Perks for teachers?

The most commonly-held "perks" associated with teaching usually include:

1. Paid summers/Christmas off (but not anymore, CPS teachers!  No more deferred pay for us!  And no more "summers off" if you're non-tenured or working for a principal with his hopes up for getting rid of "tenured do-nothings")

2. "Shorter" work day (Not if you want to keep up with your day-ta!)

3. The opportunity to enrich young people's lives (Yes, of course, but isn't that the JOB THAT WE'RE PAID TO PERFORM, rather than a "perk"?)

We all know that educational experts everywhere are embracing corporate models for schools, giving teachers myriad opportunities to attend meetings about meetings, and also to generate, inspect, and - ahem - manipulate data.  We also know that new urban reformers love "corporate churn," the idea that high staff turnover and constantly changing administrative demands leads to higher productivity.  And of course, we all know about the opportunities out there for corporate educational profiteers to a$$ist in generating new ways to inspect teachers' failures.

But what about the corporate perks?  We've heard about corporate places where staff members get awesome things at work.  In fact, Career Builder did a survey and found out about five awesome corporate perks that keep staff members happy and productive:

1. Catered lunches
2. Massages
3. Nap rooms
4. Snack carts
5. On-site daycare

Boy, do those things sound great!  We know that it's unlikely that urban educational reformers will put the corporate perks into the corporate models for schools, so we've created an alternate list of perks that we'd like to see at our school:

1. Non-roach-infested storage space
2. Non-developing-nation staff bathroom conditions
3. Food available to buy -- even in a vending machine -- during our 25 minute lunch
4. Somewhere comfortable to sit down during planning periods

And last, but not least, maybe a cup of coffee (we'll pay!)?  And a thank-you from the boss every once in a while?

Leave a comment or email wct.tips@gmail.com with perks you think teachers might enjoy.

Meet Chicago Bond Mutant: Juahm Emanugel

UNO's Debt Addiction

Time to dig out your notes from your college Econ class, readers! We're taking a look at UNO's finances, and it's not pretty.

We're not forensic accountants at WCT, but we sure could have used a team of accountants and MBAs to explain all the numbers in this alarming presentation on UNO Charter Schools. Researched and presented by Byron Sigcho several weeks ago and hosted by fellow blogger Rogers Park Neighbors for Public Schools, this presentation should be required reading on how private industry seeks to profit off the public and what charter schools have to do with it.

Educational excellence in the 21st century has become synonymous with the charter movement.  Neighborhoods might not be so welcoming to these schools--especially UNO--if they understood how they operated. 

Here are a few highlights, or rather lowlights, of UNO's finances:

• This year, UNO will generate $91 million dollars of debt, $61 million of which is private loans.

• UNO is paying over $2 million dollars a year in debt interest, while only paying $70,000 a year toward the principal (maybe UNO never went on a college spending spree, but we learned the hard way you can't just pay interest!).

• The bonds that UNO has issued are backed by the state, meaning that the state can use any available revenues including taxes, to repay the investors. In UNO's case,  one investor is the local Nuveen Securities. Those investors are waiting for some high yield returns, while taxpayers should await higher taxes! Cha-ching!!

• "Fees" are listed in the revenue table and are projected to increase each year, kind of like that $7 million $70,000 marijuana ticket ordinance the city was hoping to cash in on. One former UNO teacher said fees are generated when, for example, a student deigns to speak Spanish in the classroom. No excuses, amigos!

• Despite UNO running a $21,000 per student debt (or $71 million dollars), in 2012 UNO managed to have net revenues and then something we assume is even better: excess net revenues. Revenues on top of revenues? That's some magical accounting.

Ironically, the Tribune published an editorial on Tuesday about Chicago's "runaway bond habit." UNO and City Hall must co-plan because the city has spent $9.8 billion dollar in bonds since 2000 on such items as: spare vehicle parts, trash bins, library books, obsolete software, and other short term issues. 

Bonds are supposed to pay for long-term projects for the benefit of all, not to be used as payday loans which benefit a few.

The entire UNO presentation is available here. We encourage you to take a close look at the information and see for yourself how Rahm Emanuel and Juan Rangel have morphed into the bond mutant Juahm Emanugel. 

A Double-Secret Meeting

Dean Vernon Wormer calls a meeting

We can't help but wonder if Wednesday's Board of Education closed session for "self-evaluation" was led by the illustrious thought partners who are populating many schools these days.

Perhaps David Vitale and the Board had to answer questions like:

• Do you think you have high standards for the students?

• What's the rhythm of the protocol rollout going to be?

• Are you willing to be vulnerable in a public space?

• Will you lean into discomfort with us?

and our perennial favorite:

• Do you like being healthy?

Or, maybe they did an icebreaker called Link Up, where one person stands up to talk about themselves, and then when another person hears something that relates to them, they run up to the front of the room and link arms. Then that person talks, until another person hears something that relates to them. Finally, the whole room is linked up in the knowing communal bliss of being one. What do you think the magic words were that had the Board linking arms, readers? We guess "rich" and "Rahm's appointee."

We do hope the BOE abided the fundamental rule of Thought Partner share time: Stories stay, but lessons leave. 

Say No Thanks to Common Core on Nov. 18th

Angry parents nation-wide are calling for a November 18th protest against Common Core standards. Their reasons include:

• ever-more testing

• ever-more philanthrocapitalist dabbling

• incomprehensible homework

• unrealistic expectations

• elitist notions about the value of college

• loss of local input and control

According to Common Core, our CPS high school seniors will be evaluated on their ability to:

Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.

Unfortunately, the best of our regular, non-honors CPS high school seniors usually can only:

Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, scene, or stanza fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the theme, setting, or plot. 

We think that skill #2 is a fairly complex and intelligent task for 17-18 year olds.  But not Common Core!  According to them, skill #2 is for 6th graders.

What are your thoughts, readers?  Any parents out there with opinions?  Any teachers with strong feelings on Common Core?

Horrible CPS Bosses

Even though National Boss's Day was in October, it's never too late to note all of the ways one's boss can make life miserable. Yes, we all know about horrible bosses all over Chicago who are horrible in conventional ways, like sexually harassing their employees, refusing to let people have a day off to take care of a sick kid, or handing out the layoff notice.  But what about horrible CPS bosses?  Are they really very different from their corporate counterparts? Yes and no, readers.

Forbes published a list of behaviors horrible corporate bosses might share, and sure enough principals we know have picked up on bad corporate behavior like:

• Never being wrong about anything (check!)
• Constant staff turnover (check!)
• Being the Micromanager of micromanaging. With 100 teachers in a building, your principal has a hand in what everyone is doing (check, check, and check!)
• Turmoil in one's personal life due to "the job." (double check!)
• Never saying thanks (check!)

Here's a starter list of some horrible things we've seen and heard administrators doing:

• Sneaky "re-definition" as a way to fire tenured teachers
• Keeping a special bathroom just for their own use
• Making female teachers cry at meetings
• Standing by the time clock as staff are punching in and out
• Getting rid of staff rooms 
• Sitting in a teacher's room for "quiet" while a class is going on
• Cryptic advice that means nothing, yet is expected to be followed
• Self-congratulatory "inspirational" quotes that are doled out at every turn
• Disapproval of teachers enjoying a life outside of the school building

Readers: what horrible boss stories do you have? Use the comment link to share!

Did Common Core Consider the Source?

Hmm...

Proponents of the Common Core State Standards are on the offensive lately. Parents are fed up at the prospect of more testing, states are choosing to withdraw from Common Core (we're guessing that's not the kind of choice Arne Duncan means), and teachers are up and quitting because of it.

The outcry over Common Core might explain Common Core: Consider the Source--the sensible sibling to the other Common Core website--that aims to tell the long journey dedicated professionals made in creating Common Core. Consider the Source details the dizzying path to excellence we'll soon be traveling. Incidentally, it also pedals educational platform$ and tool$ to implement the Common Core.

Then there are the Common Core trustees. Two of whom are familiar to our readers: BBB and Juan Rangel. We're confused. Trustee implies one who is in a position of trust. Yet, BBB is at the helm of Chicago Public Schools. CPS and trust do not go together. For example, just a week ago, CPS decided to wreak havoc at Ames Elementary. After that handiwork, students, parents, and the city were left to guess if this school was: a) having another school move in, b) closing, or c) both. The right answer, of course, is none of the above. A recap: first, another was school moving in, then it wasn't, and now Ames is being renamed and rebranded as a military school. That's decision making you can believe in. Then there's Juan Rangel, head of UNO Charter schools, whose mini-empire is currently in the crosshairs of an SEC investigation. All manner of federal investigations are the sound leadership we've come to know and love.

With Common Core's emphasis on going to the source, critical thinking and higher standards, we can't figure out how these two knuckleheads were entrusted with anything.

REACHin' For Excellence

The REACH Evaluation

In Sunday's CPS issued Teacher Newsletter, we're treated to this sage advice about teaching:

Having spent the last few columns talking about setting high expectations and communicating them to students, scaffolding students to share their thinking, and engaging students in rigorous texts and tasks, it follows naturally that we should next spend time examining just what students actually learned! Component 3d [in REACH] gets at just that: where are students on their path to learning?

Ah yes, our old friends high expectations and rigor. It seems we can't go a day without hearing about high expectations and rigor! We are unsure about how scaffolding students to share thinking is done. But no matter, this is all tied to the new amped-up, excellence-inducing REACH Performance evaluation, of which one goal is to:

• Establish a common definition and standards for teaching excellence. Yes, because all you need is excellence.

How is this done?

• Standardized tests! Here, this means "customized performance tasks...which assess student mastery of standards."

If only this applied to the test developers. A reader email tipped us off to what some schools' faculties received via email today:

"...some departments had issues with test fairness and accuracy of the task. A passage may have had inaccurate information in it, the answer key may have been inaccurate and/or incomplete, or the student document never specified how many examples a student had to provide to receive credit."

Inaccurate information? Incomplete answer keys? Unspecified requirements? Teachers' job security is based on possibly inaccurate tests that will measure (or not) what a student learns during the year? Sounds like excellence to us!

Teachers, have you noticed inaccurate REACH exams?