California: Contracts hold back schools

Imagine you're a manager and you have to fill two of every five openings with specific candidates or candidates from a predetermined pool, regardless of their qualifications and fit for the job. That's what principals in the nation's public schools are asked to do, according to a new report that faults union contracts for preventing administrators from hiring the best teachers.

The San Diego Unified School District was one of five studied by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit organization that works with urban districts to improve teacher recruitment, training and support. The report was praised by California Secretary of Education Alan Bersin, San Diego Unified's former superintendent, for bringing to light a bureaucratic issue that he said hurts student achievement. But it also drew fierce criticism from union leaders, who see it as another attempt at union bashing. They contend that the report unfairly blames teachers for failures in public schools, when many other factors are responsible for student achievement.

"I know what we need. We need smaller class sizes. We need safe working conditions in urban schools. We need to make sure we have abundant supplies, materials, and microscopes for our students, and we need strong administrators who are supportive of learning environments," said Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Association. Terry Pesta, president of the San Diego Education Association, agreed. And San Diego school board member John de Beck said principals sometimes are the problem, not teachers. He has heard of cases where principals harass or arbitrarily remove teachers. "You can't fix something wrong by giving the principal more power to do wrong," he said.

Union contracts in urban districts commonly include seniority provisions that guarantee incumbent teachers first dibs on job openings. In San Diego, for example, teachers who lose their jobs when low enrollment or academic underperformance prompts a campus closure are guaranteed placement elsewhere. Contracts also typically give teachers who are cut from their campuses because of an enrollment drop or budget reductions high priority to fill vacancies. Teachers who voluntarily seek transfers are also given priority over outside candidates, regardless of their qualifications. These contract provisions, the report says, hurt students, principals and fellow teachers by forcing teachers onto campuses that may not be right for them.

Robin Stern, principal of Hearst Elementary School in Del Cerro and president of the Administrators Association of San Diego, said that this year she was assigned two teachers from King Elementary, a school that closed because of underperformance and reopened as a charter. Stern said she did not have a chance to interview the teachers. Fortunately, she said, the teachers turned out great.

Other principals are not so lucky. According to the study, 26 percent of San Diego principals surveyed said that all or almost all of the surplus teachers foisted on them have been unsatisfactory. Twenty-one percent reported that more than half of the voluntary transfers were unsatisfactory. The reason, the report said, is some principals get rid of undesirable teachers by putting them on transfer and surplus lists to avoid the time-consuming process of terminating them. Last school year, 880 San Diego teachers were on the voluntary transfer and surplus list. This year, there were 1,615. In San Diego, a quarter of the principals reported that they either had encouraged a poorly performing teacher to transfer or placed one on the surplus list.

Firing a teacher can take a few years because a principal must document deficiencies and provide opportunities to improve. A teacher can contest the dismissal at a trial-like hearing. From 2003 to 2005, only six San Diego teachers were dismissed out of 38 recommended for removal, mostly because of professional incompetence. Those not dismissed either resigned, retired or settled with the district. Nearly half of San Diego principals also reported that they tried to hide vacancies from the district's human resources department to avoid filling them with voluntary transfers or surplus teachers.

Stern of Hearst Elementary believes it's rare for principals to try to circumvent contract provisions, but she acknowledges they do limit hiring choices. "We are very much bound by the contract," she said. A particular concern, she said, is when declining enrollment and budget reductions force teacher cuts. Principals are required to remove the least senior teacher, regardless of their performance, unless someone else volunteers to leave. "Schools all over the district are suffering from declining enrollment, and they are losing wonderful teachers they'd love to keep," she said.

The contract provisions are unfair to principals, because they are held accountable for student achievement when they don't have full control over hiring, said Julie White, director of communications for the Association of California School Administrators. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, principals can be removed if their school consistently fails to make adequate progress. "Today's principal is not like today's CEO," White said. "They don't have the discretion to come into a situation, rearrange and reconfigure. It's not like that in public education, and it never has been."

However, some school districts across the nation are beginning to negotiate changes to their teacher contracts for more staffing flexibility. The New York City public school system recently adopted a contract that eliminates seniority transfer rules and the placement of surplus teachers into jobs without a school's consent.

The report noted that principals need to be held accountable if they are given more hiring power. It recommends that a formal process be created so teachers can provide annual feedback to the district's superintendent about their principal's performance. Another recommendation is to involve teachers and other school staff in hiring decisions. The report further acknowledges that fixing staffing problems will not by itself cure all the ills in public education. But they believe it will go a long way toward improving teacher quality.

Research has consistently shown the quality of instruction determines to a large extent whether students succeed or fail. "The fact of the matter is kids who have three or four strong teachers in a row will soar no matter what their family background is, whereas kids who have two weak teachers in a row never recover," said Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, which has done studies on how teacher qualifications affect student achievement.

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WHOLESALE CHEATING IN BRITISH "COURSEWORK": BACK TO EXAMS?

As if already low standards were not enough

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, demanded a wholesale review of coursework in A levels and GCSEs yesterday after the examinations watchdog found evidence of widespread cheating. A two-year review of more than a dozen subjects carried out by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has revealed a virtual free-for-all among students, teachers and parents in carrying out assignments. Coursework is an integral part of A levels and GCSEs, making up between 20 and 60 per cent of the marks allocated. The revelations cast doubt on the continually rising grades for both sets of exams and raise questions about the credibility of vocational qualifications.

In one of the most fundamental rethinks to public examinations in a generation, Ms Kelly has called for the QCA to reconsider coursework on a "subject by subject basis" and for it to be used only "where it is the most valid way of assessing subject specific skills". In a letter to Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, Ms Kelly clearly hinted it should be dropped from maths and science GCSEs, saying coursework should not be "the favoured approach where its primary purpose is to assess knowledge and skills which can equally well be assessed in other ways".

During the review, two thirds of maths teachers told the QCA that coursework - which is often done from home - was "sometimes problematic" as students could easily find answers on the internet or get siblings and parents to do the work for them. The in-depth investigation into subjects from English to history, maths and religious studies, revealed that plagiarism via the internet, collusion and "coursework cloning", where teachers give students too much help, were some of the ways pupils attempted to improve their grades.

At GCSE level, one in 20 parents admitted to doing their children's coursework, with fewer doing the same at A level. But it was the use of the internet that posed the greatest threat, according to Dr Boston. "In a very small proportion of cases there is deliberate malpractice," he said. "The availability of the internet is a powerful aid to learning but carries risks of plagiarism."

As well as issuing advice to exam boards, the QCA has appointed a taskforce to clear up confusion about how much help is allowed. Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, which has been a strong critic of coursework, said that Ms Kelly's decision was "a step in the right direction". "Coursework is obviously open to cheating and there should be much more emphasis, and more marks, on proper invigilated exams. Most youngsters can get well on the way to achieving a decent pass before they even take an exam, so coursework must have played a part in grade inflation over the years," he said. Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the review was very sensible

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MODERN EDUCATION DESPISES OUR OWN CULTURE

American institutions - documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the concepts of checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism and subsidiarity - make the United States a novus ordo seclorum, new and a perpetual source of renewal, precisely by conforming to the great tradition of political philosophy. Our culture is rooted in a realization that history is a conversation in which not only are we but one voice, but in which we are obliged to earn our right to speak. This requires that we listen and then, since silence means death to a culture, contribute something of value. It is this outward focus, this adherence to tradition, that is the lifeblood of our culture. And to be traditional is essentially to look beyond the given moment - not only to learn from the past, but to plan for the future.

This is why each generation must conserve those things that are essential - for us, the institutions that define our nation - and pass them on to its youth. A culture must continually unfold, as it were, to impress each subsequent group of people who are to become responsible "carriers" of the nation's symbols and so the preservers of true American culture. This unfolding and passing on is our charge - it is the charge to educate our youth.

Liberal education, a philosophy of education interested in objective and abiding truths about mankind that attempts, essentially, to teach the student how to learn, battles the propensity a culture has to turn in upon itself by drawing the student out of himself. Liberal education strives to free the student of that which is unecessary - to free him from the trite, the perverse, and the banal. This is an emptiness most readily found by measuring the world, not by standards set by objective reality, but by man's own ego. And yet, this is the emptiness found in most universities - indeed, it is occassionally their ideal. Behind the veil of self-discovery and multi-culturalism, as well as the lure of various student activist organizations and extra-curricular activities, all most run-of-the-mill universities seem to offer students today is the opportunity for the student to discover that his opinions bear as much weight, not only as those of his fellows at university, students and professors alike, but as all the great tradition of thinkers, most of whom he may never confront in his studies, as they've been replaced in the curriculum by the opus of a twenty-four year old feminist vegan who just last week won the Nobel Prize for Multi-Diverse Cultural Sensitivity. And why? It would seem to be because she's so "outside the box," but the truth is, it's because she spouts the exact same thing that everyone else does. She's what you read when you lack boldness as a student - she's for the comfort seekers who want nothing more than to rail against traditionalists while staring in the mirror.

It is this incestuous tendency toward narcissism that threatens the American ideal, and its destruction is nowhere more apparent than in our colleges and universities - places of learning through which our culture is meant to be preserved. The belief that there is no greater moment than the present spoils the mind of the student more than almost any other, by shutting the student off from the past and so making it impossible for him to contribute to the future. To be enamored of only the present moment is truly a fruitless enterprise, and yet it is the narcissism of the "given moment" that is passed on in university today.

Milan Kundera lends us a great term to describe this sterile egotism: kitsch. Kitsch is the essence of the modern crisis of narcissism. It is "the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection." This, too, is the narcissistic plight of Tate's Alice, an image of modern man plunging into himself, to the abandonment and denial of the objective and transcendent reality of the cosmos - that is, anything and everything that is other than himself.

University students need not, contrary to popular belief, be learning to more fully appreciate themselves and value their own opinions. They require, rather, to be free of themselves and their own opinions for a time in an attempt to inform themselves - not only to amass information, since, indeed, that is not really what is important anyway, but to learn how to view the world, how to view reality. They ought to be receiving that education that will allow them to be worthy carriers of our culture's symbols, and more practically and to the same end, able participants in the political community.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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