Sincere Appreciation

This holiday greeting was sent to a teacher from their district superintendent. We have redacted the district and superintendent's name to respect the privacy of our reader.

Happy Holidays!

I've been searching for some private time to write to all of you. It hasn't been easy finding it. I know that as my busy time has intensified, so has yours.

I spend my nights (after some form of dinner, then homework and a daily summary with my girls) looking over who we are... what District ( ) is. We know that nothing is more important than the time we spend with our students. No matter how our grades and scores go up, nothing is more important than how we feel when we are doing our jobs. Teaching is emotional and intuitive. Teaching is THE form and source of intrinsic motivation. We do it because it because we love it. There is no other way about it.

When we teach, when we look into their eyes, we have to know what they need. We do our part everyday. We're responsible, we're professional, we work, and we care. We dedicate our lives, our hearts, our minds, and our time to our students. We've already made that commitment; so we do it everyday. Our lives are the subjects we teach, the phone calls we handle, the emails we send and receive, the schools we clean, the buses we drive, the childrenwe meet everyday. They are our lives. It is the part of this job that I miss each and every day.

You have the power to give that gift everyday. What an amazing power! You, everyday, whether you teach, you feed, you drive, you service, you clean, have the power to make life better for someone else. Nowhere else in the world can one hold that priceless gift!

You give me that gift everyday. Thank you! I want to give it to you, too. Let's give a great life to our students; they all deserve it. We have the power to make their lives better, to make our schools better, and to make this city, and the world, better. Show them through your work, and tell them with your words. As we give, so shall we receive.

Thank you for making my life better. I appreciate every one of you. Sometimes, the gifts are hard to unwrap, but every lesson I have learned from all of you has made my life better. I sincerely hope I can do the same for all of you. I love the opportunity we have here in district ( ). I love that we can make life better for our students, and I love that you are giving your gift to them everyday!

Please have a restful, joyful, and absolutely beautiful holiday! You all deserve the very best life has to offer.

Keeping Kids First!

( ) Superintendent

Chasing Tails

Thanks to one of our readers for sending us the article posted below.

District 102 to keep Spanish, offer new languages at elementary level

Students "will continue Spanish instruction in kindergarten through fourth grade..."

"...students will take one trimester of Spanish and may choose French or Italian one trimester and a non-Romance language, such as German or Chinese, the remaining trimester.

In sixth grade, students must choose one language to study for the next three years. Instruction will be delivered through the Rosetta Stone and other computer programs, classroom foreign language teachers, project-based learning units and conversation sessions led by native speakers."

Included with the article were the following comments to us about our school district:

"Public knowledge being filtered by (the) school is what lets this, Pleasantdale, be like the dog chasing its tail. It is why we do not have e-readers, or French. We are too busy beating up the board. Sending the LaGrange Patch (Doings) article....see sd 102 covered and crazy exciting curriculum. Why are we so behind?

Pleasantdale is always on the outside of innovation, looking in. They are always the last school to get on board with anything. They are so focused on Bright Red Apple awards, test scores and spankings that they can't see the forest through the trees.

In December, for the fifth time in the last eight months, the board majority of consisting of Leandra Sedlack, Lisa Houk, Mark Mirabile and Beth Tegtmeier will once again attempt to spank minority members Gina Scaletta-Nelson and or Karen O'Halloran. Rather than working to bring new programs to our district such as an expanded foreign language program, a full day kindergarten program or a handheld technology based learning system, they continue to chase their tails by focusing on finding ways to chastise and publicly reign in Scaletta-Nelson and O'Halloran.

We also received a reference to this in an email:

“Not only is this abuse of power, it shows how misguided the work of the board has become...” “Our district has been nationally recognized for collaboration on behalf of children, but the current board seems more focused on electioneering than the issues that will help all children...at this critical time."

“(Teachers) have focused on improving the education of our students for years, but this board is more concerned with making sure their position is secure.”

Sounds just like Pleasantdale, doesn't it?

Pleasantdale Blog Has YouTube Channel!

Pleasantdale School Board meetings are on YouTube. Below is a link to their channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/pleasantdaleblog?feature=mhee

While you are there, check out the Special Meeting on Communication that was held on 11/9/2011.

This is a chance to put in your two cents on the meetings so feel free to leave a comment here or on YouTube!

Prediction Time!!

The ITBS scores were due back months ago and they are still not in.

Or are they?

Our prediction is that the scores ARE back and have gone down and that Dr. Fredisdorf is most likely scrambling to find someone to blame an explanation for this.

Let's see, what will it be this time?

Oh yes! It's the "poor" kids who have bad home lives. Remember when we hear that one a few years back at a board meeting?

Or, it could be the special ed kids that get blamed again. Last year they were accused of conspiring to get all the same answers wrong on purpose and that's why the scores went down?

Or better yet, all the new kids that have moved into the district. Gosh we have had sooo many kids transition into our district this year! They are ALWAYS to blame for the scores going down!

So many excuses to chose from..which one will it be this time?

One thing is for certain - instruction will be put on the back burner so the teachers can focus on test prep for the spring re-take of the ITBS test. Dr. Fredisdorf made it pretty clear at the November board meeting that tenure for teachers will no longer be based on seniority, but on student achievement/performance.

If our already overburdened teachers work really hard and force kids to take tutorials based on Dr. John Wick's PIG reports (or whatever they are called now) maybe the scores will improve by the second ITBS go-around come May.

In addition to spending tens of thousands of dollars on various testing materials, our district spends $20,000 a year on Dr. Wick's analysis and improvement plans. He has spent the last 40 years writing and developing many of the test questions on the very tests our kids take.

It makes you wonder if someone, somewhere along the way, is getting a little kick back for the amount of money being spent on all this nonsense.

It's something to think about...

Do Unto Others

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

By Marion Brady - veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.

But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.

Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”

One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.

“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.

Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”

A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.

How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?

Winter Wonderfest

Thanks to the PTA committee members and board for a wonderfully run, totally fun, winter wonderfest!!

Thanks to all the volunteers that helped make this event so nice and to the students, parents, teachers, staff and friends that supported it.

A great time was had by all!

Dear Teachers: WE HEAR YOU!

This article was sent to us by some teachers. Thanks to those brave enough to reach out!

Paperwork burden plagues teachers

By Robert McCartney, Published November 12

Regardless of whether you liked the results, the Fairfax school board elections Tuesday had at least one positive outcome. The campaign raised awareness of a bureaucratic ailment that’s becoming a regionwide classroom epidemic: the overburdening of teachers with paperwork.

Everyone from school board members to administrators agrees it’s a problem, but it keeps getting bigger anyway. The mania for more student data, more meetings to discuss the data and more high-level monitoring of the data is demoralizing teachers and undermining education.

“I used to be up late preparing creative lessons that I loved. Now I’m up late getting my data in,” said a sixth-grade language arts teacher in Fairfax. She and others from her school said administrative chores have become so excessive that teachers have broken down and cried at work.

“It’s killing us. Our building is about to implode,” the teacher said. (This is probably why Pleasantdale just spend over $20,000 on a team building workshop for their teachers.)

We all know how this started. The national school reform movement of the past decade has placed a premium on using standardized tests to measure student achievement and hold teachers accountable for results. (And it is about to get even worse with the new Illinois laws.)

That’s fine. But it’s gone too far. Several new and returning Fairfax school board members promised during the campaign to push to give teachers some relief. Let’s hope they succeed.

“This is a critical issue, and the school board needs to deal with this,” said Sandy Evans, who was reelected as the board member from Mason District in eastern Fairfax. “I’m hearing more and more that teachers are more concerned about workload than they are about pay.”

It’s not limited to Fairfax. The same complaints come from teachers, principals and union leaders elsewhere in our area. (And in OUR area!)

“What you’re hearing in Fairfax is similar to what huge numbers of our folks are experiencing,” said Tom Israel, executive director of the Montgomery County Education Association. “It’s a national phenomenon, but I think districts like Fairfax and Montgomery, which are more sophisticated and complex, have taken the problem to a higher level.”

I had a chance to learn more about the topic after a Fairfax elementary school math and science teacher phoned me around Halloween. I had mentioned the overwork problem in a column previewing the Fairfax election, and he asked, “Do you want to tell the full story of what’s really going on?”

I said yes. And so I sat down Thursday with him and four of his colleagues who work at an elementary school in the Braddock district in central Fairfax. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear they’d be punished for speaking out. (Pleasantdale administrators are notorious for punishing teachers that speak out! Can you imagine what it must be like to work in an environment where every day you are scared to death of saying or doing the wrong thing in fear of losing your job? It must be awful!"

They complained particularly about requirements to fill out and update ever more forms about kids’ individual performances and lesson plans. Some forms can take 10 to 15 minutes per child. That’s an average of about five hours for a 25-student class. (Kind of reminds us of the life skills section of the new report cards multiplied by 80 kids per cohort.)

“Every year, it’s gotten worse. There’s so much paperwork and documentation,” a fifth-grade teacher said. “I don’t earn a corporate lawyer’s salary. Teaching used to be fun. You used to have some control.”

They also were frustrated with eCART, a Web site they’re supposed to use to help develop lesson plans. It’s hard to navigate and often doesn’t have material they need.

“We spend so much time looking for resources [there] that we don’t have time to prepare our lessons,” a special education teacher said.

An instructional assistant, who’s assigned to help a kindergarten teacher, was unhappy that she was frequently left alone to run the class while the teacher was busy administering assessments.

“I’m pretty smart, but I’m not a teacher,” the assistant said.

Fairfax School Superintendent Jack Dale pledged in June to address the problem. “I will speak to all the principals about ensuring we do not create inappropriate work load/time demands on our teachers this next school year,” Dale said in an e-mail to teachers’ association leaders. (Our superintendent and principals create the problem; they don't address it.)

But Dale’s promise apparently hasn’t yielded results. “Either he never communicated it to his managers, or they don’t listen to him,” according to the math and science teacher who originally called me. (Ours would never communicate it.)

Phyllis Pajardo, assistant superintendent for human resources in Fairfax, said the administration hopes to resolve the problem but warned against sacrificing academic progress.

“We can certainly look more closely at processes and practices to streamline things,” Pajardo said. “We can’t and shouldn’t move off of improving student achievement.”

Of course nobody wants to hurt student achievement. Based on what I heard, however, a bigger danger is burning out teachers. May the new school board press the bureaucrats to focus on that risk, as well.

While the above article was not written about Pleasantdale, it could have been. This is EXACTLY what our teachers are going through with the new standards based grading grading and reporting practices, report cards, further attempts and district assessments. We have heard countless times from Pleasantdale teachers about how much paperwork they have to do nowadays... and it is only getting worse!