This is the time when you, the classroom teacher are beginning to give quarterly assessment(s) in your classroom.
As you follow the pacing guide(s) for your subject area(s), are the quarterly assessments helping you to diagnose areas of low student achievement in a timely fashion and giving you the resources and opportunities to go back and re-teach the material to your students?
Speak out below—make sure you’re registered!
At the most recent Columbus Board of Education meeting, Treasurer Michael Kinneer forecasted that the district would remain solvent through the 2008-2009 school year. This is the direct result of two factors working in the favor of CCS. First, an increased amount of tax money has begun to return to the district as TIF dollars from corporations start to enter the CCS treasury– those monies had previously gone toward local infrastructure. Second, the district had projected 3,000 students would leave for charter schools this year– only 800 have so far. Read the full story here.
South Western Education Association, the union that represents over 1400 members in the South Western City School District showed up to a recent board meeting with 900 letters for each SWCS Board Member in hand. Their previous contract expired on June 30th; read more about it here.
Seneca Valley Education Association (PA) has been on strike since Monday, October 14th. Their contract expired over 400 days ago. Check out their website here. Lake Lehman Education Association (PA) has been out since October 15th as well– learn more about it here.
CEA President Rhonda Johnson’s response to a recent Columbus Dispatch Editorial was printed in the October 27th edition of the paper. An excerpt will also run on the front page of the October 29th CEA Voice.
I write to make clear the information published in the October 18 editorial regarding the Columbus Education Association.
Our union has always been deeply concerned with doing our part to maintain fiscal responsibility within Columbus City Schools. A significant district expenditure is employee healthcare. After recently completing an audit of our membership to verify dependent eligibility for health insurance, more than $2 million of taxpayers’ money will be saved. In addition, I represented teachers on the committee charged to assess facilities and to make the difficult decision to close school buildings.
According to a recent report from Policy Matters Ohio, over 2.2 million Ohioans don’t have paid sick days. Earlier this week the Sick Days Ohio Coalition officially began its signature-gathering campaign for the Ohio Healthy Families Act (OHFA)– a proposed state law that would require businesses with 25 or more full-time employees to allow workers to earn 7 paid sick days per year. The OHFA would also allow part-time employees to earn sick days as well, depending upon the hours that they worked.
The Columbus Education Association is one of many groups and individual citizens that have joined the Sick Days Ohio Coalition.
“Our students are the children of families who don’t have sick leave,” said CEA President Rhonda Johnson. “Our students’ families should not be forced to make the economic decision of whether or not they go to work to pay the bills or stay home to care for their sick child.”
“When our students come to school because their caregiver’s job doesn’t allow them to stay home with their child, it spreads their illness in our schools to other students,” continued Johnson. “That results in a higher absentee rate and an increase in missed learning opportunities for not only that student but their peers as well.”
The group plans to submit the 140,000 signatures they have gathered to the state legislature to have legislators put the bill to a vote. If the legislature fails to act in 120 days, the group can submit an additional 121,000 signatures to put the proposed legislation on the ballot in the November 2008 general election.
In August, 1974 the United States’ economy had seen better days. The bills from the Vietnam War were coming due, and the OPEC oil embargo against America had caused the price of a barrel of oil to quadruple during the past year. Caused by these and other economic factors, the country was now experiencing inflation at an unprecedented peacetime rate.
Simply put, inflation is an increase in the price of goods and services. Low levels of price increases over time are normal, but the United States was seeing inflation levels of upwards of 9% in 1974 alone. The higher the inflation rate, the less purchasing power each dollar has. To make matters worse, teachers in Columbus Public Schools weren’t earning much to begin with.
Watch the one minute video below to learn more about the incomparable membership of the Columbus Education Association.
A few weeks ago, Buckeye Institute President David Hansen called Columbus Education Association President Rhonda Johnson a bully for her allegations of potential political links between Hansen’s organization and the campaign of Mayor Michael Coleman’s Republican challenger Bill Todd. Now Hansen has taken the finger pointing and name-calling to a whole new level— calling four-fifths of the entire state’s teaching force bullies.
In a few misplaced keystrokes, Hansen has managed to impugn the individual and collective reputations of the 4500 member-strong Columbus Education Association as well as the other 126,000 educators throughout the Buckeye state who are card-carrying members of the Ohio Education Association. To divine Hansen’s intentions from such a petulant diatribe, it is essential that one examine the etymology of the word “bully”.
The origins of the word date back to the 16th century, and most likely originated in Middle Dutch as the word boele. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary gives several definitions of the word as a noun; perhaps Hansen meant to apply the most negative definition of the word towards members of CEA— people who are “…habitually cruel to others who are weaker”.
Do bullies individually spend hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets to provide school supplies for students and equip their classrooms for learning?
Do bullies collectively donate over $60,000 to the United Negro College Fund?
Do bullies come to work early, stay late and work on weekends to help “others who are weaker”?
Do bullies join together and give $382,000 to the
Do bullies painstakingly invest a year of their time and untold personal hours to become a Nationally Board Certified Teacher so they can better meet the needs of their students?
Do bullies raise thousands of dollars to help the fight against Breast Cancer?
Do bullies constantly advocate for great public schools for every child?
We didn’t think bullies did those things, either. Perhaps David Hansen meant to use the other definition of bully, the one that means “a fine chap”.
District of Columbus Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) recently unveiled proposed legislation that would reclassify over 700 non-union employees in the central office of the D.C. school system as “at-will” employees. Created with the full support of D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the pending legislation would allow the Chancellor to quickly terminate central office employees for any non-disciplinary reason.
Turning towards educators in the district, Rhee stated that she had recently begun negotiations with the Washington Teachers’ Union. Rhee stated at a press conference that she wanted the ability to reward high performing teachers and to “remove ineffective teachers from their positions”. The WTU currently has a procedure in place that allows for the district to remove low-performing teachers in only 90 days, acknowledged by the Washington Post in a front-page story as “one of the shortest in the nation”.
This Washington Post article outlines how a federally-funded voucher program in the District of Columbia has become a compliance albatross hanging from the neck of the national government. The report was put together by the Government Accounting Office and outlines some serious problems with the private schools that are accepting the $7,500 federal vouchers. (Hat tip to NYC Educator.)
In a random sample of 18 schools reviewed by the GAO, two lacked occupancy permits, and four lacked permits needed for buildings used for educational purposes. At least seven of the 18 schools were certified as child development centers but not as private schools. In one case, a school was operating in a space designed for a retail store, the report says.