Archive for the ‘highly qualified teachers’ Category

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School’s Out but I’m Not

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

A topsy-turvy school year is over and the students are out, many just to attend summer sports camp or computer or art and dance classes.  Not knowing how close the district came to disastrous changes in strong schools.

I’m very happy that I’m not out.  The school district sent letters rescinding all the lay offs about three weeks before the start of summer vacation.

With a $4 million deficit, our local union agreed to five furlough days next school year and the parents in PTA and the Cupertino Foundation collected $2 million.  With job attrition, the use of reserves, and careful budgeting maneuvers, the district managed to find enough money to hold onto all teachers.  Parents are relieved that class size increases are staved off for one more year, special services will be maintained.

You can see how the closer people are to the schools they like, the more certain they are to support them with in-kind and financial help.

After the June elections, a number of bond measures and parcel taxes, some approved and some not, define the outlook of the schools from elementary to community college, including the school I attended, for the next several years until the state legislature either does its duty or the courts force revision of school finances.

In the meantime we had Open House at the end of May.  Parents had smiles on their faces as they looked at the maps made by their student as an assessment of the geometry unit.  Various polyhedrons, named for houses and businesses, sat on the ’streets’ made by geometric angles.  I was amazed that a few parents of third graders quizzed me about instruction for next year, sort of auditioning me for their child’s year in fourth grade.  They didn’t seem to understand that the teacher doesn’t choose who is in her class.  The students are assigned and rarely reassigned.

We even went on our yearly nature hike up to the site of the Ohlone Indian village in the Open Space Preserve above Filoli Gardens not far from Stanford University.  The docents that lead the students on the exploration of the woods and fields are retired professors and geologists from the U. S. Geological Survey, so it’s the best.  I was so glad the funds for the trip weren’t yanked to balance some budget line item.

It’s strange how things work out.  I was sure I was going to be substituting next year and so applied to San Jose State University to begin a Master’s degree program, thinking I’d have plenty of time to do well in the classes.  Now, I will be working full-time and taking classes at night like so many of my teacher friends.

Be careful what you wish for, right?

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Posted in California Teachers Association, highly qualified teachers, layoff notices, public schools, school community |
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ACLU and CSBA Throw Down Gloves

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

School districts are doing what they always do as a way out of financial crises.  They look to the source of money generated by laying off personnel to solve the problem, never mind the issue of “last in, first out.”

up-scale suburban elementary school

up-scale suburban elementary school

As an example, in the up-scale suburban district of Los Altos, California, about 100 teachers are scheduled to be laid off, making class sizes rise even though the district has long touted its small classes.

All in spite of research showing how layoffs make things worse.  See this blog’s post on February 24, 2010, titled “Short Term, Long Term.”  The May 20, 2010, article “Teachers Facing Weakest Market for Jobs in Years” by Winnie Hu, New York Times, says “the recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof.”  No kidding!

Not only are lay offs imminent-an estimate of 150,000 or more personnel nationwide, but jobs are not being offered.  One presumes class size increases are the answer.  Students aren’t going away.  Who’s going to teach them?

In this day and age, the layoff idea gets mixed up with the controversy about poor-performing teachers.  The ACLU-Southern California press release for its suit filed in Superior Court February 24, 2010, against lay offs in 3 lowest-performing middle schools in Los Angeles areas of Watts and Pico Union explains that lay offs seeming to be “a budget-related issue, underneath that is the teacher tenure policy that is under attack” by superintendent Cortines, Governor Schwarzeneggar et al.

To others, lay offs take on the quality of a civil rights issue.  Why should LIFO-”last in, first out”-be the school district’s policy when research shows that high-need schools in a district like Los Angeles have the newest teachers.  Whether they are fabulous or poor-performing, the teachers are gone each year a district faces a financial imbalance.  How can those schools establish a stable core of teachers, use resources to increase test performance, and train high-quality teachers–all of which is guaranteed in the state Constitution?

ACLU/SC won an injunction May 13, 2010.

Which leads to the suit filed May 20, 2010, in Alameda County Superior Court, by the California School Boards Association (CSBA), the California State PTA, and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) as well as nine school districts up and down the state and 60 students.  The suit seeks to overhaul the finances for school funding to “provide the resources to actually deliver” on the mandate of what schools must teach and what students must learn.

Over the past 40 years there have been several decisions and initiatives, Proposition13 (1978) being the most well-known, and Serrano vs. Priest (1976) and Proposition 98 (1988) being influential, that have set California’s untenable education budget.  The plaintiff’s argument is that “school funding is unstable, unreliable, irrational, and overly restrictive,” according to Jill Tucker and Marisa Lagos in “Suit could force major changes in school funding” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 2010.  About 70% of similar “adequacy lawsuits” have succeeded, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In California, this suit will take years to work its way out of the courts, and one can only hope the legislature will resolve this systemic problem before the court decides for them.  One can expect that lay offs will continue to the detriment of schools and students, tenure-evaluation-compensation will keep being fought over, and stop-gap measures will be found to keep schools going, until the economy perks up and state money, that is taxes, rises to “normal.”

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Posted in highly qualified teachers, layoff notices, low-performing schools, public schools, school finance reform |
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Act on Acting Out

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Do you know the jingle?  “When she is good, she’s very, very good, but when she is bad she is horrid.”

In my 4th grade class I have a child who is like that, so little self-control.  Now that it is the middle of the school year, her outbursts are close to habitual and I’m running out of strategies to modify her behavior.  By now she is often “sent to the office” for a “time out.”

When reading through articles, I get answers like ‘teachers must be able to remove disruptive students immediately’ suggesting that charter schools and parochial schools are better because they have that policy.  Perhaps those schools are quieter, but I can think of a number of reasons why all is silent, not necessarily kind and helpful reasons, and not simply because they get rid of disruptive students.

Of course, all teachers want their students to be quiet, studious, busy in productive activity-that’s what I learned in my credentialing classes.  After all, this is an intense phase of the school year when state tests are coming up in a month and students must have mastered all the subjects to be tested on California’s current criterion-referenced assessment tool.

At the same time, this is a school year of instability.  Though the Education Foundation is trying to cobble together funds, our school district deficit is large which means 102 teachers, including me, face lay offs.  In addition, guidelines for accountability are going to change due to new California legislation, and articles advocate a variety of evaluation mechanisms to lift up the highly qualified teachers and weed out the poorly qualified, all of which will take money, lots of money.  How will that happen?  The state is facing a budget deficit of $20 million for 2010-2011.

Do you see what I mean?  The ground is shaking under us and it’s hard to think of one more way to get this child to have a successful year.

Never give up.  We hold daily morning class meetings to review the business of the school day, remind ourselves how to act to help the class get through a successful day, talk over problems that might come up, defining over and over what happens if you choose to act out.

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Posted in California budget crisis, highly qualified teachers, layoff notices, public schools, school accountability |
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Another Day, Another Look at Charter Schools

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Now that California, one of many states, has raised the cap on the number of charter schools allowed to apply for licenses each year, it’s time to look again at the realities of the charter school controversy.

California elementary charter school

California elementary charter school

Why do some praise charter schools as the savior of education in the United States?

Why are others cautious, if not outright antagonistic?

The charter school movement came to life in 1988 in Minnesota with the idea to design schools with “renewable licenses to innovate, free of most school district rules.” (John Merrow, “When Roads Diverge…”edweek.org) In 1992 the first charter school opened in Minnesota, followed soon by California after passage of the Charter School Act of 1992 and which now is #2 in the list of schools chartered.

Still charter schools have not, so far, swept over the country.  Let’s look at more numbers.  There are 4000 charter schools in 40 states and DC with 1.3 million students.  Minnesota has the most schools and California in 2009 has 700 charter schools out of 10,000 public schools with 4% of the 6.3 million students.

Even so, Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington DC schools, Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, all are doing their best to restructure their school districts by closing low-performing schools and reopening with smaller charter schools, often in the same building.

Why so?

Money.  State regulations for licensing charter schools have been revised in pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds geared mostly toward low-performing high schools, a desperate problem in large urban areas.  Limited data available does show that charter high schools outperform similar traditional high schools.  In addition, in California at least, charter high schools attract more disadvantaged Hispanic students, one of the groups the state must target for academic help.

Strong teachers and administrators who want to get away from the system of traditional public schools with union contracts that were needed for a long while, but now restrict change, love the idea of starting over with a new school.

In addition, high-performing charters are small schools (average 350 students) with longer school days and year, more time devoted to English language study, a clear academic mission, a moderate discipline policy.  Those schools do well on the assessments to ensure a license renewal.

Top charters really have tried to innovate.

K-5 Conservatory Lab Charter School in the Boston area led by Diana Lam, long time administrator, uses a curricular model called Learning Through Music to support students who must improve their academic achievement.  Teacher contract innovation also is a goal.  A management team is designing the pay formula based on 5 levels of teacher performance, each level geared to identify a teacher as s/he becomes more experienced.  In addition, the teachers collaborate, using the Cycle of Inquiry model to assess, analyze, and modify teaching strategies.

City Arts and Technology High School set in a working class San Francisco neighborhood is one of Envision Schools, a non-profit group of model charter high schools.  The curriculum is rigorous, students collaborate on learning projects, and support is available to ensure all 365 students do well on state exams.

What’s wrong?

Nothing, except those exceptional schools are having difficulty being replicated across the country and time is of the essence.  For instance, in California, elementary charter schools are less likely to serve minorities, English Language Learners, and low-income students.  The schools are small, not reaching enough children.  Studies of outcome data for many charter schools have not shown better results than traditional public schools.

Often said, the parent buyer must beware.  Disinformation has been generated about charter schools, emphasizing their good qualities, denigrating perfectly good public schools, and hiding the fact that 14% of charter schools lose their licenses, just like traditional public schools fall into the low-performance abyss.

Finally, a number of professionals associated with the education field see charter schools as a way to privatize education, paid for with public money.  Others who praise charter schools do so because they hope to drag down teachers’ unions that are accused of holding onto a fixed pay structure which offers no incentives to excel.

Looking again?

Teacher’s pay structure is being re-evaluated, but the public must support the thousands of public schools looking for a model to help students achieve, instead of antagonizing the very highly-qualified teachers needed to close the achievement gap.

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Posted in Race to Top, cycle of inquiry, highly qualified teachers, low-performing schools, public schools |
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Take on a New View

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Teachers spend a lot of time thinking about the children they teach, in fact, all the time that they are not actually imparting a lesson on igneous rocks, say, or quadratic equations or the history of civil rights in the 1960’s when Martin Luther King, Jr. held Lyndon Johnson to the promise of legislation.

Who, though, is thinking about the legislation just passed in California and many other states so that real in-school change in education practice takes place?

Let’s start with one issue that brings a frown to every teacher in the country: teacher evaluation.  The federal Department of Education, ready to revise the Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is thinking about this aspect of school reform.

Whether you like the bill or not, the 8 year old NCLB legislation calling for highly-qualified teachers has shown the disparities from state to state in teacher preparation, professional development, and evaluation procedures.  If you look carefully at the new priorities, evaluation is for everyone involved in the education of public school students, not only the teacher in the classroom.

Even California has passed legislation to conform with new priorities, in spite of the teacher’s union (CTA) long-standing argument about unintended consequences of using student testing scores to evaluate teachers.  AFT’s current president gave a recent speech advocating for basic professional teacher standards, defining what a highly-qualified teacher should know and be able to do; and for serious analysis of well-designed tests to determine yearly growth that shows where to improve the program.

The old view.

Albert Shanker, the long-time AFT president, once noted schools have been seen as factories with teachers on the assembly line popping students out after 13 years.  In fact, many school reform solutions have elaborated on business models that increase productivity, thus cutting personnel, revising pay, adjusting the day, and so on, all to save money.  Teacher evaluation?  To be blunt, it was “pay for play.”

Now, in the effort to “make teaching the revered profession it should be,” (Arne Duncan, “Elevating the Teaching Profession” neatoday), money must be provided, this blog’s often-used comment.  However, in a poor economy, budget deficits, and legislator’s recalcitrance, it is difficult to see any dollar signs at the end of the tunnel.

So what’s new?

If you had looked at an economic model devised in the 1960’s by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen from New York University, you would find that some institution’s costs can only be refined down.  They will still rise, but not recklessly.  Teacher evaluation in a public school is one such institution.

Here are examples.

Highly-qualified teachers should have access to technology to save costs.  For instance, some schools use a computer-generated test to determine reading improvement.  Many students can use the same equipment, the computer spits out the score and the tested items, saving time, so teachers can analyze for the next teaching steps.  Still a teacher must boot up the program, supervise students, and keep the equipment, not cheap, in shape.  Outcomes are improved, a teacher evaluation goal, but independent of cost.

In addition, professional development is essential to support excellent teachers and there are good technologically sound training DVD’s, for example, that can be used on-site, over and over, with large groups or small, therefore an efficient and effective staff development tool.*  Still, teachers need to be paid, the computers must be maintained–all costs that remain the same, though the benefits rise.

Many schools, to insure student and program improvement, use a business model called “cycle of inquiry” to set goals, examine how the plan is working, make adjustments, decide on next steps, all an efficient, effective, analytical way to assess progress.  Of course, labor costs aren’t saved by using this procedure in the school, even though good teachers will use these decisions for the student’s benefit.

The point is that schools must find ways to improve the infrastructure, the pay schedule, the way time is spent in schools, teacher evaluation, but the costs won’t go down.  Over time, they will rise less rapidly, but there are a fairly consistent number of students and highly-qualified teachers needed to teach them in a safe facility which will need money.

Think about it.  When calculating costs and benefits of their teachers,  state legislatures would do well to look at this view of the education world.

(*Take Care! is an example, found on the website for this blog.)

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Posted in American Federation of Teachers, Arne Duncan, California Teachers Association, NCLB, National Education Association, cycle of inquiry, highly qualified teachers, public schools, school reform |
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