Archive for the ‘layoff notices’ Category

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5 de Mayo Victory for California Teachers

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

My school district is taking teachers off the Reduction in Force (RIF) list after negotiations with the district’s local union, a branch of California Teachers Association-National Education Association (CTA-NEA).  Union representatives have agreed to five furlough days, that is, no pay for a break during the fall term.

Unlike vacation days which are included in the teacher’s yearly salary, furlough days save money.  Instead of a battle negotiating revision of the pay schedule to lower salaries, furlough days seem to be preferable.  Perhaps the union’s thinking is that unpaid furlough days can be eliminated when the funds for schools increase someday.  (No way will that happen anytime soon in California!) If the state finally does conquer its budget, another revision of the salary scale would have to be renegotiated.  We can see the lines drawn right now in Oakland over salary negotiations in a poor district.

Anyway, due to retirements and resignations in my district 45 third year teachers who were on the countdown list for layoffs were notified last week that they will be working next year.  I’m happy for them and my chances of being retained are looking better.

I don’t know what will happen in big districts like Oakland or San Francisco which has a much worse deficit than my mid-size district that has already passed a parcel tax to support its schools.  Several parcel taxes-or extensions of parcel tax time limits-will be on the June and/or November ballots this year for a number of school districts up and down the state.

Our superintendent is lucky.  We have a PTA and Foundation group that is using every ounce of persuasion to get parents and the community businesses to support the schools.

May 4, 70 businesses in the surrounding shopping areas donated a percentage of their sales for the day to the Foundation.  It’s one of those win-win deals.  The businesses make money on a slow day and the schools benefit from the community support.

So far the Foundation has raised more than one and a half million $$, mainly so that school faculty and staff aren’t laid off, which would make class sizes larger, fewer librarians and other resource teachers available, and classified support minimal.

On Wednesday May 5 we will commemorate Cinco de Mayo, a festival celebrated by Mexico and Californians of Mexican descent, that honors a single victorious battle in Mexico against the French well over 100 years ago.  I hope I will be celebrating the single-handed collection of enough funds to support our school district and keep the rest of us employed.

There are over 6 million students in California.  Do voting adults in this state have to be this close to a school collapse before they are willing to put money in the pot for the student education they say they support?

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Posted in California Teachers Association, layoff notices, public schools, school community |
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Transience-Going and Coming and Going Again

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Reading and listening to the news, the huge bet in the education world is how many teachers and other staff are going to the unemployment office in June due to layoffs in each state and school district.

superintendent with students at a Los Angeles elementary school

superintendent with students at a Los Angeles elementary school

Worst of the worst, 300,000 teachers laid off will certainly clear the board of its latest spread of new teachers at low-performing schools just as those schools are identified as turn around targets.  How will it help any school when young committed new teachers who have been acknowledged as creative, innovative, self-confident, highly educated, and technologically competent are the first to be laid off when the roulette ball lands in their slot?

More pink slips than really needed are often sent out so as not to litigate layoffs that are identified too late in the school year, a no-no nationwide negotiated by unions and part of most state’s education code.  But even 100,000 is a huge number and leads to the problem to be addressed in this post-TRANSIENCE.

Begin with student transience.  In most states and definitely in California high transience in low-performing schools practically guarantees that few students will have proficient or advanced levels on the state tests given in May.  Generally, students who make strategic moves like those because of school safety issues, overcrowding, class size reduction, even suspension do not necessarily lead to worse academic achievement.  On the other hand, reactive transience due to financial stress, family dysfunction, and housing instability often lead to negative results in student achievement.  The more moves in a school year and over several school years generally indicate a worse outcome.  For more detail see the Urban Institute’s 2009 study “Student Transience in North Carolina.”

Like truancy, student transience can be reduced with relentless determination.  When a student moves to another attendance area, the child stays in the original school for the remainder of the year, a procedure dependent on buses and parent permission.  Speaking of parents, the district can educate parents on the short and long-term consequences to student achievement with constant movement.  In addition, within a school district, the speedy transfer of student records can be improved, especially with data being established on servers that can be accessed by every school.  Of course, over time in a city or region, the availability of low-income housing would ensure that students remain at the school.

Students coming and going increases teacher anxiety as each is preparing to be evaluated on student test scores.  Think, though, about the anxiety for children as teachers go and come and go again when layoffs are the way to balance the school district’s budget.

Students in low-performing schools usually need steady well-structured learning time.  One school in Los Angeles was described recently as losing half its teachers due to last year’s layoffs, and even now six months after school opened for the 2009-2010 school year, some classes are taught by a series of substitutes instead of full-time regular employees.

Teachers need to be in place in the school for an average of five years for the most effective teaching to take place.  What is going to happen in June 2010 as students see new teachers take home all their materials, still unsure of the location or grade level they will be called to teach when 2010-2011 begins?  If they get rehired.  Before the school year begins.

Last, in the Fall it’s a sure thing that some teachers laid off in the Spring will be assigned to a school when the enrollment is stabilized.  Think about the time that will be needed to train the new staff in the strategies, special programs, student discipline procedures, and myriad other details that make each school unique.  In the meantime, students review and wait for the real teaching to start.

Let’s hope student transience doesn’t begin until the transient teachers have had time to lay down the rules of the game.

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Truancy’s Many Minutes

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Today teacher layoffs for 2010-2011 hit the front page of the New York Times, “Revenue Cut, Schools Warn of Huge Teacher Layoffs Across U.S.” by Tamar Lewin and Sam Dillon.  The news (with photo of 21, 000 plus in California) finally comes to the attention of the nation.

mixed neighborhood school in Silicon Valley

mixed neighborhood school in Silicon Valley

Most media minutes this past week were devoted to the teacher evaluation-tenure-compensation conundrum.  Last week’s post reported on Colorado’s SB 10-191 legislative bill.  End of the week Florida’s governor finally vetoed the state’s bill after the entire school community flushed out the legislation’s inadequacies.

Still, how are teachers going to address the evaluation-tenure-compensation issue next year when they’re all laid off?  In fact, a long list of school-wide problems must be addressed to establish a fair playing field on which teachers and schools will be evaluated, a playing field with a timer ticking off minutes of instruction.

Truancy is at the top of the list of insidious problems for persistently low-performing schools.

How can students learn when they don’t arrive on time and every day?  When a child arrives tardy by 20 minutes once a week, it doesn’t seem like much.  When he misses 3 days in the month, it doesn’t seem like much.  Right now there are on average 36 weeks of actual learning time.  Take away about 720 minutes or 2 days a school year for tardiness, 27 more whole days of unexcused absence, and the student misses four weeks-a month-of learning time in a school year.  Now that’s many minutes!

Let’s hope more stimulus money is legislated by Congress soon, as in the next month, so teachers remain.  On Monday this week the TV news mentioned the coming distribution of millions of dollars to districts with identified persistently low-performing schools. You can bet those teachers and principals will assert ‘you want to see improvement from the beginning to the end of the year, it stands to reason that the school board better have plans to improve truancy data.’

It certainly must be in place before any new teacher accountability plan for tenure and compensation takes effect.

Severe truancy problems can be reversed.  For example, at Success for All elementary schools student attendance (arrival on time every day) is one of the first problems addressed–so students can take advantage of the learning strategies being put in place.

How do minutes of truancy decrease?  Before school a rousing Sousa march is played on the PA system,  students line up in a circle, and the principal announces birthdays, events, classes with the best attendance, and so on which are applauded.  The children go to class where a game is played to spell words, one letter each day everyone is present.  The word completed, a small reward is provided and the class is congratulated by the principal.  The attendance clerk contacts absent students’ families daily and information is sent to the district that keeps computer records of attendance with the goal of 96% each month.  The school counselor is on the phone immediately with the parents of tardy students.  A plan is set up to call, pick up, attend the morning Sunshine Club (where students sit in a group for breakfast).

If that isn’t enough, the counselor contacts the county truancy court and proceedings are initiated.  In an elementary school, one court appearance per family is usually enough, other younger children are kept track of before the problem stands out again.  See San Francisco Chronicle article “Oakland truancy court for parents” by Matthai Kuruvila (April 17, 2010) for more information about California education laws on truancy.

Be ready.  It takes relentless, unending time and effort in neighborhoods with single mothers, families working several jobs, older siblings who baby sit and don’t set good examples.  Such oversight must be funded substantially and not pulled away when the chips are down.  Like laying off teachers, cuts saves money but at what cost to the long run across the playing field?

It takes no more than a minute to agree, truancy reduction is one major procedure that will ensure many more minutes  of effective learning time on task, the entire goal of U. S. public schools.

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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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Where Are the Great Teachers?

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Within a month, three articles appeared in national magazines describing great teachers–who they are, what they do, how they do it.  Check out The Atlantic, January/February 2010; The New York Times Magazine, March 7, 2010; and Newsweek, March 15, 2010.

high-achieving suburban high school

high-achieving suburban high school

Perhaps the writers were making up for the put downs, blame games, and finger pointing, reasoning that, after all, some teachers must be doing a great job.  Otherwise, how would there be students at public university UC Berkeley, private school Harvard, or any of the terrific higher education institutions in between the coasts?

However, there are also plenty of reports about teachers in failing schools.  For example, the media flocked to Central Falls High School in Rhode Island when the board of education on the superintendent’s recommendation fired every single teacher because the school was performing on state tests at a persistently low level.

All that was reported was the fight between the teachers and the superintendent.  Couldn’t the Central Falls debacle be a story of what demographic and economic changes in the community let the school slowly sink until it was too late to address the problem?  Or why the school board let the problem fester for years and years?  Or why the superintendent and teacher leaders at the school site didn’t sit down and plan a satisfying turn around?  Hard to find clarification for the dismal picture of that school.

But as of March 15, 2010, the president and the U.S. Department of Education have taken on American education.  Revising No Child Left Behind to raise academic standards, turn around the most distressed schools, and develop tools to better evaluate teachers and principals.

And everyone is surprised?  Did every state think the issues would slither around the edges, lost in the tussle for school funds, while high-achieving students went to Stanford and the other kids got a finger wagged at them?

Speaking of which, this week California distributed its list of 188 persistently lowest-achieving schools in the state.  Mostly middle and high schools were placed on the list to go along with the state’s effort to get funds from Race to the Top, the biggest pile of money out there to help transform secondary schools.  Next application deadline is June 2010.

In the meantime thousands of teachers and students took to the streets on March 4 to advance comprehension of the disaster befalling California in which teachers will be laid off to balance school district budgets when the state can’t balance its own budget.

Which creates the question: what happens to good teachers with no money available?  Three possibilities have surfaced in the news.

First, great new teachers will be gone unless, as in San Francisco, the PTA gets families to chip in money and attract matching donors to make up the deficit.  Think that can rub out $1300 million?  Or the Educational Foundation asks each district family to contribute $375 to erase the $3 million deficit as in Cupertino.

Second, a school board in a district like Los Angeles, $200 million in the hole and 23 low-performing schools to turn around, will lay off teachers and improvement efforts will sit on the back burner to simmer and bubble.

Or third, school boards may take the cheap way out and let for-profit charter schools take over the low-performing high schools, getting the problem off the school board’s back.

As the three articles showed, the latest teacher preparation has improved a teacher’s ability to manage the class, understand the curriculum, and use best practices to teach.  No statistics tell how many and where are the great teachers.  There is an answer.

The truth is some great teachers work at Central Falls, just as they are found in every public school.  All schools could have many, but the effort to increase the number of good teachers is like the discipline needed by school boards to turn around low-performing schools.

It’s daunting, time-consuming, and depends on teacher-leaders, administrators skilled at communicating*, and, above all, resolute school boards willing to back the teachers doing the hard job.

*For one model of good communication go to the website for this blog: takecareschools.com.

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Posted in No Child Left Behind Act, Race to Top, layoff notices, low-performing schools, public schools, teacher preparation |
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