Ah-nuld's State of the State Address

[Vandalous]

Here is an article about it... (http://www.sacunion.com/pages/california/articles/1561/)

... and here is the speech transcript. (http://www.sacunion.com/pages/state_capitol/articles/1558/)

Thoughts?

[termdec]

Suck it, students and seniors.

Ugh.

[Boss99]

More than students and seniors, teachers and state workers are in the sights of Swarzaneggar's pwnage machine. The perks for working for the govt. are diminishing more and more.

[GotNoRice]

“We will start with the teachers,” he said. “I want to reward you for your hard work, but I cannot do so under the current system. So, help me change it. We must financially reward the good teachers and expel those who are not.” The governor proposed basing pay on merit and not on tenure, as in the current system. “Teachers employment should be tied to performance and not just showing up,” he said. “…We won’t protect a teacher at the expense of a child.”

Eh, I heard a lot of stuff like this growing up and most of it ended in miserable failure. That’s due to the fact that in the eyes of most politicians, a student’s “performance” in school is based on how well they do on standardized tests. This then forces the teachers to emphasize a curriculum based around brute force memorization of the stuff on the test rather than actual learning. Since you can’t take a smart kid, wave him around on a political commercial and say you’ve succeeded, something tells me that they are still going to be putting the emphasis on these tests.

[DeadLamb]

Originally posted by GotNoRice
Eh, I heard a lot of stuff like this growing up

yeah one of the strange thing is that students always know who the good teachers are and who is just brutally bad but no one else ever seems to know.. I guess you can ask the students but those rating etc are not given much weight..

"Teachers employment should be tied to performance" is a nice idea but also some what unfair to the teachers..

Ya get the class that handed to you based on a school location.. One teacher gets a class of upper middle class kids who kick ass on the tests.. LA teacher gets a mix of say lower econ level of kids, many who may not even speak english etc and geeeee wow they don't score as well..

the school system fails being too many parents are looking to the school for 100% of the kids education. I just hope they don't turn to school voucher programs and gut the public school system and drag down the private even more with a flood of kids. Of course I'm NOT a fan of private schools.. Kids need to learn to get along with other kids but then easy for me to say, I don't have a kid being forced to Grant or some other pure shit school.

[Boss99]

I'm curious about what criteria the Gov. has planned to measure teachers performance by. If it's children's performance, then Deadlamb is dead on correct: The schools in a higher socio-economic area are going to stay employed and the entire Grant school district are about to be fired.

If it's based on what parents, or students for that matter, think then it becomes a popularity contest. It just sounds like a lose-lose situation.

It truly makes me fear for my kids' futures.

http://www.cpr.ca.gov for more details about all the Govs plans.