Why Parents Want Their Kids to Stay Out of Teaching

This year's annual PDK/Gallup Poll of public attitudes toward public education found for the first time a majority of American parents unwilling to advise their children to become teachers:

Two-thirds of Americans say teachers are underpaid, and an overwhelming 78% of public school parents say they would support teachers in their community if they went on strike for more pay, according to the 2018 PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. 

Even as most Americans continue to say they have high trust and confidence in teachers, a majority also say they don’t want their own children to become teachers, most often citing poor pay and benefits as the primary reason for their reluctance.

Here are just a few of the good reasons that the majority of parents have made the right call:

• The level of teacher demonization for student test score performance over the past twenty years turned teaching into a pressure cooker that stews teachers and students before blowing up schools entirely.  In order to increase the number of corporate charter schools and other "choice" options, politicians and corporate reformers cynically designed No Child Left Behind in 2001 to "hold accountable" schools and teachers for not reaching federally-mandated proficiency targets that were known at the time to be impossible to achieve by the vast majority of children across America.

• Over the past two decades, corporate reformers and politicians have put in place teacher evaluation schemes that are invalid, unreliable, and unfair to teachers.  Untold numbers of teachers have lost their jobs as a result, even as many other teachers fled to other career fields to escape the unrelenting pressure.  Those who have stayed now focus on producing test scores by any means necessary in order to survive evaluations, which, in turn, results in moral breakdowns, nervous breakdowns, and miseducated children.

• Targeted mass killings in schools with weapons of war threaten the safety of all school personnel and children.  Growing numbers of politicians and corporate lobbyists make the case for arming teachers in schools, and kevlar book bags are now prominent on schools' mandatory supply lists for parents.  Who can blame college students and their parents for thinking of their safety and that of their children?

• In an effort to make teaching teacher proof and to reduce the number of teachers, corporate reformers and politicians continue to deprofessionalize the field with lucrative programs that turn over significant and increasing amounts of student learning to screen time governed by computer algorithms.  

• The metastasizing of the corporate cancer known as "rigor" has turned schools into training grounds for the increasingly alienating and disaffected corporate adult workplace.  Teachers are expected to function as efficiency-driven managers who increase the bottom line (test scores), and their own creativity and ingenuity have been sacrificed on the alter of standardization and quantifiable results that ignore the sociological and psychological realities of children.  

• Teachers have continued to lose economic ground to other career fields over the past decades.  With a wage gap larger today than it was in 1980, teachers work two jobs to maintain some semblance of middle class living standards.

Keep the Education Revolution Alive: Stay Away from NEA/AFT

In the Fall of 2015, both AFT and NEA presidents colluded with the DNC to back the Clinton education agenda for more charter schools, big data intrusions, Common Core, and more standardized testing.  This brazen manipulation occurred without a debate that this important decision deserved and with scant support among teachers who pay an estimated $1,750,000,000 every year to make sure that the corporate education reform agenda is pushed forward.  In effect, over three million teachers continue to pay into their own funeral funds every year when they send hard-earned dues money support the collaborationists who run AFT and NEA.

Today AFT and NEA continue to operate as a lobbying and organizing arm of Wall Street Democrats who still control the DNC.  As for teacher salaries and benefits, school resources, equitable funding, and standing up against the charter industry, the suits of the AFT and NEA are nowhere to be found.

At least that was true until the education revolution recently emerged in West Virginia.  Now having spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, and beyond, the corporate teacher unions are working overtime to get out ahead of this teacher-led movement that seeks to reclaim the pride of their profession and to restore sanity to national and state education policy.  As a result, both Randi and Lily continue busily tweeting their support and showing up at teacher-led rallies to grab a mic and some much-undeserved attention.

The New York Times has these observations today about the new grassroots teacher movement and the irrelevancy of the national union leadership:

Today, two women — Lily Eskelsen García and Randi Weingarten — lead the two national teachers’ unions, and state affiliates in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky are also led by women. Even so, many of the most visible grass-roots leaders of this new protest movement are young men who started Facebook pages to help organize protests, rallies and walkouts.

 . . . .This is a movement that was largely organized on Facebook by rank-and-file teachers, who moved faster and more aggressively than their union leaders in demanding action from lawmakers. In conservative states like these, union membership is optional for teachers.

That said, the state and national unions have stepped in with crucial organizing and lobbying muscle, and are now coordinating closely with grass-roots leaders.

My advice to the decentralized leadership of the education revolution in the states:  steer clear of the AFT and NEA, who are known for showing up with bags of cash and an agenda to co-opt any legitimate resistance to the corporate education agenda.  Both AFT and NEA have been particularly effective in wresting control of resistance movements and putting them on the road to irrelevancy.  United Opt Out and the Bad Ass Teachers are just two recent examples of national union success in turning real opposition groups into virtual resistance games. 

TeacherTown Cuts Teacher Pay by $10,000 and Erases Annual Increases: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

CorpEd at Work

With every bad instrument in the corporate education toolbox being thrown into the creation of a new schooling Frankenstein for "educating" Memphis and Shelby County children, the introduction of test scores to determine teacher pay was inevitable. 

• Gone are annual scheduled salary steps, which have been replaced by annual bonuses based on student test scores.   
• Maximum salaries have been reduced from $73,000 to $63,000.
• Teachers will max out after 18 years, with no salary increases after that.
• Teachers who teach non-tested subjects must rely upon test scores averaged for those in the school who teach tested subjects to determine their pay raises.

Meanwhile, teachers in Shelby County are represented by a teachers' association that is an affiliate of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN).

The TURNcoats work hand in glove with CorpEd to make sure that the Broad, Walton, and Gates agendas are pushed ahead of teachers, children, and parents.

MERRY CHRISTMAS SHELBY COUNTY TEACHERS!!

Bloomberg Wants to Double Teacher Salaries--By Doubling Class Size

In the early 19th Century, an efficiency zealot before his time named Joseph Lancaster came up with a monitorial system for schooling the urban poor, wherein a single teacher served as overseer for classes as large as 500 students.  With what might be thought of as a kind early Gingrich-style system using student assistants, these monitors checked and graded student work before passing the grades to a teacher at the front of the converted warehouse.

Sounds like Prince Mike might be dusting off some long-discarded ideas in order to further slash public services for the benefit of the Billionaire Boys' Club.

Story from the NYTimes:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg faced tough questions for a second day Friday on comments he made about two of the most sensitive issues in New York City education: teacher quality and class sizes.

Speaking on Tuesday to students at M.I.T., the mayor said that in his ideal world he would fire half the city’s teachers and pay those remaining twice as much to teach classes double the current size.

“If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design the system and say, ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do, you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students,” he said.

Mr. Bloomberg has been battling the teachers’ union over the issue of teacher quality, pressing Albany this year for the power to promote or fire teachers based on performance reviews instead of longevity of service. But he has never gone as far as to associate half of teachers with bad performance — an assessment not supported by a recent test of a new teacher evaluation system. In that study, which used evaluations from 20 city schools, 18 percent of teachers were rated ineffective.

On Friday, when he was asked about his remarks, Mr. Bloomberg said: “If you were going to start from scratch, you want to go and get the best teachers and you have to pay them more to get them, which means you’re going to have fewer teachers. Nobody’s talking about laying off anybody.”

He said the city increased teacher salaries 105 percent over the last decade — a figure that apparently takes into account raises built into the existing contract, like one for teachers who earn an advanced degree, on top of the 43 percent in pay increases the union says it received. The mayor also said that while some studies had shown that class size affected performance, that had not been the case in his life.

“I went to school in a class, five rows of eight,” he said. “Everybody I know in my generation went to classes of 40 or more. And education by some people’s argument was as good then as it is today. Whether it’s better or worse, I don’t know. But I got through it.”

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers union, called the mayor’s estimate of salary increases of 105 percent “the silliest comments I’ve ever heard.”

“But the disappointing fact here is a complete lack of any understanding of what’s required for education,” he said, pointing out that members of the United Federation of Teachers had seen four years of school budget cuts and get “no support” from the Education Department other than “more directives.”

“Now the mayor comes up and says — not, ‘Thank you for dealing with all this craziness.’ It’s — ‘I can make education better by getting rid of half of you,’ ” he said. “It’s pretty disgusting at this point.”

Two likely candidates for the 2013 mayoral race — the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, and the public advocate, Bill de Blasio — also denounced Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, an advocacy group, said the mayor once ran on a platform of reducing class size.

“He’s already eliminated thousands of teaching positions, we have the largest class sizes in 11 years, and he tried merit pay,” she said. “There’s been no positive results, so as far as I’m concerned. We’ve had the experiment, we’ve tried and it’s failed."

Gates, Duncan, Friedman: Connecting the Dopes

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters (I would call it "Invisible Strings")

As the corporate education deform ship tacks following the grounding of the Oligarchs in DC, it is clear already that their new lay line is bound to take the Billionaire Boys Club into shallow waters once more.  The new strategy is based on using the current economic Depression to leverage the continued crushing of the teaching profession by paying all-powerful school CEOs a bundle and by further cutting teacher pay, while basing the remainder on test scores. Gates has some experience with this kind of management, even before the Bankster Revolution. From 2005:

Microsoft's compensation moves have created a haves-vs.-have-nots culture. Newbies work for comfortable but not overly generous wages, while veterans have a lucrative treasure chest of stock options. Now a new pay scheme, scheduled to go into effect this fall, threatens to make the gulf even wider. If they meet incentive goals, the 120 or so vice-presidents will receive an eye-popping $1 million in salary a year, and general managers, the next level down, will get $350,000 to $550,000, according to a high-ranking source. But the rest of the staff is paid at market rates.

The pay disparity is exacerbated by Microsoft's rating system. The company uses a bell curve to rate employees in each group, so the number of top performers is balanced by the same number of underachievers. But Microsoft has a long history of hiring top-notch computer science grads and high-quality talent from the industry. Under the rating system, if a group works hard together to release a product, someone in the group has to get a low score for every high score a manager dishes out. "It creates competition in the ranks, when people really want community," says a former Microsoft vice-president. 

Still, Microsoft workers have a sweet deal when compared to public school teachers.  This from 2006:

On top of the very competitive salaries and perks, the health care and benefits package, which is 100% free for all full time employees, easily adds $20K to an average mid-level professional's salary at Microsoft. Still need more convincing that this is a company you should pursue for long-term employment? Check out these additional perks:

Investment Benefits - Savings Plus 401(k) Plan -Defer up to 50% of pretax salary dollars. Company matches 50 cents on every dollar to a maximum of 6% of employee contribution.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan - 1% to 15% of after-tax salary to buy Microsoft stock at a 10% discount.
Group Legal Plan - Provides assistance with routine legal services such as real estate, adoption, divorce, bankruptcy, and wills.
Employee Assistance Program - Confidential counseling services for employees and family members.
Prime Program - Discount savings on products and services, including automotive services, computers and electronics, home and garden, restaurants, and travel.
Tuition Assistance Program - Reimbursement of tuition fees and textbooks for work-related courses.


Quoted directly from the Microsoft Employee website: "At Microsoft, people are the source of our energy. Creative people from all types of backgrounds, bringing passion and new ideas, meeting challenges, and realizing their potential. Our benefits plan and resources are designed to keep our most important assets - our employees - healthy, happy, and moving ahead at optimal speed. Microsoft benefits are generous and personalized; to give our employees the coverage they need to keep them healthy and happy."

Now, let's take a closer look at two of the most common occupations at Microsoft -

Software Design Engineer

Software design engineers work in a supportive network, sharing a passion for pushing the limits of technology in order to enable customers. The work completed by SDE's at Microsoft influence the lives of millions. Some duties include coding and designing new software, and constant team collaboration to create and build products. Annual Salary: $107,300 USD plus full benefis.

Administrative Assistant

An administrative assistant is involved in a wide array of tasks and projects including event planning, customer liaison, and website updating. This position provides an opportunity to take action, use strong problem-solving skills to bring about change, and make a positive impact. Annual Salary: $47,000 US plus full benefits

Prerequisites: Some office experience, complimented by an ability to use email and Office suite of products. Possess strong time management and team building skills. Knowledge of basic website management skills is considered a strong asset.

Polish up your resume, press your best interview garb and check out the Microsoft website. Currently, there are more than 300 openings posted nationwide and you can conveniently apply online.

Now this past week the real Secretary of Education, Bill Gates, sent out his flunky secretary, Arne Duncan, to talk about getting more "bang for the buck" as a way to push for further teacher bashing and the further basing of teacher pay and job security on test scores.  Meanwhile, the puppetmaster, himself, was in Louisville spouting the same message to state school officials:

School systems will have to find the money for merit pay from within existing budgets, Gates said. He suggested shifting money set aside for rewarding teachers on the basis of seniority or from those who attain advanced degrees. To study and develop effective ways to award merit pay, the Gates foundation is investing $290 million over seven years in the Tampa, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee; and Pittsburgh school districts, as well as a charter-school consortium in Los Angeles. . . .

. . . .Schools may also save money by increasing class size, Gates said. U.S. student-teacher ratios dropped to 15-to-1 today from 26-to-1 in 1960, without improving student results, according to the foundation. Schools would save more than $10,000 per classroom by increasing class size by four pupils. They could use the money to pay the best teachers more, according to the foundation. . . . 

Now what we know about teacher pay now before these proposed "reforms" is that teacher pay is woefully inadequate already, and one of the small tangible rewards that teachers have counted on in the past is the step increase built into salary schedules across the nation.  As an example, below is a salary schedule for 2010-2011 from St. Louis, MO.  

First off, 14 percent of the beginner's $37.5K salary goes into a state retirement plan, whose eventual payouts are being slashed each year.  So the real beginning salary before other deductions is 32,250.  And Missouri teachers, like teachers in a number of other states, do not pay Social Security, which means, of course, that they will not collect it, either.  From a piece earlier this year in the Post-Dispatch:

Unveiled at last week's work session, the draft aims to reduce pensions for teachers hired after June 30, 2013, by roughly 15 to 20 percent, Yoakum said.

For example, after 30 years of service, current teachers draw 75 percent of their compensation, which includes salary and board-paid health insurance, as a pension. Under the proposal, new teachers would draw 60 percent of salary and insurance after 30 years. That would drop the pension for a $60,000-a-year teacher to $36,000 annually, down from $45,000.

Note, too, that after 10 years of teaching in some of those challenging schools in America, a St. Louis teacher makes the same as a starting administrative assistant at Microsoft in 2007.

DEGREE	STEP	ANNUAL
BA	A	37,500.00
	B	38,500.00
	C	39,000.00
	D	39,400.00
	E	40,153.00
	F	42,040.00
	G	43,467.00
	H	44,771.00
	I	46,115.00
	J	47,360.00
	K	50,358.00
	L	55,570.00

Bill Gates and Arne Duncan want to get rid of these meager step increases by eliminating them entirely.  They want teacher raises (in St. Louis or Syracuse or anywhere else) to be based on student standardized test scores.  And they want to increase class size at the same time.  

Of course, the Oligarchs' ultimate solution is to turn both St. Louis and Syaracuse and every other urban system into segregated corporate welfare charter school systems, where charter CEOs can be paid hundreds of thousand per year like Canada, Moskowitz, and New Orleans corporate welfare queen, Kathy Reidlander, all the while doing away entirely with salary schedules and due process protections in hiring and firing.  

 

In North Carolina, where the charter cap just came off after a sweep by Republicans at the state level, one newly elected pol is already crowing about all the money that will saved when the state goes charter:

"Charter schools just make sense," explained Senator Elect Goolsby.  "They operate on 70 cents out of every dollar that go to the government run public schools and they give parents choice and education freedom.  They do everything great and they do it at 70 cents on the dollar."

What part of that 30 cents on the dollar that does not come from eliminating school libraries, art, music, drama, sports, etc. comes from cuts in teacher pay (as documented by an AFT nationwide study in 2007 that found that "the average charter school teacher salary was $41,106--nearly $10,000 less than that for traditional public school teachers." 

 

Now at the other prominent orifice of this corporate reform monster plops the chief middle brow scholar of all things corporate, Tom Friedman.  And while Mr. Friedman may be able to paint a convincing canvas of a Lexus under an olive tree, Gates has provided him now with an even more difficult picture to render: one that shows how these crushing realities and punishing planned funding "reforms" can be put alongside the ethereal rhetoric of building a teaching profession equal to that of Finland. The op-ed title, itself, "Teaching for America," mirrors the thought disorder that Friedman exhibits in this smelly gush of mental diarrhea:

Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.

To label such bullshit as fanciful would be flattering.  What it is, in fact, is an insult to the capacity, even, of any of the unfortunate psychologically-sterilized borderline illiterates that the segregated corporate charter is likely to turn out with a teacher corps built on ignorance, rather than knowledge and skill and professional competence.  Do these fools think anyone is believing this stuff besides the corporate media's editorial boards?

The Astounding Hypocrisy of Chris "Mad Dog" Christie

One of the most humane social programs that New Jersey offers its citizens is the supplemental prescription drug coverage for those retirees trying to make it on Social Security. The new governor now wants oldsters to pay a $310 up front deductible to take advantage of the program. As a result many retired folks living on Social Security will be cut out of the program, which, of course, is what the deductible is about in the first place.

Meanwhile, His Bloatedness continues to talk tough about that "privileged class" fat cat teachers, even as he vows to veto the renewal of a tax that expired December 31 on those making more than $1,000,000 per year. So let's see, the poorest retirees get cut out of their prescription drug benefit, teachers are supposed to take a zero pay increase or risk losing their jobs, and those making more than a million a year get a tax cut.

The Star-Ledger has a nice piece of reporting on the facts regarding teacher pay in New Jersey. A clip:

TRENTON--Susan LiBrizzi, a divorced mother of four, earns $61,798 a year as a special-education teacher in the Flemington-Raritan Regional School District — enough, she says, to pay the bills.

Over the years, she has taken on summer jobs — cleaning houses, tutoring, baby-sitting — for extra cash as her salary has increased by $300 or $400 a year.

Now LiBrizzi, who has taught for 14 years, is due a $4,000 raise — and the governor wants her to give it back.

"I feel like staying middle-class is a struggle," said LiBrizzi, 48, who lives in Bridgewater. "I still have two more kids to put through college, and it’s scary."

In his quest to pressure teachers to accept a pay freeze, Gov. Chris Christie has portrayed them as a privileged class, untouched by the recession.

But a Star-Ledger analysis of the salaries of New Jersey’s nearly 113,000 public school teachers finds that more of them are like Susan LiBrizzi than like Rockefeller.

Most would be considered middle-class in New Jersey, making less on average than firefighters, cops, engineers and business middle managers, and more than social services workers and sales representatives. . . .

Why to Fight SB 191, and How to Get Even With the Prostisuits Who Support It

Great primer here by Angela Engel on how to get smart, get angry, and get even against corporate prosti-suits of the Colorado legislature and teacher unions:

Don't just get mad, Get Even - Senate Bill 191 passes colorado legislature by: Angela Engel Thu May 13, 2010 at 19:45:19 PM MDT

Corporate Takeover of Public Education The Formula Evaluate school according to an unattainable goal (NCLB - 100% proficiency of every student according to a single measure) to ensure the label of "failing schools." -Standardize all curriculum, nationalizing public education (Gates Foundation is funding the "Common Core Standards Initiative" - technically this is a federal directive but the distinction between the federal government and corporate America is no longer recognizable). (corestandards.com) -Cut funding to neighborhood schools so they are forced to grow class sizes; cut music, art, and PE, reduce student services, and eliminate innovative programs. - Replace professional educators with unqualified, temporary, novices that will work cheaply and rotate every two years (Teach for America and The New Teacher Project). (rethinkingschools.org/archive/24_03/24_03_TFA.shtml) - Reconstruct schools under experimental charters lacking sound educational pedagogy and boasting inadequate research outcomes (Google charter school failures) [try charter school corruption, too]. - Tie student and teacher performance to high-stakes tests, creating a monopoly for state test providers. Never require accountability or public oversight for ETS, McGraw Hill, and Pearson while granting them complete authority in judging American schools, students and now teachers. In 2007 McGraw Hill Education reported $403 million in profits. - Redirect remaining limited resources to growing bureaucracy, data management, and failed policy. - Maintain the status quo of 25 million American children living in poverty. Continue to deny those books, lead-free environments, nutritious lunches, nurturing school climates, and cut them off from the emerging world of technology. Then fire their teachers and shut down their schools. Or contract with militant charters who will adequately prepare poor kids for military service or prison life ensuring continued profits for the privatized and profitable penal system and defense contractors. - Undermine local school boards and eliminate publicly controlled schools by centralizing decision-making under the corporate funded federal government (China and the Soviet Republic have provided a working model). - Create policies that scapegoat teachers and alienate parents further removing them from the decision making table. - Use standardized tests as a mechanism for class warfare thus creating the illusion of providing "better education" and instead use the data as justification to cram ethnic groups in overcrowded factory model schools until they demonstrate mastery of the skill of shading bubbles.

Angela Engel :: Don't just get mad, Get Even - Senate Bill 191 passes colorado legislature

If you are angry about the Passage of SB191, here are 10 ways you can take action: - Begin by thanking the courageous leaders who opposed SB191. In a Progress Now survey, 4400 of the 4600 respondents opposed tying teacher compensation and job security to test scores. Let those who opposed the bill know that the public is with them. Here is the link to the Education Committee votes. (leg.state.co.us/Clics/CLICS2010A/csl.nsf/BillFoldersSenate?openFrameset) - If you are a member of the American Federation of Teachers, you can withdraw your membership immediately. I can provide you with a contact that can provide standalone insurance policy for the cost of your union dues. - If you are a parent, exempt your child from state tests. The purpose of your child's education is not to police teachers and provide data sets for government mandates. You will save our schools money in the process and provide your child with a living example of the power of democracy. - Do not make financial contributions to your political party. Instead identify the candidates, democrat or republican, who maintain children as the priority and protect our neighborhood schools from commercial interests and government representatives attempting to over step the limits of their authority. Contribute directly to candidates who advocated for the needs of children and provide them with the information and support to win the battle for All kids. - On Facebook, unfriend those legislators who voted yes on SB191. Final votes will be updated shortly. This accomplishes nothing but it feels good. - Recruit a challenger for Senator Johnston (Adams/Denver). Get behind the good people of the world and oust the Boobs. Children aren't represented in the legislature they depend on parents, teachers, and citizens to advocate on their behalf. If we defer all our responsibility to lobbyists and organizations, then flawed policy is what we'll get. - Avoid the organizations which are behind SB191 and the national strategy to privatize and capitalize on our neighborhood schools. Identified Proponents of SB10-191 Stand for Children, Colorado Succeeds/BizCares, Metro Organization for People, Colorado Children's Campaign. - Read the book, Seeds of Tomorrow; Solutions for Improving our Children's Education. Buy one for your legislator; we'll take care of the shipping charges: angelaengel.com

Saving 300,000 Teaching Jobs Equal to 2 Months of War Expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan

(Slide from National Priorities Project) Click to enlarge.

When the Wall Street bankster scheme was finally discovered in late 2008, the Feds under Bush rushed in $700 billion to rescue the the same fraudulent banks, insurance companies, and "lenders" that stole the money.

Since 2001, the U. S. has averaged wasting $111 billion per year in Iraq and Afghanistan. The peak war spending year was FY 08, when $184.5 billion was spent on both war fronts. That's over $15 billion per month.

Tom Harkin is now begging the Republicans to go along with a rescue effort to provide $23 billion to save up to 300,000 teaching jobs next year from being cut, cuts that would represent yet another legacy of the bankster heist from 2008. If we were to become so generous as to pay out to teachers that $23 billion per year, it would take over 43 years to spend as much as we have spent so far for killing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here is a nice post on the subject of teacher assistance by Steve Benen at Washinton Monthly:

. . . .Yesterday, House Minorty Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced his position on the legislation. Care to guess what he thinks? Yep, he's pro-layoff.

"The American people recognize that Washington's out-of-control spending is hurting our economy and stifling job creation, and they're asking their elected leaders to make tough choices on fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, the Administration's call for another $23 billion to pad the education bureaucracy will only make state governments more dependent on the federal government and more vulnerable when the federal funding explosion disappears. [...]

"Giving states another $23 billion in federal education money simply throws more money into taxpayer-funded bailouts when we should be discussing why we aren't seeing the results we need from the billions in federal dollars that are already being spent."

Whether Boehner actually believes his own press releases is a matter worthy of debate, but either way, his arguments seem oddly detached from reality. Spending is "hurting our economy and stifling job creation"? In Grown-Up Land, spending rescued the economy and generated the strongest job creation in years.

Just as importantly, what does Boehner think the economic impact will be if 300,000 school teachers are forced from their jobs nationwide?

Of course, notice Boehner's emphasis on this being a "bailout" -- a line Fox News is running with. As Republicans see it, emergency aid to prevent teacher layoffs must necessarily be connected in the public's mind with rescuing Wall Street with TARP.

Please.

Doug Thornell, a spokesperson for DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), said in a statement, "Yesterday, job-killing House Republicans blocked a bipartisan plan that would help get more Americans back to work. Today, it appears John Boehner and House Republicans want to stand in the way of important funds that would help save teachers' jobs. It is unbelievable that John Boehner, who begged his Conference to support Bush's bailout of Wall Street banks, has the nerve to use teachers and children as pawns in his cynical game to regain the trust of the right wing of his party."

Well, perhaps "unbelievable" is the wrong word -- it's actually sadly predictable -- but the rest of Thornell's sentiment sounds about right.

The Top Ten of the Bottom Paying College Degrees

Yep, that's right--elementary school teachers, the ones that absorb the most abuse of the Wall Street ed reformers, they're #1. Let's make them earn that $33,000 a year. From Payscale.com,starting and average pay:

Drama	$35,600	$56,600
Fine Arts	$35,800	$56,300
Hospitality and Tourism	$37,000	$54,300
Education	$36,200	$54,100
Horticulture	$37,200	$53,400
Spanish	$35,600	$52,600
Music	$34,000	$52,000
Theology	$34,800	$51,500
Elementary Education	$33,000	$42,400
Social Work	$33,400	$41,600

And the Winners Are . . . The Test Scores

With the first round of bribes being announced today in Duncan's Race to the Trough, it is now apparent that destroying the teaching profession is even more important to the Business Roundtable than containing, segregating, and psychologically neutering the poor in penal pedagogy charter schools. And so it is today that Duncan's classic behavior mod bribery system recognizes Tennessee and Delaware, where the good unions have become partners with the corporations to create a system of teacher evaluation, advancement, and remuneration that will be based on test scores. And the message to the bad union recalcitrance in DC? The ultimate non-reward of being placed 16th out of 16 finalists.

There is another advantage, too, of putting all the bucks on rewarding state plans to develop pay per score systems for teaching: it is the only one of the Oligarchs' reform strategies new enough to not already have a demonstrated track record of failure.

KIPP Baltimore Teachers Get 2.5 Percent Raise

What remains of that corporate rag the Baltimore Sun reported this week that the KIPP teachers in Baltimore will now get 20.5% added to their salaries instead of the 18% previously paid them, even though the Baltimore KIPP teachers' 9.5 hour days (not counting the 2 hours of homework duty by phone each night) requires them to put in 33% more time at school than other Baltimore teachers. In addition to the 2.5% increase, KIPP, Inc. will now actually contribute to teacher retirement funds, and teachers will get $300 per year for classroom school supplies. Here's the way the Sun reported it:

KIPP Ujima Village Academy, the middle school, complied, but at a cost to the program that had been working successfully with low-income students in its Northwest Baltimore neighborhood, according to Jason Botel, executive director of KIPP Baltimore.

All of this interference in KIPP's "autonomy" is anathema to the Billionaire Boys Club, which is behind the national effort to showcase these entirely unscalable test prep chain gangs as the model to emulate in urban schools. After all, it is KIPP's disposable teachers and disposable students (those who question the Total Compliance Model) that makes these hothouses of inhumane, anti-union innovation so attractive to the Waltons, the Fishers, the Gatess, and the Broads. And you can bet that they will be using some of their billions not to pay KIPP teachers a livable wage but to change the charter law in Maryland to make sure that the cheap charter solutions for the poor are not subject to the same requirements in terms of pay and benefits as the public schools. According to CEO Jason Botel,

KIPP Ujima Village Academy, the middle school, complied, but at a cost to the program that had been working successfully with low-income students in its Northwest Baltimore neighborhood, according to Jason Botel, executive director of KIPP Baltimore.

In the meantime, here is a partial list of KIPP's national partners. What could be more impressive, and what an expensive marketing machine they have built. So expensive that there appears be none left to pay their teachers the going rate:

60,000,000 and above:

Doris & Donald Fisher Fund

25,000,000-39,999,999:

The Walton Family Foundation, Inc.

10,000,000-24,999,999:

The Atlantic Philanthropies

The Broad Foundations

5,000,000-9,999,999:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Rothstein Educates Pay Per Score Advocates

From Ideas in Action:

Rhode Island "Reformers" Out to Axe Teacher Pay and Benefits

From the Providence Journal:

. . . . Under the proposal –– nestled in Governor Carcieri’s budget plan for the coming year –– charter schools would not be bound by prevailing wage, tenure and retirement-system clauses that govern other public schools.

Removing those requirements, supporters including the governor say, would eliminate the red tape that can hamper classroom innovation. Such freedoms give charter schools greater control over budgets and personnel and allow them to attract and pay for top teaching talent.

But teachers union representatives vehemently object, contending it amounts to an end run around collective bargaining units, giving management an excuse to pay lower wages and do away with seniority protections.

“It’s wrong, it’s unfair, it’s unconscionable, it’s absolutely unnecessary and it wasn’t the deal that was struck when the original charter law was put into place,” James Parisi, a lobbyist for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, told the House Finance Committee in a hearing Tuesday.

The original charter law, drafted more than a decade ago as Rhode Island looked for new ways to foster innovation in its public education system, called for the new class of schools to be tied to local districts. It was later amended to liberate such schools from district oversight, making it easier for independent groups to start new institutions.

A year ago, the legislature approved yet another new class of schools, known as mayoral academies, which unlike the state’s existing 11 charter schools did not require specific salary or tenure structures, or obligations that teachers contribute to the state retirement system.

The governor’s budget proposal, if approved by lawmakers, would extend that flexibility to all charter schools. (It would also add $2.8 million for existing schools and $1.5 million for new or expanding schools, including the first proposed mayoral academy, in Cumberland.)
. . . .
The House Finance Committee made no decisions on the proposal, though members including Chairman Steven M. Costantino raised questions about how the state Board of Regents selects which charter schools to approve and fund. Union leadership has accused the mayoral academies of trying to leapfrog other charter applications now pending.

Abbott conceded that while the process was not always competitive, a moratorium that temporarily banned the creation of new charter schools until last year generated a backlog of applications. It is now up to the Regents to decide which new schools to approve and how to divvy up the funding, he said.

The unions say now is not the time to thinking about funding new schools.

“What I don’t understand,” Parisi said, “is how the governor could propose expanding charter schools when the public school districts are hurting as much as they are hurting.”

Will Teacher Pay Follow Corporate Model?

If corporate America is going to run schools like the Business Roundtable oligarchs want, it seems only right to offer teachers the same kind of bonuses that the big dogs get, right? From today's NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.

The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance. . . .

Teachers who take this opportunity to send your go-to-hell letter to Weingarten, Packer, Duncan, and their puppetmaster, Bill Gates, please send along a copy of this Times article.

A Teacher Bailout?

AIG, alone, has now received $150 billion to make up for the super-sized grand larceny that took place on Wall Street during the past eight years.

To give you an idea of what that one payout of $150 billion would mean to teachers, it would give all of our 6 million teachers a $5,000 raise for the next five years.

Of course, that would still not bring them close to comparable occupations (click chart to expand).

So the next time that a politician or Secretary of Education proposes to you that teachers must earn a raise through wringing higher test scores from children who are living in cars or crack houses, I hope you will spit in his face.

Michelle Rhee In Black Astride Her Broom--Hmm

Time Magazine now joins Newsweek and Bill Gates's $3 billion in blasting away at the due process and collective bargaining rights of teachers, while pumping the brass knucks approach to charter reform schools that has made Michelle Rhee the cover girl for the anti-public-education movement. This week's salvo from Time pulls out the big guns, with senior writer, Amanda Ripley assigned the duty of creating a major piece of teacher bashing and public school castigation.

Predictably, Ripley begins with same lies that mainstream corporate media have been using since Ronald Reagan came to town:

The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made.

Or is that a failure that Ripley made with her lazy and biased generalizations that are not supported by anything more than the media mythology she inherits from her privatization preferring predecessors. If Ripley were to look beyond the talking points prepared for her by pay-based-on-test-scores advocate and Hoover Fellow, Eric Hanushek, she would see that it is not teacher rights that are eating away DC Schools nearly so much as it is a long-standing malignant neglect and a continuing history of unaddressed poverty. If teacher job security and unions were the culprit, it seems that the suburban schools would be suffering the same as the urban schools, yes Amanda?

And yet, as the chart (click to enlarge) shows from the research by Boe and Shin from the University of Pennsylvania (published in Kappan, October 2005), white American students, when compared to the average scores from the G5 countries, are doing just swell in the international test score comparison derby. Knocking them dead, in fact. It is only when you add in the poor students scores, both brown and black, that the comparisons become usable by the school privatization crowd to perpetuate their myth of failing Amerian schools. The failure is the American failure to address the disgrace that is povety. When will the media ever include these facts in a story on American public education? Ever?

Do a little reading, Amanda Ripley, before you put the Dragon Lady up for Time's Person of the Year. It might save you some real embarrassment down the road. Here is a clip to get you started, the conclusion from the Kappan piece by Boe and Shin:

Based on our review of the results of six international achievement surveys conducted from 1991 to 2001, we conclude that U.S. students have generally performed above average in comparisons with students in other industrialized nations. Certainly there is variability in performance, with the U.S. scoring above average in reading and civics, average in science, and somewhat below average in mathematics. But even in mathematics at the middle and secondary levels, the U.S. did not perform “poorly.” On the positive side, U.S. aggregate scores were above average in all subjects at the elementary levels and in reading and civics across grade levels.

How then can we explain the common perception that the U.S. generally performs poorly in the international achievement horse race? There are several plausible reasons for this, all of which might be partly correct. First, many consumers of comparative achievement statistics simply are not aware of the results of the full array of surveys that have been conducted in recent years. This may be due, in part, to the selective reporting of bad news and neglect of good news common to the press.23We hope the results reported here will provide more comprehensive factual information on which anyone can base generally valid conclusions about the achievement of U.S. students in international comparisons.

Second, it may be that others are aware of the achievement results of the full array of surveys but simply view average results as poor because they expect the U.S. to be “first in the world” academically, as it is in economic strength and military power. In this view, anything less than first place is regarded as a poor performance. Some actually might have taken seriously the political hype represented in the able public monopoly that must be privatized as much and as quickly as possible. The biased selection of evidence is not a surprising or uncommon strategy for advocates of a particular cause and may have strong policy and political impact.26

Is it reasonable to expect that in the next few decades U.S. student achievement in mathematics and science will improve to the point where assessment scores are substantially and consistently well above average? Regardless of current efforts to improve public school outcomes, this seems most unlikely. At best, we can hope for incremental improvement such as that which seems to have occurred in recent years based on our results in comparison with international surveys administered before 1991.27

A major impediment to higher average achievement scores in the U.S. is the performance of its black and Hispanic students. The achievement gap goes back decades and is not closing rapidly (if at all). Moreover, demographic trends exacerbate the impact of the achievement gap on U.S. mean achievement scores. In 1991, the population of public school students was 70% white and 26% black and Hispanic. By the year 2000, black and Hispanic students represented about 34% of the student population, a stunning growth of 8% during a 10-year period (or growth of nearly 1% per year).28 If the achievement gap remains constant, we can predict that U.S. mean scores will decline as the minority population increases as a percentage of the total.

This article should not be read as a defense of the status quo or an apology for inadequacies in U.S. public education. There is always room for improvement. In fact, all nations seem to be displeased with their education systems and levels of attainment. In the mid-1990s, the OECD sponsored an international study of innovative methods in mathematics and science instruction in 23 nations.29One of the interesting findings was that none of these nations, including some that performed well above average in the international horse race, was satisfied with their mathematics and science teaching and learning. All were striving to improve, just as the U.S. has been — especially since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983.

In recent years, the U.S. has not performed “poorly” in international comparisons in a statistical sense. Consequently, an allegation of poor performance should not be used to tarnish the constructive work of the majority of public educators and the genuine attainments of U.S. students. Nonetheless, the public and policy makers should continue to expect and demand improvements in instruction from educators and the educational system and improvements in learning from students — especially in those subjects and grade evels where student achievement plainly lags. Likewise, the public and policy makers should give credit where due and recognize genuine achievements in providing effective instruction by educators and in effective learning by students.

Top 10 Reasons Why Teaching Jobs Based on Test Scores Is A Bad Idea

It was just a few months ago that Randi Weingarten earned the blessing of Bloomberg for her AFT Presidential bid by endorsing the Bloomberg/Klein/Business Roundtable bonus pay plan for NYC teachers based on test scores. Weingarten patted herself on the back at the time for negotiating the stipulation that bonuses would go to schools rather than individuals. Increased productivity (higher test scores) would be judged on a schoolwide basis, thus assuring Weingarten, at least, that individual teachers would not be evaluated based on test scores. And Bloomberg's lawyers did the ropeadope all the way to the signing table.

That capitulation by Ms. Randi signaled the beginning for a feeding frenzy by the BR and Chamber of Commerce, so that just a few months later, we are faced with the BR's leading media stooge, Jay Mathews, now, today, greasing the slippery slope toward the teachers-on-production model by extending the argument of bonus pay for higher test scores into the dystopian ideal of keeping your teaching job based on higher test scores:

People who have studied the public schools that have significantly raised the achievement levels of impoverished students tend to accept the idea that teachers' salaries and jobs must eventually be tied to classroom results. "Of course," said Andrew Rotherham, an education think tank founder, blogger and Virginia Board of Education member who, at 37, is likely to be a major player on this issue for years to come.

Notice the luridly-misleading style of propaganda. Which "people who have studied" is Mathews referring to, and in which journals are their "tendencies" reported? To say nothing of the sloppy writing. "Of course," what, EduWink? What we can know is that Mathews is as full of digested corn as the Thanksgiving turkey he is planning to eat next week.

Yes, the Jays and Andys and Congressman Millers of the edu-world want to make sure that the teachers who are working in these poverty-blighted schools are earning the big money they are being paid. Just like in the private schools where their children and grandchildren are educated, yes? Here are a few reasons, guys, why this is a bad idea:

10. Teaching jobs based on test scores will hasten the flight of the remaining good teachers from the poorest schools where the best teachers are already in the shortest supply.

9. Teaching jobs based on test scores will attract only the most desperate teachers to the poorest schools.

8. Teaching jobs based on test scores will contribute to cutthroat competition among teachers for positions most likely to produce the best test results.

7. Teaching jobs based on test scores will decimate teamwork and collaboration among teachers.

6. Teaching jobs based on test scores will push the curriculum into a smaller and smaller box based only on what is tested.

5. Teaching jobs based on test scores will further poison the educational climate in schools that is now almost unbreathable.

4. Teaching jobs based on test scores will exacerbate the cheating and corruption associated with high stakes policy implementation.

3. Teaching jobs based on test scores will damage learning for knowledge, skills, and understanding by placing further emphasis only on memorization and short-term learning gains that can be demonstrated with paper and pencil tests.

2. Teaching jobs based on test scores will extend the view of children as raw material to be exploited for their monetary worth.

1. Teaching jobs based on test scores will encourage the marginalization and discarding of the raw material that can't be exploited.

Higher Teacher Pay: How to Kill a Great Idea

While doing some research on Teach for America (or at least for Awhile), which is described by one unconvinced Yale senior as "like the Peace Corp but, you know, creepier," I came across this quote by one of those young former Ivy Leaguers who signed up for TFA to do his 2-year urban teaching stint to prove that grim sociological reality can be eclipsed by the sunny stumbling of high cognitive functioning and and untested egomania:

"I'm having trouble sleeping, but I'm really enjoying it," he said. "It's frantic but fun. Classroom management is the hardest thing for me. I've learned that the minute I turn my back, it's a volcano in the classroom, so I won't be turning my back anymore. There's three other T.F.A. teachers in my school, and we're getting through it together."

Still these social entrepeneurs just keep on coming. With no experience, history, sociology, or politics of education to inform their splendid mental gifts and social positions, they are left to their own self-acknowledged ingenuity and glassy-eyed spunk to come up with schemes that are saleable to the new econanthropists and human capital market managers who are taking over education. Most recent example: Washington Heights TFA teacher and former Yalie, Zeke M. Vanderhoek. Zeke has a funded plan to pay teachers $125,000 a year to teach in his new school, The Equity Project. The working hypothesis: Pay enough in salary to attract people like himself to teach in the poorest schools, and voila!

If there were anything to hold Mr. Vanderhoek's immodest enthusiasm within the realm of the possible, he might have noticed that teacher pay is a factor in getting and holding great teachers--but it is not the factor. And many of those other factors have everything to do with the infrastructure, non-instructional support, resources, curriculum, facilities, climate, etc. that Mr. Vanderhoek would cut back on in order to pay the higher salary:

. . . .“I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world,” said Mr. Vanderhoek, 31, a Yale graduate and former middle school teacher who built a test preparation company that pays its tutors far more than the competition.

In exchange for their high salaries, teachers at the new school, the Equity Project, will work a longer day and year and assume responsibilities that usually fall to other staff members, like attendance coordinators and discipline deans. To make ends meet, the school, which will use only public money and charter school grants for all but its building, will scrimp elsewhere. . . .

Ah, yes, efficiency zeal and either-or thinking--the two enemies of common sense. What a great deal of energy that a little background reading and research might have saved. But then that would have necessitated the acknowledgement that the past might be relevant to what we do today, and clearly, hubris has already eliminated that possibility.

Teachers Working Two Jobs to Make Ends Meet

From the Miami Herald:

When Randolph Chancy took a job with Miami-Dade County Public Schools last year, he expected teaching would be a labor of love.

But he wasn't prepared for just how much labor would be required.

For Chancy, the $38,000-a-year salary he collects from the district is not enough to make ends meet. So every day after school, the science teacher races to a pathology lab in Miami Lakes, where he works a second job as a lab technician.

''I'm a young, black male with a background in the sciences; I figured I could make a difference as a teacher,'' said Chancy, 30, a favorite among students at the Linda Lentin K-8 Center in North Miami. ``I just never thought it would be this hard.''

''It's crazy. It's all day, every day: Go! Go! Go!'' sighed Erin Hanson, a third-grade teacher at Sawgrass Elementary in Sunrise who also works two nights and Saturdays selling purses and accessories at the Kate Spade store in the Sawgrass Mills Shopping Center. ``You run yourself ragged.'' . . . .