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Today is School Board Elections…Polls are open 10-8… If anyone is sponsored by Markell or Rodell or RTTT or WSFS, don’t vote for them.. If anyone is sponsored by DSEA, they are on the students side. They are safe.
So go out and vote like a goat… Be… B-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-D
Bottom line in all cases I think everyone here would agree, is that we do what is best for the children. In certain cases in which you may find yourself in, a charter school scenario seems better to achieve that, than that situation’s public school alternative.
I guess the opposing point to your argument, would be that instead of allowing charter schools to siphon funds away from public school systems, hard changes are now needed to be implemented inside the public schools. Raise the revenue, invest in quality, and make the public school system move itself forward to do what is best for the children.
Then, the charter’s group counter-argument to THAT…, is: that is exactly what existed before charter schools were brought in! What you suggest didn’t happen then! Instead as situations got worse, administrators were told to deal with it; use good judgment. Charters are what brought in the necessary competition and now therefore they are responsible for today reforming public schools.
The retort for THAT, would be of what I spoke before: that too many mouths at the trough make thin pigs. No one benefits from too many hungry mouths fighting over too scarce resources…
And that is where this argument seems to lie. Am I seeing our differences now as question of perspective? Sort of like from where one is looking, sort of determines how one sees this problem?
Let me elaborate. charter supporters speak of charters making positive inroads on children lucky enough to attend their schools … So from the perspective of those particular kids (our number one priority) the charter moving in and siphoning resources from a neighborhood dying entity, is a very good thing… Seen from that perspective I’ll agree….
However,… as a society one has to have the broad approach. One has to look for the Ying that corresponds to the Yang… In this case, that Ying would be…. what is happening to those children NOT being put into a charter school?
The answer is….. drumroll…… that they are doing worse then when public schools alone ruled the educational fiefdom. And shockingly, students at charter schools seem across the whole to be doing worse than when public schools alone ruled the educational landscape as well….
And this is where we have to be careful… we can say, look at this Charter… see how well it is doing?
But we must first know … is it doing well comparatively because it is teaching superlatively, or because the students it takes in were originally more highly motivated to succeed in the first place? Had those same students been in public schools, would they now be boosting the public school’s results upward?
So from a theoretical perspective, it appears that the only sane way to determine whether charters have a positive or a negative impact upon societal education as a whole, is to use the numerical data to see how well students are responding now.
Doing so is a lot more complicated than this upcoming explanation, but using a simpler model will allow me to communicate it more easily. … Think if we were to give each student a number based on whether they graduated or not, and make those numbers either a +1 for graduating, or a -1 for not…. and then add up all of an entire city’s students, we would have a number for that district. We could then compare that number with numbers of the past, and also have the future come back to compare with us…
If with Charter schools in the equation, our success (graduation) number for ALL combined Public and Charter students is lower than it was before the time that Charters came in, then despite lots of individual success stories, the concept of starting charters is over the total system, … disruptive… On the other hand, if with Charters our comprehensive success (graduation) number is higher than it was before Charters came in……. then thank heavens, someone brought in charter schools…..
Does that make sense? If we took all of Delaware and compared all the numbers of students who meet the graduation standards before Charter Schools came in to disrupt, and compared that with all the numbers of students who meet the graduations standards now, … we would see, flat out, if that disruption was a positive one, or a negative one! Is that clearer?
I think what has always quantified the difference in perspective between the two camps,… charter versus non-charter, is that one side is adding the negative numbers into the equation, and the other side is strictly only looking at the positive spectrum…
As in positive: … “look this kid was failing but now in a charter he is graduating… Isn’t that great”. Versus,“look over here, these two kids are dropping out of public school while one person graduates from a charter, that’s a combined score of a negative one… We should switch priorities, fund public education and then at least, should the charter wither and fail, we’d have a score of a positive one at the very least. Positive three if the kid in the charter succeeds!”
And if I’m a good writer, I’ve led you right to the solution that should be forming in your mind right now as you read this… The real solution is to refund education, period; allowing for both the successful existing charters to continue, and for adequately funding public education to provide increased opportunities to close the gaps still existing among our students. Remember again, our goal is our children.
Public education thrived post second World War! Only when the tax revolt began and people even considered lowering property taxes and cutting spending, did quality levels of education start declining. We once had a very robust educational system… How can we tell? Our nation today is the byproduct of that intergenerational system stretching beginning and end across the 20th Century.
But somewhere in the 80′s we began to make a conscious choice as a society that we would benefit more if we gave the wealthy more wealth and gave public education and other things… less..
Somewhere in the past we as a society made a conscious choice to allow our nation’s leaders to put less money into education, and keep more for themselves and their friends…. ( of course in fairness, we thought we were going to get some of it too…. Psyche!)
And the longer and longer I look at today’s educational problem and all the millions of pieces that need to be glued back together, the more and more I come to the inevitable conclusion that we simply really need to take that money back, invest it where it should have been all along, and still, keep that same fire in our bellies which we have now, and make education fun again so that great things can happen…..
Just like it probably did for each and every one of us… After all, we’re reading blogs for heaven’s sakes… Where on earth did THAT curiosity come from? Does that make us all sort of weird? lol.
I’d never thought I’d write that. How could anyone in their right mind be against raising teacher’s standards… After all it is our kids we are talking about who will suffer….
Exactly, Passing SB 51 with S/A 1 Amendment attached, will cause our kids to suffer. That’s how I can write that. Otherwise I’d be full force behind this bill just as was every senator who voted for it….
You ask, how can raising standards on teachers, hurt our children?
I will ask you back; ”How would you like to take your brand new car you just purchased to Joe The Mechanic’s Auto Shop and have him work it over? How could that possibly hurt your car?”
Basically that’s what this law does for education. It is as if we passed a law for cars that said every new car purchased had to be re-certified by Joe The Mechanic’s Auto Shop. The entire premise on this auto legislation lies in this one single question: gee, who is Joe?
If Joe is someone who is the world’s best mechanic, factory trained by every car manufactured, a man or woman who can analyze myriads of problems by just with listening with a fine-tuned ear, then maybe this bill could possibly be ok. But if Joe has no knowledge of electronic computers, but learned his mechanics back in the days of steel and oil, and is a complete loss when he sees a car with no distributer cap, then taking your car that runs perfectly to Joe The Mechanic’s Auto Shop, can damage your car pretty darn bad.
And THAT is the problem with SB 51… We don’t know who Joe is….
What we do know, is that our car is purring perfectly, heck we just bought it, everything was tuned at the factory. Since it is straight from the factory, it is running very well, no play in the wheel, clean car smell, all items are working, and even our factory tells us to make sure we take it back to a “factory approved shop” for all repairs in order not to void the warranty…. But our government is making us take it to Joe The Mechanic’s Auto Shop.… And we still don’t know who Joe is?
And we are not too enthralled by all the junk cars piled up in its back lot…….
That is what is wrong with SB 51….
Our great educational training program that is functioning very well, is going to be tested and inspected by someone who doesn’t know crap…
That should scare the hell out of every single parent….
The educational system of America over the last 13 years has been disrupted. Good teachers have been fired, to be replaced with bad ones. Students used to read literature, and now they are handed “packets” and read test questions. Schools that have been opened for a century, have been closed…. The educational system is in disarray; a disarry that appears to have been forced down from the top.
We’ve all been there… The new boss walks in, and yells “things are going to be different now”. Some are excited, some are afraid, but this boss is out of control… He arbitrarily fires, can’t hire fast enough, and the business breaks down. It becomes broken. He came into fix, and it got put… into a fix. So he storms out, blaming all those left for his need to make an exit. And then everyone is asked to put it back together, and they do, then the next boss is hired… If you work in America, you’re guaranteed to have been through this scenario.
We are going to do that with teachers? Who’s this guy, Joe again? Is this test going to be made by the same ones that lowered Delaware’s results? Is this test going to be like those 5th grader tests loaded with 7th grade questions using letters a,b,c in algebraic math?
As that car owner, we have the best educational system bar none. Delaware educators have among toughest standards in the country. Counting every school, even the most stringent Ivy League schools, the University of Delaware is ranked 37th in the nation. That’s ahead of Rutgers, Temple, and even Boston University. Delaware State University is solid Tier 2 school.
Currently in Delaware’s educational programs, only one third make it through the tough gauntlet into teaching. All students graduating from UD, DSU, and WU have passed Praxis I and II; have logged hundreds of hours of observation and additional hundreds more hours of supervised teaching under the watchful eye of master teachers in our public schools. Compared to the standards even 10 years ago, new Delaware teachers graduated by these universities are the best prepared to enter the classroom in our history.
Delaware should be pretty damn proud. Instead we appear to be on the verge of committing a rash act full of unintended consequences. Our head is in the sand. Ok, the argument may go…. “If we’re so good, what possiblE harm can befall us if we take our new baby to Joe The Mechanic’s Auto Shop?
Apart from the fact that we do not know who “Joe” is or will be when we get there, there are these reasons. The changes in SB 51/SA-1 actually lower some credentialing standards rather than raise them [see the section on now accepting Composite Scores].
Currently all Delaware student teachers take the Praxis One and the Praxis Two. No pass, no teach. These are the factory cars in the educational equation. There are composed by NCATE, National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. This is a very solid organization. If you go to their website right now, you will see that they pre-published their accreditation standards for public view and comments. They also dropped Wesley College’s accreditation for not living up to the standards.
This bill would replace these standards with ones created by the Delaware Department of Education. Returning to the Joe The Mechanic’s Auto Shop analogy, one has to wonder how a 3 year Phys Ed elementary teacher, can do better than a national organization that accredits schools.
Delaware has the 37th BEST teacher school ranked in the nation. And after this bill is passed, we are going to completely gut our entire program out of all we do so well, and have a 3 year elementary Physical Education Teacher rebuild our entire program from scratch….. One who has never gone through the RTTT testing he inflicts on others? One who quite questionably doesn’t meet the minimum 5 year requirement necessary to be a DOE?
It’s in the bill. that is what it says.
Would we let someone who has never been a doctor create the state’s medical certification program? Would we let a non-lawyer create the state’s Bar exam? Would we let a manager of McDonalds create our state’s nutritional guidelines?
With this administration and this Senate, I really don’t know. We just might, based on what I’m seeing right before me!
So, you are saying you would really take your BMW, Rolls, or Cadillac to Joe The Mechanic’s Auto Shop to be certified to drive it in Delaware? Wouldn’t you be afraid he’d mess it up, especially since it is working rather well right now? Ranked 37th!..
I can hear “Joe” now… “What are all these damn stupid wires for. (Rip,rip,rip) My old Model T never had this crap”…
It’s our kids. We can’t rush this, and this bill has been rushed far too fast through the Senate. The House needs to slow down and debate this one…
We can’t afford to lose our 37th top spot in the nation for which we worked so hard and so long to get….. We got to stop this bill that will make our cars all go to “Joe’s” .
Two big tragedies last week. Two bombs go off in Boston killing a total of 3 people, and a quirk explosion in West, Texas, demolishing a fertilizer plant and killing 14 for which we can find bodies for, and leaving 60 people still unaccounted …
One got unlimited media attention; the other a passing mention.
One shut down our 22nd largest city. The other will be investigated at some future point.
The differences are intriguing.
The Boston Massacre was a textbook case of how to find a bad guy. As Steve notes here, we’ve been planning for an event like this a long time. Homeland Security produced an army to “invade” Boston in order to find the perpetrators. They shut down transportation, and went door to door. Ironically, despite the effort and expense it was luck that gave them their men. The initial dragnet missed the one in the boat, and only when the curfew was lifted, did the boat owner find him and alert authorities.
What was Boston’s cost? Well, add up fuel for all the vehicles, armored cars, and helicopters. Add up all the overtime pay for police, fire, ambulance, and the para military troops brought in. Add the economic cost of shutting down the 22nd largest city for a day… It’s so big, I can’t even guess. We’ll have to wait for the number crunchers with receipts actually in their hands. But particularly with including the economic cost somewhere near a $billion, that means we spent a billion dollars to catch 2 people that were really caught by a) being run over by the other bomber, and b) a man stepping out for a smoke….
But we still, … cost ourselves a billion dollars….
Now. Texas. We had a combined 24,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia and ammonium nitrate. It wasn’t required to obtain a state air emissions permit because it was so old. In 2004 they were supposed to come up and get reauthorized by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. “They failed to do so.”
Federal documents say the plant did not have required security and safety plans in place. the EPA fined the plant more than $2,000 in 2006 for failing to update a risk management plan. In response, the site’s operators told the EPA that the plant posed no risk of fire or explosion. The worst case, plant officials said, would be a 10-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one.
The EPA also found that West Fertilizer did not have a formal maintenance program and that its employee training records were poor. In addition, the plant was found in violation of key security measures by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The agency discovered that the plant had planned to transport anhydrous ammonia without making or following a security plan. Last summer, regulators fined the plant $10,000, then settled for $5,250…. And now we find the fertilizer had 1350 times the legal amount of fertilizer material than it was allowed….
Was too much money spent by government leading up to the explosion? Or too little? Were we lulled by a litany from the Texas Republicans that companies could police themselves, and that we didn’t need to spend any money on regulations and enforcing standards? Of course we were. It all started by that guy who once owned the Texas Rangers, who said he would “cut taxes”…
Since we cut taxes we have had multiple issues. And since that time when taxes first got cut, it is easy to see our successes all come about when we, the United States Government, spends money lavishly… When we cut back, we get nothing but trouble with a capital “T”….
So our success come when we tax and spend. Our failures come when we cut taxes and fire, close down, and destroy jobs.
There comes a time when profits get so high, that hiring new people bites into them. WE have reached that point. Corporate profits have never been as high as they are today. Yet we have 15 million underemployed. The hard way to fix it, is to force businesses to hire more people they don’t want. The easy way is to tax some of that profit that certainly is not necessary for the businesses’ survival… I mean corporations have lived on less since the beginning of time, then hire an inspector who has the authority to close a Texas fertilizer plant when it flagrantly defies the law.
America needs to accept this is how it has to be.
We need things done! Eight years of Bush’s neglect plus the 2 years of having the Tea Party corral Congress, has severely damaged America! Putting America back to work, and boosting sales to corporations who benefit from all new economic activity, and using those workers to fix what is broken in America, is a win, win, win situation…..
So at what level should the assessed tax be? It appears that since incentive is a huge part of capitalization, the level of taxation needs to be below 50%. Simply put, if I invest $1 million and lose money on that, what was the point of the investment? Therefore, it appears that after a certain income level ($5 million?) taxes after all deductions should be around 40% of all income earned. If you have too much money, keeping 60% is certainly profitable. ;
Considering our current situation, a) a thriving economy, b) a current 40% tax rate on the top 1%, and c) still high unemployment, tweaking the tax law towards deductions, so that deductions only started after the first 40% got paid, might be the silver bullet that our nation needs, one which will cut the deficit, hire the unemployed, and use both to rebuild America.
We need more money, and we have to get it. Period. All future American successes depend upon it…
Courtesy of Support Public Schools
Time’s Woman Of The Year:
How one all-nighter of erasures set American Education Back 20 years. Not since Hitler invaded France has one person set back civilization as much.
Top secret footage smuggled out of a recent DOE meeting showing what corporate education has planned and is planning for this year’s tests.
(Teachers, if you have similar experiences, send your stories under untraceable names to any of these addresses… Just drop the story in the comment tray at the bottom of any article and share your story….. This is not time to be vindictive or name names; we’re just trying to channel the information past those on top who are damming the natural flow….)
In alphabetic order:
http://kilroysdelaware.wordpress.com/
http://mindofmrmatthews.wordpress.com/
http://transparentchristina.wordpress.com/
Send us your stories and we’ll mainstream them…. Looking forward to some good writing! …
Courtesy of Sprinkler Scape.
Republicans gorge themselves over having a second black couple to diss….
Yum,Yum,Yum.
“You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. …”
Martin Luther King Letter from a Birmingham Jail April 16, 1963….
Here is a copy of Markell’s State of the State speech. i wanted to take his speech and break it down, piece by piece, and analyze it.
Bear with me. If your are following along or wrote this speech, I am only concerning myself with the part under the headline: A Great Economy Demands Great Schools…
The impetus seems to be on: providing a world class education…. That sounds great and when I heard it first, I cheered it on. But now if you pressed me I couldn’t define it. How does one determine a world class level for education? Especially nations where many different languages are spoken? Some nations require many languages in their curriculum. They succeed but at a cost to high math scores. Some nations do well on math scores. They fail on creativity and ethics. We will soon be competing with the world for jobs. So do we model our education on Finland? On India? On China? or do we stick with Belgium, Netherlands, England, France and Switzerland? Or do we use the methods of Brazil?
Anyone who has traveled globally knows exactly what I’m talking about. There are so many methods being used across the globe, that using the term “world class education”, could describe situations different as the interior of Mali and downtown Sydney….
So then before beginning, we must ask for a clearer definition of “world class”…
Moving on.
Let’s make this about the children, not the adults. For my part, I speak on this issue not only as a governor, but as a father. When it comes to decisions about education, our kids deserve our total focus and commitment.
Now here is the biggest bone of contention right now. Based on feedback from a) parents, b) teachers, c) administrators, and d) students, these new changes we are undertaking are not helping children. They are putting them further behind.
Now I don’t mean to be nasty or put anyone down. There was a lot of evidence presented to us that implied a “get tough” attitude on poor schools improved test scores. But instead, the reality was not what we were told. One of the great examples that led to this program being rolled out nationwide, was the success of Atlanta’s inner city. We were told a miracle had taken place. Inner city children were rapidly learning. Alas, .. we were fooled, there was just widespread cheating going on. They didn’t learn anything after all.
Michelle Rhee has been campaigning for cracking down on inner city schools. But allegations of cheating occurred during her reign as controller of DC’s schools. Test scores that climbed magnificently, while the children have no idea how to do the problems when the meet them again in the next grade.
Texas was the granddaddy of them all. The great scores of Texas’s inner city youth, so great they compelled the “leave no child behind ” mandate across America (look at Texas we were told), whose many parts were reincorporated into Race to The Top.– all those great scores were faked. Texas dropped on knowledge vis a vis with other states despite higher test scores. We were given false results and the whole nation pursued a program that did not work the first time, or the second….
It appears that none of these programs actually do what is wanted: which is to help the children.
And what does work? Human relationships. A love bond between teacher and student. A teacher teaches her best because that is what she was born to do. A child learns his best, because he wants the teacher to be proud of them.
Can we put that into an institutionalized setting? I don’t know. But I think most baby boomers had that growing up. So, it can be done, but how to return to that setting in todays modern time, will take some experimentation…
Moving on.
Built upon four cornerstones that stand on their own:
• Improving student readiness by holding them to high standards.
• Effectively using student data to drive classroom results.
• Ensuring teacher quality.
• Turning around persistently low-performing schools.
Holding students to higher standards. The worst possible thing one can do to a child, is force him to give up. Raising standards without raising the curve, does exactly that. An A student who strives to keep up his grade average, gives up when all he gets are C’s. What’s the point. A C student who dutifully studies to keep a passing grade, gives up when all he gets are F’s… In both cases they were doing all they could do. Society considers them good students. But the same test they took last year, is now graded higher. If one got a 5 at a score of 900, now it takes 950 to get the same. If one got a 3 at the score of 750, now it takes an 800 to achieve the same….
This in no way helps students. All it does is demoralize those who get shuffled downward by the curb.
We just had Delaware Women fall out of the final 16. We are all proud. But what if we arbitrarily changed the rules? What if we said, the final 8 will be determined not by whom was beaten by whom, but by the total number of baskets their team shot across the entire tournament. Suddenly a team that scored in the 80′s instead of the 50′s, goes forward, even though they’d been beaten in the first round by a team with fewer tournament points. Suddenly Delaware’s great run means very little. We are a loser like everyone else. “Oh, you should have tried harder to make baskets” they all say. I wonder who returns back to their home court with their heads high. I wonder who tries harder the next year. I wonder which teams recruit only guards with very high three point kill rates?
Higher standards do not work. They just mean fewer people can reach them. The do nothing for the top few elite who will be above 950 anyways. They ruin lives for everyone else… Higher standards on tests hurt our children. There is nothing wrong with what we are teaching now. The problem is that we are not teaching what we are teaching well enough so those on the bottom get it. Teaching even more, will do nothing to elevate the bottom. It will do nothing to put more into the top. All it will do, is make children think they are failures and give up….
Second. Using student data to drive classroom results. There have been cartoons this year showing students taking tests and the administrators joking that firing the teachers and just testing every school day could save them money. There is some sense to using technology to help students. However, theoretically, if tests are given 2 hours each day, how much instruction does that bite into? 10 hours a week? 40 hours a month? 360 hours a year? That last total is the equivalent at a 6 hour day, of 60 days spent taking tests. Remember, we are only talking about 2 hours a day, which in High School, is pretty accurate. Under which scenario does one learn new things better? During instruction? Or taking tests… ummm a? b? c? or d? On the other hand, the new software integrating parents, students, and teachers on the same page as grades get posted on a daily basis, is a godsend. Putting parents into the mix is rather helpful in creating a positive learning experience for each child.
Third. Ensuring teacher quality. This is a noble goal. But one of the great mysteries of Ancient Greece was that the Spartans who were rigorously disciplined and toughened to the highest order, almost always lost to the Athenians who were dilettantes in comparison. Imposing structure erases creativity. There is a tendency among government types to make all state employees into solders. That means drill Sergent techniques; it means battlefield toughening. In a military application, those techniques are necessary because in battle the mind gets blown; training has to take over. The only equivalent in a class room to such an experience, is if a student puts a gun to a teacher’s head… Our techniques are jeopardizing the sole proven tactic of transferring knowledge. A positive bond between teacher and student…. an understanding that success depends solely on the amount of knowledge downloaded from one to the other.
Here is where our education is facing its biggest problem… We are using the wrong tests to determine if a teacher should stay or go. We are putting teachers into a spot where they must cheat or fail. Since all up the ladder are accountable for the results that teacher brings, they do not insist with too much effort, that cheating does not occur. The best way to have a measurment of a student’s progress, is to remove teacher accountability from the testing. If a teacher keeps her job anyways, she does not have to cheat to get good results. Our results are accurate as to what a student knows or does not know. Of course, once we know exactly what a student does not know, we can rectify it.
Getting rid of all standardized testing is not the answer. Removing job safety concerns from these tests, is the answer. Ontario has done this. The tests are tools, opening a window into the soul of each child, and a teacher can then, fill in the blanks that got missed somewhere down the line…. Ontario, is probably the best in North America, to show real growth in their children across the board.
Turning around low performing schools. This is easy to do… Logically, focus on what works. A loving teacher and student relationship. To achieve that in a higher need school, you need more teachers. The ideal number would be eleven students for one teacher. If using the test scores, we were able to group students based off their scores into groups of eleven, so the average deviation between scores was 50 or 100 points, great headway could be made. For example in a grade of two hundred twenty students, twenty teachers would be needed. Using the bell curve the lowest eleven would be in one class, the second lowest eleven in another, as well as the highest eleven in another class, the second highest eleven in another, and so on. Those in the middle on the cusp of the curve, would probably be within one or two points of each other. But the beauty is that classes would be homogenized around their standard ability. A teacher wouldn’t be answering a top students question, when the person right next to him, had no clue what was even asked. They also wouldn’t cover a basic idea, thirty times until the student gets it, boring the top student next to him into giving up….
Testing is not the answer. Testing is a tool. Teachers are the answer. Teachers are not tools….
A student who can barely read or do math, does not need to be guessing at a physics problem far above his level. Likewise, for a physics student to answer a question of what is 2 +2 =__, is equally a wasted effort…. And this is where we err. Thinking that tests and corporate programs we buy into, can make that low performing student, suddenly get excited by a physics problem far above his grade level, and suddenly decided to become a math whiz. Reality fails to work that way….
Moving on.
But it is not enough to set high standards. Our students have to meet them. To do so, Delaware will use its rich data system and new assessment to support decision-making in the classroom. Good use of the data will make teachers and schools more effective. Parents and students will be able to use this information to demand that schools deliver.
Exactly what I said. But don’t use it to get rid of teachers or all we will get is teaching to the test and more cheating. The kids will learn how to take tests; not learn anything about the subject matter.
To that end, we will work with our institutions of higher education to establish teacher residency programs. We will develop a pipeline for strong principals by establishing leadership preparation programs. And we must better compensate teachers who produce results in our most challenging schools.
This sounds good and I find no fault with it’s aims. However your compensation packages are not effective. Being corporate hounds, monetary incentives are the first motivator one thinks of. I did the same. However, interaction with teachers, students and parents, has led me to believe there are better rewards. Teachers did not sign up to teach as a career for money. In public schools, I don’t think you can find one who is there to get rich. Talk to any teacher, and once they trust you, you understand they are there because they love to teach… THAT is what moves them. THAT is what moved each of our mentors that stick out from our early educational days. They love to teach. So the best way to motivate teachers is not with compensation, but, in making them teach even better by giving them more resources than they have now.
And the best way to get teachers to teach better is to limit their classes to 11 students… Whoever can achieve that goal first, will be the top educator in the world. Business will flock to that location just to absorb the talent of that labor pool…
If we are serious about education, we need to invest in more teachers, more schools, more infrastructure, and get our class sizes down to 11 students per teacher….
Only then, when every student doesn’t want to let either their peers or their teacher down, will we begin the resurrection of our educational system.
But, some people still don’t get it.
“We are requiring that new teachers show appropriate levels of student growth before receiving tenure. In addition, we have adopted a robust evaluation system under which teachers whose students do not show satisfactory levels of growth cannot be rated “effective.” Teachers whose students do show satisfactory levels of growth cannot be rated “ineffective.” We will also improve teacher preparation programs by linking teacher performance to the schools from which they graduated.”
It is still all about the test. This has to change….
But having world class schools does not alone ensure that all our children will get a world-class education. For that, we need an increase in parent’s engagement with their children’s education.
Parents need to realize the tests are hurting their kids. Across America this season, as tests are being rolled out in state after state, it is the parents who vote, who are asking their legislators the tough question. How does this test help my kid? When asked, the legislators agree with them that tests don’t.
Education has gotten worse since we went to standardized testing. Parents in Delaware need to increase their engagement with Delaware’s legislators and appeal to Governor Markell with their concerns.
My concern started because a little girl who loved English last year, who is in Common Core this year, says this year she has learned absolutely nothing… Nothing new.
When you think of the great United States of America and all the hopes, dreams, and visions it once held…. that is just so sad. So sad.
…. said Rick Jensen as Liz Allen finished and hung up the phone before Rick could answer….
I usually drive in silence but I laughed out loud when I heard that. Seriously glad I was not drinking coffee that very second…
To set the background, Rick was trying to pin the blame on unions like would a normal corporate shill and Liz called in and was objecting…
Basically her argument was that there were a lot of things wrong with this Kinder Morgan Deal. Most of you know, I’ve outlined many. Al Mascitti has outlined some. Nancy Willing outlined some. Norinda outlined some. Bobby Marshall has outlined some. John Kowalko has outlined some. The News Journal writers and editorialists have outlined some. Even Alan Levin truthfully outlined some…. And of course, Liz Allen was Delaware’s voice. She outlined many…. And don’t even mention that the entire House of the General Assembly, both Democrats and Republicans unanimously voted for General Assembly oversight on this strange thing happening, despite the Governor and Alan Lavin saying…”shouldn’t do that!!!”
THE ENTIRE HOUSE OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY VOTED FOR SENATE BILL 3 YET KINDER MORGAN IS SINGLING OUT A LABOR LEADER, JULIUS CEPHAS? ? ?
All of these people are more to blame for swaying public opinion than Julius Cephas. However, truth be told, without Julius, none of these people would be swaying public opinion…. He didn’t harangue, he didn’t bash, he’d didn’t twist arms…
All Julius did to persuade this wave against Kinder Morgan, was speak the “truth”. The letter paints Julius as a feisty uncooperative fiery personality… Anyone who’s sat on a panel with Julius finds that hard to believe. That is not how Julius handles adversity. He digs down and works.
Of course as we all age we come to realize that anything is possible. But if we are going to allow ourselves to consider even the most outrageous items, what I find far more possible, and far more probable, was that Kinder Morgan was seriously planning on cutting jobs. Furthermore, it probably had it’s eye on the DRBA portion of the state pension fund… Speaking strictly as a vulture capitalist here… who wouldn’t?
Apparently Julius Cephas was in the way… We all owe him a thank you.
I know Texas gas firms. This deal is not off. What we have here is a lighter being held up to Delaware’s foot. To scare us a little, try to get us to move things up, to get us to concede… They sharply deduced that to have a successful operation here, they need to do away with the union. Hence, instead of excoriating Bob Marshall’s leadership, which they would have done if they truly were to pick up and go, …knowing they might need him later instead they chose to focus on Julius Cephas…
Can they turn the state into an out-roar against Julius and the Longshoreman’s union, so much so that we offer them a counter-offer with “the union” completely eclipsed out of it?
In their minds they think they can. They’re Texans… Look at Governor Perry. (Hope you weren’t drinking hot coffee right there… )
What they don’t realize is that to convince Delaware to come aboard, they have to accomplish all these four things…
A. Convince us first on the concept of privatization; Trust us, our state is completely against it.
B. Give us $5 billion for 50 years.
C. Promise us the Longshoreman’s Union will be around forever .
D. Expand business so the outside businesses will grow…..
I think this is more money than they want to bear right now…. But if they are willing to agree to these propositions, send us an offer….
Us Delawareans are a little stronger negotiators, with a little more backbone, than is Alan Levin…. I’m sorry from a honesty point of view, if his actions sort of misled you.
There are two ways to do business. One is do what is best for the business by being selfish.. The second is to do what is best for the customer and community, which in our view, turns out to be what is best for the business.
Delawareans (minus Rich Heffron) subscribe to the latter…..
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