Stone Soup

Stone Soup is an old story in the oral tradition told in many countries about an indigent person who comes into a town with nothing but an old cooking pot. No one will feed the stranger, so he fills up his pot with water, puts in a stone, and proceeds to trick the townspeople into contributing various vegetables to make the soup better. The tale teaches a valuable lesson in sharing and cooperating during hard times.

In its current contract talks, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers has brought the pot, water, the stone, and the first vegetable in the form of not asking for a raise and agreeing to some health benefit changes. That will mean the members of the union will actually see their take-home pay decrease if nothing else changes. The union agreeing to this is a big deal for the members, who will then be contributing a part of their salaries to stem the deficit of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). This proposal was made before the contract ran out at the end of August. September arrived without a contract between the School District of Philadelphia and the teachers’ union.

The state-run School Reform Commission and Dr. William Hite had prepared a doomsday budget for the 2013-14 school year which saw 4000 workers laid off, including assistant principals, counselors, nurses, teachers, classroom assistants and others. Laying off all those people still didn’t save enough money to begin the school year. Dr. Hite was asking for $300 million to get rid of the district's deficit and have enough to open school in September. The city coughed up about $100 million in loans and tax revenue. The state put up a whopping $14 million of the $100 million requested and the teachers’ union was called upon to make up the rest with salary cuts, increased benefit contributions, and work rule changes. The union instead put forth the proposal above. Our congressmen got the federal government to forgive a loan owed by the state so Governor Corbett could apply it towards the state’s contribution. He decided to hold it hostage instead, preventing the rehiring of counselors and nurses. The death of an asthmatic child at on the schools was the only reason he finally released SOME of the $45 million which was supposed to be earmarked for the Philly schools, in order for some of the laid off workers to be rehired.

Union detractors and the so-called  “school reformers”  are fond of stating that the teachers’ union hasn’t contributed a cent towards the deficit.  I beg to differ. Even without contributing a proposed salary freeze and benefits change, the first ingredients for the soup, teachers have contributed the pot, water and stone in the form of extra hours spent tutoring students, planning curricula, buying supplies and personal items for their students, attending unpaid meetings, working tirelessly, unpaid, after-hours and on weekends to make certain that their students have the best education they can get with the resources provided by the teachers.

For the past several years, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) members have met for countless hours with parents, students, and community members to propose sensible “reforms” for the public schools here in the city. Our salary is already $19,000 less than the well-paid high-income suburbs in the surrounding counties, who clearly have an easier job. We are not reimbursed for getting our Master’s, Doctorate, or additional certificates, as are many suburban teachers. So we’re on our own to become truly highly-qualified teachers sought by the district.  People are fond of stating that we get paid for summers off. Not true! We get paid from September through June. Any money we collect during the summer is money we have taken out of each paycheck during the school year, so we can have money throughout the summer. Doing it this way actually saves the School District money by allowing our summer money to collect interest during the year.

Now, instead of contributing needed ingredients to the stone soup in the form of equitable funding, the State has begun taking things out of the soup. Governor Corbett appointed William Green as head of the SRC and he has stated, in no uncertain terms, that the state will not give Philadelphia any more money until the union agrees to changes in work rules. The state wants to require a longer day, longer year, Saturday classes. They have already eliminated seniority in rehiring teachers, and also expect the union to agree to the dissolution of tenure for teachers. They want the teachers to take a 13% cut in pay in addition to the increased contribution toward benefits. The state’s whole premise is untenable for the teachers.

A study by the Pew Foundation determined that the SDP was underfunded by the state to the tune of $1 billion. The state took over the district in 2001 because of deficits and poor performance on tests. But during the 13 years it has been on charge of the district, our funding has decreased every year, while teachers are expected to do more. In 1975, the state of Pennsylvania contributed 55 percent of school funding statewide, but by the time they took over the district in 2001 it ‘s share was less than 36 percent.  Pennsylvania ranks 49^th out of 50 states in public school funding. The decrease in state funds was expected to be raised by each district’s property taxes. A state system which relies heavily on property taxes for local school funding is one of gross inequities. Wealthier school districts with more property owners and more expensive real estate have more funds for schools. Expenditures for students vary widely, with comfortable suburbs spending up to $10,000 more per student than poorer rural and urban districts. In addition, Corbett has put a property tax increase cap on the districts.

Now that we are back to the pot, water, and stone, with no vegetables (additional funds), the School District continues to be under the gun to increase test scores. Of course, there are no school counselors in the elementary schools under 600 students, there are no extra-curricular activities, no music or sports, no small  class sizes, and reduced supplies and books. With the Common Core Standards being introduced, there is little time to prepare, adapt, and learn the things that are new in the curricula. The new district proposals for next year will have the effect of taking away the water and the pot, and all we are left with is the stone around our necks – pulling us into the abyss of low test scores, decreased funding, closed schools, and low test scores, etc.

We need a fair funding formula for Philadelphia and the other districts on the brink – Reading, Allentown, Harrisburg, etc. Poorer districts that cannot raise enough revenue from property taxes, need a different way to have the increased funds that it takes to raise high poverty districts from the threat of failure to a the stone soup of success, a high quality education.

It’s not the teachers union that is preventing this from happening. But  the state is more concerned with breaking the union than educating the children, and has gone so far as to threaten shutting down the district if they can’t get their way. Throwing out tenure and seniority is not going to make me a better teacher, because they have nothing to do with making the children in my class score better on a test. As PFT president Jerry Jordan says,  "Work-rule changes don't put textbooks in our children's hands, computers in their classrooms, restore their counseling and nursing services or return music and art to their curriculum."

work-rule changes don't put textbooks in our children's hands, computers in their classrooms, restore their counseling and nursing services or return music and art to their curriculum
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/living/20140225_Funding_formula__not_work_rules__should_be_district_s_No__1_priority.html#6T4J7JUldwGPKF37.99

Which school district will do better? The one that spends $10,000 per student or the one that spends $20,000+? Which one will score better, the district whose parents make $200,000 or the one where the average income is $30,000? The one with 60% low-income or the one with 10% low income?

We already know the answer and it has nothing to do with seniority or tenure. It has to do with the difference between stone soup and lobster bisque.

 http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20140225_Funding_formula__not_work_rules__should_be_district_s_No__1_priority.html

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/23/perfect-storm-threatens-philadelphia-schools/

 

Still learning!

Size Matters

Class size seems to be a constant point of controversy for education, although it should be a no-brainer. Simply put, smaller classes are better for students than larger ones. A study I read recently reported that 13-17 students constituted a small class and a class of 22-25 children is considered a large one . The large number caused me to laugh hysterically, as the maximum class size preferred by the administration in Philadelphia is 32. It has been 32 for decades, which is actually decreased from the 33 students packed into the classrooms when I began teaching. That decrease of 1 student per class was a hard-fought issue in one of our contract negotiations years ago, a reluctant concession on the part of the school district. One fewer student will not make much difference, though.

Without doing any studies or having any personal experience, I could unequivocally say that smaller class sizes are better for academic achievement without leaving my place behind the computer. All I’d have to do is examine the brochures of the private schools in the area.

Let’s examine average class sizes of some private schools in the Philadelphia area:

Episcopal Academy – 15

St. Joseph’s Prep – 25

Friends Select – 12 to 20, with two teachers in larger classes

George School – 15

Westtown School – 15

Villa Maria Academy – 15

Sacred Heart Academy – 16

Malvern Prep – 9 to 13

Baldwin Academy – 14

St. Basil’s Academy – 18

Friends Central – 13

Agnes Irwin School – 14 to 17

The Haverford School – 17

The Hill School – 12 to 14

The Phelps School – 7 (serves both IEP and underachieving students)

Miquon School – 20 to 24 with two fulltime teachers in each class

Shipley School– 12

Springside School – 15

Germantown Academy – 15

I think I’ve made my point.  The private schools in the Philadelphia area that advertise great success and almost 100% college admission rates have determined that small class sizes matter, and use those statistics in their brochures as selling points for prospective students. So why are we even entertaining the thought that high-poverty, disadvantaged students can easily reach academic success in classes of 32 and beyond?

 

It is incredulous to make class size a bargaining point in the teachers’ contract when it’s obviously one way to increase the educational success of students. I often wonder if the members of the School Reform Commission, who are making these decisions, send their children to private or public schools. I think it should be a requirement of a sitting board member to have sent their children to public schools, so they can be personally affected by some of their asinine decisions,  thereby creating a lesser chance of foolish rules and regulations.

A report published February 2014 by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University, calls on the faulty study and faulty conclusions of Malcolm Gladwell and Eric Hanushek in examining 59 case studies of class size done in 1987 and 1995. Those studies found no significant difference in the achievement of students in large or small classes. There were several flaws in this study, one in the size of the data sets (too small), another in not taking into account other causes for the results (it wasn’t random), and faulty conclusions. Mr. Gladwell subsequently wrote a book on the subject, titled David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, which is the source frequently cited by class-size-deniers. Many experts call his “research” into account, questioning its validity. You can read an article below about Malcolm Gladwell’s “Pseudo-Profundity.”

The study cited by Schanzenbach was one of many that have refuted Gladwell’s conclusions. Called STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio), it was a real experiment, totally random in assignment of students and teachers to smaller classes and was done over the span of four years from Kindergarten to third grade. There were 11,500 students, 1,300 teachers and 79 elementary schools involved in this study in Tennessee from 1985 to 1989.  Conclusions from this better-designed study, show that students in classes of 13-17 scored 5 percentage points more on standardized tests in math and reading than students in classes of 22 to 25. Looking at the scores from a black-white achievement gap or an economic achievement gap showed an even greater advantage to being in a smaller class.   The results were unequivocal.

On a more personal note, my first two years in the school district were spent teaching pre-Kindergarten, with a maximum class size of 20. Throughout the year, I noticed that any day where 16 children or less were present, worked like a charm. It didn’t even matter which children were present, the better behaved or the behaviorally challenged.  A full class of 20 always posed a challenge to reach everyone. In Kindergarten, the same phenomenon was observed with an ideal number present of 20 to 22, where 30 was the maximum allowed.

In fifth grade, the max was 32 and the ideal, depending on the combination of kids was 16 to 24. The success of the class depended on the behavior problems that were assigned to the class, not the number of kids with IEPs. It just makes sense that a smaller class size gives you the freedom to get to know each child personally and understand what thinking processes you need to stimulate in order for him/her to learn well. It’s easier to foster a sense of community in a smaller class, so students will not be afraid to speak their mind or be made to feel stupid. The space in the class is also a consideration. With a smaller class, there’s more room to be flexible in your room arrangement, and you’re not sitting practically on top of one another. Smaller class sizes just make way more sense than larger ones.

The school district, at its cost-cutting best, stacked the classes to the maximum of 32 this year, creating over 100 mixed-grade classrooms. You can imagine the current class configuration is not going to be conducive to higher test scores. If 22 to 25 is considered a large class, I suppose Philadelphia has a XXXL size as its norm. No wonder we’re having such a tough time.

Bigger is not always better. Size matters.

Debunking Gladwell’s “Science.” - http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115164/malcolm-gladwells-pseudo-profundity

Does Class Size Matter? - Schanzenbach article

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/does-class-size-matter

 

Still learning!

A Poem By Any Other Name

In my email this morning was an article about how not to teach poetry. That got me thinking about how my feelings about poetry have changed through the years. There has been no love lost between me and that noble subject Up until I decided to throw away everything I had ever learned about poetry, I hated it. I feel differently now.

In grade school, on Friday afternoon, we had our introduction to Fine Arts. It was at this time that we learned about poetry and art. We had a tiny Picture Study book that introduced us to famous paintings, and our main mission was to memorize which artist painted which painting. I was never really good at that. I was more interested in the various genres, or styles of painting. We did this for 15 minutes each week.

The other 15-30 minutes of Fine Arts consisted of reading and memorizing poems. In the lower grades, the poems were mercifully short and sometimes evoked in my mind one of the pictures we had just studied. We were expected to match titles or stanzas to the name of the poet. Sometimes we were instructed to draw the scene described or to write a poem like the featured one.

In 7^th grade, we were supposed to memorize poems such as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Paul Revere’s Ride.  I hated poetry in the lower grades but my 7^th grade Homeroom teacher made it a game to memorize those looooong poems. She’d allow us 2 mistakes and if we could get through it with only those 2 mistakes, we got an “Angel Card” which was good for a night free of homework. Don’t you know I got an Angel Card for each of those poems that year! But to me, that’s all poetry was, memorizing.

In high school, I was fortunate to avoid poetry entirely until senior year, although technically, I guess the sonnets we had read in junior year qualified as poetry. My English teacher in my last year of high school crushed any love I may have developed with the introduction of sonnets the year before. I was often late for her class because the previous class was held in the basement on one end of the building and her class was on the 3^rd floor at the opposite end of the block-long high school. Battling 2700 other students was usually a losing proposition when you only had 3 minutes to get from one class to another. So, at least twice a week, I had a detention for being late. Add to that her method of teaching poetry, which was a whole semester’s theme. We would read a poem and have to tell her what it meant. I was always told I was wrong, but she never explained how I was supposed to be thinking when I read it. Luckily, I was very good at essay writing, which was the second semester’s theme and I managed to pull a B for the course.

In the meantime, I met my future husband, who actually captured me with his poetry. He read poems to me from his book of personal poems, explained how some of them came about, and a bit later, wrote a poem about me. Me! Maybe there was something to poetry after all, that I just hadn’t seen until then. That thought stayed with me as I left the halls of my Alma Mater and went on to higher education.

College freshman, as it is all over the US, choose their classes after everyone else at the university. I had a double whammy that year, as the only gym class left was Field Hockey (I had never even heard of it) and the only English class left was Poetry. I did not go into my first collegiate year with high hopes, as I hated poetry and was one of the most uncoordinated people on earth.

 

Gym class was one frustration after another, as everyone else in the class had played on their high school team. The coach recognized my ineptitude with team sports and played me only when she HAD to. I was, however, a whiz on the rules and regulations and made a good ref. At our final in Hockey class, we had to volley the ball on a slalom course of orange traffic cones in a certain period of time, and then we had 10 chances to hit it into the goal 5 times. Although I volleyed well, I could not for the life of me get the damn ball into the goal. She gave me a D in the practical part since “I could see you were really trying.” My A grade in the written exam allowed a passing grade. I think she didn’t want me back another semester anyway. So, I had one of my horrible courses vanquished that year.

It wasn’t so easy to vanquish Poetry. 

The professor of our poetry course was a distinguished graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and had also studied at Oxford University in London, UK. She considered herself an expert and made sure to let us know, also. We read some great poetry that year, but once again, when asked to analyze it, I was an abject failure.  I was proficient at identifying the type of poem, the rhyme scheme, the imagery used, and had a personal connection with much of what I read. But I could not for the life of me get into the poet’s head and relate why he wrote the poem or what it really meant. Unless the poet had written down what they had in their head when they wrote the verses, I couldn’t see how I was supposed to get inside their long-dead heads to figure it out.

I haven’t mentioned up until now that I went 12 years to Catholic School, the last 4 years spent in an all-girls high school. Keep reading- this is relevant.

The first poem we had to analyze was a Walt Whitman poem. I knew nothing of Walt Whitman except we had a bridge and a school named after him here in Philadelphia. Turns out he was a pretty sensual guy and had some fairly raunchy (for the times) poems. I may have been the only one who hadn’t a clue about that. That poem, whose title I cannot remember, was about the sunrise across a lovely field of flowers, I could see that field, the fog lifting, the flowers tilting their heads toward the light, and the sun’s rays spreading its warmth across the scene. He really had a way to get it across, painting with his words. After we had all handed in our homework, the professor insisted that this beautiful word painting was all about sex! Oh Lord! What did I know about sex? I had just spent 4 years in an all-girls school and was now attending an all-girls university. When my paper was handed back, I got an F. It was only the second F I had ever earned in my school career.  I told myself I’d do better the next time.

But the next time, I got an F, too, and that poem was all about sex apparently. The third and fourth poems also had F’s associated with them, and were also sexual in nature. I finally called up my brother Tom who had successfully graduated from college years before and pleaded with him to teach me how to know if a poem was sexual in nature. My wonderful big brother explained what a phallic symbol was, and also told me about the missionary position and other things that might indicate that a woman was waiting for a man to have intercourse with her.  Suddenly it all made sense. We also discussed how the professor must be pretty frustrated sexually to actually see sex in every poem. Having spent my teenage years in an all-girls school did not prepare me in the least for all this. In fact, I don’t think we spoke about sex at all in those years, certainly no conversation ever mentioned sexual positions and phallic symbols!

Armed with my new knowledge about sex, I plowed into the next poem, eyes wide open for phallic symbols and the like. Guess what? I earned a B! The rest of the semester was spent not enjoying the verses I read, but delving into sexual nuances and positions. In the end, I pulled a B in the course but it did nothing to instill a love of poetry into me.

Much later, after I had graduated with a degree in teaching, I had an opportunity to take a writing methods course that began my new appreciation of poetry. I learned it didn’t have to rhyme, that there are many more forms of poetry than I realized, that it should invoke a gut reaction, and it didn’t have to hold any hidden meanings, sexual or not. 

Armed with that knowledge, I began to teach my classes about writing poetry and how easy it could be. To put your feelings into some verses and make your reader feel what you do was a powerful thing. We wrote poems about colors, vegetables, feelings, family, dreams, anything that could be imagined and put on paper. The longer I taught it, the more a part of me poetry became. Indeed, I have since written many verses with my students through the years. And often used songs and songwriting in examining poetry.

A few years before I retired, a former student spied me in the parking lot and came over to thank me for teaching her how to write poetry. She was a struggling learner in fifth grade with a learning disability. She said poetry helped her get her feelings sorted out after her brother was killed in a drive-by shooting. She didn’t think she would have been able to get past it otherwise. In fact, she informed me that she was teaching other kids in her class about writing poetry. The hug we shared as we said goodbye was mutually grateful.

So now poetry has been a good part of my life for more years than not and I cannot imagine life without it.  My daughter Karen is a prolific poet on the All Poetry website and I know it got her through some tough teenage years. I encourage everyone to try their hand at it, but do me a favor, please? If you want to write about sex, make it obvious, ‘cause I don’t want to go looking for any more phallic symbols. And don’t read too much into a poem. If you don’t understand it, ask the poet. If the poet is dead, don’t assume.

 

Poetry

 

Using forceful verbs,

Flamboyant nouns,

Sprinkled with adjectives, adverbs

Illuminate the page with feeling,

Paint a masterpiece with words.

Let me hear your song.

 

Then tuck it away for later,

Share with someone special,

Or put it out there in the spoken word.

You are capable.

You are powerful.

You are worthy.

You are a poet.