As Public Schools Cut Costs By Cutting Back, Private Schools Are Adding In Instructional Days

» lou segal on 08.24.12 @ 03:18 AM

Shortening the school year is absolutely the worst thing you could have done to the kids. If anything, the school year should be longer.

Although the total budget for the District has been reduced since 2008, the enrollment has also declined by around 1000 students since 2005. Per pupil spending has actually remained level.

There is so much unnecessary spending in the education budget; it is really beyond belief. For some reason we have a County Education Office, which is really an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Why do we need a County Superintendent, who has no line authority for any school in the county. It is really remarkable.

I have been told by many people that school construction projects cost many times what it should because of inexplicable mandates from Sacramento. Also, too much of the local school budget is restricted by Sacramento and cannot be directed to where it is needed the most.

There is no way we should ever shorten the school year for students. If the bureaucrats and politicians don’t want to eliminate the unnecessary costs, then teachers will have to take a pay cut without the furlough days, or increase their pension contributions or health insurance premiums (or reduce health benefits). Teachers under any scenario will not work more than 180 days, around 20% less than most other people. BTW, if we had a merit pay system, I would make sure the most effective teachers would receive a pay increase, not a cut.

The school district could also apply for the “Race To The Top” funds from the Obama Dept. of Education. Of course, the local teachers association would have to agree to a comprehensive teacher evaluation system, which relies upon student test scores and other evaluative criteria. There are substantial funds available if the union would agree to the conditions as required by the law.

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» Dot's kangaroo on 08.24.12 @ 08:18 AM

The County Education office is an incredibly useful addition to our county schools and students. They fund computers for families (an organization that gives all 4th graders a computer so that all 4th grade teachers can teach at a level that requires students to use computers in their homework), they fund the children’s creative project that organizes Imaddonari,they provide tutors, they ensure foster and homeless children have the tools and access to school they need.  These are just a few of the projects run and provided by county ed.  Here is the amazing part, these programs fund themselves with private donors.  While other programs are being cut, they find private money to fund their projects so that we the tax payers do not.  So when criticizing the shortened school year and suggesting we cut county ed instead, understand they fund themselves and they run programs that will make our community better today and in the future.
As for criticizing teachers, they work much more than the time they are in school, teachers have prep, organization, and innovation they also spend time on, this time outside the class makes class time possible, it is not a luxury. For you to suggest teachers work less than the rest of society is woefully ignorant.  Stop blaming the teachers and poorest members of the school district, they are not the problem, and it is pathetic the way we as a society automatically blame those who are least able to defend themselves.  The problem is we as taxpayers want every public service to benefit us, but we don’t want to pay for it with taxes or time.

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» AN50 on 08.24.12 @ 02:51 PM

Oh brother. The problems I saw back in the 80’s and 90’s have only gotten worse. Local campus spending is down while Sacramento continues to hoard money for administrative duties. Dottie, I do not understand why there is such hostility in the teaching community toward a merit based system. This makes sure that the better you are the better you get paid and if you are a slacker you get the boot. How is that bad?

As for time spent on the job, I know many really good teachers who do spend their summers working the next year’s classroom. But it isn’t required and they, because of union rules, often get paid the same or less than teachers who don’t work during their time off. Again another reason, as Lou points out, for a merit based system. How in the world can you be against that?

Ramjet, the religious schools no doubt spend far less time teaching religion or intelligent design (which you obviously were left out of) than our mostly liberal loony lefty union bread public propagandists spend teaching leftist indoctrination.

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» citizenSB on 08.24.12 @ 08:36 PM

Oh brother is right! 
We do not need the county schools to do fund raising, we have the foundation to do that.
New teachers out of college in SB make $45k a year and even IF they work longer hours the have summers and tons of holidays, and do not forget pensions.  There pay is HUGE in today’s economy. 
Lou is right, there is tons of fat and lots of marginal teachers.
Time for change!
I which California had vouchers—- some competition is needed!

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» passing-by on 08.25.12 @ 12:00 PM

Merit-based pay is the same notion that rewards Wall St. crooks with billions in bonus $$ paid by tax payer bucks for having gambled and lost on investments that anyone with common sense would have known were unsound from the get-go. Obviously, in the business world, the merit pay system within large corporations is not always effective.

So how do we make a merit-pay system for teachers? The most commonly mentioned process is based on the annual rate of improvement for students on standardized tests.

What about teachers who are assigned (or even seek out) classes of especially low achieving kids or ones with especially difficult backgrounds (home abuse, drug issues, gang involvement, homeless status?) How about classes where a large number of students are transient and leave before the end of the term, or where a significiant number of students transfer in half way through the school year? Or where many students simply don’t show up for days on end. These are real problems in many of the worst schools and are entirely beyond the control of even the best teachers.

Those classes won’t see the same sort of improvement as others, but even modest improvements might be the result of very strong teacher performance. Conversely, mediocre teachers in ideal, up-scale campus situations may see good student improvement despite themselves!

There are lots of other issues that AN and Lou won’t like: to measure student improvement and pay teachers on that basis the state (or County or District) would have to create, administer and grade new standardized tests for each subject area at the 7-12 grade levels: each foreign language, art, industrial arts, music, PE… anything else taught at middle and high school level. Without universal testing, how could you compare performance for each instructor? But with it, the money and instructional time wasted on testing and the need for more testing bureaucracy will increase geometrically.You can’t leave the testing to the same teachers or administrators who would benefit or suffer financially from the results… there are Bernie Madoffs and Enrons both the public and private sectors.

Of course we could just rely on school site administrators to decide teacher merit pay based on their impressions and feedback from students and parents. Keep in mind that Jaime Escalante, the most publicized and apparently successful public school teacher in recent American history was in constant conflict with administrators, students and parents at Garfield HS. Lots of people wanted him fired during the very time that his students (at least the ones who stuck with the program) were improving spectacularly. He was a real pain to everyone he dealt with and, like many dynamic teachers and business men, was only appreciated in retrospect and often hated at the time he was doing impressive work.

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» lou segal on 08.25.12 @ 03:26 PM

“Keep in mind that Jaime Escalante, the most publicized and apparently successful public school teacher in recent American history was in constant conflict with administrators, students and parents at Garfield HS.”

Actually, he had much more difficulty with the teachers union than any of the constituencies to which you referred.

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» lou segal on 08.25.12 @ 04:32 PM

Again, you are relying on assumptions not supported by any facts. You conveniently left out the most important component of teacher evaluations: frequent observations of teachers. Evaluating a lesson plan and how effectively a teacher can teach it to his/her students is an essential part of any evaluative process.

“The outliers are schools with large Asian populations and magnet schools with the most motivated parents and students.”

No, there are plenty of examples of schools in very difficult urban areas serving African American and Hispanic population that have had great success in improving test scores and sending these kids to college. I can list a number of them if you would like.

“So if the at-risk kids show, say, a 5% improvement and the GATE kids show the same, then how do you assign merit pay”

You are making it much harder than it needs to be. Assuming these two teachers were identical in the other components, then they can both be categorized as effective. How much progress is needed will depend on various factors, such as achievement levels of the students and historical improvement rates for each category of students.

Sometimes, I feel the best defense you guys have of the status quo is that because we may never achieve perfection in any evaluation system, why try. For you guys, perfect is the enemy of the good. With this attitude, we would would still be in the stone age.

Your view of teacher evaluation systems is in conflict with every respectable expert in the field. I can cite numerous studies and examples where it has worked very well. I suppose this is not so much different from the skeptics of Galileo, who were convinced the sun revolved around the earth.

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» lou segal on 08.25.12 @ 07:33 PM

You know passing-by there is a lot in your post I agree with. However, I don’t quite understand where you are going with it. For example, you say,” All teachers ought to be effective and everyone ought to be paid at the same rates.” Yes, but everyone is not effective. Not everybody is cut out to be a teacher, and there are some who would be better off in another profession.

So I am guessing you agree that lifetime tenure, seniority and lifo rules are not consistent with attracting, training, evaluating and retaining great teachers. You just don’t like merit pay? I think it is necessary for rewarding and retaining the most effective teachers.

As for disregarding the input of parents, I totally disagree with you.

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