Saturday, April 30, 2011
Whitewashing of the Education Debacle (PART 8)
The United States has gone from being a world leader in education to having one of the worst education ratings in the world in less than 20 years. It is irresponsible to think that blaming someone could possibly help improve the dilemma. American Democracy has been called a governmental experiment for more than two centuries. It has been a good experiment thus far based on the product, a free self governing nation that has risen to global superiority in every assessable way. The separate entities that comprise Federal Government and the sovereignty that is afforded each state have yielded the same opportunity for success to every citizen. It has not been perfect, or fair, or ideal for everyone all the time but it has consistently improved upon itself and is of the people and for the people. Based upon the Constitution of the United States of America and through judicial action the people of this country have produced laws that protect every benefit achieved through every struggle endured to create a brighter tomorrow from every yesterday. The struggles and partnerships of brothers, sisters, neighbors and strangers have produced a unity of citizens that share opportunities through education based on their desire and will to succeed. It has not been an easy road but one that is shared and has constantly improved for all. Why then shall we now accept an opportunity to throw away the dream and begin a different path that by all reasonable expectation will force our students, our future, to accept a second class education that will merely prepare them for a second class life? New school and education reform is creating an unprotected at work at will venue for teachers out of what once was a distinguished career pathway for those wishing to perpetuate the dream.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Witewashing of the Education Debacle (PART 7)
Most jobs and especially career positions have an evaluation process to insure productivity and accountability by the employee. This process is not absent in education. Although parents may not realize it their children’s teachers undergo rigorous evaluations and are held accountable for earning professional development continuing education credits. This is not new. New teachers in CT are deemed at will employees, meaning they can be dismissed at any time without cause, until they have worked successfully for 40 consecutive months, excluding summer work opportunities, in a single district. By CT State Statute they then have attained “Tenure” earning the right to full protection in their job by a union. After all, if we are doing a good job we all want the security and compensation our contract promises? Teachers are, even after attaining tenure, heavily scrutinized through rigorous objective evaluation processes by school administrations. The process also requires the school administrators to provide the necessary training, support and corrective measures for any teachers not performing sufficiently. Don’t let stories in the media tell you education unions and tenure protects bad or ineffective teachers. A poor administration that fails to perform its contractual obligations for training, support and correction of developing teachers is more than at fault for enabling and empowering such teachers to remain in service. Teachers are after all human beings and subject to all if not more stresses than many people in other industries. There is no formula to calculate why or when anyone in any vocation may suddenly become bad or ineffective at a task. That is why accountability is so important. As for the “new teachers”, they too are only human. Although we have been able to map out the entire human genome I am completely unaware that the new teacher failsafe gene has been identified.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Effective Teachers
The original construct of the "Whitewashing of the Education Debacle" may have been somewhat more fluid. Being unable to have the entire essay published as an editorial opinion I have had to chunk it up into 300 word segments just to get one small regional weekly publication to print it. I have mixed emotions about the situation however the chunking has permitted me to be in print and on topic before an audience for an extended duration, a situation I feel I shall try my utmost to perpetuate. To that end I would like to elaborate on the concepts of Teacher Design and teacher effectiveness.
In the past couple of years there has been created a schism between two identical doctrines. How could this be, if the doctrines are identical there can be no schism? The twist is perception, like the transitive and intransitive use of a verb. The doctrines are "Traditional Design" and "New Design" Education. According to experienced teachers new design educated teachers are more or less new teachers who will through time and development become good teachers or move on to more desirable vocational conditions. Experienced teachers do not necessarily see themselves as "Traditional Design" because that label was created for the "New Design" teachers. It was created to ostracize, stereotype, profile and discriminate against teachers that they are being groomed to replace. It was not their goal but the goal of a new breed of education doctrine developers. New design teachers are indoctrinated to believe that they are able to turn around failing schools because they are full of vim and vigor, they are youthful and in touch and they possess more current and applicable intellect than the older, complacent, lazy and intellectually stale ineffective traditional design teachers. What are we? The Yugo of the Borg? The idea crossed my mind that the same people teach new designers as taught Traditionalers. What about them? Has it just turned out that they were installing bad processors before? No Recall? All those poor unfortunate people, like me, who based their career, their American dream, on a costly and hard worked for graduate education that would prepare them for job stability, are suddenly identified as "ineffective" and the education institutions can suddenly install the new improved processors to create the ideal replacements. So what is that new replacement like? They supposedly possess high technological skills, show enthusiasm for all children to be successful and have a unique awareness which allows them to connect the learning objectives to all of their student’s real world associations with efficiency and unequivocal mutual synchronicity.
I visited several New York City public schools this past summer in my employment search and found several Smart Boards in classrooms covered with posters and lacking peripherals. This was in classrooms that were in use. At the Bronx High School of Science I was told that projection would be available for my interview demo lesson. I was interviewed by an assistant principal and fellow staff member. The AP told me on the telephone she had my resume from their recruiters and all I needed to do was to show up, create and deliver a lesson demo and participate in a panel interview. I brought my resume on a flash drive nonetheless. Sure enough she did not have my resume. I offered her my interview flash drive, which contains all the pertinent information as well as supplemental materials for the application and interview process, and she did not know where to put the flash drive in to her CPU or access files in order to print a copy of my resume. Then during the demo there were only wires hanging from the ceiling where a projector should have been, and again, no peripherals. I had my laptop in my briefcase but after the flash drive incident was reluctant to do anything other than bang a few rocks together to create fire for fear it might upset their obvious geocentrism. I am sure that New Designers know how to text their CPUs off and use all the latest social networking skill based platforms, but are they equipped to teach? Children are still children cognitively at their respective levels. Meeting them where learning can happen requires a bit more prowess and experience than comes readymade through a teacher preparation pathway where the applicant is told they are the best and the brightest and they are the hope tomorrow hangs on. I am sure the only thing they are certainly not taught in their preparation is that they are part of an elaborate social experiment, one in which they are merely a variable.
I concede that not all new design preparation teachers are young although the overwhelming majority is. Even those that are entering teaching as a career change are rarely leaving positions of authority and stability. On the contrary many are victims of downsizing in other industries or switching to teaching as an opportunity to escape graduate study programs for which the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out to save on oil. Too often I hear the term “recruiting” used when a school system is looking to attract these new design teachers to stave off the vultures of failure. This is not recruitment. It is preying on the desperation of people who are willing to become reprogrammed, promoting in them a false sense of identity, so that they will eagerly present themselves to school administrations as “supermen and superwomen” willing to work longer hours and through the summers, even teaching classes in multiple content areas to get a job. Simply put, teaching is rigorous enough without wantonly trying to hurt yourself. Rule #1 in Lifesaving is to never put yourself at greater risk than the person you are trying to save. The term burnout in teaching means that the teacher is at risk. For any number of reasons a teacher can become detached from their mission and be at risk, like a lifeguard who plunges into a swollen and rushing river without a lifeline. For many of the New Designers the motivation is a Masters Degree, paid for in trade, and a promise of job placement with security. For that price they are willing to overlook the need of a lifeline. A traditional design teacher sees their contract as their lifeline and their union as their support team. Teachers with experience can tell you all the horror stories you would ever want to hear about colleagues that tried to do too much and were not able to keep their grip on their mission. Yet, new design administration willingly and deceitfully cajoles unwitting New Designers to take the plunge, cheering them against the turbulence that will take its toll. Unfortunately, today’s economy is generating a fodder of new design teaching candidates that silences the cries of desperation from students and new teachers alike that are lost in the current.
Another incentive in the New Designer marketplace is merit based pay. There are two camps on how this is done. On one hand a teacher is told they will receive healthy bonuses if their students meet benchmarks set by administrators. Well, first you have to understand that these New Designers did not go to law school and if they did they did not get a good grade in contract law because they do not realize that the benchmarks are predominantly subjective in the administrators favor or due to the class schedules there can be little specific evidence that one teacher or another made the difference in the student’s overall scores. Although having every teacher working hard to outdo every other teacher to receive a bonus would be beneficial in a sprinting race it creates a suicide situation in a marathon, once again putting teachers at risk for burnout. The second spin on merit based pay is to offer the teacher an enormous salary up front. The catch is you have to keep up the pace you are hired for until you drop dead. At best merit based pay for teachers will create a sudden agitation in the perceived abilities and stamina of the new design teachers. The obvious long-term effect is most apt to be mediocre at best at the price of destroying many good traditional design teacher’s careers, providing a disjointed and transient instructional experience for the students and disrupting the method by which education has created the promise of success to Americans for over 100 years and sustained this Nation as the world’s leader in achievement and development.
Another item that came to mind as I was filling out an application for a position this morning was that the online application asked if “you a member of the Teach for America Corps?” I have to really laugh having been a Marine Brat all my life. To be a member of the “Corps”, to “fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause”… what are they thinking? Do TFAs actually march? Let’s get our feet on the same rock shall we? The failure in our school systems is not a demonic fistula or manifestation of extraterrestrial subjugation. It is a symptom that our social values have eroded to mob rule mentality giving way to a hedonistic popular rule belief system largely fueled by drug and human trafficking and other illicit activities strongly associated with illegal alien movements within our borders that our government seems happy to let fester in urban areas rather than invest the money and sacrifice the manpower to demonstrate that our municipal police agencies are out manned and out armed by persons with seemingly limitless cash and weapon reserves. The student’s lives focus on their insight that “the man” is a target and an annoyance to what they perceive their existence to be about. Can the “Corps” change that?
The solution does not reside in a holy expectation or delusion of grandeur as it seems the New Designers are puffed up to believe they can provide. I have seen them. For the most part they are young and surprisingly naive about what really makes their protagonists tick. Most that I have met have a romantic notion about how they are going to provide the panacea for the illness in our education industry. Good teachers have always been on the ground in this battle and they have learned to be effective in ways pedagogy doesn’t begin to approach. The new paradigm is merely using smoke and mirrors to redirect attention to a different perception of achievement. I am sure positive results are recognizable but they will be short term and in fact the potential was there all along, they were masked behind other assessment data and the cloak of desperation our urban youth reside in; not just in their neighborhoods but in their minds, hearts and souls. After the novelty of the changes ware off and the students tire of their new teachers who begin to stress out over a year or two or become nameless and faceless due to the revolving merit based pay door, the short term successes in achievement will regress. The total lack of transparency holds true here as well. The data picture is a shell game where standard deviations and numerical anomalies are relied upon to create false hope and misdirect anyone who is not versed in applied probability and statistical modeling for assessment design and interpretation. Those credentials are far and few between. I really do not think that the members of the “Corps” have that kind of actuarial expertise. Nor do I think many traditional design teachers have and that makes them easy prey for manipulation by the new design administration. Most unfortunately the parents of the students don’t know it is all a fabrication to redirect teacher salaries into discretionary spending that lines the pockets of new design school system administrators that risks their children’s futures. It is an elaborate dog and pony show. Most importantly it requires the dismissal or total subjugation of effective teachers that would not stand for the criminality and unethical reality that is being perpetrated in the name of public education.
In conclusion, effectiveness in a teacher is a context, not a data point. Not every student has the same life, focus or goals so there will be variation in achievement outcome. Environmental factors in a student’s life play a big role in their meeting their potential. There are some things even an effective teacher cannot override in a student’s developmental pathway. An effective teacher cannot take away the neurological damage or other health related issues endured by a student born to a crack cocaine addict or HIV positive mother. An effective teacher cannot prevent the sexual abuse committed against young girls or the handling of weapons by young boys in their own homes let alone on the streets. An effective teacher is a good teacher who teaches to every student, encouraging them and nurturing their learning abilities in the hope that they will develop a sense of awareness past their own social dilemma. An effective teacher is a person who takes their job seriously and strives to their best ability to provide a safe and engaging classroom experience where positive social and civic values are held to high standards and modeled without fault. An effective teacher is someone who provides an unwavering sense of reliability and trustworthiness as a role model and mentor to their students. An effective teacher is a professional archivist of their students’ achievements and a professional employee with respect to the school’s mission, curriculum and practices. An effective teacher is an extension of the school to the family and the family to the student. An effective teacher helps build accountability between the student and the family for positive reinforcement of learning expectations. Effective, being a context, cannot be limited in duration. It is a process over time which requires stability and reliability. Effective teachers are career professional people, not soldiers of a corps prancing around fighting windmills. A new teacher may be effective but for how long? An effective teacher is someone who has an established record of results. New design paradigm teachers and especially those operating under merit based compensation are no more effective than a new teacher ever was and their proof is realistically prohibited by their risky exuberance to do too much too fast, throwing themselves in the rushing current without the lifeline, and for what? A free master’s degree in education or a promise of extravagant earnings beyond which no effective traditional design teacher ever hoped to achieve? It is time to stop the charade of new design education practices before we lose the identity and purpose of what American Public Education is and the ability to regain the standard it once held.
In the past couple of years there has been created a schism between two identical doctrines. How could this be, if the doctrines are identical there can be no schism? The twist is perception, like the transitive and intransitive use of a verb. The doctrines are "Traditional Design" and "New Design" Education. According to experienced teachers new design educated teachers are more or less new teachers who will through time and development become good teachers or move on to more desirable vocational conditions. Experienced teachers do not necessarily see themselves as "Traditional Design" because that label was created for the "New Design" teachers. It was created to ostracize, stereotype, profile and discriminate against teachers that they are being groomed to replace. It was not their goal but the goal of a new breed of education doctrine developers. New design teachers are indoctrinated to believe that they are able to turn around failing schools because they are full of vim and vigor, they are youthful and in touch and they possess more current and applicable intellect than the older, complacent, lazy and intellectually stale ineffective traditional design teachers. What are we? The Yugo of the Borg? The idea crossed my mind that the same people teach new designers as taught Traditionalers. What about them? Has it just turned out that they were installing bad processors before? No Recall? All those poor unfortunate people, like me, who based their career, their American dream, on a costly and hard worked for graduate education that would prepare them for job stability, are suddenly identified as "ineffective" and the education institutions can suddenly install the new improved processors to create the ideal replacements. So what is that new replacement like? They supposedly possess high technological skills, show enthusiasm for all children to be successful and have a unique awareness which allows them to connect the learning objectives to all of their student’s real world associations with efficiency and unequivocal mutual synchronicity.
I visited several New York City public schools this past summer in my employment search and found several Smart Boards in classrooms covered with posters and lacking peripherals. This was in classrooms that were in use. At the Bronx High School of Science I was told that projection would be available for my interview demo lesson. I was interviewed by an assistant principal and fellow staff member. The AP told me on the telephone she had my resume from their recruiters and all I needed to do was to show up, create and deliver a lesson demo and participate in a panel interview. I brought my resume on a flash drive nonetheless. Sure enough she did not have my resume. I offered her my interview flash drive, which contains all the pertinent information as well as supplemental materials for the application and interview process, and she did not know where to put the flash drive in to her CPU or access files in order to print a copy of my resume. Then during the demo there were only wires hanging from the ceiling where a projector should have been, and again, no peripherals. I had my laptop in my briefcase but after the flash drive incident was reluctant to do anything other than bang a few rocks together to create fire for fear it might upset their obvious geocentrism. I am sure that New Designers know how to text their CPUs off and use all the latest social networking skill based platforms, but are they equipped to teach? Children are still children cognitively at their respective levels. Meeting them where learning can happen requires a bit more prowess and experience than comes readymade through a teacher preparation pathway where the applicant is told they are the best and the brightest and they are the hope tomorrow hangs on. I am sure the only thing they are certainly not taught in their preparation is that they are part of an elaborate social experiment, one in which they are merely a variable.
I concede that not all new design preparation teachers are young although the overwhelming majority is. Even those that are entering teaching as a career change are rarely leaving positions of authority and stability. On the contrary many are victims of downsizing in other industries or switching to teaching as an opportunity to escape graduate study programs for which the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out to save on oil. Too often I hear the term “recruiting” used when a school system is looking to attract these new design teachers to stave off the vultures of failure. This is not recruitment. It is preying on the desperation of people who are willing to become reprogrammed, promoting in them a false sense of identity, so that they will eagerly present themselves to school administrations as “supermen and superwomen” willing to work longer hours and through the summers, even teaching classes in multiple content areas to get a job. Simply put, teaching is rigorous enough without wantonly trying to hurt yourself. Rule #1 in Lifesaving is to never put yourself at greater risk than the person you are trying to save. The term burnout in teaching means that the teacher is at risk. For any number of reasons a teacher can become detached from their mission and be at risk, like a lifeguard who plunges into a swollen and rushing river without a lifeline. For many of the New Designers the motivation is a Masters Degree, paid for in trade, and a promise of job placement with security. For that price they are willing to overlook the need of a lifeline. A traditional design teacher sees their contract as their lifeline and their union as their support team. Teachers with experience can tell you all the horror stories you would ever want to hear about colleagues that tried to do too much and were not able to keep their grip on their mission. Yet, new design administration willingly and deceitfully cajoles unwitting New Designers to take the plunge, cheering them against the turbulence that will take its toll. Unfortunately, today’s economy is generating a fodder of new design teaching candidates that silences the cries of desperation from students and new teachers alike that are lost in the current.
Another incentive in the New Designer marketplace is merit based pay. There are two camps on how this is done. On one hand a teacher is told they will receive healthy bonuses if their students meet benchmarks set by administrators. Well, first you have to understand that these New Designers did not go to law school and if they did they did not get a good grade in contract law because they do not realize that the benchmarks are predominantly subjective in the administrators favor or due to the class schedules there can be little specific evidence that one teacher or another made the difference in the student’s overall scores. Although having every teacher working hard to outdo every other teacher to receive a bonus would be beneficial in a sprinting race it creates a suicide situation in a marathon, once again putting teachers at risk for burnout. The second spin on merit based pay is to offer the teacher an enormous salary up front. The catch is you have to keep up the pace you are hired for until you drop dead. At best merit based pay for teachers will create a sudden agitation in the perceived abilities and stamina of the new design teachers. The obvious long-term effect is most apt to be mediocre at best at the price of destroying many good traditional design teacher’s careers, providing a disjointed and transient instructional experience for the students and disrupting the method by which education has created the promise of success to Americans for over 100 years and sustained this Nation as the world’s leader in achievement and development.
Another item that came to mind as I was filling out an application for a position this morning was that the online application asked if “you a member of the Teach for America Corps?” I have to really laugh having been a Marine Brat all my life. To be a member of the “Corps”, to “fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause”… what are they thinking? Do TFAs actually march? Let’s get our feet on the same rock shall we? The failure in our school systems is not a demonic fistula or manifestation of extraterrestrial subjugation. It is a symptom that our social values have eroded to mob rule mentality giving way to a hedonistic popular rule belief system largely fueled by drug and human trafficking and other illicit activities strongly associated with illegal alien movements within our borders that our government seems happy to let fester in urban areas rather than invest the money and sacrifice the manpower to demonstrate that our municipal police agencies are out manned and out armed by persons with seemingly limitless cash and weapon reserves. The student’s lives focus on their insight that “the man” is a target and an annoyance to what they perceive their existence to be about. Can the “Corps” change that?
The solution does not reside in a holy expectation or delusion of grandeur as it seems the New Designers are puffed up to believe they can provide. I have seen them. For the most part they are young and surprisingly naive about what really makes their protagonists tick. Most that I have met have a romantic notion about how they are going to provide the panacea for the illness in our education industry. Good teachers have always been on the ground in this battle and they have learned to be effective in ways pedagogy doesn’t begin to approach. The new paradigm is merely using smoke and mirrors to redirect attention to a different perception of achievement. I am sure positive results are recognizable but they will be short term and in fact the potential was there all along, they were masked behind other assessment data and the cloak of desperation our urban youth reside in; not just in their neighborhoods but in their minds, hearts and souls. After the novelty of the changes ware off and the students tire of their new teachers who begin to stress out over a year or two or become nameless and faceless due to the revolving merit based pay door, the short term successes in achievement will regress. The total lack of transparency holds true here as well. The data picture is a shell game where standard deviations and numerical anomalies are relied upon to create false hope and misdirect anyone who is not versed in applied probability and statistical modeling for assessment design and interpretation. Those credentials are far and few between. I really do not think that the members of the “Corps” have that kind of actuarial expertise. Nor do I think many traditional design teachers have and that makes them easy prey for manipulation by the new design administration. Most unfortunately the parents of the students don’t know it is all a fabrication to redirect teacher salaries into discretionary spending that lines the pockets of new design school system administrators that risks their children’s futures. It is an elaborate dog and pony show. Most importantly it requires the dismissal or total subjugation of effective teachers that would not stand for the criminality and unethical reality that is being perpetrated in the name of public education.
In conclusion, effectiveness in a teacher is a context, not a data point. Not every student has the same life, focus or goals so there will be variation in achievement outcome. Environmental factors in a student’s life play a big role in their meeting their potential. There are some things even an effective teacher cannot override in a student’s developmental pathway. An effective teacher cannot take away the neurological damage or other health related issues endured by a student born to a crack cocaine addict or HIV positive mother. An effective teacher cannot prevent the sexual abuse committed against young girls or the handling of weapons by young boys in their own homes let alone on the streets. An effective teacher is a good teacher who teaches to every student, encouraging them and nurturing their learning abilities in the hope that they will develop a sense of awareness past their own social dilemma. An effective teacher is a person who takes their job seriously and strives to their best ability to provide a safe and engaging classroom experience where positive social and civic values are held to high standards and modeled without fault. An effective teacher is someone who provides an unwavering sense of reliability and trustworthiness as a role model and mentor to their students. An effective teacher is a professional archivist of their students’ achievements and a professional employee with respect to the school’s mission, curriculum and practices. An effective teacher is an extension of the school to the family and the family to the student. An effective teacher helps build accountability between the student and the family for positive reinforcement of learning expectations. Effective, being a context, cannot be limited in duration. It is a process over time which requires stability and reliability. Effective teachers are career professional people, not soldiers of a corps prancing around fighting windmills. A new teacher may be effective but for how long? An effective teacher is someone who has an established record of results. New design paradigm teachers and especially those operating under merit based compensation are no more effective than a new teacher ever was and their proof is realistically prohibited by their risky exuberance to do too much too fast, throwing themselves in the rushing current without the lifeline, and for what? A free master’s degree in education or a promise of extravagant earnings beyond which no effective traditional design teacher ever hoped to achieve? It is time to stop the charade of new design education practices before we lose the identity and purpose of what American Public Education is and the ability to regain the standard it once held.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Whitewashing of the Education Debacle (PARTS 3 through 6)
(PART 3)
The stories of Pygmalion, The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes were among the tales that I was told as a child by my parents and grandparents, presumably to prepare me for rational thinking and sound decision making skills as I would grow up and inevitably be faced by less kind individuals with self serving goals who would seek to take advantage of me. This great Nation’s current path of searching for a new super spiffy initiative through which to teach our students is a certain slope of intellectual subjugation and opportunistic segregation against which the Civil Rights Movement has been struggling since 1954 with the breakout case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. Schools of choice and theme based educational models may show an ability to produce heightened student achievement, albeit short term and largely subjective, but blatantly risk denying all students their 14th Amendment protected right to equal protection under the law for an appropriate education. We know this but when do the students understand it? Although the developers of every new small design academy style school claim it provides a rigorous curriculum for college preparedness they by nature provide an unequal, different, look at the world which may not stigmatize the students’ outlook but deprive it of the variety our total society thereby creating a segregated environment.
Having been high school chemistry/biology teacher in Hartford, CT for six years I have seen the product of Sheff v. O’Neill, the need for positive change and the promise of it. In reform, I have seen students jumbled, grades fixed to promote and graduate students, special needs students neglected and students in magnet schools left unattended by staff. What exactly is being reformed in our schools?
(PART 4)
Several months ago at a Connecticut Forum event panelist Joel Klein, the outgoing Chancellor of Education in New York City, stated that smaller class sizes are optimal for learning. He also touted Hartford’s Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven Adamowski, as a wonder child of school redesign. Having begun my career in education in Hartford, CT as a chemistry teacher in 2003 and working continuously in the system until my contract was inappropriately non renewed in August of 2009 for erroneous reasons after I declined to cave to extortive tactics meant to elicit my voluntary resignation in the good name of budgetary reduction in force, I fail to see the rationale of the new design as anything that resembles effective or economically sound education administration. The autonomy granted these new education paradigm administrators in the name of saving our schools is an unleashed petard that is destroying talented teacher’s careers and demolishing hope for a bright future for our students. Many teachers such as me are being forced into unemployment while demigod administrators rape the tax coffers with their grotesque salaries and unwarranted bonuses. Additionally they dole out excessive consulting fees to cronies in an abusive misuse of the public trust. Money that did pay many great teachers well deserved salaries is now being converted for discretionary spending purposes by administrators that do not deserve to be called superintendents. The term carpetbagger comes to mind. What is transparency when you are not told the truth? How is bridging the projected school budget shortfall related to bridging the student achievement gap when the financial deficit is a theoretical contrivance presented without a fully understandable or supported explanation and assessment data is distributed for which there is no corroborating evidence other than subjective posturing by administrators who have no direct classroom connection?
(PART 5)
As a result of school redesign in many school systems students endure overcrowded classes, lack of critical materials and a revolving door approach to teacher and administrator supply which includes education interns, long term substitutes, outsourced tutors and even individuals brought here from other countries, such as India, on temporary “visiting” teacher credentials. Who should be glad they have this? Disjointed educational experiences are the greatest deterrent to achievement possible and yet this is largely the mainstream reality of the new design of education in many communities. Any parent and every student are, of course, excited on graduation day but the value of the learning behind the diploma is more important than having the diploma in hand. Greatness will never be achieved by a piece of paper. It is the inspired work of individuals that have learned the necessary skills to advance themselves and their societies beyond their dreams that have created the country we live in and nothing less will sustain it. Acceptance of mediocrity and abject complacency were not the goals of the framers of this country, Civil Rights Movement or our more recent traditional education model and should be something we all fight against daily.
Parents need to hold their child’s education system accountable for providing an appropriate education that will help the students have the opportunities that this Nation can provide. Accepting anything less than the highest accountability of an education system is shameful. Parents and community members alike need to visit schools while in session and attend school board meetings. Parents need to develop personal accountability relationships with the administrators and teachers who are responsible for their child and not accept mass produced emails from school computer servers as parent-teacher contact opportunities. Fight for a great education. Saving great teachers is saving a great education.
(PART 6)
New design education paradigm administration wants parents and politicians to believe that “Traditional Design” education professionals, teachers, are intrinsically bad, greedy, stale and lazy. The notion that teachers are overpaid is a bad notion. Teaching has been a profession in which an individual can expect to have a career with reasonable compensation, benefits and retirement. This was the reasonable goal of Lech Walesa in his fight for solidarity in Poland. Have we forgotten that the United States set the bar for fair treatment of workers? If a teacher wants to relax while the students have summer vacation, so be it. I do not think that anyone who would want to become a teacher just to have the summer off would think it a fair trade when they found out what they had to do for the rest of the year. Besides, having vacations and summers off when the schools are out is bad timing for good ticket prices. The truth is many teachers work through the summer. When was the last time you heard an infomercial about becoming a millionaire by teaching and having the summer off to count your money?
Another tremendous misconception regarding the education design that worked is that teacher unions protect bad teachers. It is the fundamental duty of administrators to identify teachers lacking in skill or ability and then work to correct the teacher’s deficit through support, guidance and training before the teacher reaches tenure. Unions tend to ignore fighting for non tenured teachers because their contract is essential at will and administration can terminate them without cause at any time. So, isn’t it pretty clear that bad administrators create and empower bad and ineffective teachers that unions must protect? The new education administration paradigm is a gamble and hardly worth a pair of nickels.
The stories of Pygmalion, The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes were among the tales that I was told as a child by my parents and grandparents, presumably to prepare me for rational thinking and sound decision making skills as I would grow up and inevitably be faced by less kind individuals with self serving goals who would seek to take advantage of me. This great Nation’s current path of searching for a new super spiffy initiative through which to teach our students is a certain slope of intellectual subjugation and opportunistic segregation against which the Civil Rights Movement has been struggling since 1954 with the breakout case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. Schools of choice and theme based educational models may show an ability to produce heightened student achievement, albeit short term and largely subjective, but blatantly risk denying all students their 14th Amendment protected right to equal protection under the law for an appropriate education. We know this but when do the students understand it? Although the developers of every new small design academy style school claim it provides a rigorous curriculum for college preparedness they by nature provide an unequal, different, look at the world which may not stigmatize the students’ outlook but deprive it of the variety our total society thereby creating a segregated environment.
Having been high school chemistry/biology teacher in Hartford, CT for six years I have seen the product of Sheff v. O’Neill, the need for positive change and the promise of it. In reform, I have seen students jumbled, grades fixed to promote and graduate students, special needs students neglected and students in magnet schools left unattended by staff. What exactly is being reformed in our schools?
(PART 4)
Several months ago at a Connecticut Forum event panelist Joel Klein, the outgoing Chancellor of Education in New York City, stated that smaller class sizes are optimal for learning. He also touted Hartford’s Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven Adamowski, as a wonder child of school redesign. Having begun my career in education in Hartford, CT as a chemistry teacher in 2003 and working continuously in the system until my contract was inappropriately non renewed in August of 2009 for erroneous reasons after I declined to cave to extortive tactics meant to elicit my voluntary resignation in the good name of budgetary reduction in force, I fail to see the rationale of the new design as anything that resembles effective or economically sound education administration. The autonomy granted these new education paradigm administrators in the name of saving our schools is an unleashed petard that is destroying talented teacher’s careers and demolishing hope for a bright future for our students. Many teachers such as me are being forced into unemployment while demigod administrators rape the tax coffers with their grotesque salaries and unwarranted bonuses. Additionally they dole out excessive consulting fees to cronies in an abusive misuse of the public trust. Money that did pay many great teachers well deserved salaries is now being converted for discretionary spending purposes by administrators that do not deserve to be called superintendents. The term carpetbagger comes to mind. What is transparency when you are not told the truth? How is bridging the projected school budget shortfall related to bridging the student achievement gap when the financial deficit is a theoretical contrivance presented without a fully understandable or supported explanation and assessment data is distributed for which there is no corroborating evidence other than subjective posturing by administrators who have no direct classroom connection?
(PART 5)
As a result of school redesign in many school systems students endure overcrowded classes, lack of critical materials and a revolving door approach to teacher and administrator supply which includes education interns, long term substitutes, outsourced tutors and even individuals brought here from other countries, such as India, on temporary “visiting” teacher credentials. Who should be glad they have this? Disjointed educational experiences are the greatest deterrent to achievement possible and yet this is largely the mainstream reality of the new design of education in many communities. Any parent and every student are, of course, excited on graduation day but the value of the learning behind the diploma is more important than having the diploma in hand. Greatness will never be achieved by a piece of paper. It is the inspired work of individuals that have learned the necessary skills to advance themselves and their societies beyond their dreams that have created the country we live in and nothing less will sustain it. Acceptance of mediocrity and abject complacency were not the goals of the framers of this country, Civil Rights Movement or our more recent traditional education model and should be something we all fight against daily.
Parents need to hold their child’s education system accountable for providing an appropriate education that will help the students have the opportunities that this Nation can provide. Accepting anything less than the highest accountability of an education system is shameful. Parents and community members alike need to visit schools while in session and attend school board meetings. Parents need to develop personal accountability relationships with the administrators and teachers who are responsible for their child and not accept mass produced emails from school computer servers as parent-teacher contact opportunities. Fight for a great education. Saving great teachers is saving a great education.
(PART 6)
New design education paradigm administration wants parents and politicians to believe that “Traditional Design” education professionals, teachers, are intrinsically bad, greedy, stale and lazy. The notion that teachers are overpaid is a bad notion. Teaching has been a profession in which an individual can expect to have a career with reasonable compensation, benefits and retirement. This was the reasonable goal of Lech Walesa in his fight for solidarity in Poland. Have we forgotten that the United States set the bar for fair treatment of workers? If a teacher wants to relax while the students have summer vacation, so be it. I do not think that anyone who would want to become a teacher just to have the summer off would think it a fair trade when they found out what they had to do for the rest of the year. Besides, having vacations and summers off when the schools are out is bad timing for good ticket prices. The truth is many teachers work through the summer. When was the last time you heard an infomercial about becoming a millionaire by teaching and having the summer off to count your money?
Another tremendous misconception regarding the education design that worked is that teacher unions protect bad teachers. It is the fundamental duty of administrators to identify teachers lacking in skill or ability and then work to correct the teacher’s deficit through support, guidance and training before the teacher reaches tenure. Unions tend to ignore fighting for non tenured teachers because their contract is essential at will and administration can terminate them without cause at any time. So, isn’t it pretty clear that bad administrators create and empower bad and ineffective teachers that unions must protect? The new education administration paradigm is a gamble and hardly worth a pair of nickels.
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