Showing posts with label merit pay for kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label merit pay for kids. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Bloomberg and Klein Get Desperate

graphic by DB

All it takes are a few messages from some rappers on a cell phone to motivate kids turned off by school. Jeez! Why didn't think of that when I was teaching? Oh, I forgot. In those days we used waxed string and milk containers to communicate. (Is there a way to send text messages that way?)

That DOE consultant Roland Fryer jumps from the fryer pan into the fire.

I was taken by these quotes in today's NY Times article:

“How do you get people to think about achievement in communities where, for historical or other reasons, there isn’t necessarily demand for that,” Mr. Klein said yesterday in an interview. “We want to create an environment where kids know education is something you should want. Some people come to school with an enormous appetite for learning and others do not — that’s the reality.”

"Mr. Klein said the effort was spurred in part by the results from focus groups performed by market research firms for the Education Department. That
research found that black and Latino students from some of the city’s most hard-pressed neighborhoods had a difficult time understanding that doing well in school can provide tangible long-term benefits."

Duhhhhh!
They needed a focus group to tell them something teachers find out in their first 10 minutes of teaching?


You see, we have been telling Klein this all along and his response is that we are making excuses. Many of us actually know how to fix this problem. Engaging, exciting curricula, not test prep. And smaller class sizes so kids who do not come with an appetite for learning have more of an opportunity to be engaged. Hell, I do not remember my friends and I having that enormous appetite for learning - we were more afraid of our mothers' daily nag.


Now let's review, kiddies:


You have non-motivated students who are often struggling with academics. I have an idea. turn on the screws by threatening them with being held over on the basis of high stakes tests and then tell them they will get a cell phone and a text message from JB Cool if they can withstand the pressure. Pure Genius!


Leonie Haimson took care of the rest of what I wanted to say on her listserve:


See today’s Times – the latest experiment dreamed up by Roland Fryer, and “focus groups performed by market research firms for the Education Department.” Cell phones, mentors, messages, free tickets to Knick games and more – all to “convince” students that staying in school is worthwhile.

Excerpt: Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said the project was the city’s first attempt to bring about change in the culture and behavior of low-performing students after years of efforts focusing on school structure and teaching.


“How do you get people to think about achievement in communities where, for historical or other reasons, there isn’t necessarily demand for that,” Mr. Klein said yesterday in an interview. “We want to create an environment where kids know education is something you should want. Some people come to school with an enormous appetite for learning and others do not — that’s the reality.”…. Dr. Fryer said he viewed the project in economic terms, arguing that while the administration’s previous efforts have focused on changing the “supply” at schools, this one is proposing to change the “demand” for education by making students want to seek learning.


“You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody wants it, it doesn’t matter,” Dr. Fryer said. What school systems have done so far, he added, “isn’t working well enough.”…. Details about how much will be spent and where the money will come from are still to be worked out, Education Department officials said.


If Fryer thinks that NYC schools are the “best product in the world,” he must be blind. Klein says there have been “years of efforts focusing on school structure and teaching”!!! How out of touch can they possibly be? This is an administration that is clearly clueless, and appears to be drowning in loose change.


It’s kind of startling, the amount of effort, time and money going into this “rebranding” PR campaign – but I guess when you’ve given up actually trying to improve schools, as they seem to have done at Tweed, what’s left?


If you run Tweed via PR, you think that’s PR is all that exists; it’s like the Bush administration and Karl Rove, who said: ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”


So what students at which schools are going to get the “thousands” of new mentors, the tickets, the cell phones and the rest? Those attending KIPP charter schools, and those run by New Visions. I thought those schools were already so expert at motivating students…but I guess not. If nothing else, this will probably lead to a surge of applicants to those schools, so they can even more effectively skim off the top.


And I guess we’ll let all those hundreds of thousands of students, left attending the large, overcrowded high schools with classes of 30 or more, to continue to drop out, be discharged or pushed out, or in other ways actively encouraged to disengage.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/education/13schools.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1194931294-Rw4bHvFh4o/V/jTqo4F0Cw&pagewanted=print

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Merit Pay Has Arrived

Updated 10/18/07 8am
Check Jeff Kaufman and James Eterno's extensive report on the ICE blog where they also cover details of the pension agreement. In a future post I will focus on the UFT hypocrisy on high stakes testing and how the task force spent a year meeting, issue a report on the evils of high stakes testing and then strikes a deal which codifies the very opposite. What was the task force all about? PR for the members.

Come to the open ICE meeting Friday, Oct. 19 at 4:30 at Murray Bergtraum HS.
These issues will be discussed in depth with the goal of publishing an analysis.


The Teacher View

by Michal Fiorillo Chapter Leader, Newcomers High School posted to ICE-mail

At this afternoon's Delegate Assembly, Randi once again demonstrated her tactical brilliance in manipulating and jamming the members she purportedly represents, while conducting strategically catastrophic negotiations for those same members. Coupling a 55-25 pension deal - which must be passed by the state legislature to go into effect - with school-wide merit pay will provide for immediate division among members in the schools, while benefiting an ever-diminishing number of teachers who can somehow survive their middle and senior professional years without being U'd, ATR'ed, Rubber Roomed and disposed of.

Couching this agreement with Bloomberg as a firewall that will prevent individual merit pay from coming to NYC, Randi has negotiated a plan that enshrines and institutionalizes high-stakes tests, provides incentives for cheating and gaming the exams, and places schools that refuse to participate in greater danger of being closed or reorganized. It also mandates private funding of the merit-pay process, increasing the de facto privatization, of policy if not management, being facilitated in New York City by the UFT.

Today's DA was a disgraceful episode, in which a fundamental trade union ethic - equal pay for equal work - was pitted against another apple pie union demand, pension improvement. But for someone like me, a ten year teacher who still has memories of a pre-Business Model system, reaching twenty years seems more and more like a mirage. Sure, Randi can claim that she's gotten more money, but ever fewer of us will live to see it. After all, these people think the schools can be staffed with a combination of upscale Peace Corps/Missionary resume polishers and foreign temps.

While I had to bitterly marvel at her mastery of the dark arts, the meeting was yet another demoralizing UFT spectacle. Nevertheless, I plan to go work tomorrow and teach, and begin to educate my colleagues to reject this blood money deal.


The Parent View

Leonie Haimson in a post to the nyceducationnews listserve:

See the new $20 million program of teacher merit pay announced today, based on school “performance” which in this case means test scores.

First the administration insists on paying bonuses to principals for high test scores, then paying kids for high test scores, now paying teachers for high test scores. This year the $20 million will be paid for by Broad and Robertson foundations and the NYC Partnership; next year it will cost double and will come from our tax money – or even worse, our children’s CFE dividend.

This system of rewards will not be fair to teachers – whose disparities in working conditions, overcrowding and unequal class sizes are not being addressed, or taken into account anywhere in the so-called accountability system. Thus they will be denied a level playing field to succeed; just as our kids are deprived of an equal chance to learn. Not to mention that one year’s test results are completely unreliable, statistically speaking.

Already too many of our schools are test prep factories—this will make it even worse. My son’s 4th grade class started w/ test prep and filling in multiple choice practice tests the second week of school, even though our school already has some of the highest scores in the city. Why? To raise those scores even higher.

The worst part of this horrid proposal is that the UFT got Quinn and Thompson – two likely candidates to be our next Mayor – to buy into it. I suppose the teachers at least will get to retire early as part of the deal; the kids – and their parents – will get further screwed – possibly for years to come.

For why this system of rewards will be unfair – and counterproductive for our neediest students -- see the blog entry from Sept. 4 here:

Ten reasons to distrust the new accountability system

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-reasons-to-distrust-new.html

“For all these reasons and more, the new accountability initiative [and this new system of bonuses] may work to impoverish all of our students and schools – while punishing those who need our help the most.”

Leonie Haimson

Executive Director

Class Size Matters