Posted on 10/21/2011 10:24:53 PM PDT by Watchdog85
Education reformer Michelle Rhee speaks out against the bi-partisan effort to appease teacher unions.
The Unions win again.
The unaccountable society. We are heading towards a place where no one is accountable for anything. It’s dark there.
I wonder what it is about being evaluated that causes union types to panic. LOL! It doesn’t seem to bother non-union types.
Half of our kids are failing, yet 99% of our teachers are doing a wonderful job...
anything wrong with that picture?
Yeah, we don’t need teachers to be properly evaluated. /sarcasm
:-p~~~
Well, why not be an uncontrolled criminal, if nobody is interested is stopping you from doing anything you want?
Amazing isn’t it? If only someone were capable of doing the math there. Although I’m sure they have all of their raises and bennies accounted for down to the penny.
Where are all of the conservative politicians, when dealing with all of the ongoing problems related to U.S. education?
I guess we should just get it over with and all quit our jobs and become “teachers”. They are the new protected class.
Manufacturing has been thoroughly gutted and healthcare is in the process of being destroyed. All that will be left for people who want a good salary will be to join a teacher’s union, become a jack booted thug, or unionized firefighter....
Sad isn’t it. We’re putting our grandkids into debt up to their eyeballs so the “teachers and first responders” will have more money to give to the unions. I don’t get it. This isn’t the America I once knew.
It says “Congress Removes Teacher Evaluations From Education Bill”. Just how did they do this and which individuals are accountable?
On Monday, Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, and Sen. Mike Enzi, a Republican from Wyoming, introduced a sweeping, 860-page replacement bill that Duncan and other top ranking politicians say is a good start, but will require some work. The biggest change is the removal of “adequate yearly progress” benchmarks—targets that the Department of Education estimates 80 percent of schools will miss by 2014.
Harkin said in a statement that the bill represents “an important step forward for our children, our schools, and our nation,” and that “it will support teaching and learning rather than labeling and sanctioning.”
[Learn more about science and math initiatives in the new No Child Left Behind bill.]
The new, bipartisan bill still faces an uphill battle toward passage, Enzi acknowledged in a statement. “This is not a perfect bill, nor does it solve every education issue. But it will make a huge, positive difference to our nation’s young people,” he said.
The Harkin-Enzi bill removes a provision in Harkin’s original draft that would require states and local school boards to devise teacher evaluation systems, with student performance being one of the key factors. Duncan said in a statement that the administration believes that provision needs to return.
“A comprehensive evaluation system based on multiple measures, including student achievement, is essential for education reform to move forward,” Duncan said. “We cannot retreat from reform.”
[Learn how school boards can develop effective teacher evaluation systems.]
Meanwhile, Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), says that the bill is a good start, but that he would offer amendments that put more control in the hands of state and local school boards.
Alexander says he will vote to move the bill out of the HELP committee and onto the Senate floor, but that the bill is “not ready yet to send to the president.”
Alexander is concerned about three federal mandates that he says help create a “national school board,” with Arne Duncan as the board’s “czar”: the teacher evaluation requirement; a requirement that states identify their lowest-performing schools; and a requirement that all schools show “continuous improvement.”
“I don’t think we need either a czar of education who grants waivers to 15,000 school districts, or a chairman of a national school board,” Alexander says. “I think if we were going to have such a czar or chairman that Arne Duncan would be a good one … but I’m going to do my best to avoid both options and get a common sense bill passed.”
Alexander says he’s optimistic that Congress will have a revised bill “on the president’s desk by Christmas,” adding, “I think Congress has no good excuse for not fixing No Child Left Behind ... I think we ought to get started.”
It’s only a quarter the length of the Health Care bill? Maybe they can actually read this one...
Public unions must die. If I want a non union made car I have a choice. But I am forced to pay for union thug schools or loose my home.
Now you know we do not really have a two party system. There silence on this issue tells you everything you need to know.
“Well, why not be an uncontrolled criminal, if nobody is interested is stopping you from doing anything you want?”
Because I am a conservative, white male in the middle class. I get a traffic ticket I go to jail for 20 years.
Have any run for office to make a change? Have any of them worked in the education system, at any level?
Do any of them contact local officials, from the school board, the state education office, their congressmen and senators, or do they just wait for others?
People complain about the education system, but never set foot in a school. People complain about teachers, but have no idea what a teacher endures during the day. I am a teacher in one county, and on the school board in another county in which I live. I seem to eat, breathe, and sleep education these days. There are some horrible teachers out there. There are horrible doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, bakers, etc..... Every profession has a few faulty members. As a whole, the teaching profession is full of dedicated, caring, experienced, and productive teachers. They are being tied down with all of the restrictions placed upon them daily. NCLB has destroyed education. Everyone will not go to college. No matter how hard we try, the bell curve will still exist. Now before even getting rid of one faulty system, we are implementing the second faulty system called Race To The Top. This is placing more misery on top of misery.
Until someone has the guts to say “Our families have fallen apart”, we will not have a good education system. We teach hard every single day. We get kids coming into school who can’t even talk in sentences. They can’t even identify simple things we see everyday. This is a crisis. The nanny state in this country has created a generation of kids who are not capable of taking care of their own children. They rely solely on the government and the school system. It is hard to have students on grade level when they come into the system on a toddlers level. I am not exaggerating. So until people spend a little time in a school in a high poverty area, they might not want to throw too many stones at teachers.
Great post. I agree, mostly.
One thing that bothered me about the movie, Waiting for Superman, which I thought was great, is that it just presented the parents who cared about their children getting a good education...which broke your heart. You didn’t see the crappy “don’t care” parents.
I left my school system this past year because I didn’t want to be part of the direction it was going—more cookie cutter bureaucracy, less relational, more inane, time wasting paperwork...you get the picture. You can’t fix broken kids and families this way. I know other educators felt likewise and are looking to get out.
I live in Washington, D.C., which has one of the most expensive yet worst performing public school systems in the country. The schools have two challenges: to remediate large numbers of kids from disastrous family backgrounds; and at the same time, to create centers of excellence that give middle class and high achieving students a reasonable home in the system. Over the years, DC public schools have failed both tests.
The schools were making modest progress under the Adrian Fenty/Michele Rhee regime, but the unions rose in revolt and elected a union tool mayor who is clearly not willing to battle the bosses. That is a recipe for backsliding. The next couple of years will be crucial. Citywide, there are a handful of DC public schools -- mostly reflecting neighborhood demographics -- that are pretty good. But they are not nearly enough. The system as a whole remains a disaster, and the good schools are always one bad administrative decision away from being destroyed.
One of the key, and unavoidable, issues is that the schools must be willing to insist on academic rigor, and that requires ability grouping. In a system that has long since lost most middle class students -- they are mostly in the suburbs or private and parochial schools -- there is no broad middle to which to teach, with remediation on the one side and accelerated courses on the other to handle the tails of the bell curve. The typical DC school is all remediation, and not very good at that. The middle class kid who ends up by accident in one of these custodial centers is likely to be one of the two or three kids in the classroom with two parents at home; one of the two or three who actually does her homework; one of the few who keep regular hours at home and show up in the morning having had breakfast; etc. And that kid is probably gone the next year, the parents having learned a lesson.
Here and there, gentrification has produced neighborhood demographics that create a workable middle class critical mass in a local school. This immmediately becomes known, and first the middle class parents in surrounding neighborhoods (who have a rising young'un and are weighing private school tuition vs. moving) and then everyone else starts hammering at the doors to get in. And of course, race gets involved; these neighborhood magnets tend to arise in areas that are becoming majority wh .... oops, almost drifted across a taboo boundary. So the central schools adminstration takes a look and decides to share the wealth; the boundaries get redrawn; suddenly there's a citywide lottery for admission; the school gets swamped with kids who drag it back to the DC mean; and the curriculum gets adjusted downward to accommodate the new arrivals. Becoming a recognized public magnet school in DC is like taking one of the lifeboats back among the survivors immediately after the Titanic sank; the odds are against staying afloat very long.
Clearly there is enormous demand from parents in all SES groups for better schools. Just as clearly, the existing system is unwilling to do the things necessary, beginning with sustained ability grouping and a commitment to academic excellence for those students able to benefit from it. The blob won't do it.
I continue to believe that the core problem is accountability, and the best way to solve the accountability issue is to voucher the system. DC is spending enough to give every parent a voucher check at least double and in many cases four times the tuition at the nearest parochial school. Heck, a full-rate DC voucher would be nearly Sidwell Friends tuition. For this, the public system runs a featherbedded jobs program for adults and a massive campaign machine for the democrat party, with the education of children well down on the priority list. Voucher it. Both the city and the schools would be transformed within ten years -- which of course is why the dems and the union bosses fear parental choice above all else.
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