Notes From Chicago

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play bandarqThis week I’m in Chicago for the National Writing Project Annual Meeting and the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention. It’s sort of a bittersweet affair because the National Writing Project is trying to re-invent itself after the loss of direct federal funding, something they have enjoyed for the last twenty years, while the NCTE is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary and its 101st annual convention. The first annual convention was held here in Chicago in 1911.

According to the convention program, the first meeting was a one and a half day affair attended by 65 teachers from twelve states. There were two meeting rooms, one shared meal, and the annual dues were $2. The charge for the banquet at the meeting was $1.50. A photo in the aktivitas shows just slightly more male members than female members.

This week, including the meetings of subsidiary groups within NCTE, the meeting spans a full week, fills two of Chicago’s largest hotels, and involves tens of thousands of teachers—the vast majority of them women. One of the most notable things to me when I walked into the headquarters hotel was the large number of teachers sprawled across the floor, on the stairs, and in every conceivable nook and cranny of the hotel. It reminded me of an infestation of ladybugs. There were teachers everywhere! I once had an acquaintance tell me that there is nothing more frightening than a high school English teacher (she clearly had some bad ones), and I kept imagining her reaction had she been here to see thousands of English and Language Arts teachers just swarming the place. I pictured her face looking something like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

For me, the first day was all Writing Project related functions and panels. And sadly, or frustratingly, we talked very little about teaching but mostly about fund raising, federal legislation, corporate giving, foundations, endowments, and advocacy. Necessary, but nothing that really stirs the passions. All I can say is that we at the CWP are fortunate to be such a long-standing, well established and well funded site. Many sites have already disappeared, and many more will struggle to sustain themselves through next year till various new sources of federal, private, and corporate funds become available to replace what was lost.

Today I would have liked to have spent the day in NCTE sessions, but mostly I worked on stuff from UConn, such as getting ready to take over and run a conference Monday for a colleague who had a heart attack. He’s all right, but of course unavailable for Monday, so I will fly in from Chicago Sunday evening, get the kids from my mother’s, unpack, lie down, get up, and go run a conference!

Tomorrow will be my day to attend sessions. I’m planning to attend panels on new research in the teaching of literacy, MA programs in English for educators, teacher-research, high school-college collaboration on college-level writing instruction, teaching literary criticism in high schools, and teaching creative writing in high schools. All of these in some way deal with collaborative efforts between high schools and colleges, which is perfect for me and informs me in my instruction of my undergraduate, pre-teaching and teaching majors.

I’ve seen several colleagues here, both from the school of education as well as from the composition aktivitas within the English department, and I brought three teachers with me, which is always cool. I love being able to provide this kind of professional opportunity to teachers (though I worry there might not be sufficient funds to do so next year). I was disappointed that I didn’t feel I could afford to bring any of the graduate students this year. I have brought two each of the last two years, and that’s always been great, to give them such a terrific professional opportunity at the start of their career and to see them interact with the veteran teachers who come. The students and the veterans always get so mutually energized by the shared experience.

And as much fun as the panels and workshops and roundtables are, it is at least as much fun to go out and socialize with different groups of teachers. We have a few drinks and a lot of fun, and we meet a lot of new people, teachers from other parts of the state and country, from other levels and other areas of the fields of English, Language Arts, and Rhetoric and Composition. And we also share ideas and hatch collaborative plans, pick each others’ brains, share successes, commiserate, and build or strengthen both personal and professional relationships.

Sorry For The Cynicism, But ...

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bandar ceme terpercayaDid anyone read Governor Malloy’s latest tawaran for educational reform? Quite a mixed bag. Looks like he’s out to eliminate certification requirements as well as tenure. If he and Stefan Pryor get their way, superintendents will be able to run their schools like the private boarding school my wife worked at when we were first married. Half the faculty was 22 and fresh from school. They were smart kids but had no idea how to teach, and the turnover was incredible. One trustee actually floated a tawaran to house the ingusan faculty in a college style dorm where they could party, thinking that this would retain them. But of course they were cheap. Room and board were provided, lousy as it was, but salaries were around $10,000 a year. I know this was almost twenty years ago now, but even twenty years ago I started at $30,000 in a district where salaries were modest, at best.

All these proposals are in the name of eliminating the red tape that prevents superintendents and boards of education from hiring the best, most talented people out there. Now I’m sure most of us can think of a situation or two when someone talented was entangled in some certification red tape. My wife had a teacher a few years ago who just couldn’t pass the math portion of the Praxis I, who actually got such test anxiety that she once vomited on the keyboard at the test site, and this prevented her from getting certified. The super at the time supported her and did everything he could to emergency certify her and retain her as long as possible, but ultimately the state called his hand and she had to be let go. She landed on her feet in a community college, but the district lost a talented teacher over a test that was irrelevant to her subject area. But let’s face it, this is not what Malloy is really opening the doors to. He wants districts to be able to hire people who aren’t certified, just as the elimination of tenure isn’t really about empowering superintendents to fire poor performing teachers. It’s about empowering boards of finance to eliminate the highest paid teachers. And if they successfully tie job performance to student performance on standardized tests, then the only thing one has to do to get rid of veteran teachers is assign them the lowest performing kids, set them up for failure by giving them kids with a history of failure. It’s that easy, isn’t it?

Sorry for my cynicism, but honestly, even if Malloy and Pryor aren’t thinking these things, we all know there are administrators and board members and local politicians who are, who are just drooling at the prospect of replacing the teachers at the top of the pay scale with a bunch of new, young, uncertified teachers who don’t have to be paid peanuts.

The only thing I liked in Malloy’s latest iteration of his plan to save education by scapegoating the teachers is his tawaran to improve continuing education programs by replacing “generic continuing education programs presented in large auditoriums” with “high-quality programs … tailored to a teacher's particular needs.” Now that would be wonderful—if he can manage it. I remember when I got my first job, and my mother, a veteran elementary school teacher, sent me a sign that read, “When I die, I hope I die during an in-service aktivitas so that the transition from life to death will be seamless.” I put that up in the faculty room at my new school. Everyone laughed, but most had seen it before.

Professional development was never meant to be this way. When the educational enhancement acts were passed almost thirty years ago now, no one intended for us all to be packed into the auditorium for some generic, canned program, or for the offerings to change with every shift of the educational wind, or to be held captive to another lecture on blood-born pathogens, or to have our principals tell us to meet as a department or team and ‘come up with something.’ Me, I get calls all the time to provide PD, but ninety percent ask me to help them raise their CMT or CAPT scores. That’s not really PD. Typically, I ask to talk to the teachers, use the discussion as a sort of diagnostic, and then I propose something I think will be useful. And I assure the direktur that it WILL help scores, however indirectly. Which isn’t a lie, really, but it takes some persuasion. Often the direktur seems overwhelmed, underfunded, and at a loss. They, too, are under such pressure to raise scores. They’re just desperate.

Can Malloy and Pryor eliminate this mess? I’ll tell you one thing, it will cost more to provide “high quality programs tailored to a teacher’s particular needs” than it does to provide something canned and generic. Somehow I see this cost getting passed onto us. We’ll be required to get this new Master Educator Certificate to stay employed and at the top of our district’s pay scale, but we’ll have to pay for the coursework ourselves. Just watch.

The Case Against Sb 24

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judi bandarq onlineIf you didn’t get to see it, The Hartford Courant ran an op-ed piece by me on Sunday as the lead article on the front of their Sunday Opinion section. You can access it here: http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-courtmanche-ending-teacher-tenure-wrong-fix--20120226,0,5934612.story.

It’s a defense of teachers and tenure. The basic argument is that tenure cannot be cited as the cause of the achievement gap. There’s another piece by a colleague from the Law School that argues that teachers’ unions should not be allowed to participate in education reform talks because the unions only advocate for teachers, and “the interests of children are not part of that discussion.” He got pretty slammed in the blogosphere.

Anyway, the opportunity to publish the piece came about suddenly. I had wanted to attend the hearings at the Capitol on SB 24, Governor Malloy’s education reform bill titled An Act Concerning Educational Competitiveness, but I was unable to do so. I thought to write a letter to the editor on the issue, and, long-story-short, I ended up writing the op-ed piece.

The response has been amazing. Besides all the friends, acquaintances and colleagues who have written me in Facebook or by email to thank me for the piece, the online edition of the Courant has gotten tremendous traffic, with over three-thousand shares, recommends, and tweets, etc, which only account for a fraction of the views. I say this not to toot my own horn but to call attention to the relevance of the issue and to the affirmative response to my defense of teachers. Teachers, of course, but, more importantly, the public in general are not buying into the scapegoating, no matter what the governor, legislators, journalists, and pseudo-reformists like Patrick Riccard claim.

Sunday, February 9, the Courant ran the results of its own poll in its Weekly Buzz section. Question #1 asked, “Should teachers have to re-earn tenure once they’ve earned it?” An overwhelming 84% of respondents replied No. Of those respondents, 56% said that “Tenure protects teachers from arbitrary firings. Without tenure, school systems will save money by getting rid of better-paid tenured teachers and keeping cheaper teachers.” An additional 25% of those who replied No to the first question said that “This [SB 24] is a ploy to get rid of tenure altogether. What’s the point of granting it in the first place if it has to be re-earned?” There were a total of 2,102 responses to this question. By contrast, the third question, on the death penalty, drew the second most, with 679 responses.

Today’s “Issue of the Day” section of the Courant was also dedicated to tenure. The question was, “What’s The Problem With Education? Is It Bad Teachers?” The response, again, was overwhelmingly in defense of teachers. Respondents repeatedly cited poverty, lack of support for education in the home, and lack of funding as the root causes of the achievement gap.

No one’s buying what the Governor is selling except the legislature and the media (and they probably like the sensationalism more than they believe the Governor’s claims).

One colleague wrote to me today and asked what I thought could be done. I told him simple things: write letters to the editor, contact your local representatives, attend the upcoming Town Hall Meetings the Governor plans to hold. The schedule for these can be found here: http://www.cea.org/issues/news/2012/governor-announces-education-reform-tour.cfm.

If you do any of these things, both the NEA and CEA have lots of helpful information on their websites. The NEA can be accessed at http://www.nea.org/. The CEA is at http://www.cea.org/. The CEA has even developed its own “comprehensive education reform plan” that was “developed by teachers” (imagine that!). You can download it here: http://cea.org/viewfromclassroom/. The AFT has good resources, too, of course, and you can access their site here: http://aftct.org/.
And if you want to slog through Senate Bill 24 itself, there are lots of places to access it from. Here’s one: http://www.mygov365.com/legislation/view/id/4f337ea949e51b5a636d0200/tab/versions/.

I hope there’s still time to stop or significantly revise this bill. I’d like to see education reform. I think we all would, but I think that means something very different to teachers than it does to the Governor and the Commissioner, neither of whom have ever taught. As I say in my article, we want and expect support in the form of funding and professional development, not blame, reprisal, watered down standards, and privatization. They seem more concerned with cost savings.

Daniel Ward, editor of Language magazine, a journal for teachers of world languages, states the case succinctly in his February editorial: “it is about time that we all stood up against teacher bashing and insisted that our media affords them the respect that they deserve.”

Check out Kristal Bivona’s article on professional development and self-determination in the same issue: http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=3380.