Taking on the latest in the controversy about the best for public school students from the viewpoints in a family of teachers and trainers.
Do you want to know some ideas to turn around schools-the well-known words from the current administration? Everyone who thinks he/she knows something has been writing about the mess of the impoverished communities and often blames the teacher unions.
Read the following from the recent NEA today journal and find out what the largest teachers union in the United States offers: www.neapriorityschools.org.
This year Teacher Appreciation Day lands almost at my turn to post. Good!
I’m feeling grateful that my Master’s degree program is almost complete. Yippee! I did well too!
My fourth grade students have performed well this year, and parents are already questioning if I can be their child’s teacher next year. What more can you ask for? A bountiful lunch is always served and greeted with delight, but “thanks” is most valued.
As if the negative words won’t be felt, I have seen a few full page ads thanking teachers again and again. Maybe some influence has been felt as those experts at negativity have heard from constituents, parents, teachers, or children.
How have I learned to speak to students? Find the positive. More likely to stick (if the administration is relentless) than telling kids how bad they are.
I read in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 2012, that San Francisco teachers, having worked without a contract for many years, are ready to strike. It turns out collective bargaining hasn’t worked for them in spite of cooperation through years of budget shortfalls, layoffs, furloughs, increased class size, and elimination of summer school. Nor has mediation worked this time. My mom said I was in my first walkout when I was only a year old. No babysitter was available, so she took me. The district and the local union settled but not until a lot of howling on both sides. San Francisco School District is the big local urban district that is really hurting.
Now that budgets are such a mess in the state (see the EdSource report), I’m happy that our district looked ahead and the teachers are middle-of-the-road types so they listen, even when they have objections.
As long as teachers feel appreciated, and not denigrated, they keep teaching all the children, easy and difficult, in schools in America.
My advice: celebrate and don’t listen to the nay-sayers.
Does the student really need a loan? Has the student picked a high-priced school counting on loans to get through? Has the student chosen a community college for his/her lower division courses, thereby saving the money needed later? Has the student applied for the millions (hyperbole) grants, scholarships, and other loans with low interest rates? Does the high school kid even know what’s available?
News about loans to pay for college have been on TV, papers, magazines, and blogs a lot. Congress is fighting over Stafford loans. In case you haven’t read, the on-line website carefully and clearly tells the reader about two kinds of Stafford loans-subsidized and unsubsidized. The interest rate increase scheduled for subsidized Stafford loans in July 2012 is causing the outrage. The loan proposal was negotiated in 2006, the cost was realized, and then amended to sunset in July 2012-allowing a five year window before further decision had to be made, i.e. extending the interest rate of 3.4%.
If you were still in high school or were a parent helping your college student, wouldn’t you be in disbelief that the House of Representatives you voted for now has a budget plan to eliminate the interest rate change for Stafford subsidized college loans (making it rise to 6.8% again) to reduce the federal government’s deficit? Pell Grants for college finance would be reduced also. Over seven million college students currently rely on subsidized Stafford loans. House members say 6.8% is cheap compared to for-profit student loans. So?
The House budget plan has already received extensive coverage. The fight was not over extending the legislation. Everyone assures the U.S. that college students need help. Instead, it was over how the budget bill would allow the interest rate to remain.
Some House members thumped their foreheads and thought who won’t vote in the next election? M-m-m. Oh yes, women and children worried about their health. Cuts were made to safety net programs for women and children. Other House members who voted against the budget bill offered to erase gas and oil subsidies that could have more than paid for the interest rate change. Representative Clarke, Democrat from Michigan, introduced a bill to give up to $45000 rebate after ten years of on-time payment at 10% of income. Too late. Didn’t pass. The original budget did.
The bill is now in the Senate. “Senate Democrats have proposed a one-year extension of lower rates by eliminating a tax break for S corporations, which pass corporate income, losses, deductions and credit through to their shareholders for federal tax purposes,” said Alexander Bolton in The Hill. Another Democratic Senate proposition is to close a tax loophole that doctors, lawyers, and small business owners use to avoid the payroll tax. Senate GOP members have not offered a way to pay to keep loans at a low rate. They must like the House way.
According to Katrina vanden Heuval (May 1, 2012) of The Washington Post, Pell grants are a much better deal and should be given, not cut, to college students because they were initially designed for those with low-income needs to attend college.
Jennifer Mishory and Nicholas Kelly of The Huffington Post wrote, “Yet even while this generation has been hit hardest, college graduates fare much better than their non-college peers, and a degree is increasingly becoming more important to 1) having a shot at entering the middle class, and 2) increasing the economic strength of our country.”
Should college education be unaffordable?
The education world sees a long snake hiding behind the rocks and rising up to snap. Whether you are worried about how “Stand Your Ground” legislation affects young people, the arts in schools being ground underfoot by budget cuts, or the off-the-wall high school that serves a lot of students, but not those who score well on tests, the snake bites and chokes.
rural California high school with truancy problem
Think truancy. It begins in the elementary school when students skip or are late to school often. Have you read the cover article by Brenda Payton in the San Francisco Chronicle’s Insight (Sunday April 22, 2012) that tells how the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation looks at truancy data for third graders to see how many prison beds will be needed in the future?
Not only is California worried about the snake slithering in the grass, states all over the country have programs to correct truancy rates. Some are punishing and some are helping. All of these programs try to get children to attend school, especially high school so the graduation rate improves. Not only do truancy numbers flail their heads, but the rate affects high or low graduation rates.
What to do about this vicious challenge?
You’ve all read this blog’s answer: low-performing schools, where truancy is a big problem, need money to change around their programs. They also need high-performing administrators to insist on improvement. Easy to say, hard to do. If Congress weren’t so stingy and determined to reduce departments, no matter what gets bitten or choked, legislators might look at programs that actually have reduced truancy. No state has used the same model; no county has used the same formula. Even the counties in the Bay Area of California pursue different strategies although all parents end up in some kind of Truancy Court if the attendance of their child doesn’t improve. Even so, 2011 California truancy rate was 29.8%.
Other states and counties’ programs and rates can be seen on the Internet: Georgia, Duke University, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Colorado are a few. It will be a long time before a variety of schools exist so students can choose. It will be a long time before the economy improves and money is again available to schools. See the Tool Kit for Creating Your Own Truancy Program.
Education will improve if parents see the value of sending their students on time every day. A heartless technocrat advocates doubling down on the free market answer, although plenty of studies have shown the snake can only be expelled from public schools with a strong truancy program set in motion and stuck to persistent ly.
It’s spring. Time to think about a good year! My thesis for a master’s degree is nearly finished. Yearly tests will take a week to complete. Then we begin the last fourth grade unit in science and social studies. Students choose one more book. We complete one more math topic. Another year will be done.
I will have another degree so my salary will rise. Lucky me, I have no loans to repay, no tuition still unpaid. Most of my friends have been not only talking but wringing their hands about all money items. Even with a raise in pay for a master’s degree, my friends will be in debt for a long time. As one can guess, I’ve been reading the newspapers, education magazines, and on-line articles that come my way. University of California pieces share demonstrations against tuition increases, and items describe Congressional votes against funding of federal Pell Grants, which are relied on, remember, because the pitiful amount doesn’t have to be repaid.
No one talks anymore about funds for the DREAM Act which would have helped some people I know who are from illegal immigrant families, but have lived here for a long time. What is it against these people? Almost everyone has some defect: legal, physical, mental. Nowadays, we have to listen to TV news about the GOP candidate who assures all us women teachers that the U.S. Department of Education will be closed down. Don’t candidates realize that the main country-wide changes to improve education have occurred in the last three years because of guidelines from the federal government? The states or local districts haven’t been prodding for change, that’s for sure.
Usually, I read the news items about elementary schools, mainly about the advantages and disadvantages of Proposition 98. Recently, I read an article addressing organized games at recess. Sounds good until you realize that the teacher is supervising the playground. There is no money to find a teacher to organize and supervise games in any but a few California schools.
Now I concentrate on the articles about money for my college friends.
Ongoing posts by CJN, Claire Noonan, M.A., elementary teacher in large urban schools with fifteen years in the classroom and twenty years supervising and coaching the reading/language arts curriculum.
Occasional posts by PEN, Paula Noonan, Ph.D., thirty years in training and consulting services to companies across the nation and content expert/teacher of M.Ed. programs for Jones International University.
Periodic posts by SEN, Sarah Noonan, the teacher starting her career in a suburban elementary school hit with all the budget and achievement dilemmas in beautiful California.