This'll Help!

At least they'll have jobless benefits through Christmas, but after that....oy.

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The AFL-CIO-SEIU-NEA?

Could be something, could be nothing, but it's certainly worth watching. From a New York Time article on how the AFL-CIO is looking to heal from its recent schism and become one big labor union again:

One somewhat surprising attendee was Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, which, with 3.2 million members, is the nation’s largest labor union, but has traditionally remained outside any larger labor federations.

A couple of years ago the Seattle EA affiliated with the AFL-CIO, though I'm not sure that much ever came of that alliance. If any of the Seattle teachers out there have thoughts, I'd love to read them.

Oh, and Eduwonk beat me to this.

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The Schoolyard Bully

From the tone of this article, you'd have to think it's the NEA and the AFT.

A piece from the article that doesn't work:

Or consider performance-based pay. Forty percent of teachers leave the classroom within their first five years on the job — in some measure because they don’t stand to gain the same performance-based pay raises available to their private-sector counterparts. Merit pay would help public schools retain good teachers by paying them more.

Let's note first that "in some measure" is a wonderfully inexact phrase; it could be one teacher, it could be all of them. Let's note too that as long as teaching is a government function there's a built-in incentive to keep costs vis-a-vis payroll down, so this idea that there's an untapped funding source out there just waiting to go to teachers is a figment of the imagination.

I'm taking a school law class now taught by a former superintendent who now does a ton of work for school districts locally as a hearing officer, investigator, and superintendent search consultant. He looked kindly on the proposed merit pay plan out of Idaho that would have given teachers raises of about $3,000 in return for giving up tenure; if you extrapolate that same number into Washington, with 80,000 teachers, you'd be looking at a cost of $240,000,000. It's not doable.

I think that if you do it right merit pay could work, under the perfect conditions and appropriate reasons. We can't pretend, though, that merit pay is a way to solve the salary gap, and it has to be acknowledged that (as with most things in life) it's impossible to do in a completely fair manner.

I do enjoy the discussion, though.

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The Catch-All

It's the reason for whatever happened. In WWII the catch-all for any problem with an airplane was gremlins, as brilliantly shown in Roald Dahl's book. For those on the left the catch-all the past few years has been our president; more positively, those on the right would tell you all good things came from Reagan.

Go far enough to the right, though, and it seems that the catch-all for all that is wrong with the world is evolution.

The latest Texas tempest is another brouhaha over evolution vs. creationism, as seen in an article in the December 19th New York Times. The lede alone is enough to raise eyebrows:

A Texas higher education panel has recommended allowing a Bible-based group called the Institute for Creation Research to offer online master’s degrees in science education.

The action comes weeks after the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer, lost her job after superiors accused her of displaying bias against creationism and failing to be “neutral” over the teaching of evolution.

And farther down the page, things get really, really weird. Regarding the institute:

It also says “the harmful consequences of evolutionary thinking on families and society (abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, homosexuality and many others) are evident all around us.”

I'll almost grant the link between evolution and abortion, especially if you think about it in terms of the more disgusting elements of eugenics. But drug use, promiscuity, and homosexuality? That's a terrible argument from any perspective, and the thought that anyone could genuinely believe that is troubling.

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Screw you, Ravitch!

The New York Times has an article today about how teachers are using comics in the classroom to get kids to engage with books. This is something that I do with my first graders, because reading at this age is 90% about getting them interested. They may not like Little Bear, or Margaret Hillert, or even Junie B., so if it's Batman, Spiderman, and The Haunted Tank that get them going--why not?

Unless, of course, you're a famous professor:

“If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool,” said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. “What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step.”

Feh, I say. This is a case of the theorist disagreeing with the practitioner, and in that battle you should always, always go with the voice that's actually working with the kids.

Let me also throw in a good word for Comics in the Classroom, a labor of love that it's administrator (Scott Tingley) has been improving steadily over the past few years. If you're interested in what books might be good for the kids you teach, his site is a great resource.

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The Nagging Question of Teacher Quality

If you set the way-back machine to October 2nd (yes, I'm a bit behind in my reading) you'll find this neat commentary by Bob Herbert in the New York Times. It's not the most ground-breaking article--pay enough attention, and you'll see 20 or more like it in a year--but there is some thought there that bears attention, particularly this:

Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

.....

Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.

New forms of identifying good teachers and weeding out poor ones — by carefully assessing their on-the-job performance — have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.

This can be done without turning the traditional system of teacher tenure on its head. Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can usually be identified, if they are carefully observed in their first two or three years on the job — in other words, before tenure is granted.

Developing such a system would be difficult. But it’s both doable and essential. Getting serious about teacher quality as opposed to harping on tiny variations in test scores would be like moving from a jalopy to a jet.

These are the good intentions with which the road to hell is paved. Some thoughts:

1) The thought taht you can judge a teacher from their first couple years in the clasroom is a tough one for me to agree with. My first year was great; the kids performed at a high level, and I felt really good about what I was doing. My 2nd and 3rd years were terrible, and I seriously thought about leaving teaching. In my 5th year I was voted Teacher of the Year for my school and getting great results again.

It's a cycle, like many things in life. If you use results as a sole measuring stick in those first few years, you're going to run some people out of the profession who have a chance to make a real difference.

2) The idea that you can wed classroom performance and evaluation without impacting the tradition of tenure is a bit naive. If you look at how the kids do on their tests as an evaluation tool you're going reflect negatively on many, many teachers, fairly or not, and that will have an impact.

3) I wish I had a good answer for getting the best teachers to the kids who need them most, I really do. The pisser for the academics who think about these kinds of issues is that all the free-market, Taylorized incentives in the world aren't going to get the hueristic answer, for the simple fact that people change, their goals change, and how they teach changes. I might to a great job with the kids I have, but there's no way of knowing if I can replicate that with inner-city kids or not beyond experimentation that I don't want to be a part of.

I don't know what the answer to teacher quality is in the system we have now. Intuitively, I don't think that the recent NYC merit pay proposal is a step, for many of the reasons that NYC Educator discusses in the link. Intuitively, it feels like extending the school day should work, but as Ken over ad D-Ed Reckoning is fond of pointing out all the extra time in the world won't make a difference for the kids who get it if we keep on with the same lousy practices that have gotten the same lousy results.

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