Frustration

I know a lot of my posts have been about education, but I feel that it is an important subject. The reason is, the quality of education in this country is something that affects every single person living in this country, even if they themselves aren't in school or don't have children in schools. The students in school today are the future doctors, inventors, lawyers, and yes even future Presidents. Every single person has a personal stake in the quality of education. The people in school right now are my future co-workers or employees. They are the people that are going to build my house, grow my food, and save my life. Just because people don't see how education impacts their lives doesn't mean that impact isn't there. We need to make people realize that improving education, improves their lives.

The cold hard truth is that right now in Michigan schools are endangered. Republicans won't let anything through the Senate that doesn't include massive cuts to much needed services and therefore are causing schools to gasp for air.

The sad part is that schools aren't going to get any help to improve themselves anytime soon. Schools have to try to tackle large issues on their own, all while giving students a quality education. If education is continually over looked, things will never get better in Michigan. You think it's bad now, keep cutting spending for education and see how bad things get.

Technology in Schools

So the iPod idea was a little blown out of proportion by the MSM (big surprise), but I hope that it opens a discussion of the role of technology in education, or really the lack thereof right now. As I've stated in my iPod post, industry is using technology for many different things, including using mp3 players as training tools, so if schools are supposed to ready students for the “real world” why isn't technology playing a larger role in education?

Even stocking shelves at the local supermarket requires you to scan bar codes and it is only going to get more technology dependent. If you walk into many class rooms around the country though you'll be lucky to find one computer in a class room of thirty. Right now if you enter the workforce and you don't know Ctrl+Alt+Delete you are screwed. Technology is supposed to be the future of Michigan's economy, and if that is true why aren't we preparing our students for that?

Education has a lot of problems, and it seems clear that it requires new ways of thinking in order to truly improve education.

iPods & Schools

The iPod idea is already starting to make some waves, but this idea though isn't one that should be discarded right away however. Let's not forget where the idea came from, Duke University (and I'm sure there were others but I not sure who they were) began giving iPods to every incoming freshmen.

Right now I am helping a company develop a new training system to get it's new employees up to speed faster and more efficiently. Right now this company gives an mp3 player to all of the new associates for the first few months to help train them, along with what are basically podcasts on their private website that also contain training material in both audio and video formats. These combined resources have helped this expanding company train people quicker, cheaper, better, and the associates come away with a better understanding of the material.

Of course the success of something like this would all depend on how it is implemented. If used correctly it could indeed be a powerful tool to help educate students. The hardest part would be training educators on how to best use the technology and developing lessons to be used on the iPods.

Both MIT and Stanford have their own Podcast on iTunes that contain prominent lectures from some of their classes. Other universities have entire recording available for free download on their websites.

If you buy into the idea that this could have a potential pay-off to our educational system, the question becomes is now the right time to invest in this? The idea arose in a discussion over how to fix the states budget problems, and therefore was immediately under attack since it meant making an investment rather than making a cut. The implementation of this idea of course will not yield results for sometime, and the short term impact to the budget will be the cost of implementing the program. There is no doubt that a program such as this would be a hard sell the the general public. How does one justify the cost of giving students a high tech device that little in the public will see the educational value of during such hard economic times?

I have long thought that education has always been a little behind the times. Schools have always been on the back end of adopting technology, and it would be nice to see schools embrace technology for once; not to mention adopting to the way students intake information now days. It truly is time to schools to evolve beyond text books and chalk boards. I would like to see more computers and technology in the classroom (many classrooms only have one computer in them).

I'm not sure if this is the right idea right now but I'm certainly not opposed to it, nor do I think it is a silly idea. I am actually very encouraged by this idea! This shows that the Democrats are willing to think out side the box, are willing to make long term investments rather than the quick fixes proposed by the Republicans, and that they realize it takes more than mandating higher tests scores to fix education. It's important to remember that without long term investment, any budget “fix” will be only short term.

Quick idea, maybe the idea would be received better if iPods were switched to PDAs. Most PDAs can do just about everything an iPod can (short of sycning with iTunes).

As far as the Detroit News Editoral goes, This is all you need to remember from it:

Democrats are either entirely indifferent to the idea that extreme hard times demand extreme belt tightening, or they are bone stupid. We lean toward the latter.
-Snip-
Stop the stupidity. Michigan can't tax or spend its way out of this economic catastrophe.

Ah, yes. Gotta love that liberal media.

The War On Education Vol 2

The war on education wages on. Everybody and their brother knows about Michigan's budget problems by now, and most people realize what is at stake. Schools have kept an keen eye on this issue, while all along assuming the worst. Yes most schools are pretty pessimistic right now, most are looking for ways to stretch this year's budget, and cut next year's. Some schools have already started handing out pink slips, others are talking about cutting back busing routes or eliminating busing altogether. A lot of schools have gone to pay-to-play sports, and the ones that haven't yet are fighting not to have to. Times are tough for schools right now, and all indications are that it's going to get worst before it gets better.

To a certain extent, I get it. Public schools are easy targets. For one thing they are public, they don't operate behind close doors; when public schools have the slightest mishap the whole community knows about it. All you have to do is look at this teacher not wearing his name tag in Clinton to see this principle at work. This was all over the area papers for weeks, with more than half of the articles making the school district out to be a boogie man (that was a large reason I sided with the school over the teacher was the way he handled the situation and dragged the school down in the process). Every one has had a bad teacher, or a teacher they didn't like and it's always those teacher the stick out in people's minds once they are out of school for a few years. And of course, there is the crowd that thinks that any one can be a teacher (oddly enough it is usually that same crowd that thinks that most teacher's aren't any good). Which brings us the the group that views schools as free daycare.

These views stem largely from the fact that most people have no idea what it takes to run a school, have no idea what goes into being a good teacher, and don't realize the potential pay off of giving students a quality education to the general public. Most people have no idea how much it actaully costs to run a school. The truth is that the public and politicians need to be educated about education. Students don't have lobbyist.

Politicians will always talk about making education better, but their idea of making education better is mandating more tests, and if you'er a Republican, cutting school funding, taking money away from public schools and giving it to private schools in the form of a voucher, and creating a nation wide program that your brother Neil will make huge profits from. Sigh

The war on Education

You gotta love it when someone tries to make an argument and they don't think it through all the way. Check out this quote from the Livingston Daily in their article about making all teachers state employees:

Every three years or so, you'd have one big set of contract negotiations between the various unions representing school employees and state education authorities.

One result might be a statewide pay scale that directly links teacher pay to educational outcomes.

If things were settled with one big negotiation, you could bake merit pay for top performers into the system

Moving past the idea of making all teachers directly state employees (they really already are) let's look at the sentence in bold. Making the pay scale directly linked to student grades; ever heard of cooking the books? What is to stop a bad teacher from just giving the bulk of his students good grades regardless of whether or not they earned it? There are some bad teachers out there and there are some immoral teachers out there.

Of course the proponents of this idea would say, that's why we have standardized tests. But anybody that actually thinks about this, can easily find holes in tests being the savior of this idea. First, standardized tests are only given every few years. What is to stop a bad teacher from saying, “It's not my fault they did bad on the test, they got good grades in my class.” Or a bad teacher could say “In order to do well on this test you not only have to be good at the subject I teach, but also other subjects that I don't teach.” So to try an fix these holes we would have to test every year, taking more away more time teachers have to actually teach, and wasting that time on trying to keep teachers “accountable.” The tests would have to be rewritten to be more specific in order to test on only the subjects as they are taught rather than testing how students integrate the knowledge they have (which is a much better measurement of a student than testing on facts). And then comes another problem, Michigan is switching from the MEAP test you take as a junior to the ACT, are you going to ask the ACT people to to bend over backwards to redesign all of their tests to fit this new testing scheme that would have to be implemented? When you jump through all these hoops to make the testing better reflect an individual teacher's performance, then are you really still testing the student?

The article also mentions that by consolidating schools to be state ran it would eliminate the need for each district to have a lawyer. But if they are going to base pay on “teacher performance” you can bet there would be a lot more lawsuits. Even if testing measures were redesigned to better test on only one teacher's effectiveness, there would still be an insane amount of loopholes. Every teacher that thought they weren't getting paid enough would sue the state for unfair wages.

Then there is still a problem of what to do about the classes where they don't give standardized tests. How are they going to judge how a teacher is doing there? Are they going to create a standardized test for band? If they do what are they going to test? Can you write out all of your scales, or how musical each student is? What about an art class, or gym, or shop, or CAD, or any number of other classes offered by different schools?

If you are going to make an argument on how to better schools, make it a valid one. Think things through, don't just come up with a bunch of ideas that aren't possible to implement, or would cost millions to implement. (I though we were trying to save money, and if you don't think this idea would cost millions, then how are you going create all the new tests that would be needed. On top of that, how would you pay to have those tests updated every year, because you can't just create them one year and use them for the rest of time.) I guess my point is stop coming up with these hair brained ideas to “fix” schools that would actually do just the opposite. Spend a little more than two seconds thinking over an idea and what it would actually mean and cost rather than just babbling on about how you think teachers make to much and aren't actually teaching students anything (or as some people think schools are teaching liberal propaganda).

ID badges for Teachers

I'm not to sure how many of you know about a little village called Clinton Michigan, but right now it is being dragged into the spotlight and causing The Daily Telegram to support a teacher while bashing the school board and Superintendent. The issue that is dragging this little school into the limelight is a new safety measure that is being adopted by other schools in this area and has already been adopted in larger districts. The district is requiring all school employees to wear a name tag and that every visitor to the school wears a visitor pass. When the policy was implemented, all of the teachers complied, all but one and this teacher is facing losing his job over it. The problem the teacher has with this policy is that he states that wearing a badge takes away his individuality. The School states that the badge is a way to help first responders identify staff in an emergency situation saving time and hopefully saving lives and as a way to identify people who are not supposed to be in the building. The police chief of the village supports the IDs as does a security firm hired by the school over the summer before the policy was implemented.

When the teacher was first asked to comply with the policy he walked out of class in the middle of the day and has not been back, taking sick days up to this point. At Monday's School Board meeting the teacher made his case to the board, after failing to make it to the superintendent. The School Board stated that they did not want to see an “excellent teacher” leave the district over this matter, but that he had to wear the name badge. The teacher then offered a few comprises; he would personally introduce himself to every student and learn every student's name, in addition to personally introducing himself to every Clinton Police officer and he would take one week unpaid as a deterrent to other staff members also not wearing their badges. After the meeting he offered another compromise to the superintendent where he would sign a liability weaver stating that he would be willing to be shoot by any intruder if he did not have to wear the badge.

This item popped up in both The Daily Telegram and The Tecumseh Herold and my problem with both stories is how one sided they both are. Both articles made the School Board meeting sound as if it were the entire community versus the School board and all but two members of the audience were in support of the teacher. Sorry, but that just wasn't the case. My understanding from someone there in support of the board, is that the teacher had a lot of support in the audience (I guess he is a very well liked teacher by his students) and his supporters were by far the most out spoken members of the audience, but they were not the only members. The articles also fail to mention that the state has required schools to beef up their security measures by requiring schools to do two lock-down drills a year*, along with the fire drills, and tornado drills it is already required to do. Oh and the articles also fail to mention how all of the other staff members of the district have complied with the policy and that many teachers support it. Did I forget to mention that that The Daily Telegram compares the teacher to Henry David Thoreau? Both articles make the school board sound as inflexable tyrants, when really what they are doing is applying this policy to everyone equaly.

To a certain extent I understand the teacher, but I still have to side with the School on this one. The IDs are not just for the safety of the person waring them, but for everyone in the school. Clinton is indeed a small town (that fact was raised as a defense for not wearing the ID), but it has still had its issues. Parents have had to be hauled away from the school by the police for violent behavior. Kids have brought guns to schools (in elementary, middle and high school). Students have beaten up teachers and any number of other things have all happened in this small town's schools. Even if the teacher were to introduce himself to all of the Clinton Police Officers, if there were a major incident the small Clinton Police force would not be able to handle it themselves. If the ID had more than just the persons name, picture, and Clinton Community Schools on it the teacher would have more of a case, but I have many friends that work places where they have to wear an ID badge (including as teachers in other districts) and most of the time that ID has much more info on it than the one Clinton Teachers are required to wear.

Even in a small district like Clinton not all staff members know each other as evident by a security check ran in the districts buildings. This check was one reason the new policy was enacted. A member of the security firm hired by the School walked through each of the buildings, timing how long it took to be told to go to the office to sign in. The member of the firm was able to walk all around the middle school and high school buildings before being asked to sign in at the office (The elementary staff stopped him almost as soon as he walked in the door). In the middle school the security member was able to wander the halls for 13 minutes before being questioned as to why he was in the building.

I don't always like all these new security measures all the time, but wearing an ID badge at work is not something I consider over the top. A lot of those working in the private sector have had to wear IDs for a very long time. Even at a fast food joint people are required to wear name tags. If I knew the guy I would most likely have more sympathy for him, but it is not worth losing your job over having to wear what is really just a name tag.

* There are two levels of lock-down one where every door into the building is locked, every door to classrooms are locked and the windows are blocked and one where in addition to have the lights have to be shut off and students and teachers have to sit in the corners of the rooms silently. Each version of lock-down must be practiced twice a year.

Think before cutting benefits for teachers

The school funding problem has been brewing for awhile now here in good old Michigan. There has been a lot of ideas thrown around as to how to fix this problem and one of those ideas is cutting benefits to the staff. To that I say hold your horses and think about this for a minute.

As if it isn't already hard enough to get good teachers, now there are people out there saying we should give them less (to be fair there were already a lot of people out there saying teachers get to much, but now there seems to be a few more, or at least those people are louder now that the shit is starting to hit the fan). Being a teacher is such a thankless job, and being a good teacher is a lot of hard work that doesn't end when the school bell rings. A good teacher can make more money and probably with less effort working in the private sector. Teachers not only have to have a degree and teaching certificate, they have to have X amount of schooling after they get that certificate to keep it. Then they need more training for the state, and more on top of that for the district. Some of that the school pays for, most of it they don't.

One of the things that has set Michigan schools apart from schools in other states are their benefits to staff. Because Michigan schools have a good union and good benefits because of that, they have enough teachers and are therefore able to keep class sizes smaller. If you look at schools in some other states, they have poor or no unions, and weaker benefits. And those same schools are always in need of teachers because of that. Teachers may hire into schools in those states, but many move away after a few years of teaching to other states like Michigan. I'm not saying that every state that needs teachers has lossy benefits, just that every state that has lossy benefits needs teachers. In some of those states the teacher even has to eat lunch with the kids because there is no lunch room staff.

I've talked a lot about schools on this blog in the past, and that's because I think they are important. But the thing that makes or brakes a school is the people who work there, most importantly the teachers. Without teachers a school is just a building with text books in it. Until we get some sort of Universal Health Insurance, schools need to continue to provide benefits to their teachers, or they won't have any more.

Higher Ed overhaul

I really think higher education needs an overhaul in this country. I feel a little ripped off from my higher education experience. Less than half of my classes had to do with my chosen subject, there wasn't enough sections of the classes I had to take, and there wasn't even close to enough equipment.

Let's put all that aside right now and talk about the useless general education requirements. I understand the thinking behind them, they are supposed to make us more well rounded and better informed. That's a great goal, but the gen-ed requirements that most people take fall very, very short of it. What use is a class on astronomy in the the real world? What about a class on linguistics, how am I going to use that? Why don't we rethink these classes and make them more useful for the people taking them.

What I suggest is something a little more practical. Instead of a class on theoretical mirco-economics, how about a class that talks about economics that we will see in our everyday life. (Someone in my micro-econ class asked the question “How is any of this used in the real world or business world?” My professor's answerer was: “Nothing in this class has anything to do with the real world, this is all theoretical economics.”) This class could talk about world trade policies, how raising or lowering the interest rate a certain times helps or hurts the economy. How about how raising or lowering taxes effects the economy? There are any number of things that could be talked about in an economics class that deals with real world, day-today economics.

How about a class that talks about the history of war. A class that talks about American politics. What about a biology class that talks about biology in reference to health. You know stuff that we will actually use. Stuff that will help us to make informed decisions at the polls, or about what car to buy, or any number of other things that impact every American much more than any of the stuff you get in the gen-ed classes now. Maybe if people had some of these classes rather than a class about the history of sentence structures people would be able to choose better politicians and demand we only go to war as a last step and that when we do things are planned out.

I'll most likely come back to this topic in the future because I think we need to make education work for us and should actually try to accomplish the goal of helping people be more informed and well rounded in their day-to-day lives.

Detroit News Vs. Teachers & Education

The Detroit News needs to be run out of town. Now they are bitching about Detroit not fining teachers for striking, and are bitching, albeit not directly, for school vouchers.

In this article The News bitches about how the court won't up hold the anti-teacher strike law. My guess is the reason this law wasn't enforced is because the judge knew that if the law was ever challenged in the Supreme Court they would side with the teachers, and the school district and the state would waste money pursuing it.

This is a stupid law, and I don't think it is even constitutional. The state doesn't out law auto workers from striking. All they would have to do is say the auto industry is too important to Michigan, a strike would cripple the manufacturer, which would then be in trouble of going under, which would cripple Michigan. There is no law like that, and there never will be a law like that because the court understands that workers have rights. So why should they be able to pass a law outlawing a teacher from striking? All that does is say that state employees rights are less important that every other worker's rights, and that just isn't true.

You don't make education better by punishing teachers, all you do is lose teachers. If you want to make education better, ask for good teachers. If you want good teachers, you have to pay them well. Teaching is a thankless job to begin with; the people who are teaching right now could make much more money if they went into the private sector somewhere and left teaching. They call the teacher's union "militant", when really it is just doing its job; making sure that teacher's rights don't get trampled.

A teacher's job never ends throughout the year. When they come home they have papers to grade. They have to go back into school at night for meetings. They have to have conferences with parents. They have to put up with asshole students and parents. They have to put up with people like the assholes at the Detroit News telling them they make to much money and are ruining education.

Teachers are people just like every one else, they need money to live. Just because they are teachers doesn't mean that they get free food to eat, or a free car to to drive to work with. They don't get a free house to live in, or any other special perks just because they are teachers. They have all the expenses that everyone else has, and sometimes more. Teachers are required by law that they continue to get more education even after they have a degree and a job. Teachers have to go to conferences about different teaching techniques throughout the year. The school they work for will pay for part of this additional education and training teachers have to take, but a good deal of this costs still comes out of the teacher's pocket. Not to mention all the little odds and ends that the school district doesn't pay for that the teacher buys for their class room.

I think these Detroit News hacks should have to live on what teachers make for a year and then see if they say teachers make to much. I swear, if these people had their way teachers would be making minimum wage, with no health care. Their idea of helping schools is treating teachers like slave labor, and taking money away from public schools and giving it to private schools. All these people do is rag on education, yet they refuse to give it any more money and insist that teachers be treated like crap.

Here's the article:
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061121/OPINION01/611210305/100

Cross-posted at Michigan Liberal

Education in America

Well since prop 5 didn't pass in Michigan last week (somehow I knew it wouldn't), it makes me wonder what Americans really think of public schools. Now I know that just because this prop didn't pass doesn't mean that American's don't want to fund public schools, but what do people think public schools role is in society, and how do they think they schools should be funded?

To me it is always interesting how politicians always talk about wanting a better eduction system in this country, but seldom do anything to help it that matters. Instead, they come up with all sorts of tests for students and if the students do poorly on those tests, the schools don't get any additional funding to help better those test scores. Politicians come up with all sorts of rules regarding the degrees teachers have to have to become teachers, making it harder to become one and more costly.

Education is still in the stone age in this country. Technology, science, and the world in general change at a very rapid pace and schools are not able to keep up. I graduated college fairly recently and I feel like I got riped off (I'm sure I will have more about this in future posts). It's not the school's fault, or the professors I had fault. I blame the system. I blame the politicians who raised our tuition every year by cutting our funding every single year I was in college. I blame the system that didn't give the school enough money to buy enough equipment. I blame the system that has a backwards idea of what a college eduction should be.

I think that the classes that I did have that had to do with my chosen concentration were quite good. My problem is all the other classes I had to take, and the classes that didn't, but should have existed in my program area. A few of us in one of my classes even asked once about why there weren't more classes in our area of study; we were told the professors wanted a lot more classes to be offered, but the school didn't have the money for the teachers or the equipment. How bad is that when the teachers and the students both want more classes, but the school can't give it to them for budgetary reasons.

I'm out of school now, so why should I care about the quality of schools? I care because some time down the road someone in school right now is going to impact my life in the future. I care because someone who is in school 10 years from now is going to change the world. I care because it is in this country's best interest to have the best education system. I care because I am an American.

If you want to be selfish and do something that you are going to befit from, demand a better education system. It won't pay off right away but it will pay off, it will make your life better in some way.

More on Proposal 5

I gotta say I am a little surprised about people's reaction to Prop 5. Over at Michigan Liberal, matt lays out how he plans on voting on the ballot proposals, including voting down prop 5. In the commits section there are both people for the prop and against it. The part that surprises me, is that I thought funding schools is one of the things that liberals are all about. This has always been a mainstay of the Dems platform, which is why I am just a little confused why Dems would be against this proposal. The main goal of this proposal is to keep funding for school on par with inflation.

Granted this prop isn't the best ever drafted, it has it flaws (such as stating how it will be funded), but it is a huge step in the correct direction. Funding schools isn't just good for schools, it's good for the whole state!

Now don't get me wrong, everybody is entitled to their opinion. I find it very, VERY hard to believe that people would think that this could take funding away from emergency services. That just would not happen, and besides try getting elected after you cut funding for police and fire/rescue operations.

I dunno, this just seems like it is an odd post to be making in response to a post on a self proclaimed liberal site.

For full discloser, my mom is a teacher at an under-funded public school.

Cross posted at Michigan Liberal.

Michigan's Proposal 5

Proposal 5 on the Michigan ballot will increase funding for schools by about $565 million a year. It calls for annual school funding to increase equal to the rate of inflation. It is designed to help not only k-12 schools, but also public universities and even community colleges. Not only that but it states that school districts only have to pay so much into it's employees (not just teachers) pension funds, where the rest would be covered by the state. All in All this sounds like a big step in the correct direction. It would help to equalize the amount of money each school gets per kid (right now some school may only be getting something like $1300 per student while other schools could get $3000).

Right now I am wondering where this so called liberal media is because The Daily Telegram (Adrian's paper), The Detroit Free Press, The Lansing State Journal, The Michigan Catholic Conference, The Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and I'm sure a bunch more entities are opposing this bill. Google it, there are all sorts of articles in papers and newsletters against it.

There arguments against it are all over the place, most of them you can tell come from people who have spent very little time in public schools. The biggest argument seems to be that no where in the proposal does it come out and say that this will help education (That must mean it will be BAD for schools right?). Another argument is that the teachers are just trying to pad their accounts. Do any of these people know any teachers? Teachers get paid so little money it's not funny. Get this, they say that since there is no mention of improving test scores it won't make schools better. Oh yeah, they said this bill will take money away from emergency services. And this one just has to make you laugh, they say schools are over funded as they are. Clearly the people making these arguments are education experts to be able to make the case that funding schools is bad for education.

By the way, the school I went to college at, Michigan State University, gets so little money, it can hardly be called a public school. It got lessthan 30% of it's funding through state funds; and that was while I was there 2 years ago, before funding for schools has been cut more.

Here is a link to the Daily Telegram article, I couldn't get any of the other newspapers sites to work.

http://lenconnect.com/articles/2006/10/26/news/news09.txt