TEACHER SURVEY: 'Things have just gotten so bad': Why teachers in America are leaving the classroom for good

'Things have just gotten so bad': Why teachers in America are leaving the classroom for good

'Things have just gotten so bad': Why teachers in America are leaving the classroom for good

The word teacher, for many, has long been synonymous with hero.

On social media, political stages and news sites, teachers are hailed as indefatigable public servants, selflessly working to shape the next generation of Americans. It’s a reputation they’ve undoubtedly earned, aided in part by how many roles (therapist, parent, first responder) they’re often forced to take on.

Of course, there are bad teachers, but the good ones are ubiquitous. Educators who give everything they have and then give more: donating kidneys, fostering their own students and literally taking bullets to tackle school shooters. Still, accurate as this heroic depiction may be, many feel it’s been misused in recent years to excuse undervaluing and mistreating educators across the country.

Because teachers, perhaps more than ever, know what they’re worth. And they’re fed up with others not acknowledging it too. “A lot of my colleagues are feeling overwhelmed by the burden that teaching has become,” Rachel Bardes, a former Spanish teacher in Florida, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Things have just gotten so bad.”

Teachers — as Bardes and more than 50 others shared in an exclusive Yahoo Lifestyle survey — are sick of budget cuts, classroom violence and salaries so low they need two extra jobs. They’re tired of standardized tests that stifle their creativity and a job that demands their every waking moment — even when they’re ill. As Sariah McCall, a teacher whose resignation letter went viral in April, wrote, “It is unrealistic to expect this much of people. We’re teachers, but we’re still people.”

Of the dozens of teachers who spoke with Yahoo Lifestyle, many said that the conditions they’ve endured are fuel to fight for better ones — a trend reflected in the historic statewide walkouts beginning in West Virginia in February 2018 (and rippling to five other states since). But for an increasing number of educators — whether due to family, personal well-being or other factors — it’s all simply too much to bear.

According to a Labor Department report (obtained by the Wall Street Journal), teachers quit the profession in 2018 at the highest rate of any year on record. Roughly 1 million public education workers walked away that year, and experts predict those numbers will only get worse. The result is shortages of teachers in multiple states and a dropping number of education majors nationwide.

To explore this national crisis, Yahoo Lifestyle conducted a survey aimed at teachers who made the decision — most in 2019 — to leave the classroom for good. More than 50 former K-12 public school teachers from over 20 states participated, sharing intimate details of ending a career that many imagined would last a lifetime.

“I’m very surprised that I am out of teaching,” says Charlie Cuddy, a former math teacher in Omaha, Neb., who now works as a software developer. “My mom always jokes with me that once I realized [being] in the NFL wasn’t a realistic CONTINUE READING: 'Things have just gotten so bad': Why teachers in America are leaving the classroom for good

OUSD meeting Violence - Oakland Not For Sale – No More School Closures! #Oaklandnotforsale

Oakland Not For Sale – No More School Closures!

OUSD meeting Violence - Oakland Not For Sale – No More School Closures!

www.oaklandnotforsale.com . Call for the School board to resign - they called the police on parents and teachers. Children watched their parents get thrown to the ground. Oakland is Not For Sale - I don't want our public schools to be sold off to privatizers.
#Oaklandnotforsale

Big Education Ape: CHARTER SCHOOL TAKEOVER WAR HEATS UP IN BROAD OCCUPIED OAKLAND USD - Chaos, arrests at Oakland school board meeting – East Bay Times - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/10/chaos-arrests-at-oakland-school-board.html

OAKLAND IS NOT FOR SALE!   STOP THE SCHOOL CLOSURES!

Scrap OUSD’s “Blueprint for Quality Schools” and declare a moratorium on all future and currently planned school closures until the summer of 2022. This will allow us to wait for the probable passage of the Schools and Communities First Act in the fall of 2020, and assess the impact of the massive increase in funding that should result. Channel all OUSD funding earmarked for supporting mergers to the highest need schools that were to be affected.

Dismantle the schools to prison pipeline. Don’t fund the Alameda County probation camp while starving traditional Public Schools.

Fight back against the Charter School takeover of Oakland Public Schools. Reverse the Community of Schools board policy (BP6006) that calls for closing schools and turning them over to the highest bidder.

Activate the Oakland community in reforming OUSD financial management.

We reject the narrative that school closures and consolidations help children. Students and families at Roots and Kaiser School have been traumatized by school closure announcements. Students and families at Sankofa, SOL, and Frick have been thrown into uncertainty about the future. School closures and consolidations cause chaos in our community, and have been and continue to be targeted at schools where the vast majority of students are students of color.

We reject the narrative that OUSD has too many schools. OUSD does not have too many schools. OUSD has too many charter schools. To save our traditional neighborhood public schools, our district must end its cozy relationship with charter schools.

We reject the narrative that our school district is impoverished, considering that OUSD ended the previous school year with a $21 million surplus, and considering that OUSD receives significantly more money per student than the average California school district. In addition, in November 2020, the Schools and Communities First Act has a good chance of passing the ballot, which would result in a huge increase in school funding.

We reject the narrative that fewer schools will allow the district to provide more quality. Research shows that students receive the best individualized attention at smaller schools. OUSD has a proven track record of fiscal mismanagement when money is kept away from school sites and pooled at Central Administration. To put it simply, the more money going out to school sites and the less money going to OUSD Central Office, the better.

We reject the district narrative that closing and consolidating schools will stabilize the district. A brief look at the data tells us the story of school closures. After previous rounds of OUSD school closures, district enrollment declined. During spells of time when schools were not closed (2012-2018 for example), enrollment increased. School closures drain students away from traditional public schools and into private schools, charter schools, and surrounding districts. Closing and consolidating schools simply exacerbates a situation that already exists: an Oakland of two school systems, one for the haves and one for the have-nots.

Oakland Not For Sale – No More School Closures!

Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong. - The Washington Post

Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong. - The Washington Post

Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong.
And why she keeps saying it.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is fond of saying that public schools in America haven’t changed in more than a century and, as a result, are failing kids.

Our children, she has said repeatedly, deserve better than the “19th-century assembly-line approach,” and would do much better with her vision of education, one in which taxpayers shoulder the cost for any school that parents want to send their children, and the ability to choose is the most important measure of success.

DeVos is a billionaire who once said public schools are “a dead end” and who has spent decades, with her husband, Amway heir Richard DeVos Jr., trying to expand alternatives to publicly funded school districts, such as charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — and programs that use public money for private and religious school education.

In her worldview, “public education” refers to any school that gets public funding, so that a religious school that accepts publicly funded school vouchers, for example, would be public. She said that here, and more explicitly on May 6, 2019, when she was addressing education journalists:

Today, it’s often defined as one type of school, funded by taxpayers, controlled by government. But if every student is part of “the public,” then every way and every place a student learns is ultimately of benefit to “the public.” That should be the new definition of public education.

Betsy DeVos and her allies are trying to redefine ‘public education.' Critics call it ‘absurd.'

But is it true that public education in America has not changed in more than a century in the way DeVos says? Historians and education scholars say it is not.

Adam Laats, for example, is a professor of education at Binghamton University (SUNY), who recently wrote a piece in The Washington Post that said it is DeVos who wants to retreat into the past, commenting on her new definition of “public education”:

While this sounds reasonable, even enlightened, on its face, those familiar with the history of American education know all CONTINUE READING: 

Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong. - The Washington Post

How Chicago's Teachers Explained the Strike to Students - The Atlantic

How Chicago's Teachers Explained the Strike to Students - The Atlantic

As the Strike Approached in Chicago, Teachers Taught Labor
“I asked the kids, ‘Do you want to know what we’re fighting about?’” said one teacher. They did.

As the strike vote got closer, Anna Lane realized that she was going to have to throw out her lesson plan. Lane, a history and civics teacher at Kelly High School, in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, was in the middle of teaching a unit about how the city funds public-education initiatives. But as labor negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) started to make the local news last month, Lane’s students began asking questions that her original syllabus didn’t cover.

CPS and Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, had publicly questioned why the union was fighting so hard for a raise, and at Kelly, Lane heard comments from students that the potential strike was just about money. “As a teacher, you know, that’s going to make you want to address the issue,” said Lane, who is a member of the CTU’s Latino caucus. “So I asked the kids, ‘Do you want to know what we’re fighting about?’” They were interested, so in a day and a half, Lane put together a lesson plan that covered the history of the modern labor movement, including 40-hour workweeks and child-labor laws. Shortly afterward, the CTU voted to authorize a strike the following month, the second time it has done so in the past decade (the first was a far-reaching week-long action in 2012).

Read: America’s teachers are furious

The current strike is now in its eighth day of negotiations, and encompasses both the CTU and the Service Employees International Union 73, which represents the classroom aides, custodians, and other workers who keep the city’s school system—serving some 361,000 students—running. Those two unions together represent about 35,000 workers, tens of thousands of whom have been picketing this week outside their schools and flooding Chicago’s downtown center. The CTU is arguing for higher pay to keep up with Chicago’s mounting cost of living, alongside a long list of other requests, including smaller class sizes, more school nurses and librarians, funding for bilingual education, and access to affordable housing for teachers and their students, an estimated 16,450 of whom are homeless.

The city contends that the teachers are asking for more than the city can afford, and Lane says she printed out and used some of CPS management’s emails as CONTINUE READING: How Chicago's Teachers Explained the Strike to Students - The Atlantic

Where Have All the Children Gone: Public Education by the Numbers - LA Progressive

Where Have All the Children Gone: Public Education by the Numbers - LA Progressive

Where Have All the Children Gone: Public Education by the Numbers

dropped ever so slightly over the past five years. The US Census estimates that California’s population last year was 39,557,045, up from just over 37 million in 2010. And yet according to the California Department of Education the number of students enrolled around the state in K-12 schools went from 6,226,737 to 6,186,278 in the past four years. If California has nearly two million more people, why are there over 40,000 fewer children attending public schools?

To better understand how our education system is changing right before our eyes, it might be helpful to look at what has been happening in the Pasadena Unified School District. As reported by the Pasadena Independent, the district population has decreased by nearly 2,100 students since the 2012-2013 academic year, forcing the closure of schools across the community. What has happened there is in many ways a snapshot of the rest of the state. So what are some of the more significant causes of a shrinking public education system? Here are a few of the most notable contributing factors.

Housing Costs: Even as the state legislature attempts to cap rising rents in response to Governor Newsom’s proposal for a rent ceiling, costs are continuing to increase. The most visible outcome is the overcrowding of apartments and homes. It is not uncommon to find three generations under the same roof, or two families sharing living quarters, or five roommates dividing up a two bedroom apartment. In addition, the reverse diaspora of families leave town to less expensive communities of the Inland Empire, Lancaster/Palmdale and even cities in nearby states like Nevada, Texas and Arizona. When housing costs surpass 50% of incomes, people are forced to search for reasonable alternatives.

Housing Composition/Construction: While there have been thousands of housing units built in Pasadena in the last 20 years, the majority have targeted the ‘luxury’ end of the spectrum. CONTINUE READING: Where Have All the Children Gone: Public Education by the Numbers - LA Progressive

Should Teenage Trick or Treaters Go to Jail? | Teacher in a strange land

Should Teenage Trick or Treaters Go to Jail? | Teacher in a strange land

Should Teenage Trick or Treaters Go to Jail?

For 20 years, I lived in a subdivision in the heart of the school district where I was teaching. Halloween was a big deal—we’d get a couple hundred trick-or-treaters if the weather was nice. Many of them were my middle school students, or former students, now in high school. I bought a lot of candy. The good stuff.

I’d put speakers in an open window, and a spooky music playlist on my iPod (remember iPods?)—pieces that were part of my annual spooky-music lesson plan. The kid who asked ‘Is that Night on Bald Mountain?’ would get an extra piece of candy. And the boys who came for candy, left and switched costumes on the street, then came back—twice—got another piece both times and props for ingenuity.

I would dress up. This was easy—same costume every year—because my 8th grade students performed a Halloween-themed concert, and I was always the Wicked Witch of the Band Room.  It’s a perfect time of year for students with two years’ worth of playing experience to prepare a fun program, stretching their musical skills and knowledge.

The students dressed in costumes. This was a hard sell for some of them, but they were assured that ‘costume’ could mean something very simple—perennially, there were boys in shoulder pads and football jersey, toting their euphoniums into the gym to play Danse Macabre.

My principals, over the decade we did this concert, were supportive—all school leaders love events that bring hundreds of happy parents into the building, especially when small children are welcome.

One principal was open to all students dressing in non-violent costumes when October CONTINUE READING: Should Teenage Trick or Treaters Go to Jail? | Teacher in a strange land

Wealth and Power Undermine Equity and Democracy Across Ohio’s Public School Districts | janresseger

Wealth and Power Undermine Equity and Democracy Across Ohio’s Public School Districts | janresseger

Wealth and Power Undermine Equity and Democracy Across Ohio’s Public School Districts

The operation of wealth and power has never been more evident in Ohio school politics than it is this month.

HUNTING VALLEY   In an op-ed this week, the retired editorial page director of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Brent Larkin describes  an attempted state budget amendment that would have let residents of wealthy Hunting Valley in greater Cleveland off the hook from paying school taxes: “There are few wealthier towns in the country than Hunting Valley, a lovely little place with meandering streams, dense forests, winding roads and gorgeous homes, snuggling along and across Cuyahoga County’s eastern border. With a mean household income of $507,214 and average home value of about $1.3 million, the Higley 1000, using 2010 Census data, ranked Hunting Valley Ohio’s most affluent place and the nation’s 17th richest community… What a small minority of the 700 or so who live in Hunting Valley want is special treatment so recklessly selfish it would devastate the Orange public school system. Worse yet, it might just ignite a backlash in the 615 school districts throughout Ohio, perhaps harming 1.7 million public school children in the process.”

Last spring, Hunting Valley hired former speaker of the Ohio House and now lobbyist, Bill Batchelder to insert a tiny amendment into the huge Ohio budget to permit Hunting Valley to limit payment of school taxes to the Orange school district of which it is a part only to the amount required to cover the tiny number of the village’s children who enroll in Orange schools. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, alerted to Hunting Valley’s search for a way to help its residents avoid paying taxes, vetoed the amendment, but Larkin reports that some of Hunting Valley’s residents haven’t given up.

What alarms Larkin is the absence of civic responsibility among some of Hunting Valley’s privileged residents: “Millions of Ohioans with no children in the school system in which they live pay these property taxes—not necessarily because they like it, but because they understand it is the right thing to do, because they embrace the notion that educating our children is an essential element of sustaining our democracy.”

HILLS AND DALES   Then there is the amendment that did make it into the Ohio budget CONTINUE READING: Wealth and Power Undermine Equity and Democracy Across Ohio’s Public School Districts | janresseger

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Enlists Help Of Kellyanne Conway And American Enterprise Institute To Sell $5 Billion School Choice Program

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Enlists Help Of Kellyanne Conway And American Enterprise Institute To Sell $5 Billion School Choice Program

Betsy DeVos Enlists Help Of Kellyanne Conway And American Enterprise Institute To Sell $5 Billion School Choice Program

At the beginning of this month, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway sat down with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to make one more pitch for DeVos’s Education Freedom Scholarships. The program seems unlikely to succeed on the federal level.

What Is She Selling?

The EFS are what’s known as a tax credit scholarship. Several states have them, and they work like this: a donor gives money to a scholarship organization, then that program issues a scholarship for a student to attend a school, while the government credits some portion of the donation against the donor’s tax bill. In the case of DeVos’s program, the amount would be 100%. If I donate $100,000 to a scholarship organization, I pay $100,000 less in federal taxes.

What Are The Problems With Her Program?

DeVos has been plugging the program with variations of the following quote from the AEI discussion:

“Our Education Freedom Scholarships proposal…doesn’t grow the government bureaucracy one tiny bit…It doesn’t impose any new requirements on states or on families. It doesn’t take a single dollar from public school students, and it doesn’t spend a single dollar of government money. And it doesn’t entangle schools with federal strings or stifling red tape. In fact, it can’t. And that’s by design.”

None of these statements are accurate. The program would certainly not grow the government in a let’s-add-a-whole-new-bureau way, but it would be a government program requiring, at a bare minimum, someone to handle the paperwork. Families would have to apply for CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Enlists Help Of Kellyanne Conway And American Enterprise Institute To Sell $5 Billion School Choice Program

Hooked on Social Media, the Brain, and School Lessons | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Hooked on Social Media, the Brain, and School Lessons | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Hooked on Social Media, the Brain, and School Lessons

…the typical social media user spends 10 to 20 minutes on an app after opening it. With 56% of respondents claiming they log onto Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and other networks more than 10 times per day, that means half of America could be spending more than three hours of their day on the networks.

And not only teens or millenials. Also the much older Baby Boomer generation. Sounds addictive yet researchers have not helped us answer the question: why?

On the one hand, neuroscientists and journalists have argued that unrestrained access to information and communication have rewired the brain. The brain is plastic altering itself  in response to the environment and creating new neural pathways that ancestors lacked. So multi-tasking has become the norm and, better yet, we are more productive and connected to people as never before.

On the other hand, there are those neuroscientists who concur that the brain is plastic but it has hardly been rewired. Instead, complete access to information and people–friends, like-minded enthusiasts, and strangers–unleashes brain chemicals that give us pleasure. Or as one psychologist put it:

What the Internet does is stimulate our reward systems over and over with tiny bursts of information (tweets, status updates, e-mails) that … can be delivered in more varied and less predictable sequences. These are experiences our brains CONTINUE READING: Hooked on Social Media, the Brain, and School Lessons | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Katherine Westerhold White No Longer with Relay Graduate School of Education, Now Works for a “Strategic” Mystery Entity. | deutsch29

Katherine Westerhold White No Longer with Relay Graduate School of Education, Now Works for a “Strategic” Mystery Entity. | deutsch29

Katherine Westerhold White No Longer with Relay Graduate School of Education, Now Works for a “Strategic” Mystery Entity.

According to her Linkedin bio, Katherine Westerhold White, wife of Lousiana state superintendent John White, has left her position as “national director of policy and government affairs” at the Relay Graduate School of Education, a position that raised ethics questions and for which John White sought formal guidance in October 2017.

Even though Westerhold’s Linkedin bio lists her current employment as simply “independent consultant,” Westerhold now appears as a “senior affiliate” with HCM Strategists, which appears to be consulting/advocacy business in the medical and education arenas. On its “who we are” page, HCM Strategists describes itself as follows:

We Are HCM

HCM works effectively on our clients’ behalf, providing support and strategic guidance to help form policy priorities that are impactful and meaningful in the channels of health and education.

We tackle the hard stuff, improving student achievement from kindergarten to 12th grade, reforming federal financial aid, increasing college attainment and completion rates, and ensuring that patient preferences and priorities are at the center of regulatory decision-making. We work hard because success is our priority.

How We Began

Terrell Halaska, Kristin Hultquist (formerly Conklin) and Michael Manganiello share a passion for contributing to meaningful change for those populations who have been historically underserved by the system, making improvements in our communities and increasing the quality of life for all people. Joining forces in 2008, these three founding partners coalesced this passion, years of expertise and a solid network of similarly-minded colleagues to form HCM Strategists, a public policy and advocacy firm focused on improving education and health outcomes across the nation.

We firmly believe that achieving such outcomes takes a combination of high-level government experience, an understanding of people’s struggles, a network of strong relationships, a keen analytical ability and the skills to find fresh, creative approaches to addressing issues.

Below is CONTINUE READING: Katherine Westerhold White No Longer with Relay Graduate School of Education, Now Works for a “Strategic” Mystery Entity. | deutsch29

Federal Judge Holds DeVos in Contempt of Court, Fines Ed Department $100,000 | Diane Ravitch's blog

Federal Judge Holds DeVos in Contempt of Court, Fines Ed Department $100,000 | Diane Ravitch's blog

Federal Judge Holds DeVos in Contempt of Court, Fines Ed Department $100,000

A federal judge found Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in contempt of court and fined her Department $100,000, which is less than a slap in the wrist. It won’t begin to cover the losses suffered by students who were hounded by the Department to repay fraudulent student loans for a fraudulent education at for-profit colleges. DeVos believes it is her duty to protect the fraudsters, not the students.

A federal judge on Thursday held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt for violating an order to stop collecting loan payments from former Corinthian Colleges students.

Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco slapped the Education Department with a $100,000 fine for violating a preliminary injunction. Money from the fine will be used to compensate the 16,000 people harmed by the federal agency’s actions. Some former students of the defunct for-profit college had their paychecks garnished. Others had their tax refunds seized by the federal government.

“There is no question that the defendants violated the preliminary injunction. There is also no question that defendants’ violations harmed individual borrowers,” Kim wrote in her ruling Thursday. “Defendants have not provided evidence that they were unable to comply with the preliminary injunction, and the evidence shows only minimal efforts to comply.”

Federal Judge Holds DeVos in Contempt of Court, Fines Ed Department $100,000 | Diane Ravitch's blog

NYC Educator: Realizing A Vision

NYC Educator: Realizing A Vision

Realizing A Vision

I've watched the Mulgrew-Carranza video five or six times. What they want is the moon, the sun, and the stars.

Now don't get me wrong--I want it too. I want it all. The issue, though, is how do we get there from here? How do we establish healthy working relationships with New York City supervisors, many of whom received training directly from Joel Klein's Leadership Academy?

Joel Klein most certainly didn't want to sing Kumbayah with the likes of me. Klein wanted to close my school and make me an ATR. As it happened, I'd already transferred to a school that got better grades than the one in which I used to work. I'm not stupid enough to think that was because of my sudden presence. It had a lot more to do with the neighborhood kids, who tended to get higher scores. Had I stayed where I was I'd be an ATR.

I transferred simply because my boss wanted me to work hours that would've precluded my second job teaching college. My transfer had nothing to do with school quality. It had to do with the transfer school being close to Queens College and having hours that would let me leave in time to do my second job. That way I could make the money I needed to pay my brand new mortgage. I happened to be very lucky, luckier than I'd imagined.

You see, my then-supervisor didn't care whether or not I could pay my mortgage. She told me that the Spanish teacher threw out too many kids, and I never threw out anyone. Therefore I was going to teach Spanish, not throw out kids, and she would spend less time dealing with kids who were thrown out. If not, I was gonna be on the late shift and lose my second job. The fact that I love teaching ESL, the fact that my English is way better than my Spanish--these were of no importance whatsoever. She needed her "me time," I had the Spanish license, and that was that.

As you surely know, there are plenty more where she came from.

When I became chapter leader, a math teacher gave me all the emails for the department. After I sent the first  CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Realizing A Vision