What’s Up With Teacher Pay Cuts in Florida!
Posted: September 2, 2011 Filed under: academic labor, culture wars, No Child Left Behind, public education | Tags: Florida, Florida Retirement System, Fund Education Now!, No Child Left Behind, teacher pensions Leave a comment
Florida Teacher Salaries Have Dropped
Thursday, Sept. 1
This week is bound to be rough.
This week teachers all over Florida will get their first paycheck of the school year.
Last session Florida legislators passed a law requiring every teacher to contribute 3% of their salary to the Florida Retirement System. Hearing about a 3% to 5% cut is very different than seeing what that cut looks like.
The other side of the story is that districts all over the state have cut teacher pay on new-hires by as much as 15%. $44,000 is the average teacher pay in the state of Florida, but some districts pay $30,000 per year. Georgia’s average teacher pay is $53,000.
It’s common knowledge that Florida teacher pay, among the lowest in the nation, was based on the promise of employer-funded retirement. For decades, teachers have accepted changes in their employment conditions based on this promise.
A school district is often the largest employer in the county. Cutting 3% from salaries in large districts like Orange, Hillsborough or Miami-Dade takes at least $50 Million dollars out of the local market. That’s a tangible loss to all of us.
On the most intimate level, teachers have been spending their personal money on classroom materials or more commonly, making sure their growing roster of homeless or at-risk students have what they need to thrive and learn.
Teaching in Florida has always meant a meager paycheck. Since there have been no raises for years, that small paycheck now means supporting families at near-poverty levels. Teacher pay stopped being the source of “extra” family income a long time ago. Florida politicians often talk about getting paid for 9 months as an amazing freedom. They dismiss teaching as a “choice.”
It certainly is a choice. Things have become so difficult, that staying reflects a level of job commitment most of us will never know.
In Florida, the choice to teach after the 3% cut could mean the loss of home ownership and foreclosure. Many of our best thinkers are being forced to choose between being able to pay the bills and the students they love.
Lawmakers told us that they had “no choice” when they cut public education by $1.3 Billion. Florida politicians should know that “choice” can cut many ways. After all, elections are also about choices.
The 3% teacher salary cut that the Florida Legislature eagerly imposed comes at a high price. Be honest. Does the level of teacher pay reflect the value we expect a dedicated teacher to bring to their students?
“Teacher Salaries a Victim of Budget Cuts” (Lily Rockwell, News Service of Florida, wctv.tv- August 30, 2011)
Stephanie Rothman has done the math. On her roughly $48,000 a year salary, the 15-year high school English teacher in Broward County barely gets by.In the last year, Rothman has had to abandon a Boca Raton home she could no longer afford, moving into a room at a friend’s house and feels “cynical and hopeless” about her financial prospects.”I love teaching, I was born to teach,” Rothman said. “But I feel there is no way I can sustain a living with just teaching. So that is why I decided to become a certified personal trainer and get a part-time job.”
Rothman is one of hundreds of thousands of teachers in Florida that have gone years without a significant raise. Read the full article here.
Permission to repost given by the author.
Final reflections: SOS, Wash., D.C., July 31
Posted: August 2, 2011 Filed under: academic labor, culture wars, High Stakes Testing, No Child Left Behind, public education, public higher education | Tags: No Child Left Behind, politics and education, Save Our Schools 1 Comment
So far, I have been disappointed with the national media coverage of the July 30 SOS Rally: there isn’t as much as I’d like to see (1). It’s as if 6,000 plus activist teachers, parents, and their allies never existed. I guess it takes 100,000 to interest CNN. In truth, it was a rowdy, impressive bunch with teacher and parent representatives from across the nation. Speaker highlights included Greg Gower, superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District in Texas. His speech is not yet on YouTube, but he inspired a crowd in Texas recently with a similar speech. Matt Damon’s mom is a professor of early childhood education and a supporter of SOS. She introduced Matt, and he gave a very compelling speech about the significance of public education on the development of his creativity and talent; the kind of support now threatened by No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
After the march, I talked with Greg Gower, an activist singer who performed “Test Teacher” at the rally. He and his companion asked the same question I’d heard at my SOS conference workshop and in personal conversations with teachers and parents throughout the conference: “Can you see the influence of NCLB on your students?”
I’m sure that most college educators have heard about No Child Left Behind; but unless they currently have children in the public schools or happen to teach in a college of education, they probably do not know how NCLB has so successfully restructured K-12 curriculum and destroyed the “space” to teach creatively. I didn’t. Essentially K-12 teachers are under threat of their school being shut down. Just like a hostile corporate takeover, your school will be restructured and all teachers fired if test scores in English and Math do not meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) outcomes based upon standardized test scores. Your state could have opted out of NCLB by refusing Title 1 federal funds, but name a state that could afford this option? This is restructuring though bribery under duress. So you get teachers, principals, and supervisors cheating on the test results as we have seen lately in Philadelphia, New York and Georgia. NCLB has been devastating to teachers. The space to teach creatively has been replaced by scripted curriculum to improve test scores (fill in the bubble). At the same time, NCLB has generated a multi-billion dollar business in testing, test prep, scripted curriculum, take-over charter school companies, consultancies, and Teach for America. It has established a reign of terror on K-12, which is spreading into higher ed through the attack on colleges of education across the country, Lumina Foundation’s push for the national standard “Degree Qualifications Profile” in higher education, charter colleges and other forms of radical restructuring. Lumina has paid $1 mil. to WASC, the accrediting agency for higher ed in the west, to embed these degree qualification outcomes in its next cycle of accreditation standards. No one is going to declare that public education is perfect; but high-stakes testing and a canned curriculum based on data driven outcomes is not the answer for reform. After nine years of NCLB, there is data to show it has failed to improve student success.
So how are Freshmen different now and can these differences be attributed to their education under NCLB? Certainly there is still a significant number of Freshmen across the nation who need developmental English and Math courses to become ‘college ready.’ NCLB has not solved the ‘readiness gap’ between high school and college. I hesitate to say that the changes I have noticed in my students, especially over the past four years, are due just to NCLB. It is a busy, video-game generation of high consumer culture and reality-T.V., of infatuation with gadgets (ipods and smart phones); it is a generation with a multitasking consciousness. This is the cultural context in which NCLB is embedded. I also must compete with the necessity of work. Most of my students work 30-50 hours a week to support their college education, parents and siblings. These students often take five classes including mine. This is not the world of 1988 when I first started teaching at CSU Long Beach nor my world as an undergraduate at U.C. Santa Barbara in the 1960s. At the same time, I know that our students can overcome any knowledge or intellectual development gaps left by NCLB by the time they graduate in 4-6 years IF they do the work and put genuine effort into their own academic career. The current free market PR in higher education that touts the student as ‘consumer’ and ‘customer’ often fails to comprehend this point: real education requires depth of effort from both the teacher and the student. It is more than simple consumption like ordering a latte from the university library coffee shop.
(1) It is true that “Democracy Now” carried a short segment on the SOS today, Aug. 1. Media expert Alice Sunshine tells me that from her analysis of the SOS event that the coverage was pretty good, including articles in the Washington Post and Parade magazine, with possible CNN and AP coverage in some regional markets .
Recommended, Randy Traweek’s blog post on SOS:
http://www.k12newsnetwork.com/2011/07/joseph-k-on-the-save-our-schools-march-and-conference/
REPORTING FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.: SOS
Posted: July 30, 2011 Filed under: culture wars, High Stakes Testing, No Child Left Behind, public education, public higher education | Tags: Arnie Duncan, education, Governor Bloomberg, No Child Left Behind, politics and education 2 Comments
Teri Yamada reporting from Washington D.C.: Save our Schools (SOS) March and National Call to Action July 28-31, focus on Jonathan Kozol.
Two other important grassroots alliances, beside the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE), were formed this past academic year in response to the rapid dismantling of public education across the nation. Both were inspired by Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010), who has become a tireless advocate for “meaningful” public education reform. These two new alliances are Save Our Schools (SOS), with its focus on K-12 but inclusive of all public education rights, and Parents Across America (PAA) a new activist group of powerful parents against the standardized test regime of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
The two-day conference at American University preceding the march on the White House in Washington D.C. today, has been packed with scores of panels and workshops focusing on successful action plans for change in public education. Along with the panels is the SOS film festival of new documentaries that debunk current myths about the “total” failure of public education (1). Author and educator Jonathan Kozol was keynote speaker on Thursday with education researcher Diane Ravitch following on Friday.
The strongest theme that has emerged from this event is the need for a new civil rights movement that focuses on equity in public education: equity in the real quality of a deep and comprehensive curriculum in every public school, and equity in access to quality public education for every youth. In his keynote address, Jonathan Kozol reminded the audience that teachers were “warriors for justice working on the front lines of the struggle for democracy.” The savage inequalities in public education that he wrote about decades ago are worse now, he said, as the charter and voucher movements have served to re-segregate the schools. No Child Left Behind has lead to a flight of “wonderful” principals and educators from the public school system, which has become punitive and oppressive as the administration of public schools has been taken over by a business model run by “dry dreary technocrats in worship of data,” who act as “drill sergeants of the state…discouraged from promoting curiosity and originality in their students.” Two-thirds of the school year has been consumed by a culture of exams. As the race gap grows wider, school systems are eliminating art, music, drama, science, social studies, geography and sports to focus on high-stakes testing out of fear of being shut down. And by the way, this testing industry has become a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business, lead by Pearson. Kozol called for a new civil rights movement that must depend on the “energy, participation and persistence of our youth.” And for the rest of us, a “passionate impatience” for change.
(To be continued…)
(1) Two recommendations from the SOS Film Festival: “August to June” tracks the intellectual and emotional development of third and fourth graders in a remarkable school “The Open Classroom” in the Lagunitas School District in northern California, which focuses on deep learning for the “whole child.” The second is “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman” which debunks the anti-public-school documentary “Waiting for Superman” that got so much press this past year. This documentary also illuminates the corruption behind the “co-location” charter movement that Mayor Bloomberg imposed upon the New York public school system after he abolished the local governance structure of the public schools and replaced it with a board of superintendents he could control through political appointments.
Administrative Oppositional Behavior Disorder: An Epidemic
Posted: June 10, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Arnie Duncan, Charles Reed, CSU Board of Trustees, Food Revolution, Governor Cuomo, Governor Scott Walker, Jaime Oliver, LAUSD, Mandatory Early Start, No Child Left Behind, Standing on the Shoulders of giants Leave a commentConfession: I rarely watch T.V. But on a recent Friday night while channel surfing, I stumbled across Jaime Oliver’s “Food Revolution” and was stunned. The Superintendent and Board of Supervisors for the Los Angeles Unified School District ( LAUSD) have declared war on this crusader chef, who just wants to analyze the quality of the school district’s cafeteria food. They banned Jaime from visiting any school kitchen or cafeteria in any Los Angeles public school upon penalty of arrest for trespassing, with the excuse that cafeteria food in the LAUSD is just fine. Jaime, an impressive organizer, had secured some media coverage over his school lockout experience. Using a radio interview, he asked parents to bring their children with samples of cafeteria food to his kitchen studio so he could analyze its nutritional value. You can guess the results: overly processed and carbo heavy. Undefeated, Jaime politely presented himself to the LAUSD Board of Supervisors during their public testimony period. Looking disinterested and chewing gum, some of the board members made a distinctly bad impression as he eloquently requested access to just one Los Angeles public school cafeteria. Denied. Will they ever let him in?
In the face of an obesity epidemic (14.9%) among children in L.A. combined with more than 30% of L.A.’s children coming to school hungry, you would think that the Superintendent and his Board would leap at the opportunity for “free” consultation with an expert who knows how to improve the quality of food in a cost effective way. Their pride is apparently more important than our children’s health.
I have testified in front of the CSU Board of Trustees and Chancellor about their poorly planned policies implemented without faculty consultation. The most recent one is Mandatory Early Start. Rarely do they look up from text messaging or email during anyone’s public testimony. I know exactly how Jaime Oliver feels: the disbelief and despair at non-experts shunning your own knowledge as irrelevant.
We have so many administrators and “managers” now in the public education business who refuse to listen to faculty expert advice. They dismiss the input of talented teachers with experience in the classroom; consequently, they make bad policy decisions that impact the lives of millions of children across the country. We have so many politicians like this with power to dismantle and privatize public education. They simply refuse to listen.
This type of destructive policy implementation appears to have gone viral. It is a specific managerial behavior pattern: the inability to admit that you might be wrong, to openly consider a wide range of opinions in order to solve a complex problem, to adhere to ethics, to consider evidence that may contradict one’s ideology or beliefs. This behavior reflects a lack of empathy. It leads to superficial, data driven, education experimentation on other people’s children. Let’s label it “administrative oppositional behavior disorder” (AOBD).
This personality disorder, now found among politicians and education managers, fosters the implementation of bad policy. It is Governor Scott Walker‘s behavior in Wisconsin, sneaking a bill to dismantle collective bargaining rights for teachers through his legislature by overriding the state constitutional process for open discussion. It appears in the form of the New York State Board of Regents and Governor Cuomo’s decision to increase the percentage of student test scores required for teacher evaluations to 40% in the face of significant, quality evidence proving that type of data misjudges teacher effectiveness. Did they do it for Race to the Top money? Does that make it okay?
AOBD appears in Washington DC in the form of Arnie Duncan who commissions a NCEE and OECD study — “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform”— and then dismisses its criticism of No Child Left Behind. To dismiss constructive criticism, especially when one has asked for it, is a weakness of character. Yet we see this disorder everywhere, with the aim of slash-and-burn dismantling and privatization of the country’s public education infrastructure. Some people are making off like bandits through the redistribution of public funds provided by this opportunity of privatization. It will take our entire global village of empathetic teachers, parents, and allies working together to turn this juggernaut around.
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RESTRUCTURING Public Hi Ed 