In 2013, the National Council on Teacher Quality offered its advice on how to fix Philadelphia’s financially beleaguered public schools. Retired teacher Lisa Haver reviewed its counsel to the city. Haver is a founder of the grass-roots advocacy organization Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.
In this article, Haver wrote:
“”Thank heavens,” you’re thinking. The district is so broke it’s looking for loose change in the corner of desk drawers; thousands of students and teachers whose schools will close forever in June don’t know where they’ll be in September; parents wonder whether their children will have access to a nurse or counselor, or remember what a school librarian is; Harrisburg says don’t call us – we’ll call you.
“What does the Council [NCTQ] recommend that the district do to solve these problems? Crack down on teachers who get too many sick days, don’t deserve collective-bargaining rights, are too hard to fire and waste time getting advanced degrees in their field.”
This is the same organization that recently “rated” the nation’s teacher preparation programs without going to the trouble of visiting the campuses.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Absurd, but part of the PR campaign built around the slogan “throwing more money at schools will not fix them.”
It may be a moot point. The Supreme Court is getting ready to issue a decision on a labor case. The contraception case will get all the media coverage, so watch for it.
If they rule the right way, anti-union, you’ll be able to hear the cheers from DC and America’s boardrooms from your desk.
With those pesky, mouthy union members effectively silenced, the privatization agenda can roll on unimpeded.
If you-all thought we were racing to the bottom now, wait until we really get sledding.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/06/samuel-alito-harris-quinn-supreme-court-union
Too many sick days? When you are teaching a life skills class, as my wife did in Philadelphia this past year, with 20 kids and fewer aids and resources than you had the year before, and because kids keep getting added to your class in the final months of the year you have 9 IEPs to schedule and complete and attend, along with countless additional behavior assessments and reevaluations, just in the last six weeks of school, and you work at home every night and on weekends and have no time to work off the stress with exercise and proper diet, and you are thankful that your school is one of the lucky ones which still has a school nurse so you can get a quick diagnosis of ringworm or bed bug bites on your skin, which happens repeatedly through the year, no I don’t think the teachers like my wife get too many sick days, and I know most, like my wife, don’t take enough of the days they earn.
God Bless the teachers of Philadelphia. I walked with my wife and the other members of the PFT last August through Center City blocking traffic from the Comcast headquarters to the District offices (I am relatively fortunate to teach in the suburbs) and will be there again if needed as we move from one budget crisis to the next. But please, NCTQ, please go crawl back under the rock you came out of and leave us alone.
I think the Philadelphia public school advocates are wonderful. I think it’s great how they actually talk about public schools and funding.
They’re not anti-charter. They’re pro-public. It’s smart and effective.
It has to have occurred to Philadelphia public school parents that a bunch of volunteers are the only advocates for their kids schools.
It really exposes the gaping hole in ed reform. They’re filling a hole because there IS a hole. Agnostics and relinquishers make lousy advocates. You’d have to value something before you’d put your heart into working for it. Paid ed reformers can memorize all the campaign slogans they want. If they valued public schools, they’d be good and effective advocates for kids in existing public schools and those schools wouldn’t be in dire straits. Public schools aren’t benefitting from any of this. Not anywhere.
Thanks, GST, I was there too, blocking the street and refusing to move. If Comcast weren’t getting abatements on their mega-buildings, the burden on Philadelphians would be less onerous.
So one of the anti-labor arguments is that private sector workers have job protections (federal and state law) but that is no longer true.
The laws that apply are rarely enforced, and increasingly the laws don’t apply at all because employers are relying more and more on outsourced contracts.
If you have are covered under a labor union agreement, hang onto it. It is pretty ugly out there for front-line workers (the people that do the actual work). I am amazed at some of the stories I hear in my practice. Employees are completely disposable.
It’s much, much worse than it was even a decade ago. They not only don’t have any leverage as employees. They aren’t even “employees” as the term was understood even a decade ago.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/sixel/article/Fissured-workplaces-can-affect-wages-working-5579358.php?cmpid=email-premium&t=6aefe9fe5218d1a0e4
On the quality of NCTQ’s advice—
From the blog of Aaron Pallas, 6/19/2013, a posting entitled “The Trouble with NCTQ’s ratings of teacher-prep programs”:
[start quote]
To be sure, few of us relish being put under the microscope. But it’s another matter entirely to be seen via a funhouse mirror. My institution, Teachers College at Columbia University, didn’t receive a summary rating of zero to four stars in the report, but the NCTQ website does rate some features of our teacher-prep programs. I was very gratified to see that our undergraduate elementary and secondary teacher-education programs received four out of four stars for student selectivity. Those programs are really tough to get into—nobody gets admitted. And that’s not hyperbole; the programs don’t exist.
That’s one of the dangers of rating academic programs based solely on documents such as websites and course syllabi. You might miss something important—like “Does this program exist?”
[end quote]
Link: http://eyeoned.org/content/the-trouble-with-nctqs-ratings-of-teacher-prep-programs_478/
For the “choice but not voice” crowd [thank you, Chiara Duggan!] that have been absorbed in CCSS closet [close?] reading and don’t understand what I am driving at, go back to one of your core Marxist axioms:
“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.” [Groucho]
😎
The NCTQ is nothing more that a propaganda organization. It has never been anything other than that and the dissemination of propaganda attacking traditional teacher prep programs is their sole reason for being. We should not take their protestations seriously on any topic or on any response to criticism of their activities. We should not be confirming any other status than “propaganda front group” upon them in any response we make to their disinformation. They are no different than one of the shell front groups of the professional liar for corporate hire Rick Berman. Do not dignify them by making any response to them other than calling them out for what they really are.
“Conferring” not confirming. Auto correct strikes again.