Probably No Early Retirement Incentive This Year | JD2718

Probably No Early Retirement Incentive This Year | JD2718

Probably No Early Retirement Incentive This Year

Today’s email from Mulgrew held out the smallest glimmer of hope, “We will continue to fight until the final hour.” But the final hour is just about here.

When the NY State legislature included in the state budget a provision that would allow the City to negotiate with unions for an early retirement incentive, some teachers got excited.

But the negotiations bogged down. The City made ridiculous proposals (for some teacher licenses, but not others) that they knew the UFT would never agree to. It does not look like the City is serious. They will probably just run out the clock.

What happened? Here’s my guess.

An incentive would save the City money today, but increase overall pension liability. And, with the COVID economy and scary budget this fall, the City was thinking about the incentive more seriously than in any recent year (An incentive gets raised every single year, but usually dies a quiet death. One assemblyman gets to score points at home for introducing it).

Bureaucracy moves slowly, and the City’s interest in the fall turned into serious legislative moves over the winter, and the adoption of the incentive with the State budget last month.

Bureaucracy moves slowly, but the world doesn’t.

While an incentive was working its way through votes and negotiations and back-room deals, the feds sent money – a huge infusion. But at least some of it is only one-year money. So now the City’s CONTINUE READING: Probably No Early Retirement Incentive This Year | JD2718

CURMUDGUCATION: NV: Should Charter Schools Hire Licensed Teachers?

CURMUDGUCATION: NV: Should Charter Schools Hire Licensed Teachers?

NV: Should Charter Schools Hire Licensed Teachers?

Nevada is one of the country's leading states for privatizers; in 2015, they went all in on education savings accounts aka super-vouchers. Well, not so super--they were not large enough to benefit the poor families that were the excuse for passing the bill. But they've got tax credit scholarships so that donors can get out of paying school taxes and support private schools at the same time. And, of course, they have charter schools.

Charter schools in Nevada enjoy a couple of advantages. One is that charters are authorized by a state board (the Nevada State Public [sic] Charter School Authority), meaning they can bypass any local boards that are elected by local taxpayers who might not want to foot the bill for additional schools in their area. 

Nevada charter schools are also excused from having to hire licensed teachers. Up to 30% of teaching staff can be unlicensed, as long as they aren't teaching certain subjects (eg English, math, special ed). The rest of the staff must be either licensed or "demonstrate subject matter expertise," whatever the heck that means.

Reportedly the state does not actually know how broadly that waiver is being used. Charter School CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: NV: Should Charter Schools Hire Licensed Teachers?

Leslie T. Fenwick: All Students, Especially The Most Vulnerable, Need Certified, Well-Prepared Teachers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Leslie T. Fenwick: All Students, Especially The Most Vulnerable, Need Certified, Well-Prepared Teachers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Leslie T. Fenwick: All Students, Especially The Most Vulnerable, Need Certified, Well-Prepared Teachers

Leslie T. Fenwick is Dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education. She is an eloquent critic of efforts to deprofessionalize teaching. She believes that teachers need more, not less, preparation for the classroom. This post appeared in Politico.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated harmful educational inequalities in the preK-12 public education system. The nation’s poorest students, Black and Latino students, and our disabled students have been the most negatively impacted by school closings necessitated by the pandemic. Black students in high poverty schools have been especially hard hit because of the racialized, historic and ongoing disinvestment in the education of Black children and youth.

One of the most obvious — and dangerous — ways this inequality shows up is by channeling a proportionally larger share of less qualified or alternatively credentialed teachers to schools with higher percentages of Black, Latino and disabled students. Black and Latino students are more likely than their white peers to be taught by CONTINUE READING: Leslie T. Fenwick: All Students, Especially The Most Vulnerable, Need Certified, Well-Prepared Teachers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It (Tennessee bans public schools from teaching critical race theory) | Zinn Education Project

Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It | Zinn Education Project

Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It

Tennessee bans public schools from teaching critical race theory amid national debate

The Tennessee General Assembly has banned the teaching of critical race theory, passing a law at the very end of the legislative session to withhold funding from public schools that teach about white privilege.

Republicans in the House made the legislation a last-minute priority, introducing provisions that ban schools from instructing students that one race bears responsibility for the past actions against another, that the United States is fundamentally racist or that a person is inherently privileged or oppressive due to their race.

Similar proposals surfaced in other states this year, including one in Idaho that has been signed into law by the governor. Texas Republicans are also pushing a proposal to ban CRT in schools.

Lawmakers in at least 12 states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the role of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and oppression throughout U.S. history.

A recent bill introduced in the Missouri legislature exemplifies a rash of similar bills — in Texas, Idaho, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Arizona, and North Carolina — that aim to prohibit teachers from teaching the truth about this country: It was founded on dispossession of Native Americans, slavery, structural racism and oppression; and structural racism is a defining characteristic of our society today.

Specifically, the Missouri bill bans teaching that:

identifies people or groups of people, entities, or institutions in the United States as inherently, immutably, or systemically sexist, racist, anti-LGBT, bigoted, biased, privileged, or oppressed.

But how can one teach honestly about the nature of our society without examining how today’s racial inequality is a systemic legacy of this country’s history?

From police violence, to the prison system, to the wealth gap, to maternal mortality rates, to housing, to education and beyond, the major institutions and systems of our country are deeply infected with anti-Blackness and its intersection with other forms of oppression. To not acknowledge this and help students understand the roots of U.S. racism is to deceive them — not educate them. This history helps students understand the roots of inequality today and gives them the tools to shape a just future. It is not just a history of oppression, but also a history of how people have organized and created coalitions across race, class, and gender.

The Missouri bill names these leading social justice education groups as those whose curricula would be banned:

1619 Project initiative of the New York Times, the Learning for Justice Curriculum of the Southern Poverty Law Center, We Stories, programs of Educational Equity Consultants, BLM at School, Teaching for Change, Zinn Education Project, and any other similar, predecessor, or successor curricula.

The proposed legislation fails to name a single lesson that is inaccurate or that misleads CONTINUE READING: Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It | Zinn Education Project

The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making

In the previous two posts (see here and here), I have argued that parents as well as grandparents, uncles and aunts who became home-bound teachers during pandemic-driven closures of schools have come to both appreciate and understand teaching as never before.

Sitting with a 10 or 14 year-old at the kitchen table figuring out how to answer the math word problems or parsing teacher-assigned paragraphs in a U.S. history text were generally unfamiliar tasks that stay-at-home parents had to do regularly when schools shut down. Parents pleading with or ordering their children to complete their homework before the home-bound children sat down at the screen to begin the next session of remote instruction is not what many felt they had to do once their children were of age to traipse off to the schoolhouse. But now they do. And many, if not most, parents see teaching hardly like what they had recalled from their own years in school but far more difficult than they had anticipated.

At-home teaching with one or more kids for maybe two hours a day parents have discovered, is hard work involving many decisions. Yet parents do not face, for example,a third grade classroom filled with 30 eight year-olds for six hours a day for thirty-six weeks.

But most parents, grand-parents, uncles, and aunts are not teachers and their only memories of being a student were when they attended school decades CONTINUE READING: The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

What's ahead for teachers? | Cornell Chronicle

What's ahead for teachers? | Cornell Chronicle

What's ahead for teachers?

One of the nation’s most influential labor leaders, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten ’80, meets Thursday with ILR Dean Alex Colvin to discuss “One Year Later, What’s Ahead for Teachers?”

Part of ILR’s eCornell series entitled “The Future of Work: Labor in America,” the event is free and open to the public.

Register here for “One Year Later, What’s Ahead for Teachers,” which will be held from 3:30 to 4:30 ET on Thursday.

The first in the ILR “Future of Work” series was “Unionization in Big Tech: Why Now?” and is accessible by completing the form in this link.

After this Thursday’s event, the next in the series will be a May 10 keynote with Colvin, Thomas Perez, labor secretary in the Obama administration and former Democratic National Committee chair, and Cathy Creighton, director of ILR’s Buffalo Co-Lab. The keynote begins at 2:30 p.m. ET.

On Thursday, Weingarten and Colvin will discuss three areas:

• the pandemic’s impact on K-12 learning and teaching, this fall and beyond
• how the Amazon union vote is affecting labor
• how the Biden administration will impact teaching.

Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, a union of 1.7 million teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; higher education faculty and staff; nurses and other healthcare CONTINUE READING: What's ahead for teachers? | Cornell Chronicle

Pandemic Stress Has Pushed Teachers To A Breaking Point : NPR

Pandemic Stress Has Pushed Teachers To A Breaking Point : NPR

'We Need To Be Nurtured, Too': Many Teachers Say They're Reaching A Breaking Point

To say Leah Juelke is an award-winning teacher is a bit of an understatement. She was a top 10 finalist for the Global Teacher Prize in 2020; she was North Dakota's Teacher of the Year in 2018; and she was awarded an NEA Foundation award for teaching excellence in 2019.

But Juelke, who teaches high school English learners in Fargo, N.D., says nothing prepared her for teaching during the pandemic.

"The level of stress is exponentially higher. It's like nothing I've experienced before."

It's a sentiment NPR heard from teachers across the country. After a year of uncertainty, long hours and juggling personal and work responsibilities, many told NPR they had reached a breaking point.

Heidi Crumrine, a high school English teacher in Concord, N.H., says this has been the most challenging year she's ever encountered in her two decades of teaching.

"And I say [that] as someone who started her first day of teaching on 9/11 in the Bronx in New York City."

Teaching is one of the most stressful occupations in the U.S., tied only with nurses, a 2013 Gallup poll found. Jennifer Greif Green, an education professor at Boston University, says the additional stress teachers are reporting during the pandemic is CONTINUE READING: Pandemic Stress Has Pushed Teachers To A Breaking Point : NPR

Fewer new teachers in the pipeline. – Fred Klonsky

Fewer new teachers in the pipeline. – Fred Klonsky

Fewer new teachers in the pipeline

Over Spring break I had lunch with an old teaching buddy of mine.

It has been nearly a decade since I retired from teaching but we keep in touch.

Not as often because of the pandemic. But, we are both vaccinated now. I wanted to share a Little Village bodega/restaurant with him and catch up.

The tacos de canasta were, as usual, fantastic. And I had one taco with sweetbread. I grant you it is an acquired taste.

I have acquired it a long time ago.

He loved the place, as I knew he would.

He told me about the number of teachers from our school who were planning to retire this year and in the next couple of years.

It is a lot of people.

It’s not just about the pandemic. In fact, while the pandemic has been the cause of CONTINUE READING: Fewer new teachers in the pipeline. – Fred Klonsky

How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin)

Dan Levin writes for the New York Times. “He was a foreign correspondent covering Canada from 2016 until 2018. From 2008 to 2015, Mr. Levin was based in Beijing, where he reported on human rights, politics and culture in China and Asia. @globaldan“ This article appeared April 7, 2021.

At this point in the school year, Lacrissha Walton typically focuses her social studies lessons on the 50 U.S. states and their capitals. But last week, the Minneapolis teacher scrawled a question that had nothing to do with geography on her fourth-grade classroom’s whiteboard: “Have you watched the Derek Chauvin trial?”

While the murder trial of Mr. Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, might not appear to be age-appropriate instruction for 9-year-old students, Ms. Walton said she felt compelled to use the event as a teachable moment. All of her students had seen their city consumed by protests in the months that followed Mr. Floyd’s fatal arrest, and some had seen the widely circulated video, filmed by a teenager, that captured his violent, slow-motion death.

“No little kid should watch that,” Ms. Walton said. “But when it’s plastered all over the news, they have questions.”

In Minneapolis, educators have grappled over the last few weeks with how to CONTINUE READING: How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Ties That Bind Teachers and Physicians | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Ties That Bind Teachers and Physicians | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Ties That Bind Teachers and Physicians

I posted this on my blog six years ago. At that time it grew out of a conversation with a friend* about two posts I published detailing my failures as a teacher with certain students I have had over the years. He has practiced Family Medicine for over a half-century in Pittsburgh and for years helped resident physicians in doing medical research and worked with hospital residents in improving communication with patients.  He pointed out to me how similar teachers making mistakes and experiencing failures with students is to physicians erring in diagnoses or treatments (or both) of their patients.

I was surprised at his making the comparison and then began to think about the many books I have read about medicine and the art and science of clinical practice. In my library at home, I had two with well-thumbed pages authored by doctors who, in the  first dozen pages, detailed mistakes either they had made with patients or errors committed by other physicians on them or their families.

In one, Jerome Groopman, an oncologist, described what occurred with his 9-month old child after a series of doctor misdiagnoses that almost caused his son’s death. A surgeon, who was a friend of a friend, was called in at the last moment to fix an intestinal blockage and saved his son.

In the other book, surgeon Atul Gawande described how he almost lost an Emergency Room patient who had crashed her car when he fumbled a CONTINUE READING: Ties That Bind Teachers and Physicians | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

NANCY BAILEY: President Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Should Include Teachers! Here’s Why

President Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Should Include Teachers! Here’s Why

President Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Should Include Teachers! Here’s Why

It’s good that President Biden is focusing on updating school buildings in his infrastructure plan. But there’s another crisis his administration should address. America needs a national movement to get well-prepared teachers into our public school classrooms.

The teaching profession has been in crisis mode for years. Much of this crisis has been generated by wealthy groups and individuals, venture philanthropists, who want to see technology replace teachers. They often use the term equity, but real equity isn’t found on a computer. Children need to see diversity face-to-face in the classroom, including real teachers of color.

It’s time to restore dignity to the profession and ensure that every child has access to qualified teachers, teachers who look like they do, care about what and how they learn like children should be cared about. Who are willing to choose teaching as a long-time career. Students need to know that their teachers are committed to them for the long haul.

This should include revisiting the Every Student Succeeds Act.

From Educational Leadership:

The Highly Qualified Teacher requirements (which stipulated that you must hold at least a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution, be fully certificated or licensed by the state, and demonstrate competence in each core academic subject area in which CONTINUE READING: President Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Should Include Teachers! Here’s Why

My Kids’ School Closed Again. So I Started Calling Experts. — ProPublica

My Kids’ School Closed Again. So I Started Calling Experts. — ProPublica

My Kids’ School Closed Again. So I Started Calling Experts.

Many New York City public schools have been repeatedly closed because of two positive COVID-19 tests, even without evidence of in-school spread. Experts call it “crazy.” And it’s driving me nuts.

Here is the minute I finally lost it: Sunday, March 21, at 9:34 p.m.

That’s when my wife and I got an email saying our kids’ New York City public elementary school would be closed yet again. Testing had found two positive COVID-19 cases among nearly 700 students and staff.

It was the fifth time the school had closed since New York reopened schools in the fall. Each time has been the same: First, we get an email that testing has turned up one case. A few days later, we get a second email saying testing has found a second case and the whole school will be closed for a day while health officials investigate.

And then, every time, comes the coup de grâce form letter: “Subject: 10 Day Bldg Closure.” Per New York City policy, two unlinked cases result in the building being shuttered for 10 consecutive days.

The first time it happened, I didn’t wonder about the rationale. Everything has been crazy during COVID-19. And despite more than 25,000 deaths, New York City, with the country’s largest public school system by far, was way ahead of most other cities in opening up schools.

Then it happened again in January, again in February and twice in March. Let me be honest here: Something in me snapped with the last one. Our kids, a second grader and a fourth grader, had done five in-person school days since the previous 10-day shutdown and 19 total since the New Year. Everyone in our apartment was struggling.

I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home. But I couldn’t concentrate. Our kids needed help. And I just could not get my mind off the rule, which mandates closure for two cases regardless of the school’s size or if, as has happened in my school, the two cases are kids grades apart who never cross paths. What, I CONTINUE READING: My Kids’ School Closed Again. So I Started Calling Experts. — ProPublica

CURMUDGUCATION: AZ: What Teacher Layoffs Look Like In An Anti-Teacher State

CURMUDGUCATION: AZ: What Teacher Layoffs Look Like In An Anti-Teacher State

AZ: What Teacher Layoffs Look Like In An Anti-Teacher State

Carie Caruso conferenced with her supervisor and was told she was a highly effective teacher. The next day, in an online meeting, she was told that she was out of a job. 47 other teachers were part of that meeting.

Angela Philpot had 23 years of experience, but this week she was one of the 150 teachers laid off by Gilbert Public Schools in a surprise meeting with a principal who read a scripted statement from the district. No comments or questions were allowed. Philpot is an Arizona Education Association officer.

Arizona public schools have seen a big drop in enrollment this year. The Arizona School Boards Association says that 40,000 children became "ghost students"-- they just didn't show up,. and nobody knows where they were. About half of the drop in enrollment are kindergarten and first grade students. Charter schools have seen a slight growth (about 18,000), but not enough to account for all the public school losses.

And so, in an attempt to "right-size" budgets, school districts are chopping staff.

A decade or so ago, Arizona's legislature decreed that these sorts of layoffs could not consider seniority or tenure. So how are these decisions made? With evaluation rubrics like this one: CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: AZ: What Teacher Layoffs Look Like In An Anti-Teacher State

Teachers I Respect and Admire–Roberta Rabinoff Kaplan | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teachers I Respect and Admire–Roberta Rabinoff Kaplan | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teachers I Respect and Admire

Roberta Rabinoff Kaplan

I met Roberta Rabinoff in 1964 after she returned from serving in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English in a rural school. She entered the Cardozo Project in Urban Teaching, a federally funded program located in a nearly all-Black high school taught by a largely Black staff in Washngton, D.C..

The program sought to attract smart, committed college graduates–Rabinoff was valedictorian of her graduating class at Denver University–to train them to develop curriculum materials, new ways of teaching, and to work in the community after school. She and other interns taught two classes of English a day, met afterwards with a master teacher of English and also took Howard University seminars after school to earn a Master’s degree by the end of the school year. After a year, they met all the certification requirements to teach in the Washington, D.C. Schools.

My job in the program was to supervise four history interns, also Returned Peace corps Volunteers, who taught two classes a day, as I did. Rabinoff and I often discussed how the 11th grade American Literature course she taught and the U.S. History course I taught overlapped so we decided to teach jointly an American Studies course for one semester. We taught about the American Revolution CONTINUE READING: Teachers I Respect and Admire–Roberta Rabinoff Kaplan | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand | Shanker Institute

Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand | Shanker Institute

Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand

In today’s public schools, teachers and administrators are constantly pressured to implement new reforms and initiatives, most of which claim to be research- or science-based. Schools are often viewed as the recipients of new policies and new knowledge generated by research. In So Much Reform, So Little Change, Charles Payne states “Best Practice discourse lends itself to decontextualized thinking, reducing the problem of urban schooling to a cognitive one: if only our teachers and principals knew how to do it in the Big City...we should spend some time thinking with school people about what those reasons might be rather than just issuing more exhortations from on high” (p. 63). Including educators in the conversation is crucial for a successful rollout of any evidence-based intervention. Additionally, in order to best support our teachers, it is imperative we develop a system for them to have access to evidence-informed practices that are contextualized and can be tailored to their varying needs. 

While there are many problems with the “research to practice” approach, one barrier is that schools are frequently not given enough training, resources, and support to make sense of educational research. Educators need evidence, innovation, and new approaches; after all, much of their job is to constantly adapt their ways of teaching to meet the unique and changing needs of their students. But right now, too many educators are doing this work without the necessary tools to be successful. In this post I would like to sketch out a tool that could improve access to and applicability of research. By access, I refer not only to the ability of finding and downloading journal articles and other sources, but also to having the knowledge to discern questionable research. According to Paula J. Stanovich and Keith E. Stanovich (2003), a failure to discern good and bad research can cause teachers to try new methods that are not strongly supported by peer-reviewed research. Applicability refers to the extent to which research has practical implications for teachers.

A Research Portal for Teachers

As a teacher who is interested in research, I often wished I had a simple way to access research and teaching resources. I knew I could find great research on education, and I knew I could explore new CONTINUE READING: Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand | Shanker Institute

Teachers I Respect and Admire–Myrtle Davis | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teachers I Respect and Admire–Myrtle Davis | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teachers I Respect and Admire–Myrtle Davis

In this series of posts on teachers drawn from my 14 years of experience teaching history in three urban high schools between the mid-1950s and early 1970s and my experiences as a district superintendent, I write about teachers who I came to respect and admire. The first post was about an elementary school teacher whose classroom I visited many times while serving as superintendent of the Arlington (VA) public schools. The second post was about music teacher William Appling, a colleague of mine at Glenville High School in Cleveland (OH) in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. This post recovers an incident that occurred at Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C. where I taught history in the early 1970s.

At Roosevelt High School in 1971, I taught five history classes a day—50-minute periods. While I had learned to pace myself much better than when I was taught at Glenville a decade earlier, I still found that teaching five classes with three preparations (sociology, government, and U.S. history) forced me to make compromises in both the what and how of teaching. I had wanted to prepare new materials for at least a few of my classes but the work was too much for me if I wanted a life outside of school–I was married and had two daughters at the time. Nor could I assign essays twice a week in each class, once a week was all I could manage. I could see only a fraction of my 150 students before and after school and during my one preparation period. I saw only those who needed the most help; I practiced educational triage.

What drove me to do more, however, was the students’ response to the history labs (learning centers or teaching stations, as some called them) that I set up CONTINUE READING: Teachers I Respect and Admire–Myrtle Davis | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teachers I Respect and Admire–William Appling | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teachers I Respect and Admire–William Appling | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teachers I Respect and Admire–William Appling

William Appling taught choral music at Glenville High School in Cleveland (OH) in the 1950s and 1960s. I met him when I arrived as a novice teacher in 1956. While nearly all students were Black coming from working class and middle-class families in the Glenville neighborhood, only half of the faculty were Black when I began teaching history. A few years older than me, Appling had been at the school directing the choir and building a reputation as a demanding teacher who loved music, performance, and his students.

William Appling teaching choral music in 1965

Decades later, one former student who became a music teacher, Dr. Marsha Kindall-Smith, remembered him in this way:

Appling also composed music, conducted ensembles and orchestras, and performed on piano and other instruments. He became an expert on the music of CONTINUE READING: Teachers I Respect and Admire–William Appling | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice