State of Education

I try not to get political in my blog but I am so frustrated with the editorials and comments regarding education in WI.  For those that don't follow Wisconsin politics, our governor and legislature passed a bill that limits union negotiation power to salary alone (not working conditions, benefits, etc.) and requires that all unions re-certify.

In general, I do not believe unions play a very important role today, however in teaching they play a huge role.  In private business management has an invested interest in the success of the company and typically has a good knowledge-base of the industry.  In teaching, management is elected officials from the community who likely have no or very little knowledge of education and what it means to be a teacher.  Additionally, their interest is typically focused only on saving the taxpayers money (which unlike private business is not tied to creating a good product at all).  Allowing a union to negotiate, reminds those elected officials of the importance of also creating a good product.

With the passing of this bill, the general public (the ones with no knowledge of teaching) have come out in greater numbers than before bashing teachers, complaining they make to much and don't work very much at all.  What this does is discourage bright students who are considering going into teaching from ever entering the field and it encourages current teachers to leave the field.  Who would want to be in a field where every day you are hearing how awful teachers are and how they have such lavish benefits???  Add to that the difficulties that parents aren't interested in their children learning (either they are only interested in good grades or they don't care at all) and administrations who cater to parents by forcing teachers to lower standards so the kids can get higher grades and not supporting teachers with discipline problems.

This new bill like just about any new bill will take many years for the effects to be clear.  But we are already seeing lots of good teachers retiring, moving to the few districts that still value their teachers, or leaving the teaching profession all together.  What will this mean for our students?  What will the changes to class sizes and student learning conditions mean for our students?  Time will tell.

Extracurriculars may be required to graduate

The title of this post is linked to an article from www.newberlinnow.com about a school district which is considering requiring extracurricular activities for graduation.

I am all for encouraging participation in extracurriculars and believe that they have a very positive impact on many students. However, forcing a student to participate in them is not the answer.

Building a Better Teacher

The title to this post is a link to an article published by the New York Times titled, "Building a Better Teacher." It highlights a few researchers who have been trying to get down to the essentials of what makes a great teacher. It's encouraging that they are finding good teachers are not born but instead they learn specific techniques that increase student learning and are seeing incredible results. It also discusses how merit pay does little to improve student learning because teachers don't know how to improve learning so the competition only frustrates them. Though merit pay with the proper support and training could attract and hold onto better qualified teachers.

Quality ranking determines state funding of day-cares

An article in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel titled "Day-care providers to be paid based on quality under Doyle plan" caught my eye. It explains Governor Doyle's plan to create a ranking system based on quality of care that will determine how much state funding day-cares get. The ranking would be based on "the education level of the staff, the learning environment in the center as well as business practices, and the health and well-being of children."

I have two issues with this concept.

1. True quality of care can't be measured objectively. Educational level of staff does not necessary equate with quality care-givers. And things like the health and well-being of children can't be measured. Plus a certain type of learning environment with one set of children may not be appropriate at all for a different set of children.

2. This type of plan allows rich day-cares to get richer and poor day-cares to get poorer. If we cut funding significantly to a day-care that can't hire teachers with a master's degree, how can we expect them to find the money to find teachers with more education. We will be seeing this same thing in schools that are not meeting the goals of No Child Left Behind. Eventually funding will get cut, and the schools will only get worse.

Instead let's deal with the real issue here: fraud. Instead of focusing on quality and spending money to do so in such a poor economy, we need to just focus on enforcing the expectations that come with state funding of day-cares. And let parents set expecations of quality by choosing where they send their children.

Mayoral control of MPS

Governor Doyle and his supporters are proposing a change to WI public schools that would give the Mayor of Milwaukee line item veto power of the Milwaukee Public School's budget as well as other control. There was an article in today's Milwauke Journal Sentinel. What just doesn't make sense to me about this proposal is why anyone would think we could improve public schools by giving someone with no education background or understanding basically sole control of the school system. To me that sounds like setting us up for bigger failures.

Yes, we need reform. And yes, that may mean brining in some from outside of the education field to give a different perspective. But to give sole control to one man with little to no knowledge of best practices in education?