Marla Kilfoyle is executive director of the BadAss Teachers Association (BATs) and a 29-year veteran of teaching.
In this post, she says that the #TeachStrong campaign is yet another effort to blame teachers instead of supporting them.
The groups aligned with #TeachStrong are recipients of Gates funding; she looks only at the last year of funding. Some of these groups have received many millions from Gates in the past.
She has her own ideas about how to improve teaching:
Here would be my humble, “teacher of 29 years in public education”, suggestion for a 5 point plan to challenge TeachStrong to do something that could actually help children and teachers.
1. Rehire the 7,000 teachers who were fired in Chicago over the last two years.
2. Return the over 7,000 teachers who lost their jobs in New Orleans after Katrina and use them to help rebuild the public school system.
2. Start to assist in the rebuilding of the Detroit Public School system and promote the return of its exiled elected school board.
3. Promote and create PUBLIC SCHOOLS with wrap around services in every community of need in America. End school closings and use teachers to set policies for schools that struggle.
4. Begin a campaign that promotes the hiring of teachers of color and an end to pushing out our veteran teachers.
5. Begin a campaign that includes all government agencies to eradicate child poverty, gentrification of neighborhoods around America, and address issues of systemic racism that not only exist in education policy but also in our communities.
I dare you to try that 5 point plan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
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I like Marla’s 5-point plan very much; although, I would make #3 centrally important to rebuilding and re-energizing the entire system of public education: “Promote and create PUBLIC SCHOOLS with wrap around services in every community…” I would put a priority on communities in greatest need, but would also argue that in the face of the accelerating corporatizing, privatizing, and commodifying of everything, the very idea of community (i.e. the commons) is threatened.
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I also like #3. But many teachers in Ohio lost their jobs due to Loony John cutting schools. Not sure if the focus on the big cities is a local issue for this organization.
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For teachers to be able to #teachstrong again, we need the abolition of the common core, high stakes testing, and VAM teacher evaluations. Without removing this triangle of strangulation, our profession continues to die a slow and painful death.
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Marla, you are waxing Finnish, if you ask me.
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Brava, Marla! Well said, so proud to work with you at BATs!
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The only problem with your plan is that there’s no money in it for the “big guys”. Where’s your mention of the connection with the Billionaire Boys’ Club?
Lol, joking.
Great list! I would also add increasing teacher base salaries, with bonuses based on meeting teacher/leadership-set goals not related to test scores or student “performance” (for example, a teacher wanting to do more hands-on curriculum, strengthening their knowledge base for working with ELLs, strengthening classroom management, etc.). Bonuses would result when teachers meet their goals, develop themselves professionally, etc. If the bonuses thing doesn’t work, at least increase the base pay! My starting engineer pay should not be higher than the most experienced step on the PhD lane salary for most of the local school districts, but it is!
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Do some research on bonuses. Been there, done that. Plus, any teacher worth his/her salt already works to strengthen their knowledge base without incentives. I don’t know how to handle pay issues since it is a local issue and in many states highly dependent on local resources. I don’t mean to sound negative or dismissive since I understand where you are coming from and applaud your support of the teaching profession.
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I understand your comment, and definitely not taken negatively. I guess what I’m saying is that in addition to good competitive base pay, there should be bonuses (not sure of how to measure bonus allotment, but there’s gotta be a way other than these proposed “incentivized systems” based in “student performance”)! And yes, teachers worth their salt do improve their practice. Those were just arbitrary examples. 😎.
And if there aren’t bonuses, pay should be very, very good. How else are you going to attract and retain teachers? It’s definitely more than a supportive administration. People need to make a good living, especially educated people with multiple degrees standing in front of our youth, etc.
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The problem with bonuses is that it can set teachers against each other in a profession that at its best relies heavily on collaboration. You already have people who go out of their way to suck up to supervisors. They may be given first shot at assignments that pay a stipend or, at the very least, are guaranteed favorable evaluations.
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To rebuild the public school system you need competent, qualified administrators, not graduates of the Eli Broad Principals’ Academy. You need administrators with years of teaching experience.
You need PRO-TEACHER ADMINISTRATORS, if such people exist. Veteran teachers would remain in even the most difficult schools if the supervisors supported teachers instead of micro-managing them; whilewriting them up for the slightest infractions.
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So true! Friend of mine who has taught 20+ years is ready to quit mid-year because her new principal is pretty much anti-teacher. If a child is disruptive, it’s the teacher’s fault – they must have done something to trigger the behavior, or they aren’t meeting the child’s needs, therefore they suck. Friend asked for district behavior consult on a child who screams all day in the classroom, principal sent the district person away, said the only problem was a bad teacher. Principal publicly shames teachers in staff meetings for referring kids for special services (a good teacher could meet the needs of ALL their kids), and will not stand up for teachers in meetings/IEPs with parents. Whatever a parent wants, they are told yes, the teacher will do that (like fill out a 10-min daily narrative report on a K child’s behavior that goes home each day with the child – meaning teacher has to get kids packed up early, put on a video for last 10 minutes while she fills out report). This principal won’t let the sped teacher help with behavior modification plans for high-impact kids who aren’t (yet) on an IEP – she is to stay in the resource room and just serve the kids with IEPs….obviously not recognizing that getting a child on a behavior plan early on might help them avoid sped referral. This principal never taught in the regular classroom, but was a part-time ELL teacher (pullout) for 3 yrs before becoming a principal. A once reasonably functional building is now completely imploding, with staff members debating about quitting over the winter break.
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WA Teacher,
Sounds like a textbook example of an adminimal!
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A great five-point plan, Marla!
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Just listening to teachers again would be a start. Now it is like rocks telling fish how to swim.
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Let us just take item 2 as an example. “Return the over 7,000 teachers who lost their jobs in New Orleans after Katrina and use them to help rebuild the public school system.”
Remember half the population left New Orleans immediately in the aftermath of Katrina, which means that half of students and half the teachers also left.
The national average student/teacher ratio in K-12 is 16:1. Let us assume that the national average applies to New Orleans school district. Currently there are 46,500 students in the New cleans school district, which means they have about 2900 teachers. Let us add the 7000 teachers as this person recommends, that makes 9,900 teachers to teach 46,500 students. The new student to teacher ratio will be 4.69:1. This ratio is inconceivable.
They have to increase the taxes by a factor of four (4) to sustain such absurdity.
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You’re right Raj. They should locate the former teachers, students, and parents, and burn them at the stake. Good For You.
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Donna,
You are sick. I am only pointing out the absurdity of the plans presented by the author of the article. What that has to do with former teachers, students and parents and burn them. Are you insane?
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Back to you Raj, back to you.
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hyperbole
noun: hyperbole; plural noun: hyperboles
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
synonyms: exaggeration, overstatement, magnification, embroidery, embellishment, excess, overkill, rhetoric; More
informal purple prose, puffery
“the media hyperbole that accompanied their championship series”
antonyms: understatement
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Yeah, I’m confused. I don’t know why us former teachers would be burned at the stake, or anyone for that matter!
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If our society were serious about providing equitable access for all children to an appropriate education, yes, that ratio would be about right. We have an increasingly vulnerable student population who need a lot of individual attention from qualified professionals in order to learn to function productively and learn productively in group settings. But instead, we have decided to throw these kids into mainstream classrooms with little or no support, and it’s doing nobody any good. So, yes. Not absurd. Necessary and equitable.
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Please add to reduce class size. The legal limit in NYC is 34 in a class. Five classes=170 students. It is patently impossible to keep up with grading and outreach as well as we would like to with this many students.
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Good one! Class size, according to research, doesn’t matter. The best teachers can manage classrooms of 40, or 20, or 50! #sarcasm
Yeah right! I’d like to meet the people who have published this type of research. I agree with you 100%. I taught 175 students my last year of teaching. It ran me so thin by the end of the first semester that I had to revamp my courses. Assessments became lower quality (100-percent multiple choice), I didn’t provide feedback on assignments, but rather just checked for completion, etc. there were no other options. At some point, something has to give. Teaching 100 students versus 175 provided more time for feedback, higher quality assessments and assignments, etc.
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I just love how the “solution” to Democratic voter’s unhappiness with the Democratic Party policies on public education is to completely ignore the criticism and talk about training teachers instead.
I guess there will be no debate on testing, monetizing public schools, privatizing public schools, or the Democratic Party’s lack of support for existing public schools.
It has been decided that we will talk about something else. Okey doke. Sure thing.
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We can’t let them do that.
This is where those who want to save public schools can use social media to challenge this. Daily tweets that call their vernacular and assertions into question.
I think the first one to go after is the phrase “best and brightest.” I like how “good abd solid” instead can change the dialogue.
Twitter them smarter! Show Dems they have egg on their face and their pants down. Put the fear of the Lord into them. Emphasize over and over that the new diogue is “teachers are leaving.” Period. Teachers are leaving. Tweet it over and over.
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Seeing is disbelieving!
The new “National Observational Teaching Exam” from ETS rates student teachers as they teach a class made up of 5 to 6 avatar, “cyber- students”.
http://www.mitchellrobinson.net/2015/11/06/the-brave-new-world-of-teacher-evaluation-be-afraid//
And no, this is not an article from The Onion.
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How about calling it “Teach Wrong?”
Bernie 2016!
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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