education reform: what would you do if you were president

what is ill to me is that we allow foreign students to come and go to our colleges and get our internships and then they go back to their homeland and get american jobs in their lands.

here is an jacked up story

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/khamis-gadhafis-us-tour-york-la-washington-wall/story?id=13237920

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During Libya Protests Khamis Gadhafi Hurried Home... From Wall Street
Travel Documents Detail Libyan Dictator's Son's Whirlwind U.S. Tour From L.A. to N.Y.C and Major U.S. Companies in Between


March 28, 2011

When a popular uprising exploded in Libya in mid-February, Moammar Gadhafi's son and military commander Khamis Gadhafi, charged with protecting the regime at all costs, was not there. Instead, Khamis was waltzing down Wall Street, just one stop on a whirlwind, cross-country tour of the U.S. organized by an American company with U.S. State Department approval.


Courtesy KTRK
Moammar Gadhafi's son Khamis meets U.S. business executives at the Port of Houston in Texas just a month before a popular revolution threatened to topple his regime.The trip was part of an internship program with Los Angeles-based engineering giant AECOM, set to span just over a month, and take Khamis Gadhafi, head of Libya's elite Khamis Brigade, to tours and meetings with high-profile universities and companies from Houston to L.A., San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Washington D.C., New York and Boston, according to travel documents obtained by ABC News.

After beginning in Houston with an extensive tour and presentations at the Port of Houston Authority, Khamis jetted off to L.A. where he was scheduled to go on an "exclusive" VIP tour of Universal Studios. After that, it was a short trip to San Francisco for meetings with technology giants Google, Apple and Intel, among others. In Colorado, Khamis toured the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and then hopped a plane to Chicago where he toured Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

By mid-February, Khamis was scheduled to visit the nation's capital to see famous landmarks like the National Mall before high-powered meetings with defense contractors including Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, among others. Both U.S. military and civilian officials were present for Khamis' meeting with Northrop, according to a company official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Next up, Khamis headed to Wall Street in lower Manhattan to walk through the heart of the U.S. economy at the New York Stock Exchange before taking in the Broadway show "Mama Mia." But on the day he visited the floor of the stock exchange and was also scheduled to tour New York's Columbia University, protests against his father's regime rang out in Benghazi, Libya. A spokesperson for Columbia told ABC News the university canceled the visit in light of the protests and an AECOM spokesperson said that instead of heading uptown to Columbia, Khamis hopped a plane and flew back to his home country that night.

That meant Khamis missed out on further scheduled events including a tour of the West Point Military Academy, MIT and Harvard University.

Less than a month later, Khamis was rumored to have been killed in an attack by a Libyan kamikaze pilot. The reports have not been confirmed.

 

Haha...just admit it...you meant corporal punishment. Wow, teacher goodlove aka LarryLong.

 

Or just kick them out of class

 

LoL. GL better get your shit together...... folks on here think that you will be one of the worst teacher to ever greet The Heart of Dixie state.

 

BEATINGS, BEATINGS, BEATINGS! Lol

I kid, I kid.

 

You don't you don't lol

 

OK...maybe I am a little serious. lol

 

merit pay

I teach in GA and we are moving to a merit-pay system. The state of GA has been losing money in taxes for a number of years and has been making cuts to education. I've not had a raise since 2008. Don't be fooled by the noble idea of a merit-pay system. Mark my words, it is being done to justify screwing teachers out of pay.

The county in which I teach has several high schools of varying socioeconomic status. My school is Title I, or comprised of a large number of students who receive free lunch. The population is 98% black. Not more than 5 miles away is a high school on the islands of 90% white students from middle to upper class backgrounds. Teaching positions in my county are transferable. I have a friend who transfered into a highly desired position teaching Spanish at this islands school.

I take a gifted education class with teachers in my field who work at the islands school and are admittedly not as knowledgeable in our area as I am. In fact, one of these teachers attended a college not far from me in our home state! We are paid on the same scale yet my teaching assignment is much, much more stressful than theirs. There are regular fights in my school and I had to prosecute a student who put his hands on me this year. It is not enough that we give progress reports every week or that parents have the ability to log-in to an online page to see their child's real-time grades...I have to call the parent of every child who's failing. If I can't reach a parent because their phone is (usually) disconnected, I have to write a social worker referral. Even if I follow all of these steps there is still no guarantee that admin will ask me to "review" a grade or a parent will try to bully their way to a passing grade. Last year I taught the entirety of the tenth grade and had three classes classified as special Ed. inclusion classes. This year, I have six of these classes.

All of these issues, but my colleagues at the high school on the islands will earn their merit pay and then some because they work with a more privileged group of public students than me. This nation seems bent on fucking teachers out of the money we barely make. Politicians want to make some cuts and save a few bucks so they get on news outlets and appeal to Jane and Joe Blow who don't know the first thing about what it takes to be a teacher and conjure up memories of when they were in high school and had that ONE teacher who was tenured and didn't do a damn thing every day. The media likes to play up this idea to ignorant people that teachers get paid for a year's work but only have to work 9 months. Sorry my dears, I get paid for 9 months of work which the state will stretch out in checks over a year. If I worked 12 months I would be paid accordingly. By the way, if the state of GA had to expand the school year- they couldn't afford it!

Everyone wants to put in their two cents about their dumbfuck idea of running a school like a business. I'll give the blueberry pie business analogy: a man is running his blueberry pie business. He has suppliers provide him with all the material he needs for the pies- blueberries, flour, etc. If the blueberries are not up to par or fully matured, the business owner can send them back or demand the grower return his money. If the flour comes to him rotten or incorrectly processed, he can do the same. Teachers can't run our schools like a blueberry pie factory. We can't send back students who are not fully matured or rotten. We have to do the best we can with what we've got, and that varies from year to year.

NYC schools used merit pay at some schools since 2007 and found that there was no significant difference in student performance. I'm not in the least surprised. Do you know why? I know teaching doesn't pay a lot. I understand it is my job to help students improve and achieve and it has NEVER occurred to me not to work as hard as I can to make that happen. If someone flashed a check in front of me, I would say, "Oh, so you're going to pay me more for doing the same thing? Okay."

The majority of teachers try as hard as they can to educate their students. Don't let the bullshit soundbites from ignorant, money hungry politicians make you think otherwise. Merit pay is French for "cutting corners."

 

Pretty damn good post. So what do you think the solutions should be?

 

U.S. vs. the world

The U.S. education system is not the same as every other educational system in the world, and doesn't need to be compared as such. Several nations only educate their best and brightest (richest) young people and U.S. education is geared to educate all. In France, college is paid for mostly by the government so they only put their most intelligent students in college-prep high school and the rest in vocational school.

If we want to compete with other countries we'll have to stop bs'ing ourselves into thinking that everyone is cut out for college and push vocational education. The problem is, new state tests are based upon college-prep education and the college and university system in the U.S. is more of a multi-billion dollar business than school. It is the American dream that people can do anything they want (even if their dream is not realistic) and has become politically incorrect (and even lawsuit worthy) for a school admin or teacher to tell a student they are not cut-out for college.

 

Excellent points, rep coming to you.

 

haha, you said it

As i said, financial barriers are handled by financial aid offices and scholarships are "investments". Im sure you wouldnt want your hard earned and taxed dollars to be "invested" on mere average citizens, right??

Barriers to ensure only quality students like entrance criteria ensures that people dont waste time and money (similar to #1).As i said, not everybody has the mind, drive and ability to be in university. I mean, even if you focused on the real world alone, youll notice; no such thing as "equality in achievement" exists. The fact is, we didn't all recieve the intellect nor the achievement of Newton. Therefore by facilitating the concept of "being" a "university" student, you overwhelm newton-like talents with 600 morons in his class, which in turn lowers the true quality of said education. The only result "free eduation" would illuminate is a population filled with equally idiots(aka socialism and communism). After all, making us all equally idiotic appears to make socialists and communists happy, nonewithstanding the fact that humans are not remotely equal.

Also remember: there is a great division between rich and poor almost identical to smart and dumb (sorry but they go hand in hand). Making education "free" and public, will federalize it. The governmnet beauracrats will be mainly trained to fulfill regulations. Affirmative action will be most effective - bringing together "dumb" and "smart" people in the same room for the sake of "equality". What will this create?...racism and outcry

Just imagine sitting in a 600 seat class, the professor is reviewing basics of whatever class it is, and there behold, constant interruption by people who neither have the educational background to be there, nor the intelligence to fully grasp the topic at hand. Im not even talking sceince courses (engineering etc) but all these liberal bulshit courses (social science, psychology etc).

Going back to the rich/poor class division::::: current times have made it extremely easy to go from rags to riches, especially if you have talent and drive. So a working class of today who worked night-and weekend-shifts while simultaneously attending university, graduating cum laude and making 6 figures (or even 5 figures) will guarantee that his children do not endure similar struggles. Recurring and generational based struggles occur primarily when parents lack safe educational plans for their chidren.

 

Also, as Mrfantastic stated, every person plays an imperative and vital role in a society's social infrastructure and if every person became equal, not every role would be fulffilled. You need the engineers who design the bridges just as much as you need maintainance people to keep it looking "nice". Its a shame that the world doesnt have robots to do society's "dirty" jobs, and nobody wants to make money in such derogative and condenscending fashions, but hey somebody gotta do it, right??...

 

If im the worst in the heart of dixie then that says something about the dudes that are responding negatively. hell I challenged Tirkah along time ago on a debate and he has yet to accept. I wonder why ? is he that dumb , I mean come on If he is an Eurdite then he should spank the shit out of me. then he can be the pedagogue.

so Tirkah whats up biatch ? LOL

whats funny I started the thread and he has yet to put in an opinion

 

GoodLove you not gone wish me Happy Bday son?

 

the problem is also with teachers not getting the respect and support from the adminstration and the community (parents). parents arent helping the teachers education the kids and expect the teacher to baby sit them and educate them

 

you need a hug ? are you sufferring from attention deficit from you parents sweety ?

come on sweet heart and get a hug for seeing another year. next year, I will teach you to love your black skin.

 

Or at the very least teach vocational skills in a college. I think everyone can do higher learning it just depends on what they're learning. I may have done well in math and history but I have friends who were really good at auto mechanics (a skill I find more valuable than 80 percent of shit they teach in hs) and the school arranged for them to go to boces. Even if they never get another mechanic job in their lives they can always fix their own car or even if they buy a used car they know what to look for. I can do my own taxes ( shit turbo tax can do for 20 bucks) yayyyyy me. So at times I think we make a way bigger deal out of college than we should. Plenty of sociology and other liberal arts degree grads who can't find a job at all let alone in their field.

 

very well put. vocational school is something to be valued. people all too often try to minimize the importance of it along with community college.

I think it is stupid to do so. every vocation is important from the janitor to the president

 

My brother in law owns his own IT firm and he can't even find enough qualified americans to do the job; there is a big gap between what the job market needs and what is actually out there.

Further, our system is so easy and shitty, it need to require and demand more from students and teachers ( I went to one of the top HS in NYC and got by with doing NOTHING). They also need to do away with the seniority system and have teachers be evaluated on performance. The money for schools need to go towards educational system, not the outdated pension plans.

Summer vacations should be cut in half; kids need to be challenged and motivated, not loaf around.

Parents who don't give a shit should be beaten.