About a month ago I found a book in our school library under the category of teacher's aid. Being a brand new book and all as well as meant for teachers, I asked my librarian if I could take it out, luckily I was able to. I'm dissapointed to say I don't remember the author or the title of the book but I remember much of what it talked about.
The author was a current High School principal who had taught in schools all over New England over the course of the last 30 years. He identified a couple main problems: The difficulty for good teachers to get into the profession, the lack of support for new teachers and a no poroper way of judging teachers. I am very sorry for my lack of exact statistics and I promise to find them on Monday, but around a fifth of teachers quit in their first year and in some States as many as 60% drop out in their first five years. I said earlier that the best teachers tend to be the ones most dedicated to their students and the ones who can use creative alternatives to
inspire their students. Yet the in class studying mixed with closed minded and outdated tenure teachers in High Schools weed many of these individuals out before they're given the oppertunity to flourish. If one can make it through University and into a full time teaching position they're often given some of the hardest assignments. For some reasons new teachers are often expected to teach the most difficult classes (student wise) like -2 or Applied subjects. Last year we had a teacher who just graduated from Ottawa and had moved to Alberta to find a job, she studied English and Psychology in University yet they had her teaching Social. My physics teacher also had a degree in Math and Chemistry yet had to learn the current day Physics lesson from the departement leader the day before she taught it to us.
As others have mentioned, teachers can't really be fired, especially more experienced teachers, so new incoming teachers often take the fall. One of the problems as author man (who I again apologize for forgetting the name of) outlined is that there is no criteria for judging teachers. My Junior High Science teacher was 79 at the time and had no business teaching anymore. Her class was an excuse to do whatever you pleased especially since her eyesight was going. Yet there was absolutely no way to terminate her position as she had been teaching for over 50 years, except for asking her to retire that is. A lack of leadership in schools contributes alot to this. High School principals are too busy with business and disciplinary actions to properly and regularly assess the performance of their teachers. This is why the Principal position needs to be sepperated, giving one person the ability to focus on classroom environments and teacher progression. And with set criteria this person could also be in charge of teacher movement.
Moving on. :P Tuition costs need to be lowered and teacher salaries are in need of increase to keep the profession competitive. Plus many of the teachers at my school often put in 10-12 hours a day yet are only payed for 6-8 of those hours. Not much encouragemet from a financial standpoint. =/ And on tuition prices, most of the kids I talk to at my school would love to go to a University or college next year, and many of them plan to but the financial matters behind it often cause more stress then the actual academic requirements. I'm all for learning balance in life but working at school to pay off 10-40 000$ loans is raising the bar too high. The future marine in the video Live_Wire posted is a perfect example.
The following does have to do with school but isn't really related to the problems with the education system so if you want to hear me rant about the "prestigous" schools of Canada, he you go:
The last thing I'd like to comment on is curriculums, mainly that of the English and Social Studies ones. I don't have time to write any more but I'll say that in Alberta the English curriculum is confusing at the best of times while the Social ones is simply a diluted mess.
I'm not from Canada, but I'm actually taking a class on education itself because it's something that I'm interested in. You've highlighted a lot of the things that we've talked about in that class. :)
I think one of the big problems with education is that, a lot of the time, it's just been a "fallback" for people. Can't get a job doing what you
want to do, like becoming a scientist? Teach science! You played college football and you can't get into pro? Teach
something and then just go for the head coaching job! I mean, it's a lack of people that enjoy the art of teaching for what it is, and just take it to be a paying job. It's a hell of a lot harder than it looks.
And yeah. Teacher tenure (is that the proper term? iunno) is one of the most hotly contested topics as far as education goes. Once a teacher has been around for over five years or so, after the point that principals and etc come in to watch their class and see how well they do, they pretty much cannot get fired. And there's really no way to determine or compare, really, how well a teacher has taught, so you can't use test scores as a basis of how well the teacher does his or her job. It's a difficult topic, yeah.