You Make Too Much Money For Having Summers Off!

“You make too much money for having summers off!”

That has to be the most frequent statement told to teachers when John Q. Public wants to know why they pay so much if teachers their have summers off. Believe me, no teacher worth their pay spends the summer goofing around! If you pressed further, the person telling you this most likely thinks that teachers have weekends off, and only work a quarter of a day, too.

First of all, a teacher’s work does not only happen during the six or seven hours you are standing in front of a classroom. Teachers who are lucky enough to have a preparation period every day have this time to mark papers, run off lesson activities and assessments, research activities, plan lesson specifics, consult with the counselor or a colleague, meet with a parent, make phone calls to parents, and do something as mundane as use the rest room. Teachers do not get a break to use the restroom during class time. Lunch and prep times are the only periods available. Since there is no way a teacher can get all of the fore-mentioned things finished in one 30-45 minute time frame, she must take home the paperwork that has not been completed.

Most states have continuing education requirements wherein every teacher has to spend a certain amount of hours in undergraduate or masters level classes or seminars designed to improve their teaching. Many teachers elect to take one college course per year during the summer so they can spend the time learning the information. Courses taken during the school year always seem to have real life intrude upon them and you can never give them the attention they deserve. So summertime is the best time to take the required continuing education courses. Any new programs initiated by the school district regarding curricula have to be introduced to the teachers so they can implement the new ideas well. Most of the time these programs are rolled out in a week’s worth of classes during the summer.

As the doors to the school are closing in June, most teachers are reflecting on the triumphs and tribulations of the past year. Depending on how tumultuous a year it was, it could take up to three weeks to wrap up the year in your mind so you can get on with some relaxation during your vacation. Teachers just can’t turn off their minds and go into rest and relax mode. Some of those beginning weeks of vacation are also spent decorating your class for next year or taking down from the end just ending. Many schools require that everything be taken down from bulletin boards and walls, and all bookshelves be cleared before you are relieved of your school responsibilities. For obvious reasons, bookshelves cannot be cleared while school is in session. Therefore, these things are done after the children’s voices fade away on the last day of school.

Vacation is usually ten weeks long. Two weeks on either end to clear your class and then put it back again, leaves you with eight weeks left to relax. Eight weeks is a little more than the time it takes to complete a summer course. If you do take a class, then you end up with only two weeks vacation, technically. If you do not take a class, school is still never far from your mind. A teacher’s mind is rarely “off.” Even when a teacher is on vacation, he keeps a lookout for books, equipment and activities that he can share with his class. He is always evaluating how a summer experience can be used to help his students acquire background knowledge for reading and social studies. Teachers in high poverty schools are claiming all the back-to-school bargains they can so their students can begin the year well equipped. Teachers spend hundreds of dollars on supplies that the school does not provide in order to be able to provide the best instruction for their pupils who might not be able to buy those little extras such as notebooks, paper, pencils and crayons. Some teachers may stock up on bookbags for a needy student or two.

One summer, my colleague and I had to roll out the new Math curriculum we had helped to write. We worked 6 hours a day in addition to our classroom duties from January to July 1st. Then we spent two weeks teaching professional development for the Math series we were introducing. After that, we spent three weeks rolling out the new curriculum to the teachers in our region. This brought us into the second week of August. Each of us took two weeks off and then went back into the school to ready our classrooms for the new school year. That school year ended up being the hardest year to teach because we had not gotten enough rest and relaxation over the summer. We were both pretty burnt out by the time the following June rolled around. It truly was not worth being busy all summer, as we couldn’t give our best to the students that year.

Do you still think teachers have too much vacation? Let us examine the hours teachers put in versus the worker who has a forty-hour workweek, with two weeks vacation. That worker works approximately 2,000 hours a year, 40 hours x 50 working weeks. A teacher performs teaching activities about 6 hours a day, including his 30-45 minute preparation period where he prepares materials to teach various subjects, communicates with parents and staff about students, grades tests and writing.  That makes 30 hours a week performing teaching duties x 40 weeks of school = 1200.

The preparation period is not sufficient to perform all the necessary tasks in a teacher’s day. So he takes paperwork home to work on.  It is not enough just to grade a test and slap a mark on it. These days, teachers are expected to comment on both what the student did well and what they need to work on. Twenty-five tests can take 10 minutes apiece to grade = 4+ hours at home. Tests are not graded every night, but two or three nights a week (12 hours total) would be common for an elementary school teacher who has to teach all subjects. If you are grading a writing assignment you should figure on 20-30 minutes on each essay. Reading through them all once, separating into piles to compare easily, using the rubric as you read again to more closely examine the writing quality, making notes on the sides about content, style, grammatical and spelling conventions and so on. Thirty minutes x 25 papers= 11 hours. So far that makes 23 additional hours per week performing grading tasks x 40 weeks of school = 920 hours + 1200 in-class hours = 2120 hours already in only 40 weeks!

Then there is the matter of researching activities, standards and lesson planning on the weekends, which, if you are doing it right, takes a good six hours a week minimum. That makes 6 x 40 weeks = 240 hours + 2120 hours of teaching activities = 2360 hours, at 40 hours weekly yields 59 work weeks in a year. Here are only 52 weeks in a year! Even though we are not physically in school, we are working as though we have no vacation time and there is plenty of overtime, which we do not get paid for.

The next time you hear someone chide a teacher for only working 40 weeks a year, please help them understand why we need all the time we get.

Still learning!

How Teachers Feel About Arne Duncan

A little while ago I wrote an imaginary letter to President Obama stating You Are Not My Education President. Today I read an article in an online newspaper, a letter to Arne Duncan by David Reber at the Topeka Examiner. It's good and says everything I'd want to say. So I will publish it here with a link to the page online. Check it out. Arne Duncan is totally unqualified to be in charge of education for the United States.

Mr. Duncan,

I read your Teacher Appreciation Week letter to teachers, and had at first decided not to respond. Upon further thought, I realized I do have a few things to say.

I’ll begin with a small sample of relevant adjectives just to get them out of the way: condescending, arrogant, insulting, misleading, patronizing, egotistic, supercilious, haughty, insolent, peremptory, cavalier, imperious, conceited, contemptuous, pompous, audacious, brazen, insincere, superficial, contrived, garish, hollow, pedantic, shallow, swindling, boorish, predictable, duplicitous, pitchy, obtuse, banal, scheming, hackneyed, and quotidian. Again, it’s just a small sample; but since your attention to teacher input is minimal, I wanted to put a lot into the first paragraph.

Your lead sentence, “I have worked in education for much of my life”, immediately establishes your tone of condescension; for your 20-year “education” career lacks even one day as a classroom teacher. You, Mr. Duncan, are the poster-child for the prevailing attitude in corporate-style education reform: that the number one prerequisite for educational expertise is never having been a teacher. Your stated goal is that teachers be “…treated with the dignity we award to other professionals in society.”

Really?

How many other professionals are the last ones consulted about their own profession; and are then summarily ignored when policy decisions are made? How many other professionals are so distrusted that sweeping federal legislation is passed to “force” them to do their jobs? And what dignities did you award teachers when you publicly praised the mass firing of teachers in Rhode Island?

You acknowledge teacher’s concerns about No Child Left Behind, yet you continue touting the same old rhetoric: “In today’s economy, there is no acceptable dropout rate, and we rightly expect all children – English-language learners, students with disabilities, and children of poverty - to learn and succeed.”

What other professions are held to impossible standards of perfection? Do we demand that police officers eliminate all crime, or that doctors cure all patients? Of course we don’t.

There are no parallel claims of “in today’s society, there is no acceptable crime rate”, or “we rightly expect all patients – those with end-stage cancers, heart failure, and multiple gunshot wounds – to thrive into old age.” When it comes to other professions, respect and common sense prevail. Your condescension continues with “developing better assessments so [teachers] will have useful information to guide instruction…” Excuse me, but I am a skilled, experienced, and licensed professional. I don’t need an outsourced standardized test – marketed by people who haven’t set foot in my school – to tell me how my students are doing. I know how my students are doing because I work directly with them. I learn their strengths and weaknesses through first-hand experience, and I know how to tailor instruction to meet each student’s needs. To suggest otherwise insults both me and my profession.

You want to “…restore the status of the teaching profession...” Mr. Duncan, you built your career defiling the teaching profession. Your signature effort, Race to the Top, is the largest de-professionalizing, demoralizing, sweeter-carrot-and-sharper-stick public education policy in U.S. history. You literally bribed cash-starved states to enshrine in statute the very reforms teachers have spoken against.

You imply that teachers are the bottom-feeders among academics. You want more of “America’s top college students” to enter the profession. If by “top college students” you mean those with high GPA’s from prestigious, pricey schools then the answer is simple: a five-fold increase in teaching salaries. You see, Mr. Duncan, those “top” college students come largely from our nation’s wealthiest families. They simply will not spend a fortune on an elite college education to pursue a 500% drop in socioeconomic status relative to their parents.

You assume that “top” college students automatically make better teachers. How, exactly, will a 21-year-old, silver-spoon-fed ivy-league graduate establish rapport with inner-city kids? You think they’d be better at it than an experienced teacher from a working-class family, with their own rough edges or checkered past, who can actually relate to those kids? Your ignorance of human nature is astounding.

As to your concluding sentence, “I hear you, I value you, and I respect you”; no, you don’t, and you don’t, and you don’t. In fact, I don’t believe you even wrote this letter for teachers. I think you sense a shift in public opinion. Parents are starting to see through the façade; and recognize the privatization and for-profit education reform movement for what it is. And they’ve begun to organize – Parents Across America, is one example.

To save yourself, you need to reinforce the illusion that you’re doing what’s best for public education. So you play nice with teachers for one day - not for the teachers but for your public audience. You also need to reassure those who leverage their wealth – and have clearly bought your loyalties – that you’re still on their side. Your letter is riddled with all the right buzzwords and catch phrases to do just that:

“…to change and improve federal law to invest in teachers” sounds like a wink-nod to TFA that federal dollars are headed their way.

“…sophisticated assessment that measures individual student growth” can be nothing other than value-added standardized testing; a mill-stone for teachers but a boon to the for-profit testing industry.

“…transform teaching from the factory model…to one built for the information age” alludes to systemic replacement of living teachers with virtual ones – bolstering the near monopoly of one software giant who believes the “babysitting” function of public schools is the only reason not to go 100% virtual.

“…recognize and reward great teaching” is stale code for “merit pay”; which is stale code for “bribe for test scores”; which comes down to “justification to pay most teachers less.” Lower teacher salaries, in turn, will free up money for standardized tests, new computer software, and other profitable pursuits.

No doubt some will dismiss what I’ve said as paranoid delusion. What they call paranoia I call paying attention. Mr. Duncan, teachers hear what you say. We also watch what you do, and we are paying attention. Working with kids every day, our baloney-detectors are in fine form. We’ve heard the double-speak before; we don’t believe the dog ate your homework. Coming from children, double-speak is expected and it provides important teachable moments. Coming from adults, it’s just sad.

Despite our best efforts, some folks never outgrow their disingenuous, manipulative, self-serving approach to life. Of that, Mr. Duncan, you are a shining example.

Letter by David Reber, Topeka K-12 Examiner

It can be found online here:

http://www.examiner.com/article/mr-duncan-you-are-a-shining-example

Still learning!

The Real Problem with NCLB

In an education article in the online newspaper at Philly.com, I found a profound statement on the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) by Anita Kulick, President & CEO, Educating Communities for Parenting. She stated:

After 12 years and billions of dollars invested, it didn’t accomplish the most important goal:

• One hundred percent of all students in 100 percent of all public schools become proficient in reading/language arts and mathematics – by spring 2014!

The entire article can be found here - http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/healthy_kids/Is-high-stakes-testing-bad-for-my-child.html#zqdXr0jDTgCisAOL.99

It’s a pleasant surprise to find opinions such as that being touted in a big city online newspaper. For such a long time, the teacher’s voice has been one “crying in the wilderness.”  As far back as the inception of NCLB, teachers have been warning that the basic premise behind that 100% goal was impossible, but for the past dozen years no one has listened. It still holds true with Race to the Top (RttT). There are many reasons why a 100% proficiency goal is unattainable: 1) We do not live in Lake Woebegone where all children are above average; 2) There are students in our schools with profound disabilities who will never be able to show proficiency at grade level; 3) English Language Learners (ELL) are expected to show proficiency on a test in English before they are English-proficient themselves; 4) Schools did not all start from the same place where test scores are concerned and cannot all be expected to reach the same standard at the same time; 5) Standardized tests are not necessarily the best way to assess whether the student has learned what they were supposed to learn; and 6) Using test scores to evaluate teachers is a misuse of statistics, as the tests were not designed to measure teacher effectiveness, but how a student performs.

1) In fact, as measured by standardized tests, that 100% goal is definitely impossible. Lake Woebegone, after all, is a fictional utopia. All of the children cannot be above average where standardized testing is concerned. When a question on such a test is answered correctly by too many test-takers, it is stricken and replaced with something else that is supposedly harder. Statistically speaking, there will never be a standardized test where everyone scores at a proficient level because that would be considered a failed test by the test-makers, and therefore scrapped. The constructors of these tests still operate by the bell-shaped curve, where there are a few will score Advanced, many will score Proficient, most will score Basic, and a few will score Below Basic. There will always be students who are labeled Below Basic on these tests, no matter how much they know.

This puts the Portfolio Model of school “reform” in the failed NCLB category as far as I am concerned. This model takes the bottom 5% or 10% of the schools, according to the standardized tests, as dissolves them, ostensibly to allow the students to attend better schools and get rid of the “bad” teachers. This is an idea that is typically used on Wall Street when examining stock market portfolios. Mark Gleason, head of the Philadelphia Schools Partnership (PSP), and a former journalist and publisher in New York, recently addressed the AERA conference in Philadelphia where he described the Portfolio Model of reform as “dumping the losers.” It might work for Wall Street, but it won’t work for education. Think about it, every year 5% of the schools get replaced, as judged by the scores on a standardized test, not by observations of successful programs in the schools. As this goes on, there will come a time when only schools who can make Adequate Yearly Progress are left, but since there will always be a bottom 5%, some will have to be closed, despite the success of the schools. There will always be some school at the bottom, even when they are all charter schools. But by that time, the public school system will have been replaced by for-profit enterprises. The Portfolio Model is the death of the public school system. The whole premise is a disaster and will only result in the entire school district turned into charter schools, like New Orleans. The quality of New Orleans schools has not improved because the majority of its public schools were replaced by charters. The much-touted charter school renaissance has not happened. New Orleans school kids are still unenlightened; they still score at the bottom.

2) Who are the students who score at the bottom? Schools which are situated in high poverty neighborhoods and those schools with higher than average enrollments of students who need Special Ed or English Language Learners (ELL) services. Some schools in any school district have a higher than normal concentration of children with disabilities. The children could have physical limitations, mental illnesses, communication disorders, learning disabilities, or simply insufficient grasp of the English Language.

Public schools are required to educate children in all of these categories. Charter schools, not so much. In my city, in order to get a student tested for Special Ed services, their un-named disability must cause them to perform at least 2 years below grade level. Then, if they score at a certain level on the psychological test, they are  deemed in need of Special Ed services and an Individualized Educational Prescription is written. These IEPs are the foundation of the student’s instruction at school. The IEP's charge to the teacher is to instruct the kids at the level at which they are performing, not their grade level, with the idea that this will help them learn the basics they missed and eventually lead to total instruction on grade level. This is an honorable goal and is sometimes the case, but not most of the time. There have been instances where children have “seen the light” and suddenly can go at a faster pace, which will lead them out of the specialized classes. But some learning disabilities are such that they cannot be overcome, and to expect a child who is 2 or more years behind, to take a grade level test with very few accommodations and pass at a proficient level is ridiculous.

With few allowed accommodations during the tests, children with certain physical disabilities have a problem when they are testing at the computer, or when doing the writing assessment. Children with speech disorders or pervasive developmental delays are expected to take the same grade level tests as their peers without disabilities, even when their communication skills are very limited. Even students who are in the hospital with life-threatening illnesses are still expected to take the tests. One recent example of this is the child who was in hospice in Florida, unable to communicate, whose teacher had to attempt to administer the test to him because it was a state requirement and he was not exempt. Or the recent case in Oklahoma where the children's parents were killed that week and the state told the school district the children still had to take the test. Luckily, the school district's administrator realized how absurd this was and made the exemption herself, without the state's approval.

3) English Language Learners are at a special disadvantage because the state makes them take the tests after only having been in the United States for 1 year. Imagine sitting in a classroom in Korea, at age 10, where the alphabet bears no resemblance to the one you first learned, and where you have very limited skills in reading and writing in that language after only 1 year. Now imagine having to take a test that uses idioms, irony, metaphors, and double negatives and being expected to take it at your grade level, not your Korean Proficiency level. Even math tests ask tricky questions and expect you to explain your answers. These ELL kids get so frustrated and the scores indicate they are doing very poorly, when that may not be the reality at all. Often they give up fairly quickly and half-heartedly bubble in any old answers. This is one reason why some charter schools show miraculous improvement over public schools, they are more likely to have lower concentrations of special ed or ELL students, and are likely to counsel out students with emotional or behavior problems.

4) It is no surprise that students in poor neighborhoods score lower than in wealthy neighborhoods. Study after study has shown that poverty has the most detrimental effect on the academic well-being of a child. Those statistics can be proven in any large city with a disparity of income level, or any state with areas of high and low poverty levels. This is not because of the quality of the teachers or the principal or the parents, it is because high poverty puts high stressors on everyone who lives there. A recent study claimed that lack of money, poor housing, no healthcare and the resulting violence in these neighborhoods all contribute to a condition very similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Schools in these areas have to address the survival, medical and emotional issues of the students in order to begin to make a dent in the academic hole they have to climb out of. Unless you make simple, sufficient, non-traumatic living a priority, academic goals will always be extremely difficult to attain, including scoring at a proficient level on a standardized test. Schools that accept all students regardless of income, disability or language proficiency will always score lower than schools with low concentrations of special students and those in high-income areas.

5) Putting income levels, disabilities, language proficiency, and the bell-shaped curve behind us, there are much better ways to evaluate the job that the school are doing than a standardized test. Graduation rates, success rates in higher education institutions, parental satisfaction surveys, student interviews, projects, observations of teachers, principals and students, report card grades, and AP exam offerings are many of the ways a person can evaluate whether a school is a good one. Improving the graduation and higher education/job attainment success rates of students, creating and maintaining an atmosphere of collegiality, creativity, and trust between and among students, teachers, and administration may be the best method to judge a school. True learning and critical thinking can only take place in an atmosphere described above. If the atmosphere and needed social services are provided and maintained, schools should be able to begin to consistently better the academic state of their students, measuring their abilities by what they can do and show that they’ve learned.

6) Using many different measures is better than using one to determine a student’s success. Test scores only measure what the students know on one certain day out of 180 days. The tests were not designed, nor do they pretend to be able, to predict the value and effectiveness of the students’ teachers. Because they were not designed to measure the teacher’s effectiveness, they should not be used as an evaluative measure for teachers. The evaluative formulas of VAM or PVAAS are poor uses of mathematics to quantify and non-quantifiable set of characteristics. If you observe a good teacher, you will not need a formula to tell you, you will be able to figure it out right away. Same with a bad teacher. Standardized test results of students will not tell you 10% of what you can observe in a day.

A sensible use of test scores from the State College School District here in Pennsylvania can be found here - http://www.centredaily.com/2014/04/19/4141707/public-issues-forum-appropriate.html

Standardized tests are a hallmark of the NCLB and RttT acts. Theses laws initiated an emphasis on standardized testing that has mushroomed out of control. Until we put the role of standardized testing back where it belongs - only measuring what a student knows on one particular day – public schools will bear the unfortunate and damaging burden of having to prove their worth with inappropriate measures.

Get back to basics. First, fairly fund public schools, and then observe, discuss, gather evidence. Only then can you figure out whether a school and its students are doing a great job.

Still learning!