John Thrasher recently pulled his legislation to build golf courses on public parks (friends I can’t make this stuff up). He says he listened to the will of the people.
If that’s the case lets tell him we don’t want to slash education budgets while giving tax breaks to millionaires.
Let’s tell him not to pass unfunded mandates to school districts, that we want our education reforms based on things proven to work, not just the latest fad of the month and that we appreciate and respect our teachers. Senate bill 736 (the son of his senate bill six), has billions in unfunded mandates, is not research based (there is no study that says merit pay works) and harms the teaching profession.
Then let’s let him know, we understand he has a pathological hatred of unions especially teachers unions, but politics is supposed to be civil not about crushing your enemies when you get the chance. Tell him to drop his union busting bills
He says we listens to the people well let’s find out. Please contact him and ask him to the right things on all these issues.
John Thrasher, District 8
(904) 727-3600 * (Fax) 727-3603
E-mail: thrasher.john.web@flsenate.gov
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Showing posts with label merit pay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label merit pay. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
SB 736 gives teachers two options, retire or leave the state
From the Palm Beach Post
by Kevin D. Thompson
For the past 29 years, Sophia Youngberg has enjoyed her time as a teacher and couldn't see herself doing anything else.
But that's changed.
Youngberg, who turns 60 on Thursday, is seriously considering retirement after the Florida Senate last week passed an unpopular merit pay bill that will tie 50 percent of teacher salaries to the performance of their students on FCAT and other standardized tests over a three-year period. The bill, which passed by a 26-12 largely party-line vote, would also end the practice of basing layoffs on seniority, require school districts to develop assessments for grades and subjects not tested by FCAT and deny tenure to teachers hired after July 1.
The House is slated to begin debate today on the Senate bill. Democrats are expected to argue against the bill, but they are outnumbered 2-1 there as they were in the Senate. The bill is poised for a final vote Wednesday and, if passed as expected, would go to Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who campaigned in favor of the merit pay plan last fall and has said he would quickly sign it into law.
"There's a lot of veteran teachers out there and this bill is scaring a lot of them into retiring early," said Youngberg, a 21-year veteran at Citrus Cove Elementary in Boynton Beach. "I could do another five years, but honestly, now I'm not sure I want to."
It's not just veteran teachers who are thinking about retiring or leaving the state.
Jen Brown, an English teacher at Palm Beach Central High in Wellington, has been teaching for more than five years. While Brown, 27, said she loves her school and principal, she has been looking into the possibility of teaching in Canada.
"I love Palm Beach Central and I'm very happy there, but I can't risk my livelihood over factors I have no control over," Brown said.
Robert Dow, president of the Palm Beach County teachers union, said the state is changing the entire structure of how teachers are evaluated, paid, hired or fired without testing or piloting a program first.
"This is a grand experiment," Dow said.
Teachers have been railing against Senate Bill 736 for months, saying it would penalize teachers who teach students who have disabilities or have a history of struggling academically. The bill, teachers say, would also force them to only teach to the test and not allow them to develop students' critical thinking skills.
Brown, for instance, said she recently asked her students to pick a favorite character from Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck's literary classic, and to create a poster and a Facebook page for that character.
"But I can't do that anymore because it's not FCAT-tested," Brown said.
Catherine Martinez, an art teacher at Pahokee Middle, said she's concerned about how she will be evaluated because the subject she teaches isn't measured on a standardized test.
"Does that mean I'm going to be evaluated on how my students do on reading and math?" Martinez asked.
Bill supporters, however, say the current teacher evaluation system isn't effective and keeps too many bad teachers in the system.
Florida Department of Education Commissioner Eric Smith said in a statement the way teachers are evaluated now is "not useful" and relies too heavily on subjective observation.
"(It) fails to connect our teachers to the work of their students," Smith said.
The measure calls for teacher evaluations that would require districts to establish a system that rates teachers as "highly effective," "effective," "needs improvement" or "unsatisfactory." The intent of the bill is to pay teachers who are rated as effective and highly effective more fairly.
But teachers are concerned that if SB 736 is signed into law, many will shy away from teaching under-performing students, fearing they will lose money if they do.
At a recent school board meeting, Vice Chairwoman Debra Robinson said teachers who work with academically challenged kids should earn an "extra credit."
Beverly Blanchette, dean of theater at Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, pointed out that not all students test well and that a rigid, merit pay system doesn't take that into account.
"I was one of those children who didn't test well," Blanchette said. "But I was able to learn. No test could have foretold where I am today and fortunately my graduation and my teachers' pay wasn't based on my test scores."
Youngberg said she's concerned that the bill will make teachers more competitive and stop them from sharing teaching strategies if part of their salaries are based on how their students perform.
"The collegial atmosphere of a school is going to be destroyed," Youngberg said. "It's going to be a very cutthroat environment."
Then there's the question of where the money will come from to pay for the reforms. The district is in a serious budget crunch and facing a $100 million shortfall.
"How are they going to fund giving some teachers more money?" Youngberg wondered. "Or are they going to cut other teachers' pay? They haven't thought this bill through."
Martinez called the legislation a "magic wand" bill.
"The legislature is going to touch everyone on the head and - poof! - everything is going to be perfect," Martinez said.
But Sara Cuaresma, a biology teacher at Forest Hill High in West Palm Beach, said there's still time to work out the kinks if the state Education Department and the local school board can work together with teachers to design a better evaluation system.
"If the state really wants to evaluate teachers based on student performance, the teachers and the DOE should do the testing," Cuaresma said. "If we know what we really want and it's fair, I might agree with that."
Staff writer John Kennedy contributed to this story.
by Kevin D. Thompson
For the past 29 years, Sophia Youngberg has enjoyed her time as a teacher and couldn't see herself doing anything else.
But that's changed.
Youngberg, who turns 60 on Thursday, is seriously considering retirement after the Florida Senate last week passed an unpopular merit pay bill that will tie 50 percent of teacher salaries to the performance of their students on FCAT and other standardized tests over a three-year period. The bill, which passed by a 26-12 largely party-line vote, would also end the practice of basing layoffs on seniority, require school districts to develop assessments for grades and subjects not tested by FCAT and deny tenure to teachers hired after July 1.
The House is slated to begin debate today on the Senate bill. Democrats are expected to argue against the bill, but they are outnumbered 2-1 there as they were in the Senate. The bill is poised for a final vote Wednesday and, if passed as expected, would go to Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who campaigned in favor of the merit pay plan last fall and has said he would quickly sign it into law.
"There's a lot of veteran teachers out there and this bill is scaring a lot of them into retiring early," said Youngberg, a 21-year veteran at Citrus Cove Elementary in Boynton Beach. "I could do another five years, but honestly, now I'm not sure I want to."
It's not just veteran teachers who are thinking about retiring or leaving the state.
Jen Brown, an English teacher at Palm Beach Central High in Wellington, has been teaching for more than five years. While Brown, 27, said she loves her school and principal, she has been looking into the possibility of teaching in Canada.
"I love Palm Beach Central and I'm very happy there, but I can't risk my livelihood over factors I have no control over," Brown said.
Robert Dow, president of the Palm Beach County teachers union, said the state is changing the entire structure of how teachers are evaluated, paid, hired or fired without testing or piloting a program first.
"This is a grand experiment," Dow said.
Teachers have been railing against Senate Bill 736 for months, saying it would penalize teachers who teach students who have disabilities or have a history of struggling academically. The bill, teachers say, would also force them to only teach to the test and not allow them to develop students' critical thinking skills.
Brown, for instance, said she recently asked her students to pick a favorite character from Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck's literary classic, and to create a poster and a Facebook page for that character.
"But I can't do that anymore because it's not FCAT-tested," Brown said.
Catherine Martinez, an art teacher at Pahokee Middle, said she's concerned about how she will be evaluated because the subject she teaches isn't measured on a standardized test.
"Does that mean I'm going to be evaluated on how my students do on reading and math?" Martinez asked.
Bill supporters, however, say the current teacher evaluation system isn't effective and keeps too many bad teachers in the system.
Florida Department of Education Commissioner Eric Smith said in a statement the way teachers are evaluated now is "not useful" and relies too heavily on subjective observation.
"(It) fails to connect our teachers to the work of their students," Smith said.
The measure calls for teacher evaluations that would require districts to establish a system that rates teachers as "highly effective," "effective," "needs improvement" or "unsatisfactory." The intent of the bill is to pay teachers who are rated as effective and highly effective more fairly.
But teachers are concerned that if SB 736 is signed into law, many will shy away from teaching under-performing students, fearing they will lose money if they do.
At a recent school board meeting, Vice Chairwoman Debra Robinson said teachers who work with academically challenged kids should earn an "extra credit."
Beverly Blanchette, dean of theater at Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, pointed out that not all students test well and that a rigid, merit pay system doesn't take that into account.
"I was one of those children who didn't test well," Blanchette said. "But I was able to learn. No test could have foretold where I am today and fortunately my graduation and my teachers' pay wasn't based on my test scores."
Youngberg said she's concerned that the bill will make teachers more competitive and stop them from sharing teaching strategies if part of their salaries are based on how their students perform.
"The collegial atmosphere of a school is going to be destroyed," Youngberg said. "It's going to be a very cutthroat environment."
Then there's the question of where the money will come from to pay for the reforms. The district is in a serious budget crunch and facing a $100 million shortfall.
"How are they going to fund giving some teachers more money?" Youngberg wondered. "Or are they going to cut other teachers' pay? They haven't thought this bill through."
Martinez called the legislation a "magic wand" bill.
"The legislature is going to touch everyone on the head and - poof! - everything is going to be perfect," Martinez said.
But Sara Cuaresma, a biology teacher at Forest Hill High in West Palm Beach, said there's still time to work out the kinks if the state Education Department and the local school board can work together with teachers to design a better evaluation system.
"If the state really wants to evaluate teachers based on student performance, the teachers and the DOE should do the testing," Cuaresma said. "If we know what we really want and it's fair, I might agree with that."
Staff writer John Kennedy contributed to this story.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
The Florida legislature is about to drive education over a cliff
From Practical State.com
by Jeannie Smith
Much was trumpeted by the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation’s partnership with Hilborough County Public Schools (HCPS) to implement “groundbreaking approaches to ensure that all students have access to effective teachers in every classroom.” Within the $100 million grant was funding for a merit pay scheme based on student performance on standardized tests. Here are the operative points from the Foundation’s web site:
Measuring, supporting, and rewarding effective teaching.
Redesign the teacher evaluation system (so at least 40 percent is based on student achievement, compared with seven percent today), incorporating teams of highly trained teacher-evaluators, and linking evaluation to mentoring and professional development.
Establish a performance-based career ladder that raises the bar for tenure including an optional fourth year before awarding tenure.
Refine pay-for-performance by linking it to better measurements of student learning, teacher progress on the career ladder, and observational evaluations.
Institute an apprentice-teacher program, providing new teachers with trained mentors, one-on-one support, and weekly observation for two years.
Provide teachers with model lesson plans and instructional guides, and better classroom tests and assignments, as well as professional development and peer support for these new tools.
Boilerplate school reform stuff to be sure and all part of SB736. But part of the core assertions of the school reform movement of which Gates is one of the high priests, is that poverty doesn’t matter. A motivated by profit teacher they assume will overcome the fact that a child comes from a poor family – or maybe even has no family at all. Here’s a key part of Jennie Smith’s op-ed:
Indeed, where merit pay has been tried in American public schools it has not produced the desired results. In Hillsborough County, 97% of teachers receiving merit bonuses the first year worked in affluent schools; only 3% worked in low-income schools. A recent Vanderbilt University study found that merit pay did not affect student achievement; teachers receiving up to $15,000 bonuses produced the same results as teachers not receiving the bonuses, and the general feeling among bonus-recipients and non-recipients was that the recipients were no more effective than the non-recipients.
The Hillsborough numbers should be tatamount to a tornado warning. They’re not. Nor has it given pause to Florida’s GOP legislators or it’s ideologically driven reformers. Reformers consistently fail to recognize contrarian data. It’s irresponsible. Writes Smith:
SB 736 has the exact same shortcomings in this respect as SB 6 did. Even when the legislation calls for paying more to those who teach in Title I (high-poverty) schools, this does not offset the fear of losing one’s job due to poor student test scores. Only someone who intends to teach for a very short period of time–perhaps one, two, three years–would be willing to take that risk. Anyone planning on making a career of teaching will lean toward the option of a “safer” school–i.e., a more affluent school. Perhaps they won’t receive the Title I bonus, but they have a better chance of keeping their job
Current teachers - good or bad – are not going to go into a Title I school with it’s impoverished student body; not only because they won’t get a bonus, but also because they could be fired for their students having poor tests grades. Fifty percent of teacher’s evaluations will come from student performance on test scores. The Hillsborough numbers unmask the merit pay myth and reveal the folly of SB736.
Scott’s signature on SB736 will prompt an exodus of good teachers from Florida’s Title I schools. The exodus of those schools’ countless dedicated and talented teachers will be left with a staff of permanent substitute teachers and a few Teach for America kids. The later are only supposed to stay three years. Most don’t even get that far. This is an equation certain to yield a train wreck.
So onward Florida goes.
Intoxicated by the soothing words of a siren (Michelle Rhee), mesmerized by a propoganda film (Waiting for Superman) and blindly following a soothsayer (Jeb Bush), Florida’s Republican legislators and its naive Governor are driving education over a cliff.
http://www.practicalstate.com/2011/03/06/bill-gates-hillsborough-experiment-with-merit-pay-failed-so-why-are-we-plowing-ahead-with-sb-736/
by Jeannie Smith
Much was trumpeted by the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation’s partnership with Hilborough County Public Schools (HCPS) to implement “groundbreaking approaches to ensure that all students have access to effective teachers in every classroom.” Within the $100 million grant was funding for a merit pay scheme based on student performance on standardized tests. Here are the operative points from the Foundation’s web site:
Measuring, supporting, and rewarding effective teaching.
Redesign the teacher evaluation system (so at least 40 percent is based on student achievement, compared with seven percent today), incorporating teams of highly trained teacher-evaluators, and linking evaluation to mentoring and professional development.
Establish a performance-based career ladder that raises the bar for tenure including an optional fourth year before awarding tenure.
Refine pay-for-performance by linking it to better measurements of student learning, teacher progress on the career ladder, and observational evaluations.
Institute an apprentice-teacher program, providing new teachers with trained mentors, one-on-one support, and weekly observation for two years.
Provide teachers with model lesson plans and instructional guides, and better classroom tests and assignments, as well as professional development and peer support for these new tools.
Boilerplate school reform stuff to be sure and all part of SB736. But part of the core assertions of the school reform movement of which Gates is one of the high priests, is that poverty doesn’t matter. A motivated by profit teacher they assume will overcome the fact that a child comes from a poor family – or maybe even has no family at all. Here’s a key part of Jennie Smith’s op-ed:
Indeed, where merit pay has been tried in American public schools it has not produced the desired results. In Hillsborough County, 97% of teachers receiving merit bonuses the first year worked in affluent schools; only 3% worked in low-income schools. A recent Vanderbilt University study found that merit pay did not affect student achievement; teachers receiving up to $15,000 bonuses produced the same results as teachers not receiving the bonuses, and the general feeling among bonus-recipients and non-recipients was that the recipients were no more effective than the non-recipients.
The Hillsborough numbers should be tatamount to a tornado warning. They’re not. Nor has it given pause to Florida’s GOP legislators or it’s ideologically driven reformers. Reformers consistently fail to recognize contrarian data. It’s irresponsible. Writes Smith:
SB 736 has the exact same shortcomings in this respect as SB 6 did. Even when the legislation calls for paying more to those who teach in Title I (high-poverty) schools, this does not offset the fear of losing one’s job due to poor student test scores. Only someone who intends to teach for a very short period of time–perhaps one, two, three years–would be willing to take that risk. Anyone planning on making a career of teaching will lean toward the option of a “safer” school–i.e., a more affluent school. Perhaps they won’t receive the Title I bonus, but they have a better chance of keeping their job
Current teachers - good or bad – are not going to go into a Title I school with it’s impoverished student body; not only because they won’t get a bonus, but also because they could be fired for their students having poor tests grades. Fifty percent of teacher’s evaluations will come from student performance on test scores. The Hillsborough numbers unmask the merit pay myth and reveal the folly of SB736.
Scott’s signature on SB736 will prompt an exodus of good teachers from Florida’s Title I schools. The exodus of those schools’ countless dedicated and talented teachers will be left with a staff of permanent substitute teachers and a few Teach for America kids. The later are only supposed to stay three years. Most don’t even get that far. This is an equation certain to yield a train wreck.
So onward Florida goes.
Intoxicated by the soothing words of a siren (Michelle Rhee), mesmerized by a propoganda film (Waiting for Superman) and blindly following a soothsayer (Jeb Bush), Florida’s Republican legislators and its naive Governor are driving education over a cliff.
http://www.practicalstate.com/2011/03/06/bill-gates-hillsborough-experiment-with-merit-pay-failed-so-why-are-we-plowing-ahead-with-sb-736/
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Facts don't matter, supporters of Merit Pay say
By Christopher Connell, The Hechinger Report
NASHVILLE — Offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores, Vanderbilt University researchers reported Tuesday in what they said was the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay.
The results (pdf) could amount to a cautionary flag about paying teachers for the performance of their students, a reform strategy the Obama administration and many states and school districts have favored despite lukewarm support or outright opposition from teachers' unions.
The U.S. Department of Education has put a great deal of effort into prodding school districts and states to try merit-pay systems as part of its Race to the Top competition, although teachers' unions have often objected on the grounds that they don't have fair and reliable ways to measure performance. In most school districts, teacher pay is based on years of experience and educational attainment levels.
The report's authors, of the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, stress that theirs is just one approach. The Nashville teachers who hit the mark based on their students' test scores received a bump in their paychecks but no additional mentoring or professional development. Neither their principals nor fellow teachers knew who participated in the experiment or who received bonuses.
Matthew G. Springer, director of the federally funded NCPI, said pay-for-performance is not "the magic bullet that so often the policy world is looking for."
At least in this experiment, Springer said, "it doesn't work."
The study was conducted from 2006 to 2009 in partnership with the nonprofit RAND Corporation. A local industrialist and Vanderbilt benefactor, Orrin Ingram, put up the nearly $1.3 million in bonuses.
Some 296 middle-school math teachers — two-thirds of the district's middle-school math teachers — volunteered to participate in the experiment. Half were placed randomly in a control group, while the rest were eligible for bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 if their pupils scored significantly higher than expected on the statewide exam known as the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.
One third of the eligible teachers — 51 of 152, or 34% — got bonuses at least once. Eighteen teachers received bonuses all three years.
Except for some temporary gains for fifth-graders, though, their students progressed no faster than those in classes taught by the 146 other teachers.
The local teachers' union in Nashville agreed to the experiment in collective bargaining, according to Erick Huth, president of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association. He said the results were not at all surprising.
"I've believed for a long time that what improves instruction is having an instructional leader who is able to get all players in a school to collaborate," Huth said
The bonuses amounted to as much as 30% of teachers' yearly salaries here in the Music City, where the scale runs from $36,000 to $64,000, Huth said. The nation's 3.2 million public school teachers earned $53,910 on average in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The study was released at a two-day conference, "Evaluating and Rewarding Educator Effectiveness," at Vanderbilt's Peabody College that drew participants from Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, D.C. and other places conducting their own experiments with performance pay. Some states have moved to tie teacher and principal evaluations to student test scores.
The study did not shake the faith of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in merit pay.
"While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder," said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for Duncan. It did not address the Obama administration's push to "change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better."
The Nashville experiment, known as POINT (Project on Incentives in Teaching), doled out the $15,000 bonuses to those teachers whose students performed "at a level that historically had been reached by only the top 5% of middle school math teachers." Teacher performance was calculated by using a value-added model, which predicts how students will do in a given year based on how they performed in the previous year. The teachers had to hit the 80th and 90th percentiles to pocket the $5,000 and $10,000 bonuses, respectively.
The study's design, in which teachers were judged against percentile benchmarks rather than their colleagues' performance, sought to preserve collaboration among teachers.
In surveys about the program, most teachers said they were already effective without the incentive of additional pay. Eight in ten said they didn't change the way they taught to improve their odds of earning a bonus. Many teachers came close to getting a bonus — so close that they would have qualified if their pupils answered two or three more questions correctly on the 55-question state exam.
The Nashville math teachers, according to the study, "expressed moderately favorable views toward performance pay in general, though less so for POINT in particular." The experiment ran smoothly, although the teachers became less enthusiastic over the three years. "They did not come away … thinking it had harmed their schools," the study said. "But by and large, they did not endorse the notion that bonus recipients were better teachers."
The fact that many fifth-grade teachers teach multiple subjects to the same students may have been a reason for the positive impact of merit pay found in fifth grade, according to the study's authors. But "the effect did not last. By the end of 6th grade it did not matter whether a student's 5th grade math teacher had been in the treatment or control group," the study said.
The researchers said the Nashville experiment didn't stir the negative reactions that have attended some other merit pay programs, but it "simply did not do much of anything."
Springer of NCPI said the study lays a foundation for further experiments on a topic that educators have been debating "for over a century."
Tennessee Commissioner of Education Timothy Webb said the Nashville study shows, "Money alone is not enough to encourage people to go into challenging schools and teach the most difficult students." He stressed the importance of improving teachers' working conditions, not just their pay.
Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said he does not believe the study says much of value and worries it will only confuse the issue.
"The fact that that teachers don't respond to cash bonuses like rats do to food-pellets does nothing to diminish my confidence that it's good for schooling if teacher pay better reflects the contributions that teachers make," Hess said. "Serious proponents of merit pay believe the point is not any kind of short-term test-score bump but making the profession more attractive to talented candidates."
William Slotnik, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Compensation Reform and Student Learning at the Community Training and Assistance Center, has argued that performance-based compensation tied directly to the educational mission of a school district can be a lever to transform schools. But he said it will take more than financial incentives to improve student achievement and that merit pay "is hard to get right. … If all you are doing is focusing on money, there is no track record in that resulting in the kind of changes needed to do this work well."
Contributing: Christopher Connell is a freelance writer. Liz Willen contributed to this article. It was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-09-21-merit-pay_N.htm
NASHVILLE — Offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores, Vanderbilt University researchers reported Tuesday in what they said was the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay.
The results (pdf) could amount to a cautionary flag about paying teachers for the performance of their students, a reform strategy the Obama administration and many states and school districts have favored despite lukewarm support or outright opposition from teachers' unions.
The U.S. Department of Education has put a great deal of effort into prodding school districts and states to try merit-pay systems as part of its Race to the Top competition, although teachers' unions have often objected on the grounds that they don't have fair and reliable ways to measure performance. In most school districts, teacher pay is based on years of experience and educational attainment levels.
The report's authors, of the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, stress that theirs is just one approach. The Nashville teachers who hit the mark based on their students' test scores received a bump in their paychecks but no additional mentoring or professional development. Neither their principals nor fellow teachers knew who participated in the experiment or who received bonuses.
Matthew G. Springer, director of the federally funded NCPI, said pay-for-performance is not "the magic bullet that so often the policy world is looking for."
At least in this experiment, Springer said, "it doesn't work."
The study was conducted from 2006 to 2009 in partnership with the nonprofit RAND Corporation. A local industrialist and Vanderbilt benefactor, Orrin Ingram, put up the nearly $1.3 million in bonuses.
Some 296 middle-school math teachers — two-thirds of the district's middle-school math teachers — volunteered to participate in the experiment. Half were placed randomly in a control group, while the rest were eligible for bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 if their pupils scored significantly higher than expected on the statewide exam known as the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.
One third of the eligible teachers — 51 of 152, or 34% — got bonuses at least once. Eighteen teachers received bonuses all three years.
Except for some temporary gains for fifth-graders, though, their students progressed no faster than those in classes taught by the 146 other teachers.
The local teachers' union in Nashville agreed to the experiment in collective bargaining, according to Erick Huth, president of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association. He said the results were not at all surprising.
"I've believed for a long time that what improves instruction is having an instructional leader who is able to get all players in a school to collaborate," Huth said
The bonuses amounted to as much as 30% of teachers' yearly salaries here in the Music City, where the scale runs from $36,000 to $64,000, Huth said. The nation's 3.2 million public school teachers earned $53,910 on average in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The study was released at a two-day conference, "Evaluating and Rewarding Educator Effectiveness," at Vanderbilt's Peabody College that drew participants from Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, D.C. and other places conducting their own experiments with performance pay. Some states have moved to tie teacher and principal evaluations to student test scores.
The study did not shake the faith of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in merit pay.
"While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder," said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for Duncan. It did not address the Obama administration's push to "change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better."
The Nashville experiment, known as POINT (Project on Incentives in Teaching), doled out the $15,000 bonuses to those teachers whose students performed "at a level that historically had been reached by only the top 5% of middle school math teachers." Teacher performance was calculated by using a value-added model, which predicts how students will do in a given year based on how they performed in the previous year. The teachers had to hit the 80th and 90th percentiles to pocket the $5,000 and $10,000 bonuses, respectively.
The study's design, in which teachers were judged against percentile benchmarks rather than their colleagues' performance, sought to preserve collaboration among teachers.
In surveys about the program, most teachers said they were already effective without the incentive of additional pay. Eight in ten said they didn't change the way they taught to improve their odds of earning a bonus. Many teachers came close to getting a bonus — so close that they would have qualified if their pupils answered two or three more questions correctly on the 55-question state exam.
The Nashville math teachers, according to the study, "expressed moderately favorable views toward performance pay in general, though less so for POINT in particular." The experiment ran smoothly, although the teachers became less enthusiastic over the three years. "They did not come away … thinking it had harmed their schools," the study said. "But by and large, they did not endorse the notion that bonus recipients were better teachers."
The fact that many fifth-grade teachers teach multiple subjects to the same students may have been a reason for the positive impact of merit pay found in fifth grade, according to the study's authors. But "the effect did not last. By the end of 6th grade it did not matter whether a student's 5th grade math teacher had been in the treatment or control group," the study said.
The researchers said the Nashville experiment didn't stir the negative reactions that have attended some other merit pay programs, but it "simply did not do much of anything."
Springer of NCPI said the study lays a foundation for further experiments on a topic that educators have been debating "for over a century."
Tennessee Commissioner of Education Timothy Webb said the Nashville study shows, "Money alone is not enough to encourage people to go into challenging schools and teach the most difficult students." He stressed the importance of improving teachers' working conditions, not just their pay.
Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said he does not believe the study says much of value and worries it will only confuse the issue.
"The fact that that teachers don't respond to cash bonuses like rats do to food-pellets does nothing to diminish my confidence that it's good for schooling if teacher pay better reflects the contributions that teachers make," Hess said. "Serious proponents of merit pay believe the point is not any kind of short-term test-score bump but making the profession more attractive to talented candidates."
William Slotnik, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Compensation Reform and Student Learning at the Community Training and Assistance Center, has argued that performance-based compensation tied directly to the educational mission of a school district can be a lever to transform schools. But he said it will take more than financial incentives to improve student achievement and that merit pay "is hard to get right. … If all you are doing is focusing on money, there is no track record in that resulting in the kind of changes needed to do this work well."
Contributing: Christopher Connell is a freelance writer. Liz Willen contributed to this article. It was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-09-21-merit-pay_N.htm
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Teacher bashing bill picks up steam
From the St. Augustine Record
By KATHLEEN HAUGHNEY
TALLAHASSEE -- Key committees in both legislative chambers gave yes votes Thursday to a proposal to partially base teacher salaries on their students' test scores, a proposal shot down last year after teachers around the state protested that the merit pay system would penalize them.
The measure and a companion House version, would grandfather in current teacher pay plans, but set up new, merit-based ones for teachers hired after July 1, 2014. The proposals also call for an evaluation process to be set up for teachers, but they don't spell out the details, allowing the Commissioner of Education and local school districts to work out just how teachers would be evaluated.
The Senate Budget Committee voted Wednesday to send its version to the floor -- with a technical stop at the Rules Committee to be put on the calendar. The House PreK-20 Competitiveness Committee, meanwhile also voted Wednesday to forward the proposal to its next committee stop. The House bill amended its measure to put it in line with the Senate bill, so both proposals are, for now, the same.
Unlike last year's measure -- SB 6 -- the new version would allow the evaluation formula to consider students' attendance, disciplinary records, disabilities and English proficiency when evaluating teachers for merit pay. It may not, however, set different expectations for students based on gender, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status.
Megan Allen, the 2010 Florida teacher of the Year, was among those who spoke out against the bill.
But a student's home life, which would likely be affected by socioeconomic status, has remained a major sticking point for teachers in their opposition to the bill. Many have said that they see students who are dealing with serious problems at home, which takes their focus away from simple math and reading. Some teachers said they should not be penalized financially because their students on the testing day may have a major problem at home over which the teacher has no control.
Megan Allen, the 2010 Florida teacher of the Year, was among those who spoke out against the bill Thursday as both House and Senate committees debated the bill. Allen, who is her family's bread winner while her husband goes back to school, said if the current proposal becomes law, she might consider leaving her Hillsborough County school, where more than 90 percent of the students receive free or reduced lunches. She said she is afraid her pay will suffer if a given class of students does not perform well because of problems outside of the classroom.
"It's not taking into account many adult life struggles that high poverty students experience each day," she said.
The bills would require districts to set up evaluation systems that rate teachers as "highly effective," "effective," "needs improvement" or "unsatisfactory." Half of those evaluations would be based on test scores. They would also allow districts to permanently put new hires on one-year contracts instead of the long term agreements that are in place now, making it easier for administrators to fire teachers.
The proposal has been backed by some high profile and politically powerful groups, namely the Florida Chamber of Commerce and former Gov. Jeb Bush's education advocacy group, the Foundation for Florida's Future.
The Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers' union, has been milder in its opposition to these proposals compared to last spring, when it reacted to the bill by encouraging members to flood lawmakers offices with e-mails, letters and phone calls. But it does seem to be ramping up efforts to fight the bill as it progresses through the Legislature.
Former Gov. Charlie Crist ultimately vetoed the bill last year, citing concerns of fairness to teachers. Prior to the veto, his office said he received 65,259 phone calls and e-mails in opposition and 3,090 in support, with thousands more left uncategorized.
The bill now appears poised for easy passage though, with Gov. Rick Scott pledging his support to merit pay legislation and both House Speaker Dean Cannon and Senate President Mike Haridopolos making it a top priority.
http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-02-23/senate-house-advance-merit-pay-bills
By KATHLEEN HAUGHNEY
TALLAHASSEE -- Key committees in both legislative chambers gave yes votes Thursday to a proposal to partially base teacher salaries on their students' test scores, a proposal shot down last year after teachers around the state protested that the merit pay system would penalize them.
The measure and a companion House version, would grandfather in current teacher pay plans, but set up new, merit-based ones for teachers hired after July 1, 2014. The proposals also call for an evaluation process to be set up for teachers, but they don't spell out the details, allowing the Commissioner of Education and local school districts to work out just how teachers would be evaluated.
The Senate Budget Committee voted Wednesday to send its version to the floor -- with a technical stop at the Rules Committee to be put on the calendar. The House PreK-20 Competitiveness Committee, meanwhile also voted Wednesday to forward the proposal to its next committee stop. The House bill amended its measure to put it in line with the Senate bill, so both proposals are, for now, the same.
Unlike last year's measure -- SB 6 -- the new version would allow the evaluation formula to consider students' attendance, disciplinary records, disabilities and English proficiency when evaluating teachers for merit pay. It may not, however, set different expectations for students based on gender, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status.
Megan Allen, the 2010 Florida teacher of the Year, was among those who spoke out against the bill.
But a student's home life, which would likely be affected by socioeconomic status, has remained a major sticking point for teachers in their opposition to the bill. Many have said that they see students who are dealing with serious problems at home, which takes their focus away from simple math and reading. Some teachers said they should not be penalized financially because their students on the testing day may have a major problem at home over which the teacher has no control.
Megan Allen, the 2010 Florida teacher of the Year, was among those who spoke out against the bill Thursday as both House and Senate committees debated the bill. Allen, who is her family's bread winner while her husband goes back to school, said if the current proposal becomes law, she might consider leaving her Hillsborough County school, where more than 90 percent of the students receive free or reduced lunches. She said she is afraid her pay will suffer if a given class of students does not perform well because of problems outside of the classroom.
"It's not taking into account many adult life struggles that high poverty students experience each day," she said.
The bills would require districts to set up evaluation systems that rate teachers as "highly effective," "effective," "needs improvement" or "unsatisfactory." Half of those evaluations would be based on test scores. They would also allow districts to permanently put new hires on one-year contracts instead of the long term agreements that are in place now, making it easier for administrators to fire teachers.
The proposal has been backed by some high profile and politically powerful groups, namely the Florida Chamber of Commerce and former Gov. Jeb Bush's education advocacy group, the Foundation for Florida's Future.
The Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers' union, has been milder in its opposition to these proposals compared to last spring, when it reacted to the bill by encouraging members to flood lawmakers offices with e-mails, letters and phone calls. But it does seem to be ramping up efforts to fight the bill as it progresses through the Legislature.
Former Gov. Charlie Crist ultimately vetoed the bill last year, citing concerns of fairness to teachers. Prior to the veto, his office said he received 65,259 phone calls and e-mails in opposition and 3,090 in support, with thousands more left uncategorized.
The bill now appears poised for easy passage though, with Gov. Rick Scott pledging his support to merit pay legislation and both House Speaker Dean Cannon and Senate President Mike Haridopolos making it a top priority.
http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-02-23/senate-house-advance-merit-pay-bills
It's not as simple as, fire bad teachers, reward excellence
From the Shanker Blog
There is an obvious, albeit somewhat uncomfortable connection between what’s happening in Wisconsin and what’s been happening in education policy discussions.
A remarkably high proportion of the discussion is focused – implicitly or explicitly – on the presumed role of teachers’ unions. The public is told that our school systems are failing, and that teachers’ unions are at least partially to blame because they protect bad teachers and block “needed” reforms such as merit pay. In this storyline, unions are faceless villains that put the interests of adults above those of children.
Wisconsin represents a threat to this perspective in at least three important manners.
First, and most basically, it is illustrating the weakness of one of the most important concepts in our debate – the idea that one can support teachers, but hate their unions. To some degree, the distinction is plausible: Disagreeing with the organization that represents a given profession certainly does not imply animosity towards its members, and not all teachers agree with everything unions do (as is the case in any democratic organization).
But none of this changes the fact that unions are comprised of teachers, led by teacher-elected teachers at the local- and school-level, and virtually everything they do is approved by the vast majority of teachers. Every day in Wisconsin and around the nation, the world is seeing many tens of thousands of teachers and other public employees coming out in their capacity as union members or supporters. They are doing so voluntarily, and with energy and dedication to their cause. Each one of these faces should send a message to those of us in the education debate: Teachers’ unions oppose many reform ideas because, as survey data make clear, teachers oppose them. The attempt to set up unions as autonomous villains that exist independently of teachers depends on a dehumanized perception of labor organizations that does not square with reality.
Second, Wisconsin illustrates something we all know about, but don’t often discuss: The unusual alliances within the large group of “market-based reformers” that dominate our national education debate. I don’t know how it breaks down (and I’m generalizing here), but there is a portion of this group that opposes unions no matter what. According to these people, collective bargaining for teachers should be either illegal or curtailed to the point of meaninglessness, as it is for public employees in 19 states.
But not all opponents of teachers’ unions are anti-union. There is another large portion (many thoughtful) that generally supports labor and collective bargaining, but makes an exception for teachers’ unions. Teachers’ unions, they argue, are different – our children’s educations are at stake.
There is a fundamental tension between support for collective bargaining in general and unremitting hostility toward teachers’ unions. So many of the core policy ideas from this crowd – eliminating tenure and traditional salary schedules, imposing new teacher evaluation systems at the state level, mandating blanket increases in teachers’ share of contributions to health and pension benefits, etc. – are in many important respects assaults on the right of teachers to bargain their own compensation and working conditions.
It’s not about whether these policy changes under discussion are good ideas. Many of them, such as improved evaluations and alternative compensation systems, are perfectly reasonable (at least in my view). It’s about how these ideas are being implemented. In large part, they are happening in a decidedly top-down fashion, with minimal input from teachers and demonization of their unions, using a budget crisis to push things along – as in Wisconsin.
The protesters are only asking for a seat at the table – for a say in what happens to them and their workplaces. If you support that right generally, then making exceptions – determining what should and shouldn’t be subject to input from the people who know the most about what goes in classrooms – is both inconsistent and counterproductive.
Third and finally, the “blame unions” narrative seems to be receiving some disconcerting news as far as public opinion. For the past few years, the “market-based reform” viewpoint has maintained almost complete dominance over the public discourse. They have been incredibly skillful in promoting their agenda – on television, in newspapers, and even major motion pictures – and you have to search far and wide for a non-teacher public voice that speaks out for teachers’ unions. Yet, we learned from Wisconsin that there is considerable public support for letting teachers and other public employees bargain their own compensation and other terms of their employment. More and more people are actually defending teachers’ unions publicly. Maybe – just maybe – when people see the workers and not the “faceless union,” they tend to come down on the side of workers.
This is important. The public reacts favorably to simplistic arguments like “fire bad teachers” or “reward excellence.” We all do. But it may not support eliminating the ability of teachers to have a say in how these slogans translate into actual policies. And that is the primary job of the thousands of local unions that represent teachers. They’re nowhere near perfect – because teachers aren’t perfect. But ignoring or villainizing them is a mistake.
The Wisconsin protesters want to talk this out, and so do teachers all over the nation. Scott Walker doesn’t seem to be listening. We should.
http://shankerblog.org/?p=1958
There is an obvious, albeit somewhat uncomfortable connection between what’s happening in Wisconsin and what’s been happening in education policy discussions.
A remarkably high proportion of the discussion is focused – implicitly or explicitly – on the presumed role of teachers’ unions. The public is told that our school systems are failing, and that teachers’ unions are at least partially to blame because they protect bad teachers and block “needed” reforms such as merit pay. In this storyline, unions are faceless villains that put the interests of adults above those of children.
Wisconsin represents a threat to this perspective in at least three important manners.
First, and most basically, it is illustrating the weakness of one of the most important concepts in our debate – the idea that one can support teachers, but hate their unions. To some degree, the distinction is plausible: Disagreeing with the organization that represents a given profession certainly does not imply animosity towards its members, and not all teachers agree with everything unions do (as is the case in any democratic organization).
But none of this changes the fact that unions are comprised of teachers, led by teacher-elected teachers at the local- and school-level, and virtually everything they do is approved by the vast majority of teachers. Every day in Wisconsin and around the nation, the world is seeing many tens of thousands of teachers and other public employees coming out in their capacity as union members or supporters. They are doing so voluntarily, and with energy and dedication to their cause. Each one of these faces should send a message to those of us in the education debate: Teachers’ unions oppose many reform ideas because, as survey data make clear, teachers oppose them. The attempt to set up unions as autonomous villains that exist independently of teachers depends on a dehumanized perception of labor organizations that does not square with reality.
Second, Wisconsin illustrates something we all know about, but don’t often discuss: The unusual alliances within the large group of “market-based reformers” that dominate our national education debate. I don’t know how it breaks down (and I’m generalizing here), but there is a portion of this group that opposes unions no matter what. According to these people, collective bargaining for teachers should be either illegal or curtailed to the point of meaninglessness, as it is for public employees in 19 states.
But not all opponents of teachers’ unions are anti-union. There is another large portion (many thoughtful) that generally supports labor and collective bargaining, but makes an exception for teachers’ unions. Teachers’ unions, they argue, are different – our children’s educations are at stake.
There is a fundamental tension between support for collective bargaining in general and unremitting hostility toward teachers’ unions. So many of the core policy ideas from this crowd – eliminating tenure and traditional salary schedules, imposing new teacher evaluation systems at the state level, mandating blanket increases in teachers’ share of contributions to health and pension benefits, etc. – are in many important respects assaults on the right of teachers to bargain their own compensation and working conditions.
It’s not about whether these policy changes under discussion are good ideas. Many of them, such as improved evaluations and alternative compensation systems, are perfectly reasonable (at least in my view). It’s about how these ideas are being implemented. In large part, they are happening in a decidedly top-down fashion, with minimal input from teachers and demonization of their unions, using a budget crisis to push things along – as in Wisconsin.
The protesters are only asking for a seat at the table – for a say in what happens to them and their workplaces. If you support that right generally, then making exceptions – determining what should and shouldn’t be subject to input from the people who know the most about what goes in classrooms – is both inconsistent and counterproductive.
Third and finally, the “blame unions” narrative seems to be receiving some disconcerting news as far as public opinion. For the past few years, the “market-based reform” viewpoint has maintained almost complete dominance over the public discourse. They have been incredibly skillful in promoting their agenda – on television, in newspapers, and even major motion pictures – and you have to search far and wide for a non-teacher public voice that speaks out for teachers’ unions. Yet, we learned from Wisconsin that there is considerable public support for letting teachers and other public employees bargain their own compensation and other terms of their employment. More and more people are actually defending teachers’ unions publicly. Maybe – just maybe – when people see the workers and not the “faceless union,” they tend to come down on the side of workers.
This is important. The public reacts favorably to simplistic arguments like “fire bad teachers” or “reward excellence.” We all do. But it may not support eliminating the ability of teachers to have a say in how these slogans translate into actual policies. And that is the primary job of the thousands of local unions that represent teachers. They’re nowhere near perfect – because teachers aren’t perfect. But ignoring or villainizing them is a mistake.
The Wisconsin protesters want to talk this out, and so do teachers all over the nation. Scott Walker doesn’t seem to be listening. We should.
http://shankerblog.org/?p=1958
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The assult on Florida's teachers continues
From the St. petersburg Times, Grade Book
by Jeff Solochek
Legislation to change the way Florida teachers are paid and evaluated still misses the mark despite increased public input, the Florida Education Association said Tuesday.
The FEA — Florida's largest teacher union — contended that the way that lawmakers want to craft performance pay plans does not take into account the complexities of today's education system. In conjunction with the Center for Teaching Quality, the group suggested that there are other, better ways to get result-oriented reform that leads to more effective teaching.
Among its recommendations:
•"Local districts should have the flexibility to create a fair, equitable and educationally sound system for student learning and teacher effectiveness."
•"The state and local districts should include teacher leaders in the decision-making process."
•"State and local districts should create teacher development systems that incorporate performance pay."
•"Get base pay right. Without a competitive base pay, it will become increasingly difficult to recruit teachers and retain them."
"If SB 736 is enacted as proposed, thousands of effective Florida teachers will be falsely branded, resulting in unfair decisions about pay and employment, potential lawsuits and, worst of all, lost educational opportunity for tens of thousands of the state's schoolchildren," said Barnett Berry, CEO of the Center for Teaching Quality. "Teaching is far too complicated to make high-stakes decisions about individual performance based on one standardized test, administered once a year. Only highly trained peer evaluators — for which SB 736 does not provide — should determine which teachers are more effective than others. And those evaluators should use a variety of measures to do so, taking into account all the key elements of good teaching."
The House and Senate versions of the bills are slated to be heard in committees again tomorrow. Several teacher organizations are trying to get people to go testify against the legislation. The Florida Department of Education, meanwhile, announced this morning the selection of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as a consultant to help create teacher and administrator evaluation systems.
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/performance-pay-plan-florida-bills-not-good-enough-florida-education-association-says
by Jeff Solochek
Legislation to change the way Florida teachers are paid and evaluated still misses the mark despite increased public input, the Florida Education Association said Tuesday.
The FEA — Florida's largest teacher union — contended that the way that lawmakers want to craft performance pay plans does not take into account the complexities of today's education system. In conjunction with the Center for Teaching Quality, the group suggested that there are other, better ways to get result-oriented reform that leads to more effective teaching.
Among its recommendations:
•"Local districts should have the flexibility to create a fair, equitable and educationally sound system for student learning and teacher effectiveness."
•"The state and local districts should include teacher leaders in the decision-making process."
•"State and local districts should create teacher development systems that incorporate performance pay."
•"Get base pay right. Without a competitive base pay, it will become increasingly difficult to recruit teachers and retain them."
"If SB 736 is enacted as proposed, thousands of effective Florida teachers will be falsely branded, resulting in unfair decisions about pay and employment, potential lawsuits and, worst of all, lost educational opportunity for tens of thousands of the state's schoolchildren," said Barnett Berry, CEO of the Center for Teaching Quality. "Teaching is far too complicated to make high-stakes decisions about individual performance based on one standardized test, administered once a year. Only highly trained peer evaluators — for which SB 736 does not provide — should determine which teachers are more effective than others. And those evaluators should use a variety of measures to do so, taking into account all the key elements of good teaching."
The House and Senate versions of the bills are slated to be heard in committees again tomorrow. Several teacher organizations are trying to get people to go testify against the legislation. The Florida Department of Education, meanwhile, announced this morning the selection of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as a consultant to help create teacher and administrator evaluation systems.
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/performance-pay-plan-florida-bills-not-good-enough-florida-education-association-says
Friday, February 11, 2011
The Florida Legislature and their apparent distain for teachers
The Legislature greets controversial former D.C. Education Chancellor as if she is a hero, while most superintendants and teachers in Florida can’t get their phone calls returned or e-mails read. They listen intently to her as she spouts her anti-teacher rhetoric even though it is based on unfounded data or practice because it reaffirms what they already want to believe and do.
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address several different sessions of the legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers, who got a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid, instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery the legislature should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place the meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address several different sessions of the legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers, who got a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid, instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery the legislature should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place the meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The mixed up Florida legislature gets’s it wrong again.
They greet controversial former D.C. Education Chancellor as if she is a hero, while most superintendants and teachers in Florida can’t get their phone calls returned or e-mails read. They listen intently to her as she spouts her anti-teacher rhetoric even though it is based on unfounded data or practice because it reaffirms what they already want to believe.
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address the entire legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery they should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place n meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address the entire legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery they should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place n meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
The Myth of Michelle Rhee Debunked
From the washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Controversial Rhee calls for bad reforms
Merit pay is not proven to work and determining teachers pay by how some of their children do on standardized tests would be like tying their salary to the wind, unfair and impossible. -cpg
From the Palm Beach Post
by Tony Alanez
TALLAHASSEE — Controversial school reformer Michelle Rhee told Florida lawmakers Wednesday that students would be better off if public schools could get rid of teacher tenure and ineffective teachers without delay.
"Tenure does not put students first," she said before the Senate Prek-12 Education Committee. "It should be virtually impossible for an ineffective educator to stay in the classroom."
The former chancellor of the Washington public school system and founder of Students First serves as an informal education advisor to Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
A 41-year-old Democrat, she has been criticized for firing more than 200 teachers, closing dozens of failing schools and her support of measuring teacher quality by students' test scores.
Her boss, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost his bid for re-election in last year's primary, and she resigned in October amid outcry from unions.
Rhee, who is featured in the education documentary "Waiting for Superman," was introduced to Florida legislators as a "movie star." Lawmakers lauded her for political courage and willingness "to take the heat."
Her No. 1 word of caution: "If you'd like to learn from one of the mistakes I made in particular, make it as clear as possible that you are not out to get teachers when you talk about and create policies that reflect how incredible their influence is."
Rhee praised SB 736 or "Race to the Top for Student Success" bill now before lawmakers that would rely heavily on student test scores to judge teacher performance and end tenure for new instructors.
A similar effort last year was widely criticized by teachers as unworkable and unfair and was ultimately vetoed by then-Gov. Charlie Crist.
Crist, who was in the capitol Wednesday, said he was disappointed to see the return of similar legislation.
"I obviously had very strong feelings about it last year, that's why I vetoed it," Crist said. "I don't think there's anything wrong with merit pay per se, but it seems to me that it has to be crafted in a way that is fundamentally fair too."
Public education faces a 10 percent reduction under Scott's newly proposed budget, but Rhee said such cuts do not have to result in damaged schools systems.
"Money does not necessarily correlate with student achievement," she said. "In this country in the last 30 years, we have more than doubled the amount of money we are spending per child…and the results have gotten worse not better."
Noting that Florida's education system recently was ranked fifth in the nation, Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee asked: "How can we be such an inept public school system, yet rank so high?"
National standing is not an adequate measure, said Rhee, emphasizing that today's children will be competing for jobs on a global level.
Last-one-in, first-one-out firing policies result in more jobs lost and tend to have negative impact on poorer neighborhoods, Rhee said.
That's because newer teachers earn less than tenured ones, so when it's time for layoffs more have to be fired to meet budget gaps, she said, and it's the schools in the neediest neighborhoods that tend to employ new teachers.
"[These firing policies are] decimating schools of the best educators in neighborhoods that need them the most," she said.
Rhee did not quibble with Democratic Hollywood Sen. Eleanor Sobel's concerns that perhaps teaching programs were failing to adequately prepare future educators.
"I'm very disappointed with the majority of teacher education programs across the country," Rhee said. "[They're] not actually preparing teachers well for the rigors they're going to see every single day in the classroom."
Rhee additionally called for separating teacher evaluations from the collective bargaining process, requiring teachers to pay into their retirement accounts and eliminating the practice of school districts paying for teachers to earn Master's Degrees.
"Keep being a leader in this most urgent area of need for our country," she said. "As you know, being among the first to challenge the status quo will not make your lives easy, especially when confronting the economic pressures that threaten the communities across the state."
Rhee made a repeat performance before the House PreK-20 Competitiveness Subcommittee Wednesday afternoon. The Senate committee is expected to vote on the bill Thursday afternoon.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/schools/scotts-reformer-tells-legislators-dump-tenure-bad-teachers-1244326.html
From the Palm Beach Post
by Tony Alanez
TALLAHASSEE — Controversial school reformer Michelle Rhee told Florida lawmakers Wednesday that students would be better off if public schools could get rid of teacher tenure and ineffective teachers without delay.
"Tenure does not put students first," she said before the Senate Prek-12 Education Committee. "It should be virtually impossible for an ineffective educator to stay in the classroom."
The former chancellor of the Washington public school system and founder of Students First serves as an informal education advisor to Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
A 41-year-old Democrat, she has been criticized for firing more than 200 teachers, closing dozens of failing schools and her support of measuring teacher quality by students' test scores.
Her boss, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost his bid for re-election in last year's primary, and she resigned in October amid outcry from unions.
Rhee, who is featured in the education documentary "Waiting for Superman," was introduced to Florida legislators as a "movie star." Lawmakers lauded her for political courage and willingness "to take the heat."
Her No. 1 word of caution: "If you'd like to learn from one of the mistakes I made in particular, make it as clear as possible that you are not out to get teachers when you talk about and create policies that reflect how incredible their influence is."
Rhee praised SB 736 or "Race to the Top for Student Success" bill now before lawmakers that would rely heavily on student test scores to judge teacher performance and end tenure for new instructors.
A similar effort last year was widely criticized by teachers as unworkable and unfair and was ultimately vetoed by then-Gov. Charlie Crist.
Crist, who was in the capitol Wednesday, said he was disappointed to see the return of similar legislation.
"I obviously had very strong feelings about it last year, that's why I vetoed it," Crist said. "I don't think there's anything wrong with merit pay per se, but it seems to me that it has to be crafted in a way that is fundamentally fair too."
Public education faces a 10 percent reduction under Scott's newly proposed budget, but Rhee said such cuts do not have to result in damaged schools systems.
"Money does not necessarily correlate with student achievement," she said. "In this country in the last 30 years, we have more than doubled the amount of money we are spending per child…and the results have gotten worse not better."
Noting that Florida's education system recently was ranked fifth in the nation, Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee asked: "How can we be such an inept public school system, yet rank so high?"
National standing is not an adequate measure, said Rhee, emphasizing that today's children will be competing for jobs on a global level.
Last-one-in, first-one-out firing policies result in more jobs lost and tend to have negative impact on poorer neighborhoods, Rhee said.
That's because newer teachers earn less than tenured ones, so when it's time for layoffs more have to be fired to meet budget gaps, she said, and it's the schools in the neediest neighborhoods that tend to employ new teachers.
"[These firing policies are] decimating schools of the best educators in neighborhoods that need them the most," she said.
Rhee did not quibble with Democratic Hollywood Sen. Eleanor Sobel's concerns that perhaps teaching programs were failing to adequately prepare future educators.
"I'm very disappointed with the majority of teacher education programs across the country," Rhee said. "[They're] not actually preparing teachers well for the rigors they're going to see every single day in the classroom."
Rhee additionally called for separating teacher evaluations from the collective bargaining process, requiring teachers to pay into their retirement accounts and eliminating the practice of school districts paying for teachers to earn Master's Degrees.
"Keep being a leader in this most urgent area of need for our country," she said. "As you know, being among the first to challenge the status quo will not make your lives easy, especially when confronting the economic pressures that threaten the communities across the state."
Rhee made a repeat performance before the House PreK-20 Competitiveness Subcommittee Wednesday afternoon. The Senate committee is expected to vote on the bill Thursday afternoon.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/schools/scotts-reformer-tells-legislators-dump-tenure-bad-teachers-1244326.html
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Michelle Rhee's resume is tainted
Not only does she support reforms that aren't proven to work, merit pay and high stakes testing, and seeks to end basic teacher protections but she inflated her resume claiming her kids made gains they didn't. This is the person our governor and Steven Wise are turning to for advice. As far as I can see her only true talent is in self-promotion. Citizens of Florida you should really be outraged and concerned.
Check out the link below to GF Brandenbergs blog to see how her kids actualy did.
http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/the-rhee-miracle-examined-again-by-cohort/
Check out the link below to GF Brandenbergs blog to see how her kids actualy did.
http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/the-rhee-miracle-examined-again-by-cohort/
Florida education reforms punitive not helpful
From the Hiffington Post
by Rita Solnet
I summarized Florida's Education Summit yesterday indicating that the event may have moved us a step forward towards genuine dialogue on education reform. We are certainly better off than if the summit never occurred!
What we haven't looked at -- as a state or nation -- is the big picture on some of these proposed reforms. Let's take a step back and away from the intense debate and ask this question:
Who are these reform initiatives really intended for?
The triumvirate of reforms being aggressively pushed right now are: 1) ending teacher tenure; 2) merit pay based on standardized test scores; and, 3) closing schools/firing staffs.
1) How will ending a teacher's right to due process (consistently mischaracterized as lifetime employment) help to improve the quality of education for children? Short-termers will teach without mentors or seasoned teachers to assist them? Who will you attract to the teaching profession when due process is gone? Corporate America has due process with upper management levels on day one of employment.
2) Merit pay will merely ratchet up the stakes surrounding standardized tests even more. High stakes on tests -- your pay or job riding on one test -- increase the dependency on mind-numbing bubble tests. That doesn't enrich the curriculum. In fact, it narrows it and creates more weeks of test prep, drill and practice.
3) How does closing neighborhood schools help improve the quality of education? Even when the handful of a few good charters acquire rights to open up, many children whose English is a second language or who are dubbed "hard to teach" are left in the dust of the closed school. That's reality versus rhetoric, Real world versus propaganda.
None of the reforms being touted and legislated in some states will truly enhance the quality of education. Isn't that what we set out to accomplish? When, where and why did we take a wrong turn?
Instead, this grand illusion of three reforms impedes improvement to public education. Hidden under the smokescreen of "tough love" reforms, these initiatives are destroying public education in our nation. Celebrities signed on to this front and the media bought it, hook, line and sinker.
Let's call a charade, a charade.
These reforms are specifically intended to acquire power or control over unions. Some may think that's the right fight. Some may think that's the wrong fight. But many will agree it's being played out in the wrong ring -- the classroom. The children of our nation, particularly in impoverished areas, are the ones being sucker punched.
Take your fight outside of the classroom! Settle it across a negotiation table or in a conference room or challenge each other to duels. Take a step back and realize that's what this has been reduced to. Then, for the love of all that's good and holy, please take this feud out of the classroom. These particular initiatives will cause irreparable damage to the future of our children. Don't let this administration be remembered as the one that sacrificed children's futures to seek revenge on unions.
Ending tenure reduces the candidate pool; merit pay further narrows the curriculum; and closing schools and firing staffs leaves many children in impoverished areas without a choice and devoid of hope.
I'm a business woman, a parent, a non union member who hails from corporate America. My only "skin in the game" is seeing my tax dollars disappear. I don't enjoy seeing my money transferred to private entities who think they can run a school, nor do I relish watching area schools open and close like check-cashing stores. If I want to invest in privatized education, I will. I want my tax dollars to go towards public education as I'm told they do.
My only motivation is to be a voice for all children who cannot be heard. Parents of America's only focus is children. We no longer choose to sit in ringside seats and witness endless bouts. Our children. Our schools. Our voices.
Follow Rita M. Solnet on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ritacolleen
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rita-m-solnet/whos-kidding-who-with-the_b_820509.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=uopx#sb=1169570,b=facebook
by Rita Solnet
I summarized Florida's Education Summit yesterday indicating that the event may have moved us a step forward towards genuine dialogue on education reform. We are certainly better off than if the summit never occurred!
What we haven't looked at -- as a state or nation -- is the big picture on some of these proposed reforms. Let's take a step back and away from the intense debate and ask this question:
Who are these reform initiatives really intended for?
The triumvirate of reforms being aggressively pushed right now are: 1) ending teacher tenure; 2) merit pay based on standardized test scores; and, 3) closing schools/firing staffs.
1) How will ending a teacher's right to due process (consistently mischaracterized as lifetime employment) help to improve the quality of education for children? Short-termers will teach without mentors or seasoned teachers to assist them? Who will you attract to the teaching profession when due process is gone? Corporate America has due process with upper management levels on day one of employment.
2) Merit pay will merely ratchet up the stakes surrounding standardized tests even more. High stakes on tests -- your pay or job riding on one test -- increase the dependency on mind-numbing bubble tests. That doesn't enrich the curriculum. In fact, it narrows it and creates more weeks of test prep, drill and practice.
3) How does closing neighborhood schools help improve the quality of education? Even when the handful of a few good charters acquire rights to open up, many children whose English is a second language or who are dubbed "hard to teach" are left in the dust of the closed school. That's reality versus rhetoric, Real world versus propaganda.
None of the reforms being touted and legislated in some states will truly enhance the quality of education. Isn't that what we set out to accomplish? When, where and why did we take a wrong turn?
Instead, this grand illusion of three reforms impedes improvement to public education. Hidden under the smokescreen of "tough love" reforms, these initiatives are destroying public education in our nation. Celebrities signed on to this front and the media bought it, hook, line and sinker.
Let's call a charade, a charade.
These reforms are specifically intended to acquire power or control over unions. Some may think that's the right fight. Some may think that's the wrong fight. But many will agree it's being played out in the wrong ring -- the classroom. The children of our nation, particularly in impoverished areas, are the ones being sucker punched.
Take your fight outside of the classroom! Settle it across a negotiation table or in a conference room or challenge each other to duels. Take a step back and realize that's what this has been reduced to. Then, for the love of all that's good and holy, please take this feud out of the classroom. These particular initiatives will cause irreparable damage to the future of our children. Don't let this administration be remembered as the one that sacrificed children's futures to seek revenge on unions.
Ending tenure reduces the candidate pool; merit pay further narrows the curriculum; and closing schools and firing staffs leaves many children in impoverished areas without a choice and devoid of hope.
I'm a business woman, a parent, a non union member who hails from corporate America. My only "skin in the game" is seeing my tax dollars disappear. I don't enjoy seeing my money transferred to private entities who think they can run a school, nor do I relish watching area schools open and close like check-cashing stores. If I want to invest in privatized education, I will. I want my tax dollars to go towards public education as I'm told they do.
My only motivation is to be a voice for all children who cannot be heard. Parents of America's only focus is children. We no longer choose to sit in ringside seats and witness endless bouts. Our children. Our schools. Our voices.
Follow Rita M. Solnet on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ritacolleen
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rita-m-solnet/whos-kidding-who-with-the_b_820509.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=uopx#sb=1169570,b=facebook
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Sad Status Quo of Education
With a nod to Education Notes On-line, from the blog, Seattle Education
by Sue peters
The current crowd of ed reformers like to dismiss any of us who disagree with their agenda as “defenders of the status quo.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am not a defender of the status quo in public education – because the status quo is currently “No Child Left Behind” and its insidious spin-off, “Race to the Top.”
In fact, I decry the state of public education in this country right now, because a beleaguered, underfunded system has been disparaged and ravaged even further this last decade by damaging policies based on failed concepts pushed by those who want to privatize our public schools.
I do not support the status quo because the status quo is teacher bashing. I don’t support the demonizing of teachers and belittling or weakening of the profession.
The status quo is standardization and high-stakes testing which narrows curriculum and kills all creativity and joy for learning and teaching.
It is “merit pay” which lashes teacher evaluations to student test scores, and which repeated studies and common sense show doesn’t work.
It is data-manipulation to create the illusion of ed reform “success.” (See: “Standards Raised, More Students Fail Tests.”
It is the re-segregation of public schools, exacerbated by the growth of charter schools.
It is overpaid, revolving school superintendents or chancellors with no ties to the local community, often no background in education, and no plans to stick around. That is the Broad Foundation model and the cause of the recent outcry in New York when Mayor Bloomberg chose a publishing executive with no background in education to be the chancellor of New York’s schools.
The status quo is national public education policy largely determined by unelected billionaires with zero expertise in education. “Venture philanthropists” Eli Broad and Bill Gates spend millions shaping public education policy. Formers staffers from the Gates Foundation now seed the Obama Administration’s Department of Education.
“Two of Duncan’s top aides, Chief of Staff Margot Rogers and Assistant Deputy Secretary James H. Shelton III, came from the [Gates] foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving-door policy limiting involvement with former employers.”– “Bill Gates’ School Crusade,” July 15, 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek.
Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and former chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, are both former members of the Broad board of directors. The “Broad Prize for Urban Education” is a trophy and large cash sum awarded annually by the private Broad Foundation to school districts performing to its liking. In its 2009-10 Annual Report, Broad boasts that the trophy itself “resides at the U.S. Department of Education.”
You couldn’t ask for a better symbol of the infiltration of private corporate interests into federal government.
Have Mr. Broad or Mr. Gates been elected to public office, or to direct education policy? Do either have any expertise or experience in public education? No and no. Do either seek genuine parent input? No.
The status quo is Astroturf ed reform groups springing up like toadstools in the night, heavily funded by the same “venture philathropists” looking for a “return on their investment” and pushing the same corporate ed-reform agenda. Washington D.C. ex- school chancellor (Michelle Rhee’s new organization is apparently backed by the same wealthy interests. These organizations lobby for an ed reform agenda that we parents have no say in or may even oppose. But they have resources and media access at their disposal that ordinary parents don’t have. This is not a democratic dialogue about our children’s future when the main stakeholders — we the parents – are largely shut out of the debate.
I do not defend the current trend of sending recent college grads with just five weeks’ training and just a two-year commitment to teach in our nation’s most struggling schools which already suffer from high teacher turnover. But that is the model for Teach for America, Inc. a multimillion-dollar enterprise that is now funded by the Obama government to the tune of $50 million-plus and is arguably de-professionalizing the teaching profession.
Five weeks training does not make these uncredentialed grads “highly qualified,” despite the recent shenanigans by Congress.
I do not support the status quo that punishes teachers, principals and schools with mass layoffs, firings and closures because of student test scores, rather than addressing why some children are struggling and how else one might measure a child’s abilities and a teacher’s worth.
I do not support the status quo which is the mindset of the corporate ed reformers that schools should be run like businesses. Schools are not businesses. Their goal is not profit. The strongest schools are communities, more like families, and need to be cooperative, creative, engaging and nurturing environments.
I do not support the status quo of shameful attacks by the media on teachers and schools and the one-sided cheerleading for charter schools that fails to acknowledge the genuine proven limitations of these schools — their failure to serve children with special needs, the high attrition of kids (even a Geoffrey Canada Harlem Children Zone apparently booted an entire class of kids from a charter school because they weren’t deemed likely to do well on tests. (See: “The Myth of Charter Schools,” Brookings Institution, Nov. 11, 2010.)
I do not support the status quo which makes celebrities and “super(wo)men” out of spotlight-seeking figures like Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, and Arne Duncan, while all the real work is being done quietly by the thousands of anonymous teachers, principals, educators, parents and students, who suffer through reform after reform, trend after trend, searing budget cuts, and still manage to go on and offer a good education to many children in this nation without any national recognition.
I do not support a status quo that cuts so much from school budgets that the PTAs are left fundraising for such essentials as teachers and books, and school communities that do not have these extra resources suffer the most.
I do not support the status quo of education policies being driven by Wall Street interests and not by what’s in the best interests of our children.
I do not support mayoral control, abolishing of school boards, quashing of parent voices and end-runs around democracy.
I do not defend the federal government imposing its edicts on local school districts, suppressing local autonomy and skirting the edges of Constitutionality, which is what Race to the Top essentially does.
The research comes on the heels of a recent pledge by President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, to use $5 billion of the $100 billion in federal stimulus funds for education to press states on charter schools. “States that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application” for federal grant money, Duncan said in a call with reporters last week. Currently, 10 states lack laws that allow charter schools, and 26 others cap their enrollment.” — from: “Charter Schools Might Not Be Better,” U.S. News & World Report, June 19, 2009.)
No, I reject this status quo.
What I support and call for is: the long-term personal and professional investment in every child –which takes time and commitment, as has been demonstrated in Everett, Washington. It’s not flashy, doesn’t require expensive high-tech products, just good old-fashioned follow-up with kids, mentoring and genuine support. And an engaging curriculum.
I support small classes sizes that allow greater one-on-one interaction. I call for the parents’ voices to be the loudest in the discussion of how to run our schools. I support autonomy for schools, teachers and principals who know their communities best, and who can ensure their children are doing well, learning what they need to know and able to graduate.
I call for creative teaching, rich, varied curricula that include the arts and music and languages, science, physical education. I call for safe, decent well-maintained buildings and healthy school meals.
I call for an honest dialogue about the ravages of poverty on our nation’s children. We need to acknowledge the shameful fact that 21 percent of our children live in poverty, and that inequities in academic results are largely determined by income and home life of the child. This is not an excuse, it is a fact, and to expect teachers and schools alone to correct the deep and damaging inequalities of our society is irrational.
I call for an overhaul of school district administrations, to pare them down to the essentials, make them efficient and serving the interests of the school communities, not the whims of private foundations or vendors of standardized tests, text books or online learning products.
I call for the hiring of school superintendents and chancellors who have a local connection and commitment to the community they must serve which will in turn lead to greater accountability. I call to retain democratically elected school board members who must answer to their constituents and oversee the superintendent, and a paid position for school board so they can do their job thoroughly and well.
Public education is an integral ingredient in creating an informed public and a strong democracy. I believe we must keep our public schools free of private and political agendas and manipulations, strengthen our schools, not close them down, stop punishing and start nurturing.
If you agree that our nation needs a new vision for public education, I invite you to join a forum of parents from across the nation who are launching a new organization, Parents Across America, in New York on Feb. 7. Our keynote speaker will be education historian Diane Ravitch. The event is free and open to the public. It starts at 6 p.m. and will held at: PS/IS 89 – Liberty School, 201 Warren Street, New York, N.Y. 10282.
Help bring parents’ voices to the education debate and support progressive, positive, constructive education reforms that work.
http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/why-i-am-not-a-defender-of-the-status-quo-in-education-because-the-status-quo-is-failed-ed-reforms/
by Sue peters
The current crowd of ed reformers like to dismiss any of us who disagree with their agenda as “defenders of the status quo.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am not a defender of the status quo in public education – because the status quo is currently “No Child Left Behind” and its insidious spin-off, “Race to the Top.”
In fact, I decry the state of public education in this country right now, because a beleaguered, underfunded system has been disparaged and ravaged even further this last decade by damaging policies based on failed concepts pushed by those who want to privatize our public schools.
I do not support the status quo because the status quo is teacher bashing. I don’t support the demonizing of teachers and belittling or weakening of the profession.
The status quo is standardization and high-stakes testing which narrows curriculum and kills all creativity and joy for learning and teaching.
It is “merit pay” which lashes teacher evaluations to student test scores, and which repeated studies and common sense show doesn’t work.
It is data-manipulation to create the illusion of ed reform “success.” (See: “Standards Raised, More Students Fail Tests.”
It is the re-segregation of public schools, exacerbated by the growth of charter schools.
It is overpaid, revolving school superintendents or chancellors with no ties to the local community, often no background in education, and no plans to stick around. That is the Broad Foundation model and the cause of the recent outcry in New York when Mayor Bloomberg chose a publishing executive with no background in education to be the chancellor of New York’s schools.
The status quo is national public education policy largely determined by unelected billionaires with zero expertise in education. “Venture philanthropists” Eli Broad and Bill Gates spend millions shaping public education policy. Formers staffers from the Gates Foundation now seed the Obama Administration’s Department of Education.
“Two of Duncan’s top aides, Chief of Staff Margot Rogers and Assistant Deputy Secretary James H. Shelton III, came from the [Gates] foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving-door policy limiting involvement with former employers.”– “Bill Gates’ School Crusade,” July 15, 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek.
Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and former chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, are both former members of the Broad board of directors. The “Broad Prize for Urban Education” is a trophy and large cash sum awarded annually by the private Broad Foundation to school districts performing to its liking. In its 2009-10 Annual Report, Broad boasts that the trophy itself “resides at the U.S. Department of Education.”
You couldn’t ask for a better symbol of the infiltration of private corporate interests into federal government.
Have Mr. Broad or Mr. Gates been elected to public office, or to direct education policy? Do either have any expertise or experience in public education? No and no. Do either seek genuine parent input? No.
The status quo is Astroturf ed reform groups springing up like toadstools in the night, heavily funded by the same “venture philathropists” looking for a “return on their investment” and pushing the same corporate ed-reform agenda. Washington D.C. ex- school chancellor (Michelle Rhee’s new organization is apparently backed by the same wealthy interests. These organizations lobby for an ed reform agenda that we parents have no say in or may even oppose. But they have resources and media access at their disposal that ordinary parents don’t have. This is not a democratic dialogue about our children’s future when the main stakeholders — we the parents – are largely shut out of the debate.
I do not defend the current trend of sending recent college grads with just five weeks’ training and just a two-year commitment to teach in our nation’s most struggling schools which already suffer from high teacher turnover. But that is the model for Teach for America, Inc. a multimillion-dollar enterprise that is now funded by the Obama government to the tune of $50 million-plus and is arguably de-professionalizing the teaching profession.
Five weeks training does not make these uncredentialed grads “highly qualified,” despite the recent shenanigans by Congress.
I do not support the status quo that punishes teachers, principals and schools with mass layoffs, firings and closures because of student test scores, rather than addressing why some children are struggling and how else one might measure a child’s abilities and a teacher’s worth.
I do not support the status quo which is the mindset of the corporate ed reformers that schools should be run like businesses. Schools are not businesses. Their goal is not profit. The strongest schools are communities, more like families, and need to be cooperative, creative, engaging and nurturing environments.
I do not support the status quo of shameful attacks by the media on teachers and schools and the one-sided cheerleading for charter schools that fails to acknowledge the genuine proven limitations of these schools — their failure to serve children with special needs, the high attrition of kids (even a Geoffrey Canada Harlem Children Zone apparently booted an entire class of kids from a charter school because they weren’t deemed likely to do well on tests. (See: “The Myth of Charter Schools,” Brookings Institution, Nov. 11, 2010.)
I do not support the status quo which makes celebrities and “super(wo)men” out of spotlight-seeking figures like Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, and Arne Duncan, while all the real work is being done quietly by the thousands of anonymous teachers, principals, educators, parents and students, who suffer through reform after reform, trend after trend, searing budget cuts, and still manage to go on and offer a good education to many children in this nation without any national recognition.
I do not support a status quo that cuts so much from school budgets that the PTAs are left fundraising for such essentials as teachers and books, and school communities that do not have these extra resources suffer the most.
I do not support the status quo of education policies being driven by Wall Street interests and not by what’s in the best interests of our children.
I do not support mayoral control, abolishing of school boards, quashing of parent voices and end-runs around democracy.
I do not defend the federal government imposing its edicts on local school districts, suppressing local autonomy and skirting the edges of Constitutionality, which is what Race to the Top essentially does.
The research comes on the heels of a recent pledge by President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, to use $5 billion of the $100 billion in federal stimulus funds for education to press states on charter schools. “States that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application” for federal grant money, Duncan said in a call with reporters last week. Currently, 10 states lack laws that allow charter schools, and 26 others cap their enrollment.” — from: “Charter Schools Might Not Be Better,” U.S. News & World Report, June 19, 2009.)
No, I reject this status quo.
What I support and call for is: the long-term personal and professional investment in every child –which takes time and commitment, as has been demonstrated in Everett, Washington. It’s not flashy, doesn’t require expensive high-tech products, just good old-fashioned follow-up with kids, mentoring and genuine support. And an engaging curriculum.
I support small classes sizes that allow greater one-on-one interaction. I call for the parents’ voices to be the loudest in the discussion of how to run our schools. I support autonomy for schools, teachers and principals who know their communities best, and who can ensure their children are doing well, learning what they need to know and able to graduate.
I call for creative teaching, rich, varied curricula that include the arts and music and languages, science, physical education. I call for safe, decent well-maintained buildings and healthy school meals.
I call for an honest dialogue about the ravages of poverty on our nation’s children. We need to acknowledge the shameful fact that 21 percent of our children live in poverty, and that inequities in academic results are largely determined by income and home life of the child. This is not an excuse, it is a fact, and to expect teachers and schools alone to correct the deep and damaging inequalities of our society is irrational.
I call for an overhaul of school district administrations, to pare them down to the essentials, make them efficient and serving the interests of the school communities, not the whims of private foundations or vendors of standardized tests, text books or online learning products.
I call for the hiring of school superintendents and chancellors who have a local connection and commitment to the community they must serve which will in turn lead to greater accountability. I call to retain democratically elected school board members who must answer to their constituents and oversee the superintendent, and a paid position for school board so they can do their job thoroughly and well.
Public education is an integral ingredient in creating an informed public and a strong democracy. I believe we must keep our public schools free of private and political agendas and manipulations, strengthen our schools, not close them down, stop punishing and start nurturing.
If you agree that our nation needs a new vision for public education, I invite you to join a forum of parents from across the nation who are launching a new organization, Parents Across America, in New York on Feb. 7. Our keynote speaker will be education historian Diane Ravitch. The event is free and open to the public. It starts at 6 p.m. and will held at: PS/IS 89 – Liberty School, 201 Warren Street, New York, N.Y. 10282.
Help bring parents’ voices to the education debate and support progressive, positive, constructive education reforms that work.
http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/why-i-am-not-a-defender-of-the-status-quo-in-education-because-the-status-quo-is-failed-ed-reforms/
Friday, February 4, 2011
Teaching as a Service Industry
From the Guardian.co.uk with a Nod to Mike Klonskys Small Talk Blog
by Paul Thomas
Management and labour are hurtling towards an impasse, and a work stoppage looms. Workers are seeking public support by emphasising the importance of benefits for workers, specifically longterm healthcare for conditions caused by the profession that do not appear until later in life.
This may sound for many like the possible scenario for a teachers' strike, backed by a powerful teachers' union. But if this were a teachers' strike, in 2011, we could anticipate little support for those teachers – not least because of the propaganda created by Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman" and the rise of false prophets of education reform (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee).
However, above, I am speaking about the possible NFL strike that hangs over this coming Super Bowl weekend: a struggle between billionaires and millionaires, which, indirectly, shines an important light on the rise of teacher and teacher union-bashing in the US. Adam Bessie, on Truthout, identifies how the myth of the bad teacher has evolved:
"In this political season of faux anti-establishment anger born of very real economic desperation, public educators have become the villain du jour, their reputations collateral damage in the war against 'big government'. In a remarkable sleight of hand, the super rich who imploded the economy, manufacturing the recession which now enrages the public, have successfully misdirected the public's justifiable anger away from them and toward teachers."
While few people have begun to demonise and criticise either the billionaire owners or the millionaire players (represented by a union) in the NFL, the education reform landscape is built on a false premise – blaming teachers and unions for school failures – that lacks credibility and masks the overwhelming source of education failures: namely, poverty.
Ironically, the new push against teachers' unions, cloaked in discourse about the damage done by "bad" teachers, comes from Democrats. For example, Arne Duncan, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration in Little Rock, Arkansas on 25 August 2010, focused on teacher quality:
"The big game-changer for us, however, in terms of both formula and competitive programmes, revolves around the issue of teacher quality … Nothing is more important and nothing has a greater impact on the quality of education than the quality and skill of the person standing in the front of the class – and there is so much that needs to change in the way that America recruits, trains, supports and manages our teachers."
But the political attacks on teachers and unions, which come from both the left and the right, would likely not resonate as much as they have done, if it were not for the celebrity tour on the back of the documentary Waiting for "Superman", whose message has been perpetuated by celebrity reformers. Two of those, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Canada, share an entrepreneur status that suggests expertise on everything simply because they are wealthy. (Possibly, also, this is what protects NFL owners and players from social ridicule in their fight.)
Both Gates and Canada also use compliant media adroitly to promote their unsupported claims. Canada appeared on the Colbert Report as part of his tour, specifically reinforcing the idea that teacher accountability is central to school reform. "We've got to hold the adults responsible … We've allowed our schools to fail these kids with no consequences," Canada told Colbert's audience.
Gates, again due to his incredible wealth and corporate success, commands media attention – media that rarely question his claims. Take, for example, the Newsweek interview by Daniel Lyons with Gates and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. While the entire interview perpetuates misunderstanding about education reform, the focus on teacher quality and the role of unions exemplifies the claims of the new reformers – even as it exposes those claims' lack of credibility.
In August of 2010, the attack on teacher professionalism was intensified when the Los Angeles Times published teacher quality analyses based on value-added methods (VAM). The charges against teacher quality and teachers' unions elicited several stringent rejections (here, here, and here), but most challenges came from educators themselves – and, of course, received little media coverage when compared to the attention lavished on Gates, Rhee and Canada.
The message has solidified: US public schools are failures because we have too many bad teachers, and we have too many bad teachers because teachers' unions use their excessive power to keep bad teachers in jobs. But it doesn't end there.
By October 2010, the narrative developed further, to take in that our teaching core is weak because "[c]ountries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds." The formula was growing complex, but there was a pattern to the proposed solutions: usurp teachers' union control and fire bad teachers; then restock the depleted teacher core with recruits from among top US students.
Ultimately, this PR campaign by corporate and political leaders has been effective, even if it remains inaccurate. Teacher quality represents only a small percentage of achievement, and there is little evidence that teacher quality is the greatest issue, or even one of the main problems, facing student achievement in public schools.
A provable problem with teacher quality, however, is teacher assignment. Peske and Haycock show that students in poverty, students of colour and ELL students are in classrooms with the least experienced teachers, who are often uncertified or underqualified. Of course, teacher quality does matter in terms of what happens once students are within the walls of schools, but we seem blind to the longstanding tradition of assigning the most experienced and best-qualified teachers to the elite students, who already experience major advantages in their lives outside of school.
That the evidence-based inequity of teacher assignment is ignored, while the myth of the bad teacher is perpetuated, is evidence of the motivation behind the new reformers – an unspoken commitment to the status quo of this social inequity that benefits the very people so keen to lay charges against teachers and unions. And the rants against unions are just as suspect as the claims that bad teachers are crippling schools. Two examples expose the flaws in union-bashing.
First, the new reformers hold up Finland as the model for education reform – while failing to identify two crucial facts: that Finland has low childhood poverty (about 3-4%, compared to over 20% in the US) and that Finland's teachers are nearly 100% unionised. Consider, also, South Carolina, a high-poverty state with a reputation for having a weak education system. South Carolina joined the accountability era at the beginning, taking "A Nation at Risk" seriously and creating standards, testing and accountability in 1984. Despite nearly three decades of precisely the process supported by the new reformers, South Carolina finds itself still ranking at the bottom of education in the US. The real dynamic here is that South Carolina remains a high-poverty state – the true cause of low test scores – and also that South Carolina is a non-union state, with no union contracts for teachers and no tenure.
Now, let's step back from all the separate but overlapping claims about teachers, teacher quality and teachers unions. If we look at them together, we discover that two powerful yet contradictory messages exist in the larger public discourse promoted by the new reformers: contradictory messages that allow one message to mask the other. Political and corporate leaders seek to speak about teaching as if it is a profession, while expecting those professionals to function as a service industry. The narratives offered by Obama and Duncan, Waiting for "Superman" and organisations such as Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America argue for the best and the brightest to implement mandated, common core standards, so that their students can take national tests for which those teachers will be held accountable. And all that while teachers are required to waive their first amendment rights, right to due process, and work for salaries that are less than a regular NFL fine.
Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture.
So, let's return to the NFL dispute. Corporate, political and public sentiment is against teachers' unions, framing unions as the source of all that ails public education; this narrative now holds firm. But virtually no one has cried foul when it comes to the unionised labour struggle of millionaire NFL players pitted against billionaire team owners. This may seem contradictory, but I believe it is not.
Corporate America benefits from the NFL thriving and from the de-professionalising of teaching – regardless of the union element. Outcries about bad teachers and corrupt teachers' unions are not about educational reform, but about guaranteeing that teaching will become permanently a service industry in which schools are reduced to the sole purpose of producing compliant workers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/04/usdomesticpolicy-schools
by Paul Thomas
Management and labour are hurtling towards an impasse, and a work stoppage looms. Workers are seeking public support by emphasising the importance of benefits for workers, specifically longterm healthcare for conditions caused by the profession that do not appear until later in life.
This may sound for many like the possible scenario for a teachers' strike, backed by a powerful teachers' union. But if this were a teachers' strike, in 2011, we could anticipate little support for those teachers – not least because of the propaganda created by Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman" and the rise of false prophets of education reform (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee).
However, above, I am speaking about the possible NFL strike that hangs over this coming Super Bowl weekend: a struggle between billionaires and millionaires, which, indirectly, shines an important light on the rise of teacher and teacher union-bashing in the US. Adam Bessie, on Truthout, identifies how the myth of the bad teacher has evolved:
"In this political season of faux anti-establishment anger born of very real economic desperation, public educators have become the villain du jour, their reputations collateral damage in the war against 'big government'. In a remarkable sleight of hand, the super rich who imploded the economy, manufacturing the recession which now enrages the public, have successfully misdirected the public's justifiable anger away from them and toward teachers."
While few people have begun to demonise and criticise either the billionaire owners or the millionaire players (represented by a union) in the NFL, the education reform landscape is built on a false premise – blaming teachers and unions for school failures – that lacks credibility and masks the overwhelming source of education failures: namely, poverty.
Ironically, the new push against teachers' unions, cloaked in discourse about the damage done by "bad" teachers, comes from Democrats. For example, Arne Duncan, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration in Little Rock, Arkansas on 25 August 2010, focused on teacher quality:
"The big game-changer for us, however, in terms of both formula and competitive programmes, revolves around the issue of teacher quality … Nothing is more important and nothing has a greater impact on the quality of education than the quality and skill of the person standing in the front of the class – and there is so much that needs to change in the way that America recruits, trains, supports and manages our teachers."
But the political attacks on teachers and unions, which come from both the left and the right, would likely not resonate as much as they have done, if it were not for the celebrity tour on the back of the documentary Waiting for "Superman", whose message has been perpetuated by celebrity reformers. Two of those, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Canada, share an entrepreneur status that suggests expertise on everything simply because they are wealthy. (Possibly, also, this is what protects NFL owners and players from social ridicule in their fight.)
Both Gates and Canada also use compliant media adroitly to promote their unsupported claims. Canada appeared on the Colbert Report as part of his tour, specifically reinforcing the idea that teacher accountability is central to school reform. "We've got to hold the adults responsible … We've allowed our schools to fail these kids with no consequences," Canada told Colbert's audience.
Gates, again due to his incredible wealth and corporate success, commands media attention – media that rarely question his claims. Take, for example, the Newsweek interview by Daniel Lyons with Gates and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. While the entire interview perpetuates misunderstanding about education reform, the focus on teacher quality and the role of unions exemplifies the claims of the new reformers – even as it exposes those claims' lack of credibility.
In August of 2010, the attack on teacher professionalism was intensified when the Los Angeles Times published teacher quality analyses based on value-added methods (VAM). The charges against teacher quality and teachers' unions elicited several stringent rejections (here, here, and here), but most challenges came from educators themselves – and, of course, received little media coverage when compared to the attention lavished on Gates, Rhee and Canada.
The message has solidified: US public schools are failures because we have too many bad teachers, and we have too many bad teachers because teachers' unions use their excessive power to keep bad teachers in jobs. But it doesn't end there.
By October 2010, the narrative developed further, to take in that our teaching core is weak because "[c]ountries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds." The formula was growing complex, but there was a pattern to the proposed solutions: usurp teachers' union control and fire bad teachers; then restock the depleted teacher core with recruits from among top US students.
Ultimately, this PR campaign by corporate and political leaders has been effective, even if it remains inaccurate. Teacher quality represents only a small percentage of achievement, and there is little evidence that teacher quality is the greatest issue, or even one of the main problems, facing student achievement in public schools.
A provable problem with teacher quality, however, is teacher assignment. Peske and Haycock show that students in poverty, students of colour and ELL students are in classrooms with the least experienced teachers, who are often uncertified or underqualified. Of course, teacher quality does matter in terms of what happens once students are within the walls of schools, but we seem blind to the longstanding tradition of assigning the most experienced and best-qualified teachers to the elite students, who already experience major advantages in their lives outside of school.
That the evidence-based inequity of teacher assignment is ignored, while the myth of the bad teacher is perpetuated, is evidence of the motivation behind the new reformers – an unspoken commitment to the status quo of this social inequity that benefits the very people so keen to lay charges against teachers and unions. And the rants against unions are just as suspect as the claims that bad teachers are crippling schools. Two examples expose the flaws in union-bashing.
First, the new reformers hold up Finland as the model for education reform – while failing to identify two crucial facts: that Finland has low childhood poverty (about 3-4%, compared to over 20% in the US) and that Finland's teachers are nearly 100% unionised. Consider, also, South Carolina, a high-poverty state with a reputation for having a weak education system. South Carolina joined the accountability era at the beginning, taking "A Nation at Risk" seriously and creating standards, testing and accountability in 1984. Despite nearly three decades of precisely the process supported by the new reformers, South Carolina finds itself still ranking at the bottom of education in the US. The real dynamic here is that South Carolina remains a high-poverty state – the true cause of low test scores – and also that South Carolina is a non-union state, with no union contracts for teachers and no tenure.
Now, let's step back from all the separate but overlapping claims about teachers, teacher quality and teachers unions. If we look at them together, we discover that two powerful yet contradictory messages exist in the larger public discourse promoted by the new reformers: contradictory messages that allow one message to mask the other. Political and corporate leaders seek to speak about teaching as if it is a profession, while expecting those professionals to function as a service industry. The narratives offered by Obama and Duncan, Waiting for "Superman" and organisations such as Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America argue for the best and the brightest to implement mandated, common core standards, so that their students can take national tests for which those teachers will be held accountable. And all that while teachers are required to waive their first amendment rights, right to due process, and work for salaries that are less than a regular NFL fine.
Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture.
So, let's return to the NFL dispute. Corporate, political and public sentiment is against teachers' unions, framing unions as the source of all that ails public education; this narrative now holds firm. But virtually no one has cried foul when it comes to the unionised labour struggle of millionaire NFL players pitted against billionaire team owners. This may seem contradictory, but I believe it is not.
Corporate America benefits from the NFL thriving and from the de-professionalising of teaching – regardless of the union element. Outcries about bad teachers and corrupt teachers' unions are not about educational reform, but about guaranteeing that teaching will become permanently a service industry in which schools are reduced to the sole purpose of producing compliant workers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/04/usdomesticpolicy-schools
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Race to the Top creates many losers
From the Hill.com
by Dennis Van Roekel
Many Americans, including President Obama, weren’t even born when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into outer space in October 1957. Yet everyone knew exactly what the President meant when he said during his State of the Union address, “This is our Sputnik moment.” Today the U.S. faces economic and innovative competition around the world. If we want to win the future in the same way that we won the Space Race, we must do what we did then – invest in education.
The President shined a spotlight on the importance of a long-term investment in education and recognized the critical role that teachers play in student success, calling for more respect for the teaching profession. His strong message of support for education and his call to fix No Child Left Behind is sorely welcome. However, as with many good things, the devil is in the details.
Global competition is a fact of life, but competition in education funding can have negative consequences. That’s why we have expressed concerns with funding models, like the Race to the Top program, that create winners and losers among our students. The federal government has a vital role to play in advancing the quality of education and ensuring equity and opportunity for all students.
The track record with Race to the Top calls into question this program’s ability to meet this critical objective. To date, 39 states were non-participants or losers in the Race to the Top competition. And according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, after two years of implementation and close to $4 billion dollars, many underserved communities – Black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian students, ELL students and poor rural states – have been poorly represented in Race to the Top’s distribution of resources.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was intended to provide a level playing field and equal opportunity, but the competitive nature of Race to the Top has pitted students against their peers, and educators against their colleagues. The expanded use of competitive grant policies has the potential to dangerously undermine public education, and for this reason we believe this formula must not be a part of ESEA reauthorization.
In the push to renew ESEA, we must change the punitive approach of No Child Left Behind, especially the fanatical focus on standardized tests and the unrealistic AYP requirements that brand thriving schools as failures. We should focus on schools that are in the most desperate need of transformation. That’s exactly what NEA is doing in our Priority Schools Campaign, which is engaging our members in districts across the country and identifying more and new ways to help students succeed.
In short, we need to redefine the federal role in education: moving beyond testing, labeling and punishing, and partnering with states to transform public education for all students.
Dennis Van Roekel is the president of the National Education Association (NEA).
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/141537-competition-in-education-funding-hurts-students?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d48ae85d44f30e5%2C0
by Dennis Van Roekel
Many Americans, including President Obama, weren’t even born when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into outer space in October 1957. Yet everyone knew exactly what the President meant when he said during his State of the Union address, “This is our Sputnik moment.” Today the U.S. faces economic and innovative competition around the world. If we want to win the future in the same way that we won the Space Race, we must do what we did then – invest in education.
The President shined a spotlight on the importance of a long-term investment in education and recognized the critical role that teachers play in student success, calling for more respect for the teaching profession. His strong message of support for education and his call to fix No Child Left Behind is sorely welcome. However, as with many good things, the devil is in the details.
Global competition is a fact of life, but competition in education funding can have negative consequences. That’s why we have expressed concerns with funding models, like the Race to the Top program, that create winners and losers among our students. The federal government has a vital role to play in advancing the quality of education and ensuring equity and opportunity for all students.
The track record with Race to the Top calls into question this program’s ability to meet this critical objective. To date, 39 states were non-participants or losers in the Race to the Top competition. And according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, after two years of implementation and close to $4 billion dollars, many underserved communities – Black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian students, ELL students and poor rural states – have been poorly represented in Race to the Top’s distribution of resources.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was intended to provide a level playing field and equal opportunity, but the competitive nature of Race to the Top has pitted students against their peers, and educators against their colleagues. The expanded use of competitive grant policies has the potential to dangerously undermine public education, and for this reason we believe this formula must not be a part of ESEA reauthorization.
In the push to renew ESEA, we must change the punitive approach of No Child Left Behind, especially the fanatical focus on standardized tests and the unrealistic AYP requirements that brand thriving schools as failures. We should focus on schools that are in the most desperate need of transformation. That’s exactly what NEA is doing in our Priority Schools Campaign, which is engaging our members in districts across the country and identifying more and new ways to help students succeed.
In short, we need to redefine the federal role in education: moving beyond testing, labeling and punishing, and partnering with states to transform public education for all students.
Dennis Van Roekel is the president of the National Education Association (NEA).
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/141537-competition-in-education-funding-hurts-students?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d48ae85d44f30e5%2C0
Monday, January 31, 2011
Merit Pay: Public Input on Friday, Bill Submitted on Monday
Et Tu Brutus? I am not optimistic. -cpg
From the Orlando Sentinel
By Leslie Postal,
Florida teachers would be judged on their students’ growth on standardized tests, and new teachers would be paid based on that test-score data as part of a new merit pay bill filed today in the Florida Senate.
Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville, chairman of the Senate’s education committee, filed the “Race to the Top for Student Success” bill.
It is the first merit pay bill filed for the 2011 Florida Legislature session but is similar to plans floated in the past few months by both the Florida Education Department and an education advocacy group.
Wise, whose committee took public comment on the issue Friday, has said he hopes this year’s debate on how to improve schools by changing how teachers are evaluated and paid would be less contentious than last year’s.
The controversial bill lawmakers adopted last year was vetoed by former Gov. Charlie Crist and widely criticized by educators.
“We’re not here to beat up the teachers, we’re not here to beat up the administrators, we’re here for student success,” Wise said at Friday’s meeting.
The new bill, SB 736, would grandfather in current teacher-pay plans but set up new, merit-based ones for teachers hired after July 1, 2014.
The bill would require that at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on student test-score data — preferably three years worth. The data would be filtered into a new system that could take into account factors outside a teacher’s control, such as a student’s absentee rate, the bill says..
Teachers would earn one of four designations — unsatisfactory, needs improvement, effective and highly effective.
Under the new pay plan, they would get raises only if they earned one of the top two ratings.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2011/01/teacher-pay-bill-using-test-scores-is-filed.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+news%2Fpolitics%2Fpoliticalpulse+%28Central+Florida+Political+Pulse%29
From the Orlando Sentinel
By Leslie Postal,
Florida teachers would be judged on their students’ growth on standardized tests, and new teachers would be paid based on that test-score data as part of a new merit pay bill filed today in the Florida Senate.
Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville, chairman of the Senate’s education committee, filed the “Race to the Top for Student Success” bill.
It is the first merit pay bill filed for the 2011 Florida Legislature session but is similar to plans floated in the past few months by both the Florida Education Department and an education advocacy group.
Wise, whose committee took public comment on the issue Friday, has said he hopes this year’s debate on how to improve schools by changing how teachers are evaluated and paid would be less contentious than last year’s.
The controversial bill lawmakers adopted last year was vetoed by former Gov. Charlie Crist and widely criticized by educators.
“We’re not here to beat up the teachers, we’re not here to beat up the administrators, we’re here for student success,” Wise said at Friday’s meeting.
The new bill, SB 736, would grandfather in current teacher-pay plans but set up new, merit-based ones for teachers hired after July 1, 2014.
The bill would require that at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on student test-score data — preferably three years worth. The data would be filtered into a new system that could take into account factors outside a teacher’s control, such as a student’s absentee rate, the bill says..
Teachers would earn one of four designations — unsatisfactory, needs improvement, effective and highly effective.
Under the new pay plan, they would get raises only if they earned one of the top two ratings.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2011/01/teacher-pay-bill-using-test-scores-is-filed.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+news%2Fpolitics%2Fpoliticalpulse+%28Central+Florida+Political+Pulse%29
If only teachers could grade legislators
The Florida legislature is considering a bill that would require teachers to grade their students’ parents. As you can imagine the bill has garnered quite a bit of attention nationwide from education experts and in the state from teachers themselves. Almost universally it has been ridiculed though that has not slowed it down in the Florida Legislature. Where we all think more meaningful parental involvement would be beneficial, most of us think the unwieldy ht it with a hammer bill isn’t the way to go.
It did however get me to thinking, what if teachers could grade legislators, what kind of grade would they get?
Listening in class, D minus: There are very few members of the legislature that were teachers or worked in the education profession but that doesn’t stop them from meddling and thinking that every notion that pops in their heads won’t somehow improve education. They have also shown very little interest in listening to those on the front lines of education. Rick Scott’s transition team had only one teacher on it out of 23 people and he taught at a virtual schools
Completing Assignments, F: The Florida constitution requires the state to fund education at a world class level, instead the legislature has chosen to cut education funding in order to pay for tax breaks to special interests (and I don’t want to hear the argument that they are the group that creates jobs because if that is the case then they have failed too). They also ignored the people with the class size amendment, preferring to fine districts or violating it rather than properly funding it.
Critical Thinking, F: Their keep proposing the same solutions, vouchers, charter schools and merit pay, despite the fact the first one violates the constitution and the last two have been proven in study after study not to improve education that is right friends not one study has said those two things work. Their other solution, virtual schools, have been ripe with fraud and the jury is still out on how effective they will ultimately be.
Conduct, F: Rather than looking for solutions that would be beneficial to our children and schools they have engaged on a smear campaign against teachers and their unions proposing solutions that will only serve to weaken public education and force more teachers from the field (less than half of all new teachers last 5 years). Whether it’s by hook (incompetence) or by crook (maliciousness) the legislature has kneecapped our public schools and the children that go there and there seems to be no end in sight.
I give them a failing grade. What about you?
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
It did however get me to thinking, what if teachers could grade legislators, what kind of grade would they get?
Listening in class, D minus: There are very few members of the legislature that were teachers or worked in the education profession but that doesn’t stop them from meddling and thinking that every notion that pops in their heads won’t somehow improve education. They have also shown very little interest in listening to those on the front lines of education. Rick Scott’s transition team had only one teacher on it out of 23 people and he taught at a virtual schools
Completing Assignments, F: The Florida constitution requires the state to fund education at a world class level, instead the legislature has chosen to cut education funding in order to pay for tax breaks to special interests (and I don’t want to hear the argument that they are the group that creates jobs because if that is the case then they have failed too). They also ignored the people with the class size amendment, preferring to fine districts or violating it rather than properly funding it.
Critical Thinking, F: Their keep proposing the same solutions, vouchers, charter schools and merit pay, despite the fact the first one violates the constitution and the last two have been proven in study after study not to improve education that is right friends not one study has said those two things work. Their other solution, virtual schools, have been ripe with fraud and the jury is still out on how effective they will ultimately be.
Conduct, F: Rather than looking for solutions that would be beneficial to our children and schools they have engaged on a smear campaign against teachers and their unions proposing solutions that will only serve to weaken public education and force more teachers from the field (less than half of all new teachers last 5 years). Whether it’s by hook (incompetence) or by crook (maliciousness) the legislature has kneecapped our public schools and the children that go there and there seems to be no end in sight.
I give them a failing grade. What about you?
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Bill Proctor, chairman of the Florida House K-20 Education Committee, talks education
I am not optimistc we will see anything but union busting and teacher bashing reforms. -cpg
From TampaBay.coms gradebook
by Jeff Solocheck
The Florida Legislature renewed its discussion on teacher quality and performance pay issues this past week, with several hearings in both the Senate and the House. The question hasn't been whether a revamped version of last year's vetoed Senate Bill 6 will come up this year, but rather what the details will be. The Senate opened the doors to anyone who wanted to come offer ideas, with no language on the table, while the House started its conversation with a detailed proposal from Jeb Bush's Foundation for a Better Florida. House K-20 Committee chairman Bill Proctor, R-St. Augustine, spoke with reporter Jeff Solochek about his expectations of this year's effort to push for change to the ways teachers are contracted, paid, evaluated and certified.
I'm wondering where you see this headed now. There's definitely going to be a bill, it looks like, and I want to know how closely the two houses are working on it and how much input you are seeking from outside groups.
Well I guess two things. No. 1, most of the committee hearings that I am acquainted with on education in the House have been predominantly testimony from representatives of the various segments of the education system. We really haven't had any testimony, any hearings dealing specifically with bills, that I am aware of. ...
I guess I am thinking when you had at the subcommittee Patricia Levesque making a presentation on the recommendations she had from the Foundation (for a Better Florida).
Okay. All right. I saw when Patricia made those. But as far as I know no one has filed a bill with the recommendations. I am sure they will be considered. I've met with Patricia on several occasions just to try to understand the proposals they are putting forth. But those are not in any type of bill form now and I don't know they will be.
Do you think there is more of an opportunity for people to have a meaningful participation in this discussion this year than last year? Because last year a lot of people felt shut out.
I think there has been a considerable amount. Of course the commissioner and his people have had meetings with the superintendents. They have had meetings with the teachers unions. I met with Sen. Wise earlier this morning. He has gone to a number of teacher meetings. But basically the SB 6 that we had last year, there were two main parts to it. One of them had to do with what we are calling teacher tenure. It's really service contracts, professional service contracts. And the other one had to do with performance pay. There has been widespread discussion of those two topics.
Are those things for sure going to happen this year?
I can't tell you anything for sure. I can tell you I don't think there's any question that we in the House will be looking at those topics.
What do you envision? What kinds of things do you think are important in that legislation? What does the House want?
Well, to say what the House wants, I don't know that I'm qualified. But I can tell you where I think we're heading, to some extent. But you've got to realize of course I've got to be consistent with what the leadership is looking for, what the governor's office is looking for. And we've got to be compatible with what the Senate is looking for. So I could tell you what I think is going to be the main frame of those issues. But it doesn't mean that's going to come out that way at the end of the day.
I want to know the way you describe it.
I think you're going to find an approach to teacher employment that will not be a tenure system. Now, will there be a probationary time? Will there be one year contracts? Three year contracts? All of that is up for discussion. But I do believe there will be an adjustment of the tenure system as we now know it.
Performance pay, I can only say at this moment it is very likely that how we come out will be fairly consistent with what the commissioner and others have negotiated with the federal government in the Race to the Top.
Are you concerned that there will be another outburst by teachers who are angry with what's going on that will stop things or make it more difficult to accomplish?
Hmmmm. Well, I don't speculate on what others might do. But I think it would be difficult for anyone to argue that there hasn't been widespread consultation with others on this issue, including teachers and the teachers union. My understanding was, they may not be in complete accord on tenure but I think they've reached some common ground on performance pay.
I know some districts are asking that you just do what Race to the Top says and just let it be a pilot program until you can see what works. Is that an idea that holds some water?
I have not heard that. I met with a group of superintendents and we had a pretty good discussion of the two topics along with several others. But I have not heard that as being a pilot program. I think we are beyond the pilot program time. I think we have got too many districts involved in Race to the Top. ... There was a relatively small number that didn't sign on in the final analysis. But it's like anything else. You're not going to please everybody. If we can come to agreement with the majority that's probably the best we can do. But I do believe that something definitely akin to what the Department of Education came up with -- I should say likely, I shouldn't say definitely -- in their Race to the Top program is where we'll start and it may be where we end up.
Do you think the collective bargaining rules and laws will stand in the way at all?
It's hard to say until you see how the bill is written in the final analysis if you would anticipate any conflict between the two. I would hope not. But I really don't know why it should. I think most of what you bargain for is still open for bargaining. But I think how people are paid and ... if we're talking about pay for performance to say we are going to pay for performance, I don't know that's a violation of any union collective bargaining standards. And I don't know that tenure is sacrosanct within the bargaining process. I don't know how many professions or organizations bargain away lifetime employment.
What about the issue of testing. That's another thing I've heard superintendents touch on, that they think kids are tested too much already. Do you think there's a way to do this without putting more testing on kids?
Well, I don't know. I don't know that I necessarily agree with the notion that there is too much testing already. Unless schools have changed dramatically since I went to one and I taught in one, we generally had tests at the end of each week. And we had tests at the end of each unit. The question is probably, are we going to have some sort of standardized tests as opposed to teacher-made tests. And I think you will see more. But a test is a test. If you're going to have a test at the end of each unit, I don't think it makes a world of difference if you're going to have a standardized test on that unit or if it's a teacher-made test. As long as the test relates to the curriculum.
Okay. What's the time frame going to be for all this? Is it going to be something that happens fast? Or will there be lots of debate and go to the end of the session?
That's a guess. ... Next week is not a committee week. The following week is a committee week. At the end of that week we should know pretty well, we'll at least be able to roll out some ideas and see where we are in relation to where the Senate is.
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/weekend-interview-state-rep-bill-proctor-chairman-florida-house-k-20-education-committee
From TampaBay.coms gradebook
by Jeff Solocheck
The Florida Legislature renewed its discussion on teacher quality and performance pay issues this past week, with several hearings in both the Senate and the House. The question hasn't been whether a revamped version of last year's vetoed Senate Bill 6 will come up this year, but rather what the details will be. The Senate opened the doors to anyone who wanted to come offer ideas, with no language on the table, while the House started its conversation with a detailed proposal from Jeb Bush's Foundation for a Better Florida. House K-20 Committee chairman Bill Proctor, R-St. Augustine, spoke with reporter Jeff Solochek about his expectations of this year's effort to push for change to the ways teachers are contracted, paid, evaluated and certified.
I'm wondering where you see this headed now. There's definitely going to be a bill, it looks like, and I want to know how closely the two houses are working on it and how much input you are seeking from outside groups.
Well I guess two things. No. 1, most of the committee hearings that I am acquainted with on education in the House have been predominantly testimony from representatives of the various segments of the education system. We really haven't had any testimony, any hearings dealing specifically with bills, that I am aware of. ...
I guess I am thinking when you had at the subcommittee Patricia Levesque making a presentation on the recommendations she had from the Foundation (for a Better Florida).
Okay. All right. I saw when Patricia made those. But as far as I know no one has filed a bill with the recommendations. I am sure they will be considered. I've met with Patricia on several occasions just to try to understand the proposals they are putting forth. But those are not in any type of bill form now and I don't know they will be.
Do you think there is more of an opportunity for people to have a meaningful participation in this discussion this year than last year? Because last year a lot of people felt shut out.
I think there has been a considerable amount. Of course the commissioner and his people have had meetings with the superintendents. They have had meetings with the teachers unions. I met with Sen. Wise earlier this morning. He has gone to a number of teacher meetings. But basically the SB 6 that we had last year, there were two main parts to it. One of them had to do with what we are calling teacher tenure. It's really service contracts, professional service contracts. And the other one had to do with performance pay. There has been widespread discussion of those two topics.
Are those things for sure going to happen this year?
I can't tell you anything for sure. I can tell you I don't think there's any question that we in the House will be looking at those topics.
What do you envision? What kinds of things do you think are important in that legislation? What does the House want?
Well, to say what the House wants, I don't know that I'm qualified. But I can tell you where I think we're heading, to some extent. But you've got to realize of course I've got to be consistent with what the leadership is looking for, what the governor's office is looking for. And we've got to be compatible with what the Senate is looking for. So I could tell you what I think is going to be the main frame of those issues. But it doesn't mean that's going to come out that way at the end of the day.
I want to know the way you describe it.
I think you're going to find an approach to teacher employment that will not be a tenure system. Now, will there be a probationary time? Will there be one year contracts? Three year contracts? All of that is up for discussion. But I do believe there will be an adjustment of the tenure system as we now know it.
Performance pay, I can only say at this moment it is very likely that how we come out will be fairly consistent with what the commissioner and others have negotiated with the federal government in the Race to the Top.
Are you concerned that there will be another outburst by teachers who are angry with what's going on that will stop things or make it more difficult to accomplish?
Hmmmm. Well, I don't speculate on what others might do. But I think it would be difficult for anyone to argue that there hasn't been widespread consultation with others on this issue, including teachers and the teachers union. My understanding was, they may not be in complete accord on tenure but I think they've reached some common ground on performance pay.
I know some districts are asking that you just do what Race to the Top says and just let it be a pilot program until you can see what works. Is that an idea that holds some water?
I have not heard that. I met with a group of superintendents and we had a pretty good discussion of the two topics along with several others. But I have not heard that as being a pilot program. I think we are beyond the pilot program time. I think we have got too many districts involved in Race to the Top. ... There was a relatively small number that didn't sign on in the final analysis. But it's like anything else. You're not going to please everybody. If we can come to agreement with the majority that's probably the best we can do. But I do believe that something definitely akin to what the Department of Education came up with -- I should say likely, I shouldn't say definitely -- in their Race to the Top program is where we'll start and it may be where we end up.
Do you think the collective bargaining rules and laws will stand in the way at all?
It's hard to say until you see how the bill is written in the final analysis if you would anticipate any conflict between the two. I would hope not. But I really don't know why it should. I think most of what you bargain for is still open for bargaining. But I think how people are paid and ... if we're talking about pay for performance to say we are going to pay for performance, I don't know that's a violation of any union collective bargaining standards. And I don't know that tenure is sacrosanct within the bargaining process. I don't know how many professions or organizations bargain away lifetime employment.
What about the issue of testing. That's another thing I've heard superintendents touch on, that they think kids are tested too much already. Do you think there's a way to do this without putting more testing on kids?
Well, I don't know. I don't know that I necessarily agree with the notion that there is too much testing already. Unless schools have changed dramatically since I went to one and I taught in one, we generally had tests at the end of each week. And we had tests at the end of each unit. The question is probably, are we going to have some sort of standardized tests as opposed to teacher-made tests. And I think you will see more. But a test is a test. If you're going to have a test at the end of each unit, I don't think it makes a world of difference if you're going to have a standardized test on that unit or if it's a teacher-made test. As long as the test relates to the curriculum.
Okay. What's the time frame going to be for all this? Is it going to be something that happens fast? Or will there be lots of debate and go to the end of the session?
That's a guess. ... Next week is not a committee week. The following week is a committee week. At the end of that week we should know pretty well, we'll at least be able to roll out some ideas and see where we are in relation to where the Senate is.
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/weekend-interview-state-rep-bill-proctor-chairman-florida-house-k-20-education-committee
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Merit pay should mirror district goals
From the Florida Tribune
by Kim MacQueen
It was Teacher Merit Pay Day in the Florida Legislature Wednesday as both the House and Senate hosted members and visitors to help flesh out "Son of Senate Bill 6" as it's drafted.
The measure currently under discussion in both houses would use as a blueprint a plan developed by Foundation for Florida's Future Executive Director Patricia Levesque in concert with the Florida Association of District School Superintendents and other education officials. A more moderate version of last year's controversial SB 6, the plan calls for teacher pay to be predicated on performance and student learning gains. It also calls for annual contracts for new teachers and three-year contract renewals for veteran teachers, and stipulates that pay increases can only be given to teachers deemed "effective" or "highly effective."
Then-Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed SB 6, but Gov. Rick Scott has said he will support similar legislation.
Legislators have already heard suggestions from Florida Education Commissioner Eric Smith and others that this year's bill should closely mirror the district goals already in place under the national Race to the Top grant program. Senate Education PreK-12 Committee Chair Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, indicated today that he's gotten the message. As it heads into bill drafting, Wise said he's calling it the "Race to the Top" bill.
Among those testifying Wednesday included Kay McGannon, advocacy director for the organization Stand for Children in Colorado, where a similar measure passed last year, as well as district representatives who warned legislators to tread with care.
"You have got to get buy-in not just from teachers, but from every employee," said Pasco Schools Superintendent Heather Fiorentino. She also asked legislators to "make sure it's fully funded" and "make sure it doesn't add additional strain" to districts in tight budget times.
A House panel heard from Smith, Florida Association of District School Superintendents representative Joy Frank, Florida Education Association President Andy Ford and others for nearly three hours of testimony on how to best craft the bill.
Ford indicated that collaboration and local solutions are keys to the success of educational reform, noting that "I don't believe we should demolish the system we have in place. It needs some fine tuning. I don't believe we should accept that our public schools are failing because I don't think that's true."
Smith pointed to comprehensive evaluation as key to making the bill work. Speaking specifically about the current process for teacher evaluations that lead to removal, he said "it's very cumbersome, frequently confrontational, lengthy and often leads to lawsuits."
"Evaluation is central to how we proceed," he said.
Originally published in the Florida Current - exclusively distributed via Lobbytools - Florida's Premiere Legislative and Media Monitoring Service.
by Kim MacQueen
It was Teacher Merit Pay Day in the Florida Legislature Wednesday as both the House and Senate hosted members and visitors to help flesh out "Son of Senate Bill 6" as it's drafted.
The measure currently under discussion in both houses would use as a blueprint a plan developed by Foundation for Florida's Future Executive Director Patricia Levesque in concert with the Florida Association of District School Superintendents and other education officials. A more moderate version of last year's controversial SB 6, the plan calls for teacher pay to be predicated on performance and student learning gains. It also calls for annual contracts for new teachers and three-year contract renewals for veteran teachers, and stipulates that pay increases can only be given to teachers deemed "effective" or "highly effective."
Then-Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed SB 6, but Gov. Rick Scott has said he will support similar legislation.
Legislators have already heard suggestions from Florida Education Commissioner Eric Smith and others that this year's bill should closely mirror the district goals already in place under the national Race to the Top grant program. Senate Education PreK-12 Committee Chair Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, indicated today that he's gotten the message. As it heads into bill drafting, Wise said he's calling it the "Race to the Top" bill.
Among those testifying Wednesday included Kay McGannon, advocacy director for the organization Stand for Children in Colorado, where a similar measure passed last year, as well as district representatives who warned legislators to tread with care.
"You have got to get buy-in not just from teachers, but from every employee," said Pasco Schools Superintendent Heather Fiorentino. She also asked legislators to "make sure it's fully funded" and "make sure it doesn't add additional strain" to districts in tight budget times.
A House panel heard from Smith, Florida Association of District School Superintendents representative Joy Frank, Florida Education Association President Andy Ford and others for nearly three hours of testimony on how to best craft the bill.
Ford indicated that collaboration and local solutions are keys to the success of educational reform, noting that "I don't believe we should demolish the system we have in place. It needs some fine tuning. I don't believe we should accept that our public schools are failing because I don't think that's true."
Smith pointed to comprehensive evaluation as key to making the bill work. Speaking specifically about the current process for teacher evaluations that lead to removal, he said "it's very cumbersome, frequently confrontational, lengthy and often leads to lawsuits."
"Evaluation is central to how we proceed," he said.
Originally published in the Florida Current - exclusively distributed via Lobbytools - Florida's Premiere Legislative and Media Monitoring Service.
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