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[McDohl]

So...it looks like Inafune has the same issue with the game development industry that I have with bad public school teachers with tenure: it causes stagnation and a decline in quality product.

Just for the record: I'm talking about teachers who are hemmoraging public money by either not teaching or those who remain on payroll pending disciplinary action, and spend an entire day in an office doing nothing and collecting a paycheck.

[Classic]

McDohl, your comments make it sound like you don't approve of pensions for teachers (specifically).
If that's the case, we may have to come to blows.
I mean, I'll lose, but it's the principle of the thing.

[McDohl]

I have no problem with pensions, but when a teacher consistently turns in sub-par performance and doesn't do the job they were hired to do, I think there should be consequences.  If I had more time at the moment, I'd elaborate, but I'll have to save that for when I'm not about to head out the door for class.

[NexAdruin]

In a public school system, tenure basically means the teacher can be as good or bad as he/she wants without fear of getting fired. It doesn't really have much to do with his/her retirement, as far as I know. It's a pretty bad system all around.

EDIT: Here's an artist's rendition of why tenure is bad. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1951

[Bal]

The problem with teaching and teachers is that there is no good reason to be one unless you have an overactive sense of altruism, or you have a generic degree and nothing better to do with it.

[Cthulhu-chan]

The problem with teaching and teachers is that they are not paid enough compared to the importance of what they do, but it is difficult to qualitatively assess their performance.

[NexAdruin]

Cthulhu-chan is correct. The only real way to assess their performance is with standardized tests, which (almost) everyone agrees to be poor indicators.

[McDohl]

Nex pretty much spelled out my issue with teachers' tenure without me having to post it.

I mean, let's think about this from the perspective of a customer service job.  Your duty is to provide a service.  If your customers (the students) don't get the service that they are there for, then you are derelict in your job, and appropriate measures should be taken.

I'm looking to become a teacher myself, so I need to be paying attention to this sort of thing.  I'm sorry for sort of derailing the Inafune conversation.

[TA]

Tenure insulates teachers' jobs from politics, be they office or local.  You don't want the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus firing every teacher who challenged students.

[Mongrel]

I think a lot of us understand what Tenure was once used for. The problem is that in our new mass-produced university graduates world, teaching has long taken a back seat to research. It's not so much that all these profs are bad, but a lot of them couldn't give two shits about teaching and it shows. Tenure has now become something to shield professors who just don't give a flying fuck.

In the end, it may be that the time has come to admit the 800-year old model of the University may be broken and that it's time to fully separate research and teaching as jobs (which isn't to say a person can't do both, but that they shouldn't be doing both at the same time). I don't know, that idea has serious problems too, but it's clear the current model is breaking down, if it isn't totally broken already.

[Brentai]

Getting a degree in California basically requires either millionaire parents or an unheathy level of dedication.  My boss has already expressed a bias against potential employees who recently graduated around here.

[McDohl]

Well, the problem isn't so much with university professors, as I can see, it's at the lower level, even down to elementary schools, where teachers can be eligible for tenure within 3 years in some places.

[Büge]

Here in Ontario, teachers don't need tenure. They have a golden parachute.

[Thad]

Oh dear, I can't move the thread to the Death Panel board because the firewall flags the button for moving a non-game-related thread to a non-game-related board as a link to a games-related site.  Little help?

[Mongrel]

Well, the problem isn't so much with university professors, as I can see, it's at the lower level, even down to elementary schools, where teachers can be eligible for tenure within 3 years in some places.

Your elementary school teachers can get Tenure?! 

I thought that was purely a post-secondary thing?

Huh. Bizarre.

[Norondor]

Well, the problem isn't so much with university professors, as I can see, it's at the lower level, even down to elementary schools, where teachers can be eligible for tenure within 3 years in some places.

Well, the problem isn't so much with elementary schools as it is with the fact that teachers, even very good ones, have almost literally no control over the academic success (or failure!) of students, but people keep wanting to fire them and replace them with entirely theoretical super-teachers that will make students succeed despite absent/abusive/alcoholic parents or just general poverty

IN FACT, the poor are pretty much just not going to do well academically, ever, due to a variety of factors beyond anyone's control (lack of stimulus during early years of brain development, higher tendency towards depression/apathy/other emotional or psychological problems, poor nutrition, no safe/quiet place to study and practice, etc etc etc etc). The phenomenon is well-understood enough that (and Thad's gonna yell at me here) i'm not even going to bother linking to any goddamn studies because seriously, i could link every single word in this run-on sentence to a different scholarly paper about it and still have like 20 unused browser tabs.

BUT SURELY CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE THE ANSWER TO ALL OUR WOES AND WILL TURN BACK THE PREVIOUS 10,000-ODD YEARS OF AGRARIAN SOCIETAL HISTORY

[Classic]

I really want to see you prove this point!

seriously, i could link every single word in this run-on sentence to a different scholarly paper about it and still have like 20 unused browser tabs.

[McDohl]

The terrible thing I find in all this education nonsense is really the fact that the US is gravitating toward this system where charter schools are in such high demand that they have to turn applicants away and determine enrollees by lottery.  Couple this with private schools, and education becomes the realm of the super-elite and wealthy.

Hey Republicans, you want those babies born and not aborted because they represent future tax revenue, but you want to restrict their opportunities to learn and try to better their social status.

That might be a little too Guild/Shinra for me, but I honestly think that there's a line of thinking there that is a factor in Republican lawmaker thinking.

[Pacobird]

This is a good start to what noro is saying!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/

tl;dr:

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.

[Büge]

A guy I knew once tried to convince me that rising tuition fees was a good thing, since it would somehow force students to be more conscientious about their studies.

I didn't bother to retort since he was one of those guys that believed a debate was won when one's opponent stopped talking.