No Animal Left Behind

From SOS Million Teacher March on Facebook. Click the cartoon for the link.

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."

Just Say No to the Waiver: Part 2

(Click Here for Part 1)

UPDATE: Schools Matter published this from teacher Michelle Newsum. Click on the link to read the whole thing.

Three Good Anwers to Poisonous Waiver Plan: No Thanks, I Said No, and Hell No

The National Academy of Sciences states, "There is no research base to support high stakes testing."Yet 'reformers' continue to push excessive and expensive testing to (line publishers' pockets and) discover which schools are 'failing' and punish them. (This, by the way, hasn't worked. Reconstituted and charter schools are not benefiting our kids. Indeed, according to a recent Stanford study, 83% of charter schools did not perform better than public schools.)

...

The billions of dollars saved from unbounded testing and carrot-and-stick reforms could then be used for real solutions such as:

* Reducing class size

(This is one of four K-12 reforms backed by rigorous evidence according to the Institute of Educational Sciences [Research arm of the Department of Education]

* Providing prenatal care for low income women

(Low income women are currently unlikely to receive adequate prenatal care. They have a high incidence of low birth weight babies. Low birth weight babies have a much higher incidence of learning disabilities)

* Funding public, school and classroom libraries

(Most children in high poverty areas have limited access to books)

* Providing quality professional development for teachers
* Including teachers, parents and students in legislative decision making

A Public Trust

There's a new tactic being used by those who wish to privatize America's public education system. It's called the "Parent Trigger." This tactic, as explained by Diane Ravitch in her Bridging Differences Blog,

...allows a majority of parents in a low-performing school to sign a petition that leads to various sanctions for the school: firing all or some of the staff, turning the school over to charter management, or closing the school. These are similar to the options in the U.S. Department of Education's School Improvement Grant program. All of them are punitive, none is supportive of changing the school for the better, and none has a shred of evidence to show that it will improve the school. Neither the Parent Trigger nor the federal SIG program offers any constructive alternatives to unhappy parents, only ways to punish the school for low scores.

The Parent Revolution is a group that encourages parents to utilize the Parent Trigger. Their goal, as claimed on their web site, is to "take back your school, for your child, your community and your future." The video on the home page states,

The only way to change [schools] is to give power to the only people who only care about children — parents.

Though worded carefully the intent of the comment is clear. The educators -- teachers, and administrators -- who work in the so-called 'failing' public schools, don't care about children.

Parents have the right to demand that schools meet the needs of their children. Municipalities, however, have the obligation to improve the schools. The trend encouraged by the US DOE, which began with No Child Left Behind and continues unabated with Race to the Top, is to throw schools filled with struggling students away, not fix them. They close schools that are in difficulty, ship the students to other schools, open charter schools, and/or fire teachers and principals. None of those "solutions" deal with the core issues of failing schools. None have any research basis whatsoever. The vast majority of charter schools don't perform better than the vast majority of regular public schools.

Ravitch concludes,

a public school is a public trust. It doesn't belong to the students who are currently enrolled in it or their parents or to the teachers who currently teach in it. All of them are part of the school community, and that community needs to collaborate to make the school better for everyone. Together, they should be able to redesign or create or discontinue programs and services. But collaboration is not the same as ownership. The school belongs to the public, to the commonwealth. It belongs to everyone who ever attended it (and their parents) and to future generations. It is part of the public patrimony, not an asset that can be closed or privatized by its current constituents.

If a school is dysfunctional, those who are in charge of the district are obliged to find out why and to do whatever they can to fix the problems. If the principal is incompetent, he or she should be removed. If there are teachers who are incompetent, they should be removed. If the school is doing poorly because it lacks necessary resources, the district is obliged to do whatever it can to improve the school.

ASIDE: The Parent Revolution in Action: McKinley Elementary School in Compton.

There does seem to be some overlap between the Parent Revolution and the Charter School industry. According to Larry Ferlazzo,

the chair of Parent Revolution’s board is the head of charter operator Green Dot Schools

and

Parent Revolution’s primary funders are the same ones who are the biggest funders of charter schools

So what we're looking at is a group with ties to charter entrepreneurs who are encouraging parents to take action to close their schools so they can be reopened...as charters.

Parent Revolution was instrumental in engaging the "parent trigger" at McKinley Elementary School in Compton California. A Charter school was established, but, a comment on Bridging Differences claims that,

Chaos ensued after the Parent Trigger was deployed against McKinley Elementary in Compton. After the dust settled, the Celerity charter operator opened this fall in a nearby church rather than taking over McKinley Elementary. The big news, as reported by the New York Times last week...is that only a small number of McKinley students have been enrolled in the new charter. So much for the notion that the families were clamoring to have this charter operator educate their kids. (Unless, of course, Celerity rejected many of the students, which is quite possible, though that would be a different story that also reveals what a failure this operation was.)

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Parents Across America

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