GO GEORGIA! GO MISSOURI!

Like many states, indeed like our own Missouri, Georgia has had to dig deep to pull themselves up by their bootstraps after finding themselves virtually at the bottom of America's educational heap. Their answer to continuous failure of public schools was not found in pumping more money into an obviously flawed public school system. They are finding their answer in education reform.

Missouri can learn from Georgia and from so many other states who are experimenting with educational reform. We must learn if we are to succeed and deliver to our deserving children the hope of a bright future.

While Georgia has added many charter schools, they are finding that charter schools are not the only solution, but rather one in a series of changes necessary to help our children in very real ways. Here's a wish list presented by education commentator Jan Jones of the Atlanta Journal Constitution who says that 'Genuine reform can't be comfy' and it sounds like a good wish list for us here in Missouri:

• Recognize that teachers count most in increasing student achievement. Award generous merit pay to teachers for classroom performance. Respect the many superior teachers by ending Soviet-style equal pay increases.

• End future teacher stipends for out-of-field masters and doctoral degrees, some generated by Internet diploma mills. Instead, spend precious tax dollars on salary boosts to address desperate teaching needs.

• Give principals greater latitude in decision-making and budgeting so they can adapt schools to their students and communities. Tie increased flexibility to higher student achievement goals.

• Offer parents options in how and where their children are educated by increasing the number of high-quality public schools of choice — charter schools. The one-size-fits-hardly-anyone approach has outlived its relevancy.

Some states, school systems and other industrialized countries have embraced these and other initiatives with encouraging results. Uncomfortable to the entrenched status quo, yes. Untried and unproven, no.

What is most appealing about her suggestions is that she includes who should be most important in our education system: parents, teachers and principals. These are the people most left out of decision making in today's educracy here in Missouri. GO GEORGIA! GO MISSOURI!

Give the Schools a Chance

Unfortunately, our schools are facing hard times right now. And this is not something entirely new, but it is new to me. 10 years ago, my children were not in school. Now, I pay more attention to the problems the schools are facing. I cannot afford private schools so I have no other option. My community has wonderful teachers that genuinely seem to care about the children. Most of the teachers grew up here and they know the children's families. They all have a sense of connection and would like to see all these children succeed. I am grateful for the teachers my children have.

I have experienced other areas, some small towns and some bigger cities. It seemed to me, and many other parents agree, the teachers seem more interested in the politics than in performance. I am guessing they were not always like this, I am hoping they once were teachers who loved to inspire and teach. The bureaucracy has swallowed them and taken that certain spark out of them. Our schools need something to get things going again, something to make the teachers full of life and the children grow and learn.

The ideas of school choice and merit pay give this opportunity back to the schools. They open the schools up to competition. We live in a market driven place, like it or not. Accept that it works and apply it to where we send our most treasured people everyday.

The Worries of a Parent

The day your child is born, you are filled with so many feelings of excitement, happiness, fear, worry, you name it. The amount of love that your feel for your child is overpowering, there are no words to describe it. For some parents, staying home is an option, while for others; the child must be left with someone else. Babysitters, daycares, friends and relatives are the ones you trust your most treasured person with, ones that you know will watch out for them, teach them, and love them. It is one of the hardest decisions a parent can make. Leaving your child can be exhilarating at times and heartbreaking at others, but hopefully, you will not have to worry about your child in the childcare you have chosen. Once the child is a little older, you worry less about diaper rash, SIDS, sleeping enough, not taking a bottle, choking hazards, if they are given enough 'tummy time' and other infant concerns.

You move on to other worries. One of which will inevitably be your child's education. You worry about grades, achievement, growing quest for knowledge, and fitting in with other classmates. Your child spends about 7 hours a day at school and you would like to know that time there is well spent. A teacher can open windows to knowledge, further a child's motivation to learn, and most of all teach them lessons that will last a lifetime. Teachers need to be appreciated for all they do. Some teachers fair well and make an impact on students while others may not have the skills, charisma, or motivation to do so.

Teachers should be rewarded when their students achieve great things. Doing so may help get the best teachers there teaching our children. And then, the parent can relax knowing their child is in the best hands.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

http://shrewdnessofapes.blogspot.com/2007/12/at-least-watching-paint-dry-would-be.html

I love the Shrewdness of Apes. Ms. Cornelius is a teacher who gets it AND still has a sense of humor about it. In response to a poorly planned consulting session, she has this to say: But we got to listen to a gentleman who had been flown hundreds of miles in to be our consultant talk on and on and on and on. It took him seven and a half hours to talk about something that we completely grasped in 20 minutes.

For. The. Love. Of. Mike.

Really.

This was a 90% waste of money, and a 95% waste of time.

Here are some ideas that could be useful:
Violence prevention. Morale and team building-- we sorely need it after a rough six months in which the staff pulled together after tragedies and valiantly gave freely of their own time to re-establish our community's sense of equilibrium. Or perhaps strategies to improve student fluency and especially vocabulary in the content areas. More training for teachers with co-teachers-- PLEASE! More training on our idiotic gradebook program.

And that's just for starters.

If you don't feed the teachers, they'll eat the students. Well not really, but they certainly will get surly or exhausted. I bet if you ask teachers what they deal with on a day-to-day basis, ask them what problems aren’t going away and what they need to make the situation better, at least a few will have concise, analytic topics to offer.

Well Structured Businesses Do well, Why Not Run Schools the Same?

Businesses must follow certain rules to monitor, evaluate, and reward the best employees. The ‘lazier’ employees will go elsewhere or decide to step up to the plate. This blog wrote a great comparison of a traditional business and a school.

To sum up my idea, if you are a good teacher, you would reap the benefits of a higher salary, and compensations would not be such a burden on your paycheck. You would be wealthier if you are an "above and beyond" teacher. On the flip side, you would hate merit pay if you are a "do nothing" teacher who feels you are entitled. If you teach economics, think about the "free market system" and how competition breeds greatness. If you know you can make more money by working smarter, you're going to put more effort into your job. On the flip side, you also know that if you do nothing, you are not going to get the compensation you desire and may lose your job. This is fair. In the work place you must perform you duties or lose your job. The better you perform, the higher your compensation at time of review.

Not only would the best teachers benefit from this, students will reap the more benefits. They will finally be getting access to the best teachers there are. Schools are failing all over the country, and that does not exclude Missouri. My town, with a population less than 10,000, has a dire need for excellent teachers. Our students need the option of a great education. Many of them would like to move onto college after high school, but they need good teachers to not only make them prepared, but to get them there. The rest of their lives will be affected by a poor education. Let’s give the students and the teachers a chance.

Teaching Special Ed Teachers Needs to Happen

What I am particularly interested in is changing the requirements of DESE for our graduating teachers in MO colleges. Currently, DESE requires students majoring in "regular education" to take only one special needs class called "Exceptional Child". This is the only special needs class that our teachers have under their belt when they enter the the public school classroom, which, no doubt, has several children who are not regularly developing.

It has occurred to me that there really is no regular education in public schools, and that it is a travesty to lie to our upcoming teachers, telling them that they may consider themselves regular education teachers. For thirty years we have had a law in place saying that students with special needs should be allowed in regular classrooms, yet our achingly slow-moving higher education system has not seen fit to train its teachers how to fulfill this law. It's no wonder to me that we as parents meet with such resistence from teachers and similarly- trained administrators.

It seems with training while in college, our bright-eyed young teachers will be willing to embrace inclusion and learn how to work through issues creatively. Presently, the "regular ed" majors don't know anything about how to incorporate all their students into their teaching approach. Similarly, the special ed teachers haven't seemed to learn how to include kids with special needs into a regular ed classroom either. And these specially trained teachers, at least in our school district, are the ones that are supposed to be the support for the regular ed teachers, but they haven't been trained how to support inclusion, only how to teach in seclusion.

Merit Pay: A Change the Schools Need

Merit pay for teachers is definitely an issue these days. Many people are having quite heated debates on the topic. One critic of merit based pay is that it would be expensive to launch and evaluate the teachers year after year While this may have some validity, this site, Bipolar Nation, had this to say:

So, if education isn’t a worthy investment - at least not worthy of more taxpayer money - why does it get public funding in the first place. Do away with the Department of Education and all publicly-funded schools, and the free market will introduce its own version of “merit-based” pay. If teachers provide so much value to this world, they have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Merit based pay would allure the best teachers, reward them, and create an incentive for them to stick around. Many incredibly talented and intelligent people chose not to enter the teaching profession because of the low pay. Many others will grow frustrated with the hard work they put in without the chance of reward. I recognize most people do not enter the profession for the pay, but this does not mean those people do not deserve more.

Using the market to guide the education system is not a new idea either. Many people feel the entire education system would benefit from the ideals of a free market. The schools would compete to be the best, In terms of merit pay, the teachers would challenge themselves to be better. The market seems to be beneficial in other areas of our country, why not try them in education? For some time now, we have let schools get worse and worse. Transformation of the system is one thing we have not tried. Let's give it a shot.

Touching Story in Springfield

This story in Springfield's New Leader , portrays Weller school in a poor Springfield neighborhood, making things work. The principles, the teachers, and the students are all aware they are in a poorer school, with 86 percent of students get free and reduced lunches- one way of measuring if the children are living in poverty. However, the school is making progress and the students are benefiting. While having great academic progress every year has its challenges in Title I schools because of the issues children may deal with at home, the teachers take what they are given and have created a great learning and emotionally gratifying environment for these children.

It seems "Weller is an example of a school where teachers and students take pride in their educational community. It's also a place where poverty has a definite impact on the lives of the students."

But for all the challenges, Monroe said, Weller teachers and staff are committed to seeing students achieve. And that commitment and belief in the kids pays off.
"Kids, for the most part, will rise to your expectations," she said.
And that's one thing that's not at all hard to see.

It goes to show that teachers can make all the difference in the lives of the children. These teachers really care about the children, and the evidence is there.

Merit Pay Would Help Schools, Not Hurt Them

Some teacher’s unions are against merit pay, performance pay, or whatever people like to call it. Norm’s Notes says “it sacrifices a fundamental union principle—equal pay for equal work.” In education, should we be more concerned about the union principles or the students? Yes, the teachers are obviously important; there is no doubt about that. But first and foremost, we need to be looking out for the students.

Merit pay would give intelligent people the motivation to enter the teaching field. Some may love the idea of teaching but are not willing to sacrifice it for lower pay. Teaching offers many rewards beyond money. Many great teachers enter the field because they want to make a difference in a child’s life, or they just love to teach. Unfortunately, some of these teachers become a by-product of the bureaucratic system they work for. The teachers unions swallow them up. In the end, some may forget why they wanted to teach to begin with and they lose the passion and drive they once had. Other teachers may enter the field with good intentions, but they are just not cut out to be ones that inspire young ones to learn. In either scenario, merit pay would force these problems to be addressed. Either the teacher remains or becomes a great teacher, or their pay will not grow. They will notice other teachers making more money, and recognize why. They will then either leave the field or decide it is time for them to make a change. It should not be about collective bargaining, it should be about the children’s education.