Again, and still, teachers in California are set to lose their jobs. Another few thousand teachers will be getting their last paycheck as teachers later this month, or in early June. The final layoff notices have already been sent out.

Disturbingly, this is has the same characteristics of a broken record. The same thing plays, over and over again.

According to the Bee, “…more than 650 Sacramento County teachers…” will find themselves out of a job. Their last day will be the end of this school year. In addition to the 650+ teachers, over 500 support staff will also be out of work as of the last day of school.

That means that in Sacramento County alone, over 1,000 school district employees will be added to the unemployed rolls. Magnify this number by the over 1000 school districts throughout this state and the number is staggering.

The effects of laying off 650+ teachers are many. Class sizes will be larger starting with the 2012-2013 school year. Depending on the district, it could be quite a bit larger.

Those 650+ teachers, and the over 500 office, cafeteria, library, maintenance, account techs, attendance clerks, aides, special program techs, will also be without health insurance.

They won’t be going out to lunch or dinner, there will be far fewer out of town vacations, and home improvement projects will stall out. Pennies will be pinched as budgets get stretched. The progression of falling dominoes related to this just goes on and on, casting a pall over the entire region.

Another aspect of this continual saga is that all of the teachers who are left have to re-calculate their position on the list. If there aren’t enough retirements and leaves next year, another batch of teachers will be looking for work in June, 2013.

The disruptions to classrooms are very real and very disturbing. More children per classroom means less individual instructional time. It’s not good.

The Governor and the the legislature will, as stated in this column recently, engage in a very heavy round of hardball politics. The biggest threat is that unless more money is forthcoming, along with enough cuts, education will take a brutal hit, says the Governor Brown.

No new taxes shouts the Republican side of the isle. The shouting will be vociferous and strident, from all sides.

In the meantime, the schools, already on a wheezing respirator, have to somehow stay afloat, and do the best possible for the children, with fewer teachers and support staff, no matter what the politics in Sacramento are.

It’s the same song and dance across the state, and probably across the nation. One can only hope that there aren’t any further calls for bake sales, paper drives, cookie dough sales, and masses of volunteers to keep everything afloat.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

It contained the usual smattering of ancient exhortations to students and teachers. Do your best, raise your hand, turn in your homework, that sort of thing. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

Here are three of the suggestions for parents on his top 10 list of how to honor teachers.

Parents should hold fund raisers and donate proceeds to schools. Really? A bake sale to fund the school system? Pardon me while I control my gag reflex.

This little bit of wisdom is from the California State Superintendent of Schools! It is impossible to know if this was a tongue-in-cheek statement, a satirical leap for the entertainment of the masses, a not so subtle message to the legislature, or, really real.

That sort of thinking, one thought, was long out of the collective unconscious. This is how we are going to make it to the top of the international educational charts? Bake sales?

PTA’s, and Parent Teacher Clubs already raise quite of bit of money for their individual schools. Local merchants already hand over boatloads of money when school children show up with a request for dollars.

These fund go for field trips, extra classroom gizmo’s and so on. They don’t supplant anything, and aren’t meant to.

It makes no difference how Mr. Torlakson meant it. It is demeaning to the entire educational system.

He also suggests that parents donate school supplies to their child’s school. Let’s see, um, isn’t K-12 education in this state supposed to be “free and equal”? If the system can’t or won’t supply the necessary supplies, perhaps they aren’t all that necessary. Teachers and parents should, under no circumstances, feel required to fork over paper, tape, pencils and whatnot, so that the school can function.

Doing so merely allows the state and the school districts to quit buying the everyday things that teachers and students need. If the supplies are at the schools, why provide more?

The presence of teachers aides in the early grades–K-3–is already a rarity in most districts. If there are aides, it for very short time periods, and always just a dollar away from not being there at all.

Torlakson’s list includes this: “Help in class or at sports events, field trips or on campus.” It’s not a new, or bad, idea. Here’s the rub though.

When the aides disappear, and parents show up to do the job the aides used to do, the impetus to adequately fund the classrooms of our youngest students begins to disappear as well. Once again, if the parents fill in, there’s no need to continue to hire, or keep, school district employees to keep the classrooms afloat. There is an assumption that all is well. After all, the parents are there, right?

The mind of the Eduskeptic is boggled by the inanity of these statements. It is our job as adults to fund the school system. We do so through our taxes. I gladly pay them.

Gov. Brown and the Legislature are about to engage in a fierce game of hardball politics. Schools are on the line, as are a few thousand more teaching jobs across the state.

In order for the magnitude of the educational funding gap to understood by the soon-to-be-engaged-in-hardball-politics “I’m doing very well, thank you” politicians in Sacramento, we have to let the gaps be seen.

Please, no bake sales. Erase that thought from your brain. It’s insulting.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

Get outside!

Are you and yours spending too much time tethered to the electronic grid? It has been reported that children spend a little over 4 hours per day, every day, in front of an electronic gadget of some kind.

While it is true that this doesn’t apply to all children and all families, it still leaves the question of what time is left for anything else. Perhaps it’s time to assess what you are able to do outside instead of inside.

Screen-Free Week asks that you do something very simple. Unplug yourself from the TV, Internet, and the various other electronic devices that you spend time with, for one week, from April 30 through May 6.

Here are some outdoor recreation suggestions for you and your little ones for this week, and perhaps even longer:

If your children aren’t in school yet, gather them up and go outside. It is a perfect time of year to start a small garden if you have space for one. Have your children help plan what to plant.

Go for a walk and while you are walking around your neighborhood, count the houses, name the colors you see, look for birds, squirrels and other critters. Keep a log book or small journal of what you see and hear.

Go to the Crocker Art Museum if you are in range of Sacramento. It is a truly wonderful place to spend time for children of all ages. If you live farther afield, choose a good art museum and go to it.

Walk along the river front in Old Sacramento, explore the old buildings in the historic area. Go back into downtown Sacramento, and take a walking tour of the many art galleries spread throughout town.

Take a hike on the American River Bike Trail. Pack some goodies and enjoy a picnic just about anywhere along the trail. Ride your bicycles on the trail on a different day.

Head out of town and explore Auburn, Grass Valley or Nevada City on the Highway 80 corridor. Visit the art galleries and cool little shops in the old parts of town.

On the Highway 50 corridor, go to Placerville and explore this historic old gold mining town. Head down Highway 49 to Coloma and see where gold was discovered at Marshall State Park. Have lunch or dinner at one of the fine eateries in Placerville.

Go further up Highway 50 into South Lake Tahoe. Continue through the “Y” towards Camp Richardson. A fantastic paved bike trail weaves through the forest on the lake side of Highway 89. Anderson’s Bicycle Rental’s is open. Either rent bikes or bring you own and ride the trail until it dead ends across from Spring Creek Tract. Walk the trail if cycling isn’t for you.

Walk along the shore of Lake Tahoe, from Camp Richardson to Taylor Creek. Read the signs along the way. Walk through the Pope and Baldwin Estates as you head to Taylor Creek.

Have lunch or dinner at the Beacon, or the Burger Lounge. For coffee, hot chocolate and goodies, go Alpina Coffee Cafe.

As you do all of these, keep writing in that journal you and your children brought with you.

When you get home, take some time to remember what you saw and heard, and what the favorite spots were.

Get out some paper, crayons, pencils, and paints and spend some time with your children painting, perhaps something from one of your jaunts, or something around your yard or in your head.

Read a story each day to your children. Go to the library with them and check out some books. Cuddle up and read, read, read.

Towards the end of the week, take your journal notes, drawings and paintings, and make a book chronicling all you did during your unplugged week. All it takes is a little tape, perhaps some twine, and your imagination.

Perhaps your unplugged week will turn into many unplugged hours, spent with your family, exploring, reading, painting, and reading. It’s a week well invested for building great family memories.

Obviously, this is written with the area close to where I live. It’s easy to put these same ideas to use in your own community, no matter where it is. The point is to get outside, away from all the electronic minutiae that constantly chips away at us.

Explore, question, record, read, as a family. You may find it to be a life long activity.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

Educators have spent the last 7 months or so teaching, re-teaching, testing, laughing and crying, in their classrooms, getting ready for spring. This is the time of year when so many things come together after a long and intense autumn and winter.

The children, K through 12, are all 7 months older. A boatload of developmental processes have taken place. The capacity for learning has grown, and things process much more quickly, no matter the grade level.

In short, this is the time of year when everything in school speeds up. In a blink of an eye, this school year will be over. 2011-2012 will be history, in the record book and memory banks of school districts, parents, and children.

The curriculum is weighted more heavily towards a final compilation of what has been learned, and how to apply those lessons, to newer, more involved issues.

Kindergartners are learning more words, practicing reading readiness skills, counting to higher numbers and making and recognizing far more intricate patterns in everything.

The higher grades are reading more involved texts, and applying the math they have learned to this point to more complex problems. Science is leading them to more experiments, and they are plowing through the appropriate history for their grade level.

Middle school 8th graders are looking at leaving the top of the pile to the bigger pool of High School. The High School seniors are simply attempting to get through the last month of any number of wacky, insane issues that are specific to graduating seniors, and sweating which college or trade school they are going to be accepted to. Lots of good-byes, tears and laughter are involved with the seniors.

What this means to families across the nation is that it’s time to pay special attention to all that is going on in your child’s school and education. Your support is more important now than ever.

The new demands that are dictated by the approaching end of the school year are exciting and intense for everyone. Take the time to help your children review what they need to, practice what they know, and stand with them as they enter new territory in the learning world.

Listen to them. They will tell you all you need to know about how they are doing. Sometimes, it’s what they don’t say that is just as important as what they do say.

Blink, and you’ll miss it. It’s that fast.

Stay in contact with their teachers and the school. Remember, assume nothing, verify everything!

School districts throughout California, all 1,000+ of them, have sent out pink slips to thousands of teachers, at all grade levels. The law says districts have to notify teachers by March 15 that they may lose their jobs.

For quite some time now, districts have been doing so with gusto. When the budget process in Sacramento is as completely dysfunctional as is possible, districts are put in the position of simply guessing what their funding will be for the coming year.

They must, by law, present a budget that is balanced for the coming year, plus the following two years. The biggest cost for school districts is people, and teachers make up the bulk of people employed by school districts.

Pretending to know what kind of money will show up and having to present a balanced budget, the districts have to make draconian cuts to meet the mandates. It’s a bit of political hard ball mixed with grim reality.

Of course, the politicians in Sacramento are blissfully not hindered by any kind of reality when it comes to money, so the disconnect with what school districts have to do is total.

The disruption to the school system is pretty intense though. As March approaches, teachers throughout the state start to wonder if they will continue to have a job. March 15 rolls around, and several thousand of them are put on notice that they won’t.

The districts start rescinding pink slips as soon as they can figure out who’s retiring, going out on leave, how many children are predicted to be in the district and so on.

In the meantime, everyone who gets a pink slip has a certain amount of their brainpower taken up with what they are going to do for a job, and how they are going to pay for their health insurance, once school is out for the summer break.

Still with me? What suffers, in addition to the self esteem of the pink slipped legions, is teaching. How can it not? Survival mode kicks in. Resumes have to be brought up to date, sent out, bank accounts surveyed, health plans figured out and on and on.

This all happens right at about the time things really start coming together for most children. It’s been a long haul since August or September, and it’s paying off. Should be a forge ahead, full speed, let’s do this, except that now the teacher has to put a part of his or her brain into how they will survive if the pink slip is real.

This is not the best set up for great teaching. Actually, it stinks. It’s also unlikely to change, unless districts quit playing hardball with the legislature, using huge class sizes and thousands of teachers as leverage, or, and this is truly unlikely, in the extreme, the boys and girls in Sacramento, including whoever is the Gov, start behaving like rational people who are on the same planet as the rest of us. Like I said, unlikely in the extreme.

In the meantime, thousands of teachers state wide are currently looking for another job, while attempting to provide exceptional teaching for their students.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

What a bike: handmade of course/photo credit: urbanvelo.org

Classrooms are generally good places to learn something, no matter your age. We have all spent a rather large amount of time in them. Some of the time was good, some bad, some ugly. It’s just the way things are. Not everything is perfect.

It is safe to say that not all learning takes place in the classroom, nor should it. The place of learning in a classroom is to gain a new theoretical skill. Except for places like the science lab, music room, art studio, or shop, it’s all theory until put into practice. The labs, shops, and studios combine theory with practice simply because of the nature of their subject matter.

Here’s the message: get out of the classroom and find a way to put the knowledge your child gained in the class room to practical use. The way to test math, science, physics, history, and all the rest of it, is to find a practical, or maybe not so practical, use for it.

Coming up on March 2, 3 and 4 is an outstanding opportunity to put math, science, physics, and art right in front of your child. The North American Handmade Bicycle Show will be in town, at the Sacramento Convention Center.

Children (of all ages) like bikes. Most of us learned to ride them, and a lot of us still do. This show connects science with the art and love of bicycles. It’s not on the program as an “educational experience” mind you. It just is one.

Here are some questions for the inquisitive mind, young or old: what is the bike made of? What keeps it together? What makes it the color that it is? How many triangles are in a bike frame? How many circles on a bike? Whats the reason for spokes on the wheels? How come the angles are all different on different bikes? What are gears? What are gear ratios? What’s a chain do? How do the shifters work? What makes it stop? What’s friction got to do with it? How come a bike stays upright (well, most of the time anyway) when it’s pedaled? What’s a shock absorber do on the forks? Under the seat? Rolling resistance is what? Does force have anything to do with riding a bike? What’s a helmet made of and what’s it supposed to do?

The list can go on for quite a long time. The fact is though, that without a good foundation in math, science and art, and the accompanying ability to read, none of these questions can be answered. The best way to see all the math, science and art put to actual hands on, everyday use, and to make the need for all it understandable, is to go to something like the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, or something like it.

Get out of the classroom, go find something that puts all that knowledge to use, something that you can see, touch, listen to. You might find that you have a young engineer, artist, or mathematician hiding in your child’s imagination, just waiting for the chance to leap out.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

KVA STAINLESS from KVA Stainless on Vimeo.

Quite a few of the big time verbal expositions about testing are offered by a group of folks who quite often don’t have any actual teachers on their boards or panels or in their non-profit or for profit corporations. Money yes, teachers, not so much.

I find that to no longer be amazing. It’s been going on for so long now that I expect that. I haven’t been disproved yet, which is a very sad thing to have to say.

How is it that the teaching profession is the purview of everyone who never has had, or has very limited, teaching experience in an actual classroom?

Corporate business types are not teachers, and don’t generally know much, if anything about classrooms and teaching.  That should be obvious. Neither are politicians, which is abundantly clear.

Superintendents aren’t teachers. They are administrators who run the business end of schools. That does include, by the way, the curricula that are used within the district. To be very clear though, they aren’t in the classroom every day, or in some cases, any day. They can’t be. It’s not their job.

Principals aren’t teachers. Their job is to see to the efficient running of an individual school. It’s a very complicated thing to do, and requires a different set of everyday skills than the classroom does.

Teachers, on the other hand, and quite obviously one would think, teach. What a concept. Here’s what else they do: test, every day, before, during, and after each lesson. At least, that’s what the good ones do. One lesson leads to the next, or not. Educational leadership exists in the classroom, not in the admin offices or in the non-profits or for profit corporations.

If it’s obvious that the lesson didn’t meet the goal that was the purpose of the lesson, good teachers stop right there and re-teach. They also know who in the group needs extra help to learn what was taught during the lesson.

This is an on-going, never ending process. It does not involve filling in bubbles on a card. It does involve question and answer, what if’s, and what else’s. When, and only when, a child demonstrates that they understand the concept, does the good teacher move on. It’s a building process.

Some children take a great deal longer to learn than others. It’s natural. It’s why the bell curve exists. In a perfect world, there would be as much help as it takes to help those children learn what they need to, within the confines of the teaching day/week/year. It doesn’t always work that way though.

Notice that I used the term “good teachers”. The teaching profession, like all other professions, has those who simply aren’t good. That’s another discussion for a different day.

Why aren’t teachers, real classroom teachers, included on the panels and boards that let everyone who is within earshot know what testing really needs to do and so on? I have no idea.

Certainly it would be possible to include some of the best classroom teachers in these discussions. At the very least, some very good retired teachers would be possible.

Then again, maybe the answers wouldn’t be acceptable. I just don’t know. Maybe there’s a test for that.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

It’s a fine balance between learning, really learning, and simply repeating factoids.

It’s not that the factoids aren’t useful at times. They certainly can be, especially when engaging in a robust game of scrabble, or educational trivia one-ups-manship. Other than that though, not so much.

Learning involves this quirky little thing called “critical thinking”. It’s far, far removed from the factoid realm. It’s not very testable on a scan-tron card. Mostly, it drives test makers crazy, and seems to completely elude politicians and the ex-”educators” in the corporate make a lot of money game.

Critical thinking is learned though. It’s just that it is learned without a linear map or trajectory. It is,  rather, scattered around the realm of possibilities and ends up presenting more than one answer, and adheres to the theory that there are no wrong answers, there’s just learning.

It takes more time than learning how to simply repeat facts, or lies for that matter. It requires the ability to apply the learning to many different situations, and understanding that the process may be a bit messy, with more than one avenue to explore to get to an acceptable conclusion.

Oddly enough, play, in its’ many forms, is part and parcel of this type of learning. Reading, especially for younger children, requires a bit of time to play out what was read. Play enables the young reader to internalize what was read.

For older, or more mature readers, play, which includes gazing out the window at sunbeams and rain, gives the brain the time to do the same thing, which is to begin to internalize the information that was read, to compare it to other sets of data, and enter the great stew pot of knowledge that is stored away until it is needed.

Play, read, play is more that the title of this little bit of writing. It’s a good road map for learning, actually learning, and growing as individuals in a complex society.

Rhee’s stated goal is for her StudentsFirst company to be a “voice” for children in education. The piece on her website regarding her is quite slick. It says she’s been working the last 18 years to give children what they need to succeed in school.

Of those 18 years, 3, and only 3, were spent in a classroom. She was a Teach for America Corps teacher in Baltimore, Md. Her claims of greatness in the classroom cannot be verified. At least, the Eduskeptic hasn’t found anything to support her claims. What seems to be true is that she was simply an average rookie teacher who quit after 3 years to pursue a corporate career path instead.

Her brief tenure (3 years) as Chancellor (Superintendent) of the Washington, D.C. school system was marked by a slash and burn approach and left things in chaos, with an unresolved cheating scandal. Her main claim to “reform” was firing a few hundred teachers who, according to her, weren’t good enough.

Rhee’s position is that senior teachers shouldn’t be given any preference in the layoff schedules. She leans toward keeping the newer, younger, and very much less expensive teachers. It is nothing more than an economic strategy, and has scant little to do with educational abilities.

The long and short of it is this: follow the money, always follow the money. Rhee seems to be much more interested in the economics of being on a large stage. To be sure, there is a lot more money to be had running a “non-profit” that bashes teachers, unions, and schools under the guise of reform than there ever will be in teaching. It’s about positioning for the big, national dollars, a lot of them.

If you are in the city of Sacramento, there is another caution, and it has to do with Kevin Johnson and his bid for a “strong mayor” position, which puts him in a spot to have direct effect on the city school system. His wife is Michelle Rhee. Be careful what you wish for.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything. Check all the links out, do your own research, come to your own conclusions.

There are those who believe that, somehow, becoming a teacher doesn’t really require University level educational training, along with the appropriate degree. “Life experience” is often put forth as the equivalent of the entire teacher training program.

That sentiment demeans the entire profession of teaching. It is an easy thing for those who want to run a school system like their businesses to say. Apparently the degree and training don’t count for anything in their business.

Teaching is a very complex endeavor. Having a bucket full of “life experiences” certainly can be helpful on the road to becoming a teacher. That bucket full cannot replace the foundation that teachers learn and build on at the University level, and then put to use in the classroom.

Considering the staggering number of new teachers who don’t make it past the first year, and an even greater number who quit the profession before leaving the rookie ranks at year 5, one can intuit that this may be an experience that isn’t a walk in the park.

As Ravitch, me, and many others have pointed out, there isn’t an “alternative path” to other professions. I trust that the people at the bank have the appropriate training to do what they do there. The doctors I see are all fully qualified in their fields. All of them went through University and medical training to become doctors. The nurses who have taken care of me during hospital stays were all qualified RN’s. Not one of them got their RN degree by presenting their experiences as a truck driver, engineer, or mom. And on it goes.

I can’t drive one of the big trash trucks that come to my house each week. I don’t know anything about them. If I could start one, I wouldn’t know what to do next. Ever seen inside the cab on one of those things?  It looks like a land based F-16 in there. I would need extensive training and practice to drive one.

So, why would anyone think that an “alternative path” to become a teacher would be OK? When I became a teacher, I had worked at quite a few other jobs, including selling soap door-to-door, and being a Good Humor Ice Cream man. I was a veteran, not far out of my Army service.

So what? Rightfully, I didn’t receive any credit for any of it, including being a bag boy at Ralph’s market. I had to get a university degree, get accepted into the teacher training program, get through that and my student teaching, and then, and only then, was I granted a teaching credential. There was no job guarantee after all that.

That process weeds out quite a few people. Those of us who made it through then had to get through probationary status at various school districts.

I expect that teachers, at all levels, have the necessary training, expertise, and intestinal fortitude to teach at their best. I think most parents do too. I do not believe that life experiences equal the equivalent of a fully earned teaching credential.

You should be happy that I’m not driving a large trash truck through your neighborhood. It’s much safer that way.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.