Showing posts with label teacher pay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teacher pay. Show all posts

Friday, April 16, 2010

Florida Teachers Beware: 'Son of S.B. 6' Coming Soon

John Koenig, who holds out against the internet savages at FloridaThinks.com ("The forum for civil debate") is warning public school teachers that Charlie "Crist's Veto May Only Delay the Inevitable."
The advocates of Senate Bill 6 – the Legislature’s Republican leadership, former Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida’s major business organizations – are not going away. They will continue to fight for merit pay and an end to teacher tenure long after Crist is out of office.
That is no doubt true. As Koenig admits almost everyone on the planet is "advocating greater accountability from schools and teachers." Yesterday's veto, he says, "only buys teachers a bit of time to come up with their own accountability proposals."

Along the way, he shares an interesting anecdote:
[E]ven for the private sector, performance-incentive programs are tricky. Basing them on too few variables or the wrong variables can lead to counterproductive results.

Consider this story from Fast Company magazine. Ken O’Brien was an NFL quarterback in the 1980s and ‘90s who threw a lot of interceptions. In an attempt to improve his performance, the owners of the team on which he played put a clause into his contract docking his paycheck for each interception. The next year, O’Brien threw fewer inceptions. But that was because he threw the ball hardly at all. The net effect: The team did no better.

The article Koenig refers to has more "incentive pay" horror stories. As if we needed them after Wall Street's investment bank geniuses brought the world to the brink just so they could snag their multimillion dollar "performance bonuses."

For example, there's Ma Bell, who "tried to encourage productivity by paying programmers based on the number of lines of code they produced. The result: programs of Proustian length." There's Merrill Lynch (R.I.P.) whose pay program so deeply discouraged a young novice from getting sage advice from his seniors that he wound up writing a scorching best-selling expose whose title tells it all: "Riding the Bull: My Year in the Madness at Merrill Lynch."

All this talk about incentive pay for public school teachers draws on the supposed lessons of the private business sector. That misses a couple of very big points.

First, of course, is the fact that the tax payers and politicians, perversely, refuse to pay elementary and secondary school teachers -- who are the most important front in educating our children to read, calculate and think -- anywhere near what the private sector forks over to CEOs, corporate executives, fraud artists, scammers, cheats, quacks, stupid celebrities, and assorted mountebanks and desk-warmers whom they hire to turn a buck. As a society, if we really valued what teachers do we'd pay them accordingly. Instead, we pay Corporate America like royalty but expect teachers to work for love of the job.

Second, where do the parents fit into this picture? Sad to say, over the decades we've heaped more and more responsibilities onto the schools while parents -- many forced to become two-earner families because of the growing gap from top to bottom in private sector employment -- abandon their responsibilities to give vital educational support in the home.

All that said, the political reality is that Koenig is right. "Son of S.B. 6" is coming soon to a legislature near you. Florida teachers need to come up with their own detailed, rational answer to it. Call it a "pay-incentive" plan, if you have to, but make it as real as possible.

Then challenge the legislators to fund it.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

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Thursday, April 15, 2010

Governor Crist Does 'The Right Thing'

Today, Florida Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the miserable 'education reform bill' known as S.B. 6, or the 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill.'

Click here for the official veto letter.There, he says among other things:
Let me be clear; I veto S.B. 6 because the bill is contrary to my firmly held principle to act in the best interest of the people of Florida. * * * I know it is the right thing to do for the people.
Soon there will be a lot of speculation about the governor's supposed political motives. While we do not doubt politics entered into the calculus, the bill was so very terrible that his specific explanation of some of its more glaring insanities is entirely plausible.

S.B. 6 -- which was endorsed by every local state legislator in Northwest Florida -- almost surely would have caused a precipitous plunge in the quality of public education in the state. In reverse order, Crist singles out --
  • As the bill was being written, state legislators excluded from all "meaningful input" "teachers, parents, superintendents, and school boards." In other words, they didn't want to hear from anyone who knew what they were talking about.
  • The probability that the bill would place "in jeopardy of losing their jobs and teaching certificates" tens of thousands of elementary, middle school, and secondary school teachers "without a clear understanding of how gains will be measured." This bill would have washed a tsunami over the state's school system, leaving little but rubble in its place.
  • The certainty that the bill would have punished excellent teachers along with the inadequate ones for circumstances "beyond the control of the teachers." Good teachers and bad would have been treated alike.
  • The bill would have violated the state constitutional, statutory, and regulatory authority of local school boards with "overreaching...directives" and "requirements" and prohibitions against agreeing to teacher contracts of longer than a year. With its mandate that local boards develop as many as 125 new and different "assessment" tests, it also would have busted the budgets of every school district in the state.
  • The bill imposed "arbitrary percentages" for calculating a teacher's effectiveness" (without any cognizable legislative standards). Only state legislators get to keep their jobs without being scored for "effectiveness."
  • S.B. 6 failed to "appropriately accommodate" special education teachers "and their dedicated teachers."
Governor Crist has done the right thing. While Florida's public education system continues to suffer from the long-time, chronic neglect of the state legislature, at least he has saved it from becoming infinitely worse almost overnight, as was likely had S.B. 6 become law.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

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Friday, April 09, 2010

Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill

"Even hamburger flippers at McDonald's have better job security than this."

The Republican-dominated legislature in Tallahassee has just come up with a scheme to completely ruin public education for the state's children. Two bills passed yesterday. They are now on their way to the Governor for signature or veto. Both are classic examples of political hypocrisy mixed with rank stupidity.

Never mind how Horace Mann taught the world a hundred and fifty years ago that excellence in public education is essential to the health of a democratic republic. There is no better way than these two bills to drive away from Florida young working families with children and cutting-edge technology industries with high-paying jobs.

First, the legislature proposes to clear the way for increasing class size. Essentially, this bill would upend a voter-initiated constitutional amendment which passed over the objections of many Republican legislators just eight years ago.
The three-fifths vote by both chambers gets the measure on the ballot in November and reopens a passionate campaign that has long pitted public school teachers and parents against school administrators and Republican lawmakers who say current class-size limits are impossible to fund.
* * *
The constitution currently limits class sizes to 18 students in grades pre-kindergarten through third, 22 students in fourth through eighth and 25 students in high school. Superintendents have been allowed to meet those caps first by district and now by school averages, but the constitution requires a shift toward hard classroom counts starting in July.

The proposed amendment would forgo hard caps in favor of maintaining school averages and would increase the maximum class size limit by three students in pre-kindergarten through third, and by five in other grades.

As Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, says, "They just don't want to pay for schools."

Second, legislators passed S.B. 6, or the so-called 'pay-for-performance' bill. It should be called the "Disappear the Teachers" bill. The St. Petersburg Times has a useful summary.

Under this horror:
  • All public school teachers would serve a five year "probationary period." What this means is that even the very best of them would be assured of a job only on a day-to-day basis for five years. Any teachers could be laid off at any time for any reason or no reason at all, with no warning. Even hamburger flippers at McDonald's have better job security than this.
  • Teachers who survive those five years then can be offered only "single-year contracts." Good grief! We give legislators better deals than that, and most of them don't know algebra from Albania.
  • Regardless of a teacher's individual merit, half their pay would be linked to the results of student tests. Teachers assigned to chronically under-funded schools -- many of them in inner city neighborhoods or rural areas which have an abundance of families who devalue education or suffer economic hardship -- would suffer lower pay. Those with connections that get them into tonier schools -- where many students have sufficient intellectual support at home to teach themselves -- get the raises.
  • As for those "student tests," every school district would be required to "find or create" a standardized final test "for every subject in every grade." As the St. Pete Times points out, "Many districts would need hundreds of new tests. And they'd be high-stakes, with teacher salaries and future employment riding on the outcome, beginning in 2014-15."
  • One-time bonuses for those dedicated teachers who on their own study for and pass all requirements for National Board certification would be forbidden after 2013. How much sense does this make? A proven, nationwide teacher certification system often used for paying small one-time bonuses is thrown overboard for locally-developed tests, many of which don't even exist yet? This can only be understood as a mean-spirited poke-in-the-eye to public school teachers.
  • Districts that don't comply with all this insanity would be penalized by state funding cuts and "requirements to raise local taxes." The legal implications of this are breath-taking enough; almost certainly, it won't survive challenges under the federal and state constitutions. But the notion that public schools, which are in many cases under-funded to begin with, would be "punished" for poor test results by cutting their funding is completely daft.
  • Districts would be required to set aside "up to 5 percent of their budget" starting next year "for performance and differential pay increases." Or, for those districts headed by administrators just as pencil-headed as our legislature, they are authorized to use much of the money "to develop tests to determine student gains."
At best, what this bill does is load all of the incentives, parsimonious as they are, into the absolute worst kind of pedagogy: "teaching to the test." Tests which in most cases haven't even been developed yet! At worst, these two bills will drive all the good teachers and administrators away, leaving behind only those who are among the worst, the least imaginative, or completely unemployable.

Everyone knows that Florida's school system suffers from chronic sickness. It ranks very poorly in comparison with other states, especially those of comparable population. Past legislatures have a lot to do with that. They've starved the public schools of adequate funding for years while trying to lavish funds on mostly religious private schools.

Yes, the Florida school system is sick. But what this year's Florida legislature has just done is to fashion an "arsenic cure" that will kill it. As the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss puts it, Senate Bill 6 is a "disaster for teachers" and the damage done by both bills is "incalculable."

Both bills are a disgrace. Governor Crist must veto them. Then the voters should fire the legislators who flunked the test by voting for this abomination.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Like Mississippi, Unfortunately

McClatchey News Service reports today that a new study shows, "for the first time in more than 40 years, the majority of children in public schools in the South are poor... ."
Twenty years ago, Mississippi was the only state in the country with such a high percentage of poor public school students. However, as textile mills shut down in the Carolinas, Appalachian coal mines cut workers and a recession swept the nation, families in the South were especially hard hit, the Southern Education Foundation report found.
* * *
Now, a majority of public school students are considered low income in a total of 13 states, including 11 in the South.
* * *
According to 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores, lower-income fourth and eighth graders lagged 20 to 30 points behind their peers on math and reading tests. Poor, Southern students who make up the majority of their states' student populations also have lower college attendance rates than their peers, the Southern Education Foundation report found.
Florida, with 62% of all public school students below the poverty line, comes in third from the bottom, besting only Mississippi and Louisiana.

What's the explanation? As always, there is a multitude. But one key reason singled out by McClatchey is "the fact that, as a region, the South spends less per pupil on education than do other parts of the country." Florida, for example, in the latest available survey from the National Education Association ranks 4th in total student enrollment but a dismal 41st out of the 50 states in per pupil expenditures.

As the St. Petersburg Times headlined the news more than two years ago, overall Florida "schools still rank near the bottom." As the Florida Forum for Progressive Policy concluded after reviewing the latest available comparative data on specific student skills and performance, "Florida ranks in the lower half of the comparable states in 12 of the 16 benchmarks--hardly an indication of “high quality.”

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the amount of money we commit to public education bears a very close relationship to the quality of education we receive. After all, money is the valuation medium in nearly every other sphere of human activity, from the things we buy to the pay we lavish on corporate CEOs.

Another reason for the collective failure of Southern schools is the heavy burden of regressive politics:
"The South historically was just a poorer part of the country and didn't have the focus on education that other parts of the country had," said Jeff Kuhner, a spokesman for the Fordham Foundation, an education think tank in Washington. "Part of its strategy for the past 25 to 30 years has been cheap, undereducated labor, they don't have labor unions.
Even Communist China has come to recognize that good, free public education is the only effective way to narrow the worrisome gap between rich and poor, as we had the opportunity to personally observe a while ago. More recently, the P.R.C. leadership reaffirmed its commitment to "the important goal of putting education first, and building a strong nation with a rich pool of human resources."

Strange to say, maybe Florida needs to be less like Mississippi and more like Communist China.
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