Over at NRO, Liam Julian has more on the outrageous homeschooling ruling out of California that I reported on last week. A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles responded to the ruling saying, "What's best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher." This doesn't fly with Julian:
Such statements are risible. Los Angeles Unified School District enrolls some 700,000 students taught by the credentialed teachers that Duffy represents, and a mere 33 percent of those pupils are proficient in reading, only 38 make the grade in math, and only 44 percent ever graduate. What's best for a child, it seems, has little or nothing to do with the credentials Duffy cherishes.
Furthermore, it is particularly noxious for the head of a big-city teachers' union, the members of which are failing to educate a stunning number of their pupils, to cheer a court decision that denies the competence of parent educators. Duffy - whose motivations for pushing more students into L.A.'s classrooms may be laudable, but may also stem from a desire to swell the ranks of public-school students to force the district to hire more dues-paying teachers - ought not lecture parents about "what's best" for their own children.
More info here.
1 Comment
Michael | March 14, 2008, 9:37pm | #
Credentialed teachers??? What??? For their "expertise" and "critical thinking skills????"
Here is some commentary from the "front lines."
I tutor privately. One student I tutor in algebra 2 had a question we call a "work problem." This question asked:
"John can get 1/4 of a wall painted in 1 hour. Working together, John and Betsy can paint the wall in 35 minutes. How long would it take Betsy to paint the wall alone?"
The teacher said the way to get the answer was to solve:
1/4 + 1/x = 7/12 (She got the 7/12 by simplifying 35/60.)
Wrong!!
Everyone makes mistakes. I sure do, and I will fight for my right to be wrong. But I catch my mistakes and I admit it when I am wrong.
But what did this much-vaunted "credentialed teacher" do?
Solve the equation, and you get x = 3 hours. Common sense should make you wonder immediately how the two could get the wall painted so quickly, if it took each person, on his own, so long.
You might also wonder about your answer if another professional got something different -- this teacher knew I had gotten a different answer; the student I tutor had told the teacher.
In either case, you should start asking questions:
1) How much would they get done at that rate if they worked an hour? (7/12 of the wall. So...how did they finish in 35 minutes???)
2) How much would John get done in 35 minutes? (Even an estimate gives you that he would do about 30/240 = 1/8 of the wall. That means Betsy would have to do the other 7/8 in about 35 minutes. You could then do 7/8 = 35/x, which implies x is 40.)
This teacher did neither. She continued to say she was right.
Another (public) school I worked at years ago made mistakes in teaching how to solve trigonometric equations. When we got to that topic and I looked at the notes all the trig teachers used, notes which had been used for 3+ years, I found they were wrong. In some trig equations, you have to solve for multiple angles; they were getting answers in the wrong quadrant.
Another student I tutored in trig had a teacher who said that the period of the tangent function was pi/2. My student had to argue with the teacher to correct the teacher on several other occasions.
Some teachers in public schools are awesome, some are horrible. Credentials as such are no guarantee you can teach. Or even think logically...