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.
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.
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.
By Mark
I was flipping through an old notebook of mine and found a doodle I had drawn during a summer inservice after my very first year of teaching. Since the original had real people's names on it, I recreated that doodle here (click on it to see the text). As soon as I saw it in that notebook, I instantly remembered everything about the situation which prompted that drawing.
When I drew that, I was thinking of one kid in particular for whom I had attended several staffing meetings the previous year. At nearly all of these meetings were all the kid's teachers, her mom, an administrator, and a counselor. The child's social worker and parole officer had also been in touch with some of us. We were all strategizing with the kid about how she could be more successful in school.
What are your goals? Where do you see yourself after high school? What do you want in life to be happy?
by Brian
On Monday I’m going to Olympia as a math teacher and a member of the Washington Education Association to try to educate the Senate Education Committee about End of Course math exams. Again. I went to Olympia last year too, and urged them to support a bill delaying the use of the End of Course math exams as a graduation requirement. That bill died in committee, and we started this school year knowing that our students would have to take the tests, but not knowing what the tests would be like because the tests hadn’t been written. They still haven’t.
By Tom
As bad as things are in Washington – and they're bad – it could be worse. We could have this guy in our state legislature. Mark Christensen, a state senator in Nebraska, introduced a bill to allow schools workers to carry concealed weapons on the job.
Can you imagine?
In an apparent response to the recent shooting in Omaha, this guy actually wants to have teachers walking around with guns in their pockets.
But first they would need professional development.
"I don't think you can simply just hand out guns like you do keys," he said. There certainly would have to be a great amount of training, a great amount of responsibility. What's the standard of care for having a gun for an employee in the district?" he asked.
"You have to be trained to get a concealed carry permit," explained Christensen. "You take a class, you go through the shooting, the training and learn about the responsibility of the gun. So that's why it's another great thing, it is a trained individual."
Another great thing?
He continues:
"I've never seen a gun escalate a situation. Guns don't kill people, people do."
So the next time you're sitting through a literacy workshop, learning about the intricacies of consonant digraphs, just think: you could be taking target practice, getting ready to de-escalate a situation.
Frankly, I can't imagine a gun not escalating a situation.
This guy clearly has no idea what we do, who we are and why we teach. Every teacher I know or have ever known, the good and the bad, the young or old, every teacher – every single teacher – would quit immediately if they were asked to take a gun to work.
And thank God.
By Kristin
Think you could find a way to cut $4.6 billion from Washington State's budget? The League of Education Voters has a nifty interactive calculator that will put you in the power seat.
To fool around and see where you would save (or earn) the state $4.6 billion, click here.
I did it, and managed to cut nothing from early learning. I managed to save 4.6 billion dollars without making state employees take a 3% salary decrease. I did it without taking away food stamps, health care for poor children, or increasing class size.
I did cut the National Board Bonus, because I don't think times like these merit bonuses, and I think those who have claimed to be leaders need to step up and take a hit. I did suspend the teacher COLA, for about the same reason, but I kept our annual experience increase. I'd rather give up a bonus and a COLA than have class size go up, wouldn't you?
And I made up the most money by doing things like increasing ferry rates, taxing cigarettes, and ending the sales tax exclusion on business services and consumer services. Call me crazy, but I think cosmetic surgery should include sales tax.
To see my budget, you can click here.
I can't figure out why Gregoire – someone who really does value education – would take such a big bite out of programs that help kids and won't increase tax on things that grownups can choose to do without. Can you?
by Brian
I recently read an article that actually defends the U.S. education system rather than attacks it (a pleasant change). Vivek Wadhwa says: U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead. It's a good read, but what really caught my interest was a link he had to another article: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior by Amy Chua.
There is a lot of concern about achievement gaps for many groups of students, but one demographic that no one is worried about is Asian-American kids. They do well. Amy Chua says that for Chinese children it's not some genetic advantage, or good schools and teachers; it's due to Chinese mothers like her. As I read her description of some of her expectations and tactics, I was taken aback. She effectively dismisses most of what I believe to be good parenting. But in this era of high stakes testing, maybe she's right.
By Tom
I was standing in the faculty room one morning, waiting for the coffee to brew. Two colleagues were talking about principals they’d worked with, and one of them said to me, “Tom, you would be a great principal. I would love to work in your school.”
She should have waited until I had some of that coffee. I would have been a lot less blunt. “Really? because the first thing I’d do would be to fire you.”
Choosing to believe that I was speaking facetiously, she laughed nervously and hurried off.
(Fun fact: the word facetiously has every vowel, in order, including Y!)
Actually, I wasn’t kidding. If I really was a principal and she really was on my faculty, I really would fire her. She was a bad teacher. Ineffective. Weak.
But it would have been difficult.