JD2718

At one level, high rates of teacher turnover reflect changes in society and the job market as a whole. But at another, conscious level, high turnover is a carefully cultivated policy practiced by districts, especially urban districts, throughout the country.

We understand. The DoE can’t keep the new teachers it hires.

Older and younger teachers in neighboring classrooms? Sure, it would be good for education. But it would be bad for the DoE’s campaign of control through fear and intimidation.

But now we’re starting to get it. The DoE has no intention of keeping most of them, right from the start.

The ATRs are part of this. A good chunk of them came from District 79. Extracontractually, unilaterally reorganized. Violated excessing rules. Who got nailed? A whole pile of teachers with lots and lots of years.

They are churning the workforce. They are turning teachers over as quickly as they can.

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Fred Klonsky (aka PREAPrez) wrote a nice piece on A Nation at Risk that didn’t get run over at the CEA blog…

Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.

-A Nation at Risk, 1983

I entered my first classroom one year after the publication of A Nation at Risk. I was thirty-five years old.

I have been a teacher for almost a quarter of a century. I have heard and read lots of people using metaphors to describe what I do. In fact, I have probably heard and read them all.

Frequently they are war metaphors. They are metaphors to make us fear global enemies. They are the education equivalent of WMDs.

They are lies.

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It’s not enough, not yet, to force Clinton out of the race. But in ones and twos they are making up their minds, overwhelmingly for Obama. The Democratic Convention Watch website keeps tabs on the numbers.

I have been saying it ends just after Memorial Day (here, here, here, here) for a few months (but hedging all the way). I am sticking with that (with some hedge, of course).

Who’s going to tell her? Lots of people. It’ll just take a few weeks to sink in.

visitors to this blog, as of May 6. And 300,000 page views a few days earlier, May 1.

It’s been two years I’ve been blogging here. It’s gratifying to think that some of the stuff really was worth reading.

Thanks for stopping by.

A week ago Eduwonkette posted about the New Teacher Project, “Why You Should Read the Fine Print in the New Teacher Project Report,” and I left a comment. I liked it, and reprint it here:

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ATRs. Attendance Teachers in Reserve. Teachers without jobs.

There’s been a bunch of stuff written about ATRs in the last week and a half. I’ve read E-d-w-i-z-e (6 posts, five ours, the last is a must-read, and the “i” is by the NTP) and Eduwonkette (that’s 3 by E-kette + 1 guest by the NTP) and a few other blogs.

Thoughts in short: ATRs include a handful of U’ed teachers. The sample is small enough that it is not statistically meaningful. But ATRs include lots and lots of senior teachers. And now the New Teacher Project wants to get them fired. They sound oh so reasonable when they make clear that the firing wouldn’t start. Yet.

Let there be no doubt that these people and the DoE that pays them have no interest in teachers, students, or the quality of education. They do have an interest in reducing workers’ rights, reducing services (in this case, education) for the poor, the Black, and the Hispanic.

Some say this is about reducing payroll. Bah. It’s about power.

(apologies for my absence. The Real World intervenes without asking permission, without conducting a study…)

Turnover among teachers in New York, especially new teachers, is high. It’s a long time we’ve been saying median years of service is 5, or under 5. I doubt it’s that high systemwide, and at many schools it’s far, far less than that.

Options, real and otherwise:

High turnover means fewer teachers (and administrators) have the personal authority that comes from experience that allows us to challenge Tweeds blatantly stupid, destructive, anti-teacher, anti-child policies. They love high turnover. We should hate it.

1. Figure out what’s making the job so hard to stay in, and address those issues, policy level.

• note: women have more options in the workplace than 30 years ago - teaching for many was once the only option, no longer.
• note: school system doesn’t seem especially concerned with low performance from poorer and darker precincts, except when that makes headlines - cf their little gifted and talented steal from the poor to give to nobody routine.
• note: unstable, ungrounded, unskilled, insecure admin corps makes institutional change tough to envision being carried out.
• note: there should be about 20 more notes)

1. Change Ed policy and practice to address turnover, or 2. Use union (collective) power to confront turnover, or 3. use democratic practice and shared decision making to keep some teachers around longer or 4. celebrate turnover, the schools and the kids be damned.  The DoE likes #4.

2. Figure out what’s making the job tough to stay in, and use the power of the union to confront those issues. My approach, and to a lesser extent, my union’s approach. Class size. Protecting teacher rights. Supporting new teachers. — in order to extend careers. To do this we need to (you’ve read it all here before) shift resources to field staff, build chapters, ensure that they meet. Empower the chapter ahead of other school-based institutions etc etc.

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Yes, but probably not too much.  First, let’s throw out some projections…

In North Carolina, the last week’s worth of polls are all over the place, from Obama by 14 to Clinton by 2. RealClearPolitics selectively averages to get Obama by 8. Given Clinton’s late push, I’ll call it Obama, 5 - 9.

it’s no longer the size of the lead that matters - it’s the distance to 2024

In Indiana the lead changed hands twice… Clinton was ahead until late April, when Obama took the lead for less than a week, and now it’s back to Clinton. Polls over the last week are spread from Obama by 2 to Clinton by 12, but they are better clustered than in North Carolina, around Clinton by about 5. Again, looking at her late push, Clinton by 4 - 7.

At the end of tomorrow (because it seems to take 24 hours to sort out), we should learn that Obama has increased his delegate lead by 5 - 10. But it’s no longer the size of the lead that matters - it’s the distance to 2025 - the number of delegates needed to nominate.

Today Obama leads Clinton 1492 - 1338 in pledged delegates. What about superdelegates?

 The spread is down to somewhere between 12 and 19 superdelegates. In February and March, only a few supers declared, but overwhelmingly for Obama. In April the pace has quickened a bit - a few every week - and more evenly divided, but still tilting Obama.

Using the AP numbers - which I like only because they fall dead middle - Obama leads 1747 - 1608. Forget the 139 delegate lead - look at how far to 2025: Obama needs 278, Clinton needs 417.

After today’s primaries, (Indiana delegates to Clinton 40 - 32, NC to Obama 64 - 51) the totals will be 1843 - 1699, but more importantly, the distance to the goalline will be Obama 182, Clinton 326.

It won’t end tonight, but even if the superdelegates start dividing dead evenly, it’s that distance to the goal that is running out. Clinton will win most of the delegates in West Virginia, Oregon, and Kentucky, all before Memorial Day, but even if she wins the delegates in those places (romps in WV and KY, holds OR close) by 85 - 45, and it won’t be that big, that 45 narrows Obama’s distance to 2025.

And? Sometime between now and the end of the month more and more supers will line up with Obama, and May 28th or something like that, it will become clear that the only reason for Clinton to stay in the race is to wait for Obama to make a mistake. At that point her advisors will push her to concede.

Or not. It would not be outrageous for her to claim that it is so close (and it is!) that going to August is the fairest thing to do. She can fight over Florida and Michigan credentials, try to flip superdelegates… but she may alienate as many as she convinces.

Either path is possible, but today’s primaries will, short of a huge upset, play no role in determining which gets followed.

Got tagged by Joel (who is not a math teacher)

The rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

Got it.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?
May 1998. Completing my first year of teaching. I had just returned from a one week trip to Turkey, where I felt the second earthquake of my life, and where I was briefly xxxxxxed due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My life was a mess, dominated by lesson planning and grading. I no longer answered phone calls or went out, except to just unload on people who were willing to support new, nearly hopeless teachers.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

(I’m giving tomorrow morning’s list)

1. Fix up grade book for 2nd marking period so I can calculate grades and grade some tests
2. Bring in Loch Ness souvenirs for kids (as prizes for winning games)
3. Make calendars for kids (with topics and homework assignments)
4. Fill in per session sheets
5. Go to exec board meeting
6. Laundry (ugh, should have done it today)

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Everything. A weakness. Except dip. Don’t like most dips.

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Over at his blog, Dave Marain asked for the fourth coordinate, along with (a,b), (0,0) and (b,a) to give a parallelogram. And then he asked for the area (in at least five ways!)

Later, Dave clarified that he wanted (a+b,a+b). IOW, the origin was to be the second coordinate. And, WLOG assuming b > a > 0, the area of the parallelogram (actually a rhombus) is .

However, without specifying the order of the coordinates, we could have used (a-b, b-a) for the missing coordinate. Can we find the area of this parallelogram?

Can we find the area of any triangle from just its coordinates (0,0), (a,b), (c,d) ?  Any arbitrary quadrilateral? I think translating to get one point at the origin is ok, but rotating is not…

A few weeks ago the New York State Legislature passed, as part of a funding law, a restriction (for a few years?) that bars school districts from using student test scores in making tenure decisions. However, districts are allowed to evaluate how well teachers use student data.

Districts are allowed to evaluate how well teachers use student data in making tenure decisions. Huh???

Who cares about that? Does that let the data in through the back door?

My union, the UFT, cares how teachers use data. I don’t know why. Silly concession to Bloomberg and his chancellor? An attempt to look “reasonable”? As some sort of half-witted attempted to nudge us towards partial-self-management system in our schools? I just don’t know. Anyway,

in one of the discussions on Edwize, the UFT’s blog, I asked my questions and made my points. (reproduced at the bottom of this post). My biggest question was essentially:

is anyone foolish enough to consider a teacher’s ability to use data in making hiring decisions?

The post’s author never responded to any of my points or questions. But eventually I found my answer. It is yes.

Who considers a teacher’s ability to use data in making hiring decisions? The UFT Charter School.

Ouch. Read it here, boys and girls. I wouldn’t make this shit up. Wanna teach math for them? English? Music? Anything except para or school aide. Better show you are proficient in use of data. Hey, I wonder if that favors younger teachers? But I wonder more, why do this? What was gained? Maybe trying to set a precedent? Create a positive model? (assuming good faith, whoever put this in had to believe that it was of value, right?) Ouch.

Proficiency in formal and informal assessments and the use of quantitative and qualitative student achievement data to drive decision-making;

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From a little blogging break. I was away, grading, trip-planning, just busy busy busy. This weekend, as I take breaks from walking and grading, I will start reading some of the 250 posts in my reader, and clearing the backlog. Possible posts for the next few days include:

• Photos and stories from Scotland
• Kid level proof about how we test divisibility by 3 (and 9)
• Some neat set theory I did with some 9th graders
• Teacher pay scales (Chicago next)
• A meme from Joel (who is not a math teacher, need to fix that)
• A rah-rah, demonstrate Tuesday morning against the budget cuts, even if for only five minutes…
• An adjustment to my “math ed manifesto”
• Tenure and data
• Green Dot in the Bronx
• The 2007 UFT contract negotiations
• Indiana, North Carolina, and the Democratic nomination

We’ll see. I’ll probably get to 2 or 3 of them.

Little challenge for some of you. On my return from Scotland, I will write up an explanation of why the divisibility rule for 3 works. I will try to make it accessible to kids.

Do you have ideas? Suggestions? My target date to post the result is no later than Monday evening.

Outline: use base 10 numbers to model something that looks like adding remainders. (maybe 2 or 3 examples with real numbers, then a “challenge,” then one abstract line about base 10. Then generalize to “other bases” (just for an instant) then reapply to modulo 3 with examples with numbers, and then abstract to “the rule”

If you have other ideas, or modifications, or warnings about terminology, or really anything to say at all, please, do.

to visit a friend…

Edinburgh, too.

Mary. Burke and Hare.

So much history.

So little sun.

Today’s the day, but I will not be able to watch, or follow the blogs, or any of that stuff. I can still make predictions though!

Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics does a good job of comparing Pennsylvania to Ohio. He expects Hillary to have a slight, late uptick. Extend it another point or two, plus some late break in her favor: Clinton by 7 to 9 points.

Also at RCP, John McIntyre provides a guide to Pennsylvania’s aftermath that makes sense (there’s more to the post, I’m just quoting the numbers part):

–Obama wins: Race is totally over.
–Clinton wins by 5 or less: Race is effectively over.
–Clinton wins by 6-9: Status quo, which favors the front runner Obama, particularly as the clock winds down.
–Clinton wins by 10-13: Clinton remains the underdog, but her odds of being the nominee will be considerably higher than the conventional wisdom in the media.
–Clinton wins by 14+: Totally different race, as Clinton will be on a path to claim a popular vote win that will give her every bit as much of an argument as the legitimate “winner”. In this scenario anything could ultimately happen, including neither Clinton nor Obama becoming the eventual nominee.

So, Clinton will cut into Obama’s lead in delegates, but just a bit, maybe 5 - 20 delegates. (the other bit, the popular vote notion, that’s not how these primaries and caucuses are arranged) Both will creep towards the 2025 delegate mark, without real possibility of reaching it without superdelegates declaring for them.

So the next post a later will be about Superdelegates.