Public Education Matters
2.27.10
Merit Pay and Seniority for Teachers – a Rant of my Own
In the news of late is the story of the Rhode Island town who up and fired all of it’s teachers for refusing to capitulate to extra hours and responsibilities at the same rate of pay. And of course the press is presenting the whole thing in terms of what lazy, ungrateful, spoiled, pampered wretches that teachers are and how the teachers union is an organization of devil worshipers, and pitting them against the very poor downtrodden residents of an economically depressed town and the rest of the nation.
Another day, same story. What’s new? We certainly can’t expect anyone in the media or in politics or in business to actually think this through, can we? Of course not. All we can really expect is for them to perpetuate stereotypes, and echo and amplify the pre-conceived notions of the politically powerful.
And well what can I do about it? Pretty much nothing. I can write in this blog. I can re-tweet and facebook alternative thoughts out into the world wide web in hopes that the public will see them and actually listen beyond the surface that the media is painting. I can pay my union dues and hope that they’ll provide defense against attacks and lies and faulty research. I can write my senators and representatives until I’m blue in the face. But it doesn’t seem to do any good at all. I feel like Don Quixote really- tilting away at big powerful windmills.
But Don Quixote I am really, so here goes- a little dialog with the people of the Rhode Island town and the world. First thing I’d like to ask them and any people thinking about the Rhode Island situation is “Who exactly put your town’s economy in the dire shape it’s in, in the first place?” Wouldn’t it have been a combination of your government (state, local, and federal) and your businessmen? And if so, then why exactly is it that you are turning to these people for the answers to issues in your schools? Haven’t these people steered you in the wrong direction enough for one lifetime?
Ok, next. There was much made about how much your teachers currently make. They said the average salary was $70k. Now first, let me just say “Wow, because no teacher around here in my state makes that much even at the end of their career! ” And then let me say “I really resent the media touting this as the norm and as heinous and greedy around and about town and the nation.” And also let me say “Wow, that does seem like a great contrast beside the 22K or so that the media reported the average townfolk makes.” But let me ask you this- “Do you understand that in order to get certified, qualified, trained teachers that you have to pay competitive salaries compared to the rest of the state and nation?” Because if you don’t? Who exactly are you able to hire? Something less than the crème, seems certain to me. But even so, why exactly do you think that teachers pay their money to be in unions? Isn’t it to protect themselves from the whims of management and to assure that their rights are protected? Do you really begrudge them that? Seriously, do you?
But ok, even if you do, and you are sitting there saying to yourself “Well but what the school board/town was asking of them was so very minor and small, that they should have just done it?” – let me ask you this- “If your boss came to you and said “Ok, I want you to show up for work on Saturday and Sunday but I’m not going to pay you for those days, what would you say?” You’d have the option of saying “heck no” and risk losing your job altogether or you’d have the option of saying “Ok, fine, I’ll be there.” But if you choose the second option, what are you choosing really? You are choosing to give them that inch that will later allow them to take that mile. That’s what you’re doing. So yes, maybe to you the hyperbole of two whole days next to the few extra hours seems great, but can you try to understand that it IS a matter of inches and miles here? And if one group of teachers allows it to happen to them, then it’s going to be like dominoes for the rest of the teachers? I can only say that these people were not just standing up for themselves, they were standing up for their colleagues everywhere. I don’t find that selfish at all. I don’t find the teachers union who encourages such unity as in league with the devil.
Now let’s slightly veer off the path here and discuss seniority and merit pay. Because these are two big pressing, looming issues to politicians and the nation’s educational leaders. And they apply to the Rhode Island situation.
I watched a report on TV last night about how seniority is preventing new, great, and wonderful teachers from having jobs. It was touching. They showed fabulous and wonderful teachers engaging the students. The inevitable contrast point was made. “SEE, public, SEE, who you’re keeping out of the schools when you continue to allow seniority and keep in the deadbeats?” And to that report I want to cry “FOUL” because as I watched those shining example teachers, I was sitting there saying to myself, “Wow, that’s what my friend/colleague of 30 plus years, Rick’s classroom looks!” And I’m saying “Hey, my friend/colleague of 10 years, Joanie uses that exact same technique!” So I’m a little miffed with the TV medium right now for perpetuating the generalization that old teachers are bad and new teachers are good. I really am. As I said “I cry “FOUL!”
So let me ask you this about these shining young examples “we” want in every classroom, do you want a system that tosses them out after 5 or so years because you can get newer cheaper people? Really? Ok, fine, but tell me how it is exactly after a while you’re going to get anyone to pay for 4 to 5 years of college to go into a field where you can only work 5 or so years. I’d predict that pretty soon, the really bright ones are going to catch on- that “this is NOT a field I can afford to work in, I’ll go be/do something else.” Those shining examples are going to go shine in other fields, where they can afford to feed/clothe/and house themselves and their families. And pretty soon, who do you have to “man” your classrooms?
So maybe you’ll answer “Well, hey, that can be addressed with merit pay. We will pay extra money to keep the good teachers and we’ll save money by tossing out the deadbeats, so therefore the costs will be covered and people will be motivated to go into and stay in the field.” Really? Ok, let’s break that argument down a bit, for the sake of argument. First, let’s agree that the amount of revenue for a school is finite. You only have so much money that can go for teacher salaries in any given year. We’ll call that x. So set up an equation here. X = teacher A pay, teacher B pay, teacher c pay…….. all the way to teacher Z pay. Now please try to figure out a fair way to provide incentives for people of quality to enter the biz and stay in the biz. Go ahead, do it, because if you do, you’ll win a Nobel prize in economics, I’m fairly certain. It seems to me that whatever solution to the equation you arrive at you’re going to have to deal with the variable of “what is the base pay?” And if you can’t offer a base pay that is decent in the first place, you cannot expect to attract anyone of quality to the teaching field and expect them to stay with it in the hopes that they’ll win a bigger award some day, not if the base pay isn’t attractive enough.
Also, here is another scenario that plays out in my head sometimes. Let’s say we go to a merit pay system. And “Fabulous Fifth Grade Teacher” one day wins himself some merit pay from his catchy achievement gaining award winning teaching program. Then let’s say the next year, on his way to school he gets run over by a school bus and while he recovers and comes back to work and is still a very decent teacher and able to raise test scores, do you take his level of pay away because he’s no longer has the stamina able to present the award winning program?
I wonder this because in an example using my own two children; they both had a woman for their second grade teacher that I still to this day think was possibly the finest teacher that either of them had all the way through college even. But here’s the thing, she wasn’t flashy, she was quiet. She wasn’t energetic exactly, she was steady. She wasn’t the type to attract anyone’s attention really because the things she did were really subtle. She probably would not have been on her administration’s list for “outstanding” and worthy of extra recognition. She would have been one of these people who would only have ever made the base pay and she would have been fine with that. She really wasn’t ambitious in any sense of the job climbing way. She just wanted to do and did her job without fanfare. Do you not think she deserved a base pay that could support her? Was she not worth keeping? In my eyes, she was until the day she retired. But I truly think that if she couldn’t have supported herself, she’d have moved on and done a reliable, steady job elsewhere and it would have been a loss for my own children and for many others.
The problem is that there just is no real fair way of making merit pay judgments and I’m afraid we’d lose some of the very best in our field this way. My children’s second grade teacher would have probably paled in the eyes of administrators next to a younger, less expensive, perky “save the world” “teach with your hair on fire” type of teacher and she’d have been out the revolving door without the doorstop of seniority.
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned on this blog that I work for a Special Education Cooperative who provides special services to 6 area school systems. When we sat down to bargain this year with our director and with the Superintendent of one of the six school systems we were offered a cut in salary- A significant cut in salary and benefits. They bemoaned that times were tight economically and that if we did not accept this cut, then WE would be responsible for the cutting of teachers and programs for children.
To which I would answer “No, I will not take responsibility for this. I hand the responsibility back to you and back to our state and back to the federal government for not providing stable ways to fund the schools. I will not take the blame for this and I will not take the responsibility for this. I go out there every day and do the job you pay me to do and then some. I’ve done that for 30 plus years, never wavering in my responsibility of doing that job. It is not my job to provide the revenue for my salary and the salaries of my peers. That is your job to manage things well so that I’m paid enough to be able to support myself. It is the state and federal government’s responsibility to provide the structure and resources to allow for management of programs. It is the taxpayers’ responsibility to pay their taxes and vote wisely. You may not come back on me and my union that is protecting my rights and tell me that I am responsible for any of this.”
“Furthermore, I will not cheapen the quality and integrity of my field by making it possible for you to allow wages to dip below middle class average and into poverty levels. That will not happen until I see every last one of YOU (administrators, business people, legislators) take the same vow of poverty and give up your free healthcare and your bonuses and your own salaries and the ability to feed your families.”
The insinuation at my bargaining session was that “With all your union rules and your seniority and all your clamoring that you and your colleagues deserve a living wage, you are responsible for bad teachers and also for what’s about to happen.” Again, I reject that because there is nothing in my teacher contract or any other that prevents them from dismissing “bad” teachers. All they have to do is follow the rules of due process. I reject the insinuation that I’m responsible for what’s about to happen because I was not cause any of the school funding and economy issues. I also did not cause you to make management decisions that wasted resources in the past few years when you knew that hard financial times were coming. So all due respect, I am not the problem and I will not be your scapegoat and/or your short term solution. All I’m going to do is continue standing up for myself and my colleagues and do my job UNTIL I can’t afford to do it anymore, even though that may be very soon. Then when I can’t, I won’t be blaming myself. My gaze will be in an entirely different and outward direction.”
“And you can consider my “retirement” and the breaking of the teachers unions a win for yourself and a win for the community and a win for the taxpayers and even a win for children if you’d like, but I’ve got maybe a stack of a hundred or so letters and thank you notes from parents and former students that would beg to differ.”
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Competition vs. Collaboration
Public Education Matters
2.23.02
Competition vs Collaboration in Education.
This afternoon I re-tweeted a link to an article “Competition Can’t Beat Collaboration” http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/02/competition_cant_beat_collabor.html I hope you’ll click on the link and read it for yourself, but if you don’t, I am going to share part of it with you below.
I believe this is an important topic right now as our educational “leaders” are pinning so much of their reform hopes on the motivation of competition. We have Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” and we have various people touting the merits of merit pay, vouchers, and charter schools, among other things. We have public denouncements of tenure for teachers and teachers’ unions who are blamed for much including the keeping of “deadbeats” or “laggard instructors” as someone who re-tweeted my earlier tweet commented.
And to all these people- I want to say “STOP!” “Please stop and think this through before you start jumping on bandwagons and picking up torches!” I want to tell them “All that glitters is NOT gold.”
So today, I’ll begin by I want telling you an amusing little story about being a parent. Perhaps every parent in our country has “suffered” through “the Science Fair project.” So have I. One year my son was at a loss for an idea for a project, but he was very interested in sports. It was the height of the Michael Jordan era and “we” were all about “being the best” and winning. Me, personally, I am all about the study of people or psychology, so I combined those interests and asked my son if he’d like to do an experiment on the effects of competition. The question being “Does the striving to be better than you were before, or better than others, and the best you can be actually cause you to be better?” And we set up a little experiment to find out.
Now I will admit that I am no scientist. But I do understand the principle of trying to control variables so as not to cast doubt on your results and we did the best we could to make the experiment as “pure” as possible to test our hypothesis. Our hypothesis was “Competition will make you perform better.”
And well, when things were all said and done and the data was examined and charted and tabled on the old poster board, my son was quite a disappointed little scientist. In fact he thought he was a failure as a scientist because our hypothesis wasn’t proven. It was discounted by our data. Our subjects did not get better in the competitive trials, they got WORSE. All of our subjects got worse. Our hypothesis seemed to be 100% wrong.
And I can’t really say that if the little homespun experiment were repeated that the results would be the same. We never followed up. We just took our project to the Fair (where we didn’t win) and then forgot about it. I hope that someone out there has or is or will pick up this research. However, even IF our results prove to be a fluke and IF it is actually true that competition begets improvement (which I truly doubt) there is another aspect to competition, as it would apply to education, that bothers me. It’s that in any competition- there are winners and there are losers. And in education, I’m afraid that actually planning for some children to be losers is just unacceptable to me. And I think it should be unacceptable to everyone, including politicians and legislators and our president and our education secretary and the business people who seem to be driving this competitive movement.
I think all children should be able to win “gold medals” when it comes to education. To me that’s what public education should be about. ALL CHILDREN WINNING.
So let’s talk about vouchers and charter schools. Seriously, do the math, there aren’t enough charter schools or vouchers for every child, so what becomes of the children left behind, the losers? Even if the theory that competition will drive improvement in the public schools, or if it were actually true that charter schools or voucher placements were better; (and I dare you to actually find unbiased research that proves this true over time when achievement is compared fairly) to wait for the public schools with “diminished” dollars to get up to speed would “lose” at least a generation of children. This is not acceptable to me and I believe there is a better way that we could put into effect right now if we weren’t all too busy trying to jump through hoops and race each other for educational dollars. A few blogs back, I cited an article “Scholars Identify 5 Keys to Urban Success” regarding what things have been proven to affect achievement for students. (I hope you’ll go back and read it. http://publiceducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/01/studying-school-improvement.html)
Competition for pay or for resources was not at all involved. Collaboration and cooperation was.
Now I’d like to touch on the issues of merit pay and competition between educators more directly. Here is where I’m going to paste from the article in the link that is at the beginning of this post, because while I was trying to put together my thoughts on this, I happened to read the article cited above. And while I am maybe not as charitable in my thoughts towards business leaders, I do believe the author Anthony Cody says it all much better than I could. The central metaphor he is speaking about is the nation’s current attempt at educational reform, “Race to the Top.”
“So why is it that the central metaphor for education reform has become a competitive race?
Race to the Top has been defined as a competition - starting with its name, and in the means by which states "win" the rivalry for the best and most innovative grant proposals.
The most trendy innovations focus on strategies that reward individual teachers for their performance - or punish them for their students' low scores. Once again, competition is supposed to drive reform.
Charter schools, which offer educators a worthwhile opportunity to innovate, have been touted as forcing public schools to compete for students and tax dollars. Unfortunately, although some are outstanding, they have not yielded the results that were predicted, and recent reports indicate there are huge obstacles that are likely to prevent them from scaling up to meet the promises that are being made for them.
The central innovation of which the Duncan administration is most proud is that it has replaced the clumsy stick wielded by the Bush administration with the clever carrot of one-time funding.
Teachers may be disinclined to compete with one another, but leaders at the state departments of education have had no qualms about doing whatever it takes to please the master dangling the carrot.
It is probably not a coincidence that this overwhelming drive to compete comes at a time when corporations have assumed a huge influence over education policy. This influence comes in three forms. First of all, corporations control large parts of the public discourse through ownership and editorial control of the media. This could be seen rather clumsily last week when Dean Millot was censored for raising questions about the integrity of the Race to the Top process. It is also seen in the general slant of most coverage of education issues, which widely embraces the condemnation of public schools as abject failures. Secondly, corporations have greatly disproportionate influence over our elected officials, through the legalized bribery system of campaign donations. This has been expanded recently by the Supreme Court decision rendering free speech rights to corporations. Lastly, corporate philanthropists such as Bill Gates have figured out that strategic investments of millions of dollars can powerfully swing public policies, redirecting billions of public dollars in the desired direction.
I am not one who believes this is all about corporations trying to make money off the public schools. I think Bill Gates and many of the others supporting these efforts genuinely believe their outlook will result in better outcomes for students. Most of these guys have tons of money and they do not need to make a buck this way.
But that doesn't mean their perspective is going to work in our schools.
Corporations are driven by the need to compete for profit. Success is achieved when we outsmart our rivals in the marketplace, when we work harder, innovate, and compete to win. It is not surprising that when people successful in this field turn their minds over to the task of improving schools, they apply the lessons they have learned in their work.
They accuse teachers of resisting their solutions because we are selfish and lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The solutions we seek are not selfish, but are based in our ethics of cooperation and mutual benefit. We want to expand learning for all of our students, by working to support one another through collaboration, not competition. We are not seeking to prove that we are better than our rival teachers, to eke out an extra thousand dollar bonus for better test scores. We do not want to set up selective schools that take the academic cream off the top of the public schools. We are choosing to work in these public schools not because it is an easy road. Anyone who walks in a teacher's shoes will know this profession is not for slackers.
Rather than fighting against this deep-seated ethical grain, education reformers must learn to work with it. We need reforms that expand the time teachers have to collaborate, to compare student work, to share lessons and reflect on how well they worked. Our schools are often compared unfavorably to those in Finland and elsewhere. But those schools do not rely on merit pay to motivate teacher performance. They DO give teachers significantly more time to collaborate and learn together.
The spirit of innovation and creativity inspired by the desire to compete and excel is a productive part of our culture. Good teachers tap into these impulses to build motivation among their students. There should be ways that great teachers are recognized and rewarded - this mustn't be an all or nothing battle. But we need a greater balance in the direction we pursue, and the desire among teachers to learn together should be recognized as the powerful force for improvement that it is. “
I hope that this excerpt provides you with some food for thought. I sure would hope that Bill Gates, and Arne Duncan, and my state’s school superintendent, Tony Bennett would race to read it and then stop and give it all some thought as well.
2.23.02
Competition vs Collaboration in Education.
This afternoon I re-tweeted a link to an article “Competition Can’t Beat Collaboration” http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/02/competition_cant_beat_collabor.html I hope you’ll click on the link and read it for yourself, but if you don’t, I am going to share part of it with you below.
I believe this is an important topic right now as our educational “leaders” are pinning so much of their reform hopes on the motivation of competition. We have Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” and we have various people touting the merits of merit pay, vouchers, and charter schools, among other things. We have public denouncements of tenure for teachers and teachers’ unions who are blamed for much including the keeping of “deadbeats” or “laggard instructors” as someone who re-tweeted my earlier tweet commented.
And to all these people- I want to say “STOP!” “Please stop and think this through before you start jumping on bandwagons and picking up torches!” I want to tell them “All that glitters is NOT gold.”
So today, I’ll begin by I want telling you an amusing little story about being a parent. Perhaps every parent in our country has “suffered” through “the Science Fair project.” So have I. One year my son was at a loss for an idea for a project, but he was very interested in sports. It was the height of the Michael Jordan era and “we” were all about “being the best” and winning. Me, personally, I am all about the study of people or psychology, so I combined those interests and asked my son if he’d like to do an experiment on the effects of competition. The question being “Does the striving to be better than you were before, or better than others, and the best you can be actually cause you to be better?” And we set up a little experiment to find out.
Now I will admit that I am no scientist. But I do understand the principle of trying to control variables so as not to cast doubt on your results and we did the best we could to make the experiment as “pure” as possible to test our hypothesis. Our hypothesis was “Competition will make you perform better.”
And well, when things were all said and done and the data was examined and charted and tabled on the old poster board, my son was quite a disappointed little scientist. In fact he thought he was a failure as a scientist because our hypothesis wasn’t proven. It was discounted by our data. Our subjects did not get better in the competitive trials, they got WORSE. All of our subjects got worse. Our hypothesis seemed to be 100% wrong.
And I can’t really say that if the little homespun experiment were repeated that the results would be the same. We never followed up. We just took our project to the Fair (where we didn’t win) and then forgot about it. I hope that someone out there has or is or will pick up this research. However, even IF our results prove to be a fluke and IF it is actually true that competition begets improvement (which I truly doubt) there is another aspect to competition, as it would apply to education, that bothers me. It’s that in any competition- there are winners and there are losers. And in education, I’m afraid that actually planning for some children to be losers is just unacceptable to me. And I think it should be unacceptable to everyone, including politicians and legislators and our president and our education secretary and the business people who seem to be driving this competitive movement.
I think all children should be able to win “gold medals” when it comes to education. To me that’s what public education should be about. ALL CHILDREN WINNING.
So let’s talk about vouchers and charter schools. Seriously, do the math, there aren’t enough charter schools or vouchers for every child, so what becomes of the children left behind, the losers? Even if the theory that competition will drive improvement in the public schools, or if it were actually true that charter schools or voucher placements were better; (and I dare you to actually find unbiased research that proves this true over time when achievement is compared fairly) to wait for the public schools with “diminished” dollars to get up to speed would “lose” at least a generation of children. This is not acceptable to me and I believe there is a better way that we could put into effect right now if we weren’t all too busy trying to jump through hoops and race each other for educational dollars. A few blogs back, I cited an article “Scholars Identify 5 Keys to Urban Success” regarding what things have been proven to affect achievement for students. (I hope you’ll go back and read it. http://publiceducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/01/studying-school-improvement.html)
Competition for pay or for resources was not at all involved. Collaboration and cooperation was.
Now I’d like to touch on the issues of merit pay and competition between educators more directly. Here is where I’m going to paste from the article in the link that is at the beginning of this post, because while I was trying to put together my thoughts on this, I happened to read the article cited above. And while I am maybe not as charitable in my thoughts towards business leaders, I do believe the author Anthony Cody says it all much better than I could. The central metaphor he is speaking about is the nation’s current attempt at educational reform, “Race to the Top.”
“So why is it that the central metaphor for education reform has become a competitive race?
Race to the Top has been defined as a competition - starting with its name, and in the means by which states "win" the rivalry for the best and most innovative grant proposals.
The most trendy innovations focus on strategies that reward individual teachers for their performance - or punish them for their students' low scores. Once again, competition is supposed to drive reform.
Charter schools, which offer educators a worthwhile opportunity to innovate, have been touted as forcing public schools to compete for students and tax dollars. Unfortunately, although some are outstanding, they have not yielded the results that were predicted, and recent reports indicate there are huge obstacles that are likely to prevent them from scaling up to meet the promises that are being made for them.
The central innovation of which the Duncan administration is most proud is that it has replaced the clumsy stick wielded by the Bush administration with the clever carrot of one-time funding.
Teachers may be disinclined to compete with one another, but leaders at the state departments of education have had no qualms about doing whatever it takes to please the master dangling the carrot.
It is probably not a coincidence that this overwhelming drive to compete comes at a time when corporations have assumed a huge influence over education policy. This influence comes in three forms. First of all, corporations control large parts of the public discourse through ownership and editorial control of the media. This could be seen rather clumsily last week when Dean Millot was censored for raising questions about the integrity of the Race to the Top process. It is also seen in the general slant of most coverage of education issues, which widely embraces the condemnation of public schools as abject failures. Secondly, corporations have greatly disproportionate influence over our elected officials, through the legalized bribery system of campaign donations. This has been expanded recently by the Supreme Court decision rendering free speech rights to corporations. Lastly, corporate philanthropists such as Bill Gates have figured out that strategic investments of millions of dollars can powerfully swing public policies, redirecting billions of public dollars in the desired direction.
I am not one who believes this is all about corporations trying to make money off the public schools. I think Bill Gates and many of the others supporting these efforts genuinely believe their outlook will result in better outcomes for students. Most of these guys have tons of money and they do not need to make a buck this way.
But that doesn't mean their perspective is going to work in our schools.
Corporations are driven by the need to compete for profit. Success is achieved when we outsmart our rivals in the marketplace, when we work harder, innovate, and compete to win. It is not surprising that when people successful in this field turn their minds over to the task of improving schools, they apply the lessons they have learned in their work.
They accuse teachers of resisting their solutions because we are selfish and lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The solutions we seek are not selfish, but are based in our ethics of cooperation and mutual benefit. We want to expand learning for all of our students, by working to support one another through collaboration, not competition. We are not seeking to prove that we are better than our rival teachers, to eke out an extra thousand dollar bonus for better test scores. We do not want to set up selective schools that take the academic cream off the top of the public schools. We are choosing to work in these public schools not because it is an easy road. Anyone who walks in a teacher's shoes will know this profession is not for slackers.
Rather than fighting against this deep-seated ethical grain, education reformers must learn to work with it. We need reforms that expand the time teachers have to collaborate, to compare student work, to share lessons and reflect on how well they worked. Our schools are often compared unfavorably to those in Finland and elsewhere. But those schools do not rely on merit pay to motivate teacher performance. They DO give teachers significantly more time to collaborate and learn together.
The spirit of innovation and creativity inspired by the desire to compete and excel is a productive part of our culture. Good teachers tap into these impulses to build motivation among their students. There should be ways that great teachers are recognized and rewarded - this mustn't be an all or nothing battle. But we need a greater balance in the direction we pursue, and the desire among teachers to learn together should be recognized as the powerful force for improvement that it is. “
I hope that this excerpt provides you with some food for thought. I sure would hope that Bill Gates, and Arne Duncan, and my state’s school superintendent, Tony Bennett would race to read it and then stop and give it all some thought as well.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Are You Smarter than a Future Rocket Scientist? (Another Response to Senator Holdman)
Public Education Matters
2.10.10
Are You Smarter than a Future Rocket Scientist? (Another response to Senator Holdman)
Are you smarter than a 10 year old?
Printed below is the text of a letter written by the son of my colleague, Tori. Hayden Emrah is 10 years old and will soon be starring as Albert Einstein in a public school program. I asked Hayden (aka Albert) to write down the thoughts that he expressed to his mother after he overheard us discussing the comments made by our State Senator Travis Holdman (regarding teachers) and how we would respond in a letter to the editor of our local paper. To read the letter to the editor that resulted from our discussions- http://publiceducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/02/letter-to-my-state-senator-travis.html
Anyway, Hayden, it seems, was quite incredulous that anyone would criticize teachers or suggest that they get raises “just for breathing.”
And with much the same kind of sadness felt when having to inform Hayden’s younger sister Sophie that Santa Claus wasn’t real after she overheard the terrible “rumors” regarding jolly man’s existence- we had to inform Hayden that teachers (as well as the teaching profession) were not really very respected by many people, including a great many people in leadership and public servant positions. We had to tell the truth.
The worst thing about it was that while Santa is not really real, the disregard for teachers in our society is very palpably real and it’s starting to have an effect. I offer this excerpt from an article by John Norton in Teacher Magazine (2.10.11) as evidence. “I’ve been working with teachers as a journalist, writer, and online community moderator for more than 25 years. And I can’t remember a time when so many outstanding teachers were so discouraged about the conditions under which they’re working and the daily criticism they’re hearing from political leaders, school reform groups, and media pundits who’ve identified teachers as the chief cause of public education’s problems.”
Following Hayden’s letter is a subsequent letter to the editor that I wrote following an editorial that expressed the opinion that we teachers were being over-sensitive to Senator Holdman’s comments and that we were missing his real message. I felt compelled to answer that editorial. Why? Because unfortunately the disrespect for teachers is pervasive and it’s fueled by things like Senator Holdman’s public comments. So I just think that those of us who are articulate enough to do so, need to start standing up for ourselves.
Without further ado- Hayden’s letter (unedited)
************
I think that teachers are important because if they were gone no one would have an education to qualify for jobs. If that happened, it will be less safety in our neighborhoods and more crime in our country. People need educated by teachers to make good choices.
People need educated by teachers in order to get jobs. If no one had a job, they would not have any money to get groceries, cars, houses, and pay taxes. This would hurt everyone in our country. More people would need government help which would bankrupt our nation.
Actually, I think that teachers are at the same spot as firefighters, police, and doctors. If there were no teachers, who would teach the firefighters, doctors, and police. If no teachers, fires would be every where and people would be sick like crazy, but no one would be able to steal anything because there would be nothing to steal! People need to understand we need teachers.
So that’s why I think teachers should be paid what they are worth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. I am 10 and I get it.
**************
And with a little further ado- is my letter. I just feel that “teacher bashing” whether it’s done through outrageous comments by legislators or by citizens blaming teachers unions for lousy teachers or poor student achievement, or by parents who don’t want to believe that their little precious baby could actually deserve a C rather than an A, or by any other means, needs to stop. And I think the only way it ever will is if we teachers stand up to the bullies. I feel we need to stand up in two ways. One is by being the best that we can be and the other is by speaking up.
****************************
Concerning the editorial in the Feb. 6 News Banner, I want to say that I see the point that teachers (and everyone) should look beyond Senator Holdman’s words to the basic message that we all need to find ways that we might cut expenses in this economy. That point, contrary to your insinuation, was never lost on Mrs. Emrah and I.
Trust me, economic realities slap teachers in the face every day. Many of our students carry them right in the door.
Our letter tried to point out that we have ALREADY given. We are sorry that we didn’t spell out more clearly that we (teachers in Adams and Wells counties) have ALREADY either accepted or have been offered (some of us haven’t settled yet) either no increment raises, or ridiculously small increments. Also, some of our districts have already suggested that we take cuts from what we have already bargained for or agreed upon in the past.
What I’m trying to say is that Mr. Holdman was beating an already dead horse.
One has to wonder why? To what end?
Should his remark be excused because he’s new to politics? Could you possibly be suggesting that Mr. Holdman went to that meeting unprepared for his audience?
When Dave Shultz looked around the room, do you think he saw ANY teachers there? Of course not. WE were all busy at work, teaching.
Instead of talking to his audience about what they might do, Senator Holdman chose to give them a message about what another group of people should do. He chose to hold teachers up as examples of people who had not given yet at all.
I also reject that this came about because Senator Holdman has a candid leadership style. I wonder, when did candid start being synonymous with rude and uninformed?
But let’s go back to what you say Senator Holdman’s true message is, that the economy is in dire shape and we don’t have enough revenue to support our schools or support teacher salaries among other things; and that something needs to be done. Tell me then, why Senator Holdman is still encouraging (per his email newsletter, that I get regularly) that we should vote for property tax caps? Despite his saying that it’s looking like the trend is going to be that people are going to vote it down, in his newsletter he’s still urging support for it.
I think a real apology would involve him saying that he was wrong to make the remarks to that particular audience that did not include us and that next time if he has something he’d like to say to us, he will speak with us directly and not try to pit the public against us.
I think that a real apology would involve him discovering, acknowledging, and thanking us for what we have already given and asking our opinions on how we might work together and not against each other.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond,
Cindi Pastore
2.10.10
Are You Smarter than a Future Rocket Scientist? (Another response to Senator Holdman)
Are you smarter than a 10 year old?
Printed below is the text of a letter written by the son of my colleague, Tori. Hayden Emrah is 10 years old and will soon be starring as Albert Einstein in a public school program. I asked Hayden (aka Albert) to write down the thoughts that he expressed to his mother after he overheard us discussing the comments made by our State Senator Travis Holdman (regarding teachers) and how we would respond in a letter to the editor of our local paper. To read the letter to the editor that resulted from our discussions- http://publiceducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/02/letter-to-my-state-senator-travis.html
Anyway, Hayden, it seems, was quite incredulous that anyone would criticize teachers or suggest that they get raises “just for breathing.”
And with much the same kind of sadness felt when having to inform Hayden’s younger sister Sophie that Santa Claus wasn’t real after she overheard the terrible “rumors” regarding jolly man’s existence- we had to inform Hayden that teachers (as well as the teaching profession) were not really very respected by many people, including a great many people in leadership and public servant positions. We had to tell the truth.
The worst thing about it was that while Santa is not really real, the disregard for teachers in our society is very palpably real and it’s starting to have an effect. I offer this excerpt from an article by John Norton in Teacher Magazine (2.10.11) as evidence. “I’ve been working with teachers as a journalist, writer, and online community moderator for more than 25 years. And I can’t remember a time when so many outstanding teachers were so discouraged about the conditions under which they’re working and the daily criticism they’re hearing from political leaders, school reform groups, and media pundits who’ve identified teachers as the chief cause of public education’s problems.”
Following Hayden’s letter is a subsequent letter to the editor that I wrote following an editorial that expressed the opinion that we teachers were being over-sensitive to Senator Holdman’s comments and that we were missing his real message. I felt compelled to answer that editorial. Why? Because unfortunately the disrespect for teachers is pervasive and it’s fueled by things like Senator Holdman’s public comments. So I just think that those of us who are articulate enough to do so, need to start standing up for ourselves.
Without further ado- Hayden’s letter (unedited)
************
I think that teachers are important because if they were gone no one would have an education to qualify for jobs. If that happened, it will be less safety in our neighborhoods and more crime in our country. People need educated by teachers to make good choices.
People need educated by teachers in order to get jobs. If no one had a job, they would not have any money to get groceries, cars, houses, and pay taxes. This would hurt everyone in our country. More people would need government help which would bankrupt our nation.
Actually, I think that teachers are at the same spot as firefighters, police, and doctors. If there were no teachers, who would teach the firefighters, doctors, and police. If no teachers, fires would be every where and people would be sick like crazy, but no one would be able to steal anything because there would be nothing to steal! People need to understand we need teachers.
So that’s why I think teachers should be paid what they are worth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. I am 10 and I get it.
**************
And with a little further ado- is my letter. I just feel that “teacher bashing” whether it’s done through outrageous comments by legislators or by citizens blaming teachers unions for lousy teachers or poor student achievement, or by parents who don’t want to believe that their little precious baby could actually deserve a C rather than an A, or by any other means, needs to stop. And I think the only way it ever will is if we teachers stand up to the bullies. I feel we need to stand up in two ways. One is by being the best that we can be and the other is by speaking up.
****************************
Concerning the editorial in the Feb. 6 News Banner, I want to say that I see the point that teachers (and everyone) should look beyond Senator Holdman’s words to the basic message that we all need to find ways that we might cut expenses in this economy. That point, contrary to your insinuation, was never lost on Mrs. Emrah and I.
Trust me, economic realities slap teachers in the face every day. Many of our students carry them right in the door.
Our letter tried to point out that we have ALREADY given. We are sorry that we didn’t spell out more clearly that we (teachers in Adams and Wells counties) have ALREADY either accepted or have been offered (some of us haven’t settled yet) either no increment raises, or ridiculously small increments. Also, some of our districts have already suggested that we take cuts from what we have already bargained for or agreed upon in the past.
What I’m trying to say is that Mr. Holdman was beating an already dead horse.
One has to wonder why? To what end?
Should his remark be excused because he’s new to politics? Could you possibly be suggesting that Mr. Holdman went to that meeting unprepared for his audience?
When Dave Shultz looked around the room, do you think he saw ANY teachers there? Of course not. WE were all busy at work, teaching.
Instead of talking to his audience about what they might do, Senator Holdman chose to give them a message about what another group of people should do. He chose to hold teachers up as examples of people who had not given yet at all.
I also reject that this came about because Senator Holdman has a candid leadership style. I wonder, when did candid start being synonymous with rude and uninformed?
But let’s go back to what you say Senator Holdman’s true message is, that the economy is in dire shape and we don’t have enough revenue to support our schools or support teacher salaries among other things; and that something needs to be done. Tell me then, why Senator Holdman is still encouraging (per his email newsletter, that I get regularly) that we should vote for property tax caps? Despite his saying that it’s looking like the trend is going to be that people are going to vote it down, in his newsletter he’s still urging support for it.
I think a real apology would involve him saying that he was wrong to make the remarks to that particular audience that did not include us and that next time if he has something he’d like to say to us, he will speak with us directly and not try to pit the public against us.
I think that a real apology would involve him discovering, acknowledging, and thanking us for what we have already given and asking our opinions on how we might work together and not against each other.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond,
Cindi Pastore
Basic Equations
Public Education Matters
2.9.10
Basic Equations
I just finished reading this interesting article http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/02/10/21algebra_ep.h29.html?tkn=SLWFswhOcFWGJUb0rHf44TMbUilBIcab%2F0J4&cmp=clp-edweek It is entitled 'Algebra-for-All' Push Found to Yield Poor Results.
I copied and pasted this title just to save typing time but then decided to leave the font bold on this blog.
The reason I’ve left if that way is in the hopes that any educational policymakers that might stumble across this blog might see it “loud" and clear.
The article speaks to the findings that it’s been folly for anyone to believe that simply expecting more of students yields higher scores and greater proficiency. You just can’t expect EVERY child who walks into a high school Algebra class, many years below grade level in Math, to succeed. And while I understand Arne Duncan’s (and Barak Obama’s) belief that too many children (because of their race or their income level or other arbitrary cause) have been the victims of low expectations by some educators, the truth of the matter is that Algebra is not within everyone’s ability to master. The further truth of the matter is that not everyone is a candidate for college, nor should we ever expect that.
And now it’s been found true, that this push (that started with Bush’s NCLB) to make every child the same and to succeed at the same rate and to the same heights is detrimental to just about everyone. It hurts the truly low ability children in that it rushes them past basic foundational math skills that they could learn- things like adding and subtracting, balancing a bank account, making change, measuring, and telling time. It hurts the high ability kids in that they are held back in their achievements because of the time it takes teachers to deal with the deficiencies that the lower functioning students have. It hurts the “middle” kids in that it ignores their needs too.
Anyway, my thoughts when I read this article ran along the lines of “DUH!” Yes, I know that’s an inarticulate way to state my feelings but really- it’s been such a long time since legislators and policymakers ever looked at real research that I’ve start to believe that they’ll never get it and I’ve started to have much lower expectations of them. I guess I’d almost given up on anyone ever seeing how much sense this all doesn’t make. I also suppose that I’m thinking “Seriously, I could have told you all this years and years ago without all the money being thrown away, but none of you would listen!”
My own state “led” by Tony Bennett (Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Schools) just considered a proposal to make every child who could not read at the third grade level at the end of the third grade to repeat the third grade. Really, they wasted legislative time on this. So maybe you can see why I might be moved to be a bit inarticulate in my reactions.
Now, do I believe in tracking? Tracking being the opposite end of the spectrum where students are put in tracks of classes according to measured ability? No, I do not. I just believe that we need to stop entertaining the ridiculous idea that all children have the same needs and will have the same outcomes. There is a way to teach elementary Math (or any subject) to all levels of students at the same time. There are ways to do that in Middle School as well. However when a child gets to High School, we need to realize that some children actually have need of advanced Math and some people just do not or will not. We need to start looking in terms of what each particular student’s career path might be. If a student makes the mistake of getting into a lower-laned track than he later decides is right for him, then what would be wrong with him going back to a Jr. College to gain those skills?
I don’t want to come across as saying we should dumb down our expectations of college requirements. That does sound really bad, doesn’t it? I don’t believe we should go there. However, I also think we need to be realistic that not all students who really deserve a high school diploma really need to master Algebra to graduate. We are simply not all going to be rocket scientists, cool as that would be, to live in a world full of only rocket scientists.
I’ll let you all know a little secret, that I’ve hidden fairly well all these years. I, myself, might be considered to have a learning disability in Math. I can read better than most people and I can write at a graduate level (when I wish to do so) and I can even do a fair amount of Geometry but I doubt very seriously that I’d have an easy time passing high school Algebra, let alone Algebra 2 for the second time in my life. The reason I passed way back in high school was because I had some fairly kind Math teachers who understood that my life wasn’t over because I couldn’t do Algebra very well. They understood, or at least believed, that the world would be a far better place if I were able to go to college, graduate, get a job, and pay my bills and my taxes than if I couldn’t. They didn’t have national and state laws saying they couldn’t do this back then.
Having said all that, I can’t be counted among the people who say they never use algebra in their jobs. Even while I don’t work in a Mathematics related field, I am quite surprised to find that I actually do use it. But that said, I also will say that whenever I have to, I do find ways to cope with the fact that I struggle with it.
However that still doesn’t mean that I could pass a test and my question to all of our policymakers is “What do you think is better- that I got my high school diploma and bachelor’s degree and master’s degree and went on to being an employed billpaying taxpayer or if I would have denied a high school diploma and would have never been able to go to college?”
I say let the college admissions tests weed out who can and can’t go to college, not the high school diploma. Again, my belief is that not everyone should or needs to go to college. Not everyone has the ability and not everyone has the need to go.
There are all kinds of jobs where one does not have to use Algebra- a great many, many jobs. I personally don’t care if my plumber or my grocer, the girl who cuts my hair, or my electrician can solve the first equation. I don’t really even care if the editor of my newspaper can solve one. I’m not even sure I care if my banker can solve one as long as she adds and subtracts well and can put the decimal point in the right place. I think they can all provide me the services I need from them without knowing what x is.
That said, I would wish that my legislators and our policy makers would know how to solve certain equations. Perhaps, rather than saying we need this ability for a high school diploma, we should just make mastery of Algebra a pre-requisite for public service or educational policymakers. That might weed out some people.
2.9.10
Basic Equations
I just finished reading this interesting article http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/02/10/21algebra_ep.h29.html?tkn=SLWFswhOcFWGJUb0rHf44TMbUilBIcab%2F0J4&cmp=clp-edweek It is entitled 'Algebra-for-All' Push Found to Yield Poor Results.
I copied and pasted this title just to save typing time but then decided to leave the font bold on this blog.
The reason I’ve left if that way is in the hopes that any educational policymakers that might stumble across this blog might see it “loud" and clear.
The article speaks to the findings that it’s been folly for anyone to believe that simply expecting more of students yields higher scores and greater proficiency. You just can’t expect EVERY child who walks into a high school Algebra class, many years below grade level in Math, to succeed. And while I understand Arne Duncan’s (and Barak Obama’s) belief that too many children (because of their race or their income level or other arbitrary cause) have been the victims of low expectations by some educators, the truth of the matter is that Algebra is not within everyone’s ability to master. The further truth of the matter is that not everyone is a candidate for college, nor should we ever expect that.
And now it’s been found true, that this push (that started with Bush’s NCLB) to make every child the same and to succeed at the same rate and to the same heights is detrimental to just about everyone. It hurts the truly low ability children in that it rushes them past basic foundational math skills that they could learn- things like adding and subtracting, balancing a bank account, making change, measuring, and telling time. It hurts the high ability kids in that they are held back in their achievements because of the time it takes teachers to deal with the deficiencies that the lower functioning students have. It hurts the “middle” kids in that it ignores their needs too.
Anyway, my thoughts when I read this article ran along the lines of “DUH!” Yes, I know that’s an inarticulate way to state my feelings but really- it’s been such a long time since legislators and policymakers ever looked at real research that I’ve start to believe that they’ll never get it and I’ve started to have much lower expectations of them. I guess I’d almost given up on anyone ever seeing how much sense this all doesn’t make. I also suppose that I’m thinking “Seriously, I could have told you all this years and years ago without all the money being thrown away, but none of you would listen!”
My own state “led” by Tony Bennett (Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Schools) just considered a proposal to make every child who could not read at the third grade level at the end of the third grade to repeat the third grade. Really, they wasted legislative time on this. So maybe you can see why I might be moved to be a bit inarticulate in my reactions.
Now, do I believe in tracking? Tracking being the opposite end of the spectrum where students are put in tracks of classes according to measured ability? No, I do not. I just believe that we need to stop entertaining the ridiculous idea that all children have the same needs and will have the same outcomes. There is a way to teach elementary Math (or any subject) to all levels of students at the same time. There are ways to do that in Middle School as well. However when a child gets to High School, we need to realize that some children actually have need of advanced Math and some people just do not or will not. We need to start looking in terms of what each particular student’s career path might be. If a student makes the mistake of getting into a lower-laned track than he later decides is right for him, then what would be wrong with him going back to a Jr. College to gain those skills?
I don’t want to come across as saying we should dumb down our expectations of college requirements. That does sound really bad, doesn’t it? I don’t believe we should go there. However, I also think we need to be realistic that not all students who really deserve a high school diploma really need to master Algebra to graduate. We are simply not all going to be rocket scientists, cool as that would be, to live in a world full of only rocket scientists.
I’ll let you all know a little secret, that I’ve hidden fairly well all these years. I, myself, might be considered to have a learning disability in Math. I can read better than most people and I can write at a graduate level (when I wish to do so) and I can even do a fair amount of Geometry but I doubt very seriously that I’d have an easy time passing high school Algebra, let alone Algebra 2 for the second time in my life. The reason I passed way back in high school was because I had some fairly kind Math teachers who understood that my life wasn’t over because I couldn’t do Algebra very well. They understood, or at least believed, that the world would be a far better place if I were able to go to college, graduate, get a job, and pay my bills and my taxes than if I couldn’t. They didn’t have national and state laws saying they couldn’t do this back then.
Having said all that, I can’t be counted among the people who say they never use algebra in their jobs. Even while I don’t work in a Mathematics related field, I am quite surprised to find that I actually do use it. But that said, I also will say that whenever I have to, I do find ways to cope with the fact that I struggle with it.
However that still doesn’t mean that I could pass a test and my question to all of our policymakers is “What do you think is better- that I got my high school diploma and bachelor’s degree and master’s degree and went on to being an employed billpaying taxpayer or if I would have denied a high school diploma and would have never been able to go to college?”
I say let the college admissions tests weed out who can and can’t go to college, not the high school diploma. Again, my belief is that not everyone should or needs to go to college. Not everyone has the ability and not everyone has the need to go.
There are all kinds of jobs where one does not have to use Algebra- a great many, many jobs. I personally don’t care if my plumber or my grocer, the girl who cuts my hair, or my electrician can solve the first equation. I don’t really even care if the editor of my newspaper can solve one. I’m not even sure I care if my banker can solve one as long as she adds and subtracts well and can put the decimal point in the right place. I think they can all provide me the services I need from them without knowing what x is.
That said, I would wish that my legislators and our policy makers would know how to solve certain equations. Perhaps, rather than saying we need this ability for a high school diploma, we should just make mastery of Algebra a pre-requisite for public service or educational policymakers. That might weed out some people.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Letter to My State Senator, Travis Holdman on Teachers
Public Education Matters
2.2.10
Letter to My State Senator, Travis Holdman on Teachers
The following is the "long" verson of a letter to the editor of my local paper. It was written by myself and a colleague following a "Third Party" town meeting held by Mr. Holdman in Bluffton, IN. It is in response to comments he made there about teachers. I hope you will read it. I would hope also that Mr. Holdman will read this version. It might help him better understand some of the people he "represents."
Dear Editor,
This letter is in response to Senator Holdman’s comments on teachers as reported on in the article “Holdman: Nothing’s Left” by Dave Schultz in Monday’s Bluffton News-Banner.
The article stated that since becoming a member of the State Senate, Holdman has been pressing for teachers to forego pay increases. He said that teachers get automatic pay raises “just for breathing.”
What Senator Holdman might be interested to know is that those pay increases are NOT “just for breathing.” They are also for eating, and for keeping a roof over our heads, and for putting gas in our cars, and for paying our taxes, among other things. They are called increments (teachers do not get cost of living increases) which are bargained into our contracts via a process that IS the legal process in Indiana for determining teacher salaries. The process is called “collective bargaining.” Also, Mr. Holdman might want to understand that the number of years (that each contract has increments) varies by district. For instance, the Adams Wells Special Services Cooperative’s increment steps only go up to 20 years not 25 as he indicated publicly.
We’d like Mr. Holdman to know that the reason we bargain these increments into our contracts is because the cost of living seems to go up every year. In fact, from what we can tell, each year, for at least the last 10 years, the cost of living index has risen by at least 3% in the state of Indiana. However, our increment increases don’t even begin to cover the cost of these living increases, let alone the rising cost of our insurance plans. So hopefully, Mr. Holdman might see that already teachers are GIVING and have been continually “coming to the table,” so to speak. We feel that for him to suggest that everyone else has given (as he did at the “Third House” meeting) and now it’s our turn is just plain wrong and very insulting. We’d like to point out to him and the public that we teachers have been giving all along.
In addition to our “sub-cost of living” increments, traditionally we have given in other ways. Mr. Holdman might want to ask any teacher he knows how much he or she and his or her colleagues voluntarily contribute to their students and their classrooms each year for basic supplies and items of need. Ask any one teacher that you know and we think you might find out that their amount of this type of giving is typically in the hundreds of dollars. We know many teachers who regularly exceed in spending what they can deduct from their income taxes for these contributions.
While we are at it, we might want to discuss what teachers in our area make in the first place. The AVERAGE teacher’s salary for our state is a little over 47,000 dollars. Mind you, this is an AVERAGE and since Indiana has a fairly “aging” teaching force this means that this average is not really reflective of what a beginning or young teacher makes. Also again, remember our “older” teachers do not even get these “increments for breathing” as Mr. Holdman likes to call them. We’d also like to point out that teachers are people with college degrees. All of us have bachelor’s degrees and a great many of us have master’s degrees which we pay for ourselves. Younger teachers are no longer required to get master’s degrees, however, they must continue to take continuing education classes at their own expense in order to keep their certification and to keep their jobs.
One might think that this level of education might be worth something to the taxpayers and to our legislators, but from Mr. Holdman’s statement “It’s time for the teachers to come to the table” it doesn’t appear that he values education or educators. It further appears that he doesn’t wish our tax payers to value them either. Why else would he make such an inflammatory statement in a public forum if not to try to influence the public? In addition to seeming to want to pit us against others in our community, he makes us sound like all we’ve ever done is “take, take, take” when all we and our unions are asking for is that we be paid a living wage. Mr. Holdman might be interested to know that the ISTA and our local bargaining teams are not even close asking for what the NEA is suggesting a beginning teacher salary should be (based on incomes of comparative careers and education levels) which is $40,000.
To continue our discussion of teacher incomes, the beginning salary for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree with our Cooperative is currently $30, 308 dollars. (The Cooperative’s salaries are close in range to other Wells and Adams districts.) That’s not at poverty level but we would not exactly say that’s rolling in dough either. For further reference, a teacher with 10 years of experience and a bachelor’s degree makes $35,188. The top salary with our Cooperative is a teacher with Master’s and 20 years of experience at $57, 508. Again this would be after working 20 years (or more) for a person who has both a Bachelor’s degree AND a Master’s degree. Really, think about it, does that seem right to you? Apparently Mr. Holdman is more than “okay” with it. He thinks we need to give back some more.
All of these figures need to be understood with the fact that our health insurance and our retirement plans and, of course, our taxes are taken out of these salaries. So to put this into better perspective, teachers at the very top end of our scale take home under $1400 dollars every two weeks if their pay is spread out through the entire year as most of us must do in order to survive. That’s less than $700 dollars every week. A teacher with 9 years of experience takes home less than a thousand dollars every two weeks, that’s $500 a week. If you figure this out to a 40 hour week, that’s $12.50 an hour. Again, this is not poverty level, but it is not exactly flush either. (It is true that teachers don’t work a 40 hour week all year long, however this example is to illustrate how much money we live on, and we’d like to point out that the way the school year is structured most of us can only pick up another couple thousand dollars a summer if we are not too busy taking classes to retain our jobs or can’t afford daycare for our children etc., and if we can find summer employment at all in this economy.)
Please read further for an even better perspective of what our salaries mean. The USDA guidelines for free and reduced lunches indicate that a beginning teacher’s (making our $30,308 with a household of 3 people) child would be eligible for a reduced cost on his or her school lunch. The children of a family of 5 people (say 2 adults and 3 children) would have eligibility for FREE lunches at a household income of $33,527.
This begs the question, does Mr. Holdman feel that a teaching income should only be a supplemental income? We happen to feel that teachers ought to be paid a livable wage in order to feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families. Many of us are the single income for our households. We thank our lucky stars that we have a teachers union who helps us stand up to legislators like Mr. Holdman. We get the feeling that he would like us to pay to be able to teach and we respectfully decline his “kind offer” to come to the table. We feel we are already there and have been there for years. We also would like to be considered as something more than teachers. We also happen to be taxpayers ourselves. We also happen to be “spenders” who stimulate the economy when we buy our groceries and other goods and services.
We apologize to Mr. Holdman if our letter seems harsh, but he’ll have to forgive us our tone following his statements that seemed a total disregard for us as people and for our profession. We do feel that we do something more than take up oxygen. We happen to be very proud to be educators and feel that we have worked very hard to be the best that we can be. We also happen to believe that our field is one of great importance in our community and in our state and in our country and that it ought to be adequately compensated.
We realize that Indiana’s economy is in bad shape, but to ask that our teachers give back more than they already have given, sends a message that education is not a field that “the best and the brightest” would want to remain in or even consider in the first place. We sincerely think our field is strengthened by the caliber of people in it. When our future and our economy and our children’s futures depend on having solid teachers, we need “the best and brightest” in our schools, more than ever before. If we don’t continue to work to keep the salaries commensurate with other fields with similar educational levels and at a living wage level, then it seems not like an “invitation to the table” but an invitation to disaster for our state and our community in the years to come.
We’d like Mr. Holdman to take our message back to his colleagues. We and our colleagues heard what he had to say and we feel that it’s our turn to be heard by our state’s policymakers.
Sincerely,
Cindi Pastore
Tori Emrah
2.2.10
Letter to My State Senator, Travis Holdman on Teachers
The following is the "long" verson of a letter to the editor of my local paper. It was written by myself and a colleague following a "Third Party" town meeting held by Mr. Holdman in Bluffton, IN. It is in response to comments he made there about teachers. I hope you will read it. I would hope also that Mr. Holdman will read this version. It might help him better understand some of the people he "represents."
Dear Editor,
This letter is in response to Senator Holdman’s comments on teachers as reported on in the article “Holdman: Nothing’s Left” by Dave Schultz in Monday’s Bluffton News-Banner.
The article stated that since becoming a member of the State Senate, Holdman has been pressing for teachers to forego pay increases. He said that teachers get automatic pay raises “just for breathing.”
What Senator Holdman might be interested to know is that those pay increases are NOT “just for breathing.” They are also for eating, and for keeping a roof over our heads, and for putting gas in our cars, and for paying our taxes, among other things. They are called increments (teachers do not get cost of living increases) which are bargained into our contracts via a process that IS the legal process in Indiana for determining teacher salaries. The process is called “collective bargaining.” Also, Mr. Holdman might want to understand that the number of years (that each contract has increments) varies by district. For instance, the Adams Wells Special Services Cooperative’s increment steps only go up to 20 years not 25 as he indicated publicly.
We’d like Mr. Holdman to know that the reason we bargain these increments into our contracts is because the cost of living seems to go up every year. In fact, from what we can tell, each year, for at least the last 10 years, the cost of living index has risen by at least 3% in the state of Indiana. However, our increment increases don’t even begin to cover the cost of these living increases, let alone the rising cost of our insurance plans. So hopefully, Mr. Holdman might see that already teachers are GIVING and have been continually “coming to the table,” so to speak. We feel that for him to suggest that everyone else has given (as he did at the “Third House” meeting) and now it’s our turn is just plain wrong and very insulting. We’d like to point out to him and the public that we teachers have been giving all along.
In addition to our “sub-cost of living” increments, traditionally we have given in other ways. Mr. Holdman might want to ask any teacher he knows how much he or she and his or her colleagues voluntarily contribute to their students and their classrooms each year for basic supplies and items of need. Ask any one teacher that you know and we think you might find out that their amount of this type of giving is typically in the hundreds of dollars. We know many teachers who regularly exceed in spending what they can deduct from their income taxes for these contributions.
While we are at it, we might want to discuss what teachers in our area make in the first place. The AVERAGE teacher’s salary for our state is a little over 47,000 dollars. Mind you, this is an AVERAGE and since Indiana has a fairly “aging” teaching force this means that this average is not really reflective of what a beginning or young teacher makes. Also again, remember our “older” teachers do not even get these “increments for breathing” as Mr. Holdman likes to call them. We’d also like to point out that teachers are people with college degrees. All of us have bachelor’s degrees and a great many of us have master’s degrees which we pay for ourselves. Younger teachers are no longer required to get master’s degrees, however, they must continue to take continuing education classes at their own expense in order to keep their certification and to keep their jobs.
One might think that this level of education might be worth something to the taxpayers and to our legislators, but from Mr. Holdman’s statement “It’s time for the teachers to come to the table” it doesn’t appear that he values education or educators. It further appears that he doesn’t wish our tax payers to value them either. Why else would he make such an inflammatory statement in a public forum if not to try to influence the public? In addition to seeming to want to pit us against others in our community, he makes us sound like all we’ve ever done is “take, take, take” when all we and our unions are asking for is that we be paid a living wage. Mr. Holdman might be interested to know that the ISTA and our local bargaining teams are not even close asking for what the NEA is suggesting a beginning teacher salary should be (based on incomes of comparative careers and education levels) which is $40,000.
To continue our discussion of teacher incomes, the beginning salary for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree with our Cooperative is currently $30, 308 dollars. (The Cooperative’s salaries are close in range to other Wells and Adams districts.) That’s not at poverty level but we would not exactly say that’s rolling in dough either. For further reference, a teacher with 10 years of experience and a bachelor’s degree makes $35,188. The top salary with our Cooperative is a teacher with Master’s and 20 years of experience at $57, 508. Again this would be after working 20 years (or more) for a person who has both a Bachelor’s degree AND a Master’s degree. Really, think about it, does that seem right to you? Apparently Mr. Holdman is more than “okay” with it. He thinks we need to give back some more.
All of these figures need to be understood with the fact that our health insurance and our retirement plans and, of course, our taxes are taken out of these salaries. So to put this into better perspective, teachers at the very top end of our scale take home under $1400 dollars every two weeks if their pay is spread out through the entire year as most of us must do in order to survive. That’s less than $700 dollars every week. A teacher with 9 years of experience takes home less than a thousand dollars every two weeks, that’s $500 a week. If you figure this out to a 40 hour week, that’s $12.50 an hour. Again, this is not poverty level, but it is not exactly flush either. (It is true that teachers don’t work a 40 hour week all year long, however this example is to illustrate how much money we live on, and we’d like to point out that the way the school year is structured most of us can only pick up another couple thousand dollars a summer if we are not too busy taking classes to retain our jobs or can’t afford daycare for our children etc., and if we can find summer employment at all in this economy.)
Please read further for an even better perspective of what our salaries mean. The USDA guidelines for free and reduced lunches indicate that a beginning teacher’s (making our $30,308 with a household of 3 people) child would be eligible for a reduced cost on his or her school lunch. The children of a family of 5 people (say 2 adults and 3 children) would have eligibility for FREE lunches at a household income of $33,527.
This begs the question, does Mr. Holdman feel that a teaching income should only be a supplemental income? We happen to feel that teachers ought to be paid a livable wage in order to feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families. Many of us are the single income for our households. We thank our lucky stars that we have a teachers union who helps us stand up to legislators like Mr. Holdman. We get the feeling that he would like us to pay to be able to teach and we respectfully decline his “kind offer” to come to the table. We feel we are already there and have been there for years. We also would like to be considered as something more than teachers. We also happen to be taxpayers ourselves. We also happen to be “spenders” who stimulate the economy when we buy our groceries and other goods and services.
We apologize to Mr. Holdman if our letter seems harsh, but he’ll have to forgive us our tone following his statements that seemed a total disregard for us as people and for our profession. We do feel that we do something more than take up oxygen. We happen to be very proud to be educators and feel that we have worked very hard to be the best that we can be. We also happen to believe that our field is one of great importance in our community and in our state and in our country and that it ought to be adequately compensated.
We realize that Indiana’s economy is in bad shape, but to ask that our teachers give back more than they already have given, sends a message that education is not a field that “the best and the brightest” would want to remain in or even consider in the first place. We sincerely think our field is strengthened by the caliber of people in it. When our future and our economy and our children’s futures depend on having solid teachers, we need “the best and brightest” in our schools, more than ever before. If we don’t continue to work to keep the salaries commensurate with other fields with similar educational levels and at a living wage level, then it seems not like an “invitation to the table” but an invitation to disaster for our state and our community in the years to come.
We’d like Mr. Holdman to take our message back to his colleagues. We and our colleagues heard what he had to say and we feel that it’s our turn to be heard by our state’s policymakers.
Sincerely,
Cindi Pastore
Tori Emrah
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