Teachers on Strike: Classic or Dud?

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

speaking as a GIGANTIC HIPPIE of a teacher ...

i strongly believe that if we want to create a better, gentler, more equitable, more democratic and more sustainable society we as teachers need to busy ourselves with

http://images.betterworldbooks.com/080/Designing-Groupwork-9780807733318.jpg

and the focus on standardized test scores seriously undercuts / dis-incentivises this work

and i am not saying that there's this zero sum game happening, ideally doing good groupwork is going to raise standardized test scores, not hurt them

i am just talking about what the incentives are for teachers and what you are going to be pushing them toward doing as you make these standardized test scores more important, the quicker, easier, more seductive way to raise test scores is to just cut groupwork out of the equation and track each kid onto specific worksheets

we don't want to stigmatize poor people as being disinterested in education because some are very, very interested.

Someone can be interested in education but so busy working that they can't spend lots of time reading with and to their child; buying reading material; getting the kid to the library;

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

yes, yes it is. class sorting mechanisms ahoy!

people whose education was crappy/didn't serve them very well aren't 'disinterested' as much as 'unconvinced' and it's up to the teachers and administration to change their mind. all well and good, but the emphasis on test-centered education takes the teacher out of the facilitator role and mechanizes their function, further diminishing the contact/interaction with the unconvinced parents, and deep-sixing various potential avenues for improvement.

Someone can be interested in education but so busy working that they can't spend lots of time reading with and to their child; buying reading material; getting the kid to the library

likewise someone can be so busy getting botoxed, shopping at gucci store, buying hovercraft vacation in greece that the same happens

also, common core/nclb/funding isn't the problem. common core (at least for the ELA classes I teach) are actually an improvement on state standards. the problem, as i see it, lies with the onus of responsibility for quality education shifting out of the good-practice classroom and onto a bunch of well-intentioned bureaucratic mid-level administrative MBAs who measure various metrics to determine pseudo-scientifically, what quantifiable gains have been made in their schools.

Distant xposting, but I've stressed repeatedly it's a massive socio-economic failure on every level. Meaning the system is so broken that even the best schools and best teachers will have a tough time fixing it, let alone any time soon. 60% graduation rates and 50% enrollment levels are manifestations of many of those problems, but also clear failures themselves. Like I said, they could take testing, evaluations, all that stuff out of the equation, and things would still be messed up or broken.

xxxp i totally know what you're saying and i know it's the best of intentions behind it but its considered a somewhat controversial stance, cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action

most of the guidance counsellors I ever had were LITERALLY bad people.

― look at this quarterstaff (Hurting 2)

my high school counselor was basically the joe paterno of the district, longtime head football coach who clearly didn't give a shit about anything not football-related. i only met with him once in four years! he was also party to covering something up. nothing paterno-level, merely the drunken driving arrest of the future star QB, who ended up being more ron powlus than joe montana tbqf.

common core math standards are a GIGANTIC improvement over old CA math standards

problem is they're going to have a devil of a time figuring out how to test those standards, looking forward to seeing that

Well the Jonathan Kozol line on all that is that we shouldn't use things we can't change as an excuse not to fix what we can. I think it would be deluded to argue that if only we spent what Lab School spends in public schools, we'd duplicate the results. I also think it's probably impossible for public school systems to spend what Lab School spends per student (btw, tuition alone is almost certainly more than $20K by now, and most of these schools fundraise in addition to tuition). But we still ought to try our damnedest to provide smaller class sizes, better teachers, enriching activities like art, music, p.e., whatever we can reasonably do to improve schools. And we probably should also focus on savings where we can get rid of waste and inefficiency (duplicative administrative and support positions, "technologies" that don't actually improve classroom learning, and, sometimes, consolidation of schools where facilities are vastly underused).

"line on all that" = xp Josh in Chi

buying hovercraft vacation in greece

Don't these folks usually hire someone to tutor their kid

u would think!

i think it's easier to hire a private school to just give them all A+ and get them into college based on name