......It's the Texas Tribune. Now, I would urge you to look at the numbers that voted in the primaries. Ted more than doubled Beta's numbers.
I have a life long friend who is a teacher in Texas. He's left of center; go figure. Anyway, he's always advocating for more money for schools/teachers; complains about teachers' health-care premiums increasing; criticizes the "Robin Hood" plan; and hates Dan Patrick. Anyway, I once asked him: are the schools being as efficient with money as they could be? I got crickets. I also pointed out to him that the high school we grew up in, in ABC town, was like a slum compared to the high school in ABC town now, where he teaches. The ABC town high school of today is like a majestic palace compared to the one we attended. But we came out Ok. So, to the point: I think that it may be possible that there *is no good way* of incentivizing compensation for teachers, and also, relatedly, it may be possible that there *is no good way* of measuring efficiency in education. Any metric you could try to use -- increased graduation rates, test scores -- can be manipulated. It may very well be that all they can do is ask for more money, pleading relative poverty. But at a certain point, injecting more money into education -- whether in the facilities or the teachers -- has diminishing returns. The student also needs to have a stable home situation and a desire to learn. Money can't fix that.
id take an online poll with a grain of salt...its not a random sample survey. its people who go onto a website and decide to answer the poll question. just like id take the phone poll that showed cruz up by 9 with a grain of salt since only old people own land-lines these days. etiher way, the fact that a texas senate race is this close says a lot.
I would say select the bottom 20% worst performers that a teacher has at the beginning of the school year and track their improvement in test scores by the end of the year. The teacher that improves their lowest 20% the most should get rewarded more.
Polls are going to be tricky this year as the primaries have shown. The issue is that only likely voters are polled and recently a lot of unlikely voters have been voting in elections. Don't know if that will be the case here but I don't think a close race is good news for Cruz. I know a lot of people that are voting for a senate race that have never voted in a mid-term before.
In my example. one that's mired in a years long, extremely bloody, civil war with no end in sight? I don't know. Who are we to say that they should have to do that? How do you know they didn't try in the first place? How do you define what makes them a better place to live...at least one good enough that they shouldn't be forced to leave their homes that they didn't want to leave in the first place? When we become the country that turns people in need away for no other reason than the country they came from is a "s*** hole", then we just join the league of ordinary nations. We're no longer special.
So, to point one, when the immigrants/migrants are wanting to come here, that gives us a say. Secondly, I'm not too worried about the USA being "special." We can't save the world. But, as long as we have freedom of speech, and the rest of the bill of rights, and economic opportunity, then we will remain "special."
I wouldn't read too much into this one, turnout was abysmal (roughly 44K compared to over 200K in the previous election) plus the Texas GOP put a lot of money and resources into this race.
Low turn out plus an incumbent who was indicted for fraud. If Texas has low turnout, Ted Cruz should won easily.
1) There’s too much administration and way too many school districts. 2) Can’t fix home issues but we can bring back after school programs
This is so true and the reason why I think Cruz wins easily. Has he even started campaigning yet? All he has to do is put out a few ads saying Beto supports Hillary's emails and - BOOM - election won. This plus low voter turnout amongst the Dems. They're great at putting signs in their yards, bumper stickers on their cars and telling everyone who they're supporting and why, but when election day arrives, it seems like they forget to actually vote.
The problem with Texas Dems is not all those people - it's the border minorities that just don't vote - or put signs and bumper stickers up. Until Dems figure out how to convince those people to vote, they've got problems. Beto is an interesting test-case. He's really likeable, running basically the ideal positive campaign against an unpopular and unlikeable incumbent in a strongly pro-Dem year. If he can't win, the Dems are basically done in Texas for the foreseeable future.
Won't that incentive teachers to ignore their best and brightest and instead focus their energies on the worst performers? I agree that there is value to raising up the bottom, but maybe not at the expense of the top performers.
