Whether it be mass firings - either for "educational" reasons or "financial" reasons, the constant public heckling and denigration of educational professionals, the cutting of health and pension benefits for "fat cat educators", or simply the "dog days" of the school year, it's definitely a time for many in our profession to be singin' the blues...

From Education Week...

Link to Original Story

Struggling Georgia School Firing Entire Staff

By The Associated Press

Atlanta

A failing Savannah high school is firing its entire staff in an effort to avoid further sanctions from the state and to make the school eligible for up to $6 million in federal money, officials said Thursday.

The 200 employees at Beach High School — including the principal — will work there through the end of the year but will not be rehired for that school, said Karla Redditte, spokeswoman for the Savannah-Chatham County school district.

The teachers can reapply for their jobs but only half can be rehired under federal education law, she said. Staff can also apply for other jobs in the school district.

"It is a sad day for us," Redditte said by phone as she stood outside the 950-student school in south Georgia.

The move is the most dramatic of four tactics allowed by the federal No Child Left Behind law for schools like Beach that consistently fail to meet benchmarks. The Obama administration is offering $3 billion in grants this year to coax struggling schools to undertake one of the four tactics, which also include firing only the principal, converting to a charter school or closing altogether.

Experts estimate the mass-firing tactic is used to turn around 20 to 30 schools in the U.S. annually.

If a failing school in Georgia refuses to make any of those changes, the state places a special administrator in the school to focus on annual progress measures such as test scores and graduation rates. In Georgia this year, 45 schools have state administrators in them, including Beach High School, state Department of Education spokesman Matt Cardoza said.

Beach has been on the state's lowest performing list for seven years, he said.

Jeff Hubbard, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, said firing an entire school staff is "exceptionally rare" in most states. He said the teacher organization is concerned that starting from scratch will hurt the school more than it will help, particularly because many educators don't want to take jobs at failing schools.

"We're very concerned about how they will be able to get a full staff there," Hubbard said. "They're basically starting that school over."

A similar action at a high school in Rhode Island earlier this month prompted outrage from the teachers' union and anger at President Barack Obama when he said he supported the move. District administrators chose the mass firing after negotiations with the union at Central Falls High School broke down.

Georgia's teachers do not have collective bargaining rights, Hubbard said.

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COMMENTS:

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fannie wrote:

Sometime starting over is the only way. In many failing schools, there is a culture of failure or low expectation. To elimate this culture sometime we have to you have to kill the root. For too long we have been concerned about teachers jobs and not the student.

Have you taken in consideration what happens to a child who can not read or perform basic math. We act like we can destory our children's educational life and later go to Wal-Mart and buy another. It's time we talk about adult failure and stop blaming the children.

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Pondoora wrote:

This whole nation of adults is failing its children, so let's stop blaming the few who work in our public schools.

Since it’s fashionable these days to look at Finland’s success as something to aspire to, we need to compare more indicators than academic outcomes.

• Soft drink consumption (litres/person/year): #1 United States: 216 litres, 15 Finland: 52 litres

• Television viewing (hours per person per week): #1 United States @ 28 hours, Finland: 18 hours

• Infant mortality rate (deaths/1,000 live births): United States: 6.3 deaths, Finland: 3.5 deaths

• Teenage birth rate (The number of births to women aged below 20 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19. Consider the relative maturity levels for the two sets of parents.): # 1 United States: 52.1, Finland: 9.2

• Marriage and Divorce rates (Number of marriages/divorces per 1,000 people per year): The U.S. is # 1 for both rates, @ 9.8 and 4.95 (51%), Finland is 4.8 and 1.85 (39%)

• Paid maternity leave: United States - 0 weeks, Finland - 105 days

• Trade union membership: # 2 Finland: 76%, # 17 United States: 13%

• Child poverty (Child poverty index is defined as the share of the children living in the households with income below 50% of the national median.): United States: 22.4, Finland: 4.3

• Child maltreatment deaths: #1 United States: 2.2 per 100,000 children, Finland: 0.7 per 100,000 children

• Cannabis use: United States: 12.3%, Finland: 2.49%

• Prisoners (per capita): # 1 United States: 715 per 100,000 people, # 113 Finland: 71 per 100,000 people

And re the dramatic rise in daily media use among children and teens, from the Kaiser Family Foundation (1/2010): “With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.”

This is just a tiny sample that reflects our truly negligent attitude toward families and children, and one which is causing our downfall. No wonder America's kids aren’t learning how to read very well. Our national policies and popular culture don't really value, encourage, or support the existence of mature, stable families.

From Education Week...

Link to Original Story

Commentary

Is Firing Teachers the Answer?

By Paul Kelleher

Central Falls, R.I., where an entire high school teaching staff was recently fired, is the latest example of a growing trend: no-nonsense superintendents attempting to improve their schools by firing teachers perceived to be incompetent to secure a bigger share of federal education dollars. But this “cleaning house” approach, encouraged and supported by the Obama administration, betrays a lack of appreciation for the value of teacher experience, a myopic view of accountability, and a flawed understanding of how substantive change occurs in public schools.

Let me first establish my credentials for making these claims. As a young high school principal 30 years ago, and later as a superintendent, I embraced the strategy of clearing out the “deadwood” to improve schools. I did not attempt wholesale firings, but I did develop a systematic approach to confronting teacher incompetence that involved increasing pressure and sanctions, culminating in dismissal if no improvement was forthcoming. (See my article “Inducing Incompetent Teachers to Resign,” Phi Delta Kappan, January 1985.) The facts are that I had success with this approach: The schools improved.

But the Obama-Central Falls approach confuses the whole with the part. In my three decades of school administration, I never saw a school where every teacher was incompetent. Firing an entire teaching staff cuts out the wheat along with the chaff. It instantly eliminates decades of teaching skill and experience, some of which may certainly not have been good, but much of which probably was. As all those years of valuable experience and know-how walk out the door, who is going to fill the void? We’d like to think that bright, young college graduates, perhaps on the Teach For America model, can step in and do a better job. But the mixed results from that program suggest that the skills and experiences that lead to success in teaching often extend far beyond the capacities of even the brightest and most promising 22-year-old.

A second problem with a wholesale-firing policy is that it reinforces a narrow and shortsighted view of accountability. When a school fails, the education system, the parents, and the community must share blame. Accountability cannot be laid only at the door of teachers. States and districts have to provide the resources—human capital as well as money—to enable success. Communities have to support the work of schools with programs that enable students to be school-ready. Parents have to set clear expectations and consistently provide the support kids need to be motivated and successful. In my public school career, I never saw a student in any school—from advantaged suburban to disadvantaged urban—achieve outstanding success in academics, sports, or the arts who did not have a parent or some significant adult right behind him or her.

What’s the answer then? We should pay attention to what a quarter-century of research on successful school change has taught us. Children’s learning will improve if a teacher does something different and better in the classroom. I rarely met a teacher who was intentionally doing a bad job. As my understanding evolved, I realized that the issue was less teachers’ willingness than their ability to meet the daunting challenges they faced. So my strategy also evolved: from just clearing out the deadwood, to developing the skills and capacities of the vast majority of teachers who wanted to do a good job but needed help.

Being successful with this strategy has several requirements. First, superintendents and boards of education must talk with teachers about what they think they need to succeed. If staff development does not begin with their perceived needs, it will not work. Second, school leaders must invest in proven staff-development programs—ones that over the years have had demonstrated success. Third, they have to deliver the staff development in a way that is consistent with what research tells us: It needs to occur as close to the actual work as possible.

Most important, these school leaders have to sustain the commitment of money, time, and enthusiasm for these programs long enough to be successful. The kind of development of teaching and administrative practice needed to improve student learning does not, contrary to current thinking, happen overnight.

Paul Kelleher is the Murchison professor and chair of the education department at Trinity University, in San Antonio.