Random Quotes - November 2014

INEQUITY

Public Education Advocates Rally For Change

Competition doesn't work in education. We're not manufacturing ice cream, or playing professional baseball. We're trying to educate students and all students come to school with different needs. You can't call for competition when some students take 2 years to learn what other students come to school already knowing. You can't call for competition and still depend on teaching practices to improve through collaboration. You can't call for competition where some schools have fewer resources than others.

A high quality public education system is fully funded through a progressive tax system and is open to all students. It must provide the services each individual student needs.

“What’s at stake here is whether or not we’re going to have a robust, well-funded, high-quality system where people can just cross the threshold and receive the service for free and have the schools deploy whatever resources are necessary to meet the needs of that student as opposed to a selective, competitive system which will inevitably reproduce dramatic inequality we’re already seeing in our system.” -- Brian Jones

TENURE

The learning atmosphere in our public schools has deteriorated into one of constant drill, test, and punish. Developmentally inappropriate curricula, abusive testing regimes, and a lack of balance in education has taken over our schools. The people who do the work are blamed and blasted as incompetent and even more unbelievably, uncaring...as if people become professional teachers in order to hurt children. In Indiana, due process (often mislabeled "tenure") has been taken away from teachers. Depending on the actual contract language, teachers can be fired at the whim of an administrator. Is it any wonder that there are teachers who are afraid to speak out? And if teachers don't speak up for the abuses that the legislature and policy makers are foisting upon our schools, who will?

Legislators and policy makers are telling teachers how to teach, what to teach, and when to teach it and then blaming teachers when it doesn't work.

Where will the "great teachers" come from when the teaching profession is made less desirable? If teachers are punished based on the achievement of their students who is going to want to work with the hard-to-teach students? Who is going to want to work with students who come to school hungry, traumatized, or with untreated health problems if their livelihood depends on their students' achievement?

Cindi Pastore of The Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education (NEIFPE) wrote,

[Educators'] hands are tied by administrators whose hands are tied by legislators whose hands are filling up with money from special interest and profit driven groups. Time to stop this chain with your votes!!!

Moral Distress in Teachers by Walt Gardner

When teachers know that something is ethically wrong but don't speak out because of fear of retaliation by their principal, they suffer from the condition [of moral distress].

Although teachers don't take the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, they nonetheless are professionally responsible for acting ethically at all times. If it were not for the existence of tenure, teachers might be intimidated in remaining silent about anything they deemed inimical to the students.

Tenure Is a Civil Rights Issue by Peter Greene

...the types of due process derailing being promoted will (by design or not) directly attack the quality of the teaching staffs in the schools that can least withstand these attacks. Linking teacher job security and pay to student test scores makes it harder to recruit and retain teachers for the urban schools already socked in by poverty and suffering from the instability that comes from steady staff churn.

Massachusetts Proposes Plan to Chase Teachers Out by Diane Ravitch

How is it possible to improve education by ruining the lives of teachers? How is it possible to improve education by making test scores the measure of everything? Good business for Pearson, not so good for the children.

See the follow up...The Massachusetts Teachers Association Blasts State Plan re Evaluations

PRIVATIZATION

"Reformers" continue to point to test scores as the only way to prove that students are achieving as well as the only way to evaluate (blame) teachers, administrators, and school systems. Yet, when it comes to blaming teachers unions for all the problems in America's schools they calmly ignore test scores which show that states with high test scores have high union membership and states with low test scores have low union membership.

Likewise, "reformers" love to label schools as "failing" and ignore the well documented relationship between poverty and low achievement.

The labels and teacher bashing are important to "reformers." By continuing to label schools, teachers, and students as "failing" and blaming unions and teachers for that "failure" they deflect attention away from the corporate takeover of America and the inability of policy makers to eliminate or even reduce poverty.

Instead, "reformers" continue to erode the public confidence in public education in order to press for increased privatization.

Where is the accountability of the politicians and the policy makers for the high level of poverty in America? Where is the accountability of corporate America for the inequity running rampant through the nation?

"When Congress passes No Child Left Unfed, No Child Without Health Care and No Child Left Homeless, then we can talk seriously about No Child Left Behind." -- Susan Ohanian

Blame It All on Teachers' Unions By Walt Gardner

In what has become a mantra, corporate reformers argue that powerful teachers' unions are the primary cause of the failure of students to perform ("Teachers Unions vs. Charter Schools, The Wall Street Journal," Nov. 20, 2013). But the reality is quite different....

Lest I be accused of selective perception, I pose the following question: If teachers' unions are the villains, as charged, why do states, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, where they are weakest, persist in posting appalling results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress? Conversely, why do states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, where they are strongest, continue to post the highest scores? Clearly something else explains the disparity, but it is given short shrift by the media.

"Stop using the word "failing schools" -- no longer. The word is "abandoned schools," or come up with something else, but stop labeling our children. Stop labeling the buildings, and stop labeling the people who do the work." -- Karen Lewis

CHARTERS

On Education, Barack Obama is the President of Privatization. Can We Stop Him? Will We? by Bruce A. Dixon

Charter schools are private schools as long as they are not accountable to publicly elected school boards. They take public money, but they claim to be private entities when pressed to be accountable.

On every level, the advocates of educational privatization strive to avoid using the p-word [privatization]. They deliberately mislabel charter schools, just as unaccountable as every other private business in the land as “public charter schools,” because after all, they use public money. So do Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, but nobody calls these “public aerospace companies,” “public military contractors,” or “public banks.” For the same reason, corporate media refuse to cover the extent of the school closing epidemic, or local opposition to it, for fear of feeding the development of a popular movement against privatization, and Race To The Top, the Obama administration's signature public education initiative, and the sharp edge of the privatizers, literally driving the wave of school closings, teacher firings, and the adoption of “run-the-school-like-a-business” methods everywhere.

TESTING

Does Arne Duncan think ‘suburban moms’ are a gullible bunch? by Carol Burris (in Valerie Strauss, The Answer Sheet)

And that really sums up the thinking of Duncan and his cheerleading Chiefs. Their distrust of public schools and the democratic control of schooling run deep. It colors every solution that they propose. They have no idea how to effect school improvement other than by making tests harder and making sticks bigger. When punishing the school did not work, it morphed into punish the teacher through evaluations based on test scores. The reality that no country has ever improved student learning using test and punish strategies is lost on those who refuse to address the greater social issues that we who do the work confront every day.

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Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 201

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Back to School

Walk through any discount department store today and it's clear that it's "that time of year" again...time to buy school supplies.

I remember as a kid being excited each year when it was time to get new school supplies. I wasn't a great student, but each year was an opportunity to start over...a chance to do better. For me it was like baseball...no matter how much trouble a team had one year, the next year, when the season starts, everyone has an equal chance to become the champion. Every year is a fresh start.

There are some things I miss about teaching...

I miss the beginning of the school year.

What? It's monumentally stressful -- getting the room set up, counting out books, sorting out name tags/desk charts, making a schedule, going to meetings, talking to last year's teachers, the late nights/early mornings of seemingly endless preparation and paperwork -- the 12-14 hour days.

True...I don't miss all that, but I do miss the excitement of meeting new children. I miss the delightful experience of learning about young humans and their fresh minds, sharing new ideas and getting to know new senses of humor and interests. I miss watching them come into the building for the first time in the new year...the confused, and excited grins on their faces as they search for their classroom and their new teacher. I even miss the ones who come in terrified and lost...I miss how that fear changes to pleasure as they see the familiar face of a friend from the previous year, or to relief as they finally find their classroom and seat...their own personal space, safe and clean.

The newness of each school year is one of those thousands of little things which makes teaching so much fun and such a great adventure. Every year is a new beginning...a chance to start over...a chance to do better. Every year is a fresh start...for teachers as well as students.

In 1951 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled The Fun They Had*. It's the story of a young boy who finds a book...

The Fun They Had

The story takes place in the year 2157, where teaching is performed by computer-like robots with vast information stores. The protagonists of this story are two children, Tommy and Margie. Tom, the older child, finds a real book in his attic. He is very surprised by the object because the words on the page do not move like the words on the screen of their mechanical teacher.

The book describes the school from centuries earlier, where there was a real man as teacher that gave homework and asked questions to his students, and all the boys and girls went into a special building. Margie is very curious but her mother calls her because it is time for school. School for Tom and Margie takes place at home in a room where they do homework and hand it in via a proper slot in a mechanical teacher.

The teacher in Asimov's story was mechanical -- a precursor of today's online schools. Margie thought that it would be so much more fun to attend a school like in the old days...with real people, a human teacher and other children.

Walt Gardner, while scolding teachers unions for alienating their most logical supporters, wrote,

...public schools are at an historic crossroads. Whether they will even exist decades from now is uncertain. If they somehow manage to survive, however, I don't think they'll be recognizable.

Perhaps not...it's obvious that the public school system of the US is in flux...charters, vouchers, online schools...who knows what things will look like when Margie and Tommy find a real book about todays schools 145 years in the future.

But if they are so different that there's no interaction among children, if real live human teachers are distant or non-existent, then something more than simple buildings will have been lost. A school is more than just the building, the books, the pencils, and the iPads.

A school is a place where children and adults begin fresh each year to explore the world together. It's a place where one generation literally sits at the feet of their elders to be introduced to our cultures, our knowledge and our shared experiences. It's a place where wonder grows in a community of learners.

One cannot get that experience sitting in front of a computer at a virtual school.

Today I miss the beginning of the school year because I'm not there to enjoy it. I dread the possibility of a time when I might miss it because it no longer exists.



* According to Wikipedia, The Fun They Had was written as a personal favor for a friend, and became more popular than Asimov ever expected. It is the most anthologized of all his stories and has appeared in many publications outside of the science fiction genre. I first read it when I found it included in a basal reader from which I taught during my first full year as an elementary teacher.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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It's No Stealth Campaign: Privatization is the Goal

This morning Walt Gardner wrote that there is a stealth campaign to privatize education. He supports his thesis by discussing the increase in the number of virtual schools.

The Stealth Campaign to Privatize Education

Despite no independent evidence that students learn more effectively through the use of technology than through traditional pedagogy, Levesque [Patricia Levesque, adviser to former Governor Jeb Bush and now head of Meridian Strategies LLC, a Tallahassee-based lobbying company] has managed to convince the Legislature otherwise, in the process boosting the profits of her educational technology clients. The result has been to pave the way for private virtual schools. Strangely, the move has prompted little public debate or opposition.

...what is happening under the guise of putting children first is a thinly veiled attempt to privatize all public schools. Florida is not alone. Pennsylvania and Indiana are also in the vanguard, even though the evidence is far from convincing. In fact, a recent study of virtual schools in Pennsylvania by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that students in online schools performed significantly worse than students in traditional schools.

If the $2.2 billion spent on software for schools in 2010 produced anything near the outcomes that supporters claim, I would be far more receptive. But the evidence is not there...

This blind faith in technology is extremely troubling at a time when the demand is for decisions that are evidence-based. But when the money to be made is so great, companies will not be deterred from lavishly spending on wooing legislators with their fairy tales. At some point even the most skeptical among them caves in. When that happens, another step is taken along the road to privatization.

He is correct that virtual schools are an additional step on the road to privatization, and those who are pushing virtual schools might be trying to do it without too much fanfare. The movement to destroy America's public school system and replace it with private schools, however, is not a stealth movement.

In 1995 Milton Friedman called for the abolition of public schools. And he did it without stealth or subterfuge. In Public Schools: Make Them Private, he said,

Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.

The quality of schooling is far worse today than it was in 1955.

Wrong. Public schools are far from perfect. However, his comment above is wrong in at least three ways.

First of all, competition doesn't help public schools. If it did, then every public school system with charters in the same district...and every public school in a state which allowed vouchers...would be getting "better." If incentives and competition among schools and teachers made students learn more then the merit pay schemes, which have been shown to be ineffective, would have worked better. See HERE.

Second, and more important, charter schools and private schools are not, as a whole, better than public schools. Yes, some charter schools and some private schools might have higher test scores than some public schools, but on the whole public schools achieve higher than private and charter schools. See HERE, HERE and HERE.

Third, schools with low numbers of students in poverty score higher than even the highest scoring countries in the world. The quality of American public schools is good. The problem with low performing schools is not the quality of public schools, but poverty.

In a new report by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, researchers found that the achievement gap between rich and poor is now greater than the achievement gap between white and black students. It's poverty that is the basis of low achievement. Not race. Not bad teachers. Not bad students.

The Academic Achievement Gap Between The Rich And Poor Is Double The Gap Between Whites And Blacks

“Family income is now nearly as strong as parental education in predicting children’s achievement.” This groundbreaking research is more evidence that America is devolving into a rigid, class-based society where the 99 Percent continue to struggle to get by as a small aristocracy rises.

Once again we see that the problem with America's public schools is child poverty...the highest in the industrialized world.

The Friedmanesque obsession with privatizing everything in sight has already brought us high unemployment (yes, the "job-makers" still have their tax breaks...but there are still millions unemployed), and the highest national poverty levels in a generation. Do we want the same people who brought us the banking/Wall Street fiasco telling us what to do with our public schools? I think not.

The privatizers want the money the country spends on public education. The religious right wants to theocratize public schools. Jefferson's concept of an educated populace, was based on the principle that universal education results in a population of good citizens. His plan involved an educational progression that started with free, local, elementary schools. The inclusion of women, blacks and native americans had to come later, and at high cost. Free public education, while given tacit acknowledgement in federal law, left out children of color until Lyndon Johnson forced the issue.

Killing public education is based on selfishness, pure and simple.

frharry, a commenter at Religion Dispatches online magazine said,

“Increasingly Americans are saying we do not want to be a nation, we do not want to be a single people. And without a single story, we won’t be. Without a shared set of knowledge and understandings, we can’t be. And without the resolve to remain united, we have no way to be.”

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What? You think I'm paranoid because I believe the corporate and religious right wants to privatize education? Read:

Privatization of Public Education

Turning the operation of public schools over to private companies is a controversial idea based on the less-controversial notion that part of what makes improving public schools so hard is that they are bogged down in bureaucratic mire.

Advocates of privatization ventures see in them the combined virtues of government and business. They argue that government's oversight function and its responsiveness to the needs of citizens can be retained while taking advantage of private enterprise's ability to be more efficient, reduce costs, and maximize production—in this case, student achievement.

Religious Right Dream of Privatized Public Education Gets Boost

The longstanding religious right goal of privatizing control and/or ownership of public education is being pushed along by the ongoing economic crisis, budget deficits, tax concerns and anti-government/anti-union sentiment. Since the Reagan Administration, religious conservatives have pushed for the elimination of the Federal Department of Education. The strategy has been to move from federal control, to state control, and then toward privatization.

Rick Scott’s plans to massively expand Florida’s voucher plan, which would inevitably result in taxpayer money funding religious education in Christian schools and Christian home schools. The plan would save money because the dollar amount of vouchers is lower than the actual cost of vouchers due to additional state infrastructure costs.

The result of these reforms is likely to be a fractured educational system incapable of serving the very purpose of public education: to ensure an educated citizenry capable of participating in a democracy.

Abolish the Education Department? Abandoned Idea Gets New Life

...all of the GOP candidates said they would either get rid of the department -- created in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter -- or seriously diminish its function. Their uniform responses earned wild applause during the debate.

Religious Right Spokeshole: Time to Destroy Public Education

It is time to drive public schools out of business by driving them into an open marketplace where they must directly compete with schools not run by the government or staffed by members of parasitic public employees’ unions.

Who Will Staff Tomorrow's Schools?

The number of new teachers is growing in the US as more and more experienced teachers are leaving the classroom for less stressful, better paying jobs or early retirement. Where will the mentors for new teachers come from? Will schools have a balance of new and experienced teachers?

Walt Gardner, in The Changing Demographics of the Teaching Profession says that teachers are getting younger and younger.

In the 1987-88 school year, for example, 14 years was the most common level of experience. But by 2007-08, it was one or two years.

And new teachers are coming from other certification routes...not just university schools of education. It doesn't matter where they get their training (assuming that they get any at all), they will eventually be trained through the classroom experience.

...new teachers from any certification route, no matter how promising, are untested. The crucible of the classroom will determine if they have what it takes to be successful...nearly half of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years...It is psychologically costly for students because the deep bonds they form with their teachers are severed when their teachers depart.

The teaching profession is going through a metamorphosis. No one knows what the eventual outcome will be. But I don't think it will be recognizable in the next two decades. 

I say that primarily because the fun has been taken out of teaching by endless rules and regulations that have effectively tied the hands of classroom teachers. Teachers in the past never chose the profession for power, fame or money. They did so because they loved their subjects, enjoyed young people and felt appreciated. It will take unusually dedicated college graduates to pass up opportunities outside of education, as immediately measurable outcomes become the only thing that matters.

It has become harder and harder to teach. With the testing insanity growing to include pay based on test scores, teachers are going to avoid teaching hard to educate children. The gaps between rich and poor will grow.

In a blog entry titled A Moment of National Insanity, Diane Ravitch said,

The corporate reformers have done a good job of persuading the media that our public schools are failing because they are overrun by bad teachers, and these bad teachers have lifetime tenure because of their powerful unions...I'm sorry to say that Race to the Top, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have stirred up a frenzy of anti-teacher sentiment that hurts even our very best teachers, by their much-publicized search for "bad teachers." 

... 

Our schools remain subject to a failed federal accountability system. We are packing children into crowded classrooms, ignoring the growing levels of child poverty (the U.S. now leads all advanced nations in infant mortality), and putting fear into the hearts of our nation's teachers. Who will want to teach? How does any of this improve schools or benefit children? Do you understand it? I don't.

Some experienced teachers are leaving the country. NBC aired an interview with Stephanie Olson, a high school English teacher in Arizona for 10 years with 2 Masters degrees.

Classroom 'crisis': Many teachers have little or no experience

Stephanie Olson...has had enough.

"I'm doing more work, but I'm getting less money every year," she told NBC News. "Instead of being excited about a job and looking forward to your job, you begin to fear your job. It becomes stressful, tiring and takes a toll not only on your health, but on your family."

So the Phoenix mother is uprooting her life and moving to Abu Dhabi, where she said will earn better pay and be more highly valued as a teacher. She landed the job through Teach Away, a Toronto-based agency that helps North Americans find teaching jobs overseas.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"Sometimes, the best teachers are the ones to leave," Olson said, adding "they feel like they are mistreated."

Hypocrisy Again

Walt Gardner in his Reality Check blog takes the "backlash" to task for hammering teachers for their "cushy" jobs. If teaching is such a great job, why is there a 50% dropout rate among beginning teachers?

The backlash should be against millionaires and billionaires who brought us the "Great Recession."

Walt says it best. Hypocrisy of Education Free Marketeers:

The rolling demonstrations that began in Wisconsin over collective bargaining rights for public sector unions have been the subject of exhaustive coverage by the media. But there's one aspect that so far has escaped their examination: The reaction to the protests by supporters of free markets exposes the basic contradiction of their position.

The essence of the backlash is that in the Great Recession teachers have it too good at a time when employees in the private sector have it very bad. They get Cadillac pensions, enjoy lavish benefits, have summers off, go home at 3:00, and receive substantial salaries.

If all of these things are true, then why don't these critics become teachers? After all, if teaching is such a sweet deal, then in a free market it should be attracting overwhelming numbers of applicants. That's how the law of supply and demand works. It's the basis for claiming that competition between schools and parental choice will result in good schools thriving and bad schools closing.

These free marketeers, however, engage in selective perception. They could have become teachers if teaching were the plum job they imagine. Instead, they chose to work in the private sector for reasons known only to themselves. No one forced them to follow that route. But rather than looking inward, they misdirect their anger and frustration at teachers, who fought for what they have over the decades through their unions. If unions are as powerful as they maintain, then why don't they form their own unions and fight for similar benefits?

The fact is that these critics would be shellshocked if they were to become teachers. They would quickly find out that their conception of teaching is a fantasy. It is damn hard work that nothing in their years of experience in business every prepared them for. Otherwise, why would teacher turnover be so high? No business reports a 50 percent churn rate in personnel in five years. In some urban districts, the time frame is three years, according to a 2006 study by the Haberman Educational Foundation. Even Teach for America, which recruits only the elite of the elite, can hold on to only 17 percent of its graduates beyond their two-year commitment.

Teaching is neither for missionaries nor mercenaries. It is a career for those who understand from the outset the sacrifices and payoffs. Whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages is a personal decision. But remember that no career is without tradeoffs. That's something for critics of the demonstrations to bear in mind.

By the way, teaching is a great job...if you have the patience, intelligence, and perseverance to do it well. The rewards are priceless. That's why I did it for 35 years.

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Teacher Absences

There's a new central office administrator in the school system from which I retired last June. One of his "pet" concerns is teacher absences.

The administrator, Mr. H, is trying to limit the number of days off teachers take. This makes sense from a fiscal point of view since when teachers are absent they get paid anyway and use a benefit day, and a substitute must also be paid.

The problem comes with Mr. H's attitude. According to some teachers, he acts condescending and overbearing. This may or may not be true, depending on one's point of view, however, the issue of teacher absences is indicative of other problems.

In his blog Reality Check, Walt Gardner wrote about teacher absenteeism in Central Falls Rhode Island. His comments are specific to the Rhode Island school district, but he makes some points which can be generalized to other schools and school systems. Mr. H, if you're reading this (which I doubt), pay attention. Perhaps you can figure out why teacher absences are a problem in our school district.

Nationwide, 5.3 percent of teachers are absent from the classroom on any given day, according to a 2008 study by the Center for American Progress. In New York City, one-fifth of teachers were absent for more than two weeks in the previous school year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Absenteeism was highest in schools serving the most disadvantaged students. In impoverished Brownsville, for example, 24.4 percent of teachers were out more than the 10 sick days allowed, compared with 13.2 percent in the posh Upper East Side.

Research shows that teachers who teach in high poverty schools are absent more. This makes sense, since there is generally more stress in those schools. The stress can come from a variety of areas, btw...students, administration, parents, and most of all, government threats of punishments for lack of "adequate yearly progress."

In our system, though, this does not seem to be a consistent pattern. Schools with high poverty rates do not seem to have more teacher absences than schools with fewer students living in poverty.

There is another issue, though, which I think relates specifically to our school system.

...It's here that it's instructive to look at San Diego.

From 1998 to 2005, teachers were subjected to an aggressive reform campaign without their input that was unprecedented in educational history. In The Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books, 2010), Diane Ravitch devotes an entire chapter to what transpired. A wave of depression and anxiety swept teachers, forcing them to seek medical attention at the local Kaiser Permanente clinic. Once a new superintendent who embarked on a more collaborative strategy took over, clinic visits dropped precipitously.

The lessons from San Diego become even more relevant because in the 1990s, its schools were widely considered one of the best for an urban district. But despite San Diego's reputation, it didn't take long for Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor, to destroy morale as city superintendent. He rejected research that emphasized the importance of involving teachers in change, believing that what he was doing was in the best interests of students.

A similar rationale is heard at Central Falls High School. But when control supersedes consensus, it invariably results in severe teacher stress. In San Diego, Ravitch says that many teachers complained of "a climate of fear and suspicion," and of being "exhausted, stressed out, and in some cases, fearful of losing their jobs if they do not perform under this new program."

The low morale...the climate of "fear and suspicion" pervades our school district. Here are a few reasons. I'm sure current teachers in the system could add more...

• The superintendent presented, and the school board approved, a plan to save millions of dollars for the school system. The plan would close 6 elementary schools, and move the students to centralized locations in and around high schools. A referendum to increase income from the community was soundly defeated during the last election. Teachers in the closing schools are uniformed about timelines for closing...about where they will be teaching...about cuts that need to be made...
• During the last round of contract negotiations, the school board's team would not negotiate. They came to each meeting with a "this is what we want" attitude. There was no give and take and no discussion. The presentations from the school board's team did not respond to teachers proposals. It was not negotiations...it was not discussion. At the last minute, the school board agreed to language about parent teacher conferences, while teachers accepted a large increase in insurance premiums (a 500% increase gradually introduced over the next few years), a zero percent pay increase, and a retirement incentive package (which I took).
• Elementary teachers have been given a curriculum developed with teacher input (a committee of classroom teachers) which takes much of the day to day decision making away from individual teachers. Much of the rest of the country has experienced this, but it's new in our school system. Teachers are now facilitators of the new curriculum. Each school has an instructional coach. The curriculum was given to the teachers with a minimal amount of training. What training there was, at least at the beginning, was scheduled to take place during the teachers' preparation time which meant less time to prepare lessons and materials.

Low morale leads to high turnover...high absentee rate...

There is little local control in elementary schools. Decisions from the central office are dumped on the principals who deliver it to teachers. The teachers are obliged to follow through. Directives come from above. There's little room for decision making at the building level. Complaints made to the principals might be listened to...but nothing can be done to change things at the local level.

Scripted curriculum + reliance on "data" (using DIBELS at the elementary level) from standardized tests + lack of opportunity for teacher individualism or creativity + loss of buildings to closings and the fear of job loss due to cutbacks = low morale = teacher absences.

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Who's a Good Teacher?

Here's an interesting post by Walt Gardner about the firing of 241 DC Public Schools teachers...and teacher evaluations. He makes a rather unique suggestion that part of a teacher's evaluation should come years after his/her students have finished school...interesting.

Who's a Good Teacher by Walt Gardner