Being able to pass a trigonometry test is useless if you can't figure out what
to do with your widgets. Likewise for the other examples.

I'm not saying standardized tests have no correlation to real-world math
ability. They obviously have some. But it's not exact. And there are lots of
real-world situations that are poorly reflected in standardized tests.

~~~
xaa
I agree with all this, but consider that the type of math being tested on a
standardized test is a _subset_ of the skills you mention. You certainly can't
perform complex word problems unless you can do the algebra or geometry
calculations, whereas the converse is not true.

IOW, standardized testing of math is testing the bare minimum, and a
successful teacher should be able to teach this bare minimum. If a teacher can
do better, great!

~~~
DanielStraight
But if "what gets measured gets done", then teachers will likely take time
away from these more complex skills to spend more time going over what's on
the test. This is especially true if you tie compensation and continued
employment for teachers, and college admission and scholarships for students
to test performance.

------
yequalsx
There seem to be quite a few people who want to do away with tenure and
seniority rules as a means of fixing a broken system. Is there any evidence
that doing this would fix the system or make it better?

Academic freedom, tenure, and seniority (to a lesser extent) have a lot of
positives. Getting rid of these should only be done if the reasons are
compelling and valid. What is required is not a collection of anecdotes of how
tenure protects bad teachers - there are equally many anecdotes showing that
tenure protects students and educational integrity - but rather statistics,
facts, and well reasoned arguments.

There are large portions of the United States where parents without any
training or knowledge on teaching have very strong opinions on what should or
should not be said in the classroom. Getting rid of tenure and academic
freedom will, in some areas, lead to ignorant people making important
educational decisions. Will the physics department stop talking about the Big
Bang? Does the geology department stop talking about processes taking millions
of years to work? Does the history department only talk about the good parts
of Manifest Destiny?

Instead of tenure maybe 5 year, renewable contracts would work. I don't know.
I do think it is in society's best interest if teachers treat society as the
client and not the students as the client. Doing the latter leads to dilution
of standards. Doing the former without fear of being fired, at least in me,
leads to grading on knowledge and not fluff.

~~~
aroberge
Tenure and Academic freedom are applicable to University professors, not to
teachers.

~~~
johnrgrace
In the United States, public school teachers do get tenure in most locations
which protects them for being fired except for a limited set of reasons or
teacher supply being greater than demand.

------
imroot
My wife was a full time teacher (she's now working on her Ph.D in educational
technologies), and she's said the same thing over, over, and over again.

Her first year out of her probationary year was a Kindergarden teacher. She
had a girl in her class who had telltale signs of EBD (Emotional/Behavioral
Disorders), and spent the year trying to convince the girl's mother to seek
the appropriate (free) care from the educational system. The mother refused to
attend any meeting; my wife eventually drove to her house to find the girl
living in a "crack den" (her words). The girl's mother refused to allow her to
be tested for EBD, and the girl barely finished the year with passing marks.

Over the summer, the district noticed that my wife wanted to help kids...so,
instead of putting her back in Kindergarden the next year, she was reassigned
to a juvenile detention center/lockdown facility, where the kids didn't want
to be helped. There were instances where they'd pull the kids out of her
class, one by one, until it was just her and another student, before they come
in to arrest the student for a crime, or, have a disgruntled student show up
on my doorstep at midnight with a handgun in his waistband.

Teachers get shit on by society, coworkers, and parents. The good ones are
worth their weight in gold. The poor ones need to be replaced with better ones
-- the problem is that there's no true way to rank teachers and how they teach
that isn't subject to tampering or isn't completely subjective based on inter-
school politics.

There's not a good solution to the teaching problem...which is why I'm excited
to look at what the technology/startup community comes out with over the next
few years. Open Source SIS'es/Course Management/Educational Networking is
something that can make the teacher's life easier, and provide pointes and
guidance for parents who _want_ to learn more, or students who want to self-
learn/pace themselves faster or slower.

~~~
chii
I m sorry to hear about the experiences of your wife - i feel that whoever
reassigned her to juvie might've even done it with the best of intentions, but
is incompetent and made the worst possible decision.

The open courses may lead to a more distributed education paradigm, and i
think that ways lies the future. However, the process of ranking is such a
subjective method, that i don't believe there will ever be a way to do so and
not have it tampered with either via politics or personal gain.

------
danielweber
_I will not spend another day wondering how I can have classes that are full
inclusion, and where 50% of my students have IEPs, yet I’m given no support._

I had to fire our public school (in North Carolina; this was in the first
district he moved to in the state) because it took them 3 years to do an IEP.
In another example, a family member moved out of state, and it took the school
two years to call up and ask if she would still be attending.

I'm know in some places the teachers are the problem, but the teachers we met
were working their hardest. The administration just didn't seem to give a
shit.

Teacher responsibility is a great thing, but we also need administrator
responsibility.

~~~
acdha
> Teacher responsibility is a great thing, but we also need administrator
> responsibility.

I cannot upvote this enough. All too often, the administrators get a free pass
for blaming everything on the teachers and/or insufficient funding. If you
have 30% annual turnover, at some point you have to ask who was the constant
in the system.

------
sodomizer
The school bureaucracy is a symptom of something else, as is the monotonous
testing and the union power. The American educational system changed its
premise back in the 1960s.

Since that time, we have become addicted to assembly line, one-size-fits-all,
bulk format education in which we put kids through a ton of information and
measure them by how much they retain. Not the quality of what they retain, and
not their actual skills, but what they've memorized.

By prioritizing memorized facts over learned application, we are losing a lot
of our most talented kids. To compound the problem further, this one-size-
fits-all approach isn't calibrated to the smart kids, but to the average. In
public schools, it's also impossible to send home the disruptive kids.

The result is a system that is so hobbled by contradictions that it is
dysfunctional. Dysfunction attracts lazy administrators who like to use test
metrics to force teachers to teach to the test, thus making everyone look like
a success, even when the graduates aren't good at doing anything.

The recent spate of test-cheating scandals should show us exactly why these
tests are in favor among administrators. Instead of a broad open-ended task
like "teach these kids to reason," all you have to do is make sure they make a
pretty bell curve on the standardized test.

------
zupreme
I found the following paragraph to be very poignant.

"I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their
true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of
disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level
state and district tests that do not assess their skills."

I hope that this teacher finds happiness teaching in a more productive
environment. Charter schools and some universities come to mind.

------
zem
> I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other
> ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those
> alternatives.

if i could fix just one thing about the educational system, this would be it.
it's the laziest option, so it ends up being implemented pretty much
everywhere (this is not a us-specific problem; i grew up in dubai, and every
time i visit my old school the place looks more like a prison), and all it
does is alienate and disinvest students at precisely the time they need to be
engaged and nurtured.

------
lifeisstillgood
There is a defence.

An engaged, informed, active, body of parents who will take action to ensure
their children receive best schooling and care available.

Take 100 irate parents to the next North Carolina State Board meeting and have
them raise individually one after the other motions of no-confidence in each
member. Then try to elect this woman to the Board.

Will that help.

Yes if you keep up the pressure for the 14 - 18 years it takes your child to
go through the system.

There is a website / startup in there...

~~~
chii
Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of parents wash their hands free of
the process, but complain when their kids don't get the high marks they think
they ought to. And looking for someone to blame, instead of looking at making
it work.

------
lifeisstillgood
We have a brilliant system for determining the quality of teachers - and it is
one used throughout the private sector with considerable effect.

Its called a competent boss

Every Head knows which ones to get rid of and which ones to keep. Every Head
also knows if they get rid of the bad ones, they will need double the budget
to hire in new, also good teachers. Especially if every other Head does this
at the same time.

------
tokenadult
"I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated."

He ("he" is correct; I was confused by the given name at first until looking
the person up with a Google search) should blame the typical master contract
with the teachers in the school district for that. That is a standard contract
provision recommended by schoolteacher unions whether a state has a "union
shop" or "right-to-work" rules. Usually, school districts cave in and adopt
contract provisions like that, because in states where a union shop is not
mandatory, and collective bargaining for public employees is not mandatory
either, schoolteacher unions are still very influential political interest
groups that can swing voter turnout in the typical low-turnout school board
election. School boards have a lot more electoral incentive to align with the
interests of schoolteacher unions than with the interests of learners. (The
interests of learners align with favoring better teachers over worse teachers,
rather than with favoring senior teachers over newly hired teachers.)

The crucial voter action influencing the daily lives of teachers at work
happens not at the federal level

[http://educationnext.org/the-election-contests-that-
really-m...](http://educationnext.org/the-election-contests-that-really-
matter/)

but at the state level and local level, where most of the funding for
schooling is set (and what proportion of funding goes to anything other than
staff compensation, by far the largest line item in any school budget, is set)
and where work rules, especially priority for promotions or layoffs, are set.

There is considerable evidence that seniority rules lead to higher numbers of
teacher layoffs than would be necessary if administrators were allowed to make
effectiveness the determining factor in issuing layoff notices, rather than
length of service.

[http://educationnext.org/seniority-rules-lead-districts-
to-i...](http://educationnext.org/seniority-rules-lead-districts-to-increase-
teacher-layoffs-and-undermine-teaching-quality/)

A teacher who is doing a good job helping students learn is worth his or her
weight in gold, but seniority doesn't match teacher quality sufficiently well
to be the sole basis for determining promotions or layoffs in a particular
school district. Actively identifying the most able teachers and encouraging
the least effective teachers to find other employment, regardless of
seniority, could do much to improve the efficiency of the public school system
and free up resources to reward the best teachers better than they are
rewarded now.

[http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-
teachers-h...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how-
much-good-teacher-worth)

My Google search to verify the teacher's background turned up this post from
the teacher's blog

<http://mgmfocus.com/2012/10/21/i-used-to-love-teaching/>

covering some of the same issues, with a different slant for the blog's
different audience.

"I give up. They win. I have joined the ranks of parents who have come to
realize that we are only empowered to do one thing: take care of our own. I
hope that things change, but I don’t have the energy, the money, or the time
to continue beating my head into a wall. And if the choices have run out for
my toddler when he’s ready for school, I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it
for others, as well. Who knows."

AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several interesting comments. Wisty asks how
teachers might be identified as effective teachers in the interest of making
more effective teachers available to students. The same scholar of education
policy I linked to for the general point that effective teachers make a
difference has written extensively about identifying those teachers. These
links

[http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/effective-
teacher-...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/effective-teacher-
every-classroom-lofty-goal-how-do-it)

[http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-
deselectio...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-deselection)

from his website (which link in turn to longer-form formal articles on the
issues) are a sample of the research on the subject. Identifying teachers with
good "value-added" is not at all easy, and there are immense incentives to
cheat while attempting to identify such teachers, but there is also an
enormous payoff from doing better than is done now in identifying effective
teachers.

~~~
jimbokun
Reading this comment from this teacher's blog article

"And if the choices have run out for my toddler when he’s ready for school, I
will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it for others, as well. Who knows."

questions about a potential education system hack popped into my head. Maybe
many others have already had this idea...

What about uniting the home-schooling and frustrated-teachers movements?

I'm sure there are onerous restrictions on setting up a "school" in the U.S.
But what about an intensive tutoring system catering to home schooled
children? If you had a tutor (who happens to be a formerly disgruntled public
school teacher) in a home, how many other children could be in that home,
receiving personal tutoring, before no longer being considered a "home school"
environment? What if the formerly disgruntled public school teacher drove to
various homes during the day or the week? Can "home school" instruction happen
in a place other than the child's residence and still be considered home
schooling?

Obviously, this could be supplemented with online curricula.

If anything like this is legally feasible, seems like an online service
allowing parents to personally select educators sharing their vision for how
they want their children to be educated could be hugely disruptive to the
current K12 educational establishment.

Does anything like this already exist?

~~~
joshuahedlund
> Does anything like this already exist?

Google "homeschool co-ops"

~~~
mamoswined
I was part of one when I was a kid. Science was taught by a teacher who used
to teach in public schools and we were very fortunate to have him because my
mother didn't want potentially dangerous chemicals or dissection animals in
the house. I was home-schooled from 1st to 8th grade, then went to public high
school and college.

~~~
lostlogin
How did you find the transition? That's an interesting pathway to have
followed.

------
swordswinger12
The author of the blog itself, Diane Ravitch, wrote a very interesting book
called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" on the topic
of education reform. I'd encourage HNers to pick it up if this piqued their
curiosity.

------
scott_meade
Good for Dr. Atkinson! Anyone who doesn't think teachers work hard enough,
care enough, or are skilled enough is full of it. When I go to my kids' after
school activities and see teachers there night after night, on their own time
and dime. When I see teachers buying supplies out of their own pockets. When I
see teachers in school weeks before start to ready their classrooms. When I
see these things I have little tolerance for the sentiment that teachers just
slack off. All that happens with this approach is that the best teachers say,
"I don't need this crap" and leave.

------
ryanwaggoner
There's a huge conversation to be had about the quality of public K-12
education in this country, but I'm not sure this letter contributes much of
anything to that conversation. The whole thing is so personal and subjective
that it could have come from any school district in the country. Maybe the
author is just a really bad teacher, and we're better off if he quits. Maybe
this rant actually represents a data point about how NC squeezes out bad
teachers. There's no way to know from what is written.

------
samspot
I was in public school in the Greenville, NC area from 1985-1998, and I felt I
had mostly good teachers and was adequately prepared for college. I happen to
be a good test taker, and so my experience is likely different from others
with different skills. At the time we only had end-of-grade tests, and not for
every subject.

My impression is that things have gotten a lot worse/more political since I
went to school. I wonder if any long-time teachers care to comment on the
changes over the last 30 years?

------
sapien
One of the big tragedies here is the seniority based tenure system that caused
a beloved energetic teacher such as this to have to leave the west coast.
There was an interesting discussion about this in an interview on reddit with
a teachers union president:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_presid...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_president_of_the_american_federation_of/)

------
brownbat
I wish I understood the arguments against testing more clearly.

It seems as if the claim is that testing doesn't correlate with knowledge,
since some kids "test well," or "test poorly," so it's a waste of time.

I've known lots of folks who claim to know a subject well, but test poorly in
it. I've never been able to verify it though, because the followup discussions
about the concepts involved left me... uncertain at best. I'm not sure
undemonstrable knowledge is really any kind of knowledge at all.

But say we granted that an individual student's tests have a wide margin of
error. Wouldn't the aggregate of tests for a given classroom or school still
provide some information on whether or not a school was well or poorly run?
(Assuming you use moving averages or something to soften noise.)

Do standardized tests really have no value, no redeeming benefits?

------
crazy1van
Finally a teacher with the guts to put their money where their mouth is. I'm
not sure I agree with the ins and outs of all the teacher's reasons, but I
applaud him for quitting instead of just complaining.

This is what people who have enough faith in themselves to find another job do
when they are in a terrible situation. I'm tired of hearing teachers complain
about life as a teacher, but never quit. That tells me that they don't have
faith in the marketability of their skills to take the plunge and get a
different job.

------
R_Edward
Great letter exposing the toxic level of administratium in the air in NC
public schools, but I think it would have been better to have left out the
financial paragraph. The author presumably knew what the pay scale was before
he accepted the opportunity and moved his family across the country to live
there. Complaining about it afterward makes him look foolish, and this teacher
is clearly no fool.

------
joncalhoun
Does anyone have any demographics for the HN community's age? I am curious how
many people here have attended schools with standardized tests.

If you did attend a high school with standardized tests - do you feel it
negatively affected your education? How? Do you have specific examples or
courses?

For clarity - I am not claiming that standardized tests do/don't help. I just
want to hear form recent HS grads.

------
rocky1138
I hate to be "that guy" but what does this have to do with hacking? Maybe
someone can explain it to me, I am asking legitimately.

------
swaits
Waiting for Superman. Watch it.

------
phusuke
Peggy hill is angry!

------
hammock
I...

I...

I...

I...

I...

I...

I...

Is that how he teaches his students to write as well?

edit: Hi downvoters, I understand parallelism. When it's used the way this
teacher has used it, he risks coming across as whiny and juvenile. His point
would come across more powerfully if he reframed his grievances in a way that
shows their impact on the real victims, the children, as opposed to himself.

"I have a dream" came from a place of hope and opportunity. King was laying
out a roadmap for what progress would look like. Similarly, the Declaration of
Independence was not a list of self-referential, logorrheic splatter. It
contained specific, directed complaints combined with a plan of action.

This man merely said I hate the world in a selfishly-worded cry for attention,
threw up his hands and gave up. We do not say the same of King or the Founding
Fathers.

~~~
zellyn
If you look at the "I have a dream speech" you'll see a similar form of
repetition. Not that this letter is comparable. But it _is_ a useful
construct.

