That’s Right Nate

Nate Peele: I’m here with Tony Federko who is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.  I wanted to get his thoughts on Obama’s proposal to extend the school year and school day.

Tony Federko: Thank you Mr. Peele, but when you asked if we could have a conference, I expected that you wanted to talk about your daughter Emily.

NP: Well, she’s doing fine–isn’t she?  She loves your class and I think she’s really learning a lot so far this year.

TF: Yes, but…

NP: Good, now how do you agree with the liberals or conservatives on education?

TF: I don’t really see a difference honestly.   Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton are currently promoting the President’s education reforms.

NP: Really?  I wasn’t aware of that.   What do you think of the President’s idea to expand the school year?  He says we’re falling behind other countries because we don’t spend enough time in school.

TF: He’s wrong.  Don’t get me wrong I voted for him…

NP: Oh really?

TF: Anyway, Obama said that he wants our children to go to school as much as they do in Korea.   An American eighth-grader gets about 1,150 instructional hours per year while a South Korean would get 923.  Our kids have more instructional time than Taiwan, The Phillipines, and Japan who score higher than us on aptitude tests.

NP: Right, because we have teacher’s unions.

TF: Most of those countries do too.  The difference is we have a third world rate of child poverty and a third world medical system where children are forced to go to school sick and malnourished.   We also count everybody on our tests, but they only count citizens.   We do better on these tests than most developed countries like Germany and England.

NP: Germany and England are socialist countries you know.  Still, education reform is a good thing.   Don’t we need to run schools like a business?

TF: Business isn’t doing too well right now.  Maybe we should run businesses more like schools.   If we wanted to run it like a successful business, we’d start with the employees who are in the trenches everyday.  Instead, reform seems to stem from corporations who want a chance at all the money in education.

NP: Liberals are like that with social programs.

TF: It isn’t just liberals.  The very people who attack the Heritage Foundations of the world on Health Care and demand a public option are the same people joining forces with the Heritage Foundation on education to push for more charter schools.   Charter schools do the same thing insurance companies do and do not always take the students with pre-existing conditions like behavioral issues or learning disabilities.  Despite all that, test data shows that the charters don’t do as well as the regular schools at educating kids.

NP: Don’t you think that the school day should be longer?   I’d love to have a job like yours where I get out at 3:00

TF: Before we talk about adding more hours to the school day, maybe we could talk about paying teachers for the hours they already work.   Georgia has started furloughing teachers and states like California are hemorrhaging jobs.  I work a 10 hour day of which I get paid for 6 hours and 15 minutes.   Even if I was paid for an 8 hour day, they couldn’t afford it.  You know I always tell people who say they’d love my job, that they should go to school and become teachers–or go to a charter school where you wouldn’t even have to take education classes to teach.

NP: I think I’d be a great teacher.   I have a way with kids you know.   Don’t you think we need to have tougher standards for teachers though?

TF: With charters, we’re actually making the standards lower, but here’s the problem.   If you have 1000 apply for 1000 job openings, you can’t be selective.  In the wealthy school districts and the schools where they have new computers and good security they can hire good teachers.   In inner city schools some good teachers are working hard, but sometimes they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

NP: So how would you improve schools?

TF: First, I’d pay teachers more for working at those inner city schools.   Then, I’d try and reduce class size.   People who say that it doesn’t make a difference haven’t taught.  I’d give teachers more preparation time because many of us work almost as many unpaid hours as paid hours.   I’d keep tenure because  due process is important in this type of job, but I would make it easier to terminate somebody who was obviously not doing their job.  I’d focus more on public education and only allow charters that did creative or experimental curriculum that could be studied and possibly implemented in the public schools.  Doing those things would give you a better pool of candidates for teaching jobs.  Then comes the next two big steps:

I’d search out successful people in business, sports, the arts, you name it and I’d ask them what was it in school that helped make them successful and I’d try and reproduce it.   Everything is so geared for tests now and I don’t believe those are the most important things.   Then, I’d pass very strong health reform with a public option and I’d make childhood poverty a major focus.

NP: So is it too late to get my daughter transferred to another class?

TF: I’m afraid so.

NP: OK, well thanks.

During a speech last week, Barrack Obama reminded us that South Korean students go to school a month longer than our students do.  After looking up the statistics, I learned that they are also scoring better on standardized tests than our students even though we have a higher percentage of students scoring in the highest category.  I decided that we need to look at what it will take to replicate the South Korean educational miracle.

First, we need the kind of quality teachers that they have in South Korea.   First, all teachers in this country should get a 75% raise so that they are equal to South Korean teachers in salary as a percentage of GDP.   I’m not thrilled about this aspect of things either because a teacher who is currently overpaid at $40,000 a year would now make $70,000.  Wow!  OK, let’s just skip this step.

One thing that South Korea has that we need is hagwons.  Hagwons are private tutoring schools that students go to after their regular school day is completed.  South Korean families spend 7 percent of their income on their children’s education and that’s for students in public school.    Student days in South Korea are much longer with both school and hagwon taking up time.  It isn’t unusual for students to catch up on their shut eye in class.  The saying in Korea is, “Sleep 5 hours and fail.  Sleep 4 hours and pass.”  Especially in high school, students routinely begin school at 6 a.m. and spend the day in classes until midnight.  This schedule lasts 7 days a week.

Students in South Korea know that they have a lot pressure to succeed and unfortunately, there is an abnormally high suicide rate among teens and children in South Korea.  However,  the schools know that if they need to instill discipline they still can.  80% of schools in South Korean still employ corporal punishment.  There was one famous story in 2006 when a teacher hit a student 200 times for being 5 minutes late for class.  You can be sure that student was on time the next day.  This iron willed discipline allows Korean teachers to use a curriculum that features far more rote memorization than are children can handle.

Some may argue, that this kind of approach is too costly or that it saps children of their childhoods.  However, what is the effect of a childhood on a country’s economy?  We need to start working to get our students capable of competing with the hard working automotons of South Korea.

Merit pay would encourage firemen like these to get out and fight fires instead of clowning around.

There’s an old song by the Pink Floyd that goes “We don’t need no education.”  I’m not quite sure what the song is, but those lines always stuck with me.  Teachers for years have been riding the educational gravy train in this country and we need to stop it.  Today, Barrack Obama laid out his plans to make teachers accountable and it is about time.  I may be one of Obama’s harshest critics, but I think his proposal is a good start.  Obama called for tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.

Obama also called for us to emulate the South Korean school system where students go a month longer than kids in this country do.  I applaud Obama for not looking to Canada which has the second best school system in the world behind only Finland, but which remains a hotbed of liberalism and socialized medicine. According to the Mathematics Association of America,  “Most of the top countries pay their starting teachers a salary equivalent to about 95% of national GDP per capita. South Korea pays 141%. In the United States, average starting salaries for teachers are at 81% of national GDP per capita. With avergae ntional GDP in the US currently at $46,000, 81% means an average starting salary of a bit over $37,000. To raise starting salaries to 95% of US GDP per capita, this would have to rise to almost $44,000″ and 141% would be over $60,000 to start, but we’re America and if we can’t get a first class education for third world wages, we might as well just give up now.  I would also hope we can avoid South Korea’s huge teen suicide epidemic which is often blamed on high stakes testing.

Now, Obama wants to increase funding for teacher salaries, but he is wisely tying this increase to merit pay.  I really love this idea because it assures us of getting what we pay for.  The problem with education is how lazy so many teachers are.  They sit at their desks all day sipping their expensive coffee and not paying any attention to what theri students are doing.  What about the lazy cops who hang out in the doughnut shop or the lazy firemen who don’t want to run into a burning building though?   Let’s face it teachers aren’t the only lazy government workers on easy street.

Which is more valuable to a city–The cop who sits in his comfortable car all day or the one who is busting his back writing speeding tickets?   Is the city getting its money’s worth for the fireman who sits around the station watching televsion all day or the one who is putting out fires?  These people should also be put on incentive pay.  Let’s allow cops to keep 20% of all ticket money they raise.  Let’s give our firemen $100 for every burning building they enter.  That’ll get them off their behinds.  In the unfortunate event that you had to go to a public hospital, wouldn’t you want to know the doctor’s salary was being tied into his patients’ survival rates?  Let’s truly make this a merit based society.  For once, Obama and I seem to agree on something.

This we saw another casualty of the teacher unions and the bloated educational bureacracy in this country.  An 8 year old Arizona boy was charged with premeditated murder after he shot and killed his father and another man with a .22 caliber rifle methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them.

This is hot on the heels of the case of another 8 year old boy from Massachusetts who shot himself in the head while firing an uzi.  Now, from everything we have heard this Arizona boy was well adjusted and not a discipline problem.  His father tried to do all he could by teaching him to shoot prarie dogs, but how is a working parent supposed to have enough time to teach his child about proper gun safety including that you never ever point a gun at another person and shoot them.  This is the job of our schools and it is a job they are neglecting.

Fortunately, since the boy is 8 he can be charged as an adult in Arizona and not coddled by juvenile justice, but this tragedy should never have happenned in the first place.  Firearm safety is as important to our children’s future as math or reading and if scholars are right about this being the end times maybe moreso.  Until we start holding school boards responsible for making sure that every 8 year old in this country is able to properly care for and safely fire a gun we are all at risk.  While some parents might opt for homeschooling I really believe that children gain more responsibility by handling firearms around other children–something that parents simply cannot provide as readily.  Let us begin to demand more of our schools.  Let’s hold them accountable so that tragedies like this do not happen again.

This past week the Texas board of education stopped an effort by teacher’s groups to hijackthe statewide English curriculum and instead turned the job over to Washington DC based Consultant StandardsWork.  There is a reason that we have modeled so much of our country’s educational sytem after Texas and it is impressive moves like this to keep educational policy in the hands of professionals and away from special interests like teachers groups that we as a nation must applaud.

The meeting began when a proposal the teachers had been working on for the past 3 years was roundly rejected by the State Board of Education’s social conservative block 9-6.  Many on the board were resentful that the teachers had been working behind the scenes over the past 3 years with educational consultants to devise their plan.  Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, said some teachers and their supporters “subverted” the process of writing the curriculum standards by working behind the scenes to influence the final version of the plan. “We don’t want to say we’re not listening to teachers, but I am very frustrated,” she said. “This process has become a joke and mockery.”

Fortunately, with litle time the State Board of Education was able to call up Republican Education Consultants StandardsWork to draft a new curriculum.  According to StandardsWork the thing that seperates the company from others is its “Customized, grassroots approach to reform initiatives.”

According to StandardsWork’s company website (http://www.goalline.org/) the seeds of StandardsWork were planted in 1991 when [Leslye] Arsht helped U.S. Department of Education Secretary Lamar Alexander promote America 2000. That initiative was then-President George H. W. Bush’s campaign to engage communities in education reform. One of the six national education goals reflected in that strategy was that American students leave grades four, eight, and twelve “having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history and geography.”

Fortunately, the Board of Education in Texas did the right thing by going with a group that has been at the forefront of the educational success of the last 14 years rather than the teachers who continue to be a lodestone around the neck of our sinking schools.  You’d think everybody would see the wisdom of this decision, but you’d be wrong.  Some board members and teachers complained. 

“The state board is split between members who respect the opinions of teachers and education experts and … other members who clearly don’t,” said Kathy Miller, president of the education watchdog group Texas Freedom Network. “So this board is increasingly unable to complete tasks with efficiency and a respect for informed debate and expert opinion.

“How am I supposed to vote on a document when I’ve had it in my hands for slightly over an hour?” asked angered board member Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democrat from Corpus Christi. “How are we supposed to reply to our constituents? I don’t understand that. I can’t support a document that I haven’t had a chance to read.”

“I find it’s really wild that we can work for three years on a project and then the board is so qualified they can pull it out of their hat overnight,” said board member Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who, like other board members, received the substituted document when it was slipped under her hotel door less than an hour before their meeting was set to convene Friday morning.

This is a reading curriculum lady.  If you’re making the decisions and you can’t read a simple 100 page document in an hour than maybe you shouldn’t be involved in the process in the first place.  This is an important blow for the type of top down educational reform that President Bush has been trying to bring to this country for the past 8 years.  I applaud the Texas Board for picking consultants who know what they’re talking about over the special interest teacher groups.

I had to comment on this thing as this video has been showing up on the web everywhere.  6 cheerleaders kidnapped one girl and took her to one of their grandmother’s homes and beat her to a bloddy pulp.  She was knocked unconcious, suffered eye and ear damage, and a concussion.  2 boys stood lookout while this happenned.

In my day when cheerleaders fought they used to pull hair and rip clothing, but this was brutal.  In fact one of the mothers of the girls said she the victim shouldn’t have posted on myspace if she wasn’t prepared to “back it up”.  I give O’Reilly a lot of credit for calling this “terrible behavior” when Fox own Myspace, but O’Reilly is one of those people who isn’t afraid to talk truth to power.

My big question is where were these kids’ teachers?  This had to be planned at school.  They should have been there to stop this before it ever got that far.