Ed was reading an article in The Economist this morning when he came across this:
He also announced plans to take on the teachers’ union, a fearsome organisation that long enjoyed a cosy relationship with the PRI. Mexico’s schools are the worst in the OECD, a club of mainly rich countries, largely because the union controls teacher recruitment and training. The president says he wants to professionalise training and to ban hereditary teaching jobs... With a little help from my friends The Economist | Dec 8th 2012 | MEXICO CITY
Our issue is that the union contract is negotiated separately from the annual budget crisis. When the budget battle begins, this leaves only other smaller areas for cuts. The town council gives the school committee and the school a dollar figure for the cuts, and they come up with cuts that push the most hot buttons for parents. They fire up their automated phone system and email list to rile up the parents and get them to the meetings. We get automated phone messages not just from the school, but from the chair of the school committee about the budget. The town council threatens to take control over the selection of the line items. However, the town council pays little attention when the school committee negotiates the terms of the union contract. Many towns desperately need professional help when those contracts are negotiated.
We have nothing this complicated.
In the spring, one or two members of the Board of Education announce that Next year we won't have layoffs. Then the next year we have layoffs.
This spring the same guy who announced that we wouldn't have layoffs said we will break the tax cap in 2013. ("The folks in the press can quote me.")
...Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.
For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.
Ed: The children need walls, so why not give them real walls?
Right!
Right!
I hadn't quite thought of it that way!
These kids need walls, but the Harvard-ed-school / Columbia Teachers College / UFT grownups, in their collective wisdom, have declined to provide them with walls. And David Brooks approves!
Does David Brooks live in a house without walls?
Work in an office without walls?
I bet he doesn't!
Why do we have walls, anyway? Why were walls invented? Does David Brooks ask himself these questions before he writes a column extolling giant classrooms with no walls? If rooms with no walls are such an all-fire great idea, how come nobody lives in geodesic domes? Answer me that, David Brooks!
And while we're on the subject of making disadvantaged children imagine the walls they need but don't have, how about imaginary books?
Imaginary teachers?
Imaginary learning?
They've probably got all those things at the New American Academy. I wouldn't be surprised.
Ed says he visited an open classroom in California years ago. It was chaos, a din. No one could learn anything in that environment.
Of course, they hadn't hit on the idea of training the kids to pretend they were inside a room with walls.
I am contacting you to follow up on the email exchange below, which includes your paragraph citing teachers who “pay for classroom materials out of their own pockets.”
I am an adjunct instructor at a small 4-year college. I attended last weekend’s “Celebration of Teaching and Learning,” where I was denied a “teacher” discount on books for sale in the Barnes and Noble exhibit.
At my college, I teach the most remedial English composition course. Students are placed in my class because, after 13 years of schooling, they need a college instructor to teach them how to write a 5-paragraph essay. Many of my students are low-income; most have taken out loans to pay for their education.
I have no job security, no health benefits, no pension. I pay out of pocket for all books, journal subscriptions, and travel related to my teaching.
Colleges everywhere in the country are experiencing budget cuts, as a quick glance at the newspapers will confirm; my department has nearly exhausted its copier budget mid-semester. I make my own copies at home. I pay for my own paper, printer, and supplies.
At the Celebration, the Barnes and Noble book tables were laden with works by Charlotte Danielson, Linda Darling-Hammond (who appeared on a panel and conducted a book signing), Douglas Reeves (ditto), and other assorted high-profile names in the public education world. These works are not intended for classroom use, and it is disingenuous at best of you to say so.
In the same email chain, Ms. Hjulstrom also refused discounts to school volunteers and school board members. (School board members are not paid in New York state.) Only "teachers, principals, and select staff" are eligible for the book discount.
My district, where average teacher compensation is approximately $130K including pension and benefits, sent a delegation of teachers and principals to the "Celebration." We funded their registration ($175/day), and we paid the cost of any substitute teachers needed to replace them in the classroom.
I don't know whether any of them bought any books, but they received a Barnes and Noble discount if they did.
Joe Nathan 24. Mar, 2011 at 2:34 pm #
John, when is questioning and challenging legitimate, and when is it “teacher bashing.” I ask because the term “teacher bashing” is used constantly.
What I also see a lot of is criticism of parents for doing a bad job, and students for being apathetic, disinterested, difficult to teach, rowdy and on and on. But I don’t see anyone using the words “parent bashing” or “students bashing.” Why not?
Seems to me that many educators regard any questioning or challenging as “teacher bashing.” The term is used constantly. A quick google search found more than 1.6 million references.
Results with quotation marks:
152,000 for "teacher bashing"
22,800 for "parent bashing" (and, again, parent bashing is not something done by school personnel or education foundations)
The "Celebration of Teaching and Learning" was such a miserable experience that I refused to return for the second day. Instead, I'm spending my Saturday recovering my equilibrium & trying to find words to describe the scene.
"Aggrieved and angry" come to mind.
The teachers are aggrieved and angry; the union leadership is aggrieved and angry; the poo-bahs and the toadies are aggrieved and angry. The lady from Scholastic was downright offensive (see below) in a you-had-to-be-there kind of way. I will not be making purchases from Scholastic book fairs in the near future.
The worst of the lot was Gene Wilhoit, who is angry at all of America. "Americans don't value education," he said, his face hard. "Americans are complacent."
He went on at length, but iPad ate my notes, and I didn't think to get out my cell phone to film him. I hope someone did because the country needs to see what these people say (and how they say it) when they think parents are out of earshot. "Americans don't understand that education is important to the future," he said.
Yes, indeed. That's why we have 21-year olds graduating college with a lifetime of student loan payments to look forward to. Because we don't value education. (Speaking of college loans, the unions want taxpayers to fund college tuition for teachers and are clearly mobilizing opinion among the rank and file. So that's on the horizon.)
Wilhoit and the others had just come from a two-day meeting with leaders from countries that have good schools, and their experience at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession seemed to be the source of their anger. Each panelist offered up his take-away (e.g. free college for teachers), and all of them speechified about "systems" and "support for teachers" and "respect" and the like.* None of it made much sense. They all agreed that although our schools are terrible, our teachers are great, or as great as they can be, considering.
It was Wilhoit who came closest to voicing the thought they were all managing to convey without speaking the words: We would have better schools if we had a better country.
Vendors everywhere, technology, no books, Smartboards (it's the 20th anniversary of the invention of the Smartboard!), and, during plenary sessions, constant calls for Parent Responsibility, each one met with thunderous applause. Parents were not a popular group amongst the Celebrants.
During the session on bullying, three teachers asked plaintively, "Why is bullying our responsibility?" "Why is everything on us?" They were aggrieved.
The great and the good (Brian Williams, Cory Booker) thought teachers had a lot to be aggrieved about. Democracy is hanging by a thread, they told us: the only reason we have a country at all is teachers. And yet Americans fail to feel "reverence" toward teachers. What is to be done?
Mehmet Oz said pretty much the same thing; then he showed us a graph charting the rise of obesity in America and said rising obesity is the reason "there's no money for education." We need to lose weight! Because we need more money for education!
Also, the NEA wants the government to pay for college and graduate degrees for teachers. We'll need to lose a whole lot of weight for that.
My friend attended a session where there was a group of young administrators seated in the middle of the room. The teachers booed the administrators. Now that's interesting ---- what was going on? I wish I'd been there.
A fellow from the Department of Education told us that DOE is rolling out "an ambitious 5-year initiative": the moon shot of this generation. Which was.....a website. The moon shot of this generation is a Department of Education website.
We watched a lot of student videos, all created with a product called Adobe-something-or-other: raps about Haiti; a geography class in California making soup. In the soup video, a pretty girl who came to America from Nicaragua complained that nobody knows where Nicaragua is or that a person who speaks Spanish and has brown eyes might be from Nicaragua and not Mexico. Another student in the video said somebody thought "Guatemala" was guacamole.
Maybe the reason students don't know where Nicaragua is or that Guatemala is a country not a dip is that they're making soup in geography class.
A high-energy Brit pitched his Teacher Channel, I think it was called: there will be authentic content!! We watched an authentic video of a grade school class in Florida where the kids scotch-taped together little houses and stuck them in a line on a stage. Then the teacher walked along the stage blowing the houses with a leaf-blower to simulate a hurricane. Some of the houses blew apart and some didn't. Shots of fist-pumping little kids; fade-out.
The Brit told us we had just witnessed "learning" and said there would be many thousands such videos available on Teacher Channel, which was being sponsored or hosted or public-private partnered or some such with WNET, the host of Celebration of Teaching and Learning. Applause!
In the session on how to teach counting using a children's book, the Math for America Master Teacher banned the words "permutation" and "order" because "permutation" and "order" are words, not understanding. He told us, repeatedly, that he makes his high school students spend a full test hour drawing the answers to counting problems in order to show them that multiplying 5x4x3 is more efficient than drawing 60 houses with 1 of 3 pigs inside. At the end of the sessions, he advocated the use of children's books for teaching high school counting problems. "How many handshakes amongst the 7 dwarfs?" That was a good counting question we could base on a children's story, he said.
At one point a teacher said she'd made a counting tree, and the Master Teacher said, a look of mock incomprehension on his face, "Tree? What is a tree? Why do you talk about trees?"
Five minutes later he put up a Powerpoint picture of a counting tree -- an actual tree, with a trunk going down to the ground, and branches pointing up to the sky. I don't know why a real tree is good and an abstract tree is bad. He didn't say. The rule seemed to be that everything the teachers said was old-school and wrong, while everything the Master Teacher said was up-to-date and correct.
The Master Teacher had no blackboard, whiteboard, or Smartboard, so you had to try to remember everything he had just finished saying while trying to follow whatever he was saying now, and his Powerpoint drawings were confusing, at least to me. He spoke too fast. He told us over and over again that we needed to hold with our students the kind of conversation he was holding with us: i.e., a conversation for understanding.
I don't recommend it. The "conversation" consisted mostly of our Master Teacher eliciting wrong answers and forbidden vocabulary from his class. There were probably 5 people of 30 who could work the problems, so he focused on them and didn't bother with the rest of us.
I'm actually thinking about writing James Simons a letter.
Description: If three pigs live in five houses and each pig lives alone, how many living arrangements are possible? Participants will learn how a children’s book illustrates a simple way to solve counting problems like this without listing all possibilities. Teachers at all levels, from elementary to high school, will learn how students can find the answers without using confusing words like “permutation.”
LIFO = last in, first out (last hired, first fired)
The Post has a story this morning about LIFO effects on teacher lay-offs:
The Bloomberg administration last night released a school-by-school list of where 4,675 planned teacher layoffs would occur under the "last in, first out" law, which requires that pink slips be handed out based on seniority rather than merit.
The breakdown shows the ax would disproportionately affect teachers in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods -- in The Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn -- that have the greatest number of newer instructors.
One of every five teachers in central Harlem middle schools would disappear, as would one-sixth of elementary school teachers in Mott Haven/South Bronx.
Overall, the mayor's preliminary spending plan recommends eliminating more than 6,000 teaching jobs -- 4,665 through layoffs and the rest through attrition.
The layoffs would trigger a complicated domino effect, shifting teachers who have seniority rights into jobs vacated by those with less experience.
[snip]
The impact would be felt all across the city, with 155 schools projected to lose at least 20 percent of their current teachers.
Of that number, 21 schools would have to say goodbye to 40 percent of the instructors there now. Nine schools would have to part with half their current teachers.
Even schools in well-to-do neighborhoods do not go unscathed. Nearly one out of seven teachers in Manhattan's District 2 - running from the Battery to the Upper East Side - would lose their jobs.
PS 41 in Greenwich Village would have to let go of nearly a quarter of the teaching staff there now.
And many of the hundreds of new small middle schools and high schools -- created to replace large failing schools -- would be severely disrupted, according to city Department of Education data.
The Columbia Secondary School in Harlem could lose 14 of its 20 teachers - or a whopping 70 percent.
This level of disruption can't possibly be good for students, and it's certainly not good for the 4,675 teachers who are going to lose their jobs.
My preference would be for everyone to take a wage freeze or, if necessary, a cut in compensation so that no one who's competent has to lose his or her job. Ed once took a 10% salary cut at UCLA when times were bad. We survived, and so did everyone else.
A couple of years ago, NYU instituted a practice of freezing raises for older, better-paid faculty while continuing to give raises to younger faculty. Everyone seems to be surviving this, too.
I was talking to a retired teacher here in town about why the union consistently chooses lay-offs of young teachers over reduction in compensation for all teachers. She told me unions can't choose wage freezes or cuts because pensions are calculated on final compensation.
But of course that's true for college professors with 401(k)s, too. The amount you and your employer pay into the account is based on current salary.
There is plenty of blame to throw around, but Rosemary takes an unexpected approach in her latest blog post. Comments on the site are always welcome (and they so encourage us!).
Also take in to account that a large minority of potential voters are employees of the school district and that the union is actively ensuring that particular candidates be put up for election. An independent candidate has a lot of work to do to counteract the organization and get out the vote in my area.
This is one of the main reasons why we have mayoral control of the schools, right?
Superintendent Frances Gallo combed the classrooms of embattled Central Falls High School. Teachers and students were gone for the day. Gallo was hunting for a particular item: an effigy of President Obama.
She hoped the rumor of its existence wasn't true.
Gallo had fired all the high school teachers just a month earlier, igniting an educational maelstrom in Rhode Island's smallest and poorest community while winning praise from the president.
[snip]
In this Democratic stronghold, teachers wondered: How could the president they supported turn his back on them? Some peeled Obama bumper stickers off their cars.
Gallo knew Obama's endorsement would create further uproar. She just didn't know how bad it would get.
She continued making her way through the school, clearing the first two floors. She was disheartened by the newspaper postings but relieved she hadn't found the offensive item.
One floor to go.
She climbed the steps and entered a classroom.
There it was.
"You couldn't miss it."
An Obama doll, about a foot tall, hung by its feet from the white board; the doll held a sign that said, "Fire Central Falls teachers," she says.
Recounting her discovery later, Gallo broke down in tears. A flood of emotions poured out, the raw toll of all that has transpired in recent weeks.
When she confronted the teacher responsible, she says he responded that it was "a joke to him."
The teachers, she says, have "no idea the harm they're doing." She thought of Obama's words: Students get only one shot at an education.
"I've tried to explain this over and over again: The children here are very disturbed by the actions of their teachers, and they're torn apart because they also love them."
A study has found that just one in 10 union members is in manufacturing, while women account for more than 45 percent of the unionized work force.
The study, by the Center for Economic Policy Research, a Washington-based group, found that union membership is far less blue-collar and factory-based than in labor’s heyday, when the United Automobile Workers and the United Steelworkers dominated.
[snip]
About 48.9 percent of union members are in the public sector, up from 34 percent in 1983. About 61 percent of unionized women are in the public sector, compared to 38 percent for men.
[snip]
The study found that 38 percent of union members had a four-year college degree or more, up from 20 percent in 1983. Just under half of female union members (49.4 percent) have at least a four-year degree, compared with 27.7 percent for male union members.
[snip]
The percentage of men in unions has dropped sharply, to 14.5 percent in 2008, from 27.7 percent in 1983, while the percentage for women dropped more slowly, to 13 percent last year, from 18 percent in 1983. For the work force over all, the percentage of workers in unions dropped to 12.4 percent last year, from 20.1 percent in 1983.
. . . the UFT is an advocate for teachers . . . The UFT is not there to protect education or to insure excellence in the classroom.
The UFT . . . Their job is to protect us, not the students.
. . . when students start paying dues, that's when the union will start representing them.
These are lifted from teachers’ comments over at a NYC Educator post where they were lamenting what they considered to be a teacher-bashing New Yorker magazine essay about the infamous ”rubber room”. Most readers would probably agree that this piece was not kind in its treatment of NYC teachers.
Although I certainly don’t fault these teachers for their candor, it did surprise me a bit. I rarely see this type of honesty from educators, where they openly admit that the union’s goal is to protect the teachers, not the students. Interestingly, on their website the UFT claims it is “an advocate for public school students”. Now, some would argue that protected teachers = well-educated students, but I would disagree that it works out that way all the time or even most of the time.
On the other hand, there is no doubt in my mind that the overriding goal of parents is to protect their children. Parents want to insure excellence in the classroom for their children. Let’s be clear, although unions and parents are often supportive of each other, in many ways this is an adversarial model at work, with each side protecting its own interests. I would like this to be uppermost in the minds of all involved in education reform efforts, especially whenever the unions agree to participate with disingenuous claims that it’s all “for the children”.
As we at KTM have been saying for years, parents should not be shut out of the education debate. If teacher unions, politicians and education bureaucrats are the only ones allowed a place at the table, how likely is it that our children’s interests will be prioritized as they should be? Parents, specialists in the various disciplines and other interested parties should be included in order for there to be any chance for a fair and productive resolution of our nation’s education crisis.
For Immediate Release July 13, 2009 Contact: Celia Lose 202/745-2176 (until 7/15) close@aft.org AFT’s Weingarten Calls for School Reform To Be Done ‘With Us, Not to Us’ Major Educational Address Calls for Collaboration and Innovation
subject line: AFT's Weingarten Calls for School Reform To Be Done "With Us, Not to Us'
The rise in housing costs has become a family problem. Home prices have grown across the board (particularly in larger urban areas), but the brunt of the price increases have fallen on families with children. Our analysis shows that the median home value for the average childless couple increased by 26 percent between 19874 and 2001—an impressive rise in less than twenty years. (Again, these and all other figures are adjusted for inflation.) For married couples with children, however, housing prices shot up 78 percent during this period—three times faster. To put this in dollar terms, in 1984 the average married couple with young children owned a house worth $72,000. Less than twenty years later, a similar family bought a house worth $128,000—an increase of more than $50,000. The growing costs made a big dent in the family budget, as monthly mortgage costs made a similar jump, despite falling interest rates….
Why would the average parent spent so much money on a home?
[snip]
For many parents, the answer came down to two words so powerful that families would pursue them to the brink of bankruptcy: safety and education. Families put Mom to work, used up the family’s economic reserves, and took on crushing debt loads in sacrifice to these twin gods, all in the hope of offering their children the best possible start in life.
The best possible start begins with good schools, but parents are scrambling to find those schools.
[snip]
Everyone has heard the all-too-familiar news stories about kids who can’t read, gang violence in the schools, classrooms without textbooks, and drug dealers at the school doors.
[snip]
So what does all this have to do with educating middle-class children, most of whom have been lucky enough to avoid the worst failings of the public school system? The answer is simple—money. Failing schools impose an enormous cost on those children who are forced to attend them, but they also inflict an enormous cost on those who don’t.
I asked the union lackey about ATRs [Absent Teacher Reserve]. He said, they just got a great deal from the DOE. Smart principals will hire them in a minute. I reminded him of the fact that principals do not like experienced teachers, that they don't like teachers that think and have minds of their owns. Years ago, principals hid vacancies whenever they could. No one wanted a veteran teacher who would not jump when told to. He said smart principals did not think like that. I said the smart ones were few and far between. He just kept talking about the one smart principal he used to work for.
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