State Commissioner of Education MaryEllen Elia announced that only one school in the state–JHS 162–failed to meet her targets. It missed by only a point or two.
This sets up the school for a radical change of staff, direction, leadership.
Here’s a thought: Let Commissioner Elia take over JHS 162.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Make her teach five classes a day too, but she has no control over who the students she teaches are.
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Five classes??? I taught 6 classes a day for most of my career! Lucky you!
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When I started teaching, we had no planning period and taught six classes. We, through the teachers’ union, fought for years to get that work load down from six to five and include a planning period during the school day that was scheduled to give us time to plan, correct papers and work together to plan as a department. It was a hard fought battle but in the end, the teachers won.
That didn’t stop the morning and afternoon staff meetings, but it did give us time on our own to get a lot done during the school day instead of before and after.
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Five? In 21 years I never had less than 6 periods a day (and one year seven, no prep) with one for planning = seven period/day, some years with 4 different preps-as many as 190 students one year. And those were Spanish classes. Seen it go from anything over 20 was considered a lot of students to 30 being the norm.
“It’s been a long time coming, goin to be a long time gone.” (CSN) Now that song is stuck in my head).
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For the first few years, I taught six period with no planning period, but we fought through our union to get that work load down to five classes and replace the 6th class with a planning period during the school day instead of before and/or after. It was a long and dirty fight with district administration but eventually the united teachers prevailed.
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One too many.
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Like that thought but maybe more could be learned from the full schedule for teaching as Lloyd suggests.
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Good news from State Commissioner of Education.
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Bad news for the school!
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Governor Cuomo must be very upset with these results.
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This is amazing:
“The Wonderful Company, an agricultural powerhouse in the Central Valley best known for Fiji Water and Wonderful Pistachios, proposed a takeover of the Lost Hills Union Elementary School District ”
The only employer in town wants to start a charter school to “compete” with the public school. Except it’s a rural area and the public school has only 500 students so it will utterly destroy the public school. The public school will cease to exist.
They’ll end up with their employer running the only school that is available.
A “company school” just like poor people had in the early 1900’s.
Boy, it’ll be tough for these people to object to anything at their children’s school when their employer owns the school.
No choice and no voice. The corporate owned school or nothing.
http://www.bakersfield.com/news/wonderful-charter-school-proposed-for-lost-hills/article_09a98dd7-cba2-507a-996e-a08be18523fe.html
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Hey, anyone can run a school. Not everyone can provide the proper teaching and learning environment. And not everyone can effectively preside over a classroom, which is the hard part, day in and day out.
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I saw Kaine entered a public school yesterday.
It must be that time in the cycle when DC Democrats reluctantly enter a public school for campaign events.
I’m sick of that. People who don’t support our schools when they get back to Congress or the state legislature should have the decency to stay out of them when they’re campaigning.
They want to privatize public schools? Fine. But get lost. Don’t visit during 4 weeks in October every 2 or 4 or 6 years.
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Tim Kaine and his wife support public education. His wife is the secretary of education in Virginia. Despite her pedigree, economics and law from Princeton and Harvard, she gets it. She understands that high stakes testing is damaging to poor students. They do not feel charters are the answer.
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Ed reformers have some exciting new ideas for public school children and parents!
“That wrong lesson is still burdening state and local efforts to design accountability systems. The right lesson is that performance measurement and incentives are indispensable but cheating shouldn’t be easy. Accountability systems need to include test and answer sheet security and penalties for overuse of test prep and falsification of results. Then, the designers of state accountability systems would no longer have to tiptoe around using direct measures of student learning.”
More testing security and sanctions! Yippee! This will come out of the shrinking instructional budget, right? How many testing experts can we add to the payroll this round?
Maybe they should suggest what we should cut. Algebra? Everything else is gone.
Relentlessly negative and punishing.
They offer absolutely nothing of value to existing public schools. The absolutely insufferable way they spend a good part of every day scolding people in public schools is just the icing on the reform cake.
http://educationnext.org/wells-fargo-and-the-atlanta-schools-testing-scandal/
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The comparison of ed reform to Wells Fargo is useful, but not for the reasons they think.
It’s like Wells Fargo because none of the people who designed and promoted the system went to jail or got fired.
In fact, they were all promoted.
There were no national accountability hawks present for that ridiculous perp walk they staged for the TV cameras because “accountability!” only runs downhill.
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I think we should demonstrate our good will to Ms Elia and demonstrate that we are fair and understanding…
I would invite our “students first” governor to ease the burden on Ms Elia and join her as a co-teacher..
And as an incentive for Mr Cuomo, sonce he understands education bette than professional educators…I would also suggest he be handsomely compensated at the rate of an experienced teacher.
A further bonus would be forthcoming if Mr Cuomo, and one also for Ms Elia….if they are able to demonstrate growth of their students, in addition to delivering lessons with an “effective understanding and application” of the Danielson rubric.
Ms Elia and Mr Cuomo…this would be a golden opportunity for you both to serve as guides in education, to show the people of New York that you practice what you preach.
Neither one will accept however…as they ar both hypocrites….on the take from the wealthy…to destroy public education in New York for profit.
A true leader serves by example from the front of the line, rather than through heavy and unattainable mandates, threats, and commissions.
Ms Elia and Mr Cuomo…,this is your opportunity to shine.
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