Teachers on Strike: Classic or Dud?

In seriousness, yeah of course they're not bad people, but there is a culture in public schools (at least in NYC, which is all I can speak to) of creating half-jobs for people and letting them kind of lounge in them for decades. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect everyone on the payroll to actually be contributing something of significance to the school. I'm not talking about the art teacher or the gym teacher, I'm talking about veteran teachers being given "enrichment" positions that involve little more than going to classrooms a few periods a day and reading stories to kids. I'm talking about having an administrative person whose sole job is basically to hold onto the key to the copier, so that other people need to go through her to make copies. I'm not making these up.

xpost Dan, what kind of property taxes did your parents pay? Because where I live, which is not some all mods con utopia, there are many who easily pay upwards of $20,000 a year in property taxes. I know we pay something close to $8000 a year, and we're hardly living large in some palace.

But anyway, xposting further: "Physical education, world languages, libraries and the arts are not frills. They are an essential piece of a well-rounded education" can both be a fundamentally true statement, if idealistic, yet also underscore why the public schools are falling short. All those things are expensive, and across the country they're getting cut left and right. Doesn't make them less essential, simply explains why public schools (in cities, at least) are getting worse, not better: they're missing something essential, which those with means can afford to replace elsewhere. The same holds true for countless things across America. Those with money can afford the things those without cannot. No news there. The debate then shifts to what a public school education should be required to provide beside the bare minimum, because while the absence of PE, world languages, arts and even libraries are bad things, they're pretty far down the list on why Chicago public schools are considered failures. If those things are "essential" for a well-rounded education, what does that make reading and math, which Chicago public schools (for, again, numerous socio-economic reasons) are having enough trouble teaching? That is, the lack of those programs does not seem to be the crux of the problem here.

Except when you cut services and & offerings you're telling kids that they're not worth those things, which kind of IS the crux of the problem?

otm

support staff problem even worse for higher ed

And I'm all for spending smarter -- no question that public schools need to do this. I just don't think we're going to spend smarter AND less AND get better results all at the same time, which seems to be either (1) the prevailing neoliberal belief or (2) cover for a hidden neoliberal belief that these kids aren't really worth it.

spend smarter AND less AND get better results all at the same time

this is liberal?

neoliberal =/= liberal

what (or who) do you mean by neoliberal

I am mostly tired of the "we can't just throw money at failing schools" canard

YES YOU CAN, DUDE

― ilx user 'silby' (silby), Monday, September 26, 2011 5:27 PM (11 months ago)

it's not like we ever threw money at poor schools. it would be nice to try it once before turning against it as a measure.

― horseshoe, Monday, September 26, 2011 5:28 PM (11 months ago)

Ha yes. That's my stock response to "we can't throw money at a problem." Let's try once and see!

― pullapartsquirrel (Jenny), Monday, September 26, 2011 6:00 PM (11 months ago)

Dan, what kind of property taxes did your parents pay?

I have no idea what my parents paid in property taxes while I was growing up. Looking online, I see that off of 12 acres of land, they have a 2012 tax bill of about $2.4K. I also know that in FY 2012, education spending is the single largest line item on the overall MN state/local budget at $16.1 billion:

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=p3&chs=600x200&chf=bg,s,e8e8ff&chd=t:7,20,29,0,10,7,8,3,12,3&chl=Pensions%207%|Health%20Care%2020%|Education%2029%|Defense%200%|Welfare%2010%|Protection%207%|Transportation%208%|General%20Government%203%|Other%20Spending%2012%|Interest%203%&chtt=State%20and%20Local%20Spending%20for%20Minnesota%20-%20FY%202012

The ridiculous, massively impressive super high school was built in 2001.

Alex Pareene has had enough of people's shit on the issue of teachers:

Alex Pareene ‏@pareene
Fun fact: pundits supporting test-based teacher evals work in a field with no professional consequences for making readers stupider

(I didn't even get into the auditorium, which I think seats 1K? and has built-in partitions all over the place to reconfigure the stage, including bits that can be raised or lowered, or the new soundproof practice rooms in the choir area with the awesome reverb technology that let you set the acoustic of a space the size of a large cubicle to have the reverberation of a large concert hall, etc etc.)

I see that off of 12 acres of land, they have a 2012 tax bill of about $2.4K.

Good lord. My 2012 property taxes are $4,253 and I have a roughly 1,600 sq ft house on a 125'x50' lot.

alex parene brings the 100 megaton truth bomb

HeadStart seems to have worked out well, that was "throwing money" at poor or disadvantaged areas (I was in one when they created it).

I have several friends who are walking picket lines with the CTU. A colleague of one of them wrote this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rusin/whats-happening-in-chicag_b_1876734.html

in a nutshell

We are on strike because we refuse to accept a system where the mayor and his appointed school board can systematically lower scores on teacher evaluations in order to justify the privatization of education.

Wait, are they accusing the city of rigging teacher evaluation scores to make teachers look bad so that can be fired?

i think the implication is that by putting more weight on standardized test scores, the city is setting up the teachers to look worse on evaluations

i think the idea is linking eval scores to test results is going to allow the city to fire a bunch of teachers in "worst performing schools" and replace them w/ underpaid, undertrained "teach for america" (yeah fucking right) charter types

"worst performing" being code for "historically most underserved" and "population most difficult to make college prep education seem relevant / realistic to"

At this point I am totally unclear what the sticking points are, since the emphasis seems to shift every day. Dear teachers: unify your message.

Or at least focus it.

- hiring pool for CPS teachers who have lost their jobs
- weight placed on test scores in evals

xp by sticking points you mean non-negotiables?

Yeah, I guess. I'm not sure what the teachers are considering non-negotiable. Is it more self-deteremined evaluations and hiring pools? Or is there more than that? Would teachers accept those things minus all the other things they are asking for?

that sort of seems like the type of thing you don't want to make public as you negotiate?

i think self-determined evaluations would not really be evaluation at all!

I get the impression from the way things normally work that there doesn't even HAVE to be a villainous plan to "rig" the evals. The system makes it IMPOSSIBLE to consistently score well, especially if "teaching the greatest number of kids the greatest percentage of the actual course-work" is your top priority and not, say, scoring well on evals. Then once you're not protected by high scores, your job is fair game. This way more schools/jobs will TEND to go charter/non-union instead of public, which is exactly why ALEC and the Acton Institute and conservative policy groups like them support NCLB and teacher evals based on student performance, and union busting, and getting "tough" on the finances of education...as long as it only affects those other kids, not their own.

xp it's the weight of the test scores as part of the evaluations that i think is the issue

insisting on high scores creates a "race to the bottom" where doing shit like this becomes incentivized

four types of lines? yeah, A, B, C, D make sure you bubble in the right one, morans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6WJdsb0dfM

^^ this is what teaching ONLY to the test looks like, i.e. coaching kids to pass something that in no way resembles "real math"

iirc the city wants test scores to make up 60% of evals, teachers want substantially lower (i think 40%?)

There has to be some criteria to fire teachers, though, right? I think standardized tests are stupid, but even if you took them out of the equation, the numbers are terrible. If a school is only 50% full, and only 60% of the kids graduate, doesn't that illustrate failure, on every level?

The best school in our district, btw, in the most well off and white part of town, just fired its principal for faking test scores.

If a school is only 50% full, and only 60% of the kids graduate, doesn't that illustrate failure, on every level?

no

why?

actually, i'm not saying it *doesn't*, i'm curious though why you say it does illustrate failure

failure of society more than anything

If a school is only 50% full, and only 60% of the kids graduate, doesn't that illustrate failure, on every level?

I don't even know where to start with this, tbh. The inequalities that lead some schools to do THIS BADLY while the director of a top private school needs 20K per child to provide "basic resources" are a sign that everyone is failing at education EXCEPT possibly the teachers and the students. They get handed a situation where they basically can't succeed and then fired/closed for not succeeding?

i'm with jordan on this one

In Florida a few months ago our beloved governor proposed redoing our own teacher evaluation system in a way that mirrors Chicago's.

in orbit OTM

a school that is only 50% full is definitely a failure of something, though probably not the teachers, seems like a district-level misallocation of resources more than anything else

speaking as a college instructor for the last 14 years, let me say unequivocally: fuck you to Jeb Bush and fuck you to No Child Left Behind.

You should have to factor socio-economics and poverty into the equation when evaluating teachers

why would you? It's easier to fire them.

maybe, maybe not. i'm divided on that one because we don't want to stigmatize poor people as being disinterested in education because some are very, very interested. but i do think an affective survey of students ("do you think college is important?") should be factored in.

also: if they can raise or maintain that #, from when students come in school to when they leave, of seeing ongoing learning and lifelong education (even if it's apprenticing as a plumber or whatever) as an important goal, regardless of "achievement" i think that's an important societal gain

because lord knows as a lot of kids go from elementary school -> jr high -> high school they become less and less interested in what becomes a more and more factory-like, standards-based education

tbf, has anyone actually proposed evaluating teachers on the basis of absolute (compared with other schools) as opposed to relative (i.e. self-compared improvement) test scores? The former is obviously ridiculous, but if it's not actually on the table then let's not go tilting at windmills.

Government used to either be less invested in education purely as the manufacture of sausage-meat citizens / wage slaves, or did a better job of hiding their goals.

The best school in our district, btw, in the most well off and white part of town, just fired its principal for faking test scores.

Still we haven't learned anything from Annie Ross in Pump Up the Volume. (derived from a true story, I recall)

tbf, has anyone actually proposed evaluating teachers on the basis of absolute (compared with other schools) as opposed to relative (i.e. self-compared improvement) test scores?

this is already part of accreditation, not sure if its part of NCLB though