Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for November 17, 2008 PUBLIC EDUCATION...

...it's the Pitts!

Make that...Leonard Pitts Jr...Columnist for the Miami Herald.

Presenting the Op-Ed piece below in the interests of "fairness"..."equal time"...whatever. Mr. Pitts' piece isn't pretty...but then neither is public education in many, many parts of the land.

My only caution...if it were as easy and obvious to fix as Mr. Pitts seems to indicate, well, it would have been fixed already.

Nobody ever asks why there are so many "bad teachers". Nobody takes the time to go in and do the HARD WORK...to find out what conditions do NOT ALLOW "good teachers" to teach. There have been many, many articles "out there" that have clearly demonstrated that you can take a "good teacher" from a "good school", put her or him into a "bad school", and voila...another one of those damn "bad teachers"! Ever wonder why "good teachers" are NOT standing in line applying for teaching positions in "bad schools"???

I've been personal witness to many "Dr.'s" (you know, the REAL "Dr.'s"...the ones that went to medical school)...and many attorneys (and I won't even go any further down that road in THIS post)...to know that EVERY profession has its TRULY "bad apples". Teachers are no different...

In short, in the education field, your "quality" as a teacher rests basically on "WHERE" you teach. As they say...LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!

Go ahead...test my "theory"! Swap a Cairo teacher of your choice for a New Trier teacher of your choice...VOILA...INSTANT TRANSFORMATION!!!

Hmmm...forget that you read in those last few lines. I wanna make the BIG BUCKS in my retirement...write "THE Book" on education reform...appear on Oprah...get the job as Secretary of Education in Barack Obama's new cabinet!

Hurry, now...we're on a tight schedule. All you school administrators out there...send me your list of bad, failing, rotten teachers AND your list of good, excellent, caring teachers. I get to play...Superintendent for a day!

(With a wink and a nod to union leaders...

You're going to have to work with me here! You've got to convince your members NOT to raise a big stink about the massive involuntary transfers that will have to take place to implement my "cure" for education. Part of the "New Heal" in our (me and Barack's) plan will be that all "good teachers" (as identified BEFORE the transfer) will receive a $10,000 bonus for agreeing to go to "bad schools". (HEY...we're negotiable on the "bonus". I mean Michelle Rhee is offering upward of $30,000 to give up tenure!) AND...all "bad teachers" (as identified BEFORE the transfer) will receive the (negotiated) bonus at the end of their first year...when they become overnight sensations...newly anointed "good teachers"!)

Hey...just tryin' to spread the wealth around!

Gotta go now...the phone's ringing...don't know if it's Barack or Oprah!

Hello...

Who is this?

Joe?

Joe, who???

I don't need a plumber...

D.C. public-school experiment is a test for all of us

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

So it seems there's this new couple coming to town (the husband just got a job with the government). Now they are scouting schools for their children and people are wondering whether they're going to go public or private.

Some observers would like Michelle and Barack Obama to send their daughters to public schools. Doing so, they say, would be a powerful statement of faith in public education.

All that notwithstanding, I expect the Obamas, like many parents of means, will choose private schools.

Can we be honest here? I mean, brutally honest? D.C. public schools are not good enough for the Obama kids. Not because they are D.C. public schools, but because they are urban public schools.

I'm not doubting the dedication of public school teachers. And yes, there are exceptional public schools - but the exceptions prove the rule. Public schools, particularly in urban areas, are largely failing our children.

Which brings me to Michelle Rhee. You might not know the name yet, but I'm betting you soon will. She is the Washington, D.C., schools chief who has drawn national attention for an audacious attempt to remake some of the nation's worst schools.

Among the changes she has instituted, or is attempting to institute, is a cash reward for students who meet certain benchmarks of performance and attendance. She also wants to make it easier to fire teachers who do not perform; under her plan, educators would give up tenure protections for a merit plan that would allow the best of them - i.e., those whose students actually learn something - to earn upward of $100,000 a year.

Rhee's proposals track closely with some of what I found last year when I wrote a series of columns on "What Works" to improve education for at-risk young people. Many educators told me that high on their wish list would be the ability to reward good teachers and fire bad ones.

You'd think it would be a no-brainer that people who don't perform get the axe and those who do get raises. Isn't that the way it works in most non-unionized professions? But the teachers union apparently exists in some alternate universe where everyone is rewarded equally regardless of the quality of their work. So it has fought Rhee with bitter tenacity, seeking to block her at every step.

Meanwhile, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 48 percent of D.C. eighth graders had attained basic reading skills in 2007, "basic" being a term denoting "partial mastery" of necessary knowledge and skills. Only 12 percent were rated proficient readers. The corresponding numbers in math: 34 and 8. Those statistics, dismal as they are, represent an improvement over previous years.

And D.C. is hardly unique.

All of us, then, have a stake in the success of Michelle Rhee's experiment. All of us should be yelling for the teachers union to get out of the way. We need to know if what she proposes will work. And if it does not, we need to determine what will.

We need, in other words, an urgency we seem to lack.

Too many of us, I think, have made peace with the idea that public schools don't work, have come to regard it as normal that they crank out poorly educated kids, have come to accept that certain children in certain places are ineducable. But I saw the falsity of that with my own eyes while traveling the country for "What Works," saw some of the nation's best students in some of its most dire places.

The failure here, then, is not the students', but ours, a failure of will and imagination. We need to reassess the things we take for granted. We need to decide that our children deserve better.

And we need to ask a simple question: if public schools are not good enough for the president's kids, what makes us think they are good enough for ours?