Hopefully the sign painters near Guilford, NC have gotten this tiny little spelling error fixed by now. Students are returning to class very soon. There really isn’t much to say. Go to school and learn to spell it. And if you learn to spell it, thank a teacher, even if Sarah Palin rolls her eyes at you.
I should not be surprised. Across the nation, it has suddenly become popular to disparage teachers in one way or another. Teaching is no longer considered an honorable profession, apparently. Last spring people cheered as all the teachers were fired from a Rhode Island school that was struggling with a high drop out rate. Governor Christie of New Jersey is a new folk hero after telling a teacher to get a different job if she doesn’t like the new way things are being run. Americans are moaning and groaning nationwide because of a jobs bill passed this week to help states with schools struggling to prevent teacher layoffs.
One can hear more signs of teacher disparity as pensions are discussed. Teachers make up a large part of many public employee pension funds. While fire fighters and cops are catching a little of the flack, teacher are certainly on the front lines. Those who criticize, including the NJ governor, seem to forget that very often teachers get pension benefits in the form of deferred compensation. I know this is true in the case of Virginia teachers and other public employees in the state who were given paid pension contributions rather than raises for several years back in the 80s.
In another era, in another time, teachers, firefighters and police officers were held in much higher esteem. Now a former governor of the last outpost state rolls her eyes over the profession. How sad. I guess there will be a fire sale for those signs that read:
Shoot, I can’t even find a bumper sticket to cut and paste here.
So this is what it has all come down to.
In another era, there was more reason to respect teachers and cops. Firefighters still get the respect they deserve.
It’s not that teachers, firemen or cops have lost any ‘esteem’ it’s just that in a time of personal sacrifice from us rabble we want to understand and see that the pain is shared ‘fairly’ amongst all the citizens.
When things were good those salaries and benefits rose. Now that things are bad it’s expected that salaries and benefits will decrease. Not seeing that, the rabble that we are tend to get upset.
Even Social Security recipients are sharing the pain by not getting a cost of living increase (tied to inflation).
If Grandma can go without I think teachers, firemen and cops need to suck it up.
I have no problem with everyone sharing a little of the pain.
But I do think that esteem has been lost and I have cited why I feel that way.
@marinm
Cargo, why do you think that is. how long of a duration, and how did the firefighters escape the same fate?
One of my favorite movies is “Good Morning, Miss Dove,” from the 1950s, though I haven’t seen it in ages. It’s about a school teacher who looks back over her life, and the students she taught, and how she had to give up a lot of her own personal life to fulfill her duties.
Please, spend a full day — not just the hours on the time clock — shadowing a teacher, firefighter or police officer, and then see what you have to say. A few weeks ago I watched a police officer, who used her own money to buy light bulbs, hand them out at a Neighborhood Watch training in a distressed neighborhood, to encourage residents to put on their porch lights for safety and crime prevention.
Yesterday I also saw the SERVE volunteers filling backpacks for students in an empty store space at Manassas Mall. Remember to pick up a few extra things when you’re shopping, for the kids who have nothing. Forty percent of the homeless in Prince William are children.
“Shcool is Cool!” – suggested NC bumper sticker.
According to the N&M website, PWC and the two cities all
tanked on the most recent AYP scores. A lot of questions
must be asked to find out “why?”. Is it a flawed test?
Poor teaching? Large numbers of minority students and those
on free and reduced lunches in schools with the lowest scores?
Any ideas? How can we improve?
Shcool……..That’s AWESOME!!
Get rid of NCLB. No it isn’t bad teaching. Don’t leave out special ed. Furthermore, no one knows the secret as to how AYP is calculated.
I will check it out.
It didn’t say who failed what. There are 4 main categories that seem to do in schools in our area: Minorities, ESOL, Economically disadvantaged, Sp. Ed.
The formulas used are the magical mystery tour.
McDonnell was smart to just say no to the new Obama ed plan…can’t even remember its name. Fool us once, shame on Bush. Fool us twice, shame on me. NCLB is just a crock. The feds need to get out of education.
AMEN!!
Cargo, back to the teacher/cop comment you made. Let’s discuss it. What is behind your comment. You said your mother is/was a Spanish teacher?
@Moon-howler
I believe that the reputation of teachers, as a whole, have fallen, for many reasons, some of them unfounded. The face of the teachers has become the union. And even in my mom’s day, the 60s, 70’s, and early 80’s, the unions cared more for money than for promoting good teaching. They protected horrible teachers, struck for measly reasons. And no, my mother was not a union member. As department head, she would walk THROUGH the picket line. The Louisiana union was incredibly dumb, having the teachers strike for $500 more a year. What they didn’t spread was that they wanted control of the pension. Didn’t get it.
The teacher’s unions also have come across as supporting only the Democrats, supporting bad teachers, supporting faddish programs, asking for more and more money while quality went down. Too many teachers come across as uneducated.
Part of the problem is that, when we were kids, business opportunities were very limited for women, forcing brilliant women into teaching. Now, those same superior women go into other fields. Teaching colleges are not the best. Heck, I read a thesis my mother did. She used circular reasoning, said absolutely nothing, repeated jargon, and “regurgitated what the teacher said.” As a sophomore in high school I could tell that it said nothing. She got a B+. She did it on purpose.
That said, as individuals, teachers deserve the highest respect (most of them). They deserve to have more autonomy and authority. But they also deserve to be held accountable for their actions and quality of teaching.
Cops deserve our support and our respect. They run into danger. However, as our nation has gotten more and more rule bound, the police have developed an US vs Them attitude. Too many have been seen to abuse their authority. Too many citizens are being arrested for recording the police. The drug wars have militarized too many forces. No knock raids have gotten too many innocents killed. A huge part of the problem is that politicians and prosecutors want to be seen as hard on crime and therefore have criminalized too many things or felonized (I think I made a new word.) minor crimes. The police seem separate from the general community.
Firefighters run INTO burning buildings. They do not enforce laws or “inconvenience” people. All they do is rescue people. That’s why they don’t get a negative review.
AYP requires that a school meet standards in each of a number
of cohorts. Scores might be fine for black and white students,
but poor for newly arrived immigrants who know little English
and have had no formal education in their home countries – thus pulling
the entire school below AYP “standards”. There is a growing amount
of anger and frustration in those schools most impacted by this fact.
Locals are pouring money and resources, even when both are tight, into
ESL programs and are still being hammered by waves of illiterate immigrants
who arrive at their door. The state and federal governments provide numerous
BS mandates and standards, but meager funding.
It’s really important to look at the sub group breakdown when looking at where a school failed to make AYP. Also, grad rates influence AYP as well. This year the benchmarks for students with disabilities was raised as well. I decided to look at SJHS scores since last year they made AYP but this year they did not even though the majority of the scores went UP. The bench marks are 79 for math and 81 for language arts. Sci and hist are not counted for AYP.
Here are SJHS passing percentages by sub group for Eng and Math:
English: Pass rate for all 93, black 89, Hispanic 90, white 97, students with disabilities 75, low income 90, ESOL 87. So the school did not make AYP in the disabilities sub group.
Math: Pass rate for all 86, black 80, hispanic 82, white 92, students with disabilities 75, low income 83, ESOL 78. The school did not make AYP in the disabilities and ESOL sub groups.
This is an example of the formula applied that no one can figure out. Sudley Elem passing percentages are below and the school MADE AYP though many sub groups scored below the benchmarks, and much lower than SJHS:
English: Pass rates for all 84, black 76, hispanic 79, white 89, disabilities 83, low income 78, ESOL 79.
Math: Pass rate for all 92, black 71, hispanic 91, white 96, disabilities 80, low income 92, ESOL 92.
If I understand what I’ve been told about how the formula works, is that weight is applied to specific categories that varies according to the number of students in each sub group. So then it is possible for a school with higher scores to fail to make AYP, while schools with lower scores can make AYP. This frustrates many teachers and administrators alike because their school gets labeled as not making AYP even when scores improved and even when for the most part in many schools the scores look pretty good.
Big Dog, you are aiming your frustration at ESOL which by no means represents all the immigrant kids. Maybe it is just a city thing but the county has problems because of special ed and minorities. PWC is a minority majority and has been for several years.
What is your free lunch rate? How many sped kids do you have? How about minorities? Those attributes come in to play as much as much or more than ESOL designation.
DB is correct. There is no way to determine why one school passes and another fails. I think there might also be some comparing you against yourself also. Did you improve enough to suit the feds.
Making AYP is really NO standard to compare a school by. Reemember that my 2014, 100% pass rate is expected.
bwaaaaahahahahahahahahaha
Now on to Cargo. Thanks for such a detailed answer. I was curious. I am going to agree with some of what you are saying but I have different reasons. For starters, VA is a right to work state. If you strike the state will pull your license. So all those union reasons just don’t apply here in Virginia. NEA and AFT have no power. Meet and Confer is about as strong as it gets. No binding arbitration.
You touched on what I see as a big issue however. The old ‘back in the day’ issue. Until the 1970s…fairly well into them I might add, women simply were kept out of most professions unless you were super woman. The professional jobs for women were teaching, nursing and librarian work. The counterparts of those women generally, not always, go into careers in private industry. So, having said this, the cream of the crop doesn’t always land in teaching.
I see too much scandelous behavior being broadcast all over the place. I am not saying there weren’t pervs and drug addicts back in the old days. We just didn’t see it plastered all over the front page. There was a teacher at my high school who regularly fell over his trash can and I am positive he kept a flask in his attache case. I know of a teacher who had an affair with a friend of mine. It was there. It just was handled in a more dignified, private matter. Those kinds of things have gone on since the beginning of time.
Educational level…I don’t know. In many ways teachers nowadays know more about how kids learn and that kind of thing. Teachers from the old days know far more about content. Back then, more emphasis was on WHAT than HOW. Now HOW rules the day.
But thanks for responding. I will let someone else handle cops. I know in PWC, Charlie Deane has extremely high standards for those who are allowed on the force. I know several real upstanding people who got told no.
I still see an overall disrespect for teachers. It seems to have gotten much worse since NCLB which is such an artificial measure it doesn’t even deserve discussion.
In all this conversation, the two things that have been left out of the formula are parents and home life. I have never been a teacher in the civilian world but have a daughter who is and I know some others. It seems to me that parents have handed off a awful lot of parenting to teachers yet when teachers attempt to do “it”, the parents get up in arms. As to home life–in many homes both parents work so kids come home to an empty home–latch key kids–a late 20th century term. I am not saying that Mom has to be there, but if we are going to accept both parents being out of the home, then we need to be prepared for the consequences. And what about the kids who spend all day in school learning and come home to a family that doesn’t understand what the kids are doing and, worse yet, don’t speak the language the kids are learning in.
I amy get slammed for this, but a word about sp/ed. My daughter, the history teacher, has sp/ed students in here “inclusion” classes. Some cannot read or write or comprehend what is being taught. Yet they are tested right along with all the other kids–how can AYP ever go up? I believe all kids should be given every opportunity to learn all they can, but at the same time, they should not be allowed to drag down everyone else. I know, I know–wrong thinking–but it is my view.
George, thanks for having the courage to say what most people don’t want to say. You are exactly right. Inclusion classes are great for kids that can learn the material. I am all in favor of that. However, far too many kids are put in classes where they cannot read the material or process the information being taught. Then they are tested on that material. Absurd. And then some brain trust wonders why test scores are low.
This absurdity is being pushed in PW to save money. In fact, I have been told it is the objective of the superintendent to phase out all self contained classrooms. The joke is ‘teachers’ (and usually is is a teachers’ aid) are put in the classroom to help the sp. ed. kids. Bigger joke. It is a lie to the kids, a lie to the teacher, a lie to the reg. ed. kids and a lie to the sp. ed. kids’ parents.
Teachers cannot be all things to all people. They are even less when they have a classroom of 30 kids, 12 sp. ed. kids, and then some ESOL kids on top of that.
Oh, did I throw in I agree? Alanna has done quite a bit of research in this area. Maybe she will chime in also.
I agree as well where sped is concerned. Students with proven (thru testing) cognitive difficulties have IEPs which design to teach them at their instructional level. However when it comes to the SOLs, these students are required to take the tests at their grade level, NOT their instructional level. So a 5th grader who lags behind 2 grades in reading still must take the 5th grade reading SOL when taking the 3rd grade reading SOL would make more sense because it would measure what they know at their current level. A school would not take a 5th grader who is 2 years behind in reading, toss them into a 5th grade reading class and say “You’re on your own.” But that is exactly what happens when it comes time to take the SOL.
Sped students can receive some accomodations for SOL testing, but not when it comes to reading, simply because the test is designed to measure reading skills. My son has a visual motor integration disability and a disorder of written expression and has struggled with reading and writing as a result. He was read the questions for history and science, and took the Plain English Math SOL (less wordy), but for the Reading SOL no help can be given obviously. He did pass all of the SOLs. Squeaked by barely above 400 in reading and math, yet 600 for the science and history SOLs which were orally administered.
They would throw them in to that instructional level in Prince William County. 4th grade math skills…? They are right there in 7th grade math.
Then there are the portfolios. Bwwwaaaahahahahahaha! What a joke.