This teacher deconstructed the proposal to change compensation for teachers in North Carolina, which follows on last year’s full menu of legislation intended to reduce the pay, job security, and rights of teachers in that state.
Bear in mind that the specifics of the plan are evolving, but here goes, from Kafkateach:
“I originally started this blog as a coping mechanism to deal with the absurdity coming out of the Florida Legislature and its wacky implementation in the Miami Dade County school system. After six months in North Carolina, Florida is starting to seem like a bastion of sanity and teacher love. The latest ideas circulating at the North Carolina General Assembly regarding how to reform the teaching profession certainly makes one wonder what exactly is in the water supply in Raleigh? Is it some brain eating teacher-hating amoeba? Or perhaps some chemical contamination laced with teacher hate? Apparently last year’s legislation to end tenure, abolish pay for advanced degrees, and reward the top 25% of teachers with a $500 raise only if they give up tenure four years early was not insulting enough. The highlights of this year’s 60/30/10 plan include: paying teachers on a per pupil basis, establishing career tracks, forcing all teachers to reapply for their jobs, and the ultimate kick in the wazoo, mandatory retirement after 20 years of service.”
According to the author’s last clarification, all teachers will not be compelled to retire in 20 years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Will not be compelled to retire in 20 years? How many teachers will be left after 20 years? When they keep raising the “standards” – at what point is good enough good enough? Teaching calculus to kindergartners?
This reminds me so very much of WWI when soldiers were sent over the top to face the new machine guns, huge canon, barbed wire, poison gas. The generals had no idea of what they were doing. The soldiers were just not “brave enough”. When the slaughter got so very bad that French soldiers refused to go “over the top” they were shot for insubordination. Cowards? How different is that in the “thought process” from what is going on in N. C. and in so very much of the U. S.? Will reason prevail before this country goes the way of most other democracies in history?
Has the whole country gone insane?
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@Gordon Wilder.. love the last sentence of your response, “Has the whole country gone insane”? This sounds like the perfect title for an article front and center of every newspaper… with of course a response on the “so many ways” the whole country seems to be going insane”.. or at least the ways the whole country is being bullied and forced to comply to the insane demands of a few filthy rich individuals who are profiting by this insanity they themselves create!
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It is INSANE….YES! Look at the people in office! OY. TY for your great comment, Gordon. I keep asking, “We pay professional dues for WHAT?”
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I guess our elected folks really DO WANT A COUNTRY OF IGNORANT CITIZENS. TY, Gordon for your reply.
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Sad, exhausted, beaten down, cynical me, says take “young” off the title. I am so tired.
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Linda,
STOP!!!!
Stop right now!
I’m serious here. . . . for once, no humor or sarcasm.
You are not going to be tired or throw in the towel. You are too bright and effective a person, and we all need you and your wit and your intelligence. . . . .
I’m telling Wendy on you (ha!).
Please don’t feel this way.
We will all stick together and tough it out. We CAN and we WILL overcome this on many different levels, short term and long term . . . .
Keep the faith and stay with the herd.
The herd is big and GROWING . . . . .
Your voice is invaluable . . . . .
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In fact, we real teachers and real educators will NOT be the ones to do the dying . . . believe me!
Not us, no how, no way, no deal . . . . .
No way, Jose . . . . . .
We will prevail, but we will increase our strength in numbers through PAA and NPE and countless other groups . . . . This will be a long fight, but truth always seeks its own level like water and that leveling is inevitable . . . . .
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Weary in the battle but the war is not over…Love your optimism Robert!
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Thank you, Neanderthal, but it’s not optimism. It’s realism.
This is still all going to have to get a lot worse befire the phoenix can rise from the ashes.
And it is but a small part of a much larger picture that people will fight about also: the stratification of America, the end of middle class America, and the triumph of the Plutocrats (borrowing a little from Paul Krugman) . . . . .
It’s ain’t over.
It’s the seed that is starting to sprout.
Give it time.
It will be messy and painful, but this is part of a very long term growing pain of American democracy.
Teach your children and grandchildren well, and teach them to teach others . . . . . spread collectivism.
Income inequality, which should have been in the mainstream mindset 15 years ago, is now finally coming to the fore. At least the term is being used in mainstream and alternative media . . . .
People are getting off their texting devices and turning off the Kardashians and finally listening more to the stench of truth . . . .
Hold your noses, batten down the hatches, and fasten your seatbelts . . . . . . . .
I’m thinking “Bastille” . . . . .
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Vive l’ecole publique!
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Couple that with in Illinois if you want to collect what is left of your pension you have to work until you are 67. Retirement after 20 years means you would be roughly 43. What happens then? What school is going to want to pay for such “expensive” teachers?
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Don’t you love it that the same people who want to time limit jobs like teaching are the same people who want to raise the retirement age and slash pensions?
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Rose, I was wondering what the tipping point was between being effective and being decrepit. It sounds like the mid forties is the end of the line.
Just wait until they can’t get a anyone willing to teach. No job security, no pension, low pay, crappy benefits – why bother.
Go into politics. They’re looking for “young” people in their forties. Just be sure to lie about your background. Tell them you had a more credible job – like used car salesman.
Eventually they’ll be begging for teachers – to watch over the cubicles. You’ll be able to name your price.
Or you can create learning “videos” for the iPad. Don’t make them too interesting – remember, education is now all repetition and boredom. We wouldn’t want the kids to get the wrong idea about school, now, would we?
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:-)….So True
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Thank you, Dr. Ravitch for posting the contents of other blogs. It is outrageous what is being done to the teaching profession.
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Yes, thank you Dr. Ravitch! This is where I come to find out what is really going on in my state of North Carolina.
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2016…When teachers wake up in NC in the morning
2016…When teachers gobble down their lunch while baby-sitting the children
2016…When teachers go to bed at night….
2016…2016…2016….2016…working on this one….
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That is NOW, 2014.
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Elections in 2016…..
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Have you all heard the latest development in NC? Ex-governor Bev. Perdue is to lead a digital learning effort called digiLEARN, a digital learning institute. Perdue and former Wyoming governor Jim Geringer announced the plan to expand the use of electronic technology to improve the learning process. Guess who is funding the project? Well, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have donated $500,000 thus far. Wanna know what Perdue said? “…we’ve been sponsored by the big players in America around educational innovation and technology…” She also thanked Governor’s McCrory’s administration for and legislative leaders for their continued support for digital educaton initiatives. Perdue is also happy to hear that the current NC governor wants to raise teacher salaries.
Interesting to say the least! http://www.wral.com has the story
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This is making me ill.
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“Big players.”
Ugh. I respect Bev (she is from my hometown), but that is a very tacky thing to say.
Lots of tacky and distasteful talk going on, and action. I am embarrassed of my state for these actions. Where has integrity gone? Did we ever have it to begin with?
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Joanna, “big players in America” annoyed me too. I often read your posts, though I don’t reply or comment often. I too want to believe that better days are ahead for North Carolina. I really want to believe that one day our profession will once again be highly respected.
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Miss Dee, “get teacher raises done this year,” is also kind of tacky. Did you read this article?
Thank goodness for Martin Nesbitt. He has some sense.
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http://www.citizen-times.com/viewart/20140122/NEWS/301220022/McCrory-promises-raises-teachers
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Reading the article now. Thank you for sharing this!
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The North Carolina plan, also known as, The Logan’s Run plan. If they can legislate a palm flower crystal for all teachers, they should be good to go. 🙂
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Dismay, dismay, dismay! We are crashing and burning and apparently clueless and powerless.
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Please keep the faith. We can overcome this despite all the true horro stories out there.
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Robert,
I hope you are right but fear you are not. I am not so sure anymore. Everything is all about money. Money trumps all. It has been syphoned away from educators to fuel for profit companies run by charlatans. There is no human decency in the eduhorror that has become reality. I fight the little battles daily for my little people. It is all that I have strength for now.
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Yeah I still don’t understand who they are trying to impress.
When did “we have to do something about the teaching profession” become an item on a to do list? Like green energy. I never heard any talk like this other than nebulous generalizations until just recently. I did not know we were such a problem.
Who is the audience who wants to see this happen? Who is cheering for this? Who is asking for this?
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1. Those who should be retired in 20 years:
For-profit/non-profit charter school CEOs and executives
The Gates, The Walton Foundation, pro-reformers/vouchers
2. Those who really need to go right away
Duncan/NJ gov. and his pets/Rhee/John King/a key advocate of 60/30/10 and his supporters/
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I hope they end up much worse than retired . . . .
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Is it some brain-eating teacher-hating amoeba?
I laughed out loud at that one. And then I though, hm, perhaps that DOES explain it. 🙂
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Perfect!! 🙂
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The brain-eating amoeba might explain things, but given the inhumanity of all this, I’m inclined to go with the Reptilian Shape-Shifter Overlord hypothesis… these people aren’t even human, so they must be aliens of some kind, right?
Nah, it’s just greed, older than the pyramids, but dressed up in the contemporary language of marketing/PR newspeak.
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A new survey by PayScale lists “secondary school teacher” as one of the top five jobs that people most regret having gone into. A major reason for that–too much paperwork and other people micromanaging one’s work. In order to perform a job well, people need a reasonable degree of autonomy. What they don’t need is outsiders telling them how to perform their jobs–what to teach, when, and how.
Education deform is premised on the notion that U.S. schools are failing. Lodge McCammon begins a recent newspaper article with precisely that line, and then he goes on to present his kooky, irresponsible fancies–a three-caste system for teachers, getting rid of teachers after 20 years, and “flipping” classes in grades K-12–part of his “Fizz” approach to teaching.
We are seeing a constant parade, these days, of the Colemans and the McCammons–amateurs who have stumbled onto an idea or two and who presume to tell everyone else how to teach. Enough!
Again, flipping is one idea in the toolkit. I was doing something similar, on occasion, when I thought it appropriate, thirty years ago. I made a lot of mistakes when I was a young teacher, but imagining that this was the way to teach my classes all the time wasn’t one of them!!!
From the field guide to education deformer watching:
One of the primary identifying characteristics of the species is the readiness to present an old idea as the a new revelation brought down from the mountaintop. The deformer assumes that no one has ever given the slightest thought to education ever before, that he or she is the first, that he or she has discovered the magic elixir, the secret formula, the philosopher’s stone. Ignorance and arrogance. These, like the fan of the peacock, are the most salient features of the deformer plumage. They’re pretty easy to spot, so you can easily keep distance between you and them, which is advisable, given how dangerous they are.
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Ready for Robert’s book on the “New Deform in Education”….
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Author Peter Schweizer
Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets,
Eye Opener last night on one of the talk shows..
The guest was the author Peter Schweizer -New Book-“Extortion” and the former CEO of an giant oil company….
Bottom Line….Education is now on the $$$$$$$$$$ Extortion List….I am convinced of this…..All of what is going on in this state and others is for the Gain of the Fat Greedy Politicians and not for the welfare of the children of this country!!
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With the attitudes about “change” and 21st Century Learning and working, none of this is surprising. None of it. I think we need to look outside of the confines of the teaching industry (as many have noted) and realize that teachers are actually the last “front” that the ALEC and associates need to conquer in order to “take America back”. Back to the 1950s. Back to being subservient and beholden to even have a job at all, back to viewing teachers as supplemental assistants to the real jobs (which are now held by the hedgfund manipulators et al).,
If you witnessed the reaction to the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Women’s Rights changes, you saw the beginnings of fear that the white male dominated world of America was going to be toppled. The things occurring now have taken 50 years to jump the hurdles necessary to speak out and unite. I think that a reaction to having a nonwhite President sent a lot of worlds into a tailspin and brought the vermin out of the woodwork. Many see the defeat of Romney as indicative that something “must be wrong” with the election process because there is no way in white, male, Judeo Christian worlds that any other voice can be truly tolerated … Not by “real Americans”.
Yes, this took place earlier than election day, but with th opportunities provide red by Citizens United, the groundwork was laid for the greedy to pounce. The corporate resistance to regulation fueled the fire for acquiring as much as possibly and for letting it “trickle down” be left up to their good will. That does not exist. Profit matters. People don’t.
The teaching profession is unique in that despite being a profession, it needs to be unionized in order to provide acceptable benefits and wages to the workers. As the paternalistic, male driven, data driven business model gained ground, teachers are being used as examples for driving the nails in the coffin of equity for female opinion, nurturing, humane, conciliatory, fair workplace environments.
The profit driven, dominating, corporate need to control has viewed it necessary to stop this profession in its tracks. How better to achieve this than by blaming teachers for society’s perceived ills? For putting “evil” ideas of equality, safety, nonviolence, environmental protection and respect, and anti-bullying attitudes into the minds of students? This must be stopped. That is where they stand. It can’t be stopped as long as education is free and public. And, it can’t be worthwhile unless it can be judged by some test. How convenient that the test is designed for failure. Even more conveniently, use that test to “prove” how terrible and unworthy teachers are! Then dump on so much work that the teaches are physically unable to get the job done in a 10 hour day. Criticize them for that. The EEOC is no longer applicable.
Sure it is a racket. False marketing is having a field day.
In Ohio we have the k12 ads on daily. They say “my teacher just didn’t get where I was coming from” or “you can’t fail because the parent and teacher are working together” even as the k12 venture is failing countless kids who don’t follow through and drop out, returning to local districts behind their peers.
Charter schools are predominantly ineffective. But there are some parents who continue to search for Lake Wobegon. It doesn’t exist.
The one failure of public education is that it tries to ram all kids through grade levels at the same pace. Maturity is a key factor in learning and in life. The “budget” that can’t afford to keep students in school until they DO have subject mastery fails the individual. The social stigma that forces kids to conform at a certain age even though the kids in a classroom are never all at the same developmental stage is detrimental to learning. It is not done for the sake of learning but for the sake of expediency, expense, efficiency. Quit kidding ourselves.
I feel really bad for students who never get to be children.
It is kind of like war…old men send young men to die to preserve the future that they won’t ever see. That is some great logic: Force kids to be adults and never experience youth and joy. Seriously, do most of us want our kids to be like Gates or Rhee? Or Koch Brothers? Not I.
Sorry for any typos. My eyes and brain are tired.
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A district in FL has found a way to evaluate teachers that makes the current VAM debacle look like a good thing. In this district, all K-5 teacher’s VAM scores will be based on or include the ‘gains’ their students make on a test to be taken the week before FCAT. This test assesses whether their students can read two articles, answer questions on them, and then produce an essay comparing / contrasting the two articles. The essay of course must include ONLY facts in BOTH essays and no background knowledge, as no one cares what you think (an actual quote from a supporter of CCSS). This test was written by a team of district teachers, has never been given to students before and the so called curriculum it is based on has never been taught in the district before, actually never existed before last month. Teachers have received almost no training in this curriculum which is totally based on the PARCC module framework and the test is formatted like PARCC. Never mind FL is not using PARCC. So teachers’ VAM scores will be based on the gains of the students in their classrooms for both Oct and Feb FTE counts, which will be around 15 students, on a test of 10 questions and an essay dual scored by (my favorite part) THE TEACHERS THEMSELVES. The pre-test and post-test are the exact same test. Obviously this test has little to no reliability or validity as it has never been field tested or even given to students. And the statistical formula of evaluating a teacher based on the performance of a sample size of about 15 students on a test worth about 15 points is so ludicrous it is really unthinkable that this is the serious proposal of a school district. In the district’s defense, this is their response to the new FL law that teachers can only be evaluated on data from their own students. Since their is no data available for the vast majority of teachers that meets that requirement, the district has had to invent a way to produce that data. The above test is their solution for K-5 teachers (and yes KG kids take the same type of test although the questions are read to them and the essay is dictated by the student to the teacher. But the same rubric applies).
The impact of this ‘reading curriculum’ on students’ reading and writing instruction in this district cannot be overstated. The level of instruction has actually dropped because teachers have no idea what they are supposed to be doing and there is little to no help available. Teachers are working harder and longer hours than ever in an attempt to figure all of this out. And now the final blow, how students perform on this test aligned to this non-curriculum will determine 50% of teachers’ appraisal scores.
So to answer the question asked in a previous reply, yes, the whole world has gone insane, especially in Florida.
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A short addendum to the above post:
The temptation for teachers to ‘cheat’ on the above test is enormous. They get to see the test before hand as the pre-test is the same test as the post-test and they get to score their own students’ essays with a grade level team member. Because their VAM score is the gain between pre and post test, it is to the teachers’ advantage to have students do as poorly as possible on the pre-test which they give to their own class in their own classroom. The test does not count for anything for the students, only the teachers VAM score. I am not suggesting that teachers WILL cheat as most teachers I know have very high ethical standards, but because this test has taken on such high stakes, the temptation to cheat is HUGE. It almost feels like teachers are being set up.
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Sadly, more of the ‘race to the bottom.’
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