Teacher Sick-Out in Miami-Dade

[Gordon Nore]

Teachers across Florida are staging a sick-out to protest a bill currently on the desk of Governor Charlie Crist, which would tie teacher pay to student test performance.

SOUTHWEST MIAMI-DADE, Fla. (WSVN) -- Protests over pay broke out at schools in South Florida and across the state, and at some schools, teachers resorted to more silent means of demonstrating by calling out sick.
As some teachers took sick days in protest Monday, others joined more vocal protests on the streets. All involved are trying to bring attention to their opposition to the measure known as SB6, or Senate Bill 6. State senators in Tallahassee created the bill, which bases teacher pay on student performance. It now rests on Governor Charlie Crist's desk awaiting his approval or veto.
Video and Story: http://www.wsvn.com/news/articles/local/MI84181/

 

[Big Don]

A shame Crist can't do to them what Reagan did to the Air Traffic Controllers...
Not showing up to work isn't brave, it is the adult extension of the childish act of holding your breath until you get your way.

 

[CoryKS]

A shame Crist can't do to them what Reagan did to the Air Traffic Controllers...
Not showing up to work isn't brave, it is the adult extension of the childish act of holding your breath until you get your way.

I agree with this, however I think it would totally suck to have my pay tied to the performance of a bunch of kids who don't want to be there and aren't really thinking about the future. It would be nice if they could find some sort of incentive for the parents to work with the kids at home, but of course they don't wield any sort of influence over them.

Tough situation, but the teachers need to grow tf up and find another way to handle it.

 

[geezer]

I agree with this, however I think it would totally suck to have my pay tied to the performance of a bunch of kids who don't want to be there and aren't really thinking about the future...

I teach high school, and I'm glad to see you can see both sides of the issue, Cory. Good teachers do the best they can to not only teach, but motivate and inspire as well. But if a kid doesn't give a rat's ****, there's only so much you can do. If pay is tied exclusively to test scores, how do you fairly assess teachers who take on the challenge of teaching in rough inner-city schools? Let them take the toughest job and then dock their pay because they can't always match the performance of the teachers in the new, well equiped suburban schools filled with the kids of doctors, lawyers, engineers and PhD.s? Sounds like a recipe for failure to me. There just aren't enough Jaime Escalate's in the world to solve this so easily.

BTW I teach Ceramics, and this whole movement to standardize instruction and assessment, to quantify performance and link it to pay is not at all helpful in the arts! It just means more regimentation and less creativity. Really.

 

[Ramirez]

BTW I teach Ceramics, and this whole movement to standardize instruction and assessment, to quantify performance and link it to pay is not at all helpful in the arts! It just means more regimentation and less creativity. Really.

I can see a reason for standardized testing, when I went to high school there were pretty big differences in the standards between high schools less than 10 minutes drive from each other and even between teachers in the same school. There is also the personal interaction problem, some students become favored, some are in disfavor etc. so some get easier marking than others.

My view is that the teacher should be a coach, not an examiner.

This is of course easier for maths and sciences than art, I have no idea how you would standardize art tests/exams.

 

[Gordon Nore]

This is of course easier for maths and sciences than art, I have no idea how you would standardize art tests/exams.

Standardized testing models currently tend to focus on mathematics and language arts. That said, all curriculum in Ontario has been standardized since 1998.

BTW I teach Ceramics, and this whole movement to standardize instruction and assessment, to quantify performance and link it to pay is not at all helpful in the arts! It just means more regimentation and less creativity. Really.

geezer, I'm curious how standardization specifically has affected your teaching of the arts.

As for the teachers taking a sick day to protest, I understand it. Some of the people commenting in the video argued that teachers should find another way to get their message across. There's the rub. Any other way, like sending a delegation to a board meeting, when, in fact, the governor is considering the bill, will go unnoticed. So I understand the value of a little civil disobedience.

I don't discuss labour matters with my students -- I teach elementary -- or their parents. Both my union and my employers expect that, and that's quite reasonable. Sometimes other measures are called for.

 

[Hawke]

I used to help inner city high schools in Los Angeles. Due to the economy the school district had to make cuts. So the arts were cut out (music, art, theater, after school programs, and a lot of athletics) for some of these schools. English, math, and science classes are important. I just think it would be nice to have some fun extracurricular activities for the kids.

The Los Angeles Unified School Districrt has it shares of problems as well. There are teachers that do not teach well, but you will have a hard time firing them. You also have fantastic teachers that are fighting an uphill battle to educate the kids in their classes.

Basing salary upon the child's performance, regardless of any advance degrees or extra training to help better educate the class, may hurt the good teachers. The teacher's salary might be gamble. One year they get great students. Another year a batch of kids that prefer listening to their mp3 player than the instructor.

The education in the US is a problem. Not sure if there's a simple solution. Even though other countries may do better on standardize test scores, they send their students here to the US for university degrees.

 

[Empty Hands]

The teacher's salary might be gamble. One year they get great students. Another year a batch of kids that prefer listening to their mp3 player than the instructor.

I also haven't seen anyone bring up the fact that the kids will also know that the teacher's salary depends on their performance. I shudder to think what some of the kids I went to school with would do with that knowledge.

 

[CoryKS]

I also haven't seen anyone bring up the fact that the kids will also know that the teacher's salary depends on their performance. I shudder to think what some of the kids I went to school with would do with that knowledge.

That would be an utter trainwreck.

 

[Gordon Nore]

When I was still teaching community college in the nineties, I had an interesting exchange with the VP at my son's elementary school. We had just come out of a PTA meeting. It was nine at night, and she was exhausted, following fielding questions about what the school was doing, what the kids were learning.

She said, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, "It's so hard to explain that teaching isn't our only job. If it were, it would be so easy. We have so much stuff we have to do to get the kids ready to learn. We feed them. We clothe them. We make them feel safe."

In my professional life, particularly working in inner-city schools, that's been very much the case. I'm not diminishing our academic role, but, quite frankly, we have an abundance of expertise in the teaching of language skills and math. There's really not some secret sauce that we haven't tried yet. It comes down to making the time to teach and deal with a complicated set of social, emotional and physical needs that kids bring with them everyday.