Last night I became the first male Kellybrook Elementary PTA officer. I am the incoming PTA treasurer. I look forward to serving in that capacity over the next year. Excited to get started and learn from the previous treasurer the job functions and such. It should be an exciting year.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
We voted on Amendment 3 yesterday which reads as follows
Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:
- Require teachers to be evaluated by a standards based performance evaluation system for which each local school district must receive state approval to continue receiving state and local funding;
- Require teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system;
- Require teachers to enter into contracts of three years or fewer with public school districts; and
- Prohibit teachers from organizing or collectively bargaining regarding the design and implementation of the teacher evaluation system?
For a moment let's get past the poor wording of the amendment and the brevity of the moment associated with amending the state constitution. Why would teachers not be in favor of the general purpose of the amendment?
As an outsider I do not understand the process of removing bad teachers from the system. I can only go on what I hear, but apparently due to the power of the union, tenure rules, contract structure, and such it would appear that getting rid of a teacher would be difficult. When was the last time you heard of a teacher being fired for poor performance?
Some would argue that lawmakers went about this change the wrong way, by not involving teachers in the progress. Could that be due to the fact that when a lawmaker or outsider would like to make a change, the NEA or local state and district unions fight tooth and nail for what appears to be good, albeit difficult, solutions?
Maybe outsiders are tired of the NEA pushing the status quo under the guise of protecting the children. Who is protecting our children from the poor performing teachers? Teachers are you not fed up with watching co-workers coast through their teaching career with better pay because of archaic tenure rules? Are you not tired of kids funneling into your classroom from previous years having little to no grasp of the core concepts of the previous grade due to terrible teaching techniques?
I would assume that most teachers care about teaching their kids and want to always improve their teaching skills. But I know for a fact that there are plenty of teachers out there just collecting a paycheck and counting down days to the pension kicks in.
Lawmakers got it wrong here in the fact that they did not detail the evaluation standards they would like to put in place. Typical politics offering some vague solution without a lot of details. I would tend to believe that most teachers would be in favor of merit pay over the tenure/leveling/whatever its called in your district pay grade system, if and only if the evaluation standards are clearly defined and communicated. Combine this with the ability for teachers to collectively request the resources needed to be successful. How crazy are you if you try to create a merit pay system without giving teachers a voice to tell you what they need to be successful (See bullet point 4 above). Allow the teachers to give input on the merit system.
Teachers seem worried about legislation that tries to circumvent the teachers union. I can only assume they think that they will lose their voice on the issues. I can understand that, but the system can be built in a way that allows teachers to be involved with the process. Bottom line, the best workers you work with are not inspired by unions and the worst people you work with are protected by them.
Tear down the us vs them mentality that the teacher unions tend to thrive on. What exactly has the NEA done for you lately besides removing some of that cheddar from the top of your pay check? Lawmakers need to do a better job writing up these amendments. This one has the looks of being done at an Applebees during half price apps.
Updates from last night's PTA meeting
Highlights
- 2 New Maker Rooms approved for the school. The rooms will be split up K-2 and 3-5. The rooms will be used for creative projects and such.
- One Culvers night is worth 2 CiCis night. That was an interesting tidbit. I was thinking that the CiCis night would be worth a lot more. PTA only clears about $250 bucks per CiCis night, which I thought was pretty low
- A teacher gave a presentation on the 7 Highly Effective Habits Kids edition. This was pretty interesting. She also talked about this book: The Leader in Me, Second Edition.
- Long discussions about Friday Folder communication methods
Maker Rooms
I will be interested to see where they take this over the next few months. Maker is a hot buzz word right now for various tech/creative projects kids do. You can check out the following links for more information:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture
- http://makezine.com/
- http://makerfaire.com/
Some hopes were dashed when someone mentioned we needed paper towel and TP rolls for the new maker space. I was hoping for a little different investment such has coding classes, Little Bits kits, or other more technology driven type projects. TP rolls sound a bit more like Art specials instead of Maker room type setup. Anyway we will see how that goes.
7 Highly Effective Habits
The Leader in Me presentation was pretty interesting. The teacher presenting had a passion for the topic and you can tell the topic and technique was important to her. The ideas sounded interesting and it seemed she was making some awesome progress in training the young leaders of tomorrow. It was encouraging to see the level of passion this teacher showed. I think a lot of times we miss this among all the other topics of education: common core, standards testing, budgets, blah blah. These more heartfelt boots on the ground type reports would go a long way, in my opinion, on putting a more positive spin on what is happening in the classroom.
Smore this Smore that
The principal is very high on the Smore service. It was Smore this Smore that. I check out the service and it seems pretty cool. It looks like a glorified re-branded blogging platform. The site mentions creating flyers which again seems like a blog post. Throw in some cool templates, mobile ready design, and some analytics about clicks and such and you appear to have a winning combination.
Don't get me wrong the service looks pretty cool and I am all for teching the place up a bit. Maybe I was just not jiving with the name and/or the use of the name in the sentence. Examples "Yeah I will just put that on my smore". "Yeah just check my smore." "I can add pictures and stuff to my smore." The push to call it smore was successful because by the end of the meeting some other members were asking will that be on the smore?
Friday Folders
Warning small rant forthcoming.
Friday Folders contain a set of informational flyers, upcoming school events, and other information the school sends to the parents. Last year the Friday folders were actually folders that contained printouts of this information. This year the decision was made to move Friday Folders to an email.
I applaud this decision 1000%. Why in the world would it make sense to print these flyers, waste a ton of volunteer hours sorting, stuffing, organizing these folders in all but the most extreme (no internet no computer) cases. A member of the PTA, inexplicably requested we go back to the paper system.
I had to speak up and try to put the brakes on this disastrous idea. Sure the email system is probably not the most optimal due to the flood of email people receive, however its by far better than the hard copy version. I suggested as another enhancement to the solution to use a central public Google Calendar that people could subscribe to.
Send out the ICAL link and let people import the calendar into whatever smartphone platform they run with. Then you make a single update on the calendar and it is pushed to all who subscribe. There was mention that teachers embed the calendar on their web site. Double bonus. Now they can just grab the embed HTML and include it on their site. The calendar is updated as needed and the changes are reflected on each teacher's site.
Someone brought up that people do not like to look at calendar's on the school website. Of course not, I don't want to look at your calendar, I want to look at my calendar. Someone added people don't like the month view calendar they want the calendar in a list. Well yeah, you know why they want the list....It is easier to enter the dates into my calendar if they are in list format. The Google Calendar solves all this with the Month View, Agenda view (list only) embed-able options, etc.
Again I understand that some folks (fewer and fewer) do not have a smartphone, computer, or internet. For these people just send the paper home with the kid.
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