Announcement: Instructional Design Committee to be formed

1. Instructional Design Committee –

In order to follow through with the charge given to the Facilities Committee by the Board of Education, a sub-committee chaired by Dr. Connie Hurst-Bayless has been formed. The Instructional Design sub-committee’s expressed purpose and function are as follows:

Purpose of the Instructional Design Committee:

To create a vision for a dynamic school that will serve the needs of students and the community for years to come.

The committee will:

• Serve as the key communicators; bridging communication between the users, the district, and the designer.
• Provide input from the building’s users.
• Make building design recommendations to the superintendent and Board of Education.
• Facilitate the application of learning, and the collaborative dialogue between design partners.
• Support learning in an effective, creative and imaginative way.
• Treat the building itself as part of the curriculum.
• Take into consideration the historical character and culture of the community as the context for the school.

The function of the Instructional Design Committee:

To develop a learning plan that will guide the design of the school facility and address the following questions:

• Guiding Themes: What factors should guide the design?
• Audience: What constituents will be served by the school?
• Point of Differentiation: What will the unique features be that distinguish this school from other schools?
• Academic Outcomes: What do we want students to know and be able to do?
• Student/Staff Development Expectations: What skills, processes, and appreciations do we want students and staff to develop?
• Organization: How do we want to organize the learning?
• Student and Staff Development: Who should be part of the teaching/learning staff and what are the desired characteristics and competencies for this group?
• Environment: What are implications of the answers to these questions on the building design?
• Culture: What customs should be in place to actively convey norms and celebrate success of the school and its students and staff?

COMPASS Staffing Participant Results

Here are the results and priorities from the stakeholders who participated at the last COMPASS meeting/presentation on staffing…

COMPASS Staffing Priorities

Print 500+ “Not-Made-in-China” Toys

For those of you parents out there looking for safe toys for your children this Christmas…

Print 500+ “Not-Made-in-China” Toys
500 “Not-Made-in-China” Toys

A list from a national toy chain
A List from a National Toy Chain

We’re anti- parental angst. And with near-daily reports of ever-more lead-laced toys from China, there’s a lot of angst in the toy aisle as the holiday approaches.

That’s why, as a service to readers, when handed a list of toys marked “not made in China” obtained from a Toys “R” Us in-store service desk, we knew the toys on the list would be of interest to many parents struggling to make safer choices for gifts for their children this Christmas and Hanukkah.

Click here for the list…

The Fairly Paid Teacher Paradox

I pulled the following from my last post because I found it incredibly relevant to this particular argument.  For more details, just read the previous post…

If teachers are to get more money, citizens must pay more taxes. That’s the bottom line. And a powerful current in American political life has been a demand for lower taxes.

If you start with the premise “taxes are too high,” the conclusion “teachers are overpaid” is virtually automatic. The arguments about why they’re overpaid come after the fact. “You can’t fix the schools by throwing money at them,” and its ilk are simply necessary fillers to bolster the premise that taxes must be lowered.

But it’s wishful thinking to suppose that we can have good schools without paying teachers good salaries. Comparisons to the good old days ignore the fact that times have changed. Back then, low wages could secure top talent because half the population was restricted to just two or three jobs, one of which was teaching. The best still had to compete to be teachers, and only the best of the best got in. Today, potential teachers–men or women–have so many other options that it’s the teaching profession that must compete, against other lines of work, to reel in the top talents. Otherwise, instead of teaching, those top talents might choose to be…

Well, let’s see: police officers, accountants, department store buyers, architects, computer systems analysts, engineers, attorneys, professors, or doctors, for example.

Selective Memory

It appears to me that some people in our community have a selective memory about who I am and what I stand for. Apparently it was OK for me to like teachers in the past, as long as I was slamming the administration and their fiscal practices. Now that we have the best and the brightest in central office, and now that the fiscal operations in the Mehlville School District are as sound as sound can be, when I speak or talk about fair pay and fair benefits for those who deserve it, all of a sudden I have been relegated to an advocate of the Mehlville NEA.

Let me clarify. I am a natural ally to those who deserve fair pay and fair benefits for those who deserve it. Those who do not deserve it, should not be employed. While I am most in favor of the elected public officials and overseers of public tax money having the final say on district finances, and what it can afford, I am in favor of employee groups collectively bargaining for their members. I see no harm in it. If there was ever a fair system devised for merit pay in education, I would certainly entertain it. Unfortunately, to date, no fair system for merit pay has ever been devised for a district with our size and diversity of students. In the past, there have been too many problems and holes in the criteria.

Now, for the selective memory portion. Nothing I am saying here is news to anyone who has been paying attention to me. This is me, and always has been me. You may remember that when I was running for the board in 2004 and 2005, I was not endorsed by the NEA. However, I said then, and I will say it again. I would have appreciated the NEA endorsement, but it did not matter to me because regardless of their endorsement, if elected, because I am a natural ally of the teachers, I will fight for their fair pay and fair benefits within the constraints and budgets of the Mehlville School District.

I do this not because I just want to help teachers. I do it because my research has shown me that the two most important factors in student success are the credentials and experience of the classroom teacher. Therefore, the logical conclusion I draw is that if student success is a goal, then we should be participating more aggressively in “the market” for the best, brightest, and most qualified teachers available.

I also made the following post on my blog in January of 2005…BEFORE I was elected….

As you know, I am one of four candidates running for the Mehlville School Board; Cindy Christopher, Marea Kluth-Hoppe, Ken Leach and Karl Frank, Jr.

That being said, it is more than a political move for me to try and communicate with the teachers of my school district. I am a third generation graduate of the Mehlville School District and have three sons that are and will be attending the district very soon. Matthew is 13 years old and is a student at Bernard Middle School. My three year old Kurtis is a student at the Mehlville Early Childhood Education Center and my two year old Joey will attend the district as well in the next year and a half or so.

There are so many ways to look at teaching and education. If nothing else, education – public education in particular should be looked at as an investment in our future. How can any other investment be seen as more important?

However, I prefer to look at teaching as something much more intricate and inherently necessary. Education is the passing on of all knowledge known to humankind to current and future generations. Sure, there are good educators and bad educators, good curriculum as well as bad curriculum, never-ending red tape (more like brick walls) to bust through, but for the most part, education, especially a publicly funded educational institution that takes all comers, is the foundation of a thriving and productive society.

According to Parker Palmer, author of ‘Let your life speak’ and ‘The Courage To Teach,’ in ancient Greece and other ancient societies, teachers were regarded by the public as highly as lofty politicians, scientists, mathematicians or anyone else.

So, are teachers overpaid? I think you already know my answer to that question. However, in my attempts to research the question, I stumbled across an article written by Tamim Ansary of Encarta. He answered the question in such a manner that I could not offer much more of my own insight and still make the argument stronger.

The link to the article can by found here…

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Departments/CareerTraining/?article=teacherpaymain or by clicking here.

…or, you can read on as I have pasted the article in this email.

I highlighted what I thought were points that really stood out to me.

Are Teachers Overpaid?

by Tamim Ansary

Some people think teachers are overpaid–I get e-mail about it all the time. Other people think teachers are underpaid. I get a lot of that e-mail too.

I was going to weigh in with my own opinion when I realized I couldn’t, because I didn’t know how much teachers make–or how much anyone else makes, for that matter, except for a few well-known CEOs and sports stars.

I said to myself, “Get some facts before shooting your mouth off, Tamim.” (I learned that from a teacher.)

Lucky for me, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) researches salary issues. I found their Web site, and here’s what they report:

The average American public school teacher, kindergarten through high school, makes $44,367.*

Salaries vary from state to state, with South Dakota coming in last at $31,383 a year, and California leading the way at $54,348.

Is $44,367 a lot, or a little? I couldn’t tell, so I dug up salary averages for a few other professions. Here’s how they stack up:

Profession
Average annual salary

teacher
$44,367

state patrol officer
$47,090

assistant professor
$47,476

accountant
$54,503

architect
$56,620

computer systems analyst
$74,534

engineer
$76,298

full professor
$89,631

attorney
$90,290

family practice physician
$150,267

I can hear some of you out there saying, “Sure, teachers make less than doctors, big deal. Isn’t that fair?” Underpaid, overpaid, it only means something in comparison to how much a person should be paid, right?

But that’s a big can of worms. How much “should” anyone be paid? And how do we judge “should”?

Are Teachers Overpaid?

Part II: What teachers deserve
Is any line of work entitled to a particular level of compensation? On what basis? Are there objective criteria?

I can think of three:

The amount of training needed for the job
The all-around difficulty of the work
The value of the product or service to society
If you use these criteria, doctors deserve tons of money. Their job requires endless schooling followed by a brutal internship…and they save lives. What could be more important than that?

Carpet installers, by contrast, don’t necessarily need a college degree, although they do need training and practical experience. If they’re good at what they do, their carpets look smooth and stay put–an important and necessary skill, but it’s not saving lives. No wonder doctors make more.

I think teachers are more like doctors when it comes to the amount of training needed for the job. Teachers need four years of college and at least one more for a teaching certificate, or two more for a master’s degree. Even then, in many states, teachers have to keep taking summer courses to hold onto their jobs. The requirements vary, but in California, for example, teachers are required to clock 150 hours of course work over five years–which they take in the summer, usually, and must pay for themselves.

In fact, teachers need about the same amount of training as architects, engineers, and accountants.

Are Teachers Overpaid?

Part III: Hard work or hardly working?
I think a lot of the “overpaid teachers” talk comes from the notion that teachers’ hours match up with students’ hours: Put in six hours a day, head home around 2 PM, and take summers off. Compared to most jobs, that’s scarcely working, right?

Hello–news flash! Classroom time is only the tip of the pencil for a teacher. No one just walks into a roomful of kids without a plan and keeps them fruitfully occupied for six hours at a stretch, day after day. Lesson plans have to be drawn up. There go your weekends.

Then there’s homework. If you have 25 kids in your class, and each one turns in one page of homework a day, you have 25 pages to read and mark before tomorrow. There go your evenings.

Furthermore, you have meetings to attend–with other teachers, curriculum experts, administrators, and parents. Plus, when kids bring their life problems into the classroom–and they’re human, so they do–who ends up dealing with them? That’s right, the teacher. It’s not in the job description, but a teacher’s obligations inevitably overlap with those of social workers, therapists, and even parents.

In his book Small Victories, journalist Samuel Freedman followed New York City high school teacher Jessica Siegel around for a year to see what she actually did, and he found that this teacher put in more than 60 hours per week at her job. It’s anecdotal evidence, and maybe Siegal is unusual. But every teacher I talked to felt his or her work week extended way past 40 hours. Indeed, a national survey conducted by the Department of Education showed that teachers spend an average of 45 hours a week doing their jobs.

Saving civilization
Which brings us to our third criterion. How valuable is the contribution teachers make to humanity?

Never mind Mr. Holland’s Opus. Forget individual cases. Let’s consider the teaching profession as a whole. If doctors save lives, what do teachers do?

Well, let’s see. Everything we call civilization has to be passed on to the next generation. Isn’t that what teachers do? Reading, writing, adding 26 plus 13, calculating the boiling point of water and naming the vitamins found in carrots, explaining the difference between Turkey and turkey–none of this stuff is in the genes.

Without teachers, civilization would have to be developed from scratch every generation, and man, you can’t get too far in one generation. We’d still be listening to eight-track tapes. We wouldn’t even have cars! Well, I guess we’d have our parents’ cars, but we wouldn’t know how to drive them!

So yeah, I guess teaching is important work. On a scale from one to ten, let’s give it a nine. (Saving lives has still got to rank higher.)

One ballplayer equals 100 teachers? According to the latest edition of Jobs Rated Almanac, the highest-paid professionals in America are NBA basketball players. They average $4,637,825 a year.

In other words, an NBA player makes about 100 times as much as a teacher.

If service to humanity counts, why should ballplayers make millions while teachers scrape by on a few measly tens of thousands? What do basketball players contribute that’s more important than transferring the contents of civilization to the next generation?

Good question, but only because it illustrates an important truth about the compensation for any job. Clint Eastwood said it best in his movie Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Are Teachers Overpaid?

Part IV: Why teachers make less than lawyers
The amount of clout is what it’s all about.

In America, teachers started out in a hole dating back to the 19th century. Back then, most schoolteachers were women, and women who worked professionally outside the home were mostly teachers (or nurses) because other careers were closed to them.

Those women were offered low wages on the assumption that they were not breadwinners supporting families. In fact, single teachers were generally assumed to be clocking time while they waited to get married. Those who kept working after marriage were thought to be making “extra income,” which justified paying them what amounted to pin money.

Since their options were limited, they had to accept what they were offered. Thus, the prevailing wage for teachers started out low.

Meet and submit
In 1948, when the AFT ran its first salary survey, teachers were making less than $3,000 a year–which is equivalent to maybe $16,000 today.

Unlike plumbers, bus drivers, and truckers, teachers had no right to engage in collective bargaining. Instead, they went through a process called “meet and converse,” which meant they would meet with their school board and discuss what they needed. Then they would go away, and the school board would decide what to give them.

But in 1961, a math teacher named Albert Shanker kick-started massive changes in educator compensation. As head of a professional association called the United Federation of Teachers, he called a controversial teachers’ strike in New York City.

The rise of clout
That strike gave birth to one of America’s major trade union movements. Over the next 15 years, teachers won the right to collective bargaining state by state. As unions took over salary negotiations, teachers’ incomes began to rise rapidly.

Today, 80 percent of teachers belong to one of two large unions, the National Educational Association and the American Federation of Teachers, or their local affiliates. If the two unions were to merge, as has been discussed, they would form the largest trade union in America.

Today, teachers’ unions swing a heavy stick in national politics. They rank near the top in political contributions, mostly to Democratic candidates. Clout is no longer the problem for teachers–as a group, they’ve got it.

According to Judy Thomas, Director of Research for the California Teachers Association, teachers go on strike only as a last resort, in part because strikes are traumatic and tend to divide a faculty for years.

Slicing the pie
But the last resort has been reached frequently. The nation has seen hundreds of teacher strikes in the last 25 years. School boards, the opposing party in a teacher strike, don’t necessarily believe teachers are overpaid. They believe schools are underfunded. The size of the pie is out of their hands, though: They can only divide up what they have.

About half the budget of a typical school district now goes to teachers. Other employees get 30 to 35 percent. They include administrators, but also janitors, secretaries, cafeteria workers, school nurses, teachers aides, and so on. Well, schools can’t run without those folks either. If teachers get more, the others must get less. Or else the money must come out of the budget for books, supplies, maintenance, lights, and water.

A bigger pie
The other alternative would be for schools to get more money.

But where would that come from? Taxes, mostly. Other sources of public school funding are negligible–always have been, always will be.

In California, about 7 percent of the budget comes from renting out school property and the like. An even smaller amount comes from the state lottery, an increasingly common funding device that was pioneered in California. Today, the lottery provides 2 percent of school costs in California. But it isn’t the answer. The bulk of the money for schools–91 percent, in fact–comes from state, local, and federal taxes.

If teachers are to get more money, citizens must pay more taxes. That’s the bottom line. And a powerful current in American political life has been a demand for lower taxes.

If you start with the premise “taxes are too high,” the conclusion “teachers are overpaid” is virtually automatic. The arguments about why they’re overpaid come after the fact. “You can’t fix the schools by throwing money at them,” and its ilk are simply necessary fillers to bolster the premise that taxes must be lowered.

But it’s wishful thinking to suppose that we can have good schools without paying teachers good salaries. Comparisons to the good old days ignore the fact that times have changed. Back then, low wages could secure top talent because half the population was restricted to just two or three jobs, one of which was teaching. The best still had to compete to be teachers, and only the best of the best got in. Today, potential teachers–men or women–have so many other options that it’s the teaching profession that must compete, against other lines of work, to reel in the top talents. Otherwise, instead of teaching, those top talents might choose to be…

Well, let’s see: police officers, accountants, department store buyers, architects, computer systems analysts, engineers, attorneys, professors, or doctors, for example.

Check page one to see what that comes out to in dollars.

—–

In my opinion, good education is more about philosophy and leadership than it is ‘teaching to the test.’ If you have a solid philosophy/curriculum, well-paid and highly qualified teachers, a firm and well-rounded disciplinary policy, solid fiscal oversight and compassionate/effective leadership, the test scores will come.

My answer, teachers are underpaid and raising teacher salaries is just the first step in getting Mehlville back on track.

Sure, there is a funding problem, but that can be worked out.

Thank you for your time and I welcome your comments,

Karl Frank, Jr.
Parent
Citizen
School Board Candidate