Category: Education

Posted on in Education

Buddy Bench: A Playground Communication Technique

Read about the “Buddy Bench,” a tool that caters to shy students. Communication techniques and methods, such as the buddy tool, help students grow into themselves and lets them know that there are communication methods that are helpful and that fit who they are as a person. I’m sure the Buddy Bench will help a quiet kid become friends with someone they would have never spoken to on their own (and vice versa). It boils down to self-esteem and awareness. Students are being taught how to acknowledge and look out for other classmates.

In the long run, it’s techniques like this one that make children more comfortable in a learning community.

Posted on in Education, Opinions on Politics

LA Charter Teachers Try to Unionize

In an article featured in the Wall Street Journal, Alliance Teachers’ continue their fight to become unionized.

Summary

Alliance College-Ready Public schools are trying to start a campaign that will lead the charter network’s teachers to be apart of the Los Angeles’ largest teachers unions. The network says the lack of a union is prominent reason why 95% of the network’s students go off to college. While Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union, says that Alliance (and all charter school teachers) should be offered, among other thing, the right to more transparency (charters operate like private institutions).

My Initial Thoughts

The network misses the point. While it’s great that 95% of students go off to college, their teachers, a huge creditor to to this success, are saying that there thoughts, ideas and voices are NOT being heard and the culture is NOT one where they can comfortably express grievances without fearing their job is on the line.

My Biggest Issue with Alliance Teachers Joining the United Teachers Los Angeles

Unions acknowledge the fact that teachers have needs but a 369 page contract is too much and would defeat the purpose of Al Shankners’ vision of charter schools. At the same time, a teacher’s desire to try new content, make insightful curriculum or internal policy suggestions should not be muffled by non-educators who are on the school’s board of directors.

My Opinion

The charter network should work with teachers, UTLA and other independent charter specialists to create a new, independent charter that would find a solution that tries to meet the teachers’ needs and maintain the school’s success rate. It won’t be easy, but, at the very least, it takes the teachers seriously without having to compromise the network’s most effective policies.

 

Posted on in Education, Opinions on Politics

A Brief Note on Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars

In Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars, there is an undertone that can be found throughout the book, which makes it’s first appearance in the introduction: “I suspected that the key to understanding the American view of teachers lay with our history and perhaps had something to do with the tension between our sky-high hopes for public education as the vehicle of meritocracy and our perennial unwillingness to fully invest in our public sector, teachers and schools included.”

I strongly agree that this sentiment and read the book through, in part for it’s history, to figure out why we blame teachers so much on a failed system that has more to do with society and corrupt educational institutions as a whole, than teachers themselves. I believe the answer lies in her suggested list of changes in the book’s epilogue. She outlines serval insightful actions that she believes will improve our country’s public education system, among them is the subsection titled “End[ing] Outdated Union Protections.” In short, she advocates for the removal of unsuccessful union policies.

Generally speaking, the public perceives teachers’ unions as entities that only care for teachers’ protections, without regard for the students they teach. Policies such as LIFO, weak tenure qualifications, strong policies against revoking tenure and years-long appeal processes to oust ineffective teachers, certainly put a teacher’s wants/needs above the cost of their students. Unions should be able to protect teachers from irrational and unfair firings and abuses but policies, such as sitting in one of New York City’s infamous Rubber Rooms for three years, is a gross abuse unions. I don’t think that eliminating unions altogether, as most charters schools opt to do, is the answer– educating children is far too complex and has a lot of gray area to do that. But, and I think Dana Goldstein would agree, teachers unions are weighed down with policies that harm the education system. Unions need reform so that policies that are counterproductive to students’ learning.

Posted on in Education

In Re Smarter Charters

Educational Leadership published an excerpt from Halley Potter and Rick Kahlenberg’s book”Smarter Charters.” The piece compares  two distinct topics: the charter school world as envisioned by former American Federation of Teachers’ president Albert Shanker in 1988 when the concept was first introduced to the United States, and the reality of the charter schools’ world, nearly thirty years later.

Charter schools are typically herald for their ability to go beyond the bureaucracy of public schools. The idea, for Shankner, was to have schools that were funded by the government but operated as a private school. This setup would allow students from socioeconomic disadvantage backgrounds an opportunity to receive a level of specialized education that is tailored for career success.

Potter and Kahlenberg believe that charter schools today have gotten it wrong. The schools now are focusing more on competition than collaboration and merit than diversity and uniqueness. I think that they have hit the nail on the head, as charter schools, while positioned as more flexible in policy, do not take advantage of this liberty. One of the key points that Potter and Kahlenberg point out is the role of the teacher in charter schools.

Teachers have the ability to have more of a say on how charter schools function. According to the Center for Education Reform, only 7% of charters schools are unionized. I find this number to be quite remarkable, as unionzed provide teachers with the career security that teaching in very complex and challenging field requires.

Furthermore, the lack of unionization may also be connected to why teacher turnover rate is twice as high at charter schools than public schools. One study shows that high turnover rates have been correlated to low test scores.

Having studied in public schools from K-12 in New York City, where there has been a debate on charter schools v. public schools, I find it particularly refreshing to read more about the pitfalls of charter schools. Not because I am against, but because i want to understand more of the actual inner workings of the present state and not the concept of charter schools. I think it is easy to fall in love with the idea of what charter schools can achieve because the possibility is there. But that is a huge difference from what is happening. Understanding the downside and issues of both education models, is the first step to understanding how we can get them to work together, like YES Prep and neighboring schools in Texas, in such a way that both systems prevail.