Archives for the month of: August, 2015
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Jeff Bryant: Jeb’s Florida Miracle is Phony

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2015 //
6

Jeff Bryant has written an excellent in-depth investigative report on Jeb Bush’s boasts about the “Florida miracle.”

The alleged miracle is pure hogwash. The biggest beneficiaries are the profiteers and entrepreneurs who have opened 600 charter schools across the state.

As Jeff writes, Jeb got into the charter business to polish up his image after losing the 1994 race for governor. A defining moment occurred when asked in a debate what he would do for blacks, if he were elected. He answered, “Probably nothing.” When he learned about charter schools, he found the perfect vehicle to burnish his credentials in education and civil rights.

He worked hard to pass charter legislation, then opened the state’s first charter school in impoverished Liberty City in 1996. He still boasts about the school but forgets to add that it closed in 2008.

Bryant interviewed Florida State Senator Dwight Bullard, who represents the section of Miami that includes Liberty City.

Bullard denounced Bush’s A-F grading law “that perpetually traps schools serving the most struggling students with an “F” label, and opening up communities to unproven charter schools that compete with neighborhood schools for funding….

“According to Bullard, charter school expansion did more harm than good in Liberty City. As charter schools chipped away student population from the neighborhood schools, the local elementary school struggled to keep its enrollment up, and the middle school eventually closed as lower student populations drained the schools’ resources.

“In Bullard’s view, charter schools also help create an unhealthy revolving door, where kids cycle from public schools to charters, and then back into the public schools when charters close down. As schools open and close, the better-prepared students tend to find spots in other new charters, while the lowest performing kids get kicked back into struggling, underfunded public schools.”

Today, major charter chains dominate the Florida landscape, and most operate for profit.

“One person who has paid close attention to the spread of charter schools in Florida is Sue Legg. As a public school teacher, college professor and an administrator of state school assessment contracts at the University of Florida for over 30 years, Legg has had a ringside seat to the Florida charter school circus. In a series of reports produced for the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, Legg revealed the many ways charter schools in Florida spread political corruption and financial opportunism while doing little to improve the academic performance of their students.

“Her year-long 2014 study, conducted in 28 Florida counties, found a 20 percent closure rate for charters due to financial problems or poor academic performance — a closure rate that has now increased to over 40 percent. The charter schools studied generally did not perform better than public schools, and tended to be more racially segregated. A significant number of these charters operated for-profit and operated in church related facilities.

“In a phone conversation with Legg, she described how charter school expansions are being driven by a state legislature with numerous connections to the charter school industry. “States get around local control by using a statewide contract for charters,” she explained. And whenever a local board rejects a new charter school or threatens a charter school with closure, the school can appeal to the state. “The appeals process overturns about half of district denials of charter operation,” Legg contends.

“The conflicts of interest among charter schools and Florida state legislators was raised to national prominence by an article in Esquire written by Charlie Pierce. Pierce quoted from a 2013 Florida newspaper article:

“A growing number of lawmakers have personal ties to charter schools. Sen. John Legg [no relation to Sue Legg], who chairs the Senate Education Committee, is co-founder and business administrator of Dayspring Academy in Port Richey. Anne Corcoran, wife of future House Speaker Richard Corcoran, plans to open a classics-themed charter school in Pasco County. House Budget Chairman Seth McKeel is on the board of the McKeel Academy Schools in Polk County. In addition, the brother-in-law of House Education Appropriations Chairman Erik Fresen runs the state’s largest charter management firm, Academica Corp. And Sen. Anitere Flores, also of Miami, is the president of an Academica-managed charter college in Doral.”

Florida mainstream media have paid attention to the financial scandals and corruption in the charter sector. The Miami Herald’s Kathleen McGrory wrote an excellent series called “Cashing in on Kids.”

The Sun Sentinel has exposed scandal after scandal.

“In a more recent series of investigative articles, from 2014, the Sun Sentinel found, “Unchecked charter-school operators are exploiting South Florida’s public school system, collecting taxpayer dollars for schools that quickly shut down … virtually anyone can open or run a charter school and spend public education money with near impunity.”

“Examples cited in the series include a man who received $450,000 in tax dollars to open two new charter schools just months after his first one collapsed. The schools closed in seven weeks. Another example: A man with “a history of foreclosures, court-ordered payments, and bankruptcy received $100,000 to start a charter school.” It closed in two months.”

The charter industry in Florida is a textbook example of the squandering of taxpayer dollars to undermine public schools and satisfy private greed. It’s not about kids.

It is about privatization and profit. Don’t be hoaxed.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Michigan Teacher: Why I Can’t Teach Anymore

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2015 //
47

Stephanie Keiles is (or was) a math teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She loves teaching. She loves her students. But the mandates and budget cuts finally got to her. I met Stephanie in Austin at the first Network for Public Education conference and again in Chicago at our second conference.

Here’s the piece:

I am sitting here in my lovely little backyard on a beautiful Michigan summer day, drinking a Fat Tire Amber Ale, and crying. I am in tears because today I made one of the hardest decisions of my life; I resigned from my job as a public school teacher. A job I didn’t want to leave — but I had to.

A little background. I didn’t figure out that I wanted to be a math teacher until I was 28. As a kid I was always told I was “too smart” to be a teacher, so I went to business school instead. I lasted one year in the financial world before I knew it was not for me. I read a quote from Millicent Fenwick, the (moderate) Republican Congresswoman from my home state of New Jersey, where she said that the secret to happiness was doing something you enjoyed so much that what was in your pay envelope was incidental. I quit my job as an analyst at a large accounting firm determined to find my passion. I floundered for a while, and then eventually got married and decided I would be a stay-at-home mom, but only until my kids were in school. Then I would need to find that passion.

I was pregnant with my oldest child, sitting on a sofa in Stockholm, Sweden, when I had my epiphany — I would be a math teacher. A middle school math teacher! I thought about it and it fit my criteria perfectly. No, I wasn’t thinking about the pension, or the “part-time” schedule, or any of the other gold-plated benefits that ignorant people think we go into the profession for. Two criteria: I would enjoy it, and I would be good at it. Nine years and four kids later, I enrolled in Eastern Michigan University’s Post-Baccalaureate teacher certification program, and first stepped into my own classroom at the age of 40. I was teaching high school, because that’s where I had my first offer, and I was given five classes of kids who were below grade-level in math. And I still loved it. I knew I had found my calling. After three years I switched districts to be closer to home and to teach middle school, where I belonged. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven! I was hired to teach in my district’s Talented and Gifted program, so I had two classes of 8th graders who were taking Honors Geometry, and three classes of general 8th grade math. This coming year I was scheduled to have five sections of Honors Geometry — all my students would be two, and sometimes three, years advanced in math. I was also scheduled to have my beloved first hour planning period, and I was excited to work with a new group of kids on Student Council. It was looking to be a great year — and I’m still walking away.

My friends, in real life and on Facebook, know what a huge supporter of public schools I am. I am a product of public schools, and my children are the products of public schools. Public education is the backbone of democracy, and we all know there is a corporatization and privatization movement trying to undermine it. I became an activist after Gov. Rick Snyder and his Republican goons took over Michigan and declared war on teachers. I am part of a group called Save Michigan’s Public Schools; two years ago we put on a rally for public education at the Capitol steps that drew over 1,000 people from all over the state with just three weeks’ notice and during summer break. I have testified in front of the Michigan House Education Committee against lifting the cap on charter schools, and also against Common Core. I attended both NPE conferences to meet with other activists and bring back ideas to my compadres in Michigan. I have been fighting for public education for five years now, and will continue to do so.

But I just can’t work in public education anymore. Coming from the Republicans at the state level and the Democrats at the national level, I have been forced to comply with mandates that are NOT in the best interest of kids. I am tired of having to perform what I consider to be educational malpractice, in the name of “accountability”. The amount of time lost to standardized tests that are of no use to me as a classroom teacher is mind-boggling. And when you add in mandatory quarterly district-wide tests, which are used to collect data that nothing is ever done with, it’s beyond ridiculous. Sometimes I feel like I live in a Kafka novel. Number one on my district’s list of how to close the achievement gap and increase learning? Making sure that all teachers have their learning goals posted every day in the form of an “I Can” statement. I don’t know how we ever got to be successful adults when we had no “I Can” statements on the wall.

In addition, due to a chronic, purposeful underfunding of public schools here in Michigan, my take-home pay has been frozen or decreased for the past five years, and I don’t see the situation getting any better in the near future. No, I did not go into teaching for the money, but I also did not go into teaching to barely scrape by, either. As a tenth-year teacher in my district, I would be making 16% less than a tenth-year was when I was hired in 2006. Plus I now have to pay for medical benefits, and 3% of my pay is taken out to fund current retiree health care, which has been found unconstitutional for all state employees except teachers. And I’m being asked to contribute more to my pension. Financial decisions were made based on anticipated future income that never materialized, for me and for thousands and thousands of other public school teachers. The thought of ANY teacher having to take a second job to support him/herself at ANY point in his/her career is disgusting to me, yet that’s what I was contemplating doing. At 53, with a master’s degree and twelve years of experience.

If I were poorly compensated but didn’t have to comply with asinine mandates and a lack of respect, that would be one thing. And if I were continuing my way up the pay scale but had to deal with asinine mandates, that would be one thing. But having to comply with asinine mandates AND watching my income, in the form of real dollars, decline every year? When I have the choice to teach where I will be better compensated and all educational decisions will be made by experienced educators? And I will be treated with respect? Bring it on.

So as of today I have officially resigned from my district, effective August 31st, which is when I will start my new job as a middle school math teacher at an independent school. I am looking forward to being treated like a professional, instead of a child, and I’m pretty sure I will never hear the words, “We can’t afford to give you a raise”, or worse (as in the past two years), “You’re going to have to take a pay cut.” I am looking forward to not having to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on classroom supplies. And the free lunch, catered by a local upscale market, will be pretty sweet, too.

I will miss my colleagues more than you could ever know, especially my math girls and my Green Hall buddies. It really breaks my heart to leave such a wonderful group of people. In fact, it’s pretty devastating. But I have to do what’s best for me in the long run, and the thought of making more money and teaching classes of 15 instead of 34, and especially not having to deal with all the BS, was too much to refuse.

I will always be there to fight for public education. I just can’t teach in it.

Stephanie

Categories Budget Cuts, Michigan, Teachers

Jason France: The Failure of School Refom in Louisiana and How to Fix it.

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2015 //
3

Jason France-the blogger known as “Crazy Crawfish”–is running for the Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education in Louisiana. He met with a reformer who said, I know what you against, what are you for?

This is Jason’s answer.

Start with the recognition that the costly “reforms” of the past decade have not moved the needle on student test scores. On the 2013 NAEP, Louisiana outpaced Mississippi by a whisker. Jason would not be surprised to learn that Mississippi outpaces Louisiana in 2015, making it the lowest performing state in the nation.

Jason dissects the state’s many misguided deforms, like charter schools, vouchers, and TFA.

And he lays out common sense ideas to stop the data manipulation, privatization, and lying.

Change course, he urges, before we lose public education altogether.

“Our schools have been plagued for many years by poverty, apathy, and acceptance. In many parts of the state we have allowed our schools and systems to fall into disarray.

“Our more affluent parents have abandoned the schools and they have taken their resources and parental involvement with them. Out of these ashes we’ve had some outstanding new school districts form with the backing of their communities, like Central and Zachary. (Obviously Baker is still a problem.)

“However the solution is not having the state/RSD come in and take control from the locals or chartering the school to a company based out of New York or Michigan. Rather than simply punishing low performance or problems, and completely pushing the locals out of the way, we need to work with these folks and help guide support them. This is what the LDOE used to do when our scores were going up – serving in an advisory and support capacity. This is what we need to do resume our climb from the performance dungeon the education reform movement has commissioned us to – while they drained our coffers dry.

“In New Orleans we have many local communities seeking to have their schools returned to them, like the perpetual failure John McDonogh.

“Rather than ignore and disregard these folks the state needs to embrace them and their efforts.

“We won’t have successful community schools without the community. We have mobilized communities in many parts of the state. This BESE and LDOE ignores them, mocks them and alienates them.

“Many public school parents of means are taking their kids out of public schools to homeschool them.

“Those are not victories, but tragic losses we must reverse now, before it’s too late!”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Louisiana

The Diane Rehm Show is Discussing Teacher Shortage at 10 a.m. EST Today

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2015 //
11

Call in to this national NPR show–the Diane Rehm show--and tell Diane Rehm why there is a growing national teacher shortage.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/contact

Categories Teachers

A Teacher Writes to Campbell Brown

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2015 //
11

Janet Van Lone left a comment on the blog, sharing a letter she sent to Campbell Brown, who advocates for charters and vouchers and for eliminating teacher due process.

Janet writes:

I was really annoyed at Campbell Brown the other day, so I wrote her a letter:

Dear Campbell Brown,

I used to like you. I remember watching you on the Today Show and CNN awhile back. To me, you felt like a friend, someone I’d like to have over for a cup of coffee or as a member of my bookclub. I see now that you have joined the ranks of school “reformer” and “child advocate”.

I have two kids who attend public school. I am a former special education teacher. I’ve spent years working with children who are living in poverty, dealing with it’s disastrous effects. Currently I am pursuing my doctorate in education, in an effort to continually work on the real problems we face in this field. I have enormous respect for the teaching profession, and I want to do everything that I can to recruit and train great teachers to put in all types of classrooms across this country. I want them to stay in their jobs for many years, and once they become master teachers, I want them to inspire and mentor the next generation of educators.

Teachers, unions, and tenure are not the problem with public education. It seems that you have waged war on teachers because of all of the “teacher sexual predators” who are apparently running rampant in our schools. Let me be clear. The very large majority of teachers are hard working people who decided to teach for the love of the profession, to inspire youth, and to make a difference in society. If a sexual predator makes it into our ranks we would be the first to be outraged and disgusted. Our job is to protect children and we take that very seriously. To my knowledge, I have not met any teacher sexual predators in the almost 20 years I’ve spent in public schools. Teachers, unions, and tenure is NOT the problem with public education.

YOU and your corporate billionaire funders are the real problem. You provide no significant data to support your claims, you refuse to address poverty (the real issue), and your goal is to dismantle the public school system, all in the name of more profits for you and your greedy billionaire donors.

You are not a school reformer, nor are you an advocate. Child advocates spend time with children. Advocates are voices for those in need. They act on their behalf to ensure they receive adequate nutrition, healthcare, education, and they work to help each child meet their own individual potential. Advocates fight tirelessly against poverty. They fight against predators who seek to personally profit off of the most vulnerable children in our society.

Diane Ravitch, a real hero for public education and the teachers and children it serves, has offered to talk with you about the actual problems with public education. Please do that. You are misinformed and misguided. She can help.

In the meantime, I’m going to pay attention to who is benefitting from your scheme, both financially and politically. And I’m going to tell everyone and anyone who will listen.

Please reconsider your actions so that you and your friends don’t destroy public education.

Janet Van Lone

Categories Corporate Reform, Special Education, Teachers

Los Angeles Times Comes Out Against “Teacher Jail”

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2015 //
25

This is a welcome editorial in the Los Angeles Times, criticizing what is known in that district as “teacher jail.” The suspension of Rafe Esquith brought this issue to the fore. John Deasy suspended the entire staff of Miramonte Elementary School after two teachers under investigation for sexual abuse, and eventually almost all of them were returned to the school. Los Angeles seems to have an unhealthy culture of suspecting the worst of teachers.

The Times writes:

In 2012, the entire 110-member staff of Miramonte Elementary School was pulled off campus after accusations of molestation were leveled at two teachers. Mark Berndt pleaded no contest to charges involving feeding semen-laced cookies to blindfolded students; charges against the second teacher were ultimately dropped (and he has since left the district). Everyone else spent the rest of the school year cooling their heels in a new, not-yet-opened school.

John Deasy, who was then superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, justified the move by saying he was concerned there might be a culture of sexual abuse at Miramonte. All staff files were scrutinized. But in only a couple of cases were there previous allegations of abuse; a few other teachers were found to have broken minor, unrelated rules, and most of the staff returned to Miramonte the following year.

At first this looked like nothing more than an honest effort to protect children, after Miramonte administrators had rebuffed earlier complaints. But it was the start of a troubling series of teacher suspensions at other schools that disrupted students’ education and that notably did not involve their safety. These suspensions with pay during often lengthy investigations are known as “teacher jail”; teachers largely spend the time at home while substitutes who often are less qualified take their places.

With classes beginning Aug. 18, the many admirers of Hobart Elementary teacher Rafe Esquith are wondering whether he’ll be there to greet a new batch of fifth-graders after four months in teacher jail. His case, and those of others before him, raise troubling questions about whether the teacher investigation system is causing too much disruption at L.A. Unified schools.

LAUSD seems to treat teachers as guilty until proven innocent. The editorial recommends:


By all means, investigate when necessary. But L.A. Unified should not overreact by removing teachers over allegations that have nothing to do with student safety. The district must put student welfare first, and their welfare is not served by disrupting the school year. It’s time for an independent examination by the district’s Office of the Inspector General.

Categories Los Angeles, Teachers

Why the SAT Might Replace PARCC and SBAC

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2015 //
65

We learned a few days ago that Connecticut will require all juniors to take the SAT instead of the Smarter Balanced Assessments. This is a solution to the problem that most students fail the SBA, and that creates a dilemma: what will the state do with the majority of students who won’t graduate? The SAT doesn’t have a passing mark, no one “fails,” and schools can really use multiple measures.

States will replace PARCC or Smarter Balanced with the SAT because:

1) David Coleman is president of the College Board (salary: $750,000), and he aligned the SAT with Common Core. So, no difference.

2) More than 800 colleges and universities no longer require the SAT, which is a threat to its income.

3) if more and more states require all juniors to take the SAT, it is a huge bonanza for the College Board.

SAT scores are closely correlated with family income, so states will get a close measure of affluence and poverty.

Researchers have. found that high school Grade Point Average and course taking were better predictors of college success than the one-shot SAT. That’s why many colleges have become test-optional.

Question: when did the SAT become a measure of career readiness?

Categories Common Core, Testing

D.L. Paulson: Who Is Buying and Selling Public Education?

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2015 //
10

D.L. Paulson is a reader who has commented before on the entrepreneurs who are investing in privatization and disruption in public education. Here he comments again on GSV (Global Silicon Valley), a leading edge investment company in the education sector.

GSV is a syndicate of financial/investment companies. GSV Advisors is where some of the trouble lies, at least in terms of conflict of interest and self-dealing. The management team invests personally in charter schools which in turn buy the products of its other portfolio companies. GSV (Advisors or Capital, it’s not altogether clear) also supports edsurge.com, which serves as a faux-journalistic voice for this “reform” movement. And all this goes on while GSV Advisors dispenses its advice to its “sister company”, GSV Capital, which makes the big investments, including the bad ones in Coursera and Chegg. (The jury is still out on U2 and Declara.)

GSV Advisors operates in a way that probably makes its management team rich—and possibly at the expense of GSV Capital, because of the personal investments mentioned earlier. Why GSV Capital stockholders put up with this situation is baffling, because this publicly-traded company has never performed very well. It has made up for its bad decisions in the education market by smarter decisions with companies like Twitter and Dropbox. Apparently GSV’s very smart management team can’t quite grasp why its expertise in one area, growing high tech companies, doesn’t carry over to student learning. Nevertheless, its poor decisions in education substantially worsen the condition of our schools, because of all the propagandizing, “disruptive technologies”, and siphoning of taxpayer money.

You should look at this page which shows the management team for GSV Capital:

http://gsvcap.com/management/

Notice anything? It’s hard to miss: no women, no color, not a hint of educational experience. Yet this small group, *unelected* and cloistered in a corporate boardroom, is making hugely important decisions about the education of our youth. Americans need to be aware of what’s happening here. We *all* need to rise up and reclaim our schools before it’s too late. And we need to understand this goes way beyond the false notions of “choice” and “student performance”. It’s not the government that’s doing something wrong here; it’s the corporations that are meddling where they don’t belong. Please, let’s not allow a 19th century-type oligopoly to destroy public education in America. It would be worse than railroads and oil; it would mean a diminished future for our children, our communities, our nation.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit

Fareed Zakaria: Why We Still Need Liberal Education

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2015 //
27

Fareed Zakaria warns that fears about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are greatly overblown.

Zakaria comes close to acknowledging that the “crisis” rhetoric of so-called reformers is a myth,or as Berliner and Biddle called it years ago, “a manufactured crisis.”

The demand fo expand STEM is often accompanied by disdain for liberal education, writes Zakaria:

“If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country’s education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children’s bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities. From President Obama on down, public officials have cautioned against pursuing degrees like art history, which are seen as expensive luxuries in today’s world. Republicans want to go several steps further and defund these kinds of majors. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” asked Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott. “I don’t think so.” America’s last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher.”

But, he writes, to de-emphasize the humanities would be a huge mistake:

“This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts — and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future. The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.”

Zakaria then makes a point I have made again and again to those who lament international test scores:

“In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.”

Sweden and Israel have poor scores on the same tests, yet are high on investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation. There are characteristics that are more important than test scores:

“They are flexible. Their work cultures are non-hierarchical and merit-based. All operate like young countries, with energy and dynamism. All three are open societies, happy to let in the world’s ideas, goods and services. And people in all three nations are confident — a characteristic that can be measured.”

The defining characteristic if a successful society, he concludes, is its ability to hone creativity and critical thinking skills. And for that, both the sciences and liberal arts are necessary.

Categories Economy, STEM

Two Views: Why Is There a Teacher Shortage?

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2015 //
52

The Huffington Post has a new education editor, Rebecca Klein. She is clear-thinking and apparently sees through the reform narrative. Welcome, Rebecca.

In her latest post, she gives a recipe for “How to Create a Teacher Shortage,” using Kansas as an example. The ingredients of her recipe will not surprise readers of this blog. The same tactics have been adopted in most states.

Read the entire post. Here is the recipe:

The How To Create A Teacher Shortage Recipe

Ingredients:

1 cup of rhetoric against teachers

2 pounds of bills and programs that attempt to de-professionalize teaching (specifically, a proposed bill that would make it easier to jail teachers for teaching materials deemed offensive and a new program that lifts teacher licensure requirements in certain districts)

3 tablespoons of a lack of due process rights for teachers

½ cup of finely diced repeated budget cuts amid a state revenue crisis

1 stalk of a new school funding system that is currently being challenged in state court

2 grinds of growing child poverty throughout the state

3 tablespoons of low teacher pay

1/3 cup of large numbers of teacher retirements

Within a day, the most important newspaper in the nation, The Néw York Times, published a story by Motoko Rich about a national teacher shortage.

She writes:

“ROHNERT PARK, Calif. — In a stark about-face from just a few years ago, school districts have gone from handing out pink slips to scrambling to hire teachers.

“Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.

“At the same time, a growing number of English-language learners are entering public schools, yet it is increasingly difficult to find bilingual teachers. So schools are looking for applicants everywhere they can — whether out of state or out of country — and wooing candidates earlier and quicker.

“Some are even asking prospective teachers to train on the job, hiring novices still studying for their teaching credentials, with little, if any, classroom experience.”

According to the latter story, the shortage is a matter of supply and demand, with barely a nod to the rhetoric of Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown, and Bill Gates about our “bad teachers” and “broken system.” Nothing about the states that banned collective bargaining. Nothing about the campaign to eliminate due process rights. Nothing about teachers’ disdain for test-based accountability. Nothing about the profound disrespect that reformers have showered on teachers, the false accusations of greed and laziness.

It is hard not to see the demoralization that has caused many veteran teachers to resign and caused a sharp decline in new enrollments in teacher prep programs.

Motoko Rich is a smart reporter. I am hoping she will talk to teachers who are leaving.

Here are some more views, from teacher bloggers. See Chaz here;

And see PerdidoStreetSchool blogger, who correctly says that the Times’ story says there is a teacher shortage without explaining why.

Perdido writes:

Yes, it’s true that a rebounding economy leads fewer people to go into teaching – there are more opportunities available for other kinds of work with “better pay and a more glamorous image.”

But unexplored in the Motoko Rich Times piece is one big reason why teaching isn’t a job with a glamorous image. – the consequences of 10+ years of corporate education reforms.

Every day you open the newspaper or turn on the TV, you see or hear some teacher-bashing crap, some politician like Christie saying he wants to punch teachers in the face, some rag like the Post blaming teachers for destroying the lives of children by using the Three Little Pigs as a DO NOW exercise to teach POV and bias.

Then there are the new “accountability rules” – the constant observations, the evaluation ratings tied to test scores (as high as 50%), the increased work load and stress for the same (or less) money, the decreased benefits, gutted pensions, and diminished work protections like tenure (Kansas is an emblem of this, but it’s happening nationwide too.)

I’d say if kids are looking around at the job landscape and saying “Hell, I can do better than be a teacher!”, they’re right – and smart for saying it.

I teach seniors and I tell the ones who say they want to be teachers to think twice about the major – that teacher bashing and odious accountability measures (most of which simply add more work to a teacher’s load without making them better teachers) make the job miserable these days.

I also tell them that teaching isn’t really a career anymore, that the politicians and educrats and oligarchs who fund education reform see it as a McJob that can be filled by untrained temps who do it for a couple of years and move on (or get moved on by accountability measures) to something else.

And this too:

Mission accomplished for education reformers – a cheap untrained temp workforce is soon going to be commonplace in schools, this will lead to an even bigger “teaching quality crisis” and allow reformers to promote privatization as the answer to the “education crisis.”

Categories Media, Teachers
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