THE AMERICAN JOBS ACT

Last night the President gave a speech and outlined his proposal to deal with the countries high unemployment. His plan is titled "THE AMERICAN JOBS ACT". You can read it all here, but we just wanted to highlight the sections dealing with education.

Putting Workers Back on the Job While Rebuilding and Modernizing America

Preventing Layoffs of Teachers, Cops and Firefighters: The President is proposing to invest $35 billion to prevent layoffs of up to 280,000 teachers, while supporting the hiring of tens of thousands more and keeping cops and firefighters on the job. These funds would help states and localities avoid and reverse layoffs now, requiring that funds be drawn down quickly. Under the President’s proposal, $30 billion be directed towards educators and $5 billion would support the hiring and retention of public safety and first responder personnel.

Modernizing Over 35,000 Schools – From Science Labs and Internet-Ready Classrooms to Renovated Facilities: The President is proposing a $25 billion investment in school infrastructure that will modernize at least 35,000 public schools – investments that will create jobs, while improving classrooms and upgrading our schools to meet 21st century needs. This includes a priority for rural schools and dedicated funding for Bureau of Indian Education funded schools. Funds could be used for a range of emergency repair and renovation projects, greening and energy efficiency upgrades, asbestos abatement and removal, and modernization efforts to build new science and computer labs and to upgrade technology in our schools. The President is also proposing a $5 billion investment in modernizing community colleges (including tribal colleges), bolstering their infrastructure in this time of need while ensuring their ability to serve future generations of students and communities.

Given the crippling impact of the recently passed budget on Ohio's public education system, this asistance would provide tremndous benefit to Ohio's students and teachers.

What teachers are telling the Governor: Day 2

Day 2 of our odyssey into comments provided to the Governor by educators and other random internet commentors. Day 1 can be found here.

People asking to be on a committee or board to develop an evaluation and merit pay system are by far the most common submissions.

Subject: merit pay
Governor Kasich,
I am a Nationally Board Certified teacher with nearly 20 years of experience. I have a Lead Professional Educator license in Ohio. I have a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. I score the SAT essays for CollegeBoard, the AP English tests for CollegeBoard, and I write content for the ACT English test. I currently work in a high achieving district, but I have also worked in a very challenging school district. I am currently also working for ETS in the MET scoring pilot, which is a Bill and Melinda Gates foundation project for teacher evaluation. My wife is an elementary music teacher, so I also understand the perspective of that age level as well as how those teachers fit into merit pay. I would be happy to discuss my ideas with you; as you can see, I have multiple levels of experience that all will need to factor in to the merit pay issue.

Please contact me if you would like to discuss my ideas on education and merit pay.

Sincererly,

--------------

I have not been contacted by anyone from the Governor's office. Please have someone contact me to let me know that he is notinterested in my input, if that is the case. If not, please have someone contact me to let me know the name of the contact person who is heading up this process.
Thank you.

The next email also follows a very common theme expressed by large numbers of educators.

Subject: Guidelines for Merit-Based Pay System
Governor Kasich,
I am a teacher and responding to your invitation to email suggesdted guidelines for a merit-based pay system. I have no suggested guidelines to offer because research has not shown that merit pay in education works towards increasing student achievement. I do request that SB5 provisions be removed from HB153.
Thank you,

Subject: have you read this yet?
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries from the NYT:

http://nyti.ms/m55fWj

Subject:HB 153
Dear Governor Kasich,
I am writing to urge you to oppose including provisions that are the same or similar to those in Senate Bill 5 in the budget bill. HB 153 makes sweeping changes to compensation, evaluation and contractual rights of Ohio's teachers. Similar changes were included in SB 5 which, as you know, is being challenged by referendum.

Passage of provisions like this in the budget bill would serve to undercut the rights of voters to decide the fate of SB 5 in the November election. I ask that you respect the voice of voters and not circumvent the "citizens' veto" by including portions of SB 5 in other legislation. Please act to have these provisions removed from HB 153.
Sincerely,

Subject:HB 153
Dear Governor Kasich,
As a parent, community member and educator, I am in total opposition of merit pay for teachers. The current pay structure is objective and gives order to the process of determining salaries for employees. Merit pay, on the other hand, would be a cumbersome and potentially unfair, subjective process. Moreover, merit pay would not ensure that poor teachers would be motivated to improve or find different careers. Your administration has done nothing but hurt education in the state of Ohio through budget cuts and the elimination of collective bargaining. Why not listen to the professionals involved in education to determine what is necessary to support education?
Sincerely,

We hope this wasn't sent while driving! Just Kidding...

Subject: Hey!
I am not a teacher but I really believe teachers r under paid. I just drive a school bus. Seen too much happening in the schools.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

We'll bring you more tomorrow.

Teachers comments hit with bullets

The Governor's teacher liaison has published a draft memo condensing over 1,200 educator comments into an awful lot of cut & paste bullet points. As noted by StateImpact, these bullets have been arbitrarily lumped into 5 categories

• Big Concern #1: Who would / could / should evaluate a teacher under this new system?
• Big Concern #2: What would / could / should be used to evaluate a teacher (or administrator) under this new system?
• Big Concern #3: How would / could / should student growth be measured?
• Big Concern #4: How would / could / should this new system lead to a teacher’s growth?
• Big Concern #5: How would / could / should my pay change if we move to performance compensation?

Not included in this document is any mention of collective bargaining, even though a significant number of teachers expressed that local collective bargaining was the best mechanism to formulate evaluations and pay. It's also not possible to determine the weight to apply to any of these bullet points based on either frequency or validity, but as noted, this is a working draft document.

In the mean time we will continue to publish a wide selection of raw comments. The memo can be found below.

Concerns Ideas Memo

What teachers are telling the Governor: Day 1

The Governor and his education Czar, Bob Sommers, have been requesting teacher input via a web form as they attempt to design a teacher evaluation and merit pay system. We here at JTF continue to believe the best way to achieve this isn't through random submissions via the web, but in a more deliberative and collaborative manner with stakeholders and subject matter experts.

But since this common sense approach has been set aside, we thought we should share the input teachers and others are providing the Governor through is website governor.ohio.gov/Contact/Teachers.aspx. We obtained these responses via a public records request. We'll publish a representative selection of responses each day. We have decided not to publish the names or contact information of any respondants.

Subject: "Merit Pay"
Dear Governor Kasich,
My first suggestions is to create a team of teachers and administrators to head this committee. We need people with a background and degree in education. A qualified person would have to have been in a classroom setting in their adult life. A person with a business degree would not be qualified to discuss this issue. A set criteria would need to be developed based on a set number of students in the classroom. You can not judge someone who has 20 students in a classroom verses a teacher with 30 students in the classroom in the same manner. The amount of students who are at risk or have special needs would need to be spread out evenly throughout the teachers at each grade level. That way the test scores would be more even throughout the grade level. This is just my first few thoughts concerning "fair" merit pay. I will continue to send emails concerning this issue.
Thank you,
----- -------
Highland Local School District
Medina, Ohio

Subject: Evaluate this...
I'd like to ask the Governor to take on a typical American class of 45 low-income mixed grade junior high students in an inner city school himself for at least one month and allow a panel of senior teachers (20 years+ experience) to evaluate his ability to lead in this situation and to bet his governorship on getting success for learning with this underfunded class of kids while on a teacher's wage.

Subject: fair method to pay teachers fairly
Governor, I am a retired teacher in Ohio after a 31 year career in Trumbull County. Considering all they do, much of it "off the clock", teachers have never been paid what they are worth and probably never will. But, for the largest majority, teachers are quite intelligent, tending toward altruism, and fair minded folks. The best way to come close to making sure they are payed fairly is to KEEP AND CONTINUE USING COLLECTIVE BARGAINING.

Maybe the process needs a bit of an overhaul, but to get rid of it totally is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Collective bargaining may not be in our country's constitution, but intelligent people over a long and intense history hammered out this process and it is a good one, very much in keeping with democratic principles. All people in this country have the right to speak for themselves in order to be treated fairly. All people of the world have this right whether it is honored or not. Most especially in the USA, that right should always be honored.

Collective bargaining for all public employees, including teachers, needs to be maintained in Ohio and restored or instituted in all other states where the process either doesn't exist or is being threatened. Thank you,

Subject: Fair pay for teachers
Governor Kasich,
“Fairness” cannot be legislated. The complexities are too subtle, and too large, to be encompassed in any law. The fair way to arrive at fair compensation and fair benefits for teachers is through collective bargaining.
That’s all!
Sincerely,

Finally for today,

Subject: No Subject
Funding for public education has been identified as illegal for years. You should be doing something to make funding more equitable so students' have the same advantages in their schools across the state; instead you want to increase salaries in salary heavy districts. Teachers who usually have the highest success rate also usually work in the wealthiest districts. The rich will get richer and we poor will stay poor.

We'll bring you more thoughts and comments tomorrow - we have over 1,300 to go through...

In Ohio, Charter School Expansion By Income, Not Performance

For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the “pilot district” for charters) and in the “Ohio 8” urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a “challenged district,” as measured by whether the district received a state “report card” rating of “academic watch” or “academic emergency.” This is a performance-based standard.

Under this system, there was of course very rapid charter proliferation in Lucas County and the “Ohio 8” districts. Only a small number of other districts (around 20-30 per year) “met” the performance-based standard. As a whole, the state’s current charter law was supposed to “open up” districts for charter schools when the districts are not doing well.

Starting next year, the state is adding a fourth criterion: Any district with a “performance index” in the bottom five percent for the state will also be open for charter expansion. Although this may seem like a logical addition, in reality, the change offends basic principles of both fairness and educational measurement.

[readon2 url="http://shankerblog.org/?p=3652"]Read more...[/readon2]

Why educators oppose SB5 and vote no on issue 2

Here are some of the reasons educators and educational support professionals are opposed to SB5 and will be voting no on Issue 2

Issue 2 is Unfair

"Teachers care deeply about our kids. When I discovered that special education students in my school district didn't have the books and resources they needed, I turned to my colleagues. The union contract helped my students get the tools they needed. That's why I'm voting NO on Issue 2. I know that without collective bargaining, my special needs students would fall through the cracks—and that's just not fair for them, or anyone else."

—Marjorie Punter, special education teacher, Dayton, Ohio

Issue 2 is Unsafe

"I take my job very seriously. After all, parents trust me to make sure their child is safe. It's a huge responsibility, and I'm afraid Issue 2 will put our kids' safety in jeopardy. For me, that's just too much to risk, which is why I am voting NO on Issue 2."

—Ian Ruck, bus driver, Pataskala, Ohio

Issue 2 Hurts Us All

“As a teacher and a mother, I worry about our children. Politicians may think they are fixing our schools, but they haven't spent any time in the classroom, and their one-size-fits-all reforms are risking our children’s future. Our kids are not widgets, and shortchanging them is not only irresponsible and shortsighted, but it hurts us all. That's why I'm voting NO on Issue 2.”

—Kyley Richardson, high school Spanish teacher, Continental, Ohio