Tuesday, January 18, 2005

TEACHERS WHO CAN'T READ

Can American education go any lower?

More than half a million Florida students sat in classrooms last year in front of teachers who failed the state's basic skills tests for teachers. Many of those students got teachers who struggled to solve high school math problems or whose English skills were so poor, they flunked reading tests designed to measure the very same skills students must master before they can graduate.

These aren't isolated instances of a few teachers whose test-taking skills don't match their expertise and training. A Herald-Tribune investigation has found that fully a third of teachers, teachers' aides and substitutes failed their certification tests at least once. The Herald-Tribune found teachers who had failed in nearly every school in each of the state's 67 counties.

But it is the neediest of children who most often get the least-prepared teachers. Students in Florida's rural outposts and inner cities, those from housing projects and migrant camps, and those from black and Latino families were far more likely to have a teacher who struggled. An analysis of the test scores of nearly 100,000 teachers found that children from Florida's poor neighborhoods were 44 percent more likely than their wealthier peers to have a teacher who failed the certification tests.

The findings raise questions about Florida's education reforms, which require students to pass standardized tests to advance, yet allow teachers to fail exams dozens of times and still stand at the front of a classroom. And they highlight challenges that have dogged public schools across the country for years: How to attract more of the nation's top minds into a profession where salaries are low, and how to steer those teachers into inner-city and rural neighborhoods where children need the most help.

A state education official said Friday a recent study confirms that student learning suffers under teachers who repeatedly fail the tests. The Department of Education study, the first of its kind, found that students learn less under teachers who had failed more than three times, said DOE spokesman MacKay Jimeson. Nine percent of teachers failed portions of the tests at least four times, according to the Herald-Tribune study.

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THE SOLUTION TO AMERICA's INCOMPETENT TEACHERS:

Import Indian teaching over the net

Twice a week, Ann Maria, a sixth grader at Silver Oak Elementary School, California, logs on the Internet from home. She's not chatting up with friends, but connecting to her personal tutor-already online, armed with a headset and a pen mouse-in a cubicle almost a timezone away in Kochi. Your neighbourhood tuition teacher, riding on the Information Technology Enabled Service (ITES) wave, has now gone global and his monthly pay packet has turned meatier-anywhere between $10 and $40 an hour. ``We started last year with three teachers and around 10 students. There are 17 teachers now and around 160 students,'' says Bina George, manager, HR and Administration of the Canadian subsidiary.

What Bina adds up in numbers is actually a business model which is slowly transforming neighbourhood classroom models across India into global education outsourcing hubs. As the education season goes into the second leg across US and Europe, the demand for tutorial assistance only stands to increase, say industry observers. And with schools recommending additional training for students performing below-average, tutors across Asia stand to gain. Says Shanthanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp Datamatics Ltd, a company which tutors students from the Santa Barbara school district in the US: ``The demand abroad is growing as there is a huge dearth of tuition teachers, especially in the USA, UK and Middle East.''

Around a year old in India, more players are in the line to pick up this model in 2005, coinciding with new outsourcing contracts from foreign shores. And investments for an organised set-up-infrastructure, networking and brainbank - could be around Rs 4 to 5 crore. ["crore" is an Indian number meaning 10 million so "Rs 4 crore" is 40 million Rupees] Satya Narayanan, chairman of Career Launcher says the time has finally come for India to emerge in this domain. ``This year and the next will see a lot of action in terms of new contracts between international education companies outsourcing tutorial teaching contracts to India, more so from the US market.''

His logic: superior intellectual power compared to competitors like China, Phillipines, Singapore and other Asia Pacific countries, and a huge English-speaking teachers community. Says Kiran Karnik, president, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM): ``Foreign countries today acknowledge India's intellectual brand thanks to efforts of institutes like IIMs and IITs. This model could be one of the best service exports which could finally globalise the education industry.''

Says 20-year-old Ruchi Dudeja, one of the 10 online brains who guide the school district of Massachusetts at Career Launcher: ``Tutoring Americans on their own syllabus is never tough as we Indians are easily intellectually superior.''

More here






THE TEACHERS' UNION PROBLEM

The teachers unions have more influence over the public schools than any other group in American society. They influence schools from the bottom up, through collective bargaining activities that shape virtually every aspect of school organization. And they influence schools from the top down, through political activities that shape government policy. They are the 800-pound gorillas of public education. Yet the American public is largely unaware of how influential they are -- and how much they impede efforts to improve public schools.....

The sources of their power are not difficult to discern. With three million members, they control huge amounts of money that can be handed out in campaign contributions. More important, they have members in every political district in the country, and can field armies of activists who make phone calls, ring doorbells, and do whatever else is necessary to elect friends and defeat enemies. No other interest group in the country can match their political arsenal. It is not surprising, then, that politicians at all levels of government are acutely sensitive to what the teachers unions want. This is especially true of Democrats, most of whom are their reliable allies.

When the teachers unions want government to act, the reforms they demand are invariably in their own interests: more spending, higher salaries, smaller classes, more professional development, and so on. There is no evidence that any of these is an important determinant of student learning. What the unions want above all else, however, is to block reforms that seriously threaten their interests -- and these reforms, not coincidentally, are attempts to bring about fundamental changes in the system that would significantly improve student learning.

The unions are opposed to No Child Left Behind, for example, and indeed to all serious forms of school accountability, because they do not want teachers' jobs or pay to depend on their performance. They are opposed to school choice -- charter schools and vouchers -- because they don't want students or money to leave any of the schools where their members work. They are opposed to the systematic testing of veteran teachers for competence in their subjects, because they know that some portion would fail and lose their jobs. And so it goes. If the unions can't kill these threatening reforms outright, they work behind the scenes to make them as ineffective as possible -- resulting in accountability systems with no teeth, choice systems with little choice, and tests that anyone can pass......

If we really want to improve schools, something has to be done about the teachers unions. The idea that an enlightened "reform unionism" will somehow emerge that voluntarily puts the interests of children first -- an idea in vogue among union apologists -- is nothing more than a pipe dream. The unions are what they are. They have fundamental, job-related interests that are very real, and are the raison d'etre of their organizations. These interests drive their behavior, and this is not going to change. Ever.

If the teachers unions won't voluntarily give up their power, then it has to be taken away from them -- through new laws that, among other things, drastically limit (or prohibit) collective bargaining in public education, link teachers' pay to their performance, make it easy to get rid of mediocre teachers, give administrators control over the assignment of teachers to schools and classrooms, and prohibit unions from spending a member's dues on political activities unless that member gives explicit prior consent.

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.

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