eduskeptic

Ever wonder who is running the education debate in the U.S.? We hear quite a lot from Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, about the need for changing how we educate children in this country. It seems as though that is one of the key phrases for most politicians. Oddly enough, it’s a good thought. Education cannot stand still and be successful. If it doesn’t evolve, it most surely will  become less and less relevant and successful as time goes on. I doubt that there will ever be a time when we as educators, or as a nation, can quit insisting that our educational systems get better.

Who, however, is in charge of this thrust? Arne Duncan, as has been pointed out many times before, is not and never has been, a credentialed teacher. He does have a senior staff though. I have taken the time to read all of their online bios. I am very curious as to who is advising Mr. Duncan. There are 32 Senior Staff listed, Mr. Duncan included. Of those, 21 have a link to their bios. Twenty-six have links to their home pages. My theory was that, among Mr. Duncan’s advisor’s, there must surely be a solid mix of professionals, with educators well represented. It is after all, the national Department of Education. I read all the online biographies. This is what I found:

Of the 31 listed Assistants to Mr. Duncan, 1 has direct experience with k-12 education, 1 has an MA in Education, and 2 are listed as having been a teacher at the University level.

Russlyn Ali is the Assistant Secretary, Office of Civil Rights. Her bio states that she was a teacher. She has taught at USC, and UC Davis. There is no indication that she has k-12 experience, nor does it indicate what she taught and for how long.

Gabriella Gomez, is the Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs. She has a Masters in Education from Harvard. There is no indication that she has taught anywhere.

Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, is the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education. She served as an assistant and deputy superintendent and chief academic officer at Pomona Unified School District, Pomona California. She also served as Superintendent of the district. Her bio states that she was an educator, for 5 years, in the Montebello and Pasadena Unified School districts, where she held various positions, including being a teacher. There is no indication of how long she was an actual teacher in a classroom.

John Wilson is the Executive Director White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He held a position as an associate professor of education in the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University. There is no indication that he has any k-12 teaching experience.

That’s it. Four out of 32 (12.5%) has some direct connection to education, and out of that group, only one (1.3%) is listed as an actual teacher in the k-12 arena. The rest of the Assistants are predominantly lawyers, with a good showing of CEO’s, membership on various boards, trusts, and educational think tanks.

Perhaps it is because I have spent the last 34 years teaching that I think that there should be a solid core of actual teachers advising Mr. Duncan. After all, I would prefer that the person who performs a medical operation on me be a board certified surgeon, not the CFO or CEO of the hospital. I hope that the person sitting in the pilots seat of the airplane I’m riding in is a qualified pilot, and not the president of the airline company.

Maybe that’s the point here though. Perhaps the business of running the nations schools is best left to lawyers and business people. It just could be, that in the minds of the national and state “education secretary” Gliteratti, that teachers are simply irrelevant to the process of better education.

My theory, as stated at the beginning of this piece, has been proved wrong. Apparently there is no solid core of educators advising anyone. The lawyers and business people are the advisors. I don’t know if this is good or bad, as these people all have advanced degrees. That is, fundamentally, very different than being an experienced teacher. I hope that at some time, some of these people talk to actual teachers about the realities of the k-12 classroom experience. It might be helpful in the discussion of what needs to be done. Maybe.

In a recent Harpers magazine article, the thinking of several speakers and writers about education and national policy has been explored. In short, according to the article, there exists among some the stance that we educate simply for return on investment (ROI). The author, Mark Slouka, makes the point that by dehumanizing the educational process, we short change ourselves, and manage, in the process of doing so, to provide a vast disservice to the children we are educating.

Slouka makes a strong case that the business of education has become the business of business. If you have a child in school, regardless of the grade, you will by now have heard that what we have to do in the classroom is get these children ready to be productive once they leave school. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, part of that statement about productivity is that they will be productive in the workplace. If one listens well to the news regarding the state of education in America, one could easily believe that that is the point of education: get them ready to compete in the global, national, or regional marketplace.

Consider this statement by District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee: “This is exactly what life is about. You get a paycheck every two weeks. We’re preparing children for life.” Really? That’s what education is all about? There’s more. Brent Staples, a New York Times editorialist wrote that the the system is failing “to produce the fluent writers required by the new economy.” It just may be that good writing has more value than that. Slouka goes on to quote Thomas Friedman, who wrote about a speech given by Bill Gates, in which Gates says that our high schools are obsolete, that even when doing what they are designed to do, they “cannot teach our kids what they need to know today”. Friedman goes on to further quote Gates, “If we don’t fix American education, I won’t be able to hire your kids.” Slouka has an entire article full of this kind of corporate view of what American education is doing, or not doing.

What are these people thinking? This writer teaches with the idea that his Kindergartners will leave his classroom at the end of the year with a better understanding of the world around them. This writer, a Kindergarten teacher for the last 23 of 34 years teaching, isn’t, by any stretch of the corporate imagination, preparing his students to be pay-check-every-two-weeks robots. With such an outlook on education, why is Michelle Rhee still employed by the District of Columbia School District? Has Bill Gates lost his billions of marbles? Thomas Friedman, whose writing I admire, seems to have adopted the company line as well. Evidently, so has President Obama. Arne Duncan is not an educator, never has been, and probably has no plans to become one. He played a bit of professional basketball in Australia, and is a business man. These are probably the skills he needs to be the Secretary of Education. Would a deep background in education, in the classroom, make a difference in his outlook? It couldn’t hurt.

The purpose of education must be much more broad than this twisted corporate view. If our children are to be leaders and innovators, now and in the completely unknown future, they have to be able to work together, understand history (let’s see–Viet Nam/Afgahnistan/Russia, hmmm), create things that don’t yet exist, engage in civil discourse, and be ready and able to stand up for their reasoned, researched positions. Democracy isn’t an easy road to be on. One can only hope that a well rounded education, strenuously applied, will keep it alive. Narrowing the focus to a paycheck every two weeks ignores the care that a functioning democracy demands. What are these people thinking about?

I had the opportunity to attend the west coast Government Technology Conference in Sacramento, CA, last Wed and Thurs, May 13&14. I have enjoyed this conference over the years for a number of reasons. I get to meet vendors of just about everything that I use or might use, talk to different company reps and specialists about trends, what’s working and what is vapor ware, and what’s toast already, what changes have taken place in the market place since last year, and pick up a pen or two with cool logos on them. I get to experience talking with adults all day too, which is vastly different than my normal day. I also get to sit in on various presentations and discussions that are of interest to me, or that I think will be of interest to my district and our technology needs and dreams. Last year I watched a fantastic presentation on interactive white boards, and a system that basically puts a fully functional computer desktop on the white board at the front of the classroom. For those of you of a certain age, blackboards all but disappeared some years ago, along with chalk. They are now whiteboards, and one uses non-permanent markers on them. I got to see the system in action when I talked with a rep at the Western Blue booth. He was using a system that put the desktop on his rather large screen, about the size of a classroom white board, fully connected to the Internet, fully functional, while he looked up some information on it for me. Very impressive. Expensive, but impressive nonetheless. This was very interesting to me, as the subject of interactive whiteboards has been spoken of, and dreamed about, by some teachers in our district, over the last few years. I was able to bring a great deal of information, and enthusiasm, back to school with me. This year I attended a session on “Demystifying the Stimulus Package”. It was presented by Paul W. Taylor, Phd. of  Converge Magazine, with a number of vendors co-hosting the event. During a rather nice lunch we were able to meet other educators, vendors, and administrators. I sat a table with one of the head IT people at San Francisco State, two reps from Cisco, and two from Elluminate. While the seating was completely at random, I couldn’t have chosen better had I been given a list. First, the Cisco guys are experts at networked systems. Second, the Elluminate reps were experts at putting together distance learning for school districts. The San Francisco State guy uses Elluminate all the time for various projects at SFS. We had a good working lunch. The main topic of the session, the stimulus package and what it means for education, included quite a few participants who spoke of the need, in addition to saving jobs, to begin using the technology tools we have today, in the classroom. It is not a given that school districts are using any of the technology that is available to the private sector. We do have computers, the age of which may be shocking to anyone who hasn’t been in a classroom lately. We do have high speed internet pipelines to our sites. Whether we have a good enough infrastructure to carry the highspeed past the entry point is different from district to district, state to state. We don’t have enough computers for all classrooms to have them. A computer lab may have, and may not have as well, current edition computers, and may or may not have a lab person who actually knows not only the machines, but who is able to work with children as well. Printers, ink, and anything more exotic than that may or may not either exist, work, or be available to all classrooms. What does all of this have to do with demystifying anything? Read on. There was quite a bit of talk about online education, online textbooks, either instead of or in addition to, hard copy texts, distance learning, and a constant ability of any student to connect on line to access school curricula, any time, from anywhere. Exciting stuff, to be sure. I think that having the ability to access curricula, assignments, and assistance, over the internet is one of the parts that will help students succeed. Children come to school, in Kindergarten, with greater technological knowledge and skills, than one can imagine. Their knowledge and use of technology grows from there, and it grows in leaps and bounds. If we aren’t able to keep up with what they have outside the classroom, we may just lose them. The enthusiasm from the private sector, the vendors and company representatives, is truly great, as it should be. They have some really cool things to offer. Maybe the stimulus package for education will help districts participate with some of it. One participant spoke about all students having an iPhone or Blackberry, and how they could then connect anytime, anywhere to the good old World Wide Web to access education. Doesn’t that sound good? After I left the session I headed to the ATT booth on the expo floor. I wanted to know how much it might cost, per person, for a level of connectivity that would allow web access from a hand held of any kind. Rough guess: $60-$70 US per person, per month. That is in addition to the cost of the hand-held device. Do the math for your district. The stimulus package seeks, in one small part of the education section, to erase the digital divide, that is, the discrepancy between those who have and use technology and those who do not. The cost is simply staggering. The digital divide is just as likely to widen as it is to shorten. In a catch-22 twist, the very people who are most likely to help with erasing the technology chasm, the good, enthusiastic, up to their ears in technology since they were born, young teachers, are the very ones who are losing their jobs due to the lack of funds for school districts. While the demystification of the stimulus is somewhat complicated, and the session offered good information about a broad range of monies coming to education, what remains a mystery is how, especially in the economic times we are experiencing now, are we going to pay for what the enthusiastic company reps have available. There is definitely another divide out there. It’s the divide between private business and public schools, how they are funded and run, and how the private sector has no clue about the Alice in Wonderland experience of school finance, which may never be demystified. Maybe next year we can have a session about demystifying school finance.

I have been teaching for over 30 years. In that time I have been through seven superintendents and about ten principals. Six of those principals I worked with in a teacher/principal relationship. The other four, or maybe five, I worked with as head of the Teachers Association. Some of these administrators were wonderful to work with. A few were, and probably still are, just plain rotten. Had I the authority to fire them, I would have. I’m equally sure that some of them would have loved to fire me too. I did carry on a professional relationship with all of them, either as a teacher, or as an association representative. I have been approached more than once over the years to consider becoming an administrator. I have chosen to stay in the classroom, for reasons I will get to in a short bit. In a recent article, Margaret Gaston wrote about the declining numbers of teachers pursing administrative credentials. It is an interesting article. In it, she says that only “… 48 percent of California principals say they plan to stay in their jobs until retirement, compared with 67 percent nationally, and only 22 percent of California’s secondary principals plan to do so.” Briefly, she notes that it is important to strengthen recruitment and retention of the administration portion of the school systems. A study by Ken Futernick of California State University, Sacramento, mentioned in the same article, points out that “…42 percent of teachers who leave the field cite ‘an unsupportive principal’ as a reason for leaving.” He says that 52 percent cite poor administrative support at the district level.

The job of principal, or superintendent, is vastly different from that of a teacher. The job of principal is one of administration, one of managing. In these days, at least in California, that job has gotten to be very complicated. Now, I think that anyone who wants to be a principal should be required to spend a minimum of five years in the classroom, if for no other reason than to get a basic understanding of what it takes to be a teacher, full time, in the classroom. Without that experience, school management shifts into the realm of magical thinking. Past that point, principals don’t teach, nor should they be expected to, any more than I should be expected to perform administrative duties.The principal has quite a full plate without attempting to be the “educational leader” of a school. I’ve not met one yet who is. I’ve met a few who thought they were. They weren’t.  I know teachers who think they know how to run a school. They don’t. Certainly, the principal must be the administrative leader of the school, the person who provides direction, support, guidance, and when necessary, discipline, for staff and students.The principal must keep up with the myriad of laws, deadlines, and edicts that govern a school and a school district, an Alice in Wonderland type of experience. I depend on my principal to keep all of that away from my classroom so that I am able to do my job, which is to teach. The principal at my elementary school somehow manages, in addition to everything else, to visit every classroom several times a year to present science lessons. He becomes the Principal of Science on these forays. It is an amazing effort, and something the children enjoy and learn from. He doesn’t pretend to be the educational leader. He’s a great Principal of Science though. Earlier, I said that I chose to stay in the classroom. The reasons are many. The principal at my school gets there before I do, and leaves after I do. His contracted days are longer than mine. His nights and weekends are full of school things, while mine are not. While I spend my days with the complexity of the behaviors of very young children, and other teachers deal with the craziness of middle school or high school students, the principal spends his days with parents, who are either happy with or disgusted with, something that happened at school/on the bus/at the bus stop/on the internet, legal issues about everything, deadlines for forms, meetings, money, clubs, curricula, student and staff problems, maintenance, and the district office.  If this person, the principal, doesn’t have adequate training for administering this mishmash of issues, he or she will fail. It is important for the principal types to have support and continuous training in not only in the business end of running a school, but in the people end as well. Teachers are not altogether easy to manage, even under the best of circumstances. It’s a difficult mix to master, and when it isn’t, some teachers, especially the young ones, leave the profession as a result. The screening process for gaining an admin credential should be rigorous, just as it should be for teachers. We cannot afford poor quality on either side of the equation. The last thing a teacher needs is a principal who is incapable of being honest, human, supportive, and knowledgeable. Now, on top of all this, the principal simply doesn’t make enough money for me to have jumped into that pool. It is a complex and demanding job, just as mine is. It is not a surprise to me at all that the number of teachers wanting to go into the administrative ranks, or stay there, is less than robust. One thing that I want to point out, which is a different from what Margaret Gaston says in her article: school leadership is not vested in the principal, or any other single source. It is a partnership between teachers and principals. Educational leadership is in the classroom, not the principals office. Administrative leadership is in the principals office, not the classroom. The success of a school results from a working relationship between the two.

I just read a blog post at Converge Magazine online.  In it, the writer complains about “glorified babysitting” and the money she once made babysitting.  She made $5.00 per hour, per child.  She, and apparently some colleagues,  goes on to do some mathematical calculations that use this figure to come up with a theoretical teacher’s salary : 35 students x 5 classes x $5 per hour = $875 per day= $160,562 per year. I left a comment.  The writer, as a teacher, should know what a sentence fragment is, and shouldn’t use them in an academic post of any kind.  She further makes a common mistake that I see more and more of these days.  She refers to people in this manner: “…we are legally responsible for every student that is physically present…”.  People should always be referred to as who, whose, or whom .  It is a sign of either a hurried and unskilled writer, or an uneducated one when “that” is use to describe people.  While I would love to make more money than I do, actually, a lot more, I do not complain about what I am paid.  I made a clear choice many years ago to be a teacher.  If I had wanted to make gobs of money, I would have done something else.  I get very tired of hearing those in my profession complain about babysitting and not enough money.  What I do get is more time off than anyone else I know.   I have a great deal of respect for babysitters and child care providers.  Their jobs are difficult, with long hours and very little time off.  My advice to everyone who is profoundly dissatisfied with the salary for teaching is this: quit.  Go find another job.  You will not be missed.  Someone else, equally qualified, or perhaps even more so, will fill your spot quite nicely.  I do not babysit in my classroom.  I teach.  I simply do not permit anything to get in the way of learning.  I do recognize that this can be a demanding and sometimes very, very, frustrating enterprise, this teaching thing, especially for those who are relatively new to the profession.  The learning curve is steep and difficult.  The very first day in your classroom isn’t very much different from the very last:  at the appointed time, the bell rings, the door shuts, and you are in the classroom, alone, with your students.  The days begin like this, and end like this.  Teachers are mostly on their own from the start, and expected to do very well with whomever the students are.  Training is sparse, if at all.  Support is sporadic.  Expectations are enormous.  Responsibility for the students is absolutely incredible, and can be daunting.  Paperwork seems to eclipse common sense.  One thing is certainly clear here though: those of us who are teachers have chosen to be teachers.  We knew the salary schedule when we signed the contract.  It is completely ridiculous to complain about it.  Either come to terms with it, stop complaining, and certainly work for better conditions,  or quit.

Data drives much of what we do.  Without data, the bits, pieces, and numbers of everyday life, it would be difficult to do much of anything.  Make a cake without the proper data to guide you, and you are more likely to end up with either an explosion or a boat anchor than a cake.  We depend on correct data to make, and alter, plans.  We collect it in many ways and forms, and use it in too many ways to count.  The education establishment needs accurate data for just about every thing that we do.  That data is constantly used to either support the idea that we are doing well, or are sliding quickly into oblivion. Verifiable data should be relatively easy to come by and probably just as easy to manipulate.  If it is verifiable data (numbers, names, places, tests etc.) then it is useful, even if we disagree with how it is used, or have different interpretations of how it should be used.   Considering that schools are, in theory, data driven, one could reasonably expect that our data stream is pretty solid, that we can point to numbers and results that actually mean something.  Maybe, maybe not.  Consider just one thing: the drop out rate at your local school or school district.  It is a number that can have rather large implications for and impacts on, schools and communities.  Finding this number is probably not, or at least shouldn’t be, very difficult.  Perhaps you could just call your local school and get it.  The question has been, and continues to be, is the information accurate?  The simple definition of “drop out” is not simple.  Who constitutes a drop out?  Is it someone who simply doesn’t show up anymore? What if someone moves but doesn’t enroll in a public school?  Dropout?  A student leaves your school for a private home school.  Dropout?  Joins the military.  Dropout?  It isn’t easy to define this one term.  How about the students in your class, or school?  Have they been with you from the start, from Kindergarten?  We are looking at test data for our second through fourth grades.  One question I have is simple enough: how many of the students we have tested have been with us from Kindergarten?  The answer: we have no way to figure that out, even with our rather expensive attendance software.  Would it be helpful to know?  Yes, it would.  For us to figure out who has been with us from the start, it seems,  would require an extensive exercise in physically looking at each child’s record and following it backward to the first date of enrollment in our district. Rather time consuming.  We need that data now, not a few weeks from now.  Perhaps a large district could devote the time to such an endeavor, but I have to guess that most districts that are small to medium in size just don’t have the money to do such a thing. If our small distict doesn’t have the capacity to figure out who has been with us since Kindergarten, how does an entire state, or the nation, figure out what the real drop out rate is? McKinsey & Co. has produced a paper that gives us, it says, “…an ideal vision of what a continuous learning system would look like” .  The State of California wants data that is real, accurate, and transparent, that gives us the ability to track students and educators alike, which they say we now do (students: CalPADs; teachers: CalTIDEs)  McKinsey & Co. proposes a comprehensive system that should lead to this goal.  I want the data too.  I want to be able to ask our attendance clerks which children have been with us from the start, who has actually dropped out, which is to say simply quit going to school in any form, and get information that I can use, instead of a statement that we can’t get that kind of information right now.  I’d like to be able to fine tune our teaching and curricula to benefit our students, and having in-depth, accurate, up-to-date information will make this task much more possible.  I would imagine that teachers, parents, and legislators in other states would like the same capabilities.  I’ll keep you posted.  Let me know what is going on in your state, district, or school.  Let’s compare notes.

Education is, if one is to believe the rhetoric, a very high priority for this nation.  This message goes out from city, county, state, and national offices.  Admirable.  One must first define “education” though, as education occurs every second of every day.  The education mentioned by the various governments is the institutional variety, that which occurs in public classrooms.  It is said, quite often, that we need to place the highest priority on education.  Not surprisingly, every priority has defenders.  Health, education, welfare are all intertwined, and have all been national priorities at one time or another.  The test of whether education, or anything else, is actually a real priority comes when there isn’t quite enough money or time, or both, to go around.  Now is one of those times.  Part of the federal stimulus package  is for education ($100 billion +).  Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Education Secretary, has a big job on his hands.  He has to see that this money is well spent by the states.  In California, as in other states, the budget is a bit difficult just now.  School districts around the state are in the process of passing out pink slips by the hundreds, which equals thousands when all the districts are counted (according to the California Teachers Association, 25,000).  The districts probably don’t have much choice, as March 15th is the date that they must notify credentialed staff that they may not have a job next for the next school year.  School districts around the state are still in the process of allocating funds, figuring out what to cut.  Mostly, the cuts will be painful.  Some, in this state and in other states, probably should have been made long ago.  What is important is that the cuts be made as far away from the classroom as possible.  What is probably real is that a large number of good, young teachers will lose their jobs, class sizes will go up, and test scores will go down.  A district in the Sacramento area has issued close to 400 pink slips.  This is just one district in one small part of the state.  They went all the way back to 2001 and have notified the teachers hired since then that they may be out of work in June.  By May 15, some of these teachers will still have jobs, and, sadly, some will not, May 15 being the day that the pink slips become real.  This is not putting education in a high priority status.  It is giving lip service to the idea and failing to back it up with actions.  The federal stimulus package has given California money for education.  The state, in turn, is working out the details for how the money will trickle down to the districts.  The districts have a rough idea about how much they are going to receive.  Still, the pink slips go out, the morale tanks, and the newer teachers have now been put in a position of figuring out what they will do for work when June arrives.  They are expected, however, to somehow stay focused on their classrooms.  Quite hard to do I think.  Mortgages, health insurance, car payments, food are now viewed in a different light.  One of the big disconnects in this scenario, and it is a big one, is that the people who are in charge of issuing the pink slips are not in danger of losing anything.  They also don’t teach anyone, and rarely visit a classroom.  Their jobs, perks, and benefits are all secure.  The entire layoff procedure is a piece of business for them.  It’s not that they should be in the classrooms.  Their jobs are, after all, different.  They should, however, be far more connected to the damage done to education when they okay hundreds of pink slips.  Some jobs will be saved by older teachers retiring, others by leaves of absences for various reasons.  The disticts should focus on how they can keep as many teachers as possible, instead of figuring out how many pink slips to issue.  Education needs these good, talented young teachers to lead us forward.  Without them, we stagnate, and that is not a good thing to have happen, now or ever.  Some of these good young teachers will abandon the field for good, feeling, rightfully I think, let down by the the very people who claim that education has just got to be a very high priority for this nation.   It is an easy thing to say, especially by government and administrators who will continue to have jobs when June rolls around.  Education as a priority?  Prove it, Mr. President, Ms. Superintendent.  Talk is, as always, very, very cheap.

As of today, Feb. 16, school districts throughout California still have no idea what their funding picture is.  Our legislators are busy in Sacramento attempting to hone political stonewalling into an even lower rung on the evolutionary ladder.  By March 15, districts must, by law, notify certificated staff (administrators, teachers, librarians who are credentialed) that they could be laid off.  The pink slip time clock is ticking rather loudly.  By May 15, those who receive pink slips will find out if they have jobs for the following school year.  Most likely no one who is as gray as I am will find anything pink in the mail.  The young, energetic, full of enthusiasm future of education in the classroom teachers will receive them.  Most of them went through University when the cry from the education and political establisments was that we have a national and state shortage of teachers.  Get your credential, get a job.  I hope that the legislators, in whatever state they are in, come to their senses and get the budgeting issue solved very soon.  It would be, in my opinion, a disaster for education if we lose young teachers because of the inability of the state government to come to agreement on where the money to run the state actually comes from.  Arranging the deck chairs to facilitate the sinking of the ship is not what we are in need of just now.

California is a large state with a large problem right now.  The state of our economy is just plain weird.  The funding picture for schools isn’t any better than it is for anything else.  We simply don’t know what it’s going to be.  We do have to plan though, and come up with a budget that is supportable for this year and the following two years.  We do the best we can with this scenario.  Keep in mind that we do not generate things that make a profit for us.  We are charged with  spending what is allocated to us in a responsible manner, and at least for this district, I think we do.  In the current financial situation, the Governor has, as part of his overall plan for schools, decided on some options for us.  It is, from the Governor’s side, a completely brilliant plan, and the ultimate in passing the buck.  In a nutshell, here it is: give school districts the ability to choose the programs they are going to fund.  It sounds like a return to local control, and I must say again that I think, from the Governor’s side, it is absolutely stunning.  What it really does is completely shift responsibility for programs from the state to the district.  Great, right?  Maybe.  The Governor and the legislature will be able to stand in front of their various microphones and tell the public, with straight faces, that the loss of any program is the result of the local district choosing to discontinue it.  They are off the hook.  If the state government actually takes the restrictions off all the categorical programs and lets us use that money for things that make sense in our districts, it might turn out all right.  The actual amount of funding that we receive is very, very important though.  One of the things that the CTA is floating an ad on TV about is class size reduction funding.  CTA says it is a target of the Governator.  Naturally, the response from the capital is that it is not.  Remember, one direction of the Gov’s financial thrust is “local control”.  I’ve been in this business a long time, and have become fairly well aquainted with how we are funded.  Here is a general picture of what the public might hear at budget time: we have fully funded the schools according to the Prop. 98 guidelines.  Schools have received a 5.5% COLA (or some other percentage, makes no difference), and that is really good for them.  Sure.  What you don’t hear, unless you work with a schools budget, is that the state has applied a 2% deficit to the 5.5%.  This simply means that instead of a full 5.5% (just for illustration purposes), we receive 3.5%.  It’s the best of smoke and mirrors.  That deficit is simply money we never see.  The bills don’t decrease, and the needs don’t decrease by any percentage.  So, with that kind of bookkeeping in mind, back to class size reduction.  If the state actually fully funds the categoricals (pots of money that may only be spent on certain programs, whether they make sense or not), and gives us control,  we will be faced with what we will fund, and what we won’t.  Maybe, not such a bad deal, as we will be able to fund programs that really do benefit children, and discontinue ones that are clearly marginal.  This will vary from district to district as the needs are different from district to district.  Class size reduction funds are $1,071 per child in each K through 3rd grade level.  I can tell you that working with 20 very young children in my classroom is much better for all concerned than working with 30+.  Yes, I have taught Kindergarten with 32 children in my classroom, no teaching partner, all day.  My small group instruction is better with groups of 6 or 7 instead of 10 or 11.  The same is true for 1st grade, where they are tasked with teaching reading, an art form that is truly amazing.  Now, full funding from the state probably means that we will be able to continue with class size reduction.  If, however, the state government decides to pull the funding, and tell us to use what ever we need to from the newly unleashed categoricals to fund what ever we want, some very difficult choices, class size reduction among the “choices”, will have to be made.  If districts throughout the state eliminate any K though 3 classes from class size reduction, literally thousands of mostly young teachers will be out of jobs in June of this year.  Along with the increasing demands of NCLB, AYP, STAR tests,and state standards, the resulting increase in class sizes, which will undoubtedly float to 30 and beyond in K-3, will have a bit of a harsh effect on meeting any of those goals.  Of course, it will be the districts fault.  The Governator and the so-called legislators will be, with straight faces, off the hook.  Free choice, remember?  I don’t know what the motivation of the Governator is, but, as the title of this blog suggests, I am absolutely skeptical.  Politicians, if nothing else, are self-serving,  That’s probably more to the point than local control.  Keep listening.  Your comments are welcomed.

I have been teaching for a while now. I earned my first credential in 1974. Since then, I have added two more, plus a masters degree. I have taught at the community college level, lectured at the university level, taught adult school, summer school, special projects, substituted at just about every level, worked with adults, incarcerated youth, and at risk youth. I was head of a School Attendance Review Board, ran a grant funded program to keep kids in school, have been the president, vice president, or site representative of our teachers association for quite a few years, have been the teacher in charge or back-up for 20 years, and was head of our peer assistance review committee. I have sat on every budget committee in our district for the last 23 years, and been on our student support team off and on for the same amount of time. I have been teaching Kindergarten full-time for the last 23 years. This has all, except for the incarcerated ones, been in public schools. All of this is simply to establish that I have a basis for what I write about. It also accounts for my blog name: eduskeptic, as I have heard more than a few claims about education and the educational process that are simply founded on faulty information, selective use of information, or pseudo research and are false. Teachers are prone to taking anecdotal information and assuming that it is real, longitudinal, replicated research that is credible. Considering that we spend our professional lives in a room with 20 to 30 or more students all day, every day, it’s not surprising that more of us don’t take the time to do our own research regarding any number of things. We run out of time and energy at the end of the day to do so. Listening to the consultants is sometimes just the short, convenient path to take. The consultants, of course, are selling something, and their pitch is tailored to their product. Our research skills could use a boost.

The same cannot be said of the government, any level of government. The No Child Left Behind Act, (PL 107-110, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001), should have been a very well researched and implemented law. While it may be impossible to account for all of the unintended consequences of anything that we do, one should expect that the ramifications of such a far reaching law at least be explored. Considering the title of the act alone, I would have certainly expected that. It is a wide ranging law that could do some good. The United States Government has the ability to task real people to do real research on anything that is being considered. It’s not a side job, but a full time job for which there are people available. What happened? Did someone forget to research developmental processes, or simple math concepts? I do think that for abysmally performing schools there should be a level of help, and if necessary, a very heavy hand, in implementing change for the better. First, it would be important to identify the reason for the sub-par results. The next step would be to figure out how to fix the problem. The last step is to fix it. Not such a radical idea. Put the money and the expertise where it is needed. Oddly enough, the fix might have to involve the community as a whole, not just the school. NCLB, however, is fatally flawed, and in its present iteration cannot do what it is supposed to do. It does not address the whole. It starts out with a mathematical impossibility, and founders from there. It completely ignores something called the bell curve. It is not possible for everyone to be at average, or above average, or below average, or at the t op. As more students move to average, the average moves, as do the rest of the elements being charted. In order for there to be an average, there must be some below average, and some above average. High is defined by low. Dark is defined by light, fast by slow, and so on. I can certainly make sure that all my students know more by the end of the school year than at the start. I should, and do, strive to reach each and every one them and make certain that they all know their letters, sounds, and simple words, are able to count etc. They will not all be in the same place, educationally, at the same time, at the end of the school year. Yet, that seems to be what is expected. Everyone is expected to be “proficient”(proficient has to have some sort of definition that involves not proficient). My colleagues in first grade are expected to have all the children reading at the same level by the end of the year. Not only are the children to be reading, they must read at a certain rate in order to be considered proficient. Each successive grade level has similar expectations. Now, the expectations are not necessarily the problem. Reading is a necessary skill. Children should be able to read, and, perhaps most importantly, comprehend what they are reading. If the emphasis is on speed, and a child is not developmentally ready to put all that together, the pressure goes up. This makes no sense at all. This is a good way to teach children to dislike reading. The net effect is that the child starts to get more than a little rattled when it comes to reading. There is no documented gain in putting undue pressure on young children. The developmental processes, like the bell curve, have been ignored in the NCLB process. It is impossible to speed up the developmental processes a child goes through. On top of that, each child is different. Not all 6 year olds (or any age young child) are the same. Anyone who has spent time during lessons at an elementary school knows this. The research (Piaget, anyone?) says this. Pediatricians will tell you this. The cognitive abilities of these young children cannot be “pushed” or hurried up just because NCLB wants it to be so. We are cautioned against teaching to the test, teaching only those things that are specific to the test. Teaching to the test does not teach thinking, creativity, problem solving, or any other skills that our society needs to foster in order to excel. It teaches only what is on the test, how to fill in a bubble on a scantron card. If my teaching job depends upon my students reaching NCLB proficiency levels, and my school must meet these definitions or be labeled non-performing and subject to the feds taking it over, how can I not teach to the test? It is a high stakes game, and unnecessarily so. Rather than the confrontational nature of the threat of having my school taken over by the feds (we are not a target just now, but unless things change, all schools will be, as the stakes start going up quite sharply form here on out), the administration replaced, teachers moved, terminated etc. it seems to me that a true partnership could be hammered out that redirects problem schools, and their communities, into a more successful model. For me, the threat is empty. If the feds, or the state, think that they are capable of doing a better job, I think they ought to come on up and get on with it. Our little district has a very high proportion of our students who end up being Valedictorians and Saludatorians at high school graduation time. We did this prior to NCLB, and continue to do. President Obama has said that education has to be a national priority and that NCLB must be revised if it is to be successful. I hope that he manages to fine tune what could be a very useful tool in education. As it stands, it isn’t doing any of us much good, especially in the long run. While there have been some gains posted, it would pay to look into just exactly what and where the gains are purported to be. What is a gain in one state could translate into a loss in another. There has been quite a bit written on the pros and cons.  It is being challenged in court also.  You can let President Obama know what you think of all this. Let me know too.