For the last four weeks, I've prodded my little freshmen as we've plowed through Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird so fast that it ought to be a crime. Along the way, we've studied vocabulary, had great socratic discussions, written personal narratives, and examined primary sources. 

Selfishly, I always arrange to read aloud in class critical chapters from any book I assign. For Mockingbird, this meant the first chapter, a few in the middle, and of course, the final chapter. Most of my students were able to keep up on the independent reading (at least they were able to make it seem so in their chapter assessments), so by the time we were ready for chapter 31, my assessments indicated that the students knew this story well enough to connect with the content of that last part.

So I proceeded to read aloud the final chapter. If you haven't read the book recently or ever, don't bother going back to read this chapter out of context…I'm afraid you'll have to start from chapter one. Each class period, as I read that chapter aloud to my little 14 and 15 year olds, I noticed the same subtleties happening in my room:

There was no typical teenage fidgeting. 

There were no hands shooting up to ask for the bathroom pass.

There were no eyes wandering in daydreams toward the windows or the cute kid a few rows over.

And unlike sometimes when as I read aloud and as I turn the page and begin the top line of the next page I can hear pages ruffling as students realize they had zoned and fallen behind, this time I could hear pages shuffling as I was reading the last line of a page–they were ready for more, raring to read on.

And then, when I read the last line and I closed the book and looked up, in each class period a handful of kids were discretely wiping an eye. Then the silence would settle on us all for a few moments…not the kind of silence in a classroom where kids are afraid to talk or waiting for that one kid with all the answers to speak, but the kind of silence where you can really tell that everyone is truly thinking.

No, that last chapter is not the most profound in all of American literature. It is not sad. But as one student–an admitted "non-reader"–wrote in a journal entry, "it was simple and beautiful." 

No matter how many of my kids pass the HSPE, no matter how many ace the common assessments, no matter how much data I gather or is gathered about me, nothing in my professional life will ever be as important to me as this kind of thing… it is in these moments that I finally have hope that I have actually made a difference.

By Tom

There are a lot of people who look at the teachers’ salary scale and complain that it unfairly rewards teachers for simply staying on the job. They cite studies showing that after about three years, teaching experience has little impact on student achievement. They notice that 15-year veterans get the highest salaries, regardless of their performance. They can even name names, from their own school or district. These people tend to be younger teachers, and they also aren’t very good at noticing the experienced, competent veterans or the rookies who have no idea how to handle a classroom. They see what they want to see and proclaim the current salary scale unfair, obsolete and bad for students.

These people quite literally have no idea what they’re talking about.

A better way to look at the salary schedule is on an individual basis. Teachers are encouraged to grow professionally and learn from experience. And after about fifteen years, a teacher is expected to reach her peak and stay there for the rest of her career. Teachers may differ in regards to the height of that peak; one teacher may be better after two years than another teacher will ever be, but what matters is that each individual teacher continues to grow. Looking at it this way may make the teacher salary scale more palatable.

It would, however, be another completely inaccurate way to look at it. The idea of gradually giving teachers more money for each year they work was never intended to reflect the quality of their work

Here’s how you should look at it.

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By Kristin

To the left, Senator McCarthy – not a shining example of how to bring out the best in people.

As you may know, Seattle has been in the news lately for unethical behavior in our accounting department.  Folks have fled to Florida, folks have been fired with a handsome severance.  We've lost our Superintendent in the process, a woman whose vision I admired, and somehow we've become a district that models our process for ensuring ethical behavior on the McCarthy Hearings.

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By Tom

Senators Rodney Tom and Joe Zarelli have come up with a new bill, titled the “Excellent Teachers for Every Student Act.“ It also goes by the name SB 5914. It would do six things:

1)     Teachers will be laid off according to their evaluations, regardless of seniority.

2)      Principals in high-needs schools get to decide whether a teacher can be reassigned to their school.

3)       Teachers who don’t “show improvement” in three of their last five years can be fired if their principals determine that their performance is detrimental to student learning.

 4)      NBCTs must be evaluated in the “top tier” within two years of certifying in order to receive their stipend.

5)      Only math, science or special education teachers can get a salary increase by earning more than 45 credits. Furthermore, no teacher gets credit for more than eight years of service in regards to salary increases. The savings harvested from this change will be put into a performance pay system, based on principal evaluations.

6)      Those districts which were allowed to pay teachers over and above the state salary scale will now have to lower their salaries down to the state scale. (The state instituted a state-wide scale a number of years ago in order to give teachers in lower-paying districts a fairer wage. In doing so, they allowed a dozen or so districts to maintain a higher salary scale so that those teachers wouldn’t experience a pay cut.)

My main problem with the “Excellent Teachers for Every Student Act” is the inappropriateness of its name.

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by Brian

Benefits for teachers and other public employees have been in the news lately.  The perception seems to be that they are better than those for workers in the private sector.  In Washington State the Auditor’s Office published a Performance Review of K-12 Employee Health Benefits in February of this year.  In it they report that 51% of K-12 employees cover themselves only, and pay on average about 5% ($27/month) of their premium cost.  Most of them select Premera Plan 1 or 5, rich plans that have lower deductibles and co-pays as well.  That does sound pretty extravagant.

 But it’s not the whole story.  Teachers who cover their families represent about 12% of all employees, and they pay an average of 39% of their premium out-of-pocket, about $500 per month on average. 

Continue reading →

By Tom

Let’s say you go out and buy a fish tank. An aquarium. You bring it home and get it all set up with gravel on the bottom, an air pump with a filter, some plastic plants and a lighted cover. You add the water and let it sit overnight, just like they told you, and then you go back to the pet store to buy some fish.

The guy at the store helps you select compatible species and explains the importance of regularly testing the water. “It has to be the right ph,” he says, “or the fish will get sick and die.” He sells you a test kit, along with some chemicals that you can use to make adjustments.

You know nothing about ph, except for the fact that it has to be just right, which for your particular fish is just slightly acidic: around 6.8.

You take seriously your role as steward of these creatures. They depend on you for survival. Besides that, they were expensive. So you diligently check the ph every three days and make adjustments as needed.

How would you go about this task? Would you employ “tricks” that you think might yield a perfect 6.8? Would you go on line to find out which part of the tank is most likely to perfect, and then use only that place to draw your test water? Would you test the tank just before the fish eat? Or just after, trying to find the time when the water was best?

Would you go so far as to buy a bottle of water that had a ph of 6.8 and use that for all your tests?

I’m guessing you wouldn’t do any of these things, and that you consider gaming your tests in an attempt to get a favorable result counter-productive. The whole point of testing the water is to see whether it’s safe for the fish or if it needs to be adjusted. You’re supposed to use the test results to that end. The results, in and of themselves matter only to the extent that they’re used to ensure that the water in the tank is healthy.

So what are we doing this spring, with standardized testing in full swing? Back in the day, tests were used as a systemic and individual check-point. We wanted accurate information so that we could see which programs, which schools and which students need to be looked at more closely. Objectivity was important. There was no “test-prep industry.” We were asked to test our class under normal conditions. We told them to skip the answers they didn’t know and do their best.

We tested our students in much the same way as any normal person would test the water in a fish tank.

Those days are well behind us. Most of you, like me, have received emails from your district administration, explaining ways in which you can enhance your students’ performance. You’ve had grade level meetings in which you’ve rearranged the math scope and sequence so that the kids get the tested stuff in a timely manner. You’ve received a few boxes of granola bars, donated by the PTA, earmarked for the “test-day nutrition break.” (If food is supposed to enhance performance, where were those snacks when the students were supposed to be learning?) Some of you have gone so far as to bring in gum, capitalizing on the myth that chewing gum increases concentration.

All of this stuff is perfectly harmless. It might be distracting, maybe a little unnecessary, but certainly not unethical.

But then there’s this. It appears that some of the schools in Washington D.C. flat-out cheated. It appears that someone went through student tests, erasing wrong answers and filing them in correctly. Coincidentally, at least one of these schools was the shining star in Michelle Rhee’s school reform campaign. In fact, the principal at that school received $10,000 because of those high test scores. The teachers got $8,000. And some of those people obviously cheated.

It’s easy for me to say I wouldn’t do it. So I’ll say it: I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t taint the results of a set of standardized tests even for $8,000. But you know something? $8,000 is a lot of money. Even for an over-paid public employee. And even though I wouldn’t do it (and you wouldn’t either, right?) it’s clear that someone would.

When we decided to focus on test results instead of education, we started ourselves down this path. This was bound to happen.

Tests are supposed to be used in the process of teaching. They were never supposed to be the product of teaching.

Some of us have forgotten that.

Some of us have never even known it.

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the cynic in me wants to wave this in the faces of the policymakers who think that more testing is going to fix all our ills. My worry: pressure for high stakes means that those with low morals find avenues to prevail and ruin it for us all…when a score matters more than learning, people will do whatever it takes to get the score.

In Washington, D.C., numerous schools, including at least one Blue Ribbon school and others touted as "models" of turnaround are being investigated in the media because of test scores which not only increased at a faster rate than other similar schools, but because their standardized tests also revealed more wrong-to-right answer changes on the bubble tests (who knew they tracked that? Well, they do, by scanning not only the right answers but also the smudges left by erased wrong answers).

I want to believe what one teacher says: that students are encouraged to review and revise answers during the course of the test, which would explain the wrong-to-right answer erasures. 

But, we live in a world of heavy threats and high stakes. Many schools in question were squarely in the center of governmental crosshairs and a hair's breadth away from reorganization. It doesn't take much, especially in the current public climate which sees only bad teachers potentially willing to care about teaching tests and not students, to assume the worst.

Even if every teacher acted with supreme ethics–which I really want to believe–this is just a sign of the damned-if-you do and damned-if-you-don't nature of the game: get those test scores up or else, but get them up too quickly and you'll be in a new set of crosshairs.

By Kristin

Dear Jim,

Your report wandered a bit, and I'm not sure where you got that fabulous "the same number went from here to there as there to here!" detail – the footnote didn't say.

If this paper had been written in my class, I probably would have conferenced with you, asked you to clarify, and encouraged you to work through a few more drafts.  It's clear that you don't think the National Board bonus has done what it set out to do, and isn't worth any more money (shame on so many teachers for going after it, anyhow!), but your paper doesn't prove that to me.

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By Tom

I agree with Mark. The study on Washington State's National Board incentive program by the Center on Reinventing Public Education is flawed and ill-timed. I have only a couple things to add:

First of all, transferring to a challenging school in the current educational climate isn't much fun. I work in a school with a fairly high poverty rate, but not high enough for me to earn the addition $5,000. If I were to move to the next school over, however, I'd get the five grand. So why don't I? As I described in a recent post, working in a high-poverty school means almost complete focus on raising achievement scores. It means teaching math, reading and little else. And not because that's what those students need, but because that's what those students will be tested on.

If the test was on health and art, they'd be learning health and art all day.

Frankly, teaching a balanced, logical curriculum is worth $5,000 a year to me. Especially when you consider the fact that NCLB and its increasingly harsh penalties on underperforming schools and the people who work there means I'd probably be transferring to a different school before too long.

Furthermore, the CRPE study makes much of the fact that many of the new NBCTs in high-needs schools are "home-grown," as opposed to new transfers. They see this as a bad thing. I attended the original summit meeting in which the whole idea of high-needs stipend was proposed. I clearly remember the assembly concluding that the best way to increase NBCTs in high-poverty schools would be for the current teachers to successfully complete the process. That's because becoming board certified is as much a professional development process as it is an assessment. And it's also because the true experts at working with high-needs students are the teachers who work with high-needs students. Supporting them in their pursuit of National Board certification made perfect sense.

It still does.