Take The Teacher Survey

LAUSD TEACHERS: CARE TO FRAME THE CONVERSATION FOR A CHANGE?LINK

(For a national view of public education reform see the end of this blog post)As the war against a professional, well-educated, and  fairly compensated teacher corp continues unabated across the United States, what remains missing in this most important discussion is the voice of teachers authoritatively laying out the reality of what they do for a living in a manner that might counter the incessant"dominant narrative" of the mainstream media, that only sees bad teachers as the problem and charter school as the panacea. 

Dr. Wendy C. Kasten of Kent State University has prepared a survey for teachers to take that might offer an alternative view of just how difficult it is to be a good teacher. However, Dr. Kasten's survey will have little credibility, unless she can get a sufficient number of teachers to take it. If you want the public at-large to finally understand just how hard we work, you might find the time to do the survey, so that you can finally frame the conversation for a change on just what it will take to fix public education.

TAKE THE SURVEY 

HAVE COLLEAGUES TAKE SURVEY

Dear Classroom Teacher:

Are you tired of hearing people outside of education say that teaching is an easy job with short hours and long vacations? Do you think most people understand what is involved being a teacher?

The only way we can hope to influence public perceptions is to present data. So, I have designed a computer based survey that explores how classroom teachers work -the degree to which you spend time at school, and how much time you spend related to your job outside of school. I have also included questions which explore the extent to which teachers spend their own money related to school needs.

The only way a study like this will be taken seriously is if the number of teachers who have taken it are huge. So, if you are a full time teacher, would you consider taking this survey? Would you also consider passing it along to another teacher who may not have gotten this email? The more the merrier!

Clink of the link here or paste this into your browser address bar. If you have any difficulties, email me at wkasten@kent.edu .

TAKE THE SURVEY

Thanks!

Dr. Wendy C. Kasten, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction

Kent State University

402 White Hall

P.O. Box 5190

Kent, OH 44242-0001

 330-672-2580 

330-672-2025 fax

If you or someone you know has been targeted and are in the process of being dismissed and need legal defense, get in touch:

Lenny@perdaily.com


NATIONAL EDUCATION REFORMERS


LA Progressive

Dick Price and Sharon Kyle
http://www.laprogressive.com/
Dick and Sharon dick_and_sharon@yahoo.com
Dick and Sharon are a pair of citizen journalists and information activists who were fed up with mainstream media. Rather than just kvetch about the media, they decided to try to become the media. So, together they founded the LA Progressive. Dick is the editor and Sharon is the publisher and webmaster, handling all technical aspects of the site.

This site was launched in March 2008, with Dick and Sharon doing most of the writing. Today, a host of gifted writers contribute to the LA Progressive's daily offering which typically amounts to about 45 articles a week. Dick and Sharon continue to write for as well as edit and publish the LA Progressive and distribute its daily e-news each morning.

Jo Scott Coe Riverside, California
Jo.Scott-Coe@rcc.edu
www.joscottcoe.com
Excellent Video Interview about Professor Coe
http://vodpod.com/watch/4959969-jo-scott-coe-teacher-at-point-blank

Assistant Professor of English at Riverside Community College and former high school English teacher. She is the author of Teacher at Point Blank and has been a teacher of English and literature in California since 1991. Her writing on intersections of gender, violence, and education has appeared in the Los Angeles Times as well as literary venues including Hotel Amerika, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ninth Letter, Memoir(and), Bitter Oleander, and Green Mountains Review. Her essay, "Recovering Teacher," won the NCTE 2009 Donald Murray Prize, and other selections of her work have received a Pushcart Special Mention as well as Notable listings in Best American Essays 2009 and 2010. As an independent researcher, Jo authored and published the most extensive study to-date of Adams v. LAUSD, a nearly 10-year legal case of student-on-teacher sexual harassment, in (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women's Experience (Cambridge Scholars Press). Jo values the aesthetic, political, and socially transformative powers of literary narrative--especially to dispel unhealthy silences and witness cultural blindspots. She works currently as an assistant professor of English at Riverside Community College in SoCal, and her book, Teacher at Point Blank (Aunt Lute 2010), has been selected as a Great Read for Fall 2010 by Ms. Magazine. Punk rock? Yes. Hockey games? Yes. Coffee? Always black. Find Jo on the web at joscottcoe.com and on Twitter @joscottcoe.

Betsy Combier New York, New York
betsy.combier@gmail.com
Betsy Combier's blog http://www.parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=488
is a jewel that chronicles the corruption in NYC's Dept of Educations (DOE)  . She has accomplished a wonderful piece of journalism, and created one of the rare places where corrupt educational governance is chronicled and revealed

Professor Samuel Culbert Los Angeles, California

is a professor at the UCLA Andersen School of Business who also teaches in the Education Department's Principals' Leadership Institute. Check out the following 3 minutes on ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/conversation-performance-review-11126992

Stuart Goldurs Los Angeles, Califonia
StuartComputers@gmail.com
Don't send LAUSD Librarians to the Inquisition, send the downtown bureaucrats
Tests, What Are They Good For? Absolutely Nothing!
LAUSD students to attend school on contaminated land, again!
Some schools teach only to the tests, so how are the students being prepared for the next grade and for life?
New LAUSD superintendent adds six-figure positions to management team

http://www.examiner.com/public-education-in-los-angeles/lausd-test-scores-up-to-failure-levels-what-are-the-students-learning

Has been a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 30 years. He is greatly aware of the district waste, large bureaucracy, and other major issues of the time. He started his blog with the sole purpose of informing the world about the truths of education in LAUSD. E-mail him at: StuartComputers@gmail.com.

LAUSD has selected a new Superintendent of Schools

Karen Horwitz Chicago, Illinois

wccbook@gmail.com

Former award winning teacher who co-founded NAPTA, National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse, and wrote the book White Chalk Crime: The REAL Reason Schools Fail to expose how teacher harassment and terrorization maintains a system of deeply hidden corruption. Disposing of dedicated teachers forms the core of the White Chalk Criminal's agenda since dedication and white collar crime do not mix. Given that all agree that good teachers are essential to good teaching, a system that cannot tolerate good teachers is worthless. This is what we have in place. With Bernie Madoff-like leaders - he was as much about investing as our school leaders are about educating - anointed with unlimited power, including the ability to fill the airwaves with propaganda, education is no longer about education. It is about money and power for those who play a very corrupt game and with an agenda of privatizing schools so their power will increase. (Privatization may have merits. NAPTA does not take a position on that. But privatizing a system that is rotten to its core - where quality teaching cannot survive, where a cover up of pretense that they do not know this despite so many of us reporting these truths prevails - documents that those advocating privatization cannot be trusted! It shows they want our schools for their own interests, not the children, nor the community.)  NAPTA welcomes parents, teachers, students, citizens or anyone who understands that without a real system of education, we no longer have a democracy. Membership is free. Go to: EndTeacherAbuse.org  or WhiteChalkCrime.com. Become educated about what is going on.

Jerry Mintz Director
Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO)
417 Roslyn Rd., Roslyn Hts., NY  11577

For those of you who cannot wait for corrupt public education to be turned around, AERO offers an excellent source to get connected with viable alternatives right now.

www.EducationRevolution.org
info@EducationRevolution.org
                                                                                                                         800-769-4171                                                              (domestic)
                                                                                                                         516-621-2195                                                              (international)

Susan Ohanian Charlotte, Vermont
susano@gmavt.net
http://www.susanohanian.org
She is a longtime public school teacher who, after 20 years, became staff writer for a teacher magazine and then went freelance. I've maintained a website of activism for nearly 9 years--ever since the passage of NCLB. People can subscribe to the website and then they get updates about new content. I answer all the mail I get through the website and with the answer, people have my e-mail.  I also try to stir things up on Twitter, though I find this medium frustrating. I have aFacebook page--just so people can find me. I don't initiate anything on it, The website keeps me busy.
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=9593

Susan Lee Schwartz Suffern, New York

Susan studied literacy education, English literature, and fine arts and holds a BA ('63) and MS ('65) from Brooklyn College, and has the equivalent of two master's degrees, earned in graduate studies of literacy, arts and education. She taught literacy skills and art, for four decades in NYC in elementary and secondary school.  In 1998 she won the New York State English Council (NYSEC) Educator of Excellence Award  for her successful teacher practice, studied by Harvard  and the LRDC at the University of Pittsburgh for the New Standards research. At the end of her research, her unique curriculum was selected by the LRDC to be used in their national staff development seminars for school superintendents. She was among six teachers -- from among the thousands across the nation-- observed during the research project, and her teaching practice met all the  principles of learning. In the nineties, she rose to prominence in national educational circles, while teaching at a new magnet school, East Side Middle School. The reading scores of her seventh grade students were at the top of the city, and on the first ELA, which two thirds of city students failed, her former students (then in the eight grade) were TENTH IN THE STATE.

 She writes often about what she learned about the genuine standards for learning, in an attempt to begin a national conversation about the authentic standards, so that there can be genuine reform. Her experience that ended her fine career in the NYC Public Schools has led her to write about the process that removed the top educators, silencing the voices of the classroom practitioners who would not accept anti-learning policies. Her essay here on Perdaily,  is one that describes this process. Read more as she talks about education, literacy  and learning on her site, from the perspective of the experienced teacher-practitioner of pedagogy. She is the voice of dedicated and talented classroom teachers who know why the schools are failing.

Her website is:

http://www.speakingasateacher.com/Susan_Lee_Schwartz_(Steiner)_/index.html


Joel Shatzky: Brooklyn, New York
Joel.Shatzky@cortland.edu
Professor of English Emeritus--SUNY, College at Cortland (1968-2005)
Adjunct instructor-Kingsborough CC (CUNY) 2006--   )
Regular contributor to the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/searchS/?q=Joel+Shatzky
Author of "The Thinking Crisis" with Ellen Hill (Authors Choice Press: New York, 2001)
Numerous articles on education in Jewish Currents.
Script-writer for three YouTube satires on educational "reform."
 "The Lessons": www.youtube.com/watch?v=D712J1V2Jsg&feature=player_embedded
"Numbers Lie": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57BRNLviVTQ
"The Charter Starters": www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnrrw5CV3Gw

Here's Joel's latest post about the low percentage of "college ready" high school graduates. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/educating-for-democracy-t_2_b_821410.html



Lorna Stremcha Havre, Montana

http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Stremcha.html
http://twitter.com/lornapstremcha

lornastremcha.com

callmescarlet.blogspot.com
facebook


HER STORY:
"I know first hand the financial, personal, emotional and physical damage that can result when school administrators, the Montana Education Association and the National Education Association put their own interests above the students, teachers and the taxpayers of the State of Montana My files contain mountains of paperwork including depositions, declarations of truth, notarized documents and exhibits resulting from an arduous legal process that finally ended when the Havre (Montana) School District settled two lawsuits - a Federal suit and one filed in State District Court. These documents also include a letter from a union representative stating, " This is nothing more than a witch hunt." Yet the union continued to allow the school administration to harass, bully and bring harm to me.
These two lawsuits resulted from a single incident that, had it been handled differently and under the light of public scrutiny, would not have snowballed into awards of more than $200,000 worth of damages. Funds that eventually came from the taxpayers' pockets. Ironically, as a taxpayer in Hill County, my family and I are helping to pay for the damages awarded to me. This covered the attorneys' fees. The settlement did not include my attorney fees, however the district, insurance and taxpayers paid the defendants attorney bills, which exceeded mine. The settlement was made on March 2, 2006."http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Jim-Taylor/125893225652
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Jim-Taylor/125893225652
http://twitter.com/search?q=DrJimTaylor

Lois Weiner Jersey City, New Jersey
Professor, Elementary and Secondary Education
New Jersey City University
2039 Kennedy Blvd.
Jersey City, New Jersey 07305
drweinerlo@gmail.com
Blog
http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/blog/5
Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/3/educators_push_back_against_obamas_business
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Impact of urban school characteristics on teachers' classroom practice
How race, class, and gender mediate academic achievement
Teachers' work and the school as a workplace. Effects of changes in global political economy on teaching, teachers, and schools.

Guest Post: The UFT Needs To Do More To Assist ATRs

  August 11, 2012
1) The UFT is to be applauded for its efforts to defeat the DOE's efforts to vilify veteran teachers and send teachers in the 24 turnaround schools into the ATR pool.  The arbitrator said that the DOE was wrong in making teachers reapply for their positions.
However, we call upon the president to extend the same commitment of protection to teachers that have been excessed prior to this June.
This tactic of closing down schools is an old one under Bloomberg, Klein, Black and Walcott. The only thing that is different with the present instance is that the DOE was trying to close schools and circumvent the messy PEP process that resulted in organized community opposition and lawsuits.
There is now court precedent on our side.  In New York state on July 24, Judge Joan Lobis sustained the arbitrator’s position by saying that teachers’ contracts must be respected. (290 82nd 338)  In Louisiana on June 20, Judge Ethel Simms Julien used the same reasoning to say that 7,000 post-Katrina school employees were wrongly fired in New Orleans. (As this last example is in another state, this can be deemed “persuasive” in a legal argument application for our state.)

While the teachers in the 24 turnaround schools have been saved, it is important to not forget the teachers new to the ATR pool from schools that the DOE has successfully shut down and the prior generation of ATRs.  The UFT must insist on a hiring freeze until ATRs have been placed, as it did on September 12, 2007.* 

The excessed teachers are not the causes for "failing schools." The schools the DOE targets for closure disproportionately have low income students, high percentages of special education and ELL students.

1-a) Stop the Lockout
It's time that Mulgrew and the UFT defend all of the ATRs and fight for their placement, just as hard as they fought for the preservation of the positions of the teachers in the 24 schools slated for "closing."  

ATRs are being locked out of positions.
i) ATRs go unhired while novice teachers, many fresh out of college or education school, are placed in positions.  We call for the termination of the new replacement workers and for their replacement by ATRs.
ii) Adding insult to injury, workers with the title of teacher are the one class of UFT professional that is forced on a weekly sojourn.  The DOE is placing guidance counselors, social workers, librarians and paraprofessionals in full-school year assignments. 
iii) ATRs are asked during job interviews to demonstrate their competency in new teaching protocols: Common Core, workshop model, Danielson Method.  Novice teachers are given preferential treatment with summer training in these areas.  We call for the termination of novice training and for the offering of training to ATRs.

1-b) No to ending careers with buy-outs
The UFT leadership’s talk of a buy-out is a caving in to the DOE's harassment of ATRs.  Mulgrew did not defend the ATRs' teaching integrity when the DOE spoke of the ATRs as dead-weight during the May news reports of buy-out talks.

1-c) No to observations of ATRs
Observations of ATRs beginning in the 2011-2012 are another product of a side agreement to contracts.  It is inappropriate for teachers to be observed with students that they have just met, with students that know that the lesson is just a sample lesson.

2) No more side-agreements to contracts
The UFT must stop making agreements to the status of ATRs outside of the contract process.  In these side agreements the city is biting off, in piecemeal fashion, contract protections of senior teachers.  As an example, on April 15, 2010, and in the summer of 2011 the DOE and the UFT made an ATR agreements without any input from ATRs or other rank and file members of the UFT.  These side agreements are made without the sort of membership vote to which contracts are subjected.  Yet, the agreements carry the same powerful weight that contracts carry.

3) Dues equity for ATRs: Elected reps of ATRs’ choosing
Furthermore, the UFT must stop its opposition to the ATRs' practice of their electoral rights.  ATRs have no venue by which to vote for representatives that come from their ranks to express their interests.  Other distinctive groups, such as paraprofessionals and career and technical school teachers have their special divisions.  ATRs, with ranks at an estimated 830, equal the size of teaching staffs at about ten large schools put together.  For the reasons of parity, ATRs must have elected representatives at the boro level. 

The UFT held during the 2011 to 2012 year that ATRs could vote in whatever school that they were serving for a given week.  This is disingenuous. How can an ATR within a few days size up the main issues at a given school and properly weigh the strengths and weaknesses of two or three candidates at the school?  It is further unfair to the staff in the school in question.  ATRs, as outsiders, in close races could tip elections, affecting the outcome for the staff to be represented at that school. 
 
The UFT needs to recognize that we are not in a temporary status.  It knows, full well, that principals are not inclined to hire them, due to their senior salary level.  There is no valid rationale in opposing chapters and representatives with the argument that giving ATRs representation will institutionalize their status.  Given that many ATRs have been in this status for more than two years, they already have an institutionalized status by default.




New York Teacher, Sept. 20, 2007. 
 
*"Dispelling rumors that their jobs might be in jeopardy, Weingarten made clear that teachers who find themselves working as ATRs maintain their salary benefits and cannot be fired or laid off thanks to a job-security guarantee that the UFT secured in the 2005 contract.

"At a Sept. 12 [2007] labor-management meeting that Weingarten requested on the treatment of excessed teachers, UFT officials called for a moratorium on new hiring until vacancies are filled by current ATRs in the district or high school superintendency provided they have the appropriate license.

"'Filling vacancies with ATRs meets both federal and state requirements related to having a 'highly qualified teacher' in every classroom,' said Weingarten.'"
 
"DOE officials agreed at the Sept. 12 meeting to modify the new school financing system to encourage principals to hire ATRs. The school will get filled for the first year as if the teacher were a new hire and for the second year at 50 percent of the teacher's actual salary before assuming the cost of the actual salary before assuming the cost of the teacher's actual salary in the teacher's third year at the school.
 
"UFT officials also urged the DOE, in the next open market transfer period, to require that principals grant interviews, in seniority order, to ATRs with the appropriate license to fill vacancies before new recruits are interviewed or hired. Principals should also be required to put in writing why the ATR was nor hired for the position, the union said.
 
"The UFT also demanded that all ATRs be allowed access to all DOE job fairs.  The union made the demand after receiving word that the DOE barred ATRs from attending job fairs for prospective new teachers last spring."    New York Teacher, Sept. 20, 2007.        

With The Right Support Mid-Career Teachers Can Get Better

Bad Teachers Can Get Better After Some Types Of Evaluation, Harvard Study Finds

Huff Post education, Posted: 08/09/2012 11:24 am

LINK

The question of what to do with bad teachers has stymied America's education system of late, sparking chaotic protests in state capitals and vitriolic debate in a recent congressional hearing. It has also stoked the movement known as 'education reform,' which has zeroed in on teacher quality by urging school districts to sort the star teachers from the duds, and reward or punish them accordingly.

The idea is that America's schools would be able to increase their students' test scores if only they had better teachers. Since 2007, this wave of education reformers -- in particular Democrats for Education Reform, a group backed by President Barack Obama and hedge fund donors -- has clashed with teachers unions in their pursuit of making the field of education as discerning in its personnel choices as, say, that of finance. Good teachers should be promoted and retained, reformers contend, instead of being treated like identical pieces on an assembly line, who are rewarded with tenure for their staying power or seniority. But what to do with the underperformers?

Different states have answered this question differently, with some instituting evaluation systems that give teachers who rank low on test scores and in classroom observations a probationary period of a few years to improve before booting them from the profession. Reformers back this policy by serving up research that asserts -- like teacher-placement group TNTP did last week in a much-heralded report called "The Irreplaceables" -- that "struggling teachers rarely improve."

In response, union leaders like American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten respond that most teachers can be good enough for America's students if they're given guidance and support. But -- perhaps because of the way research gets funded -- there has been little evidence to date that shows that teachers can, indeed, grow after their first few years in the classroom.

The story is beginning to change. On Thursday, the Harvard University journal Education Next released a study by two economists, Brown University's John Tyler and Stanford University's Eric Taylor, that provides hope that, with the right support, mid-career teachers can get better.

"It shows that you can in fact teach an old dog new tricks," says Aaron Pallas, a Teachers College, Columbia University professor who recently published research on teacher retention. "It's very important evidence that it's possible for experienced teachers to improve their practices."

The economists looked at a group of 105 mid-career elementary and middle-school teachers in Cincinnati and found that actually evaluating the teachers in a very specific way made their students perform somewhat better a few years later. According to Education Next, it's the first study that tests and proves the hypothesis that providing teachers formalized feedback makes them better. A longer version of the study, with technical details, will be released in the American Economic Review.

Recent related research by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching President Anthony Bryk found that a specific coaching program called Literacy Collaborative significantly increased students' learning gains in reading.

Taylor and Tyler chose Cincinnati because, unlike other cities that have only recently revamped and formalized their teacher evaluations, the city instituted a process known as theTeacher Evaluation System over a decade ago. Unlike many newer teacher evaluation systems, TES relies on structured classroom observation by a teacher's peers and administrators, and not on students' test scores. TES only evaluates teachers once every five years.

Tyler and Taylor already knew from previous research that these evaluations did predict teachers' students' performance on standardized tests. So they mapped out the test scores of students of mid-career teachers who had gone through the evaluation process over time, and found that an average teacher's student scored 4.5 points (out of 100) higher on state math tests in the years following a teacher's evaluation. The improvement in score represents three or four months of additional learning per student.

"Conventional wisdom has been that teachers make big improvements in their practice and skill early in their careers, but not in the middle or late parts," Taylor said to HuffPost. "This is an example where teachers in the middle of their careers are making important gains."

The researchers note that, to the best of their knowledge, their study is the first to test the hypothesis that practice-based teacher evaluation programs can help to improve teacher performance. However, the study did not find that the evaluations had any effects on students' reading scores. "There weren't similar effects in reading," Taylor said.

That may be because, Pallas suggested, "reading is a skill that's more responsive of out-of-school sources."

TES itself would not enable the district to identify which teachers to fire: Because of a bias toward leniency, 90 percent of them were rated in the top two of four categories. But the "microlevel" feedback -- the specific rubrics that grade individual teaching practices -- were much harsher, and the researchers believe this spurred reflection, collaboration and, eventually, growth. Taylor stressed that the conclusion isn't a blanket recommendation that all cities adopt Cincinnati's system, since the study was limited to a specific set of teachers.

"It's a glimmer of hope in what has been a fairly gray landscape for awhile, since professional development is extremely costly and extremely ineffective currently," said Tim Daly, TNTP's president. "The question is whether these teachers, when they improve, are good enough."