I’ve been critical of Gregoire for various things. And Lee has bee a lot more critical than me especially after the misguided veto of the medical marijuana bill. But unlike Lee, I’d have no problem voting for her again (although I hope she doesn’t run, and if she does, I’ll gladly support someone else in a primary). There are real and important ways that she’s better than Rossi would have been. For one thing, she doesn’t seem to hate teachers like The Seattle Times’ Ed Board.
They spend a whole lot of time not engaging with Gregoire’s stated reasons for opposing the measure (in short, we’re in the middle of revising the way we evaluate teachers because how we currently evaluate them doesn’t work). There’s a little dancing around that, but even then it’s pretty minimal.
It would be great to have the 82,000-strong union on the right side but not at a cost that would be borne by students betting their educational futures on the success of reforms. Requiring districts to take performance into account during layoffs represents a significant game changer. Layoffs are disruptive; robbing classrooms of good teachers is even more harmful.
Lynne (or whoever, but it’s Lynne Varner), just because you saw Waiting For Superman doesn’t mean that teachers are wrong. They’re the ones pushing for smaller class sizes and better teacher pay while your ed board keeps demanding tax cut after tax cut that has the effect of larger class sizes and worse pay. Teachers and their unions are the ones pushing for higher quality K-12 education in Washington.
I’d bet if you wanted, it wouldn’t be too tough to get the teachers on board with these sorts of reforms as part of a grand bargain: If you pushed for 25 student maximum classes and teacher pay in the six figures (for example) along with smarter evaluations of this kind, I bet you could get the teachers unions to support it. Instead you insist on something less meaningful (and quite possibly arbitrary). And your ed board insists on the things that have made gutting education inevitable.
Most teachers are good instructional leaders not threatened by accountability. Uncertainty about the shift is outweighed by the fairness and legitimacy promised from new teacher evaluations coming down the legislative pike. Some districts, including Seattle Public Schools, have adopted better evaluations.
The newer evaluations are still untested and in most cases not even through the legislature yet. Let’s impose them!
The only employees left to fear performance-based layoffs are those who aren’t performing. That’s not who the governor should be protecting.
Or teachers who think perhaps the system won’t work as advertised. Maybe, just maybe, teachers think that the same legislature that’s been slashing education budgets doesn’t have the best interests of children we’re trying to educate at heart.
I know mortgage brokers (tell me how they really make our country a better place to live) who made $500,000 a year in the boom years when real estate was going up. Yet, teachers, who most surely add value to society rather than just scraping profit off turning paperwork, never approach 6 figures. I don’t get it, wingnuts. Perhaps, you have insight I don’t have.
Misguided veto? It was a cold political calculation…you’ll no doubt see her in the Obama Administration, if he wins a second term. Perhaps even giving him advice on how to best continue raiding the dispensaries.
They’re both hypocrites, they’re both liars..and personally, I’m tired of discarding my principles and voting for the lesser of two evils..
“I know mortgage brokers (tell me how they really make our country a better place to live) who made $500,000 a year in the boom years…”
Which is a good reason to have let them all fail back in 2008. Screw this “too big to fail” shit!
As any educator can tell you, one of the worst syndromes plaguing public schools (beyond severe chronic underfunding, that is) is edu-fads that sweep through administration, regular as clockwork, that promise to improve outcomes without spending any more money (except, of course, on the consultants pushing this claptrap).
The only thing that I can think of that’s worse is fads being pushed by legislators, or editorial boards, that don’t know a damn thing about education and what does and doesn’t work.
As any educator can tell you, one of the worst syndromes plaguing public schools (beyond severe chronic underfunding, that is) is edu-fads that sweep through administration, regular as clockwork, that promise to improve outcomes without spending any more money (except, of course, on the consultants pushing this claptrap).
The only thing that I can think of that’s worse is fads being pushed by legislators, or editorial boards, that don’t know a damn thing about education and what does and doesn’t work.
I’ve mentioned before, my mother was a teacher, and a pretty good one, if I say so myself . I have some evidence to back this up – she became department head, other teachers in the school respected her, and quite a few former students have told me so over the years, with a number of them attending her funeral.
But she was very concerned about “performance-based evaluations”. The problem was (and still is), there is no way to objectively measure teacher performance. Sure, in the words of one Supreme Court justice referring to pornography, “I know it when I see it”. But that’s about as objective as it gets.
Most teacher evaluations consist of the principle, or some other evaluator, sitting in the back of the class for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple of hours, taking notes, and then making a subjective judgement. Would you like your entire career to hing on such an evaluation? What if that happens to be an “off-day” for your students, for any particular reason. Or what if your principle has somebody else in mind for your position – a friend, relative, niece of a lodge buddy, whatever. What if your principle has biases which affect his/her judgement – age, race, nationality, etc.?
So if subjective evaluations don’t work, how about objective standards, like measuring the improvement in student grades, or standardized testing? The problem with grade measurement is it’s pretty much entirely within the control of the teacher. As for standardized testing, it can penalize those who work with the most “at risk” students – a task requiring some of the very best teaching skills.
As a parent myself, I’ve seen my children have some very good teachers and one very bad one. But this really isn’t the easy solution the Times pretends it to be.
And note that the Times is going along with the conservative “B Plan” – if they can’t do away with unions entirely (at least right now), then they will attack their underpinnings, by making employment subject to the rather arbitrary will of the employer. After a few years, all the teachers who are strong union supporters will be weeded out, under one excuse or another, and the rest will realize that the union offers them no protection, so why are they still paying dues? Union de-certification votes will then follow. They will start with the public employee unions, because they are most vulnerable to attacks disguised as cost-cutting, but attacks on private-employer unions will follow thereafter.
“And your ed board insists on the things that have made gutting education inevitable”
You are a liar. It’s only public education we intend to gut. Private schools like the religious whack-job school I went to will do quite nicely. The non-producers will be weeded out at an earlier age this way with no more of my money being wasted on them. Those little losers can just wander the streets with their school vouchers in hand, begging for an education.
Teachers would have more credibility if they didn’t manipulate their death-grip on parents to line their own pockets at the expense of other public employees.
The standard drill is to go on strike a few days before school starts in fall to force school boards to give them money the school districts don’t have. These strikes usually are settled quickly because schools function as daycare centers and when the kids can’t go to school their parents can’t go to their jobs. That causes parents to put irresistable pressure on school boards to settle teacher strikes at any cost.
And who pays for it? Taxpayers do, of course, but the real answer is much more corrosive than that. In our state, schools are funded at the state level, and teachers’ demands ultimately have to be satisfied from the state budget. Historically, for several decades now, legislators have rewarded teachers for striking and punished state employees for not striking by taking money away from state employees and using it to buy peace with the teachers.
That sends absolutely the wrong message to both teachers and public employees. The message to state workers is they have to strike — even illegally, if they’re denied the right to strike legally — to get treated fairly; and if they don’t the money for their COLAs will again be taken away from them and given to teachers as a reward for shutting down schools.
And it’s not like the money went to the most deserving teachers. Invariably, it went to the most senior and highly paid teachers. Beginning teachers, whose salaries have always been, and still are, abysmal received only token benefit from this game of robbing Peter to line the pockets of people who were already well-paid.
As a career state employee, over a period of many years this repetitive cycle turned my attitude toward teachers into one of disrespect and contempt for teachers, because I felt they had disrespect and contempt for the parents they were holding hostage and the state employees whose paychecks were being robbed to pay off striking teachers. I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Scott Walker or Dino Rossi supporter, I’m not for disbanding or breaking the teachers’ unions. In fact, I reserve the bulk of my disrespect and contempt for the legislators who all too willingly played this game with them and us.
We live in a world of finite resources, and here in Washington with its severely dysfunctional tax system, public resources are in high demand and on a steadily shrinking track (as Goldy has explained many times). In such an environment the selfish greed of too many of our teachers not only is unconscionable, it’s intolerable.
Our teachers are just about the only good thing about public education.
In any list of “What’s wrong with public education?”, teachers
aren’t even in the top 5.
In other words, I’m just so sick of the trogs ranking on our teachers.
rhp @ 6
Great post.
I’m keen to learn more about measuring student achievement. Not standardized testing, because as all QA pros know: You cannot test your way to quality. And maybe not even standardized grading. I envision something like becoming an Eagle Scout: accumulate a set number and variety of achievement badges to demonstrate the student can progress to the next step (e.g. voc tech, college, work force).
In turn, if there’s a way to measure how teachers influence student achievement, as a secondary effect, I’d be totally game. Not as a punitive measure. But as a way to identify teachers and techniques to emulate.
That said, we currently do not have the methods and measurements to do the above constructively.
Jason # 10: I agree that we don’t have the right method – yet. But I do think we should & could use standardized testing to measure where resources need to be directed, whether that be specific schools, subjects, etc. The SAT is a poor substitute.
The nations of the far east (Japan, Korea, Tiawan, etc.) figured this out, and are using education to leap-frog past their traditional problems of land or raw material shortages, population density, climate, culture, etc. They don’t seem to have any problem with using standardized testing and requiring students to pass a final exam each year which is fairly rigorous.
Of course, part of the problem is a cultural bias. These asian students rank very high in subjects requiring memorization of lots of data/vocabulary – math, science, engineering, foreign languages, etc. They don’t do so well in independent thinking, creativity, self-confidence, etc.
Our students rank very high in independent thinking, creativity, and confidence, but poorly in math, sciences, and foreign languages. It’s almost like having a good computer, but no data to input – when they do get data, they don’t have enough other data to properly evaluate it.
I’m sure there’s got to be a way we can accomplish both. As for me, I was always very bored in school, I’m sure we could find more efficient ways to transfer knowledge than we previously use.
why is there an over-abundance of school administrators making well into 6 figures?
Its not the teachers that are overpaid, its the goons running the show and making idiotic policies that are making too much money.