January Newsletter

With the budget season in full gear, you may wish to read our latest newsletter. Just click on the link below and you will be taken to our Drop i.o. box where you can view or download the newsletter.

Stay tuned here for news from our next rep meeting on Monday.

January RCEA News

What About the Budget?

Folks, we are beginning to experience some of the darkest financial times I’ve ever encountered in my 27-year teaching career. Over the past week, Your Uniserv Director Pat Wood and I have visited with Delegate William Fralin, Delegate Onzlee Ware, and Senator John Edwards to discuss education funding.

Each of these local representatives hold key positions on either/both the education or appropriations committee. Thus, they will be positioned squarely to affect education funding in this year’s General Assembly. The message from each regarding that funding was bleak. Both Ware and Edwards volunteered that the funding shortfall in the state cannot be erased solely by making cuts to programs. New revenue (tax) must be raised. Both seemed to zero in on one area that may offer some hope, a gasoline tax. Ware talked about raising the gasoline tax by $0.10 a gallon at the pump while Edwards had a detailed plan to apply a 5% tax (similar to a sales tax) on gasoline at the wholesale level. He reasoned that by applying the tax in that manner, it would grow with inflation. Neither man, however, could assure us that such revenue enhancements would pass through the legislature.

We spent a great deal of time explaining to Mr. Fralin that Roanoke County is proactively planning how to cut the budget in order to make ends meet. We impressed upon him the fact that these cuts will affect instruction. There seems to be a popular and erroneous notion in the legislature right now that Governor Kaine’s proposed cuts in education funding will not affect the instruction programs, instead they’ll target school administration. Well, we’re looking at larger class sizes, a reduction in core services, a closed middle school (Central Middle), potentially a closed elementary school (Bent Mountain), a hiring freeze in association with an early retirement plan, potential RIF’s, and a potential pay cut.* You can’t tell me these things will not affect the instructional program!

* Very Recent Word is that a 1 to 1.5% pay cut is on the table for next year…we’ll know more as we learn more.

Some of you have asked what you can do to help secure funding for education during the upcoming General Assembly session. Well, our VEA president, Kitty Boitnott shared this letter with me, and I, in turn, am sharing it with you.

Dear Local President (That’s me!):

I am writing to request your help with mobilizing our members to take an active part in the lobbying effort that we are undertaking this week prior to the opening session of the General Assembly on January 14th.

We need our members to complete two simple tasks, and both of them can be accomplished by going to the Government Relations section of the VEA web site at http://www.veanea.org.

The first task is to click on and complete the writing of the electronic letters that have already been drafted. These messages need to be sent to their local legislators and senators (Delegate William Fralin, Delegate Morgan Griffith, Delegate Onzlee Ware, Senator John Edwards, Senator Ralph Smith). While the message has already been crafted, it may be altered to meet individual and specific needs.

The second task is to click on the link for the online petition which is being sponsored by a coalition of education stakeholders who have joined together for the purpose of advocating for public schools and the children of the Commonwealth. The link is at http://www.fundqualityschools.org.

So far we have had only 3,559 individuals to sign the online petition. Given that we have over 60,000 members, and their friends, family members and non-member colleagues may sign, I would like to see that number increase exponentially.

Likewise, so far, only 480 individuals have sent the electronic message to their local legislators. In order for us to capitalize on our strength as an organization of advocacy for public education, we must increase that figure into the thousands rather than the hundreds.

Please make every effort to engage your membership and mobilize members to take these two relatively simple actions. We cannot afford to miss out on this opportunity to let our collective voices be heard. Our students are depending on us to advocate for them, and I urge you not to let them down.

Thank you in advance for your quick response to this most sincere request for your help.

Kitty

E-mail: kboitnott@veanea.org

Web site: http://www.kittyboitnott.net

So my advice for now is to remain calm and respectful, but be vigilant and ready to defend what’s right. Please grab some friends and family and take a few minutes to introduce yourself to your local state delegate or senator by using the online site linked in Kitty’s letter. In addition, please, please sign the online petition. Let Richmond know that they must protect education funding, and if cuts need to be made, they must be temporary. We have almost 1,000 members, plus we all have friends and family. We really could make a huge difference!

Thanks for reading,

Thom Ryder

RCEA President

tryder@rcs.k12.va.us

RIF Policy Revision

Thursday night, the School Board will act on a revision to the Reduction In Force policy. This revision has been spearheaded by school board attorney, Pat Lacey. Mr. Lacey set about the task of stream-lining the policy, which was difficult to follow. His revisions were mostly successful with one exception.

(3) Any teacher on a plan of improvement shall not have any seniority or recall rights; provided, however, that the superintendent shall review the circumstances surrounding such plan of improvement, including, but not limited to, whether sufficient time has elapsed to allow the teacher to pursue the recommended corrective actions; whether the teacher has diligently pursued the recommended corrective actions; and whether the teacher had been previously placed on a plan of improvement. Based on such review, the superintendent may, in her sole discretion, exempt the teacher from this provision..

This exception deals with teachers on a Plan For Improvement, specifically how they will be treated in case of a Reduction In Force or "Destaffing.". In the original revision (black font), a teacher could theoretically be placed on a Plan For Improvement in February and then RIF'd in April when contracts are issued. Such a teacher would have little or no opportunity to work through the plan to improve the areas of need. At the Dec 11, 2008 school Board meeting I spoke to that point and asked the School Board to revise that section.

The compromise language that Mr. Lacey came up with is noted in red print. In my estimation, the original loophole still exists; however, an affected teacher must now undergo a review by the superintendent who will determine if the teacher should be subject to Exception #3. That is a small layer of protection. In my estimation, the process is still very murky. I would prefer that the whole exception be eliminated since, in my view, a Plan For Improvement is designed as a blueprint for a teacher to follow to improve areas of deficiency. It can also be used to document those deficiencies in building a case for termination. Allowing a teacher who is involved in a plan to improve particular skills seems to me to be counter-intuitive. However, if the Board is insistent setting local precedent by instituting this revised policy, they should go further by defining exactly how long a teacher has to be on a plan before they lose their standing. For example, they could state that a teacher on a plan loses standing in regards to exception # 3 after six months (or whatever they deem to be a reasonable/measurable amount of time) .

Make no mistake, the current revision is an improvement and may end up being what the Board decides to do, which I suppose, is their right.

...And It Begins

Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia officially released his proposed budget amendments today. The details on how his budget amendment proposal would impact our beloved county is still to be understood, but it's impossible to cut money out of a budget without there being an impact. Brace ourselves, we must. (I don't know why I just wrote in Yoda-talk.)

According to Rob Jones of VEA, there are supportable details found within the Governor's amendments. Tackling an announced $2.9 Billion deficit will not be easy. Rob passed along the following notes this afternoon.

He cut education less than any other area.

He looked at both sides of the ledger, and raised the cigarette tax, tweaked the land-preservation tax credit and eliminated the “dealer discount” (paid to merchants for collecting the sales tax) to reduce the harm to essential state programs.

We have grave concerns regarding the fact that:

He made $400 million of the cuts to education permanent cuts that will be with us even when the recession is over ($400 million in SOQ funding reductions partially offset by $60 million in loss mitigation for the 2009-2010 school year). The impact on next year is $340 million. The impact into the future is $400 million per year. This eliminates the state share of funding for 13,000 positions including custodians, finance officers, HR directors, assistant superintendents and central office personnel).

What we know about the cuts for the next school year?

$340 million SOQ cuts to support and administrative components of the formula
$78 million in teacher salary
$82.5 in school construction

Total = $500.5 million, or slightly over ½ billion

No doubt many of you will want to know what can be done faced with the reality of the budget shortfall (could end up being larger than $2.9 Billion). I can almost say with complete certainty that the budget will be amended. What we must do is help direct the amendments in a positive direction for public school education.

On January 9, I plan to join our education coalition partners in Lynchburg at a state budget hearing. At that hearing, I will no doubt push for examination of different revenue generating plans that would soften the blow. Re-instituting the estate tax, along with the cigarette tax increase, is one idea that is being considered (tax on estates valued over $2 million).

Most importantly, we must fight hard and strong to keep any cuts that happen from becoming permanent. This is paramount! Any cuts made in the remainder of the biennial budget must remain temporary. Virginia is already ranked 37th in support for public schools in America. That dubious ranking would slide further if these cuts were to become permanent.

President Boitnott will present a petition at the budget hearing in Richmond on January 19 that all members, friends of members, relatives, parents, and citizens are invited to sign. The petition clearly speaks to the issues we care deeply about. Please sign this on-line petition and urge your colleagues, family and friends to sign on as well. Our battle is to prevent permanent cuts to education funding.

The petition can be found at:

http://www.fundqualityschools.org/

Penny Hodge, Assistant Superintendent of RCPS, is working on getting a clear picture of how the proposed amendments may affect Roanoke County. Right now, this early in the budget process, it's really too early to tell. However, brace ourselves, we must.

On a side note, I'm experimenting with a new service on this blog. I realized that from time to time, I want all of you to be able to see documents that relate directly to a specific topic. Meg Swecker, master of all things technology, pointed me to a site called, Drop.io. With Drop.io, I can upload all kinds of documents, sound, and pictures and have you access them at your leisure. You can view and download the files as you wish. So far, I've added all of the back-issues of the RCEA News from this year, Governor Kaine's press release from today, and a few other documents that will be related to future blog entries. You can test out the service by clicking on the link in this article for proposed budget amendments or you can visit the whole RCEADistrict4 site.


Thom Ryder
RCEA President

Most Likely To Succeed

The New Yorker has published a piece by Malcolm Gladwell that delves into the murky world of determining who is and who isn't effective as a teacher called "Most Likely to Succeed." Gladwell compares predicting who will be an excellent teacher with determining who will succeed as an NFL quarterback. He notes that NFL scouts have failed more often than not when trying project NFL success onto a college quarterback (Jim Druckenmiller anyone?). So it is with projecting the success of teachers.

Gladwell also looks at some pioneering research being done at UVA's Curry School that is trying to identify what is excellent teaching. He takes that research a step further and suggests that what we sorely need is an open enrollment of teachers, credentials aren't important. Enrollees would need to complete a rigorous apprenticeship where they must prove themselves effective by raising test scores by a significant amount or be released. Those who make it through the apprenticeship successfully would be richly compensated.

Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

I remember when I was teaching in Albemarle County back in the late 1980's, the school board decided to do something about "bad" teachers, so they imposed a merit pay scheme. Turns out that so many teachers proved themselves meritorious that the school board was forced to pay out rewards to a whole lot more people than they anticipated. After a couple of years of providing a "healthy reward" to so many teachers, the school board abandoned the whole plan and went back to a more traditional teacher pay scale.

Merit pay schemes have always seemed like empty ideas to me. While the research going on at UVA is intriguing, do experts really know enough about what makes a great teacher to confidently identify it so that those teachers can be rewarded? What's with this idea of teaching a year and a half's material in one year? Doesn't the author realize that we teach rigidly prescribed amounts of material every year...no more, no less. Are we really going to base a reward system on what are arguably flawed tests. It's already sad enough that we place so much emphasis on them; is more emphasis a good thing?

These are all questions that came to my mind as I read Gladwell's piece. I would certainly reccommend you read the piece and form your own opinions. Feel free to deposit your comments here.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=7

Bail Out

Robert Reich, most famous for his time spent as a cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration, opined recently that, regarding public school education in our country, we're all out of whack. We bail out corporations, while we are starving and throttling our educational system.

Our preoccupation with the immediate crisis of financial capital is causing us to overlook the bigger crisis in America's human capital. While we commit hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, we're slashing our outlays for public education.

Education is largely funded by state and local governments whose revenues are plummeting. As consumers cut back, state sales and income taxes are shrinking; three quarters of the states are already facing budget crises. State revenues account for about half of public school budgets and most funding of public colleges and universities. In addition, as home values drop, local property taxes take a hit. Local property taxes account for 40 percent of local school budgets, on average.

The result, across the nation: Teachers are being laid off and new hiring frozen, after-school programs cut, so called "noncritical" subjects like history eliminated, schools closed, and tuitions hiked at state colleges and universities.

It's absurd. We're bailing out every major bank to get financial capital flowing again. But we're squeezing the main sources of our nation's human capital. Yet America's future competitiveness and the standard of living of our people depend largely our peoples' skills, and our capacities to communicate and solve problems and innovate ­ not on our ability to borrow money.

Reich continued,

It's our human capital that's in short supply. And without adequate public funding, the supply will shrink further. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying funding is everything when it comes to education. Obviously, accountability is critical. But without adequate funding we can't attract talented people into teaching, or keep class sizes small enough to give kids a real chance to learn, or provide them with a well-rounded curriculum, and ensure that every qualified young person can go to college.

So why are we bailing out Wall Street and not our nation's public schools and colleges? Partly because the crisis in financial capital is immediate while our human capital crisis is unfolding gradually. Headlines scream what's happening to our money but not to our kids.

As our state stares a $3.5 billion budget deficit in the face and as our school division considers what and whom will be axed, Reich's words ring with a sense of authenticity. When will people wake up and start investing in the foundation of education in our country?

Some will say that the educational system has all the money it needs and that there is tons of waste embedded within the system. As a teacher, I've learned that there is some merit to those arguments. Waste does exist in the educational structures, but that waste generally is does not filter down and enrich anyone at the teacher/student/classroom level.

The greatest waste both financially and instructionally is the propagation of the ridiculous national and state accountability systems. These mandates, which are easily recognized by their acronyms- SOL, NCLB, and AYP, strike fear into the hearts of communities, administrators, teachers, and students. The tacit threats attached to them have encouraged the development of a seemingly slimy accountability business resplendent with guides, formative assessments, data-driven analyzation tools, and testing materials all peddled to frightened school divisions by data sharks.

The ultimate result of this destructive movement, is that the real art and process of teaching has become hopelessly caged and filtered. The intentions may have originally been good, but the results have been destructive.

So I'm with Reich. We do need to bail out the public education system in America. We need to bail out of the myopic accountability mandates. Accountibility is important. Teachers must be accountable for what they teach, but parents and students must be held accountable for their end of the bargain as well. We need to bail out of inferior funding formulas for our schools. State and local governments must be held accountable for providing funding that is more than basic. The nonsensical SOQ game our state plays with public school funding as it seeks to further and further reduce and shirk its responsibility for fully funding its share of the budgets for our public schools needs to stop. We need to improve the physical infrastructure of our schools, reduce class size, fully fund preschool initiatives, and attract highly qualified professionals with highly attractive wages and benefits. Education needs to be the priority.

If you don't bail out a canoe as it charges head-long down a turbulent stream, it will eventually sink.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/03/of_financial_capital_and_human/

Calendar Perks

The School calendar for 2009-2010 is currently in a draft state. Over the course of the past month or so, we've received three potential calendar plans for next year. One plan would have schools starting much the same as our current calendar. Another would have us beginning school after Labor Day while the third choice would have us beginning school much earlier with semester exams hitting before the Winter Break in December. Each option would have school ending in early June, and each option would offer the most basic winter break with school dismissing on December 23.

While there was support for each option, the traditional calendar far and away received the most support from teachers in our organization with the caveat that the winter break be extended for a full two weeks as it is this year.

Teachers felt strongly that such a break could be attained in the calendar with minimal adjustments and its effect would be morale boosting. The RCEA modified the traditional draft and forwarded our thoughts to Central and the issue was discussed at the recent EAC meeting.

Our modified traditional draft proposal was accepted by Allen Journell, and he will present it to the school board for approval at the December 11 meeting. Approval is not guaranteed since at least one board member was promoting the early exam calendar.