May 2010 Archives

Like many states across the country, Oklahoma is having a tough time making ends meet and teachers are taking a hit. In a bill that is headed for Governor Brad Henry's desk, which he is expected to sign, teacher applications for National Board certification and the attached $5,000 stipend would be suspended for two years, reports the Tulsa World.

The bill would also exempt schools from purchasing new textbooks, allowing them instead to use the money for general operations. Professional development requirements for teachers and administrators would also be rolled back. Opponents have expressed concern that the suspension would become permanent.

But State Superintendent Sandy Garrett believes the cost-cutting measures are necessary, according to the Associated Press. "We do agree that flexibility needs to happen...for a couple of years here, until we get through this hard time," she said.

And in other cost-cutting news, according to NewsOn6.com, more than 360 first year teachers in the Oklahoma City Public Schools were told they might not have a job in the fall. With a $17million shortfall in its budget, the district is considering saving $6 million by not renewing 130 to 150 first-year teaching contracts. Other cuts would include closing five elementary schools and suspending the purchase of new textbooks, which could save the district more than $3 million. First year teachers in Tulsa have also been notified that their jobs might be in jeopardy.

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In a Washington Post op-ed, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers makes the economic case for the education jobs bill:

Because unemployed teachers have to cut back on spending, local businesses and overall economic activity suffer. And the costs of decreased learning time and support for students will be felt not just in the next year or two but will reduce our productivity for decades to come.

Meanwhile, North Carolina teacher Cindi Rigsbee is furious after reading that her state is cutting teaching jobs even while maintaining its budget (to the tune of $14 million) for out-of-state atheletes' college tuition.

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In Douglas County, Nev., English teachers are up in arms about a textbook set and curriculum that the district is planning to introduce this fall, reports the Record-Courier. Teachers are not happy that the program, called Springboard, eliminates many of the standard literary works that appear in high school English classes in favor of textbook readings: no more Macbeth, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, or The Catcher in the Rye. Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Twain would get the ax.

Teachers have also attacked the SpringBoard curriculum, designed by the College Board, for its lack of rigor in grammar, vocabulary, and writing instruction. "In our recent quest to find a common English curriculum, I feel that we've repeatedly used the term 'rigor,' yet we've failed to acknowledge the lack of rigor in SpringBoard," said middle school teacher and novelist Liz Leiknes. "I fear that we will be sending our students to swim in shallow waters, yet setting them up to drown in the academically competitive deep sea of the real world."

Tenth grader Taylor Gray, who participated in the pilot program for the curriculum last year, agrees. "During my entire 9th grade year, I did not learn a fraction of the grammar, structure, or vocabulary I was hoping to." Gray also complained that she didn't know what a "decently written essay" looked like. "The reason? I was spending time learning about 'Edward Scissorhands' cinematic value."

According to Kerry Pope, the district's director of curriculum and instruction, the curriculum is designed to be thematic, rather than chronological, and weighs heavily on assessments. "We're a district that believes in common formative assessments, and those assessments are included in the SpringBoard books," she said.

Middle school teacher and supporter Susan Van Doren thinks the curriculum could serve as an academic equalizer. "SpringBoard makes it possible to throw open the doors to Advanced Placement that have long been closed to all but the elite."

In part because of the strong opposition, the school board will review their decision to finalize the curriculum in early June.

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What makes some teachers better than others? A new study from the Rand Corp. concludes that, well, it's tough to know.

The study, which examined data from the Los Angeles Unified School District over a five year period, found that there was little correlation between teacher effectiveness (as measured by student test-score progress) and any particular qualifications or credentials. That includes years of experience, education level attained, or licensure test scores. Even initially failing a licensure exam showed no "statistically significant link" to a teacher's future effectiveness.

So what now? The study suggests that "education experts" may need to "develop alternative measures that will more accurately predict classroom performance." (Better be on the lookout for those.) In the meantime, there's always performance pay: "[I]t might be promising to reward teachers for their performance rather than for qualifications that are not associated with their ability to improve student achievement," the study notes.

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Miss Eyre, in a post on NYC Educator, explains her ambigious stance on her school's student dress code policy.

As well, if a child is dressed improperly, I am supposed to send that child directly to the office to either change clothes or wait for a parent or guardian to bring a change of clothes. Now, again, I am theoretically in favor of a policy like this. However, in the recent past at my school, a child has told a teacher to go f--- herself only to be promptly returned to the classroom, and another child called a classmate a name that I cannot even attempt to partially censor on a family blog and faced no consequences at all. So perhaps you can see my hesitation to remove a child who is otherwise productive and pleasantly behaved from my classroom.

Gee, sounds like a really well thought-out policy.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

With so-many school layoffs and hiring freezes being reported, you'd think it wouldn't be hard for a school to find good teachers right now. But Epiphany in Baltimore has found that, for a variety of reasons—most notably district recruitment and preference policies—that's not the case.

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A college teacher, citing some pretty ugly statistics, wonders why so many students come to college not knowing the fundamentals of decent writing, and suggests we need to rethink "the way writing is taught in high school -- and, perhaps, the way teachers are compensated."

A respondent—also a college teacher—argues that part of the problem stems from English teachers' schoolmarmish inclination to mark up and fix everything that's wrong in a student's paper:

Effective teachers of writing identify a small number of patterns of error -- perhaps three per writing project -- and then teach students how to correct these errors themselves.

And then there's the question, according to Will Fitzhugh, of whether students in today's supposed process-oriented classrooms are even getting a chance to do extended writing assignments.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A high school teacher in Georgia has been put on paid leave after allowing four students to dress up in Ku Klux Klan hoods during school.

Catherine Ariemma, an award-winning teacher at Lumpkin County High School, said the students were in costume for a film project on racial issues for her AP history class. Even so, a number of students in the school were made uncomfortable by their appearance, and the incident has fueled racial tensions in the community.

"I feel terrible that I have students who feel threatened because of something from my class," Ariemma told the Atlanta Journal-Constituion. "In hindsight, I wouldn't have had them film that part at school."

Lynn Hogue, a law professor at Georgia State University, said that there was nothing inherently wrong in allowing students to don the KKK robes for educational purposes, but the execution could have been handled better.

"The answer is not necessarily to not do it," Hogue said, "but rather to be sure that everybody is reasonably informed about it so that people aren't caught off guard and it doesn't backfire."

"Good common sense should have told her this was not a good idea," said Rev. Markel Hutchins, a civil rights activist who has been called to the town to help address the issue.

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A group of accomplished teachers representing Anthony Cody's Teachers' Letters to Obama campaign got a chance to express their concerns and ideas about federal education policy in a conference call with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and colleagues yesterday. Unfortunately, from the teachers point of view, it turned out to be a frustrating experience. Both Cody and Nancy Flanagan have posted accounts of the call. Definitely worth a read.

UPDATE 5/26: Interesting: Cody gets a callback.

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Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post's The Answer Sheet blog had some fun with the new Texas social studies curriculum standards today (including some proposals that didn't make the final cut), as she attempted to identify "the most egregious twist of history."

While she considered the proposal to remove Thomas Jefferson from the Enlightenment curriculum the winner at first (one board member argued Jefferson was "either wrong or didn't really mean it when he called for a sharp separation of church and state"), Strauss awarded the "egregious" prize to the renaming of the U.S. slave trade.

I think we have found the most egregious, even insidious proposal: Calling the country's slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade." That refers to the trade system that included the American colonies, Europe and Africa, which, if drawn on a map with arrows from place to place, certainly looks like a triangle. The proposal is correct on the geometric merits.

On historical and moral merits, however, it fails miserably. Trying to whitewash the country's ugly past is itself ugly, and dangerous.

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The education-policy community is abuzz over an article by journalist Steven Brill that appeared in the New York Times Magazine yesterday (though it's been online for a few days). Titled "The Teachers' Unions' Last Stand," the piece looks at the powerful reform forces that have coalesced around the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition (with particular emphasis on its teacher-accountabilty provisions) and at the seemingly out-of-touch—not to say doomed—efforts of teachers' unions and their supportors to resist wholesale changes to teachers' protections.

One flashpoint of the article is a devastating comparison (on first blush, anyway) of a regular public school and a higher-performing charter school that share the same building in New York City. As Brill comments, "School reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education—the union, big-system bureaucracy, and low expectations for disadvantaged children."

Brill also looks in detail at how union pressures in effect brought down New York's initial bid for Race to the Top funding—and at how the competition, especially in the aftermath of its first round, has influenced new legislation and contract agreements embodying seemingly significant union concessions. "If [President Obama] really sticks to this," Paul Pastorek, the superintendent of Louisiana schools, tells Brill, "education will never be the same."

As mentioned, Brill's piece is getting a lot of attention. Here's a sampling of the reactions from around the Web:

Leonie Haimson of NYC Public School Parents calls it a work of "hack Journalism":

The article blames all our educational problems on the union (as usual); doesn't mention any of the controversial charter co-locations that are squeezing space from our regular public schools; doesn't mention any of the myriad charter school financial scandals, or their abuse of student and parent rights; omits any reference to the ongoing (and inexcusable) opposition of the charter school industry to audits, and manages to leave out the fact that it is the hedge fund operators who with their millions of dollars in campaign contributions are driving these policies.

Megan McArdle of the Atlantic Monthly, on the other hand, thinks Brill is dead-on in his portrayal of the union's staunch opposition to meaningful reform:

The issue with the teachers' unions is not the unions per se—agitating for higher pay wouldn't make much difference, and is indeed probably a great idea. The problem is that the structure they impose makes it almost impossible (though not quite!) to innovate, and to spread the innovations that work. The cushy job protections and strict work rules are great for the teachers. But the schools aren't there for the benefit of the teachers.

Gail Robinson of the Gotham Gazette charges Brill with playing "fast and loose with the facts" in order to weight the scales against the unions:

While saying Harlem Success charter serves the same community as P.S. 149, Brill does not look into complaints that charters do not have the same number of challenging students—special ed kids, English language learners and homeless children. He discusses the cost of teachers but conveniently leaves out the cost of administrators, notably Harlem Success' Eva Moskowitz who makes far more than Klein, and of private management companies.

Valarie Strauss of The Washington Post's The Answer Sheet agrees that Brill, in his two-schools-same-building description, is comparing apples and oranges:

Traditional public schools have to educate every student who is eligible to enroll. They can't counsel students out, as many charters do, or select who they want. This is not an excuse for bad schools. But it is part of the reason that the job of the traditional public school system, which still educates about 95 percent of all schoolkids, is far more complicated than many reformers today would have you believe.

Eduwonk, meanwhile, calls the article "fantastic" in its details and says it raises the curtain on a "really interesting time for the field," but thinks it simplifies the problems schools face:

And I'm not sure the teachers' unions as the uber villain here really does justice to the complexity of the issue and how broken aspects of education culture are. That's not to say the unions don't contribute to the problem, a lot, only that if they vanished there would not be an immediate golden age.

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While BP executives struggle to stop an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a group of 1st graders in Kansas have been getting their own hands-on experience with oil spills this week in their classroom.

The students watched a presentation about the oil spill in the gulf, then tried to clean oil (made of cocoa powder mixed with vegetable oil) from a bowl of water and from bird feathers. The students learned the difficulties of cleaning the oil—one said, "it's kind of oily and watery at the same time"—and gained some real-world perspective about an ongoing ecological crisis.

"I felt closer to it because we were doing experiments about it," student Katherine Fischer said. "It was more important to me."

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Diane Ravitch, explaining her recent change of heart on accountability-based reform, goes Jungian:

I sometimes wonder whether you might be attracted to the things that you say are wrong--if you're kind of guarding yourself against something that secretly appeals to you. It's like people who are vehement, militant atheists; I think they could easily become religious crusaders, because they're almost religious in their atheism. You have to be careful what you choose to engage yourself with, because the thing you're fighting could be the very thing you want.

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With Facebook recently embroiled in privacy concerns, other sites have started popping up to capitalize on Facebook's troubles, according to the Wall Street Journal.

One such site, called Togetherville, aims to be the kid-friendly (and safe!) version of Facebook, as Wired reported this week. (Otherwise, you could take the route this N.J. middle school principal did, and e-mail every parent in your school asking them to keep their kids off Facebook.)

Togetherville is a social network designed for kids ages 10 and under. The site's users can do many of the same things Facebook users can—interact with their friends, play online games, and watch videos—but the service ensures that parents are involved with their child's online activity by making the parents create their child's account. (The site uses Facebook authentication to confirm the parent's identity, and Togetherville accounts are verified via e-mail to complete the parent-child link.)

"Togetherville is social-networking training wheels for families," said Anne Collier, co-director of Connect Safely. "It models safe social-Web use for kids and shows even parents who are already keen Facebook users how social networking works best in the family context."

The site developers worked closely with officials from Connect Safely and the Family Safety Online Institute to design a system beneficial to younger children.

"We built Togetherville using the spirit of the neighborhoods most of us remember when we were kids," said co-founder Mandeep Singh Dhillon, "where everyone knows everyone else and watches out for each other. In Togetherville, parents have peace of mind that their kids are playing with people they know and trust and kids have fun while learning the tools they need to become good digital citizens."

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Ariel Sacks, on the advice of a yoga teacher, has taken to practicing mindfulness in the classroom. It's interesting stuff:

When we take the time to notice things, we are creating an opportunity for ourselves to illuminate the choices we make on a regular basis, some of which we may not even be aware. Lately, I've even been taking time to notice what I notice. Do I take as much time to notice the progress one student makes, or how well a lesson went, as I do berating myself about a student who was messing around period 4? How I fill up my mental space involves choice as well. I've been trying to make the choice lately to notice the positive as much as the other things that beg my attention.

If you like this, see author Kirsten Olson's comment below on a Buddhist-inspired workshop for school leaders. (We've seem to have a little bit of a theme going.)

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Amid all the talk about firing ineffective teachers, award-winning educator Renee Moore argues that the real cause of poor achievement in schools might just be "ill-conceived administrative restrictions":

It sounds paradoxical that those charged with being educational leaders in their buildings or districts may actually be impediments to quality instruction, but that is a truth many of us in the field have to deal with daily.

She notes that, faced with clueless one-size-fits-all mandates and inconsistent policies, even accomplished teachers find they often have to resort to subterfuge to do their jobs in way they know they need to. She has had do so herself.

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Will Fitzhugh, editor of the Concord Review, warns against placing processes and skills above content knowledge in literacy instruction, saying that, in the manner of kudzu, they will "choke attention to the reading of complete books and the writing of serious academic papers by the students in our schools."

On the Core Knowledge blog, teacher Diana Senechal seconds him and chides those who think they can have it both ways (i.e., by combining a skills-based instructional emphasis with meaningful content):

Process does replace content when it is accorded the highest place on the scale of values. To put process at the top, to subordinate literature and history to skills, is a gory sacrifice and boring practice.

She adds, in a metaphorical flourish, that no one learns Bach's "Suites for Unaccompanied Cello" in order to "practice bowing techniques." True enough, but (just to play devil's advocate) it's worth noting that you can't play Bach's cello suites without having first developed some pretty fine bowing techniques, no?

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In preparation for a future project, we've been doing some reading recently on so-called 21st-century skills, so this story about an art teacher in Louisiana who teaches students how to draw from the right (non-verbal) side of the brain caught my eye. The idea, according to the teacher, Paulette Purser, is to get the students to slow down in their representational drawings and examine problems from different perspectives. This ultimately helps them become better problem-solvers, she says—one of the key 21st-century skills, incidentally.

Several times during the course of a class Purser will reportedly exhort her students to slow down, not to work so quickly. That's something you don't see very often in education news stories these days.

No word yet on how this technique has affected the students' test scores or academic performance—but their drawings have apparently improved dramatically.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A geometry teacher in Jefferson County, Ala., was paid a visit by the Secret Service after he reportedly attempted to elucidate a lesson on parallel lines and angles by illustrating where one would need to be positioned in order to shoot President Obama.

The secret service did not find a "credible threat," and the teacher is not expected to be placed on leave or be terminated—though he is apparently going to get a good talking-to. "We are going to have a long conversation with him about what's appropriate," the district's superintendent said. "It was extremely poor judgment on his part, and a poor choice of words." Ya think?

(Hat Tip: Talking Points Memo.)

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You've heard the news by now: Months after making headlines by firing every one of their staff members, Central Falls High School in Rhode Island has agreed to bring back all of those fired staff members without making them reapply for their jobs.

Some reactions from around the edublogosphere:

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post believes a deal would have been reached much quicker had President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan kept their noses out of it:

What do you think would have happened if Obama and Duncan had not taken sides when the teachers were first fired, and instead had urged the opposing sides to work harder to reach a better solution? I think it is fair to assume that the negotiations would have reached success a lot sooner, sparing the Central Falls community a lot of grief.

On the other hand, political reporter Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic suggests that the compromise shows the influence of the administration's policies and ultimately amounts to "notch in the cap of the AFT":

Evaluating teachers by evaluating student test scores is a reality that Obama doesn't want to change, and AFT, instead of fighting this tooth and nail, is helping to shape the policy by accommodating reality. You can bet that the White House is watching.

The American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess believes the union was accomodating to the point of giving in:

The final accord makes it clear that not only was there no compromise, but Central Falls Superintendent Fran Gallo, who started the negotiation asking for six big concessions, wound up pocketing more than a dozen. If the Central Falls teachers play poker like they negotiate, they might be advised to just mail their Visa card to Vegas and call it a day.

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Congratulations to Teacher blogger Tamara Fisher!

Her blog, Unwrapping the Gifted, made the "Top 50 Blogs for Teachers" list compiled by Rasmussen College.

Teacher's Blogboard—although now defunct—also made the list. (It's been replaced by Teaching Now, the blog you are currently reading.)

A shout out to Education Week reporters who also cracked the top 50: Stephen Sawchuk for Teacher Beat and Christina Samuels and her guest blogger Lisa Fine for On Special Education.

According to Allie Gray of Rasmussen the list is based on blog content as well as search-engine page rank.

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Parents from a California school district raised $2 million in two months to save the teaching jobs of over 100 teachers who received pink slips in March, according to KTVU.com.

The parents contacted fellow parents and teachers, along with local businesses, to save the jobs of 107 teachers to maintain the 20-to-one class size ratio in the district. The district was considering bumping the class sizes to 30-to-one for the coming school year to balance their budget.

"It's great that we have accomplished our goal and are able to save all the teachers' jobs," said Hoi Yung Poon, a marketing campaign consultant who has a kindergartener in the district. "But at the same time we really need to work on long-term solutions because there are many other school districts who do not have the time or resources to work on such fundraising campaigns."

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Will Richardson posits that one problem with evaluating teachers on the basis of student test scores is that it values knowledge over learning:

And yes, we need to know that our kids know some stuff, no question. But what I really want to know is that my kids are learners, that they are motivated to seek knowledge on their own and use it effectively, that they are problem solvers, that they are self-directed, entrepreneurial, and motivated to change the world. If you can find a way to test that, I'd be more than happy to apply the result as a part of teacher evaluation.

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A recent CNN-commissioned pilot study finds that both white and African-American schoolchildren have a "white bias"—white students overwhelmingly so.

The study, led by University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, surveyed 133 students in eight public schools—four within a two-hour radius of New York city, four within a two-hour radius of Atlanta. At each school, the researchers surveyed students in two age groups: 4- to 5-year-olds and 9- to 10-year-olds.

Spencer asked students of both age groups certain questions, and then had them answer by pointing to one of five cartoon pictures of people with varying skin tones. The older students were also asked questions about a color bar chart which featured light and dark skin tones.

According to the study, the white students responded "overwhelmingly" with "white bias"—associating positive characteristics with their own skin tone and negative characteristics with darker skin tones. The African-American students surveyed (75 altogether) also demonstrated having white bias, although to a lesser extent than the white students in the survey.

"All kids on the one hand are exposed to the stereotypes" Spencer said. "What's really significant here is that white children are learning or maintaining those stereotypes much more strongly than the African-American children."

Spencer suggested that the findings may shed light on persistent racial achievement gaps in schools, insofar as African-American families have to spend more time and energy on "reframing messages that children get from society."

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Earlier this year, Central Falls High School in Rhode Island made news by firing every single one of their teachers and staff in a radical turnaround effort that was lauded by President Obama.

Ninety of those teachers are now applying to get their jobs back, although only half can be rehired if the school hopes to receive federal school improvement money. The district already has received 800 applications from teachers, so finding replacements shouldn't be too difficult.

"It's a very interesting time to be in Central Falls and to see the wealth of educational professionals who really want to come," superintendent Frances Gallo said.

Three of the previously fired teachers have been rehired; 87 others reapplied for their jobs.

5/17 Update: On Sunday, the district announced that it had reached an agreement with the teachers' union to rehire all of the fired teachers without forcing them to reapply for their jobs.

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In an editorial, the Denver Post defends a bill just passed by the Colo. Legislature that will tie teachers' tenure status to students' academic progress:

Despite hysterical assertions to the contrary, it is not meant to set up teachers as scapegoats for the sociological and economic disadvantages that their students bring to school with them. It is not an effort to fire teachers en masse. It is an effort to recalibrate their mission in a very specific way. The foundation of this measure is the firm belief that even students who come from troubled circumstances can learn. These are the very students that public education should not and cannot give up on. They need more educators in their corner who believe in them, and who, quite frankly, have a vested interest in their success.

I am not judging the merits of the bill, but I do think it's interesting that the implicit assumption of the Post's argument is that teachers currently aren't supportive of disadvantaged children—i.e., that they need special prodding to become "vested" in their students' progress. Is there any truth in that? Would be curious to hear what others think.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Twelve-year-old Greyson Michael Chance appeared in a 6th grade talent show in Edmund, Oklahoma last month and today he is a YouTube sensation. With an appearance this morning on the Ellen Degeneres Show and more than eight million views of his YouTube cover of "Paparazzi" by pop singer Lady Gaga, Chance could very well be the next Justin Bieber or better. If you need convincing, listen for yourself and check out the faces on the female students as he performs—they go from mild disinterest to shock and awe.

Chance explained to Ellen Degeneres this morning how he found out about the invitation to her show yesterday during math class. "I was sitting in math class and I got a text from my mom. And she said, 'Call me ASAP.'" The 6th grader assumed he was in trouble, but after "excusing" himself from class, he learned otherwise. The trip to Los Angeles was his first flight ever and he says he was "very scared."

The poised and talented 12-year-old performed "Paparazzi" on the Ellen Degeneres Show and got a surprise call from Lady Gaga herself, who described the young student as "very talented." (His music teacher went a step further following his performance at the district-wide middle school talent show. "In my opinion," she said, "he just taught Lady Gaga a lesson.")

Chance is also a songwriter. He posted two of the songs he wrote— Broken Hearts and Stars—on his YouTube page to comments from around the around world professing amazement and comparing the young artist to Billy Joel and Elton John.

Update: According to News on 6, a Tulsa television station, (and a number of other blogs), Greyson Michael Chance has signed a record deal with Interscope Records— that's the same label that carries U2, Sheryl Crow, and oddly enough, Lady Gaga.

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

New York's State Education Department and teachers' unions have brokered a deal to revamp teacher evaluations by linking them to student test scores, according to the The New York Times. The agreement is expected to boost the state's chances of winning coveted federal Race to the Top money.

Under the agreement, teachers would be measured each year on a 100-point scale, 20 percent of which would be based on student improvement on state exams. Another 20 percentage points would be based local tests developed by individual school systems, while principal and peer observations make up other parts of the evaluation.

Teachers would be rated as highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective—in place of the current satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Those rated ineffective for two consecutive years would be subject to an expedited process for termination. The new evaluations would not have any immediate effect on teachers' pay.

Questions loom about how well received the plan will be among rank and file teachers. The Times story specifically—and interestingly—notes that, "The unions ... did not gain any clear benefit from the deal, other than shielding themselves from criticism that they were hurting the state's chances in Race to the Top."

That passage (among other things) sank blogger NYC Educator into a state of disbelief:

I had hoped [United Federation of Teachers President] Michael Mulgrew would bring something new to the UFT. Instead, he's brought us yet another idiotic deal in which we gain nothing, and provide givebacks. And this time he's managed to provide no raise, not even an illusory time-for-money swap. Despite this, he's unilaterally changed the contract with no input whatsoever from rank and file.

On the other hand, teacher Dan Brown—who actually works in D.C., not in N.Y.—argues the is a deal is ultimately a win for teachers, who, in his view, have been left with a choice between getting aboard the evalutions-tied-to-testing "train" or defending an indefensible system:

As trains go, you're either onboard, on the sidelines or getting run over.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

We can all agree that the "Behavior Developing Institute" is a terrible name for a district's program for troubled students. But isn't changing it to "The Oxford Center" maybe going a little too far?

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Guardian in Britain recently asked five teachers to try out some of the strategies outlined in the currently hot teaching book on this side of the Atlantic: Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on a Path to College. It's an interesting read: The teachers generally appreciate Lemov's tips, but also describe the overall instructional style he espouses as "autocratic," "teacher-centered," "aggressive," and "back-to-basics a little bit."

"After reading this book, my perception is that British teaching is ahead of the game," says one of the teachers.

"Kids don't want to be taught by monsters," adds another.

So are we turning in to monsters? Maybe we have to, to some extent?

(Hat Tip: Accomplished Teacher.)

Update 5/13: Cody adds his thoughts (pro and con) on the Teach Like a Champion phenomenon here at home.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Massachusetts Department of Education this week announced a program to recruit star teachers to work in underperforming schools, according to the Boston Globe. The campaign is believed to be the first-ever recruitment partnership between the department and local school districts.

The effort is targeting thirty-five schools in nine districts have been classified as underperforming. It's still unclear how many open positions will be available at the schools—but at least two of the districts are expected to use a federal turnaround strategy to replace half of the staff at some of their schools.

The state has launched a website, amazingteachers.org, where interested educators can learn about teaching opportunities. The site emphasizes that, in addition to benefiting from greater school resources and more time for professional development and collaboration, teachers in the program would be working alongside standout colleagues as part of a "historic transformation" of struggling schools.

According to The Globe, the school districts involved are creating financial incentives to attract teachers to the positions.

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

How is that a high school freshman who reads at the 5th grade level is picking Shakespeare more quickly than other students in his English class? His teacher, Epiphany in Baltimore, doesn't think it's a big mystery:

I told him this was because he knows what it means to work at reading while he's doing it and the other students don't. He is willing to sit and grapple with the language and the other kids who are not used to working hard are not willing to. Therefore, he's getting it quicker than the others.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Can this story be real? Apparently the teacher-job market in Ontario is so tough that some non-religious educators are taking up Catholicism in an attempt to get coveted positions in parochial schools, according the Canadian Press. "I don't particularly like going (to mass) every Sunday, but if this is what I have to do, then I'll do it," said a Toronto-area teaching-candidate.

According to data cited from the Ontario College of Teachers, some 12,200 new teachers are vying for about 5,000 open public school positions in the province. All employees of Toronto's Catholic schools, meanwhile, must be Catholic—and teaching candidates are expected to have a letter of recommendation from the pastor of their church.

Some of the newly religious teachers seem to be lapsed Catholics attempting to return to the faith. But others are outright novices (so to speak): "I haven't gone for my, um, what do you call it the bread thing yet...Communion. I'm nervous about it," said one teacher. Oh, boy. ...

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Four years ago, football captain Ben Hedblom—now a senior at Land O' Lakes high school in Florida—bet his Spanish teacher, Adrian Antonini, that he would wear the same pair of shoes from then until graduation day. The loser of the bet would have to shave his hair and eyebrows.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, Hedblom has kept up with his end of the bargain. (Granted, now that the soles of his shoes are falling off, Hedblom wraps his shoes in plastic bags for puddle protection when it rains.)

Besides basing his senior graduation project off the psychology behind his shoe choice, Hedblom learned a valuable lesson about self image.

"It made me think less of what other people think of me," he said. "And it made me approach them and talk to them. And they got to know me as a person. That goes way past the physical experience," he said. "I've learned a lot about self image. You are what you believe you are."

Antonini has since left the school—he's currently interviewing for a baseball coaching job in Texas—but he may end up shaving his head on a webcam, according to the Times.

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In an attempt to curb illegal immigrants, Arizona recently passed a controversial immigration bill that sparked a national uproar, according to the Huffington Post.

Last week, it was the students' turn to protest the new immigration bill, as many skipped class to march in their local streets, to City Hall, or even to the state Capitol, according to local news reports.

The students organized in a number of separate protests throughout the week. One such protest of 200 students took place on Monday, April 26, while 100 other students gathered peacefully on Friday, April 30 to protest the new immigration bill.

"I'm pretty sure half of the school is out here," one student said while walking towards the Capitol.

Social media sites and text messaging helped the students gather quickly and effectively.

"Its say's [sic] walk out, everybody walk out at eleven and meet by security," high school student Victor Ramos said, referring to a text message he received about the protest.

If this type of Facebook-generated student protest sounds familiar, that could be because New Jersey students protested school budget cuts in a similar fashion two weeks ago.

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Doug Johnson, a district technology director, posts the highly positive results of a survey of teachers in his district on their use of smartboards. While acknowledging recent criticism of the devices, he notes:

"When it comes to the classroom, I will listen to the teacher long before listening to the pundit."

Generally a good policy, but it's worth noting that (beyond Johnson's district) teachers' opinions on smartboards are nowhere near uniform. Which raises the question of how much teachers' experiences with them are determined by the strengh of the district's implementation.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Bellringers notes that, during testing week in her school, "teachers were allowed to wear blue jeans all week, and I even got to use my chicken to direct hallway traffic."

It's the little things ...

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Kind a downer of a Teacher Appreciation Week, huh?

According to a good overview story in the the Christian Science Monitor, teachers unions and lawmakers had to use the occasion to bring attention to looming mass education job cuts and, more hopefully, to newly proposed federal funding to avert layoffs. Not that everyone is necessarily of the opinion that more money is a good idea: "The likelihood that our kids are going to thank us for running up another $23 billion on their tab so that we can avoid making responsible decisions is unlikely," said the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess (who is now blogging on Education Week, by the way).

Meanwhile, in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Indiana is holding a statehouse ceremony tonight to recognize teachers who have shown extraordinary dedication. Too bad one of the teachers being so recognized just received a layoff notice from her district.

Teachers in New York City may not exactly be feeling the love, either.

Update, 5/7: Apparently not one but two of the teachers honored at the Indiana Statehouse ceremony had received layoff notices. The good news is that the irony of the situation got the attention of state Superintendent Tony Bennett, who, according to the Associated Press, pointed to a "need to reevaluate how schools deal with layoffs."

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Our recent interview with Richard Allington on response to intervention has generated a lot of interest, including a number comments from readers taking issue with his views. I just wanted to note that Professor Allington has posted a response to those comments. (You may need to scroll down to his post.) He's not exactly backing down.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The social networking service Ning—which hosts many thriving teacher groups—created a great deal of angst last month when it announced that is moving to a subscriptions-only model. The details on the pricing scheme are still being worked out, but the New York Times' Bits blog is now reporting that the company has worked out a deal to keep the service free for teachers.

They apparently realized it just wasn't worth asking schools for money. "For public educators, the process for buying anything tends to be so arduous, and we're going to make it easier to use Ning," Jason Rosenthal, Ning's C.E.O., is quoted as saying.

Well said.

Update: A colleague informs me that the new pricing scheme has been in fact been released. It sounds like only the "Ning Mini" version—limited to 150 members, no groups, no events—will be available for free to teachers.

"I've been pushing Ning so hard in my district and now I've got to tell people that it's basically useless regardless that it's free to teachers," says one teacher-commenter on the Ning blog. "We were thrown a bone."

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A 4th grade teacher from East Baton Rouge, La., is suing her principal, superintendent, and school board because she claims she was prohibited from assigning failing grades to students "under any circumstances," according to Courthouse News Service.

Sue Goudreau says that at a meeting of 4th grade teachers at Riveroaks Elementary School, Principal Sholanda Shamlin, "adamantly directed ... teachers to assign a D to students who were definitely not going to pass 4th grade and not to fail a student who has even the slightest chance of passing [the state test]." The district's policy had been to give a student an F if he or she earned fewer than 69 points.

Goudreau, a teacher of 20 years, went along with the directive even though she disagreed with it; however, she maintained a grade book where she posted students' actual grades, in spite of being told not to. Goudreau's anxiety was so great that she says suffered "constant fear of being written up for insubordination or other baseless reasons." She lost 30 pounds and, according to her cardiologist, developed a serious heart condition.

Goudreau accuses Shamlin of telling her "to shut up and not open her mouth again" during an open meeting of 4th grade teachers. She also accuses the principal of "charging" into her classroom and berating her in front of her students "for no rational reason." When Goudreau told Shamlin that she violated state law, Goudreau claims Shamlin retaliated by "harassing and threatening her."

Goudreau claims the superintendent and school board looked the other way in spite of knowing about Shamlin's illegal grading policy.

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Renee Moore thinks recent murmerings from teachers about blaming parents or holding them more accountable for students academic performance are ill-advised:

For one, how exactly do we expect the government to "force" people to raise their kids the way middle-class schoolteachers would like? ... The children who come to us come from every imaginable (and unimaginable) situation. We have to meet them where they are and teach from there; not from some well-intentioned, but fantasized grade-level curriculum or readiness guide.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last Wednesday, parents at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J., received an unexpected e-mail from their principal: A plea to keep their middle schoolers off Facebook.

"There is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!" Principal Anthony Orsini wrote in the e-mail. "They are simply not psychologically ready for the damage that one mean person online can cause, and I don't want any of our students to go through the unnecessary pain that too many of them have already experienced."

Orsini wrote the e-mail, according to the New Jersey Record, out of concerns that students are increasingly being subjected to bullying and inappropriate content on social network sites.

"Most parents are excellent about monitoring kids online," he said. "But once someone says something about a student's sexuality or body image or friends, you can't take it back. The damage is done. Those kids are totally distracted in school. It consumes their lives."

Parents and educators had mixed reactions to Orsini's request.

"We have to develop kids to make responsible choices," said Bergenfield, N.J., Schools Superintendent Michael Kuchar. "Just taking away something that is very popular isn't going to be the answer."

In his e-mail, Orsini also told parents that "90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer."

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's one from the (often problematic) crossroads of budget reductions, school-wide reform, and professional development time: Earlier this year, in a cost-cutting move, district officials in Des Moines, Iowa, decided to move a number of their schools to block scheduling (with 90-minute classes on alternating days) starting this fall. But, according to the Des Moines Register, questions loom as to whether teachers are being given enough time or systematic training to manage the switch—which is not always easily made. "While I think [block scheduling] provides for teachers to provide interactive and in-depth study, schools that are not adequately prepared would be better off remaining on the same schedule they have been using," commented one academic expert on the methodology.

A commenter on the Register story appears to disagree: "How about rewriting lesson plans for 90 minute classes instead of 50 minute ones? Let's not make a big deal about this." (Just a hunch, but I'd say this guy has never taught.)

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A humorous meme that is going around the teacher blogosphere: What if NCLB were applied to football?

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