eduskeptic

Tenure is a misunderstood term. The common misconception is that it literally means lifetime employment. It doesn’t.

New teachers are on probation for at least the first two years of their contract. During this time the school district can dismiss them for any reason. After the probationary term is over, tenure is granted.

Tenure simply provides due process rights for the teacher, nothing else. It grants the teacher the same rights as other employees in other companies. The tenured teacher cannot be fired at will. A legal hearing process precedes any disciplinary action. The outcry by the politicians regarding tenure is a false front, and serves no good purpose.

The history of this is simple. Prior to the tenure laws, teachers were at risk for losing their jobs for non-job related causes: politics, religious views or affiliations, not contributing money to a pet cause, sexual issues to name a few. If the superintendent, principal, or their spouses ,didn’t like what the teacher did or didn’t do, the teacher could be let go.

Tenure does not mean lifetime employment and never has. About 1% of probationary teachers are released from their contracts each year in California. The national average is around 0.71%. In California, 2% of teachers who have gained tenure are let go each year, which equals about 2 per hundred. The national average is about 1.4%. The reasons for dismissal vary. Mostly its because of a legal issue, or they just plain can’t teach. It’s not popular for the politicians to go to far into the facts.

California is a large, diverse state, and what happens here is often reflected in other states, on a more compact level. In addition to the 2% who are dismissed, 50% of new teachers leave the profession within their first 5 years of teaching. That is, according to most of us who teach or who have taught, before they even get out of the rookie stage. The reasons are many. The most common one is that the dream of teaching doesn’t square with the reality of teaching.

The national media has a penchant for sound bites from “experts” who decry the due process it takes to get non-performing teachers out of the classroom. These pseudo experts simply do not have any connection with real teachers, good or bad. Too many of the sound bites also ignore due process and the complexity and reality of K-12 teachers and classrooms.

Moving poor teachers out of classrooms is important. It always has been, and will continue to be. The issue that is paramount is the the process whereby teachers are evaluated. So far, no one has come up with a solution that works well. Firing masses of teachers because the superintendent is “ passionate” leads to legal issues that are expensive, and aren’t good for anyone.

All evaluations that the Eduskeptic is aware of are either flawed in their design (value added model comes to mind), are too infrequent, or are performed by administrators who are out of touch with the classroom setting.

Educators and administrators work with what they have. Moving to simply fire large numbers of teachers (a la M. Rhee, Wash. D.C.) and claiming success is dishonest at best. The protection of known incompetent teachers is equally, or more, dishonest.

A comprehensive evaluation system of teachers, administrators, and superintendents that is fair, multifaceted and meets due process requirements is sorely needed. Administrators and superintendents (chancellors in some districts—same thing) must be evaluated as intensely as the teachers. It is an absurd proposition to hold only one part of the system accountable.

What education needs least are kneejerk bulls in the china shop passing political aspirations off as reform.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

As established pseudo experts continue to beat the school system and all those in it for failing everything, the schools still turn out educated students at every level. It is hard to find anyone standing up for such a statement these days. It is much more politically expedient to blame educators for all that is wrong.

There is method in this approach. All of the posturing and passionate speeches by the politicians diverts a good amount of attention away from other societal ills. Everyone who has a barb to throw does so without much actual fact behind them. It doesn’t matter. In today’s wildly connected universe, once it’s out there, it stays out there.

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, doesn’t hold a teaching credential, has never taught a day in his life, and hasn’t any real connection to any real classroom anywhere. His cabinet is sorely lacking in actual teacher expertise. His job isn’t to teach anyone. It’s to run a large governmental bureaucracy. He is responsible for the overall direction of national education policy.

This doesn’t stop him, or any of the rest of them, from expounding on how actual classroom practice could be improved. The Eduskeptic retired at the end of the 2010 school year, with 36 years of teaching behind him. I know about teaching and classrooms. I know about children, teacher unions and associations, school boards, school budgets and how districts run. I don’t know anything about running either a district office or something on the scale that Duncan oversees.

The biggest issue with those who have no practical experience in the classroom attempting to define what constitutes good practice is that they have no actual basis for knowing what the reality in a classroom is. It is entirely possible that someone could come up with a great idea about how things might work better or more efficiently, just as it is possible that the Eduskeptic could come up with something that would make the Department of Education work better. The odds are against it, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.

Everyday experience over time does matter when it comes to defining good practice. Teaching is a complex endeavor. Sound bites on the news about educators are nothing more than fluff spit out for political purposes. In the teaching profession it is generally agreed that it takes about 5 years to get past rookie status. It is that complex. If a teacher makes it through those first 5 years, they may actually be a teacher, one who has some potential. It is no surprise to those of us who have taught for long periods of time that the dropout rate for new teachers is so high. It is good for the schools, students, and the profession in general, that most of those who can’t cut it, quit.

Rather than spending time bashing educators and education with gross generalities about how to get rid of all the bad teachers, the national agenda might be more productive if there were more time put into the positive building of a better educational system. The one thing that we may all agree on is that education must be an ever evolving task. It would be best to include some of the people who spend their time every day in real classrooms, across the broad spectrum of urban, suburban, and rural schools, in this very important endeavor. To ignore the expertise that is available is to invite division and failure, on a national scale.

The noise surrounding the process of evaluating teachers is varied and loud. It is the same noise that has surrounded this issue since the beginning of teachers. It is a long history.

Most recently, the national Department of Education, under Arne Duncan, has been advocating for a process to grade teachers, leading to merit pay. It is a difficult process, and no matter how it is done it will infuriate some, and make others think we’ve finally reached the land of milk and honey.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which, all by itself is larger than some cities in the United States, and has more operating expenses as well, released a report grading 6,000 teachers. Of the 6,000 who were graded, or evaluated, 1,000 were deemed to be good. The other 5,000, not so good. The report’s author is Richard Buddin, a Rand Corporation Senior Economist. It is 21 pages long, and can be downloaded as a pdf. The link to the article which has the pdf link is here. The Los Angeles Times did it’s own study of the 6,000 teachers, and released the names of the teachers.

Releasing the names of 6,000 LA Unified teachers has been on the controversial side. Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, when asked his opinion about releasing the names, stated that he had no issues with doing so. “What do they have to hide?” Arne, who has absolutely no experience in the classroom except as a student, is pushing for merit pay, and national standards for evaluating teachers.

It is difficult to understand how 5,000 teachers out of 6,000, in one district, spread out over the entire spectrum of schools in this very large and complex system, can be in the not so good column. On the face of it, it seems to be questionable, at best. It will take some time to figure out exactly what the criteria were for this outcome. What kinds of students, what ethnic, socio-economic mix, percentage of intact/broken families, special needs, ages, and more, were involved in the evaluations, and over what time period?

Ed in the Apple writes about the methods and has quite a bit to say on the subject. The dialogue about the structure of any kind of study is, and will continue to be, intense. It is very important for any study of this kind to be completely transparent. Who paid for it, who established the criteria, and what and who, exactly, were studied to come up with the data?

Years ago, in a notebook/sketchbook, the Eduskeptic,  while sitting in yet another staff development day at the elementary school where he ended up teaching for 24 years, wrote, “Here we go again, taking officious leaps into the void, led by someone who has not been there, and it’s getting late. Now what?” This was on Aug. 29, 1989. This describes Arne Duncan, and apparently his entire staff of non-teachers, quite well. It’s not that Duncan is not without passion, as he is full of it. He’s just someone who has no idea, at all, what it means to be a teacher in a public school. Duncan would not make it.

The qualities that make a good and effective teacher are, perhaps, not all that quantifiable. The complexities of making judgements about teachers based on how students perform on standardized tests are great indeed. While complex, it is a job that still needs to be done. It will not happen overnight, and no matter how much the politicians want it to happen during their tenure, it won’t. Schools don’t lend themselves to overnight change, at least not very well. Perhaps if the good Secretary would tend to putting together a set of qualified people, teachers and non-teachers alike, to make this happen, it would. It still won’t be on his timetable though, no matter how many sound bites he appears in.

The Washington D.C. school system has not enjoyed the best of reputations over the years. The local school board hired Michelle Rhee to turn the system around. Rhee holds a teaching credential, but taught just 3 years before abandoning the classroom for a more corporate setting. Her opinion of how well she did seems to be more than a bit inflated. Her claims cannot be verified (Google it, find out for yourself), and the D.C. board didn’t and doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps it just doesn’t matter in the case of the D.C. school system.

There are more than a few administrators who couldn’t handle the stress of the classroom. All whom I have spoken with are pretty up front with the reasons they chose administration over teaching. Each job demands a certain personality. This isn’t to say that one is better than the other. On the contrary, those who leave the classroom to become principals and various kinds of superintendents are wise to do so. Teachers who aren’t suited for the admin roll are wise to admit that as well. The jobs are very different, and not at all necessarily connected in any real and meaningful way.

Managing a school system is a complex endeavor. Small school districts are just as complex as big ones. They are all multi-faceted entities. Without a sure and steady hand at the district level, things could spiral out of control very quickly, likely resulting in a trip to court, with smiling lawyers all around.

The issue that seems to be the sand in the gears is when the admin types summarily decide that they know more about teaching in a classroom than classroom teachers. Put aside that they either left the classroom due to burn out or common good sense, or that they were never in one to begin with (a la Arne Duncan), and that premise seems totally unfounded. There is stronger language to use of course, but to what point?

Michelle Rhee seems to take pleasure in the ability to fire teachers. She recently let 245 or so in the D.C. district go. Fired, actually. This is not to say that some of them just absolutely didn’t belong in a classroom. Some of them probably were pretty sad as teachers. What isn’t noted is the criteria used in firing them. This is where teacher evaluations get into some pretty rough territory.

The Eduskeptic does think that teachers need to be evaluated. Over a career that spanned 36 years, the evaluations that I received were few and far in between. None of them was rigorous, and there was, as far as I can tell, nothing in the evaluations that did much more than allow the principal and the Eduskeptic talk about how the lessons went, and how well they were, or maybe weren’t, done.

It would have been obscene for anything like this to be used in deciding either merit pay, or retention in the teacher ranks.

If the available information about Rhee’s 3 years in the classroom is anywhere near the truth, she may well have had to fire herself, were she in charge back then.

Body counts do nothing to further the betterment of teachers, administrators, or children. Rhee’s, and the D.C. school board’s, apparent sense of divine right to make history by firing as many teachers as they can in the name of making things better is just plain misplaced.

What would be good is to know the criteria they used. The D.C. teachers union is surely looking into that, and it will be good to know what they come up with, as that criteria is bound to be an issue when the first lawsuit is filed.

The school year for 2010-11 has started, or is about to, across the nation. Some states and districts will begin the day after Labor Day. Others started very close to the beginning of August, a horrible thing to do of course, but there you have it.

The school year is starting off under staffed, under funded, and largely under prepared to deal with the lack of support for education in general. In previous posts, the Eduskeptic has pointed out that, in most instances, schools are opening with fewer teachers, which results in larger class sizes. There are fewer librarians, library aides/techs, library hours, or libraries at all. Music, art, and sports have all taken massive hits.

Some districts have chosen to simply eliminate libraries at their schools. This has happened across the US. In having to cut back, due to a lack of funding, districts have had to make some very difficult choices.

From Kindergarten to third grade the focus is on skills, reading being the one that is given the most emphasis and press. It is a simple connection: if a child cannot read, or comprehend what he or she is reading, everything past that point stops. What teachers in these grades are aiming at is automaticity. A child who has letter recognition and sounds internalized, who doesn’t need to decode each and every letter, sound, and combinations thereof, is likely to be able to understand what the sentence is about. This is called automaticity, and understanding the meaning of the sentence or paragraph comes along with it.  A child who is struggling to put the letters and sounds together gets to the end of the sentence with just about nothing but a jumble of letters and sounds, disconnected completely from the meaning of the sentence. It’s a simple premise.

Oddly, one of the best ways to reach a level of automaticity is to read constantly, or listen to others reading. In order to do this, one needs magazines, and books. Last time the Eduskeptic checked, these items were housed in the library.

Children, most of them anyway, love libraries. Teachers of young children know this. They, and the Eduskeptic is one of them, tell children that the entire universe is in the library, that they may learn anything, or travel anywhere, just by opening a book. It’s true. While the Eduskeptic has just retired from teaching (36 years, 24 in Kindergarten), the joy that is obvious when young children get to the library is still quite stunning. Those who don’t read yet make up their own stories looking at the illustrations. Those who do read use the illustrations to further their enjoyment of reading.

There is a very short time to get all of this across to the young ones. If it isn’t done by third grade, it probably won’t get done. Children who are behind in reading at this point face a very steep climb to automaticity and understanding. Fourth grade is the first content based grade, and reading is a stone cold requirement here.

It is incredible that in the United States, arguably one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on this planet, that schools are forced to choose between keeping teachers in classrooms, with ever more children, or curtailing or closing the school libraries. The pure stupidity of it defies reason.

School districts across the United States are struggling to keep up with the budgetary realities of the day.  It is difficult to maintain a level of educational excellence in the face of a budget that forces more children into each classroom, and cuts more programs that have been good for children, K-12. In California, and across the nation, the task is disheartening in many ways. Laying off over 20,000 teachers in California is not an easy thing to do, nor is it likely to be ignored by anyone with an agenda regarding unions, seniority, and the educational establishment in general.

In an article in the Sacramento, California, Bee newspaper, July 6, co-written by Diana Lambert and Phillip Reese, it is pointed out that, in general,  schools with the most troubles, economically, behaviorally, academically, have suffered the most from teacher layoffs. The reason is relatively simple: the staff at these schools tend to be younger, less experienced teachers. The general rule is last hired is first fired. This may or may not be true in all districts across the United States.

The article points out that a newer teacher, with a PhD in education (doesn’t say from where the PhD is from), who has written about education, and was teacher of the year for his district, was given a pink slip, which has since been rescinded. His take on the layoff business is that it should be based on performance. Perhaps it was, and that is why he still has a job. To assume that it wasn’t is simply naive.

School districts, at least in California, are paid based on the actual attendance of the students enrolled in the district. Absences equal a loss of money to the district. There are no excused absences anymore. If a child is absent, it costs the district. Every district has to make a guess about how many children will be attending school the next school year, and about what the attendance percentage will be, in order to figure out a budget.  March 15, in California, is a day when districts have to notify teachers of potential layoffs. Chief financial officers generally give the superintendents a conservative number regarding the number of potential students for the next year. The incoming Kindergarten class, subtracted from the outgoing 8th grade class, or 12th grade class in a unified district, equals the number of students lost, or, perhaps gained. Based on this number and the number of children each class will carry, teachers will be laid off, or more will be hired. It’s pretty simple. The Phd teacher of the year might want to look into this prior to making assumptions about the process.

The younger, less experience teachers are the ones who take the biggest hit in this scenario, no matter where in the district they are teaching. Teachers with tenure, those who have made it through 3 probationary years, are less like to actually lose their jobs. They do get pink slips. Teachers who have been teaching for 8 or more years have been getting pink slips. Most have been rescinded, but for a large number of teachers, the pink slips have turned out to be real. Tenure is not, as is commonly misquoted and believed, equal to lifetime employment. It means that a teacher cannot be fired, or laid off, without due cause. The reason for this is pretty straightforward.

This writer has written about this, in this blog, before. Prior to the tenure laws, teachers were fired at will for any number of reasons: having different political views from someone on the board, not financially supporting a pet project of a principal or board member, not working for free, having the termidity to argue with a principal, the principals wife, or board member, getting married or pregnant if a woman, not buying the correct clothing at the correct store, being old, not putting up with sexual harassment or assault, even thinking about joining a union, being of a different nationality, color, and the list just keeps going on and on. Tenure laws exist to protect the civil rights of teachers. It is not, and never has been, a ticket to lifetime employment.

The newspaper article, and others like it, point out that a disproportionate number of teachers at difficult schools in difficult areas are laid off at a higher rate than teachers at better schools, because the teachers in these schools tend to be the newest, least senior. Nowhere in the articles that this teacher has read has anyone taken the time to figure out that the older teachers in the districts paid their dues a long time ago. They have already been at the difficult schools with the difficult students in the difficult areas of town. They have been through the grinder and have transferred to less stressful situations. There are not many teachers who can sustain the daily assault on civility, the lack of community support, the mind numbing stress of teaching in such situations, over the long haul. Some can, and do. After a few years though, most teachers in these positions, when offered the opportunity to go to a different location, and preserve what is left of their sanity and health, do so. Not very surprising, really.

The newer teachers are also the ones who are most likely to teach anywhere they are sent, without question, who are most likely to do the involuntary “volunteer” work that principals and other administrators come up with, who won’t speak up too freely about conditions, or 3 hour staff meetings, simply because they fear for their jobs. A colleague of this writer gave up a Saturday to “volunteer” at school for what was called an ADA make-up day. The reasoning? Fear of being laid off.

Nowhere in the press, with all of the focus on the under performing schools having such high numbers of layoffs has anyone pointed out that other teachers filled those slots. The districts put more children in the classrooms, and transferred other teachers into those low performing schools to teach. These transferred teachers are the more experienced teachers. The articles and opinions on the op-ed pages would have the general public believe that the children in these difficult schools are just cast afloat, which is a patently ridiculous position.

The teachers, young and old, are not to blame for the financial mess that the schools and states find themselves in. There is no rejoicing in the teacher ranks when the young and talented are told their services are not needed for the next school year. The more experienced teachers know full well that there is a great need for young, enthusiastic, and energetic teachers to enter into, and stay in, the teaching ranks, and it is they who most profoundly feel the loss of these good young teachers. A good mix of the experienced with the inexperienced in the teaching ranks is what is needed.

No crisis will ever be left untouched for political gain by politicians. What seems to have floated to the top of the pool in this mess is a thinly veiled assault on unions, mounted by politicians who think now is the time to point to the teachers and their civil rights as a cause for the layoffs of good, young teachers. Instead of figuring out how to get the schools back on a stable financial footing, they begin to blame the unions, and all senior teachers. It is, of course, much easier to do this than to actually fix anything. It also does nothing to help children and schools do anything at all.

In the last post from Eduskeptic, the establishment of national standards for schools across the nation were discussed. In general, it may be a good idea, on several different levels. When the states apply for educational funding from the Federal government, it would be nice to know that the scores were based on the same criteria, that the criteria were assessed in the same manner, and the scoring itself was an equal opportunity proposition. As of now, that premise is doubtful at best.

While a case can be made for national educational standards across the K-12 spectrum, the rule of unintended consequences will undoubtedly apply, no matter what. It always does. The other side of national testing, the tricky part, needs close scrutiny, at least as close as the standards themselves. If teacher pay and retention is to be tied to the students success with the standards, someone has to pay attention to the process that takes place.

Teaching to the test is not new. It is what educators have done since the beginning of the educational business. How can it be otherwise? A teacher has a text, or expectations, that drive the teaching of the curriculum on a daily basis. If the expectation is that the students will understand the sound of the letter L, it makes perfectly good sense to focus on the letter L and the sound that it makes. After sufficient time dwelling upon this sound, the test is simple: what sound does the letter L make? Follow up is likewise pretty straight forward: in several different words, which ones start with the sound of the letter L? It would be completely counterintuitive to spend a week with the letter Q, then test for the letter L. Not too difficult to understand. There are some things that lend themselves rather well to this model. It is teaching to the test in a pretty pure form.

Once the varied sets of sounds, math formulas, and steps to get the right measurements and quantities is mastered, things do become more difficult. In any part of the curriculum, at least from about 4th grade on up (4th grade is the first year of mostly pure content teaching. Skills based curricula is a K through 3rd grade experience), content  becomes the focus. Students should already know the alphabet, how to read, and a  bucketful of math facts. Content is a different world altogether, but it is dependent upon the successful acquisition of the necessary skills. Content lends itself to interpretation.

Written papers begin to appear in earnest in 4th grade, and then blossom into a full bore flood after that, all the way to the end of the University years. Papers are written for every subject within the curricula strata. Some of the information that is taught isn’t open to very much, if at all, interpretation. Some historical dates are relatively cast in stone, as are some things that have happened in the various disciplines. It is not quite as easy to adequately grade the way things are written about. Teachers all hope for competent usage of the written language. After that, it gets dicey, which is to say, subjective. The various bits of scientific discoveries are not at all always consistent with what the text book may say. While Marie Curie was busy discovering radioactivity, she was in the process of killing herself with her experiments. Text books used to focus on the wonders of radiation, not so much on what happened to Marie. Perhaps they still do.

In a paper about Marie Curie, what is to be showcased? How does a teacher go about grading two equally good compositions about her, written from two perspectives that are completely at odds with each other? Does the science teacher grade differently from the history teacher, who has a different outlook than the English teacher, regarding the assignment?  History is largely, in this writers opinion, distorted very badly in the K-12 curricula. Who’s version are we writing about? Is one version more wrong than another? In the realm of English, is Shakespeare really that good?  Are “be” verbs all that insidious? Is there really only one way to solve a problem in the world of math? Is science a closed loop, with only one answer per question?

In a standardized testing situation, with standardized scoring, there is only one answer per question. This would indicate that the students have to be asked to memorize pre-sorted facts, which can then be sorted out on a bubbleized scantron card. Fill in the correct bubble, and move on. At the end of the test, the card goes into the scantron reader, and a numerical score is produced. What this measures, and all that it measures, is the ability to memorize the material that is pertinent to the test, and which can be scored with fill in bubbles. Math may be different, as a student may actually have to solve a problem to get to the right bubble on the card. Of course, since there are only 4 or 5 answers to choose from, getting close may be all that is needed.

If the nations teachers are going to be held accountable for great scantron scores in order to stay employed, or to move up, or down, on the salary scale, it becomes important to focus on the presumed correct answers. In fact, there have already been instances where teachers have been accused of cheating on this type of scoring, in order to reach the correct numerical strata in order to be judged a “good” teacher. Herein lies the problem, and this may be the dark side of national standards and testing. If the teaching day focuses on only the correct set of, or acceptable set of, answers to a nationally standardized test, it is more about the teacher than the student and what and how the student learns. The restrictions are enormous in this scenario.

The actual art of teaching takes a clear back seat to the mechanical recitation of someones version of facts. This, in and of itself, in this teachers view, is not good. The wide based critical thinking skills that are a hallmark of teaching in the United States, and which have proved to be pretty important, won’t survive in this type of atmosphere. Rote recitation is not education, it is not learning.

Somewhere there is an answer to this conundrum. Somewhere, either at the national level, in Arne Duncan’s group in the Department of Education, or in the staff room of the local elementary school, there is someone who should be able to figure out how to mesh actual learning with a set of national standards and standardized testing that will be acceptable across the educational spectrum. This will only happen if Duncan et al reach out to the educational professionals who actually spend time in classrooms. The theoreticians are useful as well, as are the sociologists, as this is not just a question that centers only in the classroom. It will take the involvement of more than just teachers to make all of this work. After 36 years of teaching, I have to hope that it does work.

Recently, the move to a national set of curriculum standards took on new life.  For quite some time there has been concern that the standards based lessons being taught around the country were anything but equal. The laws that, for better or worse, came into national prominence with the No Child Left Behind legislation, were meant to establish a basis for measuring success in the  classroom. So far, that’s not what we have.

Some states have moved to rectify the mishmosh of expectations. The intent is to make sure that when the educational, and the anti-educational, establishments are touting their success or lack of it  on the standards platform, that everyone is standing on the same platform. Initially, all of the states were given leeway to establish what the standards in their state would be. The fox was about to have lunch, and dinner, in the hen house. That is changing.

The  National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released a set of state-led education standards, the Common Core State Standards. These standards are meant to be rigorous, consistent, and understandable, from state to state, across the nation. In light of the push by the Department of Education for better compliance with the NCLB laws, and the changes in this law, this should be a good thing.

A teacher in California, Iowa, and Maine, should be able to teach a set of recognized and accepted curricula that would enable a family moving from one state to another to be assured that their children will be able to apply what they have learned in a fair and equitable manner. Students should be able to seamlessly blend into a classroom anywhere in the nation and understand what is being taught. States should be able to absolutely rely on a level competition for whatever federal education dollars that are available.

That has, up till now, not been the case. Several states established norms that were, when examined closely, at best, laughable. Texas has long claimed great educational gains using various programs. Held up to national review, the claims haven’t always held up. Mississippi and Louisiana established themselves at the bottom of the credibility ladder. What is clear is that everyone should be seeking the top of the same ladder. Educators, at least the ones this writer has worked with over the last 36 years, would appreciate this.

Because the stakes, which have become more monetized than ever, have gotten more critical, it is likewise more critical for everyone in the education arena to know what is at stake. If we are to improve the perceived quality of education on a national basis, it is important that the states sign on to an agreed K through 12 set of standards, and then to adhere to them. Inherent in the standards agreement is the component that assess how the standards are being met. The fox has to leave the hen house.

It is not just the national standards that are coming down the road. Subsequent to the standards, or, lurking in the background, depending on your point of view, are some other items. If the standards become nationalized, the business of education at the university level leading to a teaching credential may need to be standardized, to the highest state standard that exists. A teacher in one state, moving to another state, would have a portable credential. That does not currently exist. Holding teachers accountable for meeting the national standards would similarly need to be a consistent from state to state. That would seem to indicate that acceptable classroom behaviors would also need to be as standardized as possible. What to do with disruptive students, and how to measure their effect on a classroom would need to be consistent. There would need to be an acceptable alternative placement for the disruptive, or a method of applying a discount to the classroom performance, consistent from state to state. If we are to truly measure each student, teacher, state, against a set of reasonable and rigorous standards, the environment from which the children come to school will absolutely need to be part of the formula.

The list of the possible ramifications, modifications, and permutations of national standards is likely to be quite long. The law of unintended consequences will apply as well. This is not to say that the status quo is acceptable. It isn’t. We have to start somewhere, and the first step does seem to be nationally accepted standards. Education is not a static phenomenon. It is always changing, and over time, the good changes outnumber the bad ones. Anything that stays static for too long will deteriorate. We never have been able to afford that in education. We certainly cannot afford to have that happen now.

When the greedmeisters in the hedge fund/securities/mortgage/bank/realty industries threw everything off the cliff, with many willing participants going with them, our government threw out a safety net: ” too big to fail” was the name of the net. The net belonged to us, the average citizens of the country. What, you thought someone else was going to pay for it? Silly.

The large corporations made out just fine, with much of the billions, we think, having been repaid.  The world economy didn’t spin out into a black hole, never to be seen or heard of again. Too big, too important to fail. My, my.

Over the last few days, the local paper has been reporting on an effort, now deceased, to throw a safety net to the educational entities around the U.S. In California alone, about 22,000 teachers have actually received real pink slips: no job for next year. Local districts are scrambling to figure out how to make it through the next school year with drastically reduced funding. Even if you believe that the school system as a whole is over-paid, the magnitude of what is happening across the U.S is staggering.The economic hit of 22,000 teachers out of work, on top of everything else, is enormous.

The smaller class size movement in California, and anywhere else it was implemented, is rapidly slipping into nostalgia land. Although as a teacher, this writer can say that the smaller class size has been good for all concerned, there is no research to prove it. The jump to 20:1, K-3, was made so quickly that no one thought about research, control groups, and all of the planning that goes into preparing to study a major shift in class sizes. Many districts in California have simply abandoned all pretense at smaller class sizes. There is no money to support it. With larger class sizes comes a lesser need for teachers. It is an inverse equation. Many thousands of teachers across the U.S. have lost their jobs.

A district in New York advertised for 8 teaching positions. They had to wade through 3,100+ applications for the positions. The applications came from everywhere across the U.S. A district in New Jersey needed 7 teachers: 1,065 applications, again from everywhere in America, flooded in. For a few special ed positions in a district on the east coast, twice the number of applicants threw there hats in the ring: 650+. A small, rural, district in Northern California, up in the mountains, needed 1 teacher: 130 applications, again, from areas spread far and wide.

Think about it. These applicants, all, one must assume, meeting the credential and educational requirements of the districts that advertised, were willing to move, perhaps 3,000 miles, just to find a teaching job. The saddest part of this whole miasma of lunacy is that the bulk of the now jobless teachers are the good, young, educators that we need in the system to propel everyone forward in this ever changing world. This writer is 64, and my energy level, and willingness perhaps, to jump back out onto the tip of the educational leadership spear, is not the same as a much younger teacher in his or her 20’s or 30’s. In the near term, some of the laid off teachers will hang on, hoping that, due to retiring teachers, or some magic influx of funding, they might get back into the classroom. The newest of the new, just graduating University, have next to no chance at a classroom of their own.

The Democrats in Washington mounted an effort to put a few billion into the funding stream so that the school system would be able to keep teachers teaching, and children learning, in a sensible educational environment. Today, May 31, 2010, the local paper reported that the effort has been abandoned. Politically not a good idea right now it said; there’s no support for it they said.

We apparently are not too big to fail. We apparently aren’t doing much of anything to warrant much consideration at all. Fail, though, is what we will experience, and what the children will experience, as class sizes grow, and class diversity in content shrinks. A large increase in the standards that we expect children to reach, especially younger children, with a concurrent decrease in teachers to provide a quality classroom experience, is just plain nuts.

We should have mortgaged everything in sight when we had the chance.

The State that one lives in doesn’t seem to matter just now. For reasons known only to the various deities out there, the education establishment across this nation seems to be in a tailspin, financially speaking. This writer hasn’t read anything recently about a school district being solidly in the black, either in a financial or educational sense. Perhaps bad news simply sells better.

The first funds that the Dept. of Education are distributing in the Race to the Top series are going to two states that the pundits didn’t quite predict: Delaware and Tennessee. Education Secretary Arnie Duncan’s take on it: “”Both states have statewide buy-in for comprehensive plans to reform their schools. They have written new laws to support their policies. And they have demonstrated the courage, capacity, and commitment to turn their ideas into practices that can improve outcomes for students.”

Delaware will receive $100 million, and Tennessee will receive $500 million to implement their programs. The money is distributed over 4 years. The actual budgets have yet to be worked out. Someone, somewhere in Delaware and Tennessee, is getting paid well to figure out that budgeting process. As the yet-to-be-worked out benchmarks are met, money will change hands. There remains $3.4 billion to be raced for. 40 of the States, plus the District of Columbia, submitted applications for the funding. The applicants that didn’t make it have another chance though.

Phase 2 applications are due at the Department of Education by June 1, 2010. In order to assist those who didn’t cross the finish line in the first phase,  the Department of Education has made all Phase 1 applications, peer reviewers’ comments, and scores available on its website. Something else will be available that this writer didn’t know about: videos of states’ presentations will also be posted. Quite the race, video’s documenting it all.

You can access the Secretary’s remarks here. There will be a workshop on April 21 for all phase 2 applicants who want to sharpen their proposals. The workshop will be attended by the good folks from Delaware and Tennessee, who will help out. Where the money for the workshop, and the travel, lodging, food, expenses, will come from isn’t stated. Sounds like a good time to visit Washington, DC. Perhaps the cherry blossoms will still be out for all to see.

Secretary Duncan deems the Race to the Top a success in many ways, stating that it “…has been a catalyst for education reform across this country, prompting states to think deeply about how to improve the way we prepare our students for success in a competitive, 21st century economy and workplace.” Oddly, this writer was under the impression that all the staff meetings for the last umpteen years at his school district were about exactly the same thing. Perhaps not. Maybe there is a parallel universe that we go to during staff meetings, and all that we did just went into an educational black hole.