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About that Budget Proposal for 2010
To all the teachers that are emailing and calling because the EACC told you to...
The board members did NOT remove step increases from the Superintendent's budget proposal. The Superintendent recommended the removal in order to present a balanced budget and I am confident it will be passed no matter how many emails we receive because there is no money.
For the teachers saying "ask for more and you will get more"...that doesn't work when there is nothing to get. In addition, if you inflate the budget or don't make the cuts yourself (all in good faith), they will do it for you from wherever they deem appropriate.
This is tough times for everyone involved and there are tough decisions to be made. Would you rather lose step increases or face possible furloughs and lay-offs?
14 comments:
Well if there are layoffs or furloughs, they should start with all these "teachers" that do not have a classroom of students on a day-to-day basis.
These "specialists" need to go first.
IMO, they should either go back into a full-time classroom, or be replaced with someone that wants to teach.
Couldn't agree more! Furthermore since the gov has required all state employees to take furlough days I want to know when the state's teachers are going to jump in and support the governor they lobbied to elect? The EACC needs a reality check. Look around you! People are taking pay cuts, furlows, and losing their jobs. Stop the crying. I take a paycut and you want more of my money to give you a raise. I think not. Start at the top and start chopping!
If the EACC ever expects to obtain respect and credibility among their own members they've got to stop their cheezy tactics of inflamming their own members with misinformation and propaganda. Honesty - isn't that one of the things we're supposed to be teaching our students? So why do so many of us rank and file teachers allow the EACC to get away with their antics? I for one Mrs. Abell will not be sending you any letters. Thank you for what you do and for making the tough decisions. I know you support teachers. I live in the real world and see the handwriting on the wall. I agree with the first poster - non-classroom fluff needs to go first.
If you get rid of the fluff (people with experience)who will guide and mentor all those new graduates and minimally experienced classroom teachers?
Boo hoo boo hoo. Picture me playing the world's tiniest violin. I could be wrong here and Im not a member of the teacher union so I dont know that side of the story but dont you pay teachers a COLA and a step? Every year! Your post just talks about freezing steps. Correct me if I'm wrong but they will still get a COLA which is something the countys employees did without for several years and that was when the cost of living was on an upward trend. If the COL goes down will there be a corresponding cut? Its only fair. The sword should cut both ways. My guess is no but please advise. So to recap, our teachers will be getting only one raise (probably small) next year instead of two and no one will have a actual pay cut, be furloughed or downsized? Am i missing something or am i misinformed?
What an ignorant, hateful and immature group of commentaries not worthy of any further response.
Dear Anonymous - haven't you heard? The vast majority of our new and minimally experienced teachers are "HIGHLY qualified!" [cough cough] So Im kinda guessing that all them there highly qualified college graduates shouldn't really need all that expensive bureaucratic support aka fluff. So that begs the question, are they really highly qualified or not? If they're not they don't deserve a raise. If they are they need to take a field trip to Loudon county. Those highly qualified teachers haven't had a raise in two years. At least teachers still have a job unlike tens of thousands of people in this country right now.
Who said "Ask for more and you'll get more"? Sounds a bit like Marie Antionette recommending cake to the starving peasants. Theres a bigger picture here. Mrs. Abell, tell them to put down Aladdin's lamp and bargain in good faith.
Who is dumb enough to think that these "specialists" qualify for anything?
Administration allows these newbies that despise the classroom, want to get out, and if they brown-nose enough, you'll get a job as a specialist.
What the hell are these "specialists" doing anyway?
Are they guiding the literature teachers to lead their students to stellar AP scores?
Are they raising the lower than whale-doo-doo SAT scores in the county?
This falderall of teachers being "highly qualified" is the propaganda being fed through the schools to the parents. These people aren't "highly qualified".
What the hell are these brainwashed people thinking?
A "highly qualified" teacher would have advanced degrees in the discipline in which they teach.
Ph.D comes to mind. How about in Physics? How about in mathematics or chemistry? I'm sorry, but a lousy degree in education from Salisbury State or Bowie State and an M.Ed. in no way "highly qualifies" these people. More propaganda from the MSTA and local teachers association.
Come on teachers and administrators. Let's grab the bull by the horns and show us the money.
Bring engineers and other professionals to observe your classes, or take over a class or two and then compare who is qualified.
How many of these teachers have the command of the subject to ace an AP exam? Let's force every teacher teaching an AP class to take the test at the end of the year. If they don't ace it, get rid of them. Some of these people are stooges that read from their books, write solutions from the books on the board, and have admitted they wouldn't pass the exam if they had to take it.
How long will this scam continue? Get these specialists either back in the classroom full time, or get rid of them. We need experienced people, especially in the science and mathematics disciplines to lead and inspire these students to go into these disciplines to fill high-tech jobs.
The AP scores are horrid and these teachers ought to be ashamed of themselves. If they are willing to continue to teach these classes they should either:
1) Complain like HELL that they have too many slow learners in these classes, the pace of the class being slowed down, destroying the ability of the class as a whole to perform well on these tests.
2) Kindly step aside, as they are either incompetent or simply don't know the material well enough to pass along and build the self-confidence of the students that is required to perform well on these standardized exams.
What other explanation can be proposed?
The BOE adminstration knows how embarrassing these scores are, but yet continues to allow these teachers to continue in the classroom, DESTROYING a full year of a student's time, scamming the parents, giving the students a passing grade in the grade book as a final grade, but yet the student obtains a 1,2, or 3 on these exams.
This is a sham! It is no damn wonder that Richmond is keeping professionals from observing these classes. These specialists aren't doing their job.
Hire teachers that have the intellect, ambition, the courage and spine to be forthright with the administration regarding the abilities of some of the students "shoved" into these classes.
The "everybody benefits" from these classes is an outright lie, as it propagates the absolute absurdity of the correlation of the grade in the classroom to the score on the AP exam. These exams were meant for the purpose of obtaining college credit, saving parents hundreds and thousands of dollars of tuition.
Look what this corrupt system has accomplished. They waste our taxpayer dollars, the student's time, the absolute pummeling of the student's self-confidence due to the teacher not knowing what they are doing, and the misrepresentation of the AP syllabus to the students in the class.
If there are to be "specialists", the positions should be filled with seasoned, experienced teachers that love the classroom, have the intelligence AND advanced degrees in the discipline in which they teach, along with a minimum of 15 years of classroom experience.
AMEN, BROTHA!
1) I agree completely that the administration and specialist level is bloated. All too often (as someone said previously) many of the specialists and MANY administrators are people with few years in the classroom who do in fact "brown nose" their way up the ladder regardless of competence. How can someone who is not even 26 years old with only three years in the classroom tell anyone how to do anything? (Disclaimer: there ARE some dedicated and talented administrators out there)
2) The AP situation is not the fault of most teachers. The Church of Jay Matthews has ruined the entire AP program. AP scores are statistically valid instruments only when used to judge what they are designed to judge: how well an individual student did with the material covered by the test. And ONLY that. You can take all the AP scores of a school or subject, do some simple arithmetic and create an "average" or even a so-called "challenge index". While interesting, both of those numbers are totally useless. They average AP score and the "challenge index" are both ways for administrators and school systems to brag about a totally meaningless number.
3) Along the same lines, the average SAT score is also a statistically useless number. A student's score on the SAT (unlike the AP test) is not based on right or wrong answers. The student's score is only a reflection of how well that student did compared to a "normal" group of students. (Usually defined by standard deviations). That's why someone can miss questions on the test and still get a "perfect" score. The average SAT score tells you no actual statistically valid information. My guess is that this all started when some dumb jock Principal wanted to have a pissing contest with his buddies.
4) The #1 problem in CCPS is student discipline. None of these other problems can be solved until administrators stop being afraid of parents and actually start doing something about students who disrupt class and impede the learning process. Many teachers don't even bother with the official discipline system because administrators often do NOTHING to children who disrupt the classes or defy the teachers. Behavior and discipline problems are the dirty little secrets of CCPS
Since teachers are contracted for a certain number of hours per day and a certain number of days per contract year, wouldn't any attempt at a furlough be illegal?
Anonymous 7:32,
I guess furlough wouldn't be the correct word but lay-offs could be a definite possibility.
Why does the super still use the term furlough then?
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