Teacher Job Satisfaction Plummets -Survey

Kenzo Shibata, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, wrote earlier this week in the Huffington Post, that teacher alienation has worsened to the point that one in three teachers is considering quitting the teaching profession in the next five years, and increase over the one in four teachers that was considering leaving in a survey three years ago.

According to a report on a survey commissioned by Met Life last spring, morale among the nation's teachers is at its lowest point in more than 20 years. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years. According to the report, just three years ago, the rate was one in four.
Met Life's results did not shock me. I often felt powerless as one teacher, advocating for the supports my students needed to succeed. In my first two years, not a week went by that I didn't consider changing careers and that had nothing to do with my students or their parents -- it was the system.

And read this posting by Valerie Strauss from The Washington Post, August 7, 2012:
Teacher job satisfaction plummets — Survey

This was written by Kevin G. Welner, a professor of education policy and program evaluation in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and director of the National Education Policy Center. The center is housed at the university’s School of Education and sponsors research, produces policy briefs, and publishes expert third party reviews of think tank reports.

By Kevin G. Welner

It’s not fun to be repeatedly punched in the gut. And we can now quantify how not-fun it is, at least when teachers are the punchees.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That’s according to the annual ­ MetLife Survey of the American Teacher.

While this 15-point plummet is no doubt caused in part by the bad economy and budget cutting, it’s also hard to overlook things like Waiting for Superman, the media deification of Michelle Rhee, and the publishing of flawed “scores” that purport to evaluate teachers based on students’ test results — an offense first committed by the Los Angeles Times and now taken up by the New York Times and other New York papers. Teachers knew these evaluations were unreliable and invalid even before researchers documented those problems.

Similarly, teachers see states and districts implement policies that largely base their performance evaluations on student test scores. These new policies are layered on top of No Child Left Behind and the subsequent years of narrowed curricula and teaching to the test. Teachers have been watching sadly as the sort of engaging learning that attracted them to the profession is increasingly squeezed out. Further, teachers in many states are facing attacks on their collective voice in education policy by anti-union governors such as Walker (Wisconsin), Scott (Florida), Christie (New Jersey), Daniels (Indiana), Kasich (Ohio), and Brewer (Arizona).

While all those governors are Republican, the trashing of teachers has been a bipartisan effort, led by groups that include Democrats for Education Reform and Stand for Children. In fact, President Obama is widely viewed as part of the problem. He will never achieve a Santorum-esque level of anti-public-school rhetoric, but Race to the Top and related policies have continued the drive toward privatization and test-focused instruction. Although the title of a U.S. Department of Education press release from a few weeks ago read “Obama Administration Seeks to Elevate Teaching Profession,” the headline a couple years ago was, “Obama Official Applauds Rhode Island Teacher Firings.”

None of us would want to have our job performance judged on an outcome that we don’t really control. Research suggests that a student’s teacher for a single given school year influences as little as 5 to 10 percent of her or his test-score growth. Sensible policymaking does not leap from “teachers are important” to “teachers can be evaluated as if they are the only thing that’s important.”

Similarly, none of us would want to have our evaluation based on an outcome, like test scores, that we know represents only a fraction of what we do and why we do it. And we wouldn’t want to pursue a good evaluation by doing our job in ways we think unwise or even harmful.

But that’s where teachers now find themselves. Maybe we should feel grateful that their job satisfaction only dropped 15 percentage points.
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By Valerie Strauss | 12:01 AM ET, 03/07/2012

House Committee Defunds Race to the Top; House Committee Says 5 Week Experienced Teacher Can Be Highly Qualified

In a lightly followed item, a U.S. House Subcommittee voted to defund President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's signature Race to the Top program. This has been the program, launched in 2009, Obama's first year in office, that one early conservative critic dubbed, "NCLB 2: The Carrot That Feels Like a Stick." It has pressed states to institute teacher evaluation systems and to expand the number of charter schools. Compliant states would get extra federal funds. Individually, deficient teachers would get fired, "successful" teachers would receive bonuses (Michael Winerip, New York Times, January 22, 2012, "In Race to the Top, the Dirty Work Is Left to Those on the Bottom.")
Alyson Klein, Tuesday, in "House K-12 Spending Bill Would Scrap Race to the Top" in Education Week reported,

The Obama administration's signature K-12 initiative—the Race to the Top competition—would get axed under a proposal put forward by Republicans on the House panel that oversees K-12 spending.
Two other major Obama priorities—the School Improvement Grant program, which provides $533 million to help turn around low-performing schools, and the nearly $150 million Investing in Innovation grant program—would also be eliminated, according to a press release put out by U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The spending bill was introduced today by Republicans on the House subcommittee on Labor, Health, Human Services, Education and Related agencies. It would cover fiscal year 2013, the fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1. The panel is expected to vote on the legislation tomorrow.
But it looks like not all of the administration's favorite programs would be big losers. The bill appears to renew two new competitive-grant programs. One is Promise Neighborhoods, which helps communities pair wraparound services with education programs. Promise Neighborhoods would get nearly $60 million, the same level as last year. That's not as much the $100 million President Barack Obama wanted for the program.
The measure also would renew the nearly $300 million Teacher Incentive Fund, which provides grants to districts to create pay-for-performance programs. And it would keep in place a nearly $160 million comprehensive literacy program.
So which program would win out big-time? Special education state grants, which would get $12.1 billion, a $500 million increase over current levels. By contrast, Title I would get $15.1 billion, the same level as last year. The Obama administration had proposed flat funding for those programs this year.

Alas, this could be a repeat of last year, when the Republican House saved teachers from Race to the Top. The Democrat-controlled Senate prevailed in the negotiations between the two houses and RTTT was restored.
Klein closed with her thoughts on how this year's general election results might impact on RTTT.

This isn't the first time House Republicans have attempted to jettison many of the programs on the Obama administration education-redesign hit parade. Last year, the committee also proposed scrapping Race to the Top, Investing in Innovation, SIG, and other programs. But, the Democratically-controlled Senate—and the administration—ultimately won out in budget negotiations.
So when we will know the outcome this year? Probably not until after the presidential election. It's unlikely that Congress will actually finish its work on the bills before that deadline—it's become tradition for them to pass stop-gap measures extending funding until they can work out a deal.
That means that if Obama isn't re-elected—or if Republicans take over the Senate—it's going to be much much tougher for programs like Race to the Top and i3 to survive the chopping block.
Want more? Check out the full draft bill right here.

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Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post reports that a House committee (same one?) has voted to extend for two years defining teachers with five weeks training as highly qualified. [Yep, better have those Teach for America trainees in classrooms than experienced ones. Bravo to Michael Bloomberg for driving experienced teachers out of the profession.]

Does 5 weeks of training make a teacher ‘highly qualified?’ — Updated
By Valerie Strauss (Updated with House subcommittee vote)
Should someone with five weeks of teacher training be considered a highly qualified teacher?
A U.S. House appropriations subcommittee approved legislation on Wednesday that extended for two more years the federal definition of a highly qualified teacher as including students still learning to be teachers and other people with very little training.

A Teach for America recruit gets classroom management training. (Ricky Carioti, photo/THE WASHINGTON POST)
The nonprofit organization Teach for America places college graduates into high needs schools after giving them five weeks of training in a summer institute. The TFA corps members, who are required to give only a two-year commitment to teaching, can continue a master’s degree in education with selected schools while teaching.
Of course it doesn’t make any real sense that a new college graduate with five weeks of ed training or any student teacher should be considered highly qualified — because they aren’t. But federal officials inexplicably partial to Teach for America have bestowed millions of dollars on the organization, and TFA has, not surprisingly, lobbied Congress for this legislation.
The reality is that teachers still in training are disproportionately concentrated in schools serving low-income students and students of color — the children who need the best teachers. This inequitable distribution disproportionately affects students with disabilities.

Strauss closed with an overview of what No Child Left Behind requires and how federal courts are colliding with legislative decisions in the area:

The No Child Left Behind law requires all classrooms to have highly qualified teachers, though the definition of just what those are has been debated for years.
In 2010, Congress approved legislation that defined “highly qualified teachers” as including students still in teacher training programs. There is an effort now among supporters to keep that definition on the books — even though the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals twice ruled that it violated No Child Left Behind because it did not fully meet a credential standard set in that law.
Last month the Senate Appropriations Committee was on its way to extending the federal definition but, after some protest, decided not to. Still there is support in the Senate to do so.
The House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday approved legislation that would eliminate most of the funding for President Obama’s Race to the Top and other education programs — and would allow teachers in training to be considered highly qualified teachers through the 2014-15 school year.
The Obama administration has given waivers to more than half of the states, which allows them to ignore major parts of NCLB. That includes the highly qualified teacher provision, if they include student achievement in teacher evaluations.
However, there are other federal education funds, such as Title 1, tied to a highly qualified teacher provision.
Bottom line: The issue isn’t over.

UNICEF: America's Race to the Top in Child Poverty

America's new race to the top -- second place in child poverty.

UNICEF reported in late May of this year, as Common Dreams reported, May 30, 2012, now going viral in the last day here and here. (We are actually second place in child poverty, behind Romania.)

UNICEF: US Among Highest Child Poverty Rates in Developed Countries
- Common Dreams staff

A new report released this week by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reveals alarming child poverty rates within affluent, or 'developed', nations. The US ranks second highest among all measured countries, with 23.1 per cent of children living in poverty, just under Romania's 25.6 per cent.
The report Report Card 10 shows roughly 13 million children in the European Union (plus Norway and Iceland) lack basic items necessary for their development. 30 million children – across 35 countries with developed economies – live in poverty.
“The data reinforces that far too many children continue to go without the basics in countries that have the means to provide,” said Gordon Alexander, Director of UNICEF's Office of Research.

Common Dreams continued:

UNICEF: Table of relative child poverty, 35 economically advanced countries

Figure shows the percentage of children (aged 0 to 17) who are living in relative poverty, defined as living in a household in which disposable income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the national median income.

UNICEF: Tens of millions of children living in poverty in the world’s richest countries
As debates rage on austerity measures and social spending cuts, a new report reveals the extent of child poverty and child deprivation in the world’s advanced economies. Some 13 million children in the European Union (plus Norway and Iceland) lack basic items necessary for their development. Meanwhile, 30 million children – across 35 countries with developed economies – live in poverty.
Report Card 10, from UNICEF’s Office of Research, looks at child poverty and child deprivation across the industrialized world, comparing and ranking countries’ performance. This international comparison, says the Report, proves that child poverty in these countries is not inevitable, but policy susceptible - and that some countries are doing much better than others at protecting their most vulnerable children. [...]
In doing so UNICEF’s Office of Research tries to estimate what percentage of children are falling significantly behind what can be considered normal for their own societies. [...]
“The report makes clear that some governments are doing much better at tackling child deprivation than others,” said Mr Alexander. “The best performers show it is possible to address poverty within the current fiscal space. On the flip side, failure to protect children from today’s economic crisis is one of the most costly mistakes a society can make.”

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Galling WNYC, Village Voice inconsistency re NYPD, DOE malfeasance coverage

Yesterday (Wednesday, August 25, 2010) I heard WNYC's Brian Lehrer speak about New York State's victory in the "Race to the Top." The voice of New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein graced the show. While there was at least one caller that bemoaned the rising stress on teachers from test-driven teaching to the test, the general reception of Klein was congratulatory in New York State's competition with neighboring New Jersey.
A blogger has cited the Broad Foundation's friendly relationship with WNYC after my open question: why is WNYC treating New York City's Department of Education with such kid gloves?
One would hope that the exposure of New York City's plummeting scores (when the notoriously easy New York State tests were made more difficult this year) would prompt WNYC to lessen the fawning treatment of Chancellor Klein. No. Klein was allowed to wax on an on, in an uninterrupted soliloquy. Valuable time that could have gone to parents or teachers was lost in deference to his ego.
In contrast to the kid gloves treatment that Lehrer gave Klein last Thursday, August 19, note these essential questions that a poster to Lehrer's site offered:

1. Isn't Klein a total failure? Eight years of an experiment on our kids and no progress?

2. Wasn't claiming progress on flawed tests a lie?
Wasn't he promoting and firing teachers on the basis of these flawed tests? And telling parents which schools are good on the basis of these tests? And so if he knew these tests were flawed why did he give all this bad advice and claim progress that didn't happen?

3. Shouldn't he just resign?

When Lehrer usually organizes a segment on an issue with opposing perspectives he invites guests from different sides of an issue. Not so with the NYC DOE. No Leonie Haimson, no Juan Gonzalez or no Norm Scott for balance. On Lehrer's show there is no speaking truth to the power of Mr. Klein.

*SUDDENLY NO LEHRER FOR ONE OF THE MAYOR'S DEPARTMENTS WHEN NYPD MISDEEDS ARE THE SUBJECT*
So, it was grandly disappointing when Lehrer segued over to a piece dealing with insensitive treatment of police officers. The piece centered around "NYPD Tapes 5: The Corroboration," the latest of a series of journalistic pieces by The Village Voice that has looked into corrupt practices in the New York Police Department, New York City's police force. It was obvious --but Lehrer did not pick up on it-- that there is a direct parallel: in both the NYC DOE and in the NYPD there is a management culture that only values the professionals, teachers and police officers, respectively, on the basis of their statistics.

In both cases the public suffers. Students get a dullened education that only lives for tests (see Gabe Pressman's report from his interview of Diane Ravitch and see this City University of New York study, "Teaching to the Test: How No Child Left Behind Impacts Language Policy, Curriculum, and Instruction for English Language Learners"). No appreciation of knowledge, just prep for the test, all to the end of making the great Oz (his holiness Mike Bloomberg). In the case of police performance, police offices do not report larcenous thefts as such, police officers willy-nilly harass black and Hispanic New Yorkers (see this Times story and this New York Civil Liberties Union report), all in the name of protecting the great Oz (mayor Bloomberg, just to remind you) and his ever improving statistics.

The Village Voice's disturbing report is a good deed. Perhaps the Pulitzer Prize committee will reward the newspaper or its reporters. But why the attention to stats mania in the police department, but no attention to similar abuses in the Education Department? The allegations that police department supervisors pressure police officers, with a singular mind to statistics, in self-interest for promotion or bonuses resonate with the allegations that teachers make about principals that harass teachers over test statistics. Yet, neither The Village Voice nor WNYC will address the parallel patterns of harassing of teachers and mis-serving the students.

Where is our free press? Where are the investigative reporters? The "alternative" or "non-commercial" media outlets fail at their duty. We bloggers don't carry the same weight as these outlets or the daily newspapers. Otherwise, Bloomberg would have lost to Bill Thompson last fall.

Obama threatens veto to get his school-deform ways

Obama vetoing over his bullying for school de-forming.

He's making this the rare case of using his veto?????
And people wonder why we use the term, "Obushma"?

From the L.A. Times, July 12, 2010:
Obama's school-aid showdown
The president is wrongly threatening to veto a school-aid package unless cuts to his Race to the Top program are eliminated.

All across the country, the most pressing need in schools right now is to keep as many teachers, janitors, counselors and librarians as possible. Less important: expanding charter schools and linking teachers' evaluations to their students' test scores.

So we're surprised by the tumult over a school-aid package approved by the House last week as part of a larger appropriations bill. It would provide $10 billion to keep as many school employees as possible in their jobs during the recession, but would do so, in part, by imposing some cuts on the Obama administration's key education initiative. Race to the Top, a $4.3-billion program that provides competitive grants to states that draw up reform programs in keeping with the administration's priorities, would lose $500 million. Two other incentive programs would lose a total of $300 million.

President Obama has threatened to veto the school-aid package unless the cuts to these programs are eliminated. But Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), who inserted the aid package, included those cuts among many others to offset its cost, thus winning support from Republicans and conservative Democrats. Even with the reduction in its budget, Race to the Top would have billions of dollars to hand out. Would the president really undermine desperately needed school funding over a less-than-lethal reduction in the grant program's coffers?


Opponents of the cuts say that more money for schools won't help unless reforms are instituted. But the $10 billion doesn't represent "more" money; it simply makes up for — to a limited extent — devastating budget cuts that schools have suffered in recent years. And reforms will accomplish nothing unless schools can keep teachers in the classroom.

Of course, if Obey had seen Race to the Top as invaluable, he wouldn't have touched its funding. And here we agree with him as well. The concept behind the program is brilliant: Leverage a relatively small amount of money by using competitive grants as an incentive for states to embrace change. Dozens of states have drawn up new legislation and made new pledges in order to align with the administration's goals. But some of those goals are untested and others are too severe. We too believe that teachers' evaluations should have some connection to how their students score on tests, but are dismayed to see states win grants by promising to make those scores account for at least half of a teacher's performance. And though well-run charter schools have brought welcome new practices to public education, the jury is still out on whether charters improve educational outcomes as a whole. Just as important is the question of which charter schools work well; some perform significantly worse than public schools.

It's too bad that Obey's school-aid package doesn't include some reasonable accountability measures of its own, such as a requirement that states not lay off teachers strictly by seniority when doing so would hurt low-income and minority students, or that they begin drawing up plans for thoughtful teacher evaluations. But above all, let's keep teachers.