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Like no other profession

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Like no other profession

Imagine an experienced surgeon in the middle of a delicate six-hour procedure where the surgeon responds to a series of unexpected emergencies being evaluated by a computer based on data gathered from a fifteen-minute snapshot visit by a general practitioner who has never performed an operation.

Imagine evaluating a baseball player who goes three for four with a couple of home runs and five or six runs batted in based on the one time during the game when he struck out badly.

Imagine a driver with a clean record for thirty years who has his or her license suspended because a car they owned was photographed going through a red light, when perhaps there was an emergency, perhaps he or she was not even driving the car, or perhaps there was a mechanical glitch with the light, camera, or computer.

Now imagine a teacher who adjusts instruction because of important questions introduced by students who is told the lesson is unsatisfactory because it did not follow the prescribed scripted lesson plan and because during the fifteen minutes the observer was in the room they failed to see what they were looking for but what might have actually happened before they arrived or after they left.

“Right to Work” a Creatively Worded Catchphrase

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Social Studies teacher William Wyss writes, via the OEA blog

Whenever I hear phrases such as “right to work’ repeated loudly and frequently, I know that organizations are trying to convince me to react rather than think. Who doesn’t want the right to work? It appears to logically flow from Thomas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” concept. However, the use of other catchphrases has made me very skeptical.

Shortly after President George H. W. Bush’s famous “Read My Lips, No New Taxes” pledge during the 1988 campaign, his administration unveiled a wide range of “revenue enhancements” as a method to obscure the implementation of new taxes. From the automobile marketing arena, I have often marveled at the transformation of “used cars” to “pre-owned cars.” This creative wording has swept the industry to the point that my students stare at me strangely when I refer to “used car salesmen.”

“Right to Work,” I think, is the same kind of sugarcoated misnomer for policies intended to dismantle unions, effectually giving workers nothing more than the right to workplace conditions once referred to as wage-slavery.

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Wall St: Charter schools are hurting urban public schools

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Few states have seen an explosion of charter school growth as rapid as Ohio. Now this growth is coming with a warning from Moody's, one of the financial industry's leading risk analysts, that it will damage traditional school district finances.

The dramatic rise in charter school enrollments over the past decade is likely to create negative credit pressure on school districts in economically weak urban areas, says Moody's Investors Service in a new report. Charter schools tend to proliferate in areas where school districts already show a degree of underlying economic and demographic stress, says Moody's in the report "Charter Schools Pose Growing Risks for Urban Public Schools."

"While the vast majority of traditional public districts are managing through the rise of charter schools without a negative credit impact, a small but growing number face financial stress due to the movement of students to charters," says Michael D'Arcy, one of two authors of the report.

Charter schools can pull students and revenues away from districts faster than the districts can reduce their costs, says Moody's. As some of these districts trim costs to balance out declining revenues, cuts in programs and services will further drive students to seek alternative institutions including charter schools.

Many older, urban areas that have experienced population and tax base losses, creating stress for their local school districts, have also been areas where charter schools have proliferated, says Moody's. Among the cities where over a fifth of the students are enrolled in charter schools are Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Nationwide about one in 20 students is in a charter school.

One of the four risk factors Moody's identifies as making a school district vulnerable to charter school growth is that the school district is already financially pressured and grappling with weak demographics.

A second factor is having a limited ability to adjust operations in response to a loss of enrolment to charter schools.

"Shifts in student enrollment from district schools to charters, while resulting in a transfer of a portion of district revenues to charter schools, do not typically result in a full shift of operating costs away from district public schools," says Moody's Tiphany Lee-Allen, the Moody's Associate Analyst who co-authored the report. "Districts may face institutional barriers to cutting staff levels, capital footprints and benefit costs over the short term given the intricacies of collective bargaining contracts - leaving them with underutilized buildings and ongoing growth in personnel costs."

A third risk factor for a school district is being in a state with a statutory framework promoting a high degree of educational choice and has a relatively liberal approval process for new charters and few limits on their growth, as well as generous funding.

For example in Michigan, the statutory framework emphasizes educational choice, and there are multiple charter authorizers to help promote charter school growth. In Michigan, Detroit Public Schools (B2 negative), Clintondale Community Schools (Ba3 negative), Mount Clemens Community School District (Ba3 negative) and Ypsilanti School District (Ba3) have all experienced significant fiscal strain related to charter enrollment growth, which has also been a contributing factor to their speculative grade status.

A final risk factor is when a school district is not integrated into a healthier local government, as such integration can lead to greater diversity in revenues and more flexibility in balance sheets, positioning the district to better handle operating and financial changes.

Testing More, Teaching Less

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A new study titled "Testing More, Teaching Less" has found some not too surprising results, America’s obsession with student testing is costings huge sums of money and causing significant lost instructional time.

Based on a detailed grade-by-grade analysis of the testing calendars for two mid-size urban school districts, and the applied research from other studies of state mandated testing, our study found that the time students spend taking tests ranged from 20 to 50 hours per year in heavily tested grades. In addition, students can spend 60 to more than 110 hours per year in test prep in high-stakes testing grades. Including the cost of lost instructional time (at $6.15 per hour, equivalent to the per-student cost of adding one hour to the school day), the estimated annual testing cost per pupil ranged from $700 to more than $1,000 per pupil in several grades that had the most testing. If testing were abandoned altogether, one school district in this study could add from 20 to 40 minutes of instruction to each school day for most grades. The other school district would be able to add almost an entire class period to the school day for grades 6-11. Additionally, in most grades, more than $100 per test-taker could be reallocated to purchase instructional programs, technology or to buy better tests. Cutting testing time and costs in half still would yield significant gains to the instructional day, and free up enough dollars in the budget that could fund tests that are better aligned to the standards and produce useful information for teachers, students and parents

Based on a detailed grade-by-grade analysis of the direct costs and the time costs of testing in the two school districts’ assessment inventories, our study found:


  • Pervasive testing.

    • One of the districts in our study had 14 different assessments given to all students at least once a year in at least one grade. Some assessments are administered for several subjects multiple times a year resulting in 34 different test administrations. The other district’s testing inventory had 12 different assessments but 47 separate administrations over the course of the year.

  • Test-taking time.

    • Students in one district in grades 3-10 spent approximately 15 hours or more per year (about three full school days) taking state-mandated tests, interim/bench- marking tests and other district academic assessments. Students in the other district in grades 6-11 devoted up to 55 hours per year to taking tests (about two full weeks of the school year).

  • Time for administrative tasks with students.

    • This includes giving directions, passing out test booklets and answer sheets, reading directions on the computer, etc., before and after each testing session. These administrative tasks with students took more than five hours annually— one full school day—in one of the districts. In the other district, administrative tasks with students used up more than 10 hours of the school year—two full school days—in the most highly tested grades.

  • Direct budgetary costs.

    • Several national studies show that the direct cost of purchasing, licensing and scoring state-mandated tests is around $25 per test-taker, and the annual cost of interim/benchmark testing is about $20 per test-taker. But when considering the cost of all the tests in a school district’s inventory, the direct budgetary costs of the district testing program ranged from $50 per test-taker in one district to over $100 per test-taker in the other for grades 2-11. The direct budgetary cost of state testing represents less than 1 percent of K-12 per-pupil education spending. Nationally, education spending averages about $11,000 per pupil and reaches $20,000 per pupil in the highest-spending states.

  • Logistics and administrative costs.

    • Estimated at $2 per student per hour of testing (up to $80 per year for students in several grades in one district), these are costs associated with man- aging pallets of testing boxes; verifying and affixing data labels to test booklets, which could include three versions of the test at each grade level; and placing testing materials in secure locations before and after each round of testing to prevent cheating. After testing is completed, each school has to collect booklets, pack them and ship them off for scoring.

  • Test preparation time.

    • The detailed researched-based rubric narrowly defined “test preparation” to include giving practice tests and teaching test-taking strategies, but does not count review, reteaching or tutoring. Students in grades 3-8 in one district spent at least 80 hours per year (approximately 16 full school days) preparing for state-mandated tests, the associated interim/benchmarking tests and all of the other district assessments. In the other district, students in grades 6-11 devoted 100 hours or more per year on test prep (approximately one full month of the school year).

  • The cost of testing and lost instructional time.

    • If school districts lengthen the school day or the school year to regain the instructional time lost to testing, the direct budget costs of testing are far from inconsequential. Adding one hour to the school day costs about $6.15 per student. In one district, the annual cost of testing per pupil in grades 3-8, including the cost of lost instructional time, was about $700—approximately 7 percent of per-pupil expenditures in the typical state. In the other district, the cost of testing in grades 6-11 exceeded $1,100 per student—about 11 percent of per-pupil expenditures in the typical state.

  • Alternate uses of testing time and costs.

    • Redirecting time and money devoted to testing to other uses would provide a lot more time for instruction—possibly including partial restoration of art, music and PE programs, during the existing school day. Cutting test prep and testing time in half could still restore significant minutes for instruction and would free up funding that could be used to purchase better tests, such as the Common Core assessments.

Teachers, Unions and other Thoughts

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via teacher Rachel

[...]here are my responses to the arguments put forth about why Teachers' Unions have to go --

The Union protects bad workers: As a teacher and union member, I DON’T want “Bad” teachers as my colleagues. People love to throw this phrase around. But there doesn’t seem to be any agreement at all on “Bad Teacher.” A teacher who is abusive, on drugs, or otherwise blatantly unprofessional I’m sure we can all agree upon would qualify. I’ve never met such a teacher. I’m sure they exist, and if my union were to protect one, and keep that person in the classroom, then that is a horrible breach of trust. Let us all shake hands and agree on this one, shall we?

But what about the more grey areas – the teacher who works to contract, comes in and leaves on time and doesn’t seem to do any work outside the classroom either. I’ve never met this teacher, either, but I’m sure they exist. Is this person a “Bad Teacher?”

The teacher who is burnt out – this teacher I think I’ve met, but mostly when I was a student and knew everything in the world. Is this person truly worse than the first-year teacher who would replace him? First-year teachers are universally pretty lousy. They make up for it, usually, with energy and verve and excitement, but they’re still pretty lousy. I certainly was. So should all first-year teachers just be fired? And replaced with….?

I am actually all FOR helping poor teachers improve or helping them out the door if they choose not to improve. What I'm NOT FOR is someone with no teaching experience whatsoever trying to determine which teacher is which based on a single test score. Sorta like judging a Seurat based on the quality of a single dot.

There are too many unproductive and unnecessary workers: Just how many students do you think can be crammed into a classroom and still have it be productive? Unions prevent schools from saving money by just upping the classroom size to completely unmanageable levels. Anybody who thinks that it’s easy teaching 30 children with a wide range of abilities and talents, disabilities, and behavioral problems has NEVER BEEN A TEACHER. If you haven’t been there, and don’t know what it is like, firsthand, then you do not get to say what is do-able and what is not. This type of thinking is typical of someone who is applying a business model to something that is NOT a business. Our raw materials are children. We take all comers. We cannot send back the ones that aren’t up to standard like you can in business. We have our raw materials for 7 hours out of the day, then we return them to their homes or other environments over which we have no control. For a more fleshed out example, google "the blueberry story." In states with no unions and really lousy pay and working conditions, they have had to reduce the requirements for being a teacher. In some cases, there is no requirement for certification or training as a teacher at all. They can't find people willing to make that kind of educational investment for the return the district is willing to pay. Usually there is a requirement for having a college degree, but if things are bad enough, I'm sure that's been waived, too. Do you really, truly believe that someone with no teacher training at all is going to be better than a certificated teachers? This is not a method for RAISING the quality of education in America. The states that ban teacher unions are the ones at the very BOTTOM of the state rankings. They are embarrassingly bad. Unions protect teachers and they protect the quality of education, too.

Public Schools should be privatized: And with that, the law requiring that children from ages 5 – 18 attend school would naturally be abolished, because a government should not be allowed to compel a citizen to pay for a service he or she may not want, correct? And if they can compel it, then what about those who can't afford it? A tiered system? Separate-but-equal schools for those with money and those without? I think the end result of that is obvious to pretty much anyone: those with an extra 8k a year, per child, would send their child to school. The rest would try to care for them at home and provide what education they could. Or parents just let the kids run wild while they (the parents) were off trying to make a living. A “government-subsidy” method (as was suggested) would be enormously cumbersome and probably unfathomable to someone with a poor education, or who spoke/read English as a second language, or, in general, was impoverished. The gap between the haves and have-nots would be enormous. And without an educated populace, the country would suffer tremendously. I have been in a country where they do not bother to educate a large section of the population. Squalor is too nice a word to describe their conditions. I, for one, do not want to condemn anyone to that sort of life. Public education can prevent it. And that doesn't even begin to address the needs of those kids who fall outside the "typical" range. The kids who need speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, a full - time aide, or a classroom where there are only four other children and three adults at all times. Where would those kids go? Right now, the cost of caring and educating them to the best of their and our ability is spread out over all of society. It has to be. It's enormously expensive. What will happen when the burden falls solely on the parents of those children? Will we head back to the dark ages where the mentally different were chained in basements and backyards because no one could afford to do any better? Private schools do not have to take these children. Public schools do. Privatizing would leave the very least among us with nowhere to go. Having a child with a severe disability would ensure that you would be impoverished for as long as your child lived. Most Americans living now do not recall the utter inhumanity of how people with disabilities were treated 100 years ago. Privatizing would all but ensure a return to that. By spreading out the cost of educating the all the young among all people and businesses, society as a whole benefits. But we have become a society that is so short term in its thinking that we have lost sight of that. We can only see that "x dollars a year are going towards property taxes and I don't even have a kid in school yet!" or "I don't have a kid at all!" Private schools run at least 6k to over 20K a year. My property taxes are cheap by comparison. And even if I didn't have children, I need a society with an educated population to work in it, live in it, be part of my society's economy. How many businesses really want to hire employees who can't read? Can't write? Can't use a computer? Can't add? Can't get along with others? Would you hire someone with no education, or want to pay for remedial training? That's that taxes pay for, not just for your own personal child to go to school.

Teachers should have “Merit Pay”: This has been tried a few times, and the result is – no effect on test scores. None. Zip. Zero. But then, test scores are a piss-poor measure of a teacher. Even if you take Child A, test him and test him again with a similar test one year later and compare that to how he did the previous year it’s STILL a piss-poor measure. Why? Because kids do not grow evenly and even if they did, paper-pencil test don’t accurately judge what a child can do or understand. Or what about the gifted kid who took the test last year, got a 99th%ile score on it and next year, missed one question and got the 98th%ile instead. He went down a point! Does that mean the teacher is a failure? Not hardly. It means he maxed out the test BOTH years, bonked his head on the test ceiling and the test makers haven’t got the faintest idea of what he can do. Or what about the kid who got a new baby brother 10 days before the test and is being woken up 4 times a night now by a colickly newborn? What about the kids whose parents got divorced this year, or lost their jobs, or moved or 1000 other things – should we penalize the teacher for a child’s lousy life situation? Now, one could argue that we should take the information, over several years, in aggregate, and we should see some trends. Like Teacher X always has kids that perform worse than Teacher Y who teaches the same things at the same grade level. If that’s the case, then maybe Teacher X needs support, mentoring, professional development and assistance to improve his teaching skills. There ARE districts that have tried this, and used other teachers, who know and understand teaching, as part of a team to evaluate teachers’ performance and recommend for rehire or not. It’s done with respect and support and these pilot programs may work, though the jury is still out, to my knowledge. Pay, as far as I am aware, isn’t a part of it. The whole “merit pay system” has such a nice ring to it. But all those who use it haven’t the faintest idea of how to go about devising it. So unless you have something tested, accurate, valid and reliable to use, then quit saying it’s the way to go. I have had experience working in the private sector, albeit briefly, and one thing I know is that salaries are kept 100% private. They are highly privileged information. When something gets out about how much person X is paid versus person Y, intense anger/rage/jealousy/annoyance/dissatisfaction ensues. Teacher salaries are public. They have to be. A “merit pay” system as devised by those who know only the business world would inevitably result in teachers being demoralized, angry, and outraged at one another. That’s hardly going to result in improved teaching.

If you have not had experience in the world of teaching, only in business, then you need to either spend significant time in a classroom before making your judgments and pronouncements, or you need to SHUT UP.

Does StudentsFirst deserve a seat at the policy table?

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It's a great question, and a long list

If an outside advocacy organization

but is more than willing to lavish large contributions around so that it floods local school board elections with unprecedented monies and is the biggest contributor to state legislative races, do you think it deserves a seat at the policymaking table?

Read more at Dangerously Irrelevant.