By Kristin
I've got a problem. The previous owners of our house didn't seal this window enough. Luckily, there's this – my chop saw.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Clothing
By Tom
What are we supposed to wear to work? It seems like business people have it figured out, as do dentists and janitors. Baseball players have it figured out for them, just like inmates and cops. Teachers, though, are all over the place.
I was thinking about this the other day while reading this piece in the Tacoma News Tribune. It's about a teacher who earned National Board Certification, only to learn that the Governor's proposed budget did away with the National Board bonus. It was a good article about a sad situation, featuring a young lady who, by all accounts, is a wonderful teacher.
But then I got down to the bottom of the page, where the comments began. Wow. Read them for yourself, if you have the stomach, but what really caught my attention was a series of remarks about the fact that the teacher was wearing jeans. I had to look back at the picture to confirm it, and sure enough; there she is, wearing blue denim.
Judging by the comments, jeans are not universally considered proper attire in the classroom. Apparently some people think jeans are unprofessional. And they can't get past that to see what the person wearing the jeans is actually doing in them.
And that's unfortunate. Clothes shouldn't matter. Objectively speaking, anyone should be allowed to wear anything they want anywhere. Within reason.
Myth
By Tom
The Washington State legislature is currently dealing with a pair of bills designed to make it easier to fire bad teachers. The house version is apparently gaining traction. The senate version (SB 5399) is stalled, held up by Senator Rosemary McAuliffe, who chairs the leading education committee.
Good for you, Rosemary.
These bill are driven by the popular narrative that bad schools are caused by bad teachers, and bad teachers are nearly impossible to fire because of their powerful unions and because they have "tenure."
If that's true, then there should be data to support it, right?
But there isn't.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average school district in 2007-2008 had 211.4 teachers. Of those 211.4 teachers, 4.4 of them were fired for poor performance. That's about two percent. I challenge you to find another profession with a higher termination rate.
But here's the weird thing: of those teachers who got fired, most of them were "protected by tenure." That's right; the average district fired 4.4 teachers. Three of them were tenured, and 1.4 of them weren't.
But isn't it impossible to fire tenured teachers? Apparently not. According to the standardized data, it seems easier than firing untenured teachers; 1.4 compared to 0.7. Twice as easy. And according to Perry Zirkel, professor of education and law at Lehigh University, when districts and teacher unions go to court to settle a termination issue, the districts win by a ratio of three to one. Not only is it possible to fire bad teachers who have tenure, but it happens quite often.
So on the one hand, we have the press and the president and Davis Guggenheim telling us that the problem with American education is bad teachers and their unwavering protection by the NEA and AFT.
And on the other hand, we have data that tells us differently. The data contradicts the popular narrative.
The irony, of course, is that so-called "education reformers" want more data used more often. They want the kids with bad data held back. They want the schools with bad data shut down. They want teachers of kids with good data paid more.
But more than anything, they want teachers of kids with bad data fired.
And they're frustrated by the fact that teachers and their unions disagree with them. So they perpetuate this myth that teachers are nearly impossible to fire.
Which simply isn't true.
And the last thing our state lawmakers should be doing right now is passing unnecessary legislation based on a myth.
Teacher or Parent?
By Kristin
Like many other Washington parents, in the fall I checked my daughter's MAP scores. The test, the Measurement of Academic Progress, is Washington's best bet for measuring teacher impact because it's given in the fall, the winter, and the spring.
At least, a few weeks ago I thought it was the best tool. Now I'm not so sure.
Reading
By Mark
- A while back I posted a short piece inspired by my revelation to my freshmen that Jersey Shore was in fact not real. (I was nearly burned at the stake for my heresy…luckily they forgot quickly.)
- A colleague of mine shared with me this article from Educational Leadership (ASCD), provocatively titled "Too Dumb for Complex Texts?" which points out evidence that students lack the skills (and patience) to work through difficult texts, and are thus scoring more poorly on college entrance exams and undergraduate coursework.
- And then there's the NPR piece about the "Incredible Shrinking Sound Bite" (which I always thought was spelled "byte," go figure) that points out the amazing lengths, or shorts, that statements which function as "news" have achieved…thus reducing communication about highly complex issues to what amounts to less than nine seconds of spoken words, or approximately the length of a twitter post if it were spoken aloud.
Together, these three are speaking to me, more loudly than ever, that we need to change our approaches to literacy instruction in public schools–especially at the secondary level if not earlier. The first, my ruminations about "reality" and the Jersey Shore, have to do with increasing kids' literacy about how messages are constructed. The latter two though suggest that perhaps the media has conditioned people to not do precisely the thinking I want my students to do about the Jersey Shore.
So here's the big question: what does it mean to teach someone how to read?
Evaluation is changing
by Brian
After I read Tom's pungent post about the bill that proposes to change Reduction in Force criteria from seniority to evaluation, I spent Friday at a workshop sponsored by ESD 114 and WEA-Olympic Uniserv thinking about how to create the new evaluation system (mandated by last year's SB 6696 and to be in place statewide by 2013-2014) that will put a number to an evaluation. Tom's post sparked a lively debate, but to debate seniority vs. effectiveness we first have to agree that we could even come up with a number from a teacher's evaluation. That is a huge assumption that requires some critical thinking. And we have to think about what we want the purpose of an evaluation system to be. If we want the system to promote growth, instead of just verifying compliance with state law, will applying numbers help?
Not Happy = Change
Grading Parents?
By Mark
I doubt this will ever fly, but it sure makes for good staff lunchroom conversation.
A CNN.com article reported that Florida State Rep. Kelli Stargel has presented a bill wherein "public school teachers would be required to grade the parents of students in kindergarten through the third grade." The three grading criteria:
• A child should be at school on time, prepared to learn after a good night's sleep, and have eaten a meal.
• A child should have the homework done and prepared for examinations.
• There should be regular communication between the parent and teacher.
At first I thought it was a joke, and now I think that this bill is more a social statement than an actual attempt at creating the law.
What's your take? Below is the video that accompanied the article, sorry about the commercials which precede it.
SB 5399
By Tom
There's an economic principle known as zero-sum. It's when two parties compete and one party's gains are exactly equal to the opponent's losses. Tug-of-war is a zero-sum game. So is a teeter-totter. Business works the same way. There's only so much market, say, for vacuum cleaners. If I sell vacuums to 30 households, the other salesman has effectively lost out on those thirty sales. My gains, minus his losses, equals zero. Thus, zero sum.
But while zero-sum theory might explain sports, business and everything else grounded in competition, it does little to describe what happens in schools.
Or what should happen.
Consider SB 5399, a ridiculous piece of legislation that the Washington State Senate is currently debating. It's an attempt to use future teacher layoffs as an opportunity to get rid of bad teachers, regardless of seniority.
The idea is to base layoffs on "evaluation scores." Never mind the fact that most districts, including mine, don't have numerical, four-tier evaluation systems in place, and won't be required to for another three years. And never mind the fact that even when they do, a four-tier scale uses ordinal variables, not interval variables. SB 5399 bases its layoff system on a scheme by which a teacher's evaluations are averaged and compared with that of other teachers. I'm no statistician, but I do know that you can't average ordinal integers.
But never mind all that. My real gripe with SB 5399 is that it will end up pitting teacher against teacher. It will turn teaching into a zero-sum game. Why would I have any interest in helping the new teacher down the hall when two years from now only one of us will have a job? Why would I want to collaborate with the very "colleagues" with whom I'm competing? If my gains are my teaching partner's losses, why would I want her to teach well? Why would I want her students to learn?
I wouldn't. I've got a kid in my house who'll be ready for college in four years. He has a younger brother who needs braces. Under SB 5399 I would have no reason to help anyone else become a better teacher; and every reason not to. I love teaching, and I think I'm pretty good at it, but I also need teaching. Frankly, I have no other skill-set. My family depends on my job. Pit me against my colleagues and I'll fight like hell to win. Which also means that I'll fight like hell to make sure my colleagues lose. Along with their students.
I'm all for getting rid of bad teachers. The fact that they make the rest of us look bad is immaterial compared to the crime they commit day in and day out in their ill-deserved classrooms.
But getting rid of bad teachers by making the rest of us compete with one another will ultimately do far more harm to more students than every bad teacher we'll ever have.
Teaching is not a business. It's not a game. It's a collaborative endeavor in which the whole school is far more valuable than the sum of all the classrooms. Good schools are places where teachers work effectively in their classrooms. Great schools are places where good teachers spend countless hours planning, analyzing and reflecting together, and where they work effectively throughout the whole school.
Good teachers have an impact on their own students. But great teachers have an impact on the whole school.
SB 5399 might get rid of the bad teachers.
But it will also get rid of the great teachers.
Substitutes
By Mark
I have a short list of people who I feel comfortable turning my classroom over to. Yes, I'm a bit of a control freak. People close to me would say that it is a manifestation of a form of professional arrogance, as if only a select few people have the capacity to fill these size 13s. Maybe there's a touch of that, but I like to think that it has more to do with the fact that I believe every minute of time I can offer my students is critical; so sacred that I lament any potentially lost minutes of instruction or practice.
So when I do have to be out of the classroom–which with three small kids at home (germ-factories) and a handful of teacher-leader obligations, tends to be more often than I'd like–there is no greater relief than seeing the names of a certain few substitute teachers appear next to my room key on the sub table in the main office.
The job of a substitute teacher is harder, I think, than the job of a regular contract teacher.