Budget talks in Albany are coming down to the wire.

Governor Paterson reconvened the State Legislature this week for a special session to close a midyear deficit of over $3 billion, and under consideration is a $223 million cut to New York City schools. Legislators will make a decision on a deficit reduction plan in a matter of days.

The UFT is prepared to work with lawmakers to meet the challenge. We have proposed alternative budget cuts that will help us get us through the immediate crisis. But we say
NO to cuts to the classroom and direct services to the classroom.

We need you to once again call or fax your local senator and assembly member and tell them: Protect the classroom!

Call the state Assembly at 518-455-4100, between 8 a.m. and midnight, Monday through Friday, and ask to speak to your local assembly member.

Don’t know who your assembly member is? Look it up here.

Call the state Senate at 518-455-2800, between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., Monday through Friday, and ask to speak to your local senator.

Don’t know who your state senator is? Look it up here.

Send another fax to your state representatives to drive home the message that classrooms must be shielded. Go here to send a fax to Albany.

Urge your state legislators to protect classrooms from midyear cuts!

Sincerely,

Michael Mulgrew
UFT President

We can think of a lot of ways to describe Kevin Carey’s advocacy of Keynsian economic policies, but Checker Finn’s characterization of “Stalinist” seems to border on the hallucinatory.

53,000 members’ pension checks were returned quickly after a horrendous $189 million withdrawal, thanks to UFT and city demands.

At the 12th annual UFT Parent Conference on Oct. 31, some 3,000 parents eagerly soaked up information and ideas about how to help their children in school — and signed up in record numbers to advocate in the political arena for adequate education funding.

A sense of history, continuity and pride pervaded the UFT’s Teacher Union Day as more than 1,200 union activists gathered to honor their colleagues and leaders.

When it comes to special education, it seems principals are making excuses again. As of Nov. 9, 705 complaints were logged on the UFT online special education complaint form.

Of 49 City Council hopefuls endorsed by the union, 47 were elected to four-year terms on Nov. 3. The union’s choices for city comptroller and public advocate — Councilmen John Liu and Bill de Blasio, respectively — romped to victory.

Professional development took many forms on Nov. 3, from a UFT safety training to a session at the New York Public Library on how to teach Frankenstein, and strategies for reaching struggling writers in the Rockaways.

Tomatoes, celery, potatoes, parsley, sunflower seeds and other earthly delights, picked right out of the garden by kids at PS 205 in Queens, are part of the “Garden to City Harvest” project, which feeds the hungry in New York City.

Are you interested in protecting the environment? A novel way you and your students can pitch in is by participating in a citizen-scientist project. One teacher tells how he did that by creating a bird-watching club at his school.

Teaching is so much more than test results. Regardless of the critics’ demands, we can’t teach and children can’t learn when they are feeling sick or hungry or worried about adult-size problems.

Where should we spend precious education dollars, especially now that we don’t have so many? A new paper suggests there’s a much bigger bang for the buck when you invest in curriculum, rather than expensive “solutions,” like charter schools or merit pay.

A crucial component of this choreography was the fact that the Hoxby report was issued without any peer review, a break with the commonly accepted standards for the publication of  serious academic research. The absence of peer review was crucial because it meant that reporters, who do not have training in rigorous academic research based on complex statistical modeling, were in no position to question the reports’ methods and thus its conclusions.

Now we have an analysis of the Hoxby report by Think Tank Review, a joint project of the Education and Public Interest Center at the School Education of the University of Colorado-Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. Reviewer Sean Reardon, Associate Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford, finds a number of major flaws in the methods employed by Hoxby. Specifically:

• The report relies on an inappropriate set of statistical models to analyze the data.

• The report includes claims regarding the cumulative effects of attending a New York City charter school from kindergarten through eighth grade that are based on an inappropriate extrapolation.

• The report does not include adequately detailed information in some areas to allow a reader to fully assess its methods, results, or generalizability.

• The report uses a criterion for statistical significance that is weaker than that conventionally used in social science research.

• The report describes the variation in charter school effects across schools in a way that may distort the true distribution of effects by omitting many ineffective charter schools from the distribution.

Reardon concludes:

As a result of the flaws in the report’s statistical analysis, [the Hoxby report] likely overstates the effects of New York City charter schools on students’ cumulative achievement, though it is not possible—given the information missing from the report—to precisely quantify the extent of overestimation.

Over at Gotham Schools, Aaron Pallas explains the import of these flaws in layperson’s terms — or as “lay” as you can get when discussing the world of statistics.

According to Ladner, a survey commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs had shown that the overwhelming majority of those students didn’t know who was the first president, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, or that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were the Bill of Rights.

These are old canards, trotted out at regular intervals by the far right to fuel righteous indignation at American civic education. There is much that can and should be done to improve the quality of civic education in our schools [see this Shanker Institute report Education for Democracy*], but this sort of  “know nothing” charade is a huge diversion that only distracts from substantive issues.

Now there is compelling evidence [here and here] that this survey was the sort of fabricated junk science we have come to know all too well from the Wal-Mart Professor of Education Jay Greene and his comrades. Ladner is whining [scroll down to the comment written by Ladner] that he and COPA may have been the victim of fraud by the company which supposedly conducted the survey.

There certainly are a number of victims of fraud here. There are the bloggers and the newspaper reporters who took at face value summaries of this report such as the two Ladner published on Jay Greene’s blog. There are the people of Oklahoma who may have believed all of the reports, and the high school students who were libeled by them. But Ladner? Presumably, he read the entire report before he blogged about it twice, so he knows that among its incredible claims is the finding that 1 in 10 Oklahoma high school students said that the two main political parties in the United States were the Republicans and the Communists. Where on this earth — save perhaps the feverish far right politics of the offices of the Goldwater Institute, where the Democratic Party is seen as creeping communism — would high school students get such a bizarre idea? Where would high school students who could not identify the first president of the United States or the author of the Declaration of Independence have learned that there was such a thing as a Communist Party?

No director of research with the slightest intellectual integrity could pretend that this survey passed the most minimal smell test.

_____________________

Full Disclosure: I was among the signatories of the report.

It’s possible I may be suffering from PWSD: Post-William Stress Disorder.

As I mentioned ever so briefly in my last post, William has departed from us, to a special education classroom at another school. If I could say one thing to his new teachers, I would say, Please help him succeed where our school failed him for three years. If I could say two things, I would say, Please help him succeed where our school failed him for three years, and also, no backsies.

So here’s the deal with my class minus William (who, by the way, had perfect attendance while he was in my class): It’s like a whole new class. On the plus side, it’s like a whole new class, but on the minus side…it’s like a whole new class. It’s like September 9 all over again. It’s like I turned around to find 26 other children sitting in front of me to whom I had not been able to devote a single iota of my attention because I was too busy chasing William around the classroom and trying to get him to give up my stapler (which he enjoyed using as a machine gun).

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about this development, but I am a little surprised by it. Even though I knew that William was holding our class hostage and making our days agonizing, I’m still startled by how much calmer everything feels without him. And part of that is my own personal fault, not William’s or my students’ — for a while there, I let him control my emotions and my reactions, and of course that trickled down to my class. I was tense and, quite frankly, on the verge of panic when he was in the room (What am I going to do if he doesn’t stop throwing that ball at the wall? How am I going to get him to quit the name-calling?), and that vibe oozed around the classroom like poison.

But on the other hand, our class was defined by William and his behavior for so long that it’s almost a challenge to adjust to life without him. (Well, for me, at least — other than Julio, who of course terribly misses his partner in crime, all of the other kids have adjusted well to bidding him adieu.) Last week, we took our first field trip, and all I kept thinking the whole time was: Oh my God, we never could have done this with William. When we got back, my kids were surprisingly mellow as they ate their lunches (”This is the best sandwich ever!” one of them enthused dreamily), and then something miraculous happened: One of the first kids to be done eating asked if she could read a book from our collection of Read Alouds. I agreed. Then another kid asked, and another kid. Before I knew it, my entire class was gathered in small clusters at the meeting area, sharing books. Some of them were reading aloud to each other. Some of them were obviously practicing their own “teacher” persona. Some of them had their heads bent close together, giggling as they pointed at the pictures.

Nobody was fighting, nobody was grabbing, nobody was shouting, nobody was using hurtful language. I had been planning to gather the class together to discuss the trip, but I hadn’t counted on this beautiful, wondrous thing happening. I literally just sat back and watched them — I even snapped a picture — and before I knew it, it was time to go home.

It was the first time my classroom felt like a community. And slowly we will rebuild, and hopefully it will feel that way again.

Teachers and staff at three Civitas charter schools overwhelmingly ratified their first contract today, crediting a collaborative negotiations process for achieving the breakthrough agreement.

The three-year collective bargaining agreement at Civitas’ Ralph Ellison Campus, Northtown Academy and Wrightwood Campus is the first of its kind for charter schools in Chicago. The Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff is the union that represents nearly 140 teachers at the three schools.

“This contract puts students first, gives teachers a voice and a seat at the table, and makes parents and the community partners in education,” said Emily Mueller, a high school Spanish teacher at Northtown Academy and chair of the negotiations.

Read the entire press release here.

Although the crush of medical bills is the prime cause of individual bankruptcy (and the catastrophic collateral damage it does to families) in this country, and despite our nation’s lagging far behind several dozen other countries (including many less wealthy than we are) in many indicators of health care quality, (such as longevity and infant mortality), and even though not a single major political party in any of these other democratic nations has ever proposed the elimination of their existing national health system, millions of gullible Americans have been suckered by reactionary special interests into practically equating a government-sponsored health care option with the worst excesses of Marxism.

What rot!

Their resistance to proposed health care reform is macabre, not patriotic.

All sane arguments favor a national health care program. The UFT’s Executive Board has endorsed it and the AFT is mobilized to persuade federal legislators to show courage and common sense by supporting it.

There has been much deliberate blurring of the facts and orchestrated ambiguity surrounding issues of health care reform. This must be made clear:  there MUST be a government-administered health insurance plan. This so-called “public option” can co-exist (as it does in the United Kingdom where, by the way, there are no “death panels”) with private insurers.

It is essential that we protect Americans who cannot otherwise afford insurance and we must thwart efforts to tax the health care insurance of those people who already have it.

And there absolutely must be a government-sponsored public option. Reform without it is no option at all.

After spending my first two years as a first grade teacher working solo in an elementary school classroom of 28 students, I was recently hired at a new school as the general education teacher working with a special ed teacher in a collaborative team teaching classroom of 27 1st graders, nine of whom have IEPs. Coming into the new assignment, I was nervous about working with a partner. Suddenly I was presented with the reality of working with another teacher in the classroom, and I wondered what the day to day of it would be like. Would we have the same philosophy of education? How would we share the workload and paperwork? Would we be able to better reach our students by working collaboratively? And, not least, would we get along personally?

The first few weeks of planning and teaching were an adjustment period for both of us. It’s sort of like having an assigned roommate freshman year of college – you’re supposedly matched as perfect roommates, but every now and then one of the roommates ends up complaining to the resident advisor about the other. Our school matched us because it thought that we would be good partners, and, thankfully, the school was right.

At first, we were both slightly unsure of the power balance in the classroom. I think that teachers like to be the captain of their own ship. Now it was no longer “my” class, but “our” class.

My co-teacher and I use the “one teach, one assist” model in our classroom: one of us will be teaching the mini-lesson at the meeting area, while the other supports. This model allows for better behavior management, which in the workshop model is critical to the students’ learning and retention of the material. We have a few students in particular who are able to focus much better when an adult is sitting next to them and helping them pay attention to the lesson.

One particular lesson in Reader’s Workshop teaches the students how to read independently and with a partner. My co-teacher and I demonstrate independent reading time to the students and then model how reading partners share with one another. We model fair play for our students and deciding who goes first with sharing their stories. We are very friendly and easy-going with one another, and the students get a kick out of us pretending to be 1st-graders in their shoes.

When teaching by myself, I found conferencing during Writer’s and Reader’s workshops a challenge. I wasn’t able to see as many students as I wanted to during each independent work period. Working in a CTT classroom allows both teachers to meet with students during the independent work time. Currently in our classroom, we also have two paraprofessionals and a student teacher. Each of us is able to meet with two to three students during reading time, which means that the majority of students get one-on-one attention from an adult in each independent work period. We rotate which students we work with, so each student gets the opportunity to work together with every adult.

Teaching in a CTT classroom does require a lot of open communication, organization and planning. I feared planning together would be difficult, since I was so used to planning by myself at home or at the Laundromat on weekends. Now I really enjoy bouncing ideas off my partner to create lessons that reflect our two distinct teaching methods.

All in all, I’m happy to be teaching in a CTT class. It’s helpful for students to experience the personalities of two different teachers. I also feel that our students benefit from the individualized attention that more than one teacher in the classroom provides.

I’m thankful to have experienced working solo and with a partner in my career. I feel that both of these experiences have helped me learn and grow as a professional.