His intent is to destroy the system
of public education, which has provided the future of this Democracy since its
earliest days. He and the Republican Party believe everything operated by
government will be better operated by for-profit corporations.
They have given our prisons,
probation, and parole to corporations, at a great cost, and the next big pie to
divvy up among their friends with eyes for the bottom line is your kid’s
schools.
The ballot in November 2016 will ask
you to approve something Nathan calls “Opportunity Schools” and asks you to let
him operate them himself — as a czar. No, my friends, our school boards will
have no input or authority. Nathan will be a dictator over our schools.
But, first, he says he will scrap
Georgia’s teacher pay schedules.
In recent years, local anti-tax
groups, conservative politicians, and proponents of performance-based pay
systems have attacked the single salary schedule for teacher pay, such as we
have in Georgia — portraying it as an anachronism and an impediment to
advancing student academic performance. Such claims have no basis in fact.
The single salary schedule is an
objective method for determining teacher compensation and has been our law for
more than 50 years. It removes biases associated with grade level, race and
gender. It recognizes the contributions of all teachers irrespective of the
subject matter taught. And it guards against subjective and inconsistent
evaluations of performance.
Teachers have always been devalued
in the United States and, in the past several years, the pace and intensity of
the attacks has escalated sharply.
Spurred by the June 2 deadline for
the second round of Race to the Top funding, states have raced to fire more
teachers, tie pay and evaluation to student test scores, close or reconstitute
more schools, and disempower teachers’ unions and teaching as a profession —
trampling teachers, students, and communities in the process.
What lies behind this unprecedented
assault on teachers? And, even more important, what can we do about it? We
believe that these attacks are part of an effort to dismantle public education
and that we need an effective, collaborative strategy to combat it.
But let’s start with
what isn’t going on. In virtually the same words used to sell No
Child Left Behind in the early years of Bush II, the attacks on teachers are phrased
in terms of “closing the achievement gap.”
No. If closing the achievement gap
were the goal, we would see demands for adequate, equitable resources and
funding for every student in every school — demands, for example, for quality
early childhood education programs, full-time librarians, robust arts and
physical education programs, mandated caps on class size, and enough time for
teachers to prepare and collaborate.
We would also see a renewed
commitment to affirmative action in university admissions; a drive to recruit
and nurture teachers of color; a commitment to ensure that students come to
school ready to learn because their families have housing, food, medical care,
and jobs; and an end to zero tolerance discipline policies that criminalize
youth.
The idea of “pay for performance,”
which involves supplementing teacher pay or providing bonuses based on student
test scores, is one of the latest educational fads to sweep the country. The
fact is, research indicates that performance pay will not improve teaching or
learning.
In an authoritative
study conducted at Vanderbilt University, teachers who were offered
bonuses for improving student test results produced no more improvement than
the control group. Similar studies of teacher merit pay have shown null results
in New York City and Chicago. Because of the lack of positive
results, a number of pay for performance programs have been abandoned,
including programs in New York City and California.
Faced with evidence that performance
pay does not directly improve instruction, promoters of the system have turned
to a different claim — that performance pay will help school systems attract
and retain strong teachers, while discouraging weaker ones. This is an unlikely
scenario.
Performance pay may in fact drive
more talented teachers out of the profession. Studies show that while money
matters to teachers, working conditions are more important.
Teachers want to work in supportive
environments, where they have scope for creativity as well as rigor, and where
colleagues collaborate, rather than compete, with one another. If performance
pay pits teachers against one another, places even greater emphasis on test
results, and creates doubts about the system’s fairness, more teachers are
likely to look for other lines of work.
When Finland’s leaders sought to
improve their students’ academic performance, they instituted measures that
included reducing class size, boosting teachers’ salaries, and eliminating
standardized testing. Teaching is now a highly sought after profession in
Finland, and Finnish students top the world in academic performance.
If we want to make teaching a
profession worth pursuing, we must pay all teachers a respectable professional
wage and provide them the tools they need to do their job — small classes,
strong mentors, time for planning and collaboration, scope for their own
creativity and help with addressing challenges such as poverty and
homelessness.
Teachers, pick up your phone, or pen
and paper, and contact your state legislators now. They will decide your
future, beginning on Jan. 11, 2016. They are your elected representatives and,
believe you me, they will hear you much more clearly than they will Nathan
Deal. Don’t stop there. Keep it up. Plan to visit the capitol with your friends
soon after Jan. 11. Do something.
Kenneth
Fuller, a retired Rome attorney and former state senator, writes for the
website MOVE GEORGIA FORWARD. Readers may contact him at MoveGeorgiaForward@gmail.com.
Comments
So, we have Deal on one side, Democrats on the other side
and the rest of us on another side. The
rest of us are maintaining daily contact between teachers and parents to keep
students on the job. Parents are
monitoring content, teachers are doing their best. Costs are way too high.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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