Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Eat 100,000 poor children; Add 5 students to each top teacher's class?

2 Modest Proposals?
1.  Sell 100,000 children per year to be "stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; ..." - from "A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick." by Jonathan Swift 1729 - more text, citation below.

2.  "...get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students.  
 Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise." - from "How teacher development could revolutionize our schools" by Bill Gates 2011 - more text, citation below. [Where might these 'savings' come from? From firing and not replacing 25 percent of the non-top teachers? - Steve Gilbert, 2011]

Citations/More...
1.  "... hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table."  Swift, Jonathan. “A modest proposal.” 1729. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 19 Dec 2007. 17 Feb 2010 http://essays.quotidiana.org/swift/modest_proposal/

2.  "...Our goal is a new approach to development and evaluation that teachers endorse and that helps all teachers improve.

"The value of measuring effectiveness is clear when you compare teachers to members of other professions - farmers, engineers, computer programmers, even athletes. These professionals are more advanced than their predecessors - because they have clear indicators of excellence, their success depends on performance and they eagerly learn from the best.

"The same advances haven't been made in teaching because we haven't built a system to measure and promote excellence. Instead, we have poured money into proxies, things we hoped would have an impact on student achievement. The United States spends $50 billion a year on automatic salary increases based on teacher seniority. It's reasonable to suppose that teachers who have served longer are more effective, but the evidence says that's not true. After the first few years, seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement.

"Another standard feature of school budgets is a bump in pay for advanced degrees. Such raises have almost no impact on achievement, but every year they cost $15 billion that would help students more if spent in other ways.

"Perhaps the most expensive assumption embedded in school budgets - and one of the most unchallenged - is the view that reducing class size is the best way to improve student achievement. This belief has driven school budget increases for more than 50 years. U.S. schools have almost twice as many teachers per student as they did in 1960, yet achievement is roughly the same.

"What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) "
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Washington Post, Feb 28, 2011, p A15; online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/27/AR2011022702876.html

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