An online training program. Sounds fancy.
Seriously, I refuse to believe there is a worse state government in the union at this point. They are systematically destroying North Carolina.
It would serve them right if every teacher in the state simply walked away in 2015, leaving them with no functioning schools.
What a liberal proposal! Everyone knows that kids learn just as well by watching a prerecorded video covering topics that will be on the standardized test, so it's quite nice of NC to propose above-market babysitter rates to keep all these other people employed.
What is it about teachers that makes people so upset?
I mean, nurses are also essential actors. Why don't people try to restructure their income, for instance? Or cabbies?
And I assume that $32k/year for 20 years means the same wage over all those years. That's $640k! Invest that properly and they'll be millionaires!
"In a 2011 op-ed in the News & Observer, McCammon explains that flipped classrooms, in which students can view videotaped instructional materials at their own pace, should allow teachers to accommodate larger classroom sizes"
I wrote 4 as a joke before reading the article and seeing that they really are saying that.
What is it about teachers that makes people so upset?
Because nurses didn't make them feel stupid in school?
And honestly, what the living fuck? NC state government is terrifying. It makes me sad for the people who can't leave and sad for the ones who had to but didn't want to.
It would serve them right if every teacher in the state simply walked away in 2015
Believe me, Chris, this process is well underway already.
What is it about teachers that makes people so upset?
They tend to vote Democratic. Plus, most of the well-off Republicans have had their kids in private schools ever since integration, so what do they care?
Because nurses didn't make them feel stupid in school?
Turn your head and cough.
Which is not to say that the Democratic Party has been all that great over the past few decades when it comes to NC's education system. But compared to the openly malevolent fuckers in charge now, the benign neglect of the Democrats looks like a golden beacon.
What is it about teachers that makes people so upset?
Apo is right that they vote Democratic. But more importantly, I think, they have unions. Or some of them do.
5: Startups like Uber and Lyft are trying to restructure cabbies' income.
they have unions
Not in North Carolina, they don't. Against the law. Like I said, the Democrats haven't been any great shakes on this either, yet still wildly better.
Or rather, they exist, but in name only. Strikes are illegal, collective bargaining is not allowed, fees can't be collected from non-members.
Is Art Pope trying to turn the state into Bartertown? Good Lord.
That's horrifying. 10.2 is exactly right. I think one of the nastiest features here is the 20-year cap on service - teachers would be done at 45. Where could they work then? Even teachers who take buyouts to retire early are 52+. Also, standardizing salaries across the state eliminates incentives to work at schools with low-income student populations. I don't know whether NC has tenure for K-12, but if it does, I assume this would also demolish that system. Maybe they should just turn over the entire system to Teach For America and pay all teachers $30K for three year terms. Current salary schedule for NC here. US average salary for instructional staff 2011-2012: $57,282. NC was $46,700 (46th in US). Poor NC.
The 20-year cap is indeed astonishingly cruel.
http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2014/01/22/update-nc-teacher-compensation-plan/
The 20 year thing seems to have dropped out.
Once again, North Carolina looks at the shambles that California has made of a public institution,* an important part** of its once-admirable civil society and says, "We can do worse than that!"
* Classrooms with 30+ kids***, teachers paid poorly enough that they can't live anywhere near the communities they serve, crumbling infrastructure, constant revision of a curriculum built around nonsense schemes, etc.
** I mean, K-12 ed here was never all that great, but it wasn't especially terrible.**** Not anymore!
*** Don't bother telling me that classroom size has nothing to do with learning outcomes; I don't care.
**** For example, we're excellent at footnoting.
I hate the flipped classroom bullshit so very, very much. The only part of it that ever produces improved results is the part where teachers use classtime in a more varied way, instead of straight lecturing. There is no k-12 teacher who only lectures. Basically the flipped classroom encourages college teachers to use, like, actual pedagogy, and the recorded videos part is a total red herring, and a gigantic waste of time and effort. Albeit a gigantic waste of time and effort that can be farmed out to private contractors, of course.
20: Are CA schools uniformly terrible? Or does it vary by affluence? Because I've been judging some people very harshly for moving to affluent areas specifically for the school district and still needing to send their kids to private school. (The argument going that once you take your kid out of private school, you can't get them back in.)
There should be an Uber for teachers. Thousands of people could be on call to teach impromptu classes with surge pricing around the standardized testing* periods. Efficiency!
*Because there will be no other kind of assessment.
It's always a bummer to realize, when looking at policy prescriptions like this, that movement conservatives are every bit as cartoonishly evil as advertised. They really do want to destroy every last union, no matter how ineffectual it may be; make every last public school a shining example of how government can't do anything right, proving the central tenets of their ideology correct; and create a reserve army of surplus labor, transferring even more wealth to the rich. It's mourning in American again.
I was complaining about proctoring tests to my friend who teaches high school. Apparently when he proctors standardized tests each year, they have to wander the aisles for the entire six hours, straight, for a week's worth of tests. They get surprise checks by administrators, too. OMG I would go nuts.
It's always a bummer to realize, when looking at policy prescriptions like this, that movement conservatives are every bit as cartoonishly evil as advertised.
One side of the aisle actually believes that the world is split into good and evil, determined like a high school rivalry, and the goal is to sabotage anything that is linked with the other team. The other side is adults - corrupt adults, but nonetheless adults - who are willing to see the world in shades of gray and feel vaguely like they should balance the greed with the cruelty, because they understand that there are many kinds of forces in the world.
22: there are good districts. Or there are good districts, relatively speaking. Cupertino, for instance, has famously good (and also truly terrible) schools. And the schools here are reputed to be pretty good. In fact, though, we spend next to nothing per pupil, cram 30 kids into classrooms designed for 20, and, as noted above, shift the curriculum around all the fucking time. Teaching here -- even here here, where many of the kids are faculty brats, where lots of families self-select into the district, and where there are no private alternatives -- has been getting harder and harder for the last decade, and it was no picnic before.
26: are you going to send your daughter to public school? In your neighborhood? (I'm not challenging you. I'm genuinely curious.)
22: My knowledge is badly out of date, but I suspect you can keep on judging. I can't think of anywhere affluent where the public schools were remotely bad, or even average compared to the rest of the state.
I wonder if it's right that movement conservatives have been on offense, pushing a relatively coherent set of policies and ideologies, since LBJ, whereas liberals/Democrats/progressives haven't had any coherence whatsoever to their policy prescriptions and no meaningful ideology to speak of (We're less bad! Third way!) during that time and have mostly been playing defense, trying to protect the last vestiges of the New Deal. It certainly feels that way.
Have the conservatives been coherent? Nixon's policies have very little to do with W's. I guess "destructive" is a policy.
Me? No, she goes to a fancy private school, though we're contemplating a charter for next year. I already went through this on some other thread. But in semi-defense I live in the ghetto and the local district school is truly a poor kids school -- 100% nonwhite and mostly very poor -- and has relative "performance" to match (though of course those metrics are totally mysterious). If I lived in LaCanada-Flintridge or Beverly Hills I'd at least feel more ridiculous picking a private school.
That's why I said relatively consistent. The policies have amounted to dismantling government and the ideology is the market is god. There are lots of cracks in the edifice -- neo-cons v paleo-cons is just one example -- but compared to Democrats, who have been fighting from a crouch -- when they've fought at all -- the right seems pretty coherent.
in semi-defense
You don't need to defend your parenting choices to me. As I said above, I wasn't on the attack.
34 to 32. I should also add that obviously there have been huge gains for progressives in some arenas of social policy/civil rights. But I tend to think those gains owe in part to the fact that they can be cast as an expansion of liberty. Social conservatives, notwithstanding those on the Supreme Court, are in full retreat at the moment.
As I never tire of saying, we live in Andrew Sullivan's America.
movement conservatives are every bit as cartoonishly evil as advertised
If anything, they're actually worse (at least the ones I know down here). This kind of plan is what they put out for public consumption. Get them in a private conversation with a few beers to loosen them up, and a non-negligible portion of the crowd will advocate deporting African-Americans to Africa.
You may think I'm exaggerating for effect, but I am not. One hopes that they are exaggerating for effect, but one is consistently surprised at just how much that attitude persists.
Corey Robin, before he annoyed me on Crooked Timber and lost credibility, convinced me that conservatism is about making sure the powerful stay powerful in the face of a various economic and social challenge from the previously oppressed masses and ... that's it, there is nothing else, 100% of the rest is bullshit. All the various subspecies are just marginal variations on a single common goal, maintaining relative power. Having poor kids educated badly is a goal.
The original plan, which I downloaded, is careful to reassure that principal hiring and salaries will not be affected.
deporting African-Americans to Africa
I was going to say, what would Southern whites do with themselves if this came to pass. But: Hispanics. Ok, what if we got rid of the Hispanics, too? Oh, wait: Muslims.
Much as I love hating Southerners, I don't know how many people told us that the place we're living now is "safe," in contradistinction to...places you'd have to drive an hour and aim for. Stop watching local news, people: it inflames your latent racist tendencies.
41 -- The key question is where does "the South" start? I-90, the 49th parallel, or the Arctic Circle?
It really would serve some states right if the public school teachers just quit en mass and said "Well, teach your own damn kids then."
I recently saw a friend of mine from high school during Christmas, and he had just quit his job as a teacher after 7 years because he was so fed up with constant petty bullshit that was being dumped on him and his co-workers.
Much of it seems to amount to simple bullying: "Hey, let's fuck with these people just because we can!"
Like Grumbles in 5, I can't figure out why this is so appealing. It seems like sometime ~15 years ago, politicians in both parties realized that they just couldn't go wrong with demagoguing teachers. The voters gobble it up every time.
where does "the South" start?
The Charles river, which is the border of all civilization.
43: Every single week, the Raleigh paper has letters to the editor from teachers leaving the profession. Every. Single. Week.
Much as I love hating Southerners, I don't know how many people told us that the place we're living now is "safe," in contradistinction to...places you'd have to drive an hour and aim for. Stop watching local news, people: it inflames your latent racist tendencies.
I keep on thinking that if we could just get people to actually believe that crime is historically low, things would get better. So much bad policy is justified by appealing to crime control and the fear of crime, and things really aren't terribly bad, crime-wise, these days.
But I don't know how to convince people.
The key question is where does "the South" start?
At the city limits of almost every metropolitan area in America. Don't fool yourselves.
I'd like, and I think there would be a decent (online) audience for, something like a Statistical Times, reporting only broadly relevant news: crime rates and accident rates rather than murders and fires; laws and policies and their effects rather than babbling about narratives; RCTs and other valid findings rather than N=15 questionnaires; the occasional individual story if is an outlier or points to a need to measure something new or there is a lack of actual data. Sort of the outlook of 538, but not so model-driven, and on all topics. Maybe that's Klein's venture.
At the city limits of almost every metropolitan area in America
Exactly right. My mom was giving us the "I can't believe you'd consider living in the South" business, and I said, uh, mom, drive twenty minutes from your place and see how you like it.
Apo, you're pretty ok for a Southerner.
His counting is about average for a Southerner.
Have the conservatives been coherent?
Upward distribution of wealth, transfer of public assets to private hands, and yes, the maintenance of the power structure, which is basically the central idea. Pretty consistent—the apparent cracks in the edifice represent differences in means and time frames, but the core values remain.
At the city limits of almost every metropolitan area in America
So true, even 20 minutes out of the People's Republic of Northeast Portland. Even the accent is roughly the same.
I suspect there's an ongoing selection between, say, fearful people and explorative people that keeps re-sorting country mice and city mice into right-wingers and left-wingers all over again with each generation. That assumes people move around, though.
I know, I know, that hierarchy of values (haidt?) with loyalty vs fairness, etc.
His counting is about average for a Southerner.
Soft bigotry of low expectations.
I can count to 21 when I'm naked.
So much bad policy is justified by appealing to crime control and the fear of crime, and things really aren't terribly bad, crime-wise, these days.
The type of crime that is typically appealed to at the local political level is low. Inasmuch as a political faction fraudulently induced the country to enter a major war effort and farmed out much of the operations of that effort to private contractors, and as that war is ongoing, I suspect that high level crime -- you could probably call it treason -- is at a relative high. But as it isn't being prosecuted, I don't know how you'd measure that.
57: I hope you lost fingers, not testicles.
McCammon explains that flipped classrooms, in which students can view videotaped instructional materials at their own pace, should allow teachers to accommodate larger classroom sizes-and be paid according to how many students they can teach in one classroom."
Maybe this whole plan is a Trojan horse for armed teachers. Give me a riot-proof booth, an intercom, and one of those beanbag shotguns and I'll teach 100, 200, 300 kids at once.
As far as underfunding the schools goes, aren't most of the Republicans too old to worry about that directly?
I would hesitate to call it treason.Maybe that is just me. I thunk propel are mostly good people. Made of, mostly, good people.
I certainly get that the FBI is fucking evil. I have interacted with them. Fuck them.That doesn't speak to most of humanity. Or, at least, I hope not
I would hesitate to call it treason.Maybe that is just me. I thunk propel are mostly good people. Made of, mostly, good people.
I certainly get that the FBI is fucking evil. I have interacted with them. Fuck them.That doesn't speak to most of humanity. Or, at least, I hope not
You've got another thunk coming.
I think you mean another THUNG, Jesus.
48 is a great idea, but we'll have to see whether that's Klein's new venture. I sort of doubt it if Yglesias is coming on board.
46: I keep on thinking that if we could just get people to actually believe that crime is historically low, things would get better. So much bad policy is justified by appealing to crime control and the fear of crime, and things really aren't terribly bad, crime-wise, these days.
This came up on Melissa Harris-Perry's show this morning in connection with immigration reform and the state of affairs in Arizona in particular: a panelist pointed out that despite what the average citizen seems to believe, crime rates have been flat in the undocumented immigrant-laden southwestern states for the last 10 years. She observed that it's crucial to introduce and repeatedly point to facts in these debates. Over and over again.
Would be great to see the facts/statistics brigade on duty as a matter of course on TV news programs.
A long time ago now, but
I hate the flipped classroom bullshit so very, very much. The only part of it that ever produces improved results is the part where teachers use classtime in a more varied way, instead of straight lecturing. There is no k-12 teacher who only lectures. Basically the flipped classroom encourages college teachers to use, like, actual pedagogy, and the recorded videos part is a total red herring, and a gigantic waste of time and effort. Albeit a gigantic waste of time and effort that can be farmed out to private contractors, of course.
is exactly right.
I think you mean another THUNG, Jesus.
RICHARD SHERMAN IS NOT A THUNG.
My coworker/supervisor is really into talking about flipped classrooms lately. But she keeps saying she's going to flip her classroom by having the students do work outside the class and then bring it in, and she'll grade it right there in class.
I'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work.
71.2: Don't worry. There's an on-line court.
My student evaluations for last semester were way worse than in the spring. Maybe I should have flipped them.
It's been a long time since I lived in North Carolina, but I can't help thinking that this kind of thing (i.e. the proposal in the OP) is the rest of the state telling Chapel Hill to go fuck itself.
But they gave me so many helpful comments, like "I wish he had written more words on the board" and "he did not controlled the pace very well".
the rest of the state telling Chapel Hill to go fuck itself
I don't think it's that specific. In all honesty, I think it's the Republicans (officeholders and constituents alike) telling black North Carolinians to go fuck themselves.
I was about to say, so far as white people were being told to fuck themselves.
Because the other half of the education agenda is making sure the public schools are allowed to re-segregate.
77, 79: Apo, do you know how much, if any, of this proposed legislation is coming out of ALEC? It's right up their alley.
Bill Moyers' site has a lot of stuff on ALEC - might could have some research on state-specific efforts, or links to sites taht do. It'd behoove all of us in challenged states to keep an eye on state legislators affiliated (or not) with ALEC.
For "taht" I blame the household cat who's newly decided that jumping up on my desk to look into my eyes and touch his nose to mine is an interesting idea.
I don't know to what extent ALEC is involved, but the local locus of evil is Civitas Institute, personified in Art Pope.
How did conservatives manage to convince everyone that teachers get worse the more experience they have, when experience is respected in every other fucking job on earth?
Everyone in America seems to believe this now. Look at the movies. In every movie about teachers, the teacher with experience is the villain, and the new teacher is the hero. Cop movies don't work that way. The grizzled veteran cop is shown as having important lessons to teach the hothead new recruit, and they are buddies by the end of the movie.
Well, then there's Training Day. But the veteran cop is black in that one. COINCIDENCE??
Teach for America. Hatred of unions. Oh wait, that's the same thing.
can we get flip and or natilo to write the TFA vs Training Day pitch?
So yes, they're ALEC-affiliated. Next step would be to see which NC legislators are members of ALEC -- probably all of them, actually -- and bring pressure to bear on them, embarrass the hell out of them.
Just googling "civitas alec" provides information about NC policy proposals, like this one:
Heh. Art Laffer, eh?
The Civitas tax plan was written by Arthur Laffer, the author of the annual American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) tax publication "Rich States, Poor States." The two plans are like peas in a pod. Like the ALEC publication, the Civitas plan proposes austerity coupled with abolishing individual and corporate income taxes and replacing them with an increased state sales tax.
I'm sorry. For your state. The Moral Mondays movement is making some progress? How are you doing with getting some of the Republican jackasses out of state office?
If I were a North Carolina Democrat, my main hobby would be inventing ways to fuck Art Pope come 2020. There should be an agenda in place of 10 bills that will make him sorry he ever got interested in politics. And I don't mean policies he would disapprove of, but 10 bills that will personally fuck with him.
bring pressure to bear on them, embarrass the hell out of them
Embarrass them? How? By revealing that they're fat-cats in league with fatter cats? Their constituents know that and love them for it. That's how they got elected. They were voted into office to kick sand in the face of the niggers and the pantywaist America-hating liberals. Embarrass them? Like they have any fucking shame. Honestly, this is a state where Jesse Helms held office from the end of Reconstruction through a few months ago.
Not to mention, the only real virtue of North Carolina's Democrats -- much like the rest of the country's Democrats -- is that they're not Republicans.
The Moral Mondays movement is making some progress?
The General Assembly has been out of session since the end of the summer, so everything's sort of on hold. I suspect there will be some Democratic gains come November, because the pendulum has swung about as far as it feasibly can. However, the state Democratic Party is a complete shambles right now and the districts are gerrymandered six ways to Sunday, so my hopes are not very high.
More specifically, there's a decent chance McCrory loses his re-election bid, but if Roy Cooper (the state AG) doesn't run, I don't know who else the Dems even have on the bench. The GenAssembly is going to be a horrorshow until the districts get redrawn, so we probably are stuck with this until 2022 at the earliest.
And as currently constituted, both houses of the Assembly have veto-proof GOP majorities, so even retaking the governor's mansion only gets you so far without pulling some upsets.
How did this come about, Apo? NC went for Obama in '08. Is it just that every Democrat in the state lives in one of three districts?
90: Embarrass them? How?
Chiefly by guilt through association, I think. The ALEC Stand Your Ground law after Trayvon Martin's death did them a lot of damage.
But Apo has a better sense of what the chances are on the ground, as it were. I don't know what Moral Mondays are up to beyond public protests, but I'd bet -- or at least I hope -- that they're digging around behind the scenes.
Gerrymandering. GOP state House candidates took 51.1% of the statewide vote, and won 64% of the seats.
In the federal House of Representatives races, Democrats won 51% of the statewide vote, but Republicans won 9 of 13 seats, and were just a couple hundred votes short of picking up a 10th.
94: More specifically, there's a decent chance McCrory loses his re-election bid, but if Roy Cooper (the state AG) doesn't run, I don't know who else the Dems even have on the bench.
Should the rest of us in the rest of the country throw money at a Dem gubernatorial candidate? Would that help?
Yah. Nor do I. I figure the Moral Mondays crowd is the best bet for ideas.
Not to go Godwin preëmptively, and it's only tangentially related to the thread, regressive politics and all, but the one-percenter is the new Jew. I know I shouldn't be surprised by this kind of thing anymore, but I found the chutzpah breathtaking.
Do you have to do that every time?
No, sometimes other people beat me to it.
Not so much pressure without having to control the world?
Anyway, Josh Marshall has an interesting take on the mindset behind that kind of thing.
The link in 109 is a must-read. The 1% have in large part gone completely off the rails.
I'm not going to bother googling treason to find an acceptable definition for y'all; consider it a matter for independent study.
liberals/Democrats/progressives haven't had any coherence whatsoever to their policy prescriptions and no meaningful ideology to speak of (We're less bad! Third way!) during that time and have mostly been playing defense, trying to protect the last vestiges of the New Deal. It certainly feels that way.
I saw something somewhere saying that ing liberal Democratic politics is like watching a stagecoach being pursued by bandits, throwing fragments of the New Deal out the door in a futile effort to delay their pursuers.
Except for social libertarian areas like gay marriage and marijuana legalization, where liberals go from strength to strength. But none of those are a problem for the wealthy at all.
Still, I can't really believe this thing is real, that a major state would actually enact something like this in the 21st century. It's just too over the top...was it a leaked extremist plan that has not yet been advanced officially by anyone?
I saw something somewhere saying that ing liberal Democratic politics is like watching a stagecoach being pursued by bandits, throwing fragments of the New Deal out the door in a futile effort to delay their pursuers.
This is exactly right.
Hearsay gets you past the analogy ban? In that case, I read something somewhere that said watching conservatives try to govern is like watching a dog that has finally caught its own tail.
I saw something somewhere saying that ing liberal Democratic politics is like watching a stagecoach being pursued by bandits, throwing fragments of the New Deal out the door in a futile effort to delay their pursuers.
Here you go: Democrats in a defensive crouch:
Eager to dispel claims that President Barack Obama is engaging in "class warfare" as he heads into his State of the Union address next week, the White House is de-emphasizing phrases focusing on economic disparity and turning instead to messages about creating paths of opportunity for the poor and middle class.