Changes...

  These last 4 months have been crazy, and the last thing that I could think about was posting to my blog. This entire year has been a tough one. My wife and I welcomed our first child into the world this year, right as morale at our school hit an all time low. Education weathered the storm of a lower budget and more kids in our classrooms. In February, I reached a place where I needed to make a decision. I had been asked about a job in the private sector that paid a lot more. My discontent with some of the actions taken by the district and the tough schedule of being a teacher weighed heavy on me. This same problem is a plague on the education institution and claims a lot of teachers. I wrestled with the allure of more money, but also less time off. I finally came to the decision that I needed to change my outlook before I gave up on education. 

  I applied with a new idea in education, one that I wrote about last year, a concept called early college. The basic purpose is to take kids that have the potential to graduate college an avenue to achieve at least an associates degree. Students choose a degree plan and then follow that degree plan in college to get to their goal. They can then take the credits earned and apply them to a four year program, or finish out their associates. I found out after spring break that I had been offered the position and took it. This week will mark the end of my time at my current school. This school year has highlighted the problems with education and the system that we operate in. STAAR testing is now a hot button topic with administrators and teachers. State legislatures are missing the point completely. Not everyone is meant for college. The world needs pipe fitters, bakers, and plumbers. Each of those can earn a really good living without a college degree in hand. We have to prepare the kids for a future where they enter high school and choose a path that speaks to their talents and helps to develop their minds. Early college is one of the avenues that can do that, but their are programs in the high schools right now that could prepare kids for a career in something that they would like. 

  I have accepted my new position, and look forward to working with a new group of people. I encourage everyone that reads this to support your local district. Also, for those interested I have included a link to Save Texas Schools. This is a group that I am in full support of. I will be taking a hiatus until next school year. My plan moving forward is to try and blog this new experience as I move into uncharted waters.

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi

Respect Redux

In March of this last year, I wrote a post about respect. Teachers have to walk that fine line between an entertainer and a disciplinarian. We have to garner respect with our students and with their parents that send their kids to us. How do people react when you tell them what you do? I get an unusual reaction for a teacher. I get a response of surprise and some admiration for teaching a hard subject like Physics. There is some respect there, more for the material than the profession. Unfortunately, this respect for my subject does not really translate to my profession. I constantly have to deal with the fact that I could be making more money and work less hours in business. Since our society equates success with money, teachers are naturally at the low end of the respect spectrum.
   President Obama is looking to change that perception of teachers. His new program called Project RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching), looks to increase the respect that people have for the profession. The program is not a new concept. It seems that everyone has weighed in on how to increase respect for the profession. Salary is the first topic that comes up. I would love to make more money, and I do not think that you would find a teacher that would disagree with getting a raise. The problem with increasing the teacher salaries is that ALL teachers get more money. It is not merit based. I do not make more for teaching a subject that requires more time than a friend that teaches elementary education.
  Salary is not alone. The project looks to make teacher programs more selective,  thus reducing the number of people teaching because they do not have anything better to do. If you know anything about teaching, you know that the teacher that gets in it for the hours typically does not last very long. Other parts of this program have a lot of importance in furthering the profession. Tenure needs to be reevaluated. Higher salaries should mean that each year the teachers are reevaluated. If a teacher is weak than he or she should be removed.
  This program really stands out in that it calls for a career ladder. Currently, if I am a good or a great teacher at my subject, there is not really a higher level that I can go to. This means that if a teacher wants to make more money they have one option, administration. Good teachers are lost for higher paying positions. Teachers that move out of the classroom lose touch with the kids and loose that perspective. This disconnect alone accounts for the large divide between administrators and teachers.

  The program has a good heart. I agree with President Obama and Arne Duncan that something needs to be done. What we need however is not a vague outline of how to rehabilitate the image of the teacher. We need a clear plan. What law makers have to realize is that if we try and operate in a system that has some serious flaws we are limiting ourselves. I think we have to open up the discussion in the community and look for solutions that may not be the most comfortable for everyone involved.

Until next week,
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort.  The tough problem is not in identifying winners:  it is in making winners out of ordinary people.  ~K. Patricia Cross

Eye of the tiger

   It is interesting to sit in a teacher's lounge and listen to teachers talk at lunch. The other day, a government teacher that happens to be a coach, was speaking about a banquet that the sports program has every year. At this banquet, awards are given out for top performers. She informed us that every player gets a participation award. Sports to me symbolize the spirit of america. They are a competition that results in a winner and a loser. Participation awards seem to cheapen this competition. This shows that there are not really winners or losers, but everyone wins with a nice certificate after the season is over.
 In the district that I work in these participation awards are called out and and handed to each student as if they were getting an MVP. When I was a kid I did not play that many sports, but I was involved in Tee ball and then in little league. My team was horrible. Each time we lost it taught us about being a good sport and making sure that we were prepared for the wins and the loses in the future. This teaches us something. It is this compeditive spirit that we should embrace. Instead, we try to make everyone feel better. Our grandparents, or in some cases our parents, fought in a war to help keep us free. There was no consolation prize. No participation trophy for participating in the war. Only winners and losers.
  This spirit of competition echoes in the halls of some of the greatest schools in the country. Where would Harvard be without competition, or UT. In K-12 education, we often look to see what the charter and the magnate schools are doing. The root of this success is good teachers and competition. People have to apply to get in. The process of getting into the school means that you really have to want it. Having the winners and the losers out of that makes the kids feel better when they get in, but it also breeds investment. Children are invested and so are their parents. Their parents then look at it as an oppertunity and push their kids harder. This parental investment is part of the keys to success for a child in school.
  Not everyone can get into a charter school. This I believe is the future though. How much more investment would parents have if their kids had to apply to a high school? This is how europe does it, and combine it with a program that either prepares the child for a college level education, or prepares them for a vocational persuit. To solve the woes of the educational system, we have to play to our strengths, competition.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey



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Fired Up

   The differences between people in education and people in the corporate world are vast. I am often in awe of some of the things that I am told about or experience for myself in the world of education. One of the things that I cannot fathom is the fact that despite the problems, no one seems to want to stand up and make changes. It seems that the people that do want to make changes are thrown to the wolves by the very people that ask for it. In Washington DC, Michelle Rhee was steeped in controversy for her handling of DC schools. She took a down district and made some radical changes. She offered teachers a lot more money, but at the risk of dissolving unions. In Texas, unions do not hold as much power up north, but they have still shaped the fabric of the system that we live in.

  No matter where you work, firing someone is a process. There are certain instances where firing someone is pretty cut and dry. In teaching those thing wind up in the news. However, what happens when you have a teacher that is toxic, or one that is wanting to read the paper more than teach? To get rid of that teacher it actually is a lot harder than you might think. Administration places them on a growth plan. If for some reason administration does not follow through on the growth plan then the growth plan is invalidated and the procedure would have to start over again. Only when it can be shown that the growth plan has been failed by the teacher then they can start the proceedings to be fired. This long process has to be followed to the letter. The contracts that hold teachers to their jobs also protect the teachers from being fired needlessly.

   The system is broken. It is known that bad teachers are out there. They can hurt things more than anyone else. I know of them in my school. I also know that some of them are protected because they are involved in programs that are deemed important. They continue to teach, or not teach, and the product of that system results in students that are ill prepared for the world. I think that the districts loose sight of this. It does not matter if the teacher is there doing something else. Bad teachers do more harm than good. I look at it like this. If a child starts out with a bad teacher in their 9th grade year, they may only get 50 percent of what they were taught. Then move that in to 10th grade and they are 50 percent behind. The student still moves to the next grade because bad teachers do not fail that many kids. They have to deflect suspicion.  The student then gets in a teacher's class that is bad for the second straight year. They loose out on 50% more of the education they would get with a competent teacher. They are behind a whole year by the time they go into 11th grade. Districts have to look at the pros and the cons of keeping good teachers in the classrooms and bad teachers out of the classrooms.

  What I look at when I get together with teachers or hear from friends. I hear that the kind of teachers that are getting flack from administrators are teachers that have not been affiliated with special programs like athletics. In fact, some of the worse teachers that are with the athletic programs are protected. We have to prioritize the education of students first. I have a friend that is catching a lot of flack right now because she does not get a long with an administrator. She is a friend, and I cannot comment on her teaching ability, as I have never seen her teach. She is really intelligent and is a person that does not compromise her values. She has been put on a spit at the school she works at. A teacher she works with, I know only in passing, is a coach that has on several occasions made serious errors in his class. He however has not even been talked to by their administration. If we want to fix the system we have to trim the fat. It is the answer that is the best for kids. Districts have to do this. The kids demand it. As a teacher that considers themselves a decent one, I have seen what two years of a system that caters to keeping bad ones in their place.

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
John F. Kennedy

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Back in Black

It has been a while, in fact an entire semester of school has gone by, but I return to you ready to spin a few more stories about education. My absence has been a mix of being busy and probably some frustrations with the education system. See where I work the morale has gone right out of the window. A place which two years ago was a beacon of positivity has now become a place that is a shadow of its former self. Each day it seems there is another problem that is forcing us to reevaluate the way that we do things. Friends are contemplating leaving education. People at school that I talk with are thinking about leaving. The entire school seems to be angry. This dark shadow is not unique to my school. In fact it is happening all over. I spoke with several people that have talked about how hard this last semester was, how tired they are, and how they are having trouble getting up each morning. This comes on the heels of the massive layoffs in the state, and larger class sizes for everyone.

    Apathy of the kids and lessening parent involvement are just a few of the problems that have created a negative outlook by teachers today. The last part has to do with the people in charge of the system. This is where we make decisions to try and better our numbers that actually create more problems than they solve. In the corporate world management often makes problematic decisions. Often this results in dissension among the lower ranks, but if the policy does not increase revenue then the change is out. In education there is no real way to measure how the product is affected. The decisions that are made are often not evaluated months down the line to determine their effectiveness, and the decisions that are thrown out often show the easiest decision that impacts only staff and does not cause any waves in the community. Ask a teacher, any teacher, about how he or she feels about administration and decisions they have made recently, and I can bet you that they can give you a list of problems. Now I realize that not everyone is a teacher, so I will give you an example. The best example is to take our make-up test requirement. In theory this sounds like a great idea. You take a kid that failed a test and give him the option of making up a test to get a 70. It is hard to argue with that. Then you make it mandatory for all teachers because the grades and the retention rates in schools are getting higher than you would like to see. The result is lower retention rates, but the collateral damage is that a lot of these kids now rely on that safety net all the way through the year. They come to you with the knowledge that failure is not an option for you, not for them. It is this attitude that reminds me of the A and E show Hoarders. There are a lot of shows like it, but these people live in houses that are so piled with clutter that they are unable to get themselves out of it. The attitude that these administrators have is very similar to the Hoarders themselves. They know there is a problem, but ignore the larger issue. They keep on going until the entire house is rotting, and the city is condemning where they live and threatening to kick them out. We are in a similar situation. There is a problem, but the powers at be are ignoring it. They think that more stuff with solve the issue. Another policy will fix it. It does not. In fact it just keeps getting worse. The entire thing keeps getting worse. This creates a problem with the people in the system because they know that it is not fixing the issue. Inevitably, at some point the system starts to falter and another band-aid is needed. When will the cycle stop? If you want to fix the morale problem in education you start at the source. Stop making bad decisions.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain


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