Category Archives: Teachers

My Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow is breaking a story about a serious disagreement in collective bargaining negotiations in Colorado’s largest school district: “Jeffco Teachers Union Calls for Impasse over Pay Dispute”. Check it out.

I’ve told you before about Westminster School District’s program to move from seat time to standards — re-thinking the whole traditional grade system that has dominated American education for decades — and the Doogie Howser-like potential such a system could offer me. Well, earlier this week, Rebecca Jones at Ed News Colorado chronicled the fact that the moment of truth has arrived for Westminster (aka Adams 50): It’s the last day of the 2008-09 school year in the district. The last day of life as most students and teachers there have always known it. The last day that categories like “third grade” or “sixth grade” – or A or B+ or C- — will exist in most of Westminster. The district is scrapping traditional notions of grade level and doing away with letter grades. Students will instead progress through academic levels 1-10 based on their mastery of subjects, not on the length of time they’ve been in school. This concept, known as standards-based education, has been tried in individual schools and in some small districts in Alaska, but never before in a large, urban district such as Westminster. The bold step is bringing national attention to the district.

It seems the local teachers union in Hartford, Connecticut, resents outside experts from the National Council on Teacher Quality looking at the effect their collective bargaining contract has on school performance and student learning. One issue in particular made me chuckle. From the Hartford Courant: [Hartford Federation of Teachers president Andrea] Johnson also disliked the recommendation that Hartford teachers be given fewer sick days. According to the report, many large districts and most business-sector jobs have an average of 10 sick days a year, while a Hartford teacher gets 20. On average, Hartford teachers use 11 of the 20 sick days each year, according to the report. If all the allotted sick and personal time (an additional five days) was taken, teachers would miss 14 percent of the school year, the report says. Johnson said that working with children every day requires more sick time because teachers are more susceptible to catching illnesses from the students and also passing along an illness to a room full of children. *Cough, cough.*

It isn’t easy for me to say this, and many of my fellow kids may vote me out as a Benedict Arnold, but Colorado teacher Kathy Kullback has a good point: Maybe there’s something to the year-round school idea. What? No more summer vacation, you argue? Ms. Kullback writes: As a special educator, I tried to sign up special education students with generalized learning disabilities reading below grade level for summer school, but soon learned that the only special education students who take an extended year are cognitively disabled. I was advised that I not extend my students’ school year because the esteem issues associated with students of average cognitive ability attending summer school with students with cognitive disabilities is too severe. Then why not offer different classes for the learning disabled student? If year round classes are good for cognitively disabled students, it seems to me that year round classes would give regular education students that needed boost of continuity, and aid in their achieving academic success. It just makes sense. Year-round school usually means more overall days in the classroom. But just because you give up the long summer vacation doesn’t mean you’re in school every week of […]

Detroit Public Schools is far from the model of educational success. In fact, it’s one of the worst-performing school systems in the country. For example, look no further than the abysmally low graduation rates. One of the problems that could be addressed would be the tremendous difficulty to remove ineffective classroom teachers. It is so difficult and costly to do that on the occasions when Detroit (and the problem isn’t isolated there by any stretch of the imagination) actually tries to remove poor performers, they have to resort to offering settlements worth many months of pay and promises not to reveal the reason for their terminated employment. That’s for teachers who show extensive evidence of not being cut out for the job — or in some cases, even worse. As the Education Action Group has uncovered (PDF), though, there is one sure way to ensure the removal of a Detroit Public Schools instructor. From a local union official’s own mouth, fire him or her for not paying union dues or fees:

I’m 5 years old. Generally speaking, I like puppets and think they’re pretty cool. Recently learning that Kermit the Frog himself was a puppet (or muppet, you know what I mean) only increased my respect for him. But when heavily-funded teachers unions use other groups as puppets to oppose education reforms like choice and accountability — reforms that help kids like me, but especially kids in more dire straits — that’s a different story. Case #1: Thanks to the hard work of the Education Intelligence Agency’s intrepid Mike Antonucci, we learn that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to the group Republicans Opposing Voucher Efforts (ROVE). The company that registered the ROVE website is run by a former high-level National Education Association (NEA) staffer. As Greg Forster notes, it “sure looks a whole lot like it has the NEA’s arm sticking out the bottom”.

Have you ever tried to pound a square peg into a round hole (or vice versa)? How about after that doesn’t work a couple times, you go out and buy 100 of the same square pegs to keep trying what already failed? It makes about as much sense as most systems we have today for training, developing, paying, and retaining teachers. Sure, we’ve seen some progress with performance pay programs — Colorado has produced some leading examples — but the old-fashioned salary schedule still persists. Pay teachers based on seniority and academic credentials. Never mind, as the Denver Post‘s Jeremy Meyer observes from Urban Institute education director Jane Hannaway (with supporting evidence compiled here), that teachers overwhelmingly improve during the first four years of their career and then just stop: “It’s one of our very consistent findings,” said Hannaway, presenter last week at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in San Diego, citing at least two recent studies of teacher effectiveness. “The reason of course is not clear, but it’s in study after study,” she said. “Teachers do get better (in the beginning). If you look at the same teacher at Year One, they look a lot better at […]

Today is a busy day: Lots of playing outside to do … I’m going to the zoo! So instead of a longer post, I’m just going to point you to what my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow wrote yesterday about Washington DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and “collaboration”: Maybe some think it would be nice that Rhee “collaborated” more with union officials — or career bureaucrats, for that matter. But it certainly isn’t necessary, and may even be counterproductive. Yes, the situation is complicated by politics. Not including the Washington Teachers Union at the table may end up unleashing various obstructions from an entrenched group. In his piece, Mr. Ben takes on two very different comments about Michelle Rhee’s recent visit to Denver — the one I was so sad to have missed. Have I mentioned how much I really like Rhee? Maybe she’ll play Legos with me sometime… or come to the zoo and look at the tigers with me – I love the Tigers!

The new MetLife Survey of the American Teacher finds that more teachers today seem to have a bright outlook on their jobs than 25 years ago: The survey reveals that a majority of today’s teachers (62%) are very satisfied with their careers, compared to 40% in 1984. Two-thirds (67%) of teachers think that the training and preparation teachers receive does a good job of preparing them for the classroom, compared to 46% in 1984. A lot of the commenters on Joanne Jacobs’ posting are grousing that the results are bogus, since they don’t jibe with their own personal professional discontent. Maybe they have a point, maybe not: I read more ad hominem attack than substantive critique of the survey’s methodology. Since we’re trafficking in the world of anecdotes, let me add that my own kindergarten teacher seems to be pretty happy with her job. Of course, I’m not allowed into the teachers’ lounge, so my perception could be a complete illusion. And a lot more can be learned about educators’ views on the profession by perusing the entire survey. It tackles a lot of questions, but one that I’d really be curious to see answered: How satisfied are educators with […]

Jay Greene’s blog has a humorous – but sad – story of how New York City teachers union operatives were caught red-handed passing out cue cards (including one with a misspelled word) to City Council members. Because we really need school boards and other policy makers to do the thoughtless bidding of adult interest groups rather than stand up for the interests of children and taxpaying citizens, right? I’m obviously being sarcastic there. But seeing that funny post made me wonder whether cue cards recently may have been passed out at the Colorado State Capitol: What cue cards were given to legislative opponents who slapped down school choice twice in the same day? Who wrote the script for the lawmaker who needed help from Grover to distinguish public from private (another legislator raised the same question on another bill at another hearing)? Who authored the cue cards for the education committee chair to ignore critical findings about school employee pensions so he could grandstand with frivolous attacks? What lobbying interest group told the same committee chair to thwart the will of the people and double-super kill school spending transparency? Or perhaps these lawmakers came up with these bad, silly, arrogant, […]