Education Startups Court Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not saying this doesn't happen in other industries. But it is frustrating to see so much of it in education — to the point where I have asked myself: is this just how all the successful companies became successful? Is this just the way the game is played?
Hopefully articles like this one will help set a trend toward better behavior. It sounds like teachers could get in a bit of trouble, both ethically and legally, if they're promoting products without appropriate disclosure. But they probably just figure that anything that companies ask them to do is ok for them to do. Now parties on both sides are on notice that much of what is going on is not legal.
For anyone interested in reading more about the dark-ish underbelly of edtech, check out http://www.hackeducation.com. No affiliation — just a fan.
I'm under the impression that you must be 13 or older to agree to a TOS and most 3rd graders are 8-9 years old. Does this also mean that all of these kids have their own smart phone? So many questions...
While I'm not a teacher I have no idea how this (IG and Twitter) is beneficial to learning at the slightest. I definitely know that I would delay giving my kid any smart device for as long as absolutely possible so they can get as much of their childhood away from staring at the screen as they can.
When I explain and ask "is it OK to misrepresent yourself in order to deceive someone to give you something that otherwise they would reject as an illegal act" I get blank stares.
It depends on the situation, sometimes the answer is yes
Hopefully that teacher is educating the children about the safe use of those services.
> She teaches them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts she set up.
This may violate the TOS, but these accounts are shared by the class.
It's a damn shame my country (USA) can't provide adequate and quality food and schooling to its children, yet is so proud of itself.
We as a society have stopped looking at our tax dollars as an investment in the future. Public education is one of the best investments we can make, but you're right; it tends to be viewed as "liberal indoctrination" (because you know, the truth has a liberal bias).
Modern conservatives look at a problem and see the answer as "free market economics, let those who want it pay for it!" Hence the tragedy of the commons situation we're rushing headlong into. Modern conservatism is morally and intellectually bankrupt; and as a result 2017 will be known as the year that China assumed leadership of the world.
Incendiary comments aside, I have to agree with you, a lot, the mindset in the United States towards free markets has become something of a religion. While free markets are definitely useful as a general heuristic, markets Can be inefficient.
We can also spend all the money in the world and we might not have any better of an education system. Just look at Mark's Zuckerbergs millions he gave to schools with no results.
Anyone who genuinely wants to make an impact in any field first surveys the literature to see what has been done before. Why didn't he consult with experts [1] before dropping millions at the Newark Public School system?
Zuckerberg isn't exactly known for righteousness. There's his other initiative where he wants to arm people with tablets to provide the schoolchildren in a certain impoverished African country (forgot which, was it Sierra Leone?) with an education, instead of funding teacher training. One thing would improve the infrastructure in the country, the other would funnel money to online education companies. What if the same goals were at work here?
[1] It's easy to point fingers at Schools of Education because many are bad. Not all of them are, tough.
The gutting of education has negative tendrils we'll be dealing with for generations.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Also, the whole local taxes pay for local schools model is obviously not working. Things used to be more distributed, but now it's so easy to optimize for all the best schools and best neighborhoods that it creates a huge class system. Which was always there, but as the divide grows larger and the consequences life long, I don't see how it helps to cultivate a feeling of "country".
Providing equal footing to kids (and I know the home situation is most of the problem) could help alleviate a little bit of the problem.
of course, maybe I'm wrong about increasing quality of teachers will increase quality education, but I think it's a good place to start.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Fig2Sta...
Maybe things are different outside of the northeast, but between the enviable schedule, the union protections, and things like tenure, teaching is quite desirable, even if the raw salary looks poor on paper.
Tenure is a thing because a certain section of the population believes that reading a book in which a priest has a venereal disease is a firing offense.
I can go on.
> The period since 1972 has seen a steady decline in the percentage of college and university teaching positions in the US that are either tenured or tenure-track. United States Department of Education statistics put the combined tenured/tenure-track rate at 56% for 1975, 46.8% for 1989, and 31.9% for 2005. That is to say, by the year 2005, 68.1% of US college teachers were neither tenured nor eligible for tenure; a full 48% of teachers that year were part-time employees.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_tenure_in_North_Ameri...
Tenure isn't some magic "I can't be fired" button. It IS a "I am no longer an at will employee button". Once someone has tenure, you must have a documented reason to fire them. And those reasons are delineated up front.
People are upset that you are teaching evolution--not fireable. Teaching creationism in a science class--likely fireable(but unlikely to occur for various reasons). Too expensive a salary--not fireable. Dating a student--fireable even if you are both of age and consenting. Plagiarism or academic misconduct--fireable even if it wouldn't be so in private enterprise.
The problem is that school administrators tend to be very political--they are always working on getting their next job/promotion and need approval from their current/future teachers, current/future board, and current/future community. This interacts to form a feedback loop.
If an administrator gets a reputation for firing people, he's not going to get approval from the new teachers. Firing people costs money, so the next board is going to be suspicious. The new community may be staring at the fact that the old community rallied behind a teacher that the administrator tried to fire.
So, as an administrator, your best political bet is to shunt aside someone quietly rather than documenting and firing them.
If course, this assumes that the teacher actually needed to be fired. Administrators (especially in small schools) are notorious for playing petty political games of the "Do what I want or I'll give you the shitty class" kind. Older teachers tend to have zero tolerance for that kind of crap and, in small communities, may be able to zap the administrator for it and incur their wrath.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that the political situations in a large university, a small college, a large high school (like New York City), and a small high school (like rural New York) are VASTLY different and tenure serves slightly different purposes in each.
Also, tenure in k12 typically just means you have to have a PIP before they can fire you (NYC rubber room insanity is not representative).
Teaching being a tenured position after only a couple years also means that many great younger teachers end up getting fired to maintain older checked-out teachers. A lot of adverse selection going on.
[1] http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ (check out the Math world map for a humbling view)
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/21/jeb...
Much like healthcare the U.S. spends a lot of money per pupil on public education, but it is a wildly inefficient system. Our return per dollar is poor.
Furthermore, there are a lot of factors contributing to this inefficiency.
- Schools are locally controlled and budgeted, but have to deal with federal and state regulations and initiatives.
- Wildly different systems for school funding, property tax, school tax, etc. that all have their drawbacks and favor middle and upper class neighborhoods.
- In the US we expect a lot of services from the school that are not provided in other countries (sports and band are prime examples that in other countries would be programs staffed by volunteers and not paid out of the school budget).
- Litigation, helicopter parents...
- Intellectually bankrupt unions opposing reform
Outside of the discussion around funding, the larger problem is cultural. You could gold plate the toilets in Detroit or Baltimore or Appalachia and buy every student a MacBook Pro and pay the teachers 50% more and it won't make students want to learn.
If you want to increase the "quality of eduction" you need to fix the culture first.
I am not denying that there are some deplorable public schools out there and those should be fixed, but they are a small minority of schools.
The problems are larger and societal.
There is a lot to fix, and part of it is that for all the money we spend, to little filters down to teacher salaries.
Average elementary teacher salary in North Carolina in 2013 was $45,947
times 0.5 is $22,973.50 plus $45,947 equals
$68,920.50
For that kind of salary I'd go teach arithmetic at Nantahala School in the middle of the Western NC woods. Like a lot of schools in remote locations of "Appalachia" it is small-- a K-12 school with something around 100-200 students total. 200 divided by 13 would equal a pretty manageable class size.
For that kind of average salary I'd bet there'd be a nice mix of similarly chipper new teachers also happy to get paid handsomely for their efforts.
I'd also bet that the students would respond to a sudden influx of interest and funding in a place that otherwise looks like it was frozen in the year 1973.
First lesson plan would be titled: "Math: The Details matter."
65K for 9 months of teaching with several holidays built into those 9 months is quite a lot. Perhaps if we made school year-round teacher pay would go up considerably.
Of course one of my favorite summer experiences was when I realized that as a supervisor at a theme park that my algebra teacher was one of my subordinates, as he took a summer job there too!
Underpaid is a word not to be used with teachers salaries. Just look at any district here
[0] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/
US education is just depressingly terrible in so many ways. If I had a kid, I feel like sending him/her to public school would be borderline unethical.