Based on recent headlines, this would appear to be a glorious year for education reform. After years of wheel-spinning debates, governors in states such as Florida, Connecticut, Indiana and Ohio are blazing fast tracks trying to turn around troubled school districts.
To ensure the best new teachers are those who stay in teaching, governors are redefining tenure. To rid schools of truly awful teachers, they are imposing realistic teacher evaluation systems. And when those evaluation systems uncover truly effective teachers, they propose to reward them with higher salaries. Heady stuff, right?
That's not how I see it. My sense is that the school reform movement -- roughly defined as those who believe that schools alone can make a dent in the seemingly intractable problems arising from the confluence of race and poverty -- is headed into a major beat down.
Why the pessimism? I'm watching Ohio Gov. John Kasich make one of the most boneheaded moves I can imagine, trying to solve his budget problem by trimming back union collective bargaining while simultaneously imposing school reforms such as ushering in better teacher evaluations.
Does he really think teachers horrified at a peel-back of their collective bargaining are going to embrace a new teacher evaluation system? A similar package of twinned reforms is working its way through the Tennessee legislature. In Ohio, teacher union officials vow to place the governor's reforms on the November ballot, putting both budget and education reforms at risk.
The backlash isn't a future threat; it's already here. Check out comedian Jon Stewart's recent riffs defending teachers. The lampooning starts with defending teachers against Wisconsin-type efforts to trim pensions and proceeds to inviting anti-school reformer Diane Ravitch onto the show to proclaim that school reform -- especially reforms that try to weed out ineffective teachers -- are all wrong: only solving poverty can solve our school problems. Stewart shakes his head in rapturous agreement.
Ravitch and Stewart are right to emphasize the role poverty plays in education outcomes. But to understand why the debate can't stop so abruptly you have to consider the surge of students moving through our public education system whose parents never earned college degrees.
Quick scorecard: Let's carve out the most successful of these students, the ones who graduated from high school and have college ambitions. Among this group, roughly 40 percent are forced to pay for remedial courses, non-credit courses to make up for what they didn't learn in high school.
What those remediation rates tell us is that we, as a country, are not successfully educating the future workforce. The workforce reality is that students need at least two years of post-secondary study to handle even sophisticated blue collar jobs. To turn around this education problem we need K-12 school reforms -- the same reforms that governors are putting at risk as they package them with their fiscal reforms, the very same reforms that Jon Stewart now scoffs at and unions may have the clout to repeal.
Jon, maybe you should be the one to tell these students to wait until we win the war on poverty. This new education/political chemistry has bubbled up to the White House. Although President Obama started off in a promising reform direction -- Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top carrot incentives are the best federal reforms we've ever seen out of Washington -- Obama himself recently retrenched.
Testing is "boring" and needs to be cut back, Obama declared at a town hall meeting in Washington late last month. Interesting timing the President chose to shoot his own school reforms in the foot -- just as a newly energized, anti-testing, labor movement, enraged by the Wisconsin challenges to collective bargaining, promises to play a major role in the next presidential election.
Sure, there may be examples of excessive testing, but there are not enough of the kind of quick-turnaround assessments I've seen work in urban districts, where students lacking specific skills in math, science or reading get flagged: Johnnie needs a quick re-teach of this topic, perhaps delivered in a different style. If anti-school reformers succeed in their broad campaign against testing, all that is at risk.
As the author of new book about the school reforms carried out by Michelle Rhee, former schools chancellor in Washington, D.C., I've had a front row seat for watching the signs of this approaching blowback storm. When Rhee first arrived in Washington, the national press idolized her. Today, sensing a momentum change, writers try to savage her record in D.C.
The fact that neither the former nor current negative press coverage was based on any real reporting in D.C. classrooms is irrelevant. Writers were just catching the mood of the moment, which today is trending away from the tough and controversial reforms she carried out -- reforms that appeared to be working.
The impact of that anti-reform trending can be seen in Rhee's new group, Students First, which tries to take the D.C.-style reforms national. To date, only conservative Republican governors have signed on, a sure sign that Democrats know when to duck, when to latch onto the anti-school reform movement that has been energized by the trims in collective bargaining.
In the short term, conservative governors can have it all -- fiscal cutbacks that may require curtailing the powers of collective bargaining combined with academic reforms. But in the longer term, twinning the two will set back school reforms, perhaps for a very long time. And that's going to do some real damage.
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Katy ISD has almost as many non-teachers as teachers – 7,579 total staff, with only 4,120 of those being teachers. And teachers earn far less than other professional District staff. Katy ISD spends only 49.7% of their tax dollars on instruction.
Yet the district is letting go of more than 500 teaching positions and only a handful — about 50 — administrative positions. Teachers earn on average between $12,500 – $58,000 LESS than non-teaching staff.
Katy Superintendent Alton Frailey earns more than five times the average teachers’ salary — $280,000 base salary (not including benefits and perks). Frailey earns almost twice what the Governor of Texas makes.
How about this
- figure out what constitutes a good education (we don't even have agreement on that)
- figure out what % of students should be educated for college (a minority) and invest in vocational training for the vast majority that will never, ever get a college degree
- teach parents how to prepare their kids for a life of literacy
- reshape the economy such that one parent can support a family so you have the other parent at home raising the next generation
All the "reforms" are doing is re-arranging the deck chairs - the reform movement is more of a bowel movement.
Good for whom? Good for what?
Effective teachers need effective support:
1) Kids 3-4 years behind expected to learn grade level skills
2) Kids and parents told if students are not on grade level the teacher is at fault, not that they have to study harder and learn the material and teachers are not magicians.
3) Student dicipline is not the teachers responsiblity; administrators, deans, school boards need to ensure that teachers can do their job, rather that playing politics with the classroom and telling everyone that it is the teachers job to teach manners.
4) Longer school day and longer school year could support students that have no home support, but the school boards have elliminated these supports and blame teachers.
5) Overwhelmed, uneducated, poor parents that move their kids around make it difficult for students, but this is all the teachers fault.
This Ponzi Scheme is incredible and serves those that see large state education budgets that need to be put to good use...............profits, administrative salaries, testing companines, etc...
I could not wade through the article, but at any point did the writer address the simple truth that parents who prepare their kids to be literate before they ever enter the system nearly always get much better results?
How is a teacher supposed to make up for bad parenting?
Why do people think that paying teachers less will overcome that?
* larger class sizes
* high-stakes testing PLUS
* hiring unqualified, non-credentialed teachers and administrators
* hiring minimally educated teachers
* more charter schools
* scripted, narrow curriculum
* no due process for teachers
* privatizing public schools to make a profit
* mayoral control
You mean THOSE failed policies??? Then I'm proud to be colored an 'anti-reformer'.
* larger class sizes (200 students in Organic Chemistry lecture)
* high-stakes testing (SAT, MCAT, GRE)
* hiring non-credentialed teachers and administrators (most professors are experts in their fields, not trained teachers)
* scripted, narrow curriculum (to major in a subject, students must follow a rigorous course load)
* no due process for teachers (most professors at universities are not tenured)
* privatizing public schools to make a profit (ivy league universities and most private universities are run for profits)
So how do you account for the success of private universities in America?
The Ivy league universities accept students with decent SAT scores, students that already are dedicated to their studies and good learners with good working habits. I bet there is no disruptive student in 200 class lecture. Not even one.
Have you ever set a foot in a typical inner city high school ? You do not have such fantastic learners population in a typical urban high school . You can count on one hand the students with the interest in organic chemistry. The disruptive and rude behavior are rampant there.
and that is the whole difference.
The NEA supports any kind of pay system that rewards teaching behavior and preparation, as long as it does not try to reward the result of teaching, and as long as the reward system is negotiated by... a teachers union!
http://schoolsteach.blogspot.com/2011/04/sense-of-entitlement-school-choice-part.html
Most people commenting here are very well-intended, but have not considered the monopoly that holds them hostage. The sad truth is that many of these same people assume the existence of private sector monopolies that do not exist.
some anti-union advocates like to claim that state laws render these needs moot, but recent, sudden changes in many state laws are proof that there is no substitute for a powerful political organization on your side. if your goal is to end unions, first find another way to preserve those protections. without at least these meager benefits, expect the brightest teachers to leave the field.
Merit pay, vouchers, and minimizing or eliminating collective bargaining will result in only one class of losers: ineffective teachers. Aside from them, the list of winners include: students (who will not be stuck with union-protected ineffective teachers), parents (who can choose to allocate the money to educate their children where they choose and can hold the school accountable by taking the money elsewhere if they don't like it), and effective teachers (who will find that they are in demand by multiple employers in what will be a win-win situation for both employers and effective teachers, who can rest that claim based on results rather than the malfeasance you reference that can exist in any administration, with or without unions).
As someone who now works in the private sector and teaches part time, I can attest that, when employees perform a valued role, they don't need a union to organize. Recently, some teammates and I were not happy with management, so we all found jobs with competitors. We'd made our case. Management didn't buy it, so we left. There was no need for a strike or an act of Congress.
The problem, of course, is that public schools almost always outperform charters. When we control for student demographics, they usually outperform private schools, too. So the "unions are the problem" argument really flies in the face of facts.
Yes, there are bad teachers; most, however, are kind, caring, competent, and doing a good enough job. It is, however, very hard to guide the young mind through the development of mathematical thinking when they don't pay attention for more than five minutes at a time. It is hard to keep students focused when Bozo in the corner keeps making "funny" cracks--and then there is the question of homework. If only 10% do the work, is it better to give up on assigning it and try to make students practice in class--which usually does not work well--or to bore the 10% who did their part while trying to coax or coerce the others into learning in spite of their best effort?
If we want real improvement, we will ALL have to do our parts.
To designate someone as anti remformer or pro reformer is very dangerous here. I don't believe Diane Ravitch is against reform, just these reforms. Teachers have been fighting for change for a long time. Now these bone heads in politics call themselves reformers so they can look good and mark anyone against what they say as anti-reformers. Now everybody on both sides has slipped into this dichotomy. It's like the red scare all over again.
One is not "anti-reform" simply because they are capable of observing that certain specific reforms, although they are favored by the establishment, happen not to work.
Here is the bottom line. Teachers Unions have run our schools for 30 years. We spend much more per student THAN ANY other country. In results we are 30-40th place. It is not working. There are alternative schools NOT run by the teachers union that are doing much better, and they spend the same or less and pay their teachers the same as public schools. That's why Obama supports them. Obama has taken a lot of heat from unions, his core supporters, for supporting them, why do you think he is doing that?
Obama wants to end rubber rooms the unions support where bad teachers no longer allowed near children go and sit each day, doing nothing, but getting paid.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill
Obama is for schools like this the unions hate:
“Waiting for "Superman," Davis Guggenheim's (who won an Oscar for the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth) film.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2021951,00.html
Promise Academy (featured in Waiting for Superman) produced Great results. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opinion/08brooks.html
Pause and think about that, “eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students”
The REAL Inconvenient Truth is that if the Teachers Unions can’t be brought under control, our kids are doomed!
We don't need to end rubber rooms; they're already gone.
"Waiting for Superman" is laughably misleading. And as for the Promise Academy, its test scores haven't been great. While some charter schools HAVE done well, they're in the minority, and their success, where it happens, is probably more attributable to the fact that they don't have to serve all children. Only those whose parents care enough to apply go to charter schools, and the charters can "counsel out" low performers, sending them back to drag down public schools' scores.
If unions were the problem, we'd expect unionized schools to do poorly and non-union schools to do well. In reality, we see the opposite. States with strong unions tend to have the best schools, while states with weak or no unions have worse public schools. Charters, usually non-union, generally do a worse job than public schools. Any rational person would have to conclude that the unions are not a problem, and may provide a net benefit.
But that's "any RATIONAL person."
I am passionate about school reform because I have come to believe that competition holds the only possibility to shake up the entrenched power structure and allow change to take place. Charters and vouchers allow some kids opportunity and hope today. For twenty years I told kids to suck it up for the team and someday things will be better. I can no longer look a kid in the eye and spout that party line.
Vouchers have been tried in several places. They've never worked.
Neither of those options offers a solution. But I'm sure that people who will benefit from them (in other words, not the kids) will keep insisting that they might work if we try them just one more time.
Vouchers CAN help poorer students with the proper academic leanings and motivations get into more elite schools. It happens here often enough with some of the high-end private schools in the Detroit Metro area, such as U.D. Jesuit, Notre Dame Prep, and Cranbrook Academy.
So, in that sense, I would support keeping vouchers around. But they must be made available only to those without the means to pay for the schooling themselves, rather than people who already have scads of money and would rather burn federal dollars to do it than spend from their own largesse.
Obama knows that education
Needs business minded edu-men
To get things moving. Amputation
Of all not in his regimen
Of “innovation” suffer hacking
Until there’s nothing left for whacking
But selling off the public schools
Which he and Duncan made cesspools.
They’ll go for pennies on the dollar
Wherever Gates and Rhee and Broad
Have dumped the load from their commode.
At last, when schools are stuck in squalor,
The only way to clean these “sties”
Is wiping out Obama’s lies.
Please see more at http://poemsonaffairsofstate.blogspot.com/