A teacher in Miami asks these questions. Can you answer and help us understand?
“I am writing out of anxiety and fear .. I have been a bit down for a year, I realize I may have to switch careers or move to another state.
“I could be wrong but I feel the greatest school reformation in the US is occurring in Miami-Dade county public schools.
“Miami-Dade is the 4th largest district in the country (392 schools, 345,000 students and over 40,000 employees). Miami-Dade has a WEAK union (right to work state)… The union is so weak, it feels as if the union is part of the school system.
“Miami insights
– teachers contribute 3% of our salary for retirement
– salary tied to Testing
– VAM
– weak union
– Eli Broad award
– Common Core
– $1.2 new technology bond (My fear, Bill Gates’ cameras will soon be in the classroom.)
– charter schools/ virtual schools
– 11,000 new immigrant students a year, 68,000 esol .
– financially, it is difficult for teachers to make ends meet … Miami is an expensive city, I wonder if some teachers are on Food Stamps and or have lost their homes — our salary scale is shocking
http://salary.dadeschools.net/Schd_Teachers/
***( I have been teaching 14 years but I am on step 11 due to frozen salaries ($42,128) , I just advanced a step, $300, which the school system considered a raise ( it was a step)….. No cost of living expense was factored in)
– the school system pays for teachers health insurance but high out of pocket expenses (Dr visits, prescriptions are VERY high, I pay an additional $2,400 a year with dental & vision) .
What do you see happening in Miami Dade County public schools??
Are my fears a reality???”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are 49 other states, and summer is just arriving.
You have nothing to lose by investigating your options in other states for next school year.
Miami-Dade sounds pretty bad, and I am in Louisiana. Not sure if you could do worse– this is actually to your advantage right now.
Find districts in other states where teachers are in short supply.
Chin up.
My best to you.
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I love teaching but I am going into debt on my credit cards just to pay for my rent, food and gas (my car is 10 years old, I barely buy clothes). I believed the system was looking out for the teachers. Now every day I keep thinking – Where should I move? What should I do? I am not in a position to pay for another degree.
I am not sure why the Miami Herald does not cover what is occuring to Miami-Dade teachers.
Miami states the average teacher’s salary is $52,000. ?? After 14 years, I would think my salary would be considered average. Miami teacher salaries were frozen for three years and all teachers have lost 3 steps. (A 7 year teacher is on step 4, they make $40,000)
After 14 years – $42,128 salary + $675 (bonus for being an effective teacher), 3% is then deducted for retirement, then taxes.
In November, Miami approved a $1.2 Billion bond issue for school improvements and technology advancements – I would think 1.2 Billion would free up money in other areas for teacher raises.
Florida’s Governor proposed a $2,500 raise for every teacher in Florida – however, I am not sure if teachers in Miami will get a raise because Miami-Dade public schools have stated they pay too much for teacher insurance.
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Miami treats their teachers so poorly and the union is so corrupt and weak I had to start blogging about it.http://kafkateach.wordpress.com The Miami Herald will never cover it because the school district pays them thousands every month to write flattering articles about education in Dade County, especially about the superintendent.
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What??? The School District pays the Miami Herald thousands a month to only post flattering articles about the district and Superintendent?? Can the district and newspaper spend tax payers dollars to do that ??? Wow !!! That is shocking!!!
Kafkateach, your website is awesome – informative!!! You really address the issues facing Miami teachers.
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Look for one of the few non-CCSS states or Indiana where they have put it on hold a bit. It’s not as nice as Florida but….
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Do not consider looking in Indiana.. Tony Bennett had 4 years to screwl things up here before heading to Fl. No raise or cost of living for 5 years.salary frozen.
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I was just thinking I need a room mate – I live in Indiana and am struggling under the burden of school loan debt… and currently looking for a teaching job… eesh!
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Last year, President Obama visited Miami-Dade to bear wittness to the effectiveness of REFORM. Nobody – particularly our historians of education – mentioned that the current crop of graduates is a third generation community. Do they think it is an insignificant event?
This was brought to the forefront of my mind a couple of weeks ago when I watched The Voice blind auditions. Two young women from Miami knocked the socks off the judges. One of them was so mainstream American, Shakira was visibly shaken to have failed to recognize the singer’s Hispanic origin. The contestant’s grandmother and parents were offstage watching. The grandmother was born in Cuba. The father was born in Miami and through hard work attained a good standard of living.
What do you think has happened to Miami-Dade schools? Canada keeps track of generational attainment in immigrant populations. They claim it takes this sort of time for immigrant communities attain acculturation.
To the extent our testing system measures acculturation, Miami-Dade is now acculturated. What is more insignificant, reform or a community of immigrants becoming “American”?
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I live in Miami because it is an International city – I Love Miami! However, the state fails to recognize – when teaching to the test, test scores vary in Miami due to ESOL students -It is stressful for the students, stressful for the teachers.
Education reform, meaning a shift towards the privatization of public education. Money being taken from the public sector and funneled into Charter and Online schools.
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Sad to think it’s happening all over. A letter from a teacher in Douglas County that was posted on the facebook page SPEAK.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/SPEAK-for-DCSD/113649758761679
ColoradoBlue (Teacher): “What is happening to this school district is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and I’ve been teaching for 25 years, 12 of them in DCSD. Oh, sure…public schools and teachers have sadly been an easy scapegoat for the ills of our society for many years now, but the slow, piece-by-piece dismantling of this once incredible district goes way beyond societal blame, or the overu…sed and often completely misinterpreted banner of “Education Reform.” It is about arrogance, combined with a politically driven need for power and control; and it has found its way into every part of DCSD.
Before continuing, I must clarify that I do believe our American education system needs true “reform”—we need updating and an overhaul on many levels, including structural, curricular, and assessment. This reform needs to be brainstormed, researched, piloted, and led by the people who are experts in the field—experienced teachers! Too often of late—and glaringly obvious in DCSD right now—school reform is trumpeted by politically frustrated people who set their sights on school management as a place to gain power and control. These reformers typically have limited or no experience working with children in classrooms at any level or in any subject or in any educational environment.
These self-appointed reformers—for whatever reason—possess a sickening disdain for people who choose to be teachers. They will do everything possible to drown out and shut down the voice of the experts in the field—TEACHERS…even though we are the very people who know the MOST about what needs to be done in education to keep moving forward and doing the best for our kids. In what other situation or profession do people who want to make changes and improve and move forward run away from, ignore, or silence the successful experts and the experienced? It is completely ludicrous when you think about it! The DCSD reformers, and others like them around the country, think that for some reason—even with little or no credentials in the world of education—that they are automatically qualified to be superior thinkers and decision makers about our nation’s schools, teachers, and students. And this arrogance and need to have control and power in school districts across the country is proving to be the most destructive force in American education in recent history.
The past two years of teaching in DCSD have felt like what standing in quicksand must feel like. The educational and philosophical foundations have been ripped out from underneath, and we are teaching in a constantly changing and always sinking environment of unrealistic, over-jargonized, and appallingly vague expectations of teachers that have no relation at all to education and what is best for teaching and learning—but have everything to do with manipulation and power and punishment. We have also been subjected to an unrelenting and horrendous amount of “hoop jumping” and meaningless busy work that will not improve student learning or teacher effectiveness and growth. It is unlike anything I have seen in my long teaching career, and it has caused a rapid disintegration of any pride and sense of professional value that teachers may have once possessed.
This latest round of hoop jumping for teachers in DCSD has been particularly devastating to teaching as a profession of collaborative educators and administrators. The numbers we were all assigned as educators last week—based on the cumbersome at best and divisively unfair at worst—new evaluation tool have changed everything in every building across this district. In most of my first 24 years of teaching, teacher evaluations were not used as a weapon of threat to salary and career…but were rather structured and used as a way for the Principal to see what we were doing well, see what could be improved, and open a dialogue of working together to make our classrooms and our school a better place for kids to learn. In only one instance did I have the extreme misfortune to teach in a building where the Principal was literally a bully, and he wielded the annual evaluation as a weapon of power and control over the lives of his teachers and staff. He was eventually fired after 2 years (for multiple reasons, including the bullying) after literally running the school into the ground.
The new DCSD evaluation tool is designed so that it is impossible for teachers to fully succeed; it is designed for failure. The only way a teacher can obtain the highest rating using this tool is to be absolutely perfect 100% of the time, which is not humanly possible. This new evaluation tool is designed to bully teachers, and is being used as a weapon of power and control over the lives of teachers in DCSD.
DCSD Principals were forced to use this evaluation tool to classify us all by number, with the extreme pressure of knowing that our salaries were dependent upon the results. Administrators certainly expect to be evaluating teachers—just as teachers expect to be evaluated—but the added pressure of knowing that these evaluations were key to our very livelihoods had to have been a lot for Principals to handle.
The evaluation tool is also designed to pit teacher against teacher. When these number ratings assigned by our Principals were shared among colleagues (who chose to share) in DCSD buildings last week, instant invisible barriers of inequity and injustice fell into place that will be there for good. Instant competition between teachers took root—whether talked about or even recognized—and will eventually manifest into teachers not sharing and collaborating anymore, because their individual career and salary and survival depend on making their personal number ranking higher and better than those around them. The concept of educating students in a collaborative environment? That has been utterly destroyed; first by the salary band pay scale that came out last year that assigns higher monetary values to teaching certain subjects and grade levels than others, and now by the evaluation tool currently used in DCSD.
I’ve had an amazing career doing what I passionately love to do…teach and work with students…for 25 years. I’m smart and organized and an excellent teacher and leader. My number rating in DCSD is high. But…I no longer believe that what I do means anything, because the people in charge of this district have wiped away just about all sense of professional self-worth for me and so many of my colleagues. And this stripping away of our professional value means that they have never valued children and their education…EVER. If they were motivated by what was in the best interests of students and their learning, they would never treat teachers this way, and literally hundreds of teachers would not be leaving DCSD. They can spin this all any way they like, but there will come a day when it will crumble around them, and “this too shall pass,” as the saying goes. However…at what cost to our kids, schools, and this community?”
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When the first grant from RttT gave the largest amounts — $900 mln — to New York and to Florida, you just knew it would be worse there.
This plan to dismantle the public school systems throughout the country by stealth using ALEC-inspired laws at the state level could not have occurred without the DoE. Arne Duncan spent many hours speaking to the trade association, the National Governors Association, telling them a pack of lies and platitudes.
I am sure that the plan is a long and drawn out; the de-professionalization of teachers I believe they figure would take about 8 years to complete. They have all the money and are content to wait.
This is the worst thing that the Democratic Party and its leaders has ever done to “We, the people.”
And it is the absolute worst scam that Gates, Buffett, Oprah, Broad, the Waltons, Klein, Bloomberg and a host of other Americans have decided to perpetrate on their fellow citizens.
There is no sense of us as Americans who can pull together for the public good anymore. It is all for private gain.
It is a shame, a travesty.
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President Obama has stayed silent for so long. Many of us are almost past caring whether he ever gets on the right side of this issue. But it is so obvious that there is a right and wrong side, and that he remains quietly but firmly with the privatizers is a betrayal of the public good that will be central of his legacy and will be painful to “We the people” for decades.
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This is worth a read.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/05/a-reversion-to-a-dickensian-variety-of-capitalism.html
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Teachers, it is tough to read all the stories of sacrifice. I hope the contribution of free books can help you and the families you serve. My company supplies free bilingual children’s books for families. The books are Pre K- 5th grade, and the program is called Read Conmigo. We may be able to help with the larger school events in Miami. If fact, we were a part of over 120 events last year in Miami-Dade. Parents and teachers can register directly through the Read Conmigo website or a banner placed on a blog or school’s website. Please feel free to contact me directly with questions.
Keep the faith…You are making a difference in the lives of so many.
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I am about to start working in Miami Dade under the Instructional salary, same as teachers. I am wondering, what will my net pay be after taxes, insurance, ss, etc.? How much will I actually take home with a Specialist degree?
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