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This makes so much sense that it’s bound to never happen (at least as long as teachers’ unions, educrats and politicians are in the mix). Jerry Pournelle makes the following suggestion as part of his response to a reader who was himself responding to an earlier comment on education by Pournelle. Confused? Go read the posts. 1 2
“As a first cut I would offer first grade teachers a bonus of 100% of base salary if 100% of the pupils could read at the end of first grade; 50% bonus if 99% (or all but one) can read; 10% bonus if all but two; no bonus otherwise. It would make first grade teaching interesting…”
Well, d’oh, of course! If a first grade teacher has more than a couple of students who cannot read by year’s end, they have simply not done their job. Now, that could be because some jackass administrator has placed so many barriers in the way of the teacher doing his/her job that it was nigh onto impossible to do any real teaching, but it’d more likely be because the teacher was taught wrong by some jackass school of education. As Pournelle further noted,
“… give a teacher a class of IQ 70 and it will be very hard work getting them to learn to read, and they won’t learn much else — but they WILL learn to read if properly taught.”
Big “if” there. Any readers with young children (or grandchildren or neices/nephews) might want to explore Roberta Pournelle’s reading program before some prison for kids warden (disingenuously called “public school principal/superintendant”) gets its paws on them and passes them to a hamstrung teacher. (Did I just label pubschool administrators as “other than human”? Yep. And I’ll do it again. As a class, the dumbest things in “public education” are the critters that go into administration. Dumber than rocks—with the ocassional notable exception.)
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