I'll respond to this since a question was posed directly at me:
I'll start off with you sort of contradicting yourself by saying your mother was underpaid but in general teachers are overpaid. Which is it? If what you mean is that principle's should have more power to fire a teacher who is performing poorly, then I agree with you on that as a whole. The issue is that right now our teachers have been scapegoated as the problem and underpaid for so long that the profession is suffering due to it is now made out to be an unattractive field to get in to. I have provided a very well written article by News 6 about the issues of staffing and retention in the state of Indiana where most have said poor compensation for the amount of work done is what leads them to leaving their jobs. (
http://www.theindychannel.com/longform/call-6-thousands-of-indiana-teachers-leaving-the-classroom). This issue is compounded when more veteran teachers are typically more effective in their strategies for educating young people. This isn't a factory job where you can simply learn on the fly and become good at your job due to repetition over a short period of time. It takes education, practice, higher learning (done now through the practice of Professional Growth Points needed every 5 years for re-licensing), a knowledge of learning styles and pedagogy, and the continued love of teaching to be effective. it also doesn't hurt to be compensated at a fair wage for the work that you do to show your work is valued. If you believed that you were underpaid for your educational level and the job you were performing, you would leave your job and that is just one reason as to why we can't retain many new teachers. I could honestly leave my teaching job right now and go to Tate & Lyle (if I was hired on) and make nearly twice as what I make currently. I am unable to do so for a number of reasons but mainly I have two sons who I have full time with little help from their mother.
You are some what correct that the issues in the past have simply had money thrown at it to see if it would be better but that rarely works. The issues are so much more profound and deeper culturally than simply throwing money at it can fix. I have thrown the idea of running for political office and have actually drafted ideas down about how to fix the educational issues in our country:
1: Fix the healthcare system in our country and see the health and wellness of our children improve. This improvement will benefit lower income families to miss less of work and increase their ability to work their hours needed to sustain their families with a lower reliance on programs such as medicare and welfare.
2: Improving child health will lower premiums and insurance costs over time. This can only truly be done by switching to a single health payer system. Allowing the government to be the single payer to the insurance companies will inherently allow the cost of insurance to go down as the government will refuse (and will largely be unable) to pay for the costs of medical as they currently are. For example, there are 500,000 heart bypass surgeries done every year in the America at roughly a cost of 75k per surgery for a total cost of $37.5 billion per year. The same surgery in Europe costs an average of $17,500 with absolutely no difference in the outcome of health. That means if a single payer system entity (like the Federal Government) was able to get their costs down to roughly the same as that in Europe, it would mean a total savings of roughly $28,750,000,000.00 per year in that single surgery alone. There is absolutely no reason that should be happening in America other than corporate greed which hurts nearly all Americans below what many would consider the very wealthy in this country.
3: High quality universal early childhood education (ages newborn to pre-k) will allow parents to free up more of their income to afford a higher quality of life. Many times children are forced in to situations where their learning and development is being put in front of a television or with minimal interaction. This uneven early development leads to delays and educational issues later on that could be identified at an earlier age and thus could be improved prior to a child entering K-12 schooling.
4: Creation of technical high schools that focuses on trades such as welding, CDL, heavy machinery operations, automotive, and other skills that have been lost as the United States has transitioned from an industrial economy (heavy manufacturing) to a post-industrial economy (service sector and technology). These skills are highly valuable moving forward as the countries infrastructure needs improving and the loss of these jobs leads to higher and higher costs (a traveling welder is in such demand their hourly rate can be as high as $400-$500 due to a lack of skilled welders in our country). These are lost skills that allow children who don't have the drive or the ability to go to college. As my father said, somebody is going to have to pick up your trash, or dig your ditches, or drive the trucks....there is nothing wrong with those jobs but children have been made to feel that those jobs are second rate jobs.
5: Funding of before and after school programs that promote a number of community first ideals. The idea of a strong community is the foundation of great schools and is evident by the school I teach at in the Lafayette area. A school with a weak social bond to the community typically has higher instances of issues.
6: Increase the recruiting and retention of high ability teachers with increased benefits packages and salaries.
7: Increase the ability of principals to justify the moving or firing of teachers who inhibit the success of their students.
8: Removal of high stakes standardized testing which has been proven to be largely ineffective (
https://www.fairtest.org/reports-high-stakes-testing-hurts-education). It does nothing but promote an idea for teachers to teach toward the test instead of allowing teachers to be imaginative and innovative in their classroom. Want to know why education has been hurt in the last 20 year? This is reason #1 and needs to be abolished immediately. Should kids take tests like the SAT/ACT or ISTEP to look at progress at a base level? Of course, but kids are tested so heavily now that my nephew was on a computer on the first day of kindergarten for testing and re-testing. Something is very wrong with that necessity.
9: Increase teacher wages: The state of Indiana has seen a decrease of 11% from 2015-2016 in the wages and is currently 9.1% below the national level. Some sources even place that number as high as 16%.
10: Restructuring of our educational system on the idea of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math). This idea can begin heavily at the lower age levels where emotional and mental health are shown to improve with being in the arts. Currently, educational policy has forced the cutting of arts programs from schools instead of allowing them to expand as our technology for arts has expanded.
11: Restructuring the social welfare programs needs to be focused on building infrastructure instead of just handing out monetary amounts. Building access to things such as libraries, grocery stores, banks, community centers, and other necessities builds on the idea previously of pride in a community being the basis for building successful schools.
That's most of my ideas and I can expand on them if wanted or requested. If anyone actually makes it through that novel I just wrote, I congratulate you. However, I felt personally as though that my knowledge of the issues at hand in education was being challenged as an educator and one that I felt would be good to point out that my ideas and my opinions aren't just whimsical or degrading those who have different ideas. I have researched and done countless debates with individuals ranging in fields to come up with many of these ideas.
