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My Response to a Teacher in North Carolina: Please Don’t Give Up

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2014 //
68

I hope teachers will find the inner strength to stand up to the bullying by governors and legislators. If you can’t teach, find another job. But if you are a good teacher and you are devoted to making a difference in the lives of children, don’t give up. Stay and fight. Join grassroots groups. Join the Network for Public Education. In every state there are groups of parents and educators standing shoulder–to-shoulder against the cultural vandals now in charge in places like North Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. We will prevail, because their goal of destroying public education and turning teaching into a job for temps is so wrong that it will eventually be repudiated by the voters. We must work to make that day come sooner.

Here is a note from a teacher in North Carolina about the poisoned atmosphere for teachers in a state determined to crush public education and professional teachers:

“What do I, a NC public school teacher, think? I think it’s time to relocate. I chose to settle in NC b/c of its strong support for public education, but that’s now a thing of the past. The state govt is hell-bent on destroying both the teaching profession and the public schools.

“As soon as I am able, I will join the exodus of good, experienced teachers to anywhere but here…”

I wonder if Teach for America can produce enough temps to replace the experienced teachers who are leaving North Carolina? Perhaps the legislature will use this opportunity to increase class size, flip classrooms, and encourage home schooling and virtual charters?

Don’t leave. Stay and fight.

Categories Corporate Reformers, North Carolina, Teachers and Teaching

Message to N.C. Teachers “We Hope You Die Young”

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2014 //
43

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.

Categories North Carolina, Teachers and Teaching

David Sirota: Who Is Thomas Friedman?

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2014 //
31

Yesterday, Thomas Friedman published yet another article lambasting American public education. Every time he writes about public schools, it is a put-down. He said in one article that America is “in decline” because of low scores on international tests, because McKinsey & Co. said so. Google his name and “Teach for America,” and you will get more than 100,000 hits.

David Sirota, an investigative journalist, wondered why New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman always sides with the economic elites in this country and around the world, and he suggests the answer: He married into one of the richest families in America.

He wrote in 2006:

I’ve documented repeatedly how New York Times columnist Tom Friedman parrots the propaganda of Big Money, using his column to legitimize some of the worst, most working-class-persecuting policies this country has seen in the last century – all while bragging on television that he doesn’t even bother read the details of the policies he advocates for. I have always believed Friedman’s perspective comes from the bubble he lives in – that is, I have always believed he feels totally at ease shilling for Big Money and attacking workers because from the comfortable confines of the Washington suburbs he lives in and the elite cocktail parties he attends, what Friedman says seems mainstream to him. But I never had any idea how dead on I was about the specific circumstances of Friedman’s bubble – and how it potentially explains a lot more than I ever thought.

As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club.” He “married into one of the 100 richest families in the country” – the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.

Sirota thinks that full disclosure matters. In the case of Ted Kennedy, for example, everyone knew about his family and its wealth. And, furthermore, he did not advance his family’s economic interest.

As we have seen again and again, whenever Thomas Friedman writes about education, he writes with hostility towards public education, towards career educators, and with indifference to the struggles of many middle-class and poor families. He consistently writes admiringly about corporate reform policies such as high-stakes testing and Teach for America (one of his daughters joined TFA).

Sirota writes:

Friedman, unlike Kennedy, uses his position to push the very specific economic policies (such as “free” trade) that the superwealthy in this country are pushing and exclusively benefit from. That’s why his billionaire scion status is so important for the public to know – because it raises objectivity questions. If, for instance, Richard Mellon Scaife wrote articles in newspapers demanding the repeal of the estate tax – don’t you think it would be important for readers to be warned that Scaife was a multimillionaire whose family (and the few families like his) would almost exclusively benefit from the policies he was writing about? Of course. That’s called full disclosure and transparency, the very things critical to an objective free press and democracy – the very thing Friedman says is so important for other countries when he writes about foreign policy.

So the next time you read a piece by Tom Friedman telling us how wonderful job outsourcing is or how great it is to pass Big Money’s latest trade deal that include no labor, wage, human rights or environmental provisions – just remember: Tom Friedman, scion of a billionaire business empire, is just doing right by his own economic class.

Categories Economy, Education Industry, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Update on North Carolina Proposal: The Story Evolves

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2014 //
18

This morning I posted about a bizarre proposal to change (demolish) the teaching profession in North Carolina, called the 60-30-10 plan.

It included features such as, all teachers re-applying for their jobs in 2015. Flipped classrooms. Larger class sizes. Teachers paid per student. No teacher allowed to teach more than 20 years. Constant churn. No profession, just a temp job monitoring work on computers.

And more:

““The NC 60/30/10 Plan, which “embraces high teacher turnover,” would place teachers on one of three tracks: Apprentice, Master or Career.

“Sixty percent of all North Carolinian teachers would make $32,000/year in the Apprentice category and be allowed to teach for up to twenty years, at which time they must retire or move on to another industry.

“Thirty percent of teachers would be eligible for the Master category if they have been teaching for three years, have completed an online training program, and can demonstrate mastery of the teaching method based on “customer survey data.” Master teachers would earn $52,000/year.

“Ten percent of teachers would become Career teachers, making $72,000 if they have an advanced degree and can innovate and lead.

“All teachers would be able to serve in North Carolina for no more than 20 years. If the plan were to be adopted, all teachers in North Carolina would be required to reapply for their jobs in 2015.”

The author of the plan then wrote to this blog to say that the reporter didn’t interview him and that his plan was evolving.

Now the reporter, Lindsay Wagner, wrote a new post saying that she tried to interview the plan’s author but he did not return her call. She apparently has now interviewed him. The 20-year deadline for teachers is gone, he says.

Wagner is the best investigative reporter in North Carolina. Lucky she reported on this pernicious proposal before the extremists in the legislature passed it into law.

Best of all is that the blog became a platform where the new compensation plan was aired to a national audience, bringing an immediate response from its author, and at least a few corrections. But every other part of the plan is still an insult to professional educators.

Categories North Carolina, Teachers and Teaching

North Carolina: Greatest Insult to Teachers Ever Cooked Up in Backroom

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2014 //
221

I thought this must be a joke. It is not.

North Carolina legislators are considering a law that would demolish the teaching profession and encourage teacher turnover.

Call it the “here-today-gone-next-year” policy. The goal is to cut costs by increasing class sizes, pushing out senior teachers, and using technology to “flip” classrooms.

According to NC Policy Watch:

“A new plan to raise some teachers’ salaries while significantly reducing education spending is circulating among lawmakers and education professionals.

“The NC 60/30/10 Plan, which “embraces high teacher turnover,” would place teachers on one of three tracks: Apprentice, Master or Career.

“Sixty percent of all North Carolinian teachers would make $32,000/year in the Apprentice category and be allowed to teach for up to twenty years, at which time they must retire or move on to another industry.

“Thirty percent of teachers would be eligible for the Master category if they have been teaching for three years, have completed an online training program, and can demonstrate mastery of the teaching method based on “customer survey data.” Master teachers would earn $52,000/year.

“Ten percent of teachers would become Career teachers, making $72,000 if they have an advanced degree and can innovate and lead.

“All teachers would be able to serve in North Carolina for no more than 20 years. If the plan were to be adopted, all teachers in North Carolina would be required to reapply for their jobs in 2015.

“The man behind this plan is self-employed and self-described “educational pioneer” Dr. Lodge McCammon. A former Wake County teacher and Friday Institute specialist in curriculum and contemporary media, McCammon heavily promotes the use of video recording to transform teaching and learning.

“In a 2011 op-ed in the News & Observer, McCammon explains that flipped classrooms, in which students can view videotaped instructional materials at their own pace, should allow teachers to accommodate larger classroom sizes–and be paid according to how many students they can teach in one classroom.”

Is there something in the water served in the State Capitol? Do they hate teachers? Or is it that they just don’t like experienced teachers? What’s going on? Can anyone explain this blatant attempt to end teaching as a profession and a career? Will Arne Duncan denounce what this zany legislature is doing to teachers and public education? Will President Obama? He held the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina in 2012; last week, he announced a major job-creating project for the state. Can’t he just speak up?

– See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2014/01/21/latest-nc-teacher-compensation-plan-would-significantly-reduce-education-spending-encourage-teacher-turnover/#sthash.aoS7xNwn.dpuf

Categories North Carolina, Teachers and Teaching

The AFT Criticizes Myths about Common Core

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2014 //
24

The American Federation of Teachers is a strong supporter of national standards and has been for many years.

Soon after the release of the Common Core State Standards, the AFT emerged as one of its strongest advocates.

Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, contends that the standards are valuable but the implementation has proceeded without adequate preparation. Last year, she called for a one-year moratorium on Common Core testing until teachers had time to learn the standards, resources with which to teach them, and time for students to learn them. She told a breakfast meeting of the Association for a Better New York, attended by the city’s civic and political elite, that the standards would fail unless implementation was done appropriately, with enough time for teachers and students to prepare for the demands of the new standards.

In the current issue of the AFT journal, American Educator, the AFT educational issues department published a memorandum called “Debunking Myths of the Common Core,” and responded to each of them in turn.

For example, the article maintains, it is a myth that the standards tell teachers what to teach. It is a myth that the standards are a national curriculum. It is a myth that the standards were imposed by the federal government and are mandatory. Etc.

Categories Common Core, Teachers and Teaching

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Time to Look at Evidence About Teach for America

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2014 //
17

A new report by Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez reviews the evidence about the effectiveness of Teach for America.

Their study, published by the National Education Policy Center, “challenges the simplistic but widespread belief that TFA is a clear-cut success story. In fact, Heilig and Jez find that the best evidence shows TFA participants as a group are not meaningfully or consistently improving educational outcomes for the children they have taught.”

They find that:

Teach For America and other organizations have produced studies asserting benefits provided by TFA teachers. Those studies, however, have only rarely undergone peer review – the standard benchmark for quality research, Heilig and Jez observe. In contrast, the available peer reviewed research has produced a decidedly mixed picture. For example, the results attributed to TFA teachers varies both by their experience and certification level. The results also fluctuate depending on the types of teachers to whom the TFA teachers are compared; TFA teachers look relatively good when compared to other inexperienced, poorly trained teachers, but the results are more problematic when they are compared to fully prepared and experienced teachers, Heilig and Jez report.

Because of these differences, the question most frequently asked—Are TFA teachers “as good as” teachers who enter the profession through other routes?—is not the question we should be asking, Heilig and Jez contend. Whether one or the other group is better is “a question that cannot be answered unless we first identify which TFA and non-TFA teachers we’re asking about,” they write.

Even more important, “The lack of a statistically and practically significant impact should indicate to policymakers that TFA is likely not providing a meaningful reduction in disparities in educational outcomes, notwithstanding its explosive growth and popularity in the media,” according to Heilig and Jez. Moreover, despite its rapid growth, TFA remains a tiny fraction of the nation’s teaching corps; for every TFA teacher, there are 50,000 other teachers in the U.S., Heilig and Jez note, and the small numbers and small impact of TFA point to a needed “shift in thinking.”

“We should be trying to dramatically improve the quality of teaching,” write Heilig and Jez. “It is time to shift our focus from a program of mixed impact that, even if the benefits actually matched the rhetoric, would not move the needle on America’s educational quality due to the fact that only 0.002% of all teachers in the United States are Teach For America placements.”

In other words, those who seek long-term, systematic improvement of the teacher force in the United States will not find an answer in Teach for America. Their numbers are few, and not many remain in teaching.

Those who want real change must concentrate on improving the working conditions of teachers so that it is an attractive option for college graduates, and must focus on raising standards for entry into the profession as well as strengthening the quality of professional preparation and support for new teachers.

 

 

 

Categories Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching

Parent to NC Legislature: Stop Assaulting Our Teachers!

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2014 //
27

Deborah R. Gerhardt, a parent of school-age children in North Carolina, is upset that her children’s teachers–including their best teachers–are leaving. They are leaving because the Legislature is driving the state’s best teachers away, she says.

Ten years ago, she and her family moved to North Carolina because of its reputation for investing in its public schools.

But that reputation has been squandered.

She writes:

After six years of no real raises, we have fallen to 46th in teacher pay. North Carolina teachers earn nearly $10,000 less than the national average. And if you look at trends over the past decade, we rank dead last: After adjusting for inflation, North Carolina lowered teacher salaries nearly 16 percent from 2002 to 2012, while other states had a median decline of 1 percent. A first-year teacher in North Carolina makes $30,800. Our school district lost a candidate to a district in Kentucky because its starting salary was close to $40,000. It takes North Carolina teachers more than 15 years to earn $40,000; in Virginia it may take only four. Gap store managers on average make about $56,000.

If you talk to a teacher in North Carolina, you will hear the bitter truth of how difficult it is for them to make ends meet. Most teachers at Ben’s school work at least one extra job.  An elementary school teacher told me that his daughters do not have the chance to play soccer or cello like his students. He has no discretionary income left to spare.

What are we teaching our children about the value of education? When my boys see a teacher outside school, they rush up to say hello, eyes bright with admiration and respect.  How I wish our children could minister to the adults in my state. While the majority of us remain quiet, North Carolina teachers face incessant reminders that they are not valued.

Both parties are responsible, she says. The Democrats froze teacher pay. Then the Republicans started an all-out war on teachers in 2013.

 Job security in the form of tenure was abolished. Extra pay for graduate degrees was eliminated. A new law created vouchers so that private academies could dip into the shrinking pool of money that the public schools have left. While requiring schools to adopt the Common Core standards, the legislature slashed materials budgets. According to the National Education Association, we fell to 48th in per-pupil expenditures. State funds for books were cut by about 80 percent, to allocate only $14.26 a year per student. Because you can’t buy even one textbook on that budget, teachers are creating their own materials at night after a long day of work. As if that weren’t enough, the legislature eliminated funding for 5,200 teachers and 3,850 teacher assistants even though the student population grew.  North Carolina public schools would have to hire 29,300 people to get back up to the employee-per-student ratio the schools had in 2008. The result?  Teachers have more students, no current books, and fewer professionals trained to address special needs, and their planning hours are gone now that they must cover lunch and recess.  For public school teachers in North Carolina, the signals sent by this legislation are unambiguous: North Carolina does not value its teachers.   

As a parent who is deeply concerned about the public schools, she is leading a campaign to raise teacher pay to the national average. Friends say this is hopeless because the Legislature is determined to wipe out public education altogether. But she is buoyed by polls showing that three-quarters of people in North Carolina think teachers should be paid more. “A nonpartisan survey from October 2013 showed that 76 percent of North Carolinians agree that public school teachers are paid too little, 71 percent think we cannot keep the most qualified teachers with the current pay scale, and 83 percent support increased pay for higher degrees. I love these data. They prove that the recent legislative assault on teachers does not reflect true North Carolina values.”

It is parents like this who will turn the tide in North Carolina, where the Legislature seems to despise teachers. The bottom line: It is parents like this who will vote these men out of office.

Over the past year, as I learn about what is happening in North Carolina, I keep imagining a scene where the leaders of the Legislature meet each week to think up a new idea to make teachers feel disrespected. “Well, let’s see, we have already taken away the stipends for graduate degrees. We have already taken away due process rights. We have already gotten rid of teachers’ aides. We cut the textbook fund. What can we do now?”

These guys are creative. What will they think up next?

Categories North Carolina, Teachers and Teaching

John Flavin: How to Improve Education

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2014 //
13

John Flavin teaches language arts in a rural high school in Oregon.

He wrote this article for Oregonlive.com explaining what really matters in school reform.

Time and resources for teachers to prepare for the flood of federal mandates.

Class sizes of 22 or less. In his school, some classes have more than 40 students.

A restoration of options and electives. He wrote: “All across America students are stripped of drama, band, wood and metal shops, and dozens of other career-starters designed to serve a diverse population.”

A de-emphasis on standardized tests,which harm children with high needs.

He concludes:

“If you’re not a teacher, you ought to be saying to yourself: The enemy of America’s future is anyone who is opposed to guaranteed classroom sizes of 22 or less, increased professional development for teachers, diversified options for students and the elimination of standardized tests as we know them.”

Categories Class size, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Why San Diego Is the Best Urban District in the Nation

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2014 //
57

Something magical is happening in San Diego. It is a good school district. Teachers and administrators and the school board are working towards common goals.

San Diego, in my view, is the best urban district in the nation.

I say this not based on test scores but on the climate for teaching and learning that I have observed in San Diego.

It’s not the weather, which of course is usually magnificent. Los Angeles too has great weather but it is constantly embroiled in turmoil, with teachers against administrators, the school board divided, and political tensions underlying every decision and policy.

San Diego went through its time of troubles in the late 1990s and early 2000s (I wrote about it in my next to last book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, in which I devoted a chapter to the upheaval in San Diego, where corporate-style, top-down reform was birthed).

But in recent years, San Diego has elected a school board that works harmoniously with the teachers and their union. Until recently, it had a superintendent, Bill Kowba (a retired Navy admiral) who understood the value of teamwork. And with the leadership of an activist board, a new spirit of community-based reform began to take hold.

Scores went up on almost everything that was tested, but that was not what mattered most to the new (and true) reformers in San Diego. The rising test scores were the result of the new spirit of community-building that included parents, students, teachers, administrators, and the local community.

San Diego, of course, rejected Race to the Top funding. It didn’t want to make test scores more consequential than they already were.

When Superintendent Kowba retired, the San Diego school board met and immediately announced their choice of a new superintendent, without conducting a national search. The board asked Cindy Marten, one of the district’s best elementary school principals, to assume the superintendency. She was stunned, and she chastised them for not casting a wider net. But she took the job.

Cindy is a leader. She knows how to inspire and lead. She respects the work of principals and teachers, and they respect her. She also knows the importance of parent and community engagement.

Her motto, which is a playful twist on the KIPP motto is: “Work Hard. Be Kind. Dream Big! No Excuses.”

No matter how sunny the skies for the schools, no matter how harmonious the educators, parents, and children, the business community is grumpy. It can’t get over the fact that San Diego doesn’t have a brash, disruptive superintendent who wants to test the kids until they cry “uncle,” demean the teachers, and hold everyone’s feet to the fire. It can’t accept that there is any other way to lead the schools. And it can’t give up on its favorite meme that the schools are “failing” even though they are not.

These views were expressed full force recently when the San Diego Union Tribune, a deeply conservative newspaper, penned an editorial longing for the good old days when Terry Grier was superintendent. The UT can’t believe that San Diego let him go, let him move to Houston, where he is following the corporate reform script, handing out bonuses, firing teachers, using test scores as a club to beat up teachers. Talk about being a skunk at the garden party! The UT published an editorial lamenting “what might have been” if only Grier had stayed around in San Diego to do what he is doing now in Houston.

There was pushback. One board member wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that the dropout rate in Houston was nearly double the dropout rate in San Diego and commending Cindy Marten for avoiding the polarizing tactics associated with certain other unnamed superintendents.

But whoa! There are also some basic facts that the Union Tribune should have noticed. On the 2013 NAEP, San Diego’s public schools outperform those of Houston in math and reading, in grades 4 and 8. San Diego is in the top tier of urban districts; Houston is not. San Diego’s scores on the NAEP have steadily improved over the past decade. The proportion of students who score “below basic” has dropped significantly, and the proportion who score at or above proficient has increased significantly over the past decade. Why does the UT envy a lower-performing district and dismiss the solid, steady, persistent gains of its own district?

Michael Casserly, the fair-minded and careful leader of the Council of Great City Schools wrote an article for the newspaper applauding the success of San Diego and the leadership of Cindy Marten, but the Union Tribute failed to publish it.

Doug Porter of the San Diego Free Press wrote up the imbroglio and called out the UT for its humbug and hypocrisy. He aptly called his article “Facts Don’t Matter in Newspaper’s Quest to Demonize Public Education in San Diego.”

He wrote:

Talk about your cheap shots. It was bad enough when the UT-San Diego editorial board whipped up an attack on our city’s schools laden with misstatements, factual errors and a personal attack on Superintendent Cindy Marten. But when a nationally recognized education leader stepped forward to correct the record on her behalf, his response was deemed unworthy for publication.

It’ all very Orwellian; reality isn’t simply what Papa Doug Manchester tries to tell us it is. When his minions refuse to acknowledge something, the idea is for you to believe that it never happened.

One of the longest running narratives with our Daily Newspaper has been their dislike for the Board of Trustees at San Diego Unified. The paper’s ‘reform’ agenda for public education mirrors the libertarian/conservative wet dream of privatized charter schools, a change that means monetizing learning for corporate interests and creating a two-tiered system favoring the wealthier (and white) classes.

The reality that voters have elected and re-elected progressives to a school board that refuses to demonize teachers and puts the classroom first just is too much for them to handle. So this hatchet job is consistent with their refusal to acknowledge that SD Unified is making steady, determined progress (and is, in fact, a national leader among urban school districts).

Porter includes the full text of Mike Casserley’s supportive article about the steady progress of the San Diego public schools. This is my favorite line from his letter chastising the San Diego UT:

“So, pining for a previous superintendent is not only an affront to Ms. Marten but is akin to daydreaming about a former lover on your honeymoon.”

Porter makes only one mistake. He suggests that the school district engaged in “puffery” when it talked about its steady improvement on NAEP. I disagree. San Diego has made steady progress. On most NAEP measures, it outperforms other large city districts. This is a record to be proud of, not puffery.

San Diego now has the political climate that every district should have: a wise and experienced educator as leader; a collaborative relationship among administrators, teachers, the union, and the school board; a sense of vision about improving the education of every child and a determination to provide a good public school in every neighborhood. This is a vision far, far from the reformy effort to close down public schools and replace them with a free market. Unlike Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and most other urban districts, San Diego has the right vision, the right climate, and the right leadership. There is a unity of purpose focused on children that is impressive.

And that is why San Diego at this moment in time is the best urban district in the nation.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, California, Education Reform, NAEP, Parents, Students, Teachers and Teaching
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