Evaluating and Devaluating Flint Area Teachers

Chicago Teachers are fighting harder for changes in how they are being evaluated than they are for a nominal pay raise. In a nutshell; the contracts, benefits and income of a teacher is now being based on an evaluation of their talents. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT!

Think about it as if you were a professional baseball coach or manager and you and all the coaches in the league were given a mandate that each of the players on your team, must hit .300, must hit 22 home runs, and must steal at least 22 bases! WOW! What a team you would have! But does it and can it happen? NO! Not in your wildest dreams. WHY? Because each of your players have different talents, both physically and mentally, each have different abilities and strengths, some are great infielders, some good hitter with the speed to steal a base, others hit massive home runs.

Now think about a classroom. The teacher is given a large group of children, each having different backgrounds. Some of the children come from homes were their parents’ actively prepare and help their children for school. Other parents have so many problems of their own, like putting food on the table, struggling with drug additions, and living in the perpetual circle of generational poverty or generational violence that preparing their child for school, let along giving them proper nurturing, is far from being one of their priorities!

Ladies and gentlemen, put yourself into a teachers’ position. Understand that all our schools and classrooms are different from another, yet even now, the influx of children of poverty, children with limited parental attention, is increasing within all our school systems! Teachers in Grand Blanc over the recent years are seeing more and more troubled children as their students. Even charter schools who for a time were secretly selective of the students they allowed in, have now, due to there need to increase their student population, thereby, increasing their profits, have to deal with this problem just like Public Schools have. They’re all seeing what the inner city schools deal with on a massive base every-single-day. LANSING, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!

What has the government done to correct this? They’ve connected their funding to evaluations of schools and school teachers based on every child having the potential of hitting .300, 22 home runs, and stealing at least 22 bases! WHAT!

Okay, I am not saying teachers and schools should not be evaluated and given goals to achieve within grade levels and overall testing scores. It’s how it’s being use to evaluate the teachers that is unfair.

I will suggest here as I have suggested before, that evaluation of teachers should not be done on student test scores, but be done by their peers and administrators. Those are the people at ground zero that can evaluate a teacher. Yes, for a time those administrators had their hands tied by the unions and others to actively remove poor performing teachers. That is not the case anymore.

The evaluation system being put in place is very, very bias. It’s base on good students, ready to learn, sitting within the classroom. That is not the reality of it!

Simply stated, the government looked at this situation and took the most simplest and simplistic route in dealing with it.  Connecting a teacher’s performance on an unrealistic, pie in the sky premise; that all children have the potential of hitting a home run! Sorry people, its time to see the truth, the awful truth, that some children do not have the potential of hitting a home run. Heirisy, you say! “Don’t we all have the potential to become President of the United States, or a chance to be an astronaut?!” We all do have a chance, but it gets slimmer and slimmer as poor parenting skills dominate a child’s life.

Don’t judge a teacher on what the world has done to a child, judge a teacher on their work in overcoming it!

Trouble, right here in (Flint) River City!

After sitting, listening and questioning many of our Flint area schoolteachers, I have come to this conclusion. Teachers want to go back to the old days where they did what they were “created” to do: TEACH!

Problems of the near past: School Administrators, Principles, and “Specialty” teachers have been, for the most part (Not all!) made-up of persons that are poor teachers! These folks, in the old days, once within the school system, were moved into these positions due to their inept, classroom-teaching abilities. Shocking! Not at all, once you take into consideration a Union that protects Teacher’s employment rights to the point of inhibiting good administrators’ ability to remove talentless teachers. (Unions are meant to help the people AND the SYSTEM they represent!)

Today:

Inept administrators insolate their inability to make correct management decisions by surrounding themselves (Nepotism) with personal allies that cover their butts and confuse the line of blame for poor decision-making. Many of those folks have secured outrageously high pay-packages. (See Flint area school superintendent Linda Thompson and her addition of twenty-some underlings.)

Principles: (again, not all!) Find themselves worn out, burned out and just willing to let the needed, tough decision on discipline of students, of teachers, and yes, even parents to go unaddressed by just placating everyone. Due in no small part to their being placed, in a position that needs more talent and skills than even a classroom teacher has!

“Specialty” Teachers: (again, not all!) as our school system takes in more and more “Troubled” students (More on this later) teachers are leaning more and more on those “Specialty” teachers. These “Troubled” students need special one on one (or small group) attention. These students are so far behind the others in the classroom that their lower skill level detracts from the education of others. Consequently, they’re sent off to “Specialty” teachers. Here’s the report on many of those “Specialty” teachers. For so long “Poor” teachers have infiltrated, “Specialty” teachers, that now classroom teachers are screaming that some of these (federally funded) crappy “Specialty” teachers are not doing their job! Surprise!

Want to hear the inside scoop? Not only are those crummy “Specialty” teachers holding their jobs because of the Unions, but also because they’ve become the allies of the School’s Principle. That’s right! Did you know that most schools in Flint, no longer have Vice-Principles? (yet, the schools’ superintendant has added jobs to her administration!) Who does the Vice-Principles day to day job? The “Specialty” teachers! So now, you have inept, protected, one-time classroom teachers, that are even more inept as “Specialty” teachers, helping an inept school Principle and not doing their designated job! Happy days! And you wondered what’s wrong with our schools.

Troubled Students: Today’s teachers long for the old days when a “Troubled” student meant a kid that was a bit rebellious, maybe even bored in the classroom due to their higher abilities or creative method of thinking. Calling a kid “Troubled” in our schools today is like calling Kadhafi a “Troubled” Dictator!

Today’s “Troubled” students are children living through the most awful environment of both nurture and nature! Let me just list a few of the problems these “Troubled” students live with: poverty, sexual abuse, drug addicted parents, mentally ill parents that should be on drugs, neighborhood gun battles, dead bodies found on their street, homelessness, murdered relatives, gang involvement, hiding in the bathtub as shots are fired into their homes, and the constant moving from one school district to another. I can’t go on, no wonder they’re “Troubled”, it breaks my heart to list just a few of these reasons, but every teacher in our city schools’ hear and live with these heart-wrenching stories, EVERYDAY!

Should I end this with some positive notes? I can. There are, for the most part, good and caring School Administrators, Principles and Specialty Teachers in our City, but they’re feeling overwhelmed. How would you feel if you had to work in this kind of environment that just a few “Troubled” people have created? Wouldn’t you quit?

I use to laugh at Mrs. Clinton’s idea that “It takes a Village.” Not anymore. We each have to get personally involved and fix things, it's not just about your own children, it’s about all our children. Let’s help our “True” teachers do what they were “created” to do. TEACH!

Stop by and read next week’s Blog/article, where I lay out the solutions to all of Flint’s problems in a column entitled “SuperFlintEnomics”

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Teachers teach because they're teachers......

Teachers, facing low salaries, opt to moonlight

Nov. 11, 2011, 11:47 a.m. EST

AP

MIAMI (AP) — By day, Wade Brosz teaches American history at an A-rated Florida middle school. By night, he is a personal trainer at 24 Hour Fitness.

Brosz took the three-night a week job at the gym after his teaching salary was frozen, summer school was reduced drastically, and the state bonus for board certified teachers was cut. He figures that he and his wife, also a teacher, are making about $20,000 less teaching than expected to, combined.

"The second job was to get back what was lost through cuts," said Brosz, a nationally board certified teacher. "It was tougher and tougher to make ends meet. I started personal training because it's flexible hours."

Second jobs are not a new phenomenon for teachers, who have historically been paid less than other professionals. In 1981, about 11 percent of teachers were moonlighting; the number has risen to about one in five today. They are bartenders, waitresses, tutors, school bus drivers and even lawnmowers.

Now, with the severe cuts many school districts have made, teachers like Brosz, who hadn't considered juggling a second job before, are searching the want ads. The number of public school teachers who reported holding a second job outside school increased slightly from 2003-04 to 2007-08. While there is no national data for more recent years, reports from individual states and districts indicate the number may have climbed further since the start of the recession.

In Texas, for example, the percentage of teachers who moonlight has increased from 22 percent in 1980 to 41 percent in 2010.

"It's the economy, primarily," said Sam Sullivan, a professor at Sam Houston State University, which conducts the survey.

Rita Haecker, president of the Texas State Teachers Association, said cuts in education have forced many teachers to take furlough days. It's an extra strain because, unlike in the past, many teachers are now the primary breadwinner, either because they are a single parent or their spouse is unemployed, Haecker said.

"It affects their morale in the classroom," she said. "The last thing we want is our teachers worried about how they are going to pay their bills."

The average salary for a public school teacher nationwide in the 2009-10 school year was $55,350, a figure that has remained relatively flat, after being adjusted for inflation, over the last two decades. Starting teacher salaries can be significantly lower; compared to college graduates in other professions, they earn more than $10,000 less when beginning their careers.

"I think people have felt the need to supplement their teaching salaries in order to have a middle class lifestyle," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, which published a study this year concluding the average weekly pay of teachers in 2010 was about 12 percent below that of workers with similar education and experience.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which collects data on student performance across the globe, advised the United States earlier this year to work at elevating the teaching profession in order to improve student performance. The recommendations included measures like raising the bar for who is selected to become a teacher, providing better training and better pay. In many nations where students outperform the U.S. in reading, math and science, including Japan and South Korea, teachers earn more than they do in the United States.

"International comparisons show that in the countries with the highest performance, teachers are typically paid better relative to others, education credentials are valued more, and a higher share of educational spending is devoted to instructional services than is the case in the United States," the OECD report concluded.

While moonlighting isn't unique to teachers, they do tend to have second or third jobs at a higher rate than other professionals. One researcher estimates their moonlighting rates may be four times higher than those of other full-time, college educated salaried workers.

Eleanor Blair Hilty, an education professor at Western Carolina University, said most teachers make around $5,000 through outside work. Yet when asked if they would quit if given a raise in the equivalent amount, most said no. Her conclusion: teachers are getting something more from their second job other than an extra paycheck.

"A lot of it has to do with what I think is wrong with the teaching profession," Hilty said, noting that teachers have little autonomy and control over what and how they teach. "They found their moonlighting jobs to be satisfying."

Policies on moonlighting vary by district; some have no written guidelines, while others merely advise teachers to ensure any outside work doesn't interfere with their duties at school.

In North Carolina, a survey conducted in 2007 found 72 percent of teachers moonlight, whether it's an after-school job or summer employment.

"There's a culture of silence," Hilty said. "Everybody knows that moonlighting goes on and they know it's part of what teachers do but nobody likes to talk about it very much."

Michelle Hartman, a language arts and science teacher at a Plantation, Fla., elementary school, is balancing two other jobs, one as an organist with the local Presbyterian church, playing at church services, weddings and funerals, and another doing janitorial work twice a week at her father's accounting firm.

The single mother has a master's degree in educational leadership and has been a teacher 15 years. But she says she cannot afford to leave any of her extra jobs, which she said brings in about $6,000 year, in addition to her $46,000 teaching salary.

"I'm tired some days," Hartman said. "But no matter what, it doesn't matter because I know I need to be there for the students."

Yet working an extra job inevitably does take a toll. On top of their work in the classroom, teachers have to grade papers and plan lessons — work they often do at home. One study on teachers who moonlight in Texas cited the case of a teacher who ended up grading papers at the restaurant where she worked. The same study found that all the teachers interviewed reported that moonlighting had a negative effect on their health. In the Texas survey, a majority said moonlighting was detrimental to their work in the classroom.

"Yes, they go 100 percent, but they're still tired," said Dave Henderson, a retired professor who worked on the study for many years.

Albert Ochoa, a middle school art and publications teacher in Austin, Texas, works at least five hours a night at UPS as a shipper, a job he's had since graduating from college in 1977. Even though he is now toward the higher end of the teacher salary schedule, he said he cannot afford to quit either job.

He said he'd have to earn another $2,000 a month in order to support his wife, who is on medical disability, and son, and not work a second job. "I've had opportunities to go work full time at UPS and do other things," Ochoa said. "But I enjoy what I do. I like teaching."

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