I originally posted a similar column in The Examiner almost a year ago (12/09/2009). I'm afraid, if anything, the situation has become even more dire for the teaching profession in the past year. Mayor Bloomberg's plan to publish the "ratings" of teachers in the press -- on the basis of test scores -- is one more example of the public humiliation many of the best New York City teachers have to endure in the interest of "educational reform. " Perhaps the following article can put this absurd situation into perspective.
If doctors were treated like teachers:
1. "Charter hospitals" could certify "smart people" as qualified to begin practicing medicine without any prior experience in the field if they had had "some business background."
2. Since a "doctor" can "doctor" anything, a cardiologist would be on staff at a hospital in place of a urologist when there was a shortage of urologists. The cardiologist could "learn on the job." Of course, a general practitioner could be used in the place of any specialist since such a doctor would have "general knowledge" of anything involving medicine.
3. Whenever a doctor gave a patient a prescription, the patient's parents could come to the doctor's office demanding he or she change the prescription since the parents "knew better."
4. Because of a shortage of doctors, Mayor Bloomberg would institute a summer "crash course" in medicine for people who had no background in the field but "liked playing doctor" when they were little. Those who got through the six-week course would then be considered qualified to care for the most severely ill patients since no other doctors would want to do the job.
5. Doctors would qualify for "permanent license" if they showed by their rates of patient survival that they were "improving their scores." In order to do so, doctors would only treat the healthiest patients and refuse to treat the sicker ones to keep their rates of successful treatment high.
6. Many "Charter hospitals" would be established in which unlicensed doctors could practice the latest techniques on their patients, using the funds of public hospitals to subsidize them. Of course, only the healthiest patients, whose relatives cared enough about their condition to place them in a charter hospital would be admitted. Any patient exhibiting signs of serious illness would be immediately discharged and placed in a public hospital.
7. The average longevity of a doctor's career would be considered "normal" if he or she practiced for no more than five years.
8. If a hospital proved to have a poor "patient survival record," it would be closed down and three new hospitals would be created in the same building with nothing to do with each other but with three times as many bureaucrats running them.
9. Any patient who entered a doctor's care when already terminally ill would be expected to make a full recovery -- or the doctor would be considered incompetent.
10. A special program -- "Heal for America" -- would recruit students who graduated from the top colleges in the country but with no background in pre-medicine to "try to make a difference" by being placed in the most severely crowded and understaffed clinics and hospitals so they could know "what it feels like" to be a doctor, if only for a few years.
11. The American Medical Association would be condemned by politicians and health "experts" for "protecting incompetent doctors" on the basis of mortality rates in high-risk neighborhoods and the organization would be disbanded as a "menace to public health."
Richard C. Senelick, M.D.: Do TVs Belong In Doctor Waiting Rooms?
1) They would take summers off and only work 180 days a year
2) They would be able to treat patients after completing an undergraduate education and a standardized tests that is set at 8th grade reading and math competencies (Praxis I)
3) They would achieve tenure after 1-2 years and couldn't be fired
4) They would be able to commit scandalously poor medicine and their union contracts would stop the hospital from firing them
5) Exceptional doctors would be paid exactly the same as the worst doctors
2.) True. But to keep their doctor's licenses, they'd be required to continue to go to school, at their own expense, for their entire career, eventually ending up with more education than doctors are currently required to have.
3.) Not true. Tenure usually takes longer than 2 years, and grants only the right to due process. Tenured teachers can be and are fired if they're not doing their jobs.
4.) Not true. See #3.
5.) Sort of true, within one hospital. But doctors in wealthy areas, where people can afford to pay attention to their own health and are educated enough to do so, would be rated as exceptional and paid accordingly. Doctors in impoverished areas would be called "the worst," even if they were actually more knowledgeable and skilled, and paid much less.
Probably a good idea to become informed before discussing stuff like this. It never makes you look good to spout common misinformation about something you don't understand.
I'm sure that you have parents who choose your school because there's no tenure. That's because tenure has been demonized in the media, and so they don't understand what it means. The due process rights provided by tenure are one of the reasons that traditional public schools do a better job educating students than charters do: in traditional public schools, a tenured teacher can be fired for not doing his job (and this is much more common than a charter school being closed for poor performance). He can't be fired because the principal's niece just graduated and wants a teaching job.
As for teacher pay: yes, teachers in places with a very high cost of living, like NY, are paid more than the average college graduate, who lives and works in middle-America with a much lower cost of living. That's a deliberately misleading comparison. Compare teachers to other professionals in the same area, and you can't argue that teachers are well paid.
What a great piece.
The saddest part is that there are plenty of kids out there without a parent or guardian at all. Who watches out for their long-term goals?
And frankly, some of what you suggest does happen in medicine. For instance, my daughter comes down with strep and I KNOW Amoxicillin does not work for her, so yes, I DO tell the doctor to prescribe a different antibiotic. Furthermore, when you have tried something your doctor prescribes and it doesn't work, you go back and try something else. They don't continue to give you the same treatment regardless of the failure or success of the outcome.
What's more, you don't get a new doctor every year that insists on trying the same failed medicine that has not worked for you and who refuses to listen when you tell them, "Hey, this doesn't work, but this does!"
As well, when you walk into a doctor's office they generally diagnose you before they start prescribing remedies to fix what's wrong with you.
In medicine, much like in education, you have your general practitioner and your specialist. We have reading specialists,speech pathologists, behavioral specialists etc. Much like there are Cardiologists and Dermatologists.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in your argument is that when you don't like your doctor or the diagnoses, you can either find a new one or seek a second opinion.
Doctors do not generally blame poor parenting for a child's ailments and thank goodness they don't- I would hate to think that a doctor would look at my asthmatic child and say, "Well, that's the result of poor parenting, they are un-treatable."
I also admit my bias. My sister is a first-year teacher with Teach for America and I think she should be lauded for her willingness TO make a difference in education. In a time when teachers are leaving the profession in droves, you have someone who gave up a job making six figures to take one making in the low $40's because she felt like she could change something. Perhaps you could liken it to a Red Cross volunteer who goes to a third world country to distribute vaccines.
If a doctor was being held responsible and criticized for the number of ailments that a child has and how many prescriptions he has to write, he will start looking closer at reasons.
Medicine is hardly a "science", it's more like a religion. The fact is most doctors don't know all that much. Your general practice doctor does what exactly? Give you check ups (most everything they do a nurse can do), if you have a cold they over-prescribe anti-biotics (which has done more harm than good, and a computer program could do the same thing). Otherwise if it's something they can't handle, they refer you to a specialist (which a nurse could do). If you think doctors are practicing a science, you've bought a bill of goods sold to you by the medicine-men at the AMA. Most of the ills your body gets will heal on their own, without a doctors help. Most of the "cures" a doctor offers were invented long ago by other people. Most doctors I know are no better at diagnosing an illness than your average person with Internet access (often they are worse).
Don't even get me started on specialists. If you had a pain in your gut, the "diagnosis" would depend on whom you see. If you happen to see an OBGYN, they will say "You need a hysterectomy", if you saw a proctologist he's say "you need a colonoscopy". Most specialists aren't interested in you other than how much money they can pull out of you - when they look at you, they are really figuring how big a monthly payment they can afford for a new luxury car.
It depends on what type of illness they are suffering from and how far along that illness was when they first stepped in the doctor's office.
How many hospitals would remain open if they had the same problem (i.e. districts)?
It depends on where the hospital is located, what each individual patient's medical history is and how long they have been going to the same hospital. What if most of your patients didn't speak English to tell you what was wrong with them, but you are not allowed to speak any language other than English in your examining room and their health or lack thereof could get you fired? What if they had no insurance to boot?
The education situation is way more complex than your response to this article indicates. It is obvious that you have not taught in a public school.
One of the major misunderstanding regarding the rubber room is that it is the fault of the union. Teachers are in the rubber room pending an investigation by the board of education. If they dedicated the required number of investigators to do the job properly, people would not be stuck in the rubber room for such longs periods of time. Remember that teachers in these rooms often do not even know the accusations that have put them there and they are indeed waiting for due process. I've always heard that people are innocent until proven guilty. Do teachers not also deserve this right? Would you be comfortable if you lost your job and pay for an unsubstantiated claim from just anybody? There are cases where teachers are in the rubber room due to accusations from vindictive administrators for personal rather than professional reasons.
When a teacher is proven to have committed a serious crime, they lose their jobs. They have the right to defend themselves like everybody else. Teachers have actually been fired for numerous things including comments written on facebook and sleeping in class.
And, yeah, if a doctor worked with terminally ill patients, 100% of their patients would die. Does that make them incompetent compared to a general practitioner?
1. Employees would never be fired, irrespective of performance, attitude or abilities. They'd practically have to murder someone first.
2. They'd get raises almost every year. If they didn't, they'd go on strike.
3. They'd get summers off with pay.
4. The entire community would be taxed to pay for Walmart, its products, its employees (and their summer breaks), no matter whether you buy from Walmart or not.
5. People would be forced to buy from Walmart under the threat jail time. Officers would keep track of you and how frequently you attended.
6. If you refused to pay your Walmart tax, they would kick you out of your home and give it to someone else.
7. Walmart employees would have total pay and benefits averaging nearly twice that of the community that supports them.
8. Anyone daring to speak against Walmart's tyranny or offering an alternative would be portrayed as being a heartless, knuckle-dragging troll who wants to eat children.
9. You could only buy what Walmart employees thought you needed, not what you really wanted.
10. Everything in Walmart would cost about 10 times as much as it should, but Walmart would be routinely broke, out of pencils, and unable to meet its budgets.
11. Walmart employees would be constantly (and laughably) comparing themselves to professional athletes, astronauts, doctors and other very highly skilled people.
12. Walmart employees would go apopleptic when presented with these truths.
To use Walmart as an analogy to teaching considering that Walmart employees are not required to have a degree of any kind to be employed as an "associate" is revealing since it has an historically bad record of employee treatment but here goes:
1.Teachers can be and some are fired all the time. But it takes administrators who are determined, thorough and informed of what good and bad teaching is to do so effectively and fairly.
2. TEACHERS CANNOT LEGALLY GO ON STRIKE. In NYC a teacher will lose her job if she does so.
3. Teachers are paid for ten months a year but can opt to have their monthly paychecks reduced during the school year so they can have income during the summer.They are NOT ELIGIBLE for unemployment compensation during the summers.
4. Everyone is taxed for certain public services including fire and police even if they have a private arrangement. IT'S CALLED DEMOCRACY!
5. I don't know of any case in which parents who chose to send their children to private schools were jailed for doing so. And, unfortunately truancy is rampant in many communities.
6. Property taxes and municipal taxes provide revenue for running government services: all of them.
7. The average salary of a starting teacher is in the $30-35,000 range.Where's your community: in Borneo? To be continued.
8. Among the roster of people who have recently criticized public school teachers or have supported summarily firing them are: President Obama, Michelle Rhee, Chancellor Joel Klein, Mayor Bloomberg and most everyone on Fox network including, probably, the doorman. I haven't heard that any of them have been "portrayed as being a heartless, knuckle-dragging troll who wants to eat children."
9. Are you a teacher, Seth? If you are, I would love to know what school you teach at in which the teachers were given the freedom to teach the way they wanted and what they wanted, that is, in a regular public school. Many teachers now have "scripted" classes from which they deviate on pain of discipline or worse. That is due to the "test-prep" mania that is infecting the nation's public school system and driving teachers out of the profession.
10. If you're correct that everything in the public schools "cost about 10 times as much as it should " some private suppliers must be making quite a fortune. I would suggest you check on your numbers before you make such a statement.
11. As far as "athletes, astronauts, doctors and other very highly skilled people" are concerned, unless I am self-deluded, they ALL WERE TAUGHT THEIR SKILLS BY TEACHERS, unless, of course, like your statements, their knowledge came out of thin air. Albert Einstein made his living as a teacher.
12. I'm not apoleptic: just saddened by your ignorance.
1. Teachers are evaluated annually and when administrators subjectively don’t approve of lesson plans, discipline, test scores, etc., the teacher will not get contract renewal. This has happened to coaches of poorly scoring teams that do well in the classroom and to provide nepotistic hiring due to too few teachers.
2. Many states froze raises this year due to poor tax revenues and less corporate donations after the economic downturn. Where were the massive strikes?
Plus, the raise is less than a percent from the meager starting salary.
3. Teachers are paid for their days in the classroom, often 180. The choice to get 10 or 12 monthly checks still provides the same meager total.
During most summer breaks, teachers are now forced to spend THEIR SALARIES on graduate courses, workshops, and conferences in order to keep their teaching license.
4. Less than 10% of taxes get directed at education. Don’t even try to make this a tax issue.
5. Truancy would be enforced for the children under 17 that do not attend school, but parents can declare “home-schooled” and no one gets jail-time. It is mostly used for teenagers that skip. Would like those freedom-fighters to hang out around your home during working hours?
6. …again with the taxes. Don’t worry; lots of it goes to political retirement after voting down teacher pay raises. Teachers have to put away for their own after much more than a four-year term.
As a side, I don't see this article as a complaint about doctor's pay. What I think it is saying is that the schools take anyone with a degree, doesn't adequately prepare them, and then expects them to achieve miracles, even though they have very little control over major components, such as curriculum, pacing of lessons, or even discipline. The field of medicine would never take people who are not trained and put them in charge of areas they have no expertise. Education does this all the time.