From TBO.com
It will be interesting to see how Republican presidential contenders respond to an exhaustive study by a prominent skeptic of global warming that found the planet is indeed rapidly getting hotter.
The study's conclusion does not mean GOP candidates should suddenly embrace more regulations, new fees or unbridled spending on green technologies. It does mean they should treat the issue seriously, and not simply dismiss it as a kooky fabrication by back-to-nature fanatics.
While there remains a great deal of debate about the extent of the threat, the scientific evidence is compelling that climate change is occurring, and the burning of fossil fuels is likely a factor.
The GOP candidates should be offering conservative, market-based responses, not blanket denials. Yet so far only Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have acknowledged they believe climate change is real, and lately Romney has sounded as if he were backtracking.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he thinks climate change is an unproven theory advanced by scientists who have "manipulated data." Herman Cain calls man-made global warming "poppycock. I don't believe in it."
They should consider the findings of physicist Richard Muller, a long-time climate change skeptic, who conducted a two-year study that was partially funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a conservative group that has funded the tea party and campaigns against environmental regulations. Brothers Charles and David Koch are involved in oil and other industries that produce greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet Muller found the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s, numbers that affirmed the findings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. Muller did not research the exact cause, but the majority of climate scientists say the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels is a factor. Muller seemed inclined to accept those findings.
He says it was prudent to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels because "greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world." This from a University of California, Berkeley, scientist who once mocked Al Gore.
Muller still has doubts that the climate change threat is as grave as some claim. Research should continue on climate change causes, likely impacts and the most effective responses. But it is irresponsible to treat the matter as political make-believe.
The effects of climate change could have devastating effects on the economy, public health and the environment. Consider Florida, where even a minor increase in ocean levels could ruin the tourism industry and the value of coastal real estate. Rising temperatures can increase the spread of pests and disease and can cause more severe weather patterns. Not all the impacts are negative. Warmer weather, for instance, can help growers in certain areas. But it may also result in damaging droughts and floods.
The U.S. military takes climate change seriously, recognizing how changes in weather and the availability of resources can affect the stability of other nations and create threats to our national security.
There is no doubt some left-wing activists are using climate change to advance government command-and-control schemes. The level of threat is still unknown, and certain natural events are simply beyond our control. Doom-and-gloom scenarios always merit a degree of healthy skepticism.
But simply ignoring the issue — and leaving our nation unprepared for the possibilities — is hardly conservative leadership.
The prudent reaction is to confront the facts, develop a long-term course of action and find ways to encourage private markets — not with Solyndra-like giveaways — to develop clean-energy and other technologies that will enable the nation to cope with whatever climate change comes our way.
http://www2.tbo.com/news/opinion/2011/nov/08/meopino1-dont-ignore-science-ar-301432/
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Teachers lie according to politicians and ed reformers
From the New York Times
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated in part on her school's fifth-grade writing scores.
Erin Alvarado, a librarian, does not teach classes, but she had to for observational purposes.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has the job of implementing President Obama’s signature education program, praised Tennessee officials for having “the courage, capacity and commitment to turn their ideas into practices that can improve outcomes for students.”
Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, called his state “the focal point of education reform in the nation.” Tennessee’s new motto is “First to the Top.”
So you would think that educators like Will Shelton, principal of Blackman Middle School here, would be delighted. The state requires that teachers be evaluated by their students’ test scores, and that principals get into classrooms regularly to observe teachers.
Mr. Shelton is a big believer in both.
But not this. “I’ve never seen such nonsense,” he said. “In the five years I’ve been principal here, I’ve never known so little about what’s going on in my own building.” Mr. Shelton has to spend so much time filling out paperwork that he’s stuck in his office for long stretches.
The new rules, enacted at the start of the school year, require Mr. Shelton to do as many observations for his strongest teachers — four a year — as for his weakest. “It’s an insult to my best teachers,” he said, “but it’s also a terrible waste of time.”
Because there are no student test scores with which to evaluate over half of Tennessee’s teachers — kindergarten to third-grade teachers; art, music and vocational teachers — the state has created a bewildering set of assessment rules. Math specialists can be evaluated by their school’s English scores, music teachers by the school’s writing scores.
“One of my teachers came to me six weeks ago and said, ‘Will, morale is in the toilet,’ ” Mr. Shelton recalled. “This destroys any possibility of building a family atmosphere. It causes so much distrust.”
If ever proof were needed for the notion that it’s a good idea to look before you leap, it’s the implementation of Race to the Top in Tennessee. “I don’t know why they felt they had to rush,” said Tim Tackett, a member of the school board here who was a teacher and principal for 32 years. “Clearly this wasn’t well thought out.”
Federal officials said that they did not pressure Tennessee to rush, and that the other 10 states that won grants, as well as the District of Columbia, have routinely been given time extensions. Kelli Gauthier, a spokeswoman for the state’s Education Department, wrote in an e-mail that the state spent a year developing the evaluation system after consulting administrators and teachers around the state. At meetings in Nashville last week, state officials seemed to be giving ground and spoke about tweaking the requirements.
On Friday, Tennessee’s education commissioner, Kevin S. Huffman, asked the State Board of Education for modifications to the evaluation rules that are intended to reduce the amount of time principals must spend on them.
“We have said from the beginning that we will listen and respond to feedback from educators on this evaluation model, and that is exactly what we’re doing,” Mr. Huffman told state legislators. “This adjustment made sense, and if approved, our evaluation system will be stronger because of it.”
But tweaking the rules may not be nearly enough. A recent article in Education Week said essentially that things were so bad in Tennessee, there was a danger that the grant program would be undermined elsewhere.
The state is micromanaging principals to a degree never seen before here, and perhaps anywhere. For example, Mr. Shelton is required to have a pre-observation conference with each teacher (which takes 20 minutes), observe the teacher for a period (50 minutes), conduct a post-observation conference (20 minutes), and fill out a rubric with 19 variables and give teachers a score from 1 to 5 (40 minutes).
He must have copies of his evaluations ready for any visit by a county evaluator, who evaluates whether Mr. Shelton has properly evaluated the teachers.
He is required to do at least four observations a year for the 65 teachers at his school, although the changes suggested last week would save paperwork by allowing two of the observations to be done back to back.
Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students’ results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.
To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores.
“How stupid is that?” said Michelle Pheneger, who teaches ACT math prep at Blackman High and is also being evaluated in part based on writing scores. “My job can be at risk, and I’m not even being evaluated by my own work.”
For 15 percent of their testing evaluation, teachers without scores are permitted to choose which subject test they want to be judged on. Few pick something related to their expertise; instead, they try to anticipate the subject that their school is likely to score well on in the state exams next spring.
Several teachers without scores at Oakland Middle School conferred. “The P. E. teacher got information that the writing score was the best to pick,” said Jeff Jennings, the art teacher. “He informed the home ec teacher, who passed it on to me, and I told the career development teacher.”
It’s a bit like Vegas, and if you pick the wrong academic subject, you lose and get a bad evaluation. While this may have nothing to do with academic performance, it does measure a teacher’s ability to play the odds. There’s also the question of how a principal can do a classroom observation of someone who doesn’t teach a classroom subject.
The answer is, the principal still has to observe them teaching something. Erin Alvarado, a librarian at Central Magnet, a combined middle and high school, picked eighth-grade descriptive writing. One of the rubric variables is how well the teacher knows her students. There are 938 students at Central, and she knew few in that class by name. “Fortunately, the teacher put all the names on index cards for me,” Ms. Alvarado said. “I’d take a quick peek down at the card, pick a name, look around and hope the student was there.”
This would all be hilarious, except these evaluations can cost people their jobs.
In September, the school board here sent a letter to the education commissioner requesting that these state policies be “reviewed immediately.”
“Doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, does it?” said Mr. Tackett, who drafted the letter.
State officials have said that by next year, they will develop ways to assess teachers in subjects with no state test.
Mr. Tackett is skeptical. “I’ll be interested to see how they evaluate a band director,” he said.
In the end, it’s all about distrust: not trusting principals to judge teachers, not trusting teachers to educate children.
Like a lot of principals, Mr. Shelton has always done “pop-ins,” quick, unannounced visits that can be as short as two minutes, as long as 15. He says he used to get into every classroom several times a week, every day if a teacher was having problems. After 23 years as an educator, he said, it doesn’t take him long to spot trouble.
He says the new state policies put everyone under stress, are divisive and suck the joy out of a building. “What I need to make my school better is pretty simple,” he said. “I want everybody to be happy. If they’re happy, they will do a better job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/education/tennessees-rules-on-teacher-evaluations-bring-frustration.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated in part on her school's fifth-grade writing scores.
Erin Alvarado, a librarian, does not teach classes, but she had to for observational purposes.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has the job of implementing President Obama’s signature education program, praised Tennessee officials for having “the courage, capacity and commitment to turn their ideas into practices that can improve outcomes for students.”
Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, called his state “the focal point of education reform in the nation.” Tennessee’s new motto is “First to the Top.”
So you would think that educators like Will Shelton, principal of Blackman Middle School here, would be delighted. The state requires that teachers be evaluated by their students’ test scores, and that principals get into classrooms regularly to observe teachers.
Mr. Shelton is a big believer in both.
But not this. “I’ve never seen such nonsense,” he said. “In the five years I’ve been principal here, I’ve never known so little about what’s going on in my own building.” Mr. Shelton has to spend so much time filling out paperwork that he’s stuck in his office for long stretches.
The new rules, enacted at the start of the school year, require Mr. Shelton to do as many observations for his strongest teachers — four a year — as for his weakest. “It’s an insult to my best teachers,” he said, “but it’s also a terrible waste of time.”
Because there are no student test scores with which to evaluate over half of Tennessee’s teachers — kindergarten to third-grade teachers; art, music and vocational teachers — the state has created a bewildering set of assessment rules. Math specialists can be evaluated by their school’s English scores, music teachers by the school’s writing scores.
“One of my teachers came to me six weeks ago and said, ‘Will, morale is in the toilet,’ ” Mr. Shelton recalled. “This destroys any possibility of building a family atmosphere. It causes so much distrust.”
If ever proof were needed for the notion that it’s a good idea to look before you leap, it’s the implementation of Race to the Top in Tennessee. “I don’t know why they felt they had to rush,” said Tim Tackett, a member of the school board here who was a teacher and principal for 32 years. “Clearly this wasn’t well thought out.”
Federal officials said that they did not pressure Tennessee to rush, and that the other 10 states that won grants, as well as the District of Columbia, have routinely been given time extensions. Kelli Gauthier, a spokeswoman for the state’s Education Department, wrote in an e-mail that the state spent a year developing the evaluation system after consulting administrators and teachers around the state. At meetings in Nashville last week, state officials seemed to be giving ground and spoke about tweaking the requirements.
On Friday, Tennessee’s education commissioner, Kevin S. Huffman, asked the State Board of Education for modifications to the evaluation rules that are intended to reduce the amount of time principals must spend on them.
“We have said from the beginning that we will listen and respond to feedback from educators on this evaluation model, and that is exactly what we’re doing,” Mr. Huffman told state legislators. “This adjustment made sense, and if approved, our evaluation system will be stronger because of it.”
But tweaking the rules may not be nearly enough. A recent article in Education Week said essentially that things were so bad in Tennessee, there was a danger that the grant program would be undermined elsewhere.
The state is micromanaging principals to a degree never seen before here, and perhaps anywhere. For example, Mr. Shelton is required to have a pre-observation conference with each teacher (which takes 20 minutes), observe the teacher for a period (50 minutes), conduct a post-observation conference (20 minutes), and fill out a rubric with 19 variables and give teachers a score from 1 to 5 (40 minutes).
He must have copies of his evaluations ready for any visit by a county evaluator, who evaluates whether Mr. Shelton has properly evaluated the teachers.
He is required to do at least four observations a year for the 65 teachers at his school, although the changes suggested last week would save paperwork by allowing two of the observations to be done back to back.
Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students’ results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.
To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores.
“How stupid is that?” said Michelle Pheneger, who teaches ACT math prep at Blackman High and is also being evaluated in part based on writing scores. “My job can be at risk, and I’m not even being evaluated by my own work.”
For 15 percent of their testing evaluation, teachers without scores are permitted to choose which subject test they want to be judged on. Few pick something related to their expertise; instead, they try to anticipate the subject that their school is likely to score well on in the state exams next spring.
Several teachers without scores at Oakland Middle School conferred. “The P. E. teacher got information that the writing score was the best to pick,” said Jeff Jennings, the art teacher. “He informed the home ec teacher, who passed it on to me, and I told the career development teacher.”
It’s a bit like Vegas, and if you pick the wrong academic subject, you lose and get a bad evaluation. While this may have nothing to do with academic performance, it does measure a teacher’s ability to play the odds. There’s also the question of how a principal can do a classroom observation of someone who doesn’t teach a classroom subject.
The answer is, the principal still has to observe them teaching something. Erin Alvarado, a librarian at Central Magnet, a combined middle and high school, picked eighth-grade descriptive writing. One of the rubric variables is how well the teacher knows her students. There are 938 students at Central, and she knew few in that class by name. “Fortunately, the teacher put all the names on index cards for me,” Ms. Alvarado said. “I’d take a quick peek down at the card, pick a name, look around and hope the student was there.”
This would all be hilarious, except these evaluations can cost people their jobs.
In September, the school board here sent a letter to the education commissioner requesting that these state policies be “reviewed immediately.”
“Doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, does it?” said Mr. Tackett, who drafted the letter.
State officials have said that by next year, they will develop ways to assess teachers in subjects with no state test.
Mr. Tackett is skeptical. “I’ll be interested to see how they evaluate a band director,” he said.
In the end, it’s all about distrust: not trusting principals to judge teachers, not trusting teachers to educate children.
Like a lot of principals, Mr. Shelton has always done “pop-ins,” quick, unannounced visits that can be as short as two minutes, as long as 15. He says he used to get into every classroom several times a week, every day if a teacher was having problems. After 23 years as an educator, he said, it doesn’t take him long to spot trouble.
He says the new state policies put everyone under stress, are divisive and suck the joy out of a building. “What I need to make my school better is pretty simple,” he said. “I want everybody to be happy. If they’re happy, they will do a better job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/education/tennessees-rules-on-teacher-evaluations-bring-frustration.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
The war on teachers
From the Washington Post's Answer Sheet
By Anthony Cody
As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind state waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price: They will be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores.
Under NCLB, it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers from the most onerous requirements of NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.
This revelation came to me as I read the 17th edition of the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It explains where each state stands on the education “reform” initiatives that have become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.
The score card begins with a histrionic comparison between the struggle over our schools and the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. The authors wrote:
“Britain’s enemies overreached, invading the Soviet Union and attacking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Finally, British forces defeated the German army in Egypt, securing their hold over the strategically vital Suez Canal. Prime Minister Winston Churchill recognized the turning point:
“ ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well armed and perhaps better armed troops. Hence forth they will have to face in many theatres of war that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless.
“We mean to hold our own.’ ”
In 2011, America’s struggle for education reform may have also reached a turning point — an end of the beginning.
In case you missed it, in this analogy, the teacher unions represent the Nazis, while the forces for corporate reform represent the doughty British and their allies.
The greatest success story cited in this report is Indiana, where the corporate reform “alliance”succeeded in passing comprehensive “reforms.”
Gov. Daniels detailed the reforms to the American Enterprise Institute audience, describing how Indiana lawmakers limited collective bargaining to wages and benefits. Indiana law ended the illogical practice of LIFO (Last In, First Out) in layoffs, mandating a determination of merit-- based in part on student test-score gains--rather than simply seniority be used as the basis for making layoffs.
Readers may recall a post I wrote last July describing the role the Gates Foundation-funded group Teach Plus played in advancing this legislation. The Gates Foundation last year also gave ALEC a grant of $376,635 “to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement.”
The report describes many other reforms enacted by the Indiana legislature, including expansion of vouchers, charter schools, “virtual schools,” and a parent trigger so that parents can petition to convert neighborhood schools into charters.
But it was the introduction to the report, written by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, that brought this into focus for me. He wrote:
“Prior to this session, 99 percent of Indiana’s teachers were annually rated ‘Effective.’ If that rating were actually true, 99 percent--not just one-third--of our students would be passing national tests. From this point on, because of the diligence and fortitude of our reform-minded legislators, teachers will be promoted and retained based on performance rather than seniority. Teacher evaluations, which will be locally formulated, will rely on student improvement. Successful educators will be rewarded, while those whose students lag behind will be asked to find work elsewhere. Additionally, schools will now be graded on an A-F scale and they, too, will be held accountable for student advancement; and the state will not hesitate to intervene in those schools that fail repeatedly.”
According to this logic, the individual teacher’s accountability for student performance is absolute. Gov. Daniels apparently believes there ought to be a one to one correspondence between student achievement and teacher effectiveness. This is rather incredible, but there you have it. Most systems base between 25% and 50% of the teacher’s evaluation on test scores, but that is enough to make a big difference in one’s career, as examples below illustrate.
Even Eric Hanushek, the Stanford University economist who has done more to advance these evaluation systems than anyone, admits that teachers only account for around 10 percent of the variability in student test scores. (Teachers are the largest IN SCHOOL variable, but their influence is dwarfed by factors such as family income and education levels.) But when teacher unions represent the axis of evil, I guess anything that can be done to rout them is justifiable.
According to the Wall St. Journal, as of last fall, nearly half the states now link teacher evaluations to student test scores. This week Connecticut became the latest to make the move.
I do not think teachers in many states quite understand how the profession is being transformed. And our unions are, in some cases, negotiating these agreements into place. Tennessee has been ahead of the curve, and may offer us a preview of what may be in store. There, the state has had en extensive data collection system for years, and, in order to gain Race to the Top funds, implemented a comprehensive system that rates teachers using test scores.
Michael Winerip wrote about Tennessee in the New York Times:
“Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students’ results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.
“To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores.”
These “reforms” have been created to give principals more authority, so they can fire bad teachers. But even principals are questioning the new model. New York Principal Carol Corbett Burris has been outspoken, and has rallied more than 1,278 principals in the state of New York to object to the new evaluation system there. In a New York Times column, she wrote,
“The right question to ask, however, is not whether this evaluation system is good or bad for adults, but rather whether it is good or bad for students.
“Numerical evaluations of educators, 40 percent of which is based on student test scores and achievement, will damage the relationship between teachers and students, a relationship at the heart of student success.
“It will accelerate teaching to tests instead of teaching to the needs of kids.
“It will put teachers in the terrible position of wondering whether the performance of their weakest students on a test might be a threat to their careers.
“It will make principals hesitate to lead schools where test scores are low.”
This is a good summary of the bad effects of this shift. In the brave new world of teacher evaluations based on test scores, every teacher, every year, will be subject to the vagaries of chance. Every teacher will have to decide how that class of English Language Learners will affect their livelihoods. Every teacher will live in fear of being assigned special ed students, likewise difficult to move on the VAM charts. We are moving from the time when schools were blamed to a new time of the toad, when individual teachers will be vilified, their careers ruined over their scores.
To make this more real, I want to share with you some specific results from the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Houston has been evaluating teachers based on value-added student test data (calculated through a widely-used commercial system called EVAAS) for the purpose of both merit pay and dismissal.
In spring of 2011, a number of HISD teachers’ contracts were not renewed, largely due to:
“a significant lack of student progress attributable to the educator,” and
“insufficient student academic growth reflected by [EVAAS] value-added scores.”
A recent research summary included evidence about the value-added scores of several of those teachers, including one who had been a highly regarded elementary teacher in HISD for more than 10 years. In each year, she “exceeded expectations” across every domain in her supervisor evaluations. She was given a “Teacher of the Month” award in 2010 and a “Teacher of the Year” award in 2008.
Many studies have found that the scores that come from these models are subject to a great many factors, and are highly variable from year to year. In Houston, the study quoted here found that most teachers’ value-added scores were lower in the years when they had a large number of newly mainstreamed English learners, a practice that occurs in grade 4.
One teacher certified for grades 4-8 via HISD’s Alternative Teaching Certificate (ATC) program. She took a full-time position in HISD in 2006. Until 2010-11, she was rated as “exceeded expectations” or “proficient” across every domain in terms of her supervisor evaluations. Like most teachers, she had positive (3 out of 6) and negative (3 out of 6) value-added scores across the years.
In 2009-2010, when she was assigned to teach a large number of English Language Learners who were transitioned into her classroom, her value-added scores went down. This well-regarded teacher has now also left the Houston school district, while those who have stayed are increasingly confused and demoralized by this system.
These teachers report that there is no relationship between their instructional practices and their value-added ratings, which appear unpredictable. As one teacher noted:
“I do what I do every year. I teach the way I teach every year. [My] first year got me pats on the back. [My] second year got me kicked in the backside. And for year three, my scores were off the charts. I got a huge bonus, and now I am in the top quartile of all the English teachers. What did I do differently? I have no clue.”
These examples were drawn from the report of a policy briefing sponsored by the American Educational Research Association and National Academy of Education, Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers , by Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Edward Haertel, and Jesse Rothstein.
The report notes the results of a number of studies that have found wide swings in teachers’ value-added ratings, based on classes and characteristics of the students they teach, the year, the test, and the statistical model used. For these reasons, this research summary points out that leading research organizations, like the National Research Council, Educational Testing Service, and RAND Corporation, have all counseled against the use of these kinds of ratings for high-stakes decisions for teachers. As a letter from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment stated in a letter to the U.S. Department of Education:
“VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness ... should not used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.”
Of course this is all taking place against a backdrop of rising class sizes and cuts to support services such as school libraries and health programs. But teachers alone are held accountable for the results of their students, on the narrowest of measures. How many more teachers will we lose as these policies spread? How far will this corporate reform war on our profession go? At the end of the day, this will hurt the most vulnerable students the most, as it will speed up the revolving door of their teachers and create a dynamic in which teachers with options will try not to teach in the schools and classes where poor students and English Language learners predominate.
It seems that ALEC considers itself engaged in a battle of epic proportions, yet many teachers are too busy working to even realize that their profession is being redefined in state after state. I would offer another quote from Winston Churchill:
“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/how-the-war-on-teachers-is-changing-the-profession/2012/01/27/gIQAbKyLWQ_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Anthony Cody
As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind state waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price: They will be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores.
Under NCLB, it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers from the most onerous requirements of NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.
This revelation came to me as I read the 17th edition of the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It explains where each state stands on the education “reform” initiatives that have become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.
The score card begins with a histrionic comparison between the struggle over our schools and the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. The authors wrote:
“Britain’s enemies overreached, invading the Soviet Union and attacking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Finally, British forces defeated the German army in Egypt, securing their hold over the strategically vital Suez Canal. Prime Minister Winston Churchill recognized the turning point:
“ ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well armed and perhaps better armed troops. Hence forth they will have to face in many theatres of war that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless.
“We mean to hold our own.’ ”
In 2011, America’s struggle for education reform may have also reached a turning point — an end of the beginning.
In case you missed it, in this analogy, the teacher unions represent the Nazis, while the forces for corporate reform represent the doughty British and their allies.
The greatest success story cited in this report is Indiana, where the corporate reform “alliance”succeeded in passing comprehensive “reforms.”
Gov. Daniels detailed the reforms to the American Enterprise Institute audience, describing how Indiana lawmakers limited collective bargaining to wages and benefits. Indiana law ended the illogical practice of LIFO (Last In, First Out) in layoffs, mandating a determination of merit-- based in part on student test-score gains--rather than simply seniority be used as the basis for making layoffs.
Readers may recall a post I wrote last July describing the role the Gates Foundation-funded group Teach Plus played in advancing this legislation. The Gates Foundation last year also gave ALEC a grant of $376,635 “to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement.”
The report describes many other reforms enacted by the Indiana legislature, including expansion of vouchers, charter schools, “virtual schools,” and a parent trigger so that parents can petition to convert neighborhood schools into charters.
But it was the introduction to the report, written by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, that brought this into focus for me. He wrote:
“Prior to this session, 99 percent of Indiana’s teachers were annually rated ‘Effective.’ If that rating were actually true, 99 percent--not just one-third--of our students would be passing national tests. From this point on, because of the diligence and fortitude of our reform-minded legislators, teachers will be promoted and retained based on performance rather than seniority. Teacher evaluations, which will be locally formulated, will rely on student improvement. Successful educators will be rewarded, while those whose students lag behind will be asked to find work elsewhere. Additionally, schools will now be graded on an A-F scale and they, too, will be held accountable for student advancement; and the state will not hesitate to intervene in those schools that fail repeatedly.”
According to this logic, the individual teacher’s accountability for student performance is absolute. Gov. Daniels apparently believes there ought to be a one to one correspondence between student achievement and teacher effectiveness. This is rather incredible, but there you have it. Most systems base between 25% and 50% of the teacher’s evaluation on test scores, but that is enough to make a big difference in one’s career, as examples below illustrate.
Even Eric Hanushek, the Stanford University economist who has done more to advance these evaluation systems than anyone, admits that teachers only account for around 10 percent of the variability in student test scores. (Teachers are the largest IN SCHOOL variable, but their influence is dwarfed by factors such as family income and education levels.) But when teacher unions represent the axis of evil, I guess anything that can be done to rout them is justifiable.
According to the Wall St. Journal, as of last fall, nearly half the states now link teacher evaluations to student test scores. This week Connecticut became the latest to make the move.
I do not think teachers in many states quite understand how the profession is being transformed. And our unions are, in some cases, negotiating these agreements into place. Tennessee has been ahead of the curve, and may offer us a preview of what may be in store. There, the state has had en extensive data collection system for years, and, in order to gain Race to the Top funds, implemented a comprehensive system that rates teachers using test scores.
Michael Winerip wrote about Tennessee in the New York Times:
“Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students’ results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.
“To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores.”
These “reforms” have been created to give principals more authority, so they can fire bad teachers. But even principals are questioning the new model. New York Principal Carol Corbett Burris has been outspoken, and has rallied more than 1,278 principals in the state of New York to object to the new evaluation system there. In a New York Times column, she wrote,
“The right question to ask, however, is not whether this evaluation system is good or bad for adults, but rather whether it is good or bad for students.
“Numerical evaluations of educators, 40 percent of which is based on student test scores and achievement, will damage the relationship between teachers and students, a relationship at the heart of student success.
“It will accelerate teaching to tests instead of teaching to the needs of kids.
“It will put teachers in the terrible position of wondering whether the performance of their weakest students on a test might be a threat to their careers.
“It will make principals hesitate to lead schools where test scores are low.”
This is a good summary of the bad effects of this shift. In the brave new world of teacher evaluations based on test scores, every teacher, every year, will be subject to the vagaries of chance. Every teacher will have to decide how that class of English Language Learners will affect their livelihoods. Every teacher will live in fear of being assigned special ed students, likewise difficult to move on the VAM charts. We are moving from the time when schools were blamed to a new time of the toad, when individual teachers will be vilified, their careers ruined over their scores.
To make this more real, I want to share with you some specific results from the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Houston has been evaluating teachers based on value-added student test data (calculated through a widely-used commercial system called EVAAS) for the purpose of both merit pay and dismissal.
In spring of 2011, a number of HISD teachers’ contracts were not renewed, largely due to:
“a significant lack of student progress attributable to the educator,” and
“insufficient student academic growth reflected by [EVAAS] value-added scores.”
A recent research summary included evidence about the value-added scores of several of those teachers, including one who had been a highly regarded elementary teacher in HISD for more than 10 years. In each year, she “exceeded expectations” across every domain in her supervisor evaluations. She was given a “Teacher of the Month” award in 2010 and a “Teacher of the Year” award in 2008.
Many studies have found that the scores that come from these models are subject to a great many factors, and are highly variable from year to year. In Houston, the study quoted here found that most teachers’ value-added scores were lower in the years when they had a large number of newly mainstreamed English learners, a practice that occurs in grade 4.
One teacher certified for grades 4-8 via HISD’s Alternative Teaching Certificate (ATC) program. She took a full-time position in HISD in 2006. Until 2010-11, she was rated as “exceeded expectations” or “proficient” across every domain in terms of her supervisor evaluations. Like most teachers, she had positive (3 out of 6) and negative (3 out of 6) value-added scores across the years.
In 2009-2010, when she was assigned to teach a large number of English Language Learners who were transitioned into her classroom, her value-added scores went down. This well-regarded teacher has now also left the Houston school district, while those who have stayed are increasingly confused and demoralized by this system.
These teachers report that there is no relationship between their instructional practices and their value-added ratings, which appear unpredictable. As one teacher noted:
“I do what I do every year. I teach the way I teach every year. [My] first year got me pats on the back. [My] second year got me kicked in the backside. And for year three, my scores were off the charts. I got a huge bonus, and now I am in the top quartile of all the English teachers. What did I do differently? I have no clue.”
These examples were drawn from the report of a policy briefing sponsored by the American Educational Research Association and National Academy of Education, Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers , by Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Edward Haertel, and Jesse Rothstein.
The report notes the results of a number of studies that have found wide swings in teachers’ value-added ratings, based on classes and characteristics of the students they teach, the year, the test, and the statistical model used. For these reasons, this research summary points out that leading research organizations, like the National Research Council, Educational Testing Service, and RAND Corporation, have all counseled against the use of these kinds of ratings for high-stakes decisions for teachers. As a letter from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment stated in a letter to the U.S. Department of Education:
“VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness ... should not used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.”
Of course this is all taking place against a backdrop of rising class sizes and cuts to support services such as school libraries and health programs. But teachers alone are held accountable for the results of their students, on the narrowest of measures. How many more teachers will we lose as these policies spread? How far will this corporate reform war on our profession go? At the end of the day, this will hurt the most vulnerable students the most, as it will speed up the revolving door of their teachers and create a dynamic in which teachers with options will try not to teach in the schools and classes where poor students and English Language learners predominate.
It seems that ALEC considers itself engaged in a battle of epic proportions, yet many teachers are too busy working to even realize that their profession is being redefined in state after state. I would offer another quote from Winston Churchill:
“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/how-the-war-on-teachers-is-changing-the-profession/2012/01/27/gIQAbKyLWQ_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Dear President Obama, please stop hurting education
From With a Brooklyn Accent
by Mark Naison
We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s educators, want to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although the majority of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, we are reluctant to do so again unless we see some modification of the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives:
1. The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership
2. The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on "bad teachers" rather than poverty and neighborhood distress
3. The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools
Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation's educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”
We therefore recommend the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort
1. The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
2. The incorporation of teachers in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
3. .An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers.
4. An end to policies that use incentives or penalties to encourage states and municipalities to prefer charter schools to existing public schools.
5. An end to federal policies that require the closing of low performing schools based on student test scores and the creation of a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of such schools.
We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote both creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing, could ever hope to do
Sincerely,
Teachers
http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2012/01/draft-of-teachers-letter-to-president.html
by Mark Naison
We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s educators, want to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although the majority of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, we are reluctant to do so again unless we see some modification of the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives:
1. The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership
2. The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on "bad teachers" rather than poverty and neighborhood distress
3. The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools
Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation's educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”
We therefore recommend the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort
1. The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
2. The incorporation of teachers in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
3. .An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers.
4. An end to policies that use incentives or penalties to encourage states and municipalities to prefer charter schools to existing public schools.
5. An end to federal policies that require the closing of low performing schools based on student test scores and the creation of a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of such schools.
We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote both creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing, could ever hope to do
Sincerely,
Teachers
http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2012/01/draft-of-teachers-letter-to-president.html
Friday, January 27, 2012
Up is down in America
We won’t let banks close but we will actively close schools.
We complain about cutting the military’s budget but we shrug our shoulders when education budgets are slashed.
We complain about regulations that are onerous to business but we double down on laws (NCLB and RTTT) that handicap children.
We say the debt is to big and we must pay it down to save our children’s futures while we ignore the present where over a fifth of our children live in poverty.
We saved the automobile industry with few strings attached while requiring states to fire teachers and shut schools in exchange for a few extra nickels.
In Florida we create slush funds for business and refuse to close loopholes or tax internet sales while tuition has gone up sixty percent over the last four years and likely to go up another fifteen percent this one.
We blame the teacher while administrators, politicians and absentee parents get a pass.
We complain about cutting the military’s budget but we shrug our shoulders when education budgets are slashed.
We complain about regulations that are onerous to business but we double down on laws (NCLB and RTTT) that handicap children.
We say the debt is to big and we must pay it down to save our children’s futures while we ignore the present where over a fifth of our children live in poverty.
We saved the automobile industry with few strings attached while requiring states to fire teachers and shut schools in exchange for a few extra nickels.
In Florida we create slush funds for business and refuse to close loopholes or tax internet sales while tuition has gone up sixty percent over the last four years and likely to go up another fifteen percent this one.
We blame the teacher while administrators, politicians and absentee parents get a pass.
We can't cut the military but we can cut education?
From school matter MKE.com
By Tom Beebe
Have you noticed that it’s OK to bail out Wall Street with billions of taxpayer dollars, but we can’t “just throw more money” at the problems in public education? We can save the automobile industry with an infusion of cash, but we talk about closing schools that “don’t produce” on standardized tests.
The argument from some so-called school reformers is that money isn’t really the issue.
“They say that public spending on education has risen dramatically in recent decades, but the United States has still fallen behind other countries on international assessments,” says Valerie Strauss in an article in The Washington Post.
At the root of this discussion — whether an honest debate or a political attack — is the question: How much is enough or how much should we spend resources to make sure every child has the opportunity to succeed? If we answer this question, the debate should be over. Right?
It won’t be, but we know answering the question is still important. Here’s the way I look at it — educators (teachers, administrators, board members, etc.) need to be accountable for teaching, children need to be accountable for trying as hard as they can to learn, and parents need to be accountable for feeding their kids, reading to them, taking care of them and getting them to school on time.
In this accountability equation, we too often forget society as represented by elected officials. Their job is to make sure every child in Wisconsin has opportunities to learn in school and to succeed in life. For example, every child should have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, as well as everything that entails, including lower class sizes, well-educated staff and programs and services to offset the scourge of poverty.
Other opportunities would be quality, universally available early-childhood education, challenging curriculum for all children, equitably distributed resources (such as technology, textbooks and extra-curricular activities), and extended learning options where needed.
A new study by the Shanker Institute answers the question of whether or not money matters with a resounding yes. It’s not about throwing money at a problem, but rather about providing the right amount of resources so that children have the opportunity to succeed.
“Revisiting the Age-Old question: Does Money Matter in Education ,” was written by Rutgers University Professor Bruce Baker. His take on the question gets right to the point. In a review of the research, Baker finds, despite the popular political rhetoric, that “in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.”
School resources that really make a difference, including class size reduction and getting and keeping quality teachers, are “positively associated with student outcomes” and, on the whole, “the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence there are more cost-effective measures.”
Can we use money in our public schools more effectively? Maybe, and we should always be looking for ways to do that. Money, however, does matter, and “arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded,” according to Baker.
What we need to do, then, is work for reforms here in Wisconsin that will result in a school-funding system that gives schools the fiscal resources they need to make sure all kids have those opportunities.
If it is really all about our kids and their education, the question should be: What are the right number of resources for our schools? Bakers’ research and that of others through the years (including the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future) gives us great insight into the answer.
Now all we have to do is build the political will in communities throughout Wisconsin to demand our elected officials actually have conversations like this — about real problems and real solutions.
http://schoolmattersmke.com/of-course-money-matters-in-quality-education/
By Tom Beebe
Have you noticed that it’s OK to bail out Wall Street with billions of taxpayer dollars, but we can’t “just throw more money” at the problems in public education? We can save the automobile industry with an infusion of cash, but we talk about closing schools that “don’t produce” on standardized tests.
The argument from some so-called school reformers is that money isn’t really the issue.
“They say that public spending on education has risen dramatically in recent decades, but the United States has still fallen behind other countries on international assessments,” says Valerie Strauss in an article in The Washington Post.
At the root of this discussion — whether an honest debate or a political attack — is the question: How much is enough or how much should we spend resources to make sure every child has the opportunity to succeed? If we answer this question, the debate should be over. Right?
It won’t be, but we know answering the question is still important. Here’s the way I look at it — educators (teachers, administrators, board members, etc.) need to be accountable for teaching, children need to be accountable for trying as hard as they can to learn, and parents need to be accountable for feeding their kids, reading to them, taking care of them and getting them to school on time.
In this accountability equation, we too often forget society as represented by elected officials. Their job is to make sure every child in Wisconsin has opportunities to learn in school and to succeed in life. For example, every child should have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, as well as everything that entails, including lower class sizes, well-educated staff and programs and services to offset the scourge of poverty.
Other opportunities would be quality, universally available early-childhood education, challenging curriculum for all children, equitably distributed resources (such as technology, textbooks and extra-curricular activities), and extended learning options where needed.
A new study by the Shanker Institute answers the question of whether or not money matters with a resounding yes. It’s not about throwing money at a problem, but rather about providing the right amount of resources so that children have the opportunity to succeed.
“Revisiting the Age-Old question: Does Money Matter in Education ,” was written by Rutgers University Professor Bruce Baker. His take on the question gets right to the point. In a review of the research, Baker finds, despite the popular political rhetoric, that “in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.”
School resources that really make a difference, including class size reduction and getting and keeping quality teachers, are “positively associated with student outcomes” and, on the whole, “the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence there are more cost-effective measures.”
Can we use money in our public schools more effectively? Maybe, and we should always be looking for ways to do that. Money, however, does matter, and “arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded,” according to Baker.
What we need to do, then, is work for reforms here in Wisconsin that will result in a school-funding system that gives schools the fiscal resources they need to make sure all kids have those opportunities.
If it is really all about our kids and their education, the question should be: What are the right number of resources for our schools? Bakers’ research and that of others through the years (including the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future) gives us great insight into the answer.
Now all we have to do is build the political will in communities throughout Wisconsin to demand our elected officials actually have conversations like this — about real problems and real solutions.
http://schoolmattersmke.com/of-course-money-matters-in-quality-education/
It's time schools let some kids go
In recent months I have read numerous articles about the soaring cost of letting kids drop out of high school. Their options are limited, their earning power is retarded and they often end up in jail or on the government dole. And where I agree this is all bad, I say let them go because the truth is we can’t afford them. Society loses out on much more by trying to keep them.
Think about this, if your kid is in high school and his teacher spends just ten percent of the time redirecting that kid who no longer cares, then your kid has just lost out on 18 days worth of instruction over the course of a year. Sadly many of our teachers spend more than ten percent of their time dealing with the bad behavior of a few but the real cost to your children has just begun.
Say your kid needs extra help, well often they can’t get it because teachers have to spend so much of their time with just a few students. Some kids are just a kind word, a little attention or an inspirational speech away from getting over the hump but they don’t get it because often teachers are to worn out dealing with that handful of kids whose priority is cutting up not learning. What will your son or daughter miss out over the course of a lifetime because the system decided trying to save a few was more important than elevating the many?
Then there are the inappropriate lessons that good kids learn from these maladaptive kids that costs society in the long run as well. The school system is notoriously bad at giving consequences, and remember for a consequence to be effective they must be meaningful to kids and I am afraid forty-five minutes in study hall with their friends just doesn't cut it.
The system doesn’t want to suspend these kids either because they are afraid if they miss a few days they will keep on missing (let them). They don’t want to come down to hard because they figure they are just a breath away from dropping out (oh God please let them). Teachers all over the nation pray certain kids won’t show up so they can teach and thier other students can learn. I know numerous teachers who don’t write referrals anymore, preferring to endure toxic learning environments. They know nothing will happen or worse they will have their classroom management skills questioned and that could adversely affect their jobs.
If your son or daughter sees a handful of kids acting up over and over again and receiving no real consequences well they have just learned they can act up too. Is that a lesson you want them taking into adulthood. Is that a lesson that is going to serve them in college or in the workforce? No of course not and if you care about your children then you want them to be disciplined and responsible.
A lot of the kids the system is trying to nurse through are passed from grade to grade whether they have mastered the material or not. The system refuses to fail many because some study somewhere said kids that fail certain grades are more likely to drop out (please let them). We can’t afford summer school anymore so that's not an option either. Instead we pass them along without the skills they need and then they drag their classmates down with them.
Many teachers teach to the lowest common denominator (also a byproduct of standardized tests by the way) giving a disproportionate amount of time to the low kids in order to move them up. This means the fairly bright kid, or the kid with a bit of potential are sadly ignored. They aren’t nurtured or challenged. Imagine what these kids could accomplish and what they could be if they were pushed in the right direction. How many doctors, engineers, generals, inventors and scientists are we losing out on, because we decided that jerk in the third row should be passed along?
Sadly for some their bad behavior is not completely their fault. We force them into classes they have no business being in where they are in way over their head and then we wonder why they act up. Lacking discipline, a work ethic and the academic skills they need must be a terribly frustrating position to be in.
Then there are also no alternatives for many of these kids because we have gutted the teaching of trades and skills. Our leaders, and most have never been in the classroom, foolishly have an everybody is going to go to college mentality. If we are not going to commit to these kids with counselors and social workers because why kids act up in school has nothing to do with school, summer school, discipline rigor and alternate curriculums, then it’s time we cut our losses before they drag more kids down with them. The truth is we don’t always have the kids we wished we had, we have the kids we do and if we are not going to plan accordingly we risk more than we gain by keeping them.
The president, editorial boards and academics who aren’t in the classroom lament about the hardships that the kids that drop out endure. I lament for the borderline kid who learns inappropriate lessons from the bad kids. I lament for the bright kid who has their potential retarded. I lament for the brilliant kid who isn’t pushed to be all they can be and I wonder what cost society is paying as it makes saving a few who show they have no desire to be in school a priority, instead of concentrating on the majority that do. No Child Left Behind should be, we are leaving about ten percent of them behind until they straighten up. We could have tremendous addition with just a little bit of subtraction.
Now I am not saying we kick the hyperactive eight year old out, or let the sixth grader with ADHD slip through the cracks but if you are sixteen and you are more interested in acting up than learning it’s time we showed you the door. This isn’t a new train of thought either. Our courts routinely try kids under the age of 18 as adults and it seems the age gets younger and younger each year. It’s time we allowed schools to follow their lead, we can no longer afford the alternative.
Think about this, if your kid is in high school and his teacher spends just ten percent of the time redirecting that kid who no longer cares, then your kid has just lost out on 18 days worth of instruction over the course of a year. Sadly many of our teachers spend more than ten percent of their time dealing with the bad behavior of a few but the real cost to your children has just begun.
Say your kid needs extra help, well often they can’t get it because teachers have to spend so much of their time with just a few students. Some kids are just a kind word, a little attention or an inspirational speech away from getting over the hump but they don’t get it because often teachers are to worn out dealing with that handful of kids whose priority is cutting up not learning. What will your son or daughter miss out over the course of a lifetime because the system decided trying to save a few was more important than elevating the many?
Then there are the inappropriate lessons that good kids learn from these maladaptive kids that costs society in the long run as well. The school system is notoriously bad at giving consequences, and remember for a consequence to be effective they must be meaningful to kids and I am afraid forty-five minutes in study hall with their friends just doesn't cut it.
The system doesn’t want to suspend these kids either because they are afraid if they miss a few days they will keep on missing (let them). They don’t want to come down to hard because they figure they are just a breath away from dropping out (oh God please let them). Teachers all over the nation pray certain kids won’t show up so they can teach and thier other students can learn. I know numerous teachers who don’t write referrals anymore, preferring to endure toxic learning environments. They know nothing will happen or worse they will have their classroom management skills questioned and that could adversely affect their jobs.
If your son or daughter sees a handful of kids acting up over and over again and receiving no real consequences well they have just learned they can act up too. Is that a lesson you want them taking into adulthood. Is that a lesson that is going to serve them in college or in the workforce? No of course not and if you care about your children then you want them to be disciplined and responsible.
A lot of the kids the system is trying to nurse through are passed from grade to grade whether they have mastered the material or not. The system refuses to fail many because some study somewhere said kids that fail certain grades are more likely to drop out (please let them). We can’t afford summer school anymore so that's not an option either. Instead we pass them along without the skills they need and then they drag their classmates down with them.
Many teachers teach to the lowest common denominator (also a byproduct of standardized tests by the way) giving a disproportionate amount of time to the low kids in order to move them up. This means the fairly bright kid, or the kid with a bit of potential are sadly ignored. They aren’t nurtured or challenged. Imagine what these kids could accomplish and what they could be if they were pushed in the right direction. How many doctors, engineers, generals, inventors and scientists are we losing out on, because we decided that jerk in the third row should be passed along?
Sadly for some their bad behavior is not completely their fault. We force them into classes they have no business being in where they are in way over their head and then we wonder why they act up. Lacking discipline, a work ethic and the academic skills they need must be a terribly frustrating position to be in.
Then there are also no alternatives for many of these kids because we have gutted the teaching of trades and skills. Our leaders, and most have never been in the classroom, foolishly have an everybody is going to go to college mentality. If we are not going to commit to these kids with counselors and social workers because why kids act up in school has nothing to do with school, summer school, discipline rigor and alternate curriculums, then it’s time we cut our losses before they drag more kids down with them. The truth is we don’t always have the kids we wished we had, we have the kids we do and if we are not going to plan accordingly we risk more than we gain by keeping them.
The president, editorial boards and academics who aren’t in the classroom lament about the hardships that the kids that drop out endure. I lament for the borderline kid who learns inappropriate lessons from the bad kids. I lament for the bright kid who has their potential retarded. I lament for the brilliant kid who isn’t pushed to be all they can be and I wonder what cost society is paying as it makes saving a few who show they have no desire to be in school a priority, instead of concentrating on the majority that do. No Child Left Behind should be, we are leaving about ten percent of them behind until they straighten up. We could have tremendous addition with just a little bit of subtraction.
Now I am not saying we kick the hyperactive eight year old out, or let the sixth grader with ADHD slip through the cracks but if you are sixteen and you are more interested in acting up than learning it’s time we showed you the door. This isn’t a new train of thought either. Our courts routinely try kids under the age of 18 as adults and it seems the age gets younger and younger each year. It’s time we allowed schools to follow their lead, we can no longer afford the alternative.
Teacher should shut up and take it
Or that's what administrations think. -cpg
From the Hechinger Report
By Eric Shieh
I remember the moment I stopped resenting the deduction in my paychecks that went to my union. It took me three years, and happened suddenly.
Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school level as part of a plan to improve student test-scores. Appalled, I sent an email to my fellow arts teachers across the district asking what we were going to do.
The response from my colleagues? There is nothing you can do; this has been happening for the past 20 years. Nonetheless, unwilling to let the arts programs go quietly, I circulated petitions among staff, acquiring signatures from several hundred teachers—arts and non-arts teachers alike. It didn’t do anything.
Out of ideas, and with no sense of what it might accomplish, I called my union. The response was immediate: The union would help mobilize teachers and parents opposed to the planned cuts.
In the end, the union’s role in the struggle was minimal. But at that moment when I felt ready to give up, its contribution was decisive: It rejected the powerlessness that my colleagues had articulated, and affirmed my professional convictions about the centrality of the arts in public education. With renewed confidence, several of my colleagues and I began to organize, and following a large outcry from parents and teachers, the administration ultimately reversed its decision.
Flash forward to today. I am in my sixth year of teaching, now in New York City, and what bothered me then in St. Louis bothers me even more now. I am frightened by a perceived powerlessness in my profession—teachers across the nation who have given up advocating for their students not because they don’t wish to, but because it seems an impossibility. And I am saddened by the fragility of our hard-forged convictions. I am saddened that my efforts researching and negotiating the work of public education seem meaningless in the face of current policy debates—and that last year’s nationwide struggle over teacher tenure or this week’s “debates” over teacher evaluation in New York arrive forcefully, demanding immediate reaction rather than initiative from educators.
Consider this past year. By all accounts, it should have been one of teacher outrage. For me, 2011 started—as it did in many school districts across the country—with the announcement of teacher layoffs for the fourth year in a row. In New York City, this included 6,000 teachers, with a disproportionate share of those in physical education and the arts. Over the summer, my school also joined many others across the country in losing its Title I funding when a large portion of these funds expired with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And then in October, $753 million in cuts to New York City schools forced mass layoffs of school support workers: secretaries, teacher aides and parent coordinators.
Additionally, my school’s budget was reduced by 3.26 percent (adding to a total of almost 14 percent in the past four years), general per-pupil funding was cut by 6 percent, and the city decided students with special needs would receive 15 percent less per-pupil funding than before. Students in poverty would receive 50 percent less.
In total, this meant a budget reduction of more than $300,000 for my small school, 80 percent of whose students live at or near the poverty line.
What interests me here, however, is not the magnitude of the cuts and layoffs, both at my school and across the nation. I could list the effects on my school, where we made hard choices to reduce after-school programs and time for teacher collaboration in an effort to maintain moderate class sizes and services to students with disabilities.
Instead, what interests me is the fact that these cuts—coupled with other challenges that teachers faced in 2011—targeted students in poverty and students with special needs, that they targeted arts and physical-education programs, and that they severely disrupted school processes as one seismic change after another was proposed. What interests me, too, is how the cuts to schools came and went so quietly while other education issues raged in the public eye.
How do cuts so brazenly disproportionate toward students in poverty and those receiving special-education services happen without notice?
I believe these cuts were made—strategically, perversely—to the very populations least likely to detect and fight against them. I have seen this happen all too often in the short decade I have worked in education.
Who, then, will speak up—and not simply for marginalized students and communities, but for all students? Who will articulate what it means to attend music class, or what it means to be in a class with 28 students versus 35 or 40 students? Who might feel that these issues are no less worthy of attention than that pertain to teacher tenure or evaluation?
Most teachers, it seems, have learned simply to “shut up and teach” (as one conservative blogger has advocated). The atmosphere has been so relentlessly damning and thoughtless about our work these past few years, it’s hard to know where to start engaging with the public. By my best estimate, under 10 percent of New York City’s teachers participated in any kind of protest or public action over last year’s threatened teacher layoffs. The budget cuts, as I have noted, came and went quietly.
What happened?
Perhaps teachers heard what I had been hearing as I sought to organize: “This has been happening for the past four years,” or “There is nothing you can do.” Perhaps teachers learned the lesson that Gov. Scott Walker hoped we’d learn from the Wisconsin protests: It doesn’t matter how loudly you shout. The power to direct education lies with politicians who consider it one of many special interests, with billionaire philanthropists who’ve been plowing policy changes that suit their business models through Congress for nearly a decade.
Mark me: I do not believe that teachers alone should run schools or direct education policy, nor do I believe that every idea from the business sector is misguided. But there are deep problems when teachers are taught to shut up and “teach,” as if they could do so in silence. When teachers cease to advocate, we cease to fulfill one of the most essential elements of teaching: the act of caring.
To teach is to care—and to care deeply when students don’t get the services they require, or when class sizes are unwieldy, or when test prep becomes synonymous with education, or when there’s not enough money to pay for after-school programs.
There is a grave negligence, I believe, when the public gives the work of education over to bureaucratic and market forces. More than politicians and the invisible hand of markets, it is teachers working as professionals who recognize that students are not numbers to be thrown into global economic wars, but rather lives and bodies—bodies that sit in desks, that suffer, that grieve, that matter uniquely in the future we wish to create. It is, indeed, the charge of the teaching profession to further the work of education, in consideration of our children, our society’s needs, our changing world.
Lest I be accused of naïveté, let me point out that part of teacher professionalism is advocacy about job interests—compensation, money for supplies, pleasant working environments. It is also true that the perspectives of teachers may be biased toward the immediate needs of their students, and less concerned with larger social and economic needs. But this is no less true in the bureaucracy (politicians look out for votes) or market (investors look out for profits): These are all compromised spaces, which must have shared voice and dialogue to serve as checks and balances, and to build on the best that each offers.
A few examples of reforms suggested by professional associations of teachers seem called for here—examples that in the past decade have been overshadowed by talk of testing, accountability and choice. ASCD, a national association of education leaders focused on curriculum practices and policies, launched an initiative in 2007 called “Whole Child,” which calls for states to coordinate services, resources and data collection across school, social, health and safety sectors. Urging broader definitions of achievement and accountability, it proposes a plan that measures achievement by including access to healthcare, safety, personalized learning and support, learning that is connected to the broader community, and academic challenge across all subjects.
In 2008, a coalition from various education researchers and diverse professional associations launched a campaign for “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.” In it, the authors coupled a bevy of school-improvement proposals with investment in pre-k and kindergarten, health services, and access to a range of out-of-school programs. The policy paper is notable for its repeated emphasis on evidence based in serious and sustained research.
What happens when these kinds of proposals that grow out of education communities are lost or rendered mute? What happens when the discipline of education is devalued? Or when teachers come to learn that no one will listen to their testimonies, assessments and analyses of what they daily see and hear?
If you ask me what needs to happen, I have a few suggestions. First, unions need to widen their discourse beyond bread-and-butter issues like compensation and work environment. Teachers must be able to engage seriously and continuously in their profession’s discussions of evaluating teacher quality, of developing standards and curriculum, of allocating resources. Only then will we see substantive engagement, and not the kinds of rushed reactions I’ve seen recently from New York City teachers over the current teacher-evaluation debates.
Second, in order to do this, leaders of all teacher professional associations must do a better job of organizing teacher voice. Here there is fault in our unions and our professional associations, which for too long have served as top-heavy lobbying organizations. Small, local associations such as the New York Collective of Radical Educators have found ways to foster and direct teacher voice by creating member-led committees that develop projects and actions; a few national organizations have done similar work with membership networks. It is imperative that our unions and largest associations find ways to build spaces for member action, and to focus member discourse on innovative practices and policy.
Third and finally, teachers need to find ways to engage with education policy. This engagement—which the act of caring for our students demands of us—includes finding and creating spaces within our professional associations where we can speak of issues that matter to us, and where we can act in ways amplified by the weight and work of the associations.
These are not easy tasks, and I do not have a precise blueprint for where to start. But my experience working in several cities and participating in teacher associations has convinced me that there’s an eagerness among teachers to participate in our profession as professionals, not as technicians isolated in classrooms and subject areas. To build that capacity after years and perhaps decades of isolation, though, will require careful attention and hard work.
The stakes—the voices of those who work with children daily, the building of educators’ capacities to care fully and advocate for those they teach, the valuing of teaching as a profession—have rarely been higher. But I believe they are the right stakes, and the ones on which not only our educational but also our civic lives will thrive.
Eric Shieh is a founding teacher of the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, “A School for a Sustainable City,” which opened in New York City in September 2010. His article “Can Music Professional Associations Build Capacity for Curricular Renewal?” will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of the Arts Education Policy Review.
http://hechingerreport.org/content/%e2%80%98shut-up-and-teach%e2%80%99-the-high-stakes-of-teacher-voice_7479/
From the Hechinger Report
By Eric Shieh
I remember the moment I stopped resenting the deduction in my paychecks that went to my union. It took me three years, and happened suddenly.
Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school level as part of a plan to improve student test-scores. Appalled, I sent an email to my fellow arts teachers across the district asking what we were going to do.
The response from my colleagues? There is nothing you can do; this has been happening for the past 20 years. Nonetheless, unwilling to let the arts programs go quietly, I circulated petitions among staff, acquiring signatures from several hundred teachers—arts and non-arts teachers alike. It didn’t do anything.
Out of ideas, and with no sense of what it might accomplish, I called my union. The response was immediate: The union would help mobilize teachers and parents opposed to the planned cuts.
In the end, the union’s role in the struggle was minimal. But at that moment when I felt ready to give up, its contribution was decisive: It rejected the powerlessness that my colleagues had articulated, and affirmed my professional convictions about the centrality of the arts in public education. With renewed confidence, several of my colleagues and I began to organize, and following a large outcry from parents and teachers, the administration ultimately reversed its decision.
Flash forward to today. I am in my sixth year of teaching, now in New York City, and what bothered me then in St. Louis bothers me even more now. I am frightened by a perceived powerlessness in my profession—teachers across the nation who have given up advocating for their students not because they don’t wish to, but because it seems an impossibility. And I am saddened by the fragility of our hard-forged convictions. I am saddened that my efforts researching and negotiating the work of public education seem meaningless in the face of current policy debates—and that last year’s nationwide struggle over teacher tenure or this week’s “debates” over teacher evaluation in New York arrive forcefully, demanding immediate reaction rather than initiative from educators.
Consider this past year. By all accounts, it should have been one of teacher outrage. For me, 2011 started—as it did in many school districts across the country—with the announcement of teacher layoffs for the fourth year in a row. In New York City, this included 6,000 teachers, with a disproportionate share of those in physical education and the arts. Over the summer, my school also joined many others across the country in losing its Title I funding when a large portion of these funds expired with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And then in October, $753 million in cuts to New York City schools forced mass layoffs of school support workers: secretaries, teacher aides and parent coordinators.
Additionally, my school’s budget was reduced by 3.26 percent (adding to a total of almost 14 percent in the past four years), general per-pupil funding was cut by 6 percent, and the city decided students with special needs would receive 15 percent less per-pupil funding than before. Students in poverty would receive 50 percent less.
In total, this meant a budget reduction of more than $300,000 for my small school, 80 percent of whose students live at or near the poverty line.
What interests me here, however, is not the magnitude of the cuts and layoffs, both at my school and across the nation. I could list the effects on my school, where we made hard choices to reduce after-school programs and time for teacher collaboration in an effort to maintain moderate class sizes and services to students with disabilities.
Instead, what interests me is the fact that these cuts—coupled with other challenges that teachers faced in 2011—targeted students in poverty and students with special needs, that they targeted arts and physical-education programs, and that they severely disrupted school processes as one seismic change after another was proposed. What interests me, too, is how the cuts to schools came and went so quietly while other education issues raged in the public eye.
How do cuts so brazenly disproportionate toward students in poverty and those receiving special-education services happen without notice?
I believe these cuts were made—strategically, perversely—to the very populations least likely to detect and fight against them. I have seen this happen all too often in the short decade I have worked in education.
Who, then, will speak up—and not simply for marginalized students and communities, but for all students? Who will articulate what it means to attend music class, or what it means to be in a class with 28 students versus 35 or 40 students? Who might feel that these issues are no less worthy of attention than that pertain to teacher tenure or evaluation?
Most teachers, it seems, have learned simply to “shut up and teach” (as one conservative blogger has advocated). The atmosphere has been so relentlessly damning and thoughtless about our work these past few years, it’s hard to know where to start engaging with the public. By my best estimate, under 10 percent of New York City’s teachers participated in any kind of protest or public action over last year’s threatened teacher layoffs. The budget cuts, as I have noted, came and went quietly.
What happened?
Perhaps teachers heard what I had been hearing as I sought to organize: “This has been happening for the past four years,” or “There is nothing you can do.” Perhaps teachers learned the lesson that Gov. Scott Walker hoped we’d learn from the Wisconsin protests: It doesn’t matter how loudly you shout. The power to direct education lies with politicians who consider it one of many special interests, with billionaire philanthropists who’ve been plowing policy changes that suit their business models through Congress for nearly a decade.
Mark me: I do not believe that teachers alone should run schools or direct education policy, nor do I believe that every idea from the business sector is misguided. But there are deep problems when teachers are taught to shut up and “teach,” as if they could do so in silence. When teachers cease to advocate, we cease to fulfill one of the most essential elements of teaching: the act of caring.
To teach is to care—and to care deeply when students don’t get the services they require, or when class sizes are unwieldy, or when test prep becomes synonymous with education, or when there’s not enough money to pay for after-school programs.
There is a grave negligence, I believe, when the public gives the work of education over to bureaucratic and market forces. More than politicians and the invisible hand of markets, it is teachers working as professionals who recognize that students are not numbers to be thrown into global economic wars, but rather lives and bodies—bodies that sit in desks, that suffer, that grieve, that matter uniquely in the future we wish to create. It is, indeed, the charge of the teaching profession to further the work of education, in consideration of our children, our society’s needs, our changing world.
Lest I be accused of naïveté, let me point out that part of teacher professionalism is advocacy about job interests—compensation, money for supplies, pleasant working environments. It is also true that the perspectives of teachers may be biased toward the immediate needs of their students, and less concerned with larger social and economic needs. But this is no less true in the bureaucracy (politicians look out for votes) or market (investors look out for profits): These are all compromised spaces, which must have shared voice and dialogue to serve as checks and balances, and to build on the best that each offers.
A few examples of reforms suggested by professional associations of teachers seem called for here—examples that in the past decade have been overshadowed by talk of testing, accountability and choice. ASCD, a national association of education leaders focused on curriculum practices and policies, launched an initiative in 2007 called “Whole Child,” which calls for states to coordinate services, resources and data collection across school, social, health and safety sectors. Urging broader definitions of achievement and accountability, it proposes a plan that measures achievement by including access to healthcare, safety, personalized learning and support, learning that is connected to the broader community, and academic challenge across all subjects.
In 2008, a coalition from various education researchers and diverse professional associations launched a campaign for “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.” In it, the authors coupled a bevy of school-improvement proposals with investment in pre-k and kindergarten, health services, and access to a range of out-of-school programs. The policy paper is notable for its repeated emphasis on evidence based in serious and sustained research.
What happens when these kinds of proposals that grow out of education communities are lost or rendered mute? What happens when the discipline of education is devalued? Or when teachers come to learn that no one will listen to their testimonies, assessments and analyses of what they daily see and hear?
If you ask me what needs to happen, I have a few suggestions. First, unions need to widen their discourse beyond bread-and-butter issues like compensation and work environment. Teachers must be able to engage seriously and continuously in their profession’s discussions of evaluating teacher quality, of developing standards and curriculum, of allocating resources. Only then will we see substantive engagement, and not the kinds of rushed reactions I’ve seen recently from New York City teachers over the current teacher-evaluation debates.
Second, in order to do this, leaders of all teacher professional associations must do a better job of organizing teacher voice. Here there is fault in our unions and our professional associations, which for too long have served as top-heavy lobbying organizations. Small, local associations such as the New York Collective of Radical Educators have found ways to foster and direct teacher voice by creating member-led committees that develop projects and actions; a few national organizations have done similar work with membership networks. It is imperative that our unions and largest associations find ways to build spaces for member action, and to focus member discourse on innovative practices and policy.
Third and finally, teachers need to find ways to engage with education policy. This engagement—which the act of caring for our students demands of us—includes finding and creating spaces within our professional associations where we can speak of issues that matter to us, and where we can act in ways amplified by the weight and work of the associations.
These are not easy tasks, and I do not have a precise blueprint for where to start. But my experience working in several cities and participating in teacher associations has convinced me that there’s an eagerness among teachers to participate in our profession as professionals, not as technicians isolated in classrooms and subject areas. To build that capacity after years and perhaps decades of isolation, though, will require careful attention and hard work.
The stakes—the voices of those who work with children daily, the building of educators’ capacities to care fully and advocate for those they teach, the valuing of teaching as a profession—have rarely been higher. But I believe they are the right stakes, and the ones on which not only our educational but also our civic lives will thrive.
Eric Shieh is a founding teacher of the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, “A School for a Sustainable City,” which opened in New York City in September 2010. His article “Can Music Professional Associations Build Capacity for Curricular Renewal?” will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of the Arts Education Policy Review.
http://hechingerreport.org/content/%e2%80%98shut-up-and-teach%e2%80%99-the-high-stakes-of-teacher-voice_7479/
Students speak to power in Talahassee
From the Tampa bay Times
by britany Davis
Some students protested tuition increases. Some lamented cuts to the Bright Futures scholarship program. And some said they were only after the extra credit.
But when the 200 or so university students cheered, chanted and booed on the Capitol steps Thursday, they all seemed to have one common goal.
“Being a student means you’ve sometimes got to speak truth to power, and let them know where you stand,” Rep. Darryl Rouson (D- St. Petersburg) said in preacher’s cadence, drawing wild cheers from the crowd.
Many of the students were en route to Tallahassee before dawn, on busses from the state’s 11 universities. Thirty-three attended from the University of South Florida.
The rally came at a time when tuition has hiked 60 percent in four years, said Michael Long, chairman of the Florida Student Association.
The proposed House budget would bump up tuition another 15 percent. The Senate’s budget proposals are not yet released.
“We don’t mind contributing to our education, as long as it’s reasonable,” he said.
The Florida Student Association, which organized the rally, handed out pamphlets with three legislative goals.
•Maintain the current level of state funding.
•Increase money for Bright Futures but strengthen qualification requirements.
•Reject proposals pending in the Legislature that would allow the governor to appoint the student member on the Board of Governors. Traditionally, Florida Student Association members elect the position.
Senate President Mike Haridopolos (R-Melbourne), in his speech, promised to protect Bright Futures and criticized former Legislatures for misspending money that could have gone toward education.
“For those who don’t know, Florida has the fifth lowest tuition in the United States today,” he said.
“Keep it that way!” a student shouted.
Frank Brogan, chancellor of the state university system, praised lawmakers for pushing degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (known as STEM).
“It will ensure that the next PalmPilot or BlackBerry isn’t founded in California in the Silicon Valley,” he said. “The next generation of technology will be right here in the Sunshine State.”
Abdool Aziz, a USF biology senior, said he shares the sentiment but thinks politicians shouldn’t go too far.
“If you really like English, you shouldn’t be punished,” he said. “You’re paying for it. It’s your future.”
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/content/students-take-tuition-protests-tallahassee
by britany Davis
Some students protested tuition increases. Some lamented cuts to the Bright Futures scholarship program. And some said they were only after the extra credit.
But when the 200 or so university students cheered, chanted and booed on the Capitol steps Thursday, they all seemed to have one common goal.
“Being a student means you’ve sometimes got to speak truth to power, and let them know where you stand,” Rep. Darryl Rouson (D- St. Petersburg) said in preacher’s cadence, drawing wild cheers from the crowd.
Many of the students were en route to Tallahassee before dawn, on busses from the state’s 11 universities. Thirty-three attended from the University of South Florida.
The rally came at a time when tuition has hiked 60 percent in four years, said Michael Long, chairman of the Florida Student Association.
The proposed House budget would bump up tuition another 15 percent. The Senate’s budget proposals are not yet released.
“We don’t mind contributing to our education, as long as it’s reasonable,” he said.
The Florida Student Association, which organized the rally, handed out pamphlets with three legislative goals.
•Maintain the current level of state funding.
•Increase money for Bright Futures but strengthen qualification requirements.
•Reject proposals pending in the Legislature that would allow the governor to appoint the student member on the Board of Governors. Traditionally, Florida Student Association members elect the position.
Senate President Mike Haridopolos (R-Melbourne), in his speech, promised to protect Bright Futures and criticized former Legislatures for misspending money that could have gone toward education.
“For those who don’t know, Florida has the fifth lowest tuition in the United States today,” he said.
“Keep it that way!” a student shouted.
Frank Brogan, chancellor of the state university system, praised lawmakers for pushing degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (known as STEM).
“It will ensure that the next PalmPilot or BlackBerry isn’t founded in California in the Silicon Valley,” he said. “The next generation of technology will be right here in the Sunshine State.”
Abdool Aziz, a USF biology senior, said he shares the sentiment but thinks politicians shouldn’t go too far.
“If you really like English, you shouldn’t be punished,” he said. “You’re paying for it. It’s your future.”
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/content/students-take-tuition-protests-tallahassee
More bad legislation making the rounds in Tallahassee
From the Orlando Sentinel's School Zone
by Leslie Postal
Rep. Kelli Stargel made headlines last year when she proposed that elementary school teachers evaluate parents on the “quality” of their invovlement in their child’s education.
The bill died in commitee, but it’s back again this year in a revised form.
Its goal is to “help parents establish a home environment that supports the child as a student.” Teachers would evaluate parents based on whether the child has a lot of unexcused absences and/or tardies, whether the parents provide up-to-date contact information and whether the parents respond to requests for conferences or communication, the bill says.
This year’s bill does not go as far as last year’s as it does not deal with homework and test readiness or “physical preparation for school,” including a good night’s sleep and healthy meals.
Stargel, a Lakeland Repubican, is a mother of five. She said last year that the proposal was not meant to be punitive or intrusive but a way to prod parents to make their child’s education a top priority.
“I think there’s a certain segment of parents who would just step it up a notch,” Stargel told the Sentinel last year. ”It’s not intended to be big government coming down on parents. It’s just intended to hold parents accountable.”
This year’s senate version is sponsored by Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville, who is chairman of the Senate education committee. Stargel is chair of a house education subcommitte. So the bill should get some discussion, at least.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2012/01/teachers-grading-parents-bill-is-back-for-2012-session.html
by Leslie Postal
Rep. Kelli Stargel made headlines last year when she proposed that elementary school teachers evaluate parents on the “quality” of their invovlement in their child’s education.
The bill died in commitee, but it’s back again this year in a revised form.
Its goal is to “help parents establish a home environment that supports the child as a student.” Teachers would evaluate parents based on whether the child has a lot of unexcused absences and/or tardies, whether the parents provide up-to-date contact information and whether the parents respond to requests for conferences or communication, the bill says.
This year’s bill does not go as far as last year’s as it does not deal with homework and test readiness or “physical preparation for school,” including a good night’s sleep and healthy meals.
Stargel, a Lakeland Repubican, is a mother of five. She said last year that the proposal was not meant to be punitive or intrusive but a way to prod parents to make their child’s education a top priority.
“I think there’s a certain segment of parents who would just step it up a notch,” Stargel told the Sentinel last year. ”It’s not intended to be big government coming down on parents. It’s just intended to hold parents accountable.”
This year’s senate version is sponsored by Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville, who is chairman of the Senate education committee. Stargel is chair of a house education subcommitte. So the bill should get some discussion, at least.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2012/01/teachers-grading-parents-bill-is-back-for-2012-session.html
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