SMETA

Seniority list

2012-02-22T16:47:00.001-08:00

All members MUST check the seniority list ASAP to see if there are any mistakes. If you notice a mistake make sure you tell your administrator so it can be fixed. This is very important when it comes to lay offs. If you don't tell anyone your start date is incorrect and you end up getting a pink slip it will be very hard for SMETA to fight for you. So check that list!!!!

Viewpoints: For California schools, we need less testing and more assessing

2012-02-15T22:43:00.001-08:00

By Linda Darling-Hammond
Special to The Bee
Published: Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012

There is a saying that American students are the most tested and the least examined of any in the world. Nowhere is that more true than in California, where students take 35 tests before they hit the SAT and AP exams.

Gov. Jerry Brown's call for less testing and more focus on meaningful learning is a welcome breath of sanity in an American education landscape that has appeared more and more like Alice's Wonderland. Fortunately, the state's decision to join the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium – a group of more than 20 states creating new tests – will support, rather than conflict with, these goals, as a Feb. 5 story in The Bee suggested.

No country tests its children as often as the United States: The highest achieving often have few or no tests until the end of high school. Furthermore, the tests that are used in top-ranked nations like Finland, South Korea and Singapore are open-ended essay and oral examinations. Most top systems also expect students to design and conduct extended research projects and scientific investigations.

By contrast, in California, nearly all of our current tests are limited to bubbling in answers on multiple-choice items, rather than writing well-defended responses, researching and presenting information, solving complex problems and using new technologies or other skills increasingly critical in our 21st-century society.

With punitive sanctions from the federal government attached to test scores, parents and teachers have complained for years that these important higher-order skills are often edged out of the curriculum in favor of test prep that encourages a drill-and-kill, multiple-choice curriculum. All this testing has not helped California's achievement: The state ranks in the bottom five on every national measure of achievement, far below states that test students much less and use different kinds of measures.

The Smarter Balanced tests will replace California's existing English language arts and math tests in grades three through eight, and grade 11 with new computer-assisted assessments that include more written responses from students, plus tasks that require them to engage in research, solve more complex problems and use technology. These tests will be designed to measure student growth more accurately and to return results more quickly to teachers, students and parents.

Local districts may choose to support teaching with some of the formative instructional lessons and interim assessments the consortium will offer. These will be less costly and more aligned to the Common Core standards than current products that many districts are trying to buy or create, but they will be completely optional. And, unlike current bubble tests, these lessons and assessments will foster complex-thinking and problem-solving skills, and give teachers timely feedback on how well students understand what is being taught.

California can replace up to 18 of its tests with a smaller number of these new assessments. Brown's proposal should lead us to reconsider the other 17 as well. In particular, we should rethink the science tests that – unlike those in other countries and some leading states – include no real experimentation or investigation, as well as the history and social science tests that include no real analysis of historical events or extended reading and writing about important social issues.

Many schools and districts in California have already developed exciting, intellectually rigorous projects and assessments for students in these and other subjects. Envision Schools, New Tech and High Tech High Schools, Linked Learning schools, and many others require their students to engage in the kind of science and technology assessments that are used in Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland and other high-flying nations. Their outcomes show that they are preparing their students to be truly college- and career-ready. Shouldn't we do this for all our students?

The governor's call to tap local initiative and creativity should encourage us to look to our own pioneers for ways to focus schools on the kind of learning that will matter for our children's – and California's – future.

Linda Darling-Hammond is a professor of education at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Her latest book is "The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future."

Governor Brown Tax Initiative

2012-02-15T09:00:00.001-08:00

There are a few initiatives coming up in the near future. Governor Brown's initiative proposes a temporary income tax increase for the next 5 years on high earners. 1% on those making $500,000-$600,000, 1.5% on $600,000-$1,000,000 earners, and 2% on those making more than $1,000,000. This measure is expected to generate $7 billion a year. This money would be placed in an education protection account for pre-K -12 education and community colleges. Keep an eye open for ways to get involved in the next election.

Food Drive

2012-02-14T20:33:00.000-08:00

Hey members, don't forget to fill those bags with non perishable foods for SMETA and the district's Second Harvest Food Drive. We hope to fill at least 10 bins of food this Friday. Bring your bags of food to the Professional Development day at Bowditch school. We would also love to see you show some SMETA support by wearing your SMETA blue. See you there.

Professional Development day

2012-02-13T18:51:00.001-08:00

I was assigned a workshop I didn't even rank as one I would be remotely interested in. In fact it has nothing to do with what I teach. Did this happen to anyone else?

Education: Achievement gap starts before school starts

2012-02-08T21:09:00.001-08:00

If you read news magazines or watch TV, you might think that American education is in a crisis of historic proportions. The media claim that that our future is in peril because our students have low test scores caused by incompetent, lazy teachers.
Don't believe it. It's not true.
Yes, our students' scores on international tests are only average, but our students have never been at the top on those tests; when the first such test was given in 1964, we ranked 12th out of 12. And, yet, the United States continued to prosper.
So maybe standardized tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Perhaps our country has succeeded not because of test scores but because we encouraged something more important than test scores — the freedom to create, innovate, and imagine. Unfortunately, recent educational reforms throw aside that philosophy in favor of an even greater emphasis on test scores.
In 2001 Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which imposed a massive program of school reform based on standardized testing. The theory behind the plan was that teachers and schools would try harder — and see rapid test score gains — if their test results were made public.
Instead of sending the vast sums of money that schools needed to make a dent in this goal, Congress simply sent testing mandates that required every child in every school to reach proficiency by 2014 — or the schools would be subject to sanctions. If a school failed to make progress over five years, it might be closed, privatized, handed over to the state authorities, or turned into a charter school.
The Obama administration launched its own school reform plan in 2009 called Race to the Top. The program dangled nearly $5 billion in front of cash-hungry states, which could become eligible only if they agreed to open more privately managed charter schools, to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, to offer bonuses to teachers if their students got higher test scores, and to fire the staff and close schools that didn't make progress.
None of these policies has any consistent body of evidence behind it. The fundamental belief that carrots and sticks will improve education is a leap of faith, an ideology to which its adherents cling despite evidence to the contrary.
Two major reports released in spring 2011 showed what a risky and foolish path the United States has embarked upon.
The National Research Council gathered some of the nation's leading education experts who concluded that incentives based on tests hadn't worked. In other words, the immense investment in testing over recent decades was based on intuition, not on evidence—and faulty intuition, at that.
The second report, by the National Center on Education and the Economy, maintained that the approach we are now following—testing every child every year and grading teachers by their students' scores—is not found in any of the world's top-performing nations.
Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests at the expense of the creativity, innovation and imagination that helped this country succeed.
We are now at a fork in the road. If we continue on our present path of privatization and unproven reforms, we will witness the explosive growth of a for-profit education industry and of education entrepreneurs receiving high salaries to manage nonprofit enterprises.
The free market loves competition, but competition produces winners and losers, not equality of educational opportunity. We will turn teachers into “at will” employees who can be fired at the whim of a principal based on little more than test scores. Their pay and benefits will also depend on the scores. Who will want to teach? Most new teachers already leave the job within five years.
What the federal efforts of the past decade ignore is that the most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who are homeless or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.
If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we should make sure that every pregnant woman has good prenatal care and nutrition and that every child has high-quality early education.
The achievement gap begins before the first day of school. If we mean to provide equality of educational opportunity, we must level the playing field before the start of formal schooling. Otherwise, we'll just be playing an eternal game of catch-up — and that's a game we cannot win.
Diane Ravitch, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education, is a historian of education and a professor at New York University.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/community/northwest/news/article/Education-Achievement-gap-starts-before-school-2213710.php#ixzz1lrGe2ojF

Another related article

2011-12-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?

By HELEN F. LADD and EDWARD B. FISKE

Published: December 11, 2011

Durham, N.C.

NO one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. But rather than confront this fact of life head-on, our policy makers mistakenly continue to reason that, since they cannot change the backgrounds of students, they should focus on things they can control.
No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s signature education law, did this by setting unrealistically high — and ultimately self-defeating — expectations for all schools. President Obama’s policies have concentrated on trying to make schools more “efficient” through means like judging teachers by their students’ test scores or encouraging competition by promoting the creation of charter schools. The proverbial story of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost comes to mind.
The Occupy movement has catalyzed rising anxiety over income inequality; we desperately need a similar reminder of the relationship between economic advantage and student performance.
The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.
International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?
Yet federal education policy seems blind to all this. No Child Left Behind required all schools to bring all students to high levels of achievement but took no note of the challenges that disadvantaged students face. The legislation did, to be sure, specify that subgroups — defined by income, minority status and proficiency in English — must meet the same achievement standard. But it did so only to make sure that schools did not ignore their disadvantaged students — not to help them address the challenges they carry with them into the classroom.
So why do presumably well-intentioned policy makers ignore, or deny, the correlations of family background and student achievement?
Some honestly believe that schools are capable of offsetting the effects of poverty. Others want to avoid the impression that they set lower expectations for some groups of students for fear that those expectations will be self-fulfilling. In both cases, simply wanting something to be true does not make it so.
Another rationale for denial is to note that some schools, like the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools, have managed to “beat the odds.” If some schools can succeed, the argument goes, then it is reasonable to expect all schools to. But close scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students.
A final rationale for denying the correlation is more nefarious. As we are now seeing, requiring all schools to meet the same high standards for all students, regardless of family background, will inevitably lead either to large numbers of failing schools or to a dramatic lowering of state standards. Both serve to discredit the public education system and lend support to arguments that the system is failing and needs fundamental change, like privatization.
Given the budget crises at the national and state levels, and the strong political power of conservative groups, a significant effort to reduce poverty or deal with the closely related issue of racial segregation is not in the political cards, at least for now.
So what can be done?
Large bodies of research have shown how poor health and nutrition inhibit child development and learning and, conversely, how high-quality early childhood and preschool education programs can enhance them. We understand the importance of early exposure to rich language on future cognitive development. We know that low-income students experience greater learning loss during the summer when their more privileged peers are enjoying travel and other enriching activities.
Since they can’t take on poverty itself, education policy makers should try to provide poor students with the social support and experiences that middle-class students enjoy as a matter of course.
It can be done. In North Carolina, the two-year-old East Durham Children’s Initiative is one of many efforts around the country to replicate Geoffrey Canada’s well-known successes with the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Say Yes to Education in Syracuse, N.Y., supports access to afterschool programs and summer camps and places social workers in schools. In Omaha, Building Bright Futures sponsors school-based health centers and offers mentoring and enrichment services. Citizen Schools, based in Boston, recruits volunteers in seven states to share their interests and skills with middle-school students.
Promise Neighborhoods, an Obama administration effort that gives grants to programs like these, is a welcome first step, but it has been under-financed.
Other countries already pursue such strategies. In Finland, with its famously high-performing schools, schools provide food and free health care for students. Developmental needs are addressed early. Counseling services are abundant.
But in the United States over the past decade, it became fashionable among supporters of the “no excuses” approach to school improvement to accuse anyone raising the poverty issue of letting schools off the hook — or what Mr. Bush famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Such accusations may afford the illusion of a moral high ground, but they stand in the way of serious efforts to improve education and, for that matter, go a long way toward explaining why No Child Left Behind has not worked.
Yes, we need to make sure that all children, and particularly disadvantaged children, have access to good schools, as defined by the quality of teachers and principals and of internal policies and practices.
But let’s not pretend that family background does not matter and can be overlooked. Let’s agree that we know a lot about how to address the ways in which poverty undermines student learning. Whether we choose to face up to that reality is ultimately a moral question.

Helen F. Ladd is a professor of public policy and economics at Duke. Edward B. Fiske, a former education editor of The New York Times, is the author of the “Fiske Guide to Colleges.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 12, 2011, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?.

From the article: Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

2011-12-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

This from Dissent Magazine (http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781) by Joanne Barkan:
THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher. Other foundations—Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few—often join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement’s success so far has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate.

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.

Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.

Given all this, I want to explore three questions: How do these foundations operate on the ground? How do they leverage their money into control over public policy? And how do they construct consensus? We know the array of tools used by the foundations for education reform: they fund programs to close down schools, set up charters, and experiment with data-collection software, testing regimes, and teacher evaluation plans; they give grants to research groups and think tanks to study all the programs, to evaluate all the studies, and to conduct surveys; they give grants to TV networks for programming and to news organizations for reporting; they spend hundreds of millions on advocacy outreach to the media, to government at every level, and to voters. Yet we don’t know much at all until we get down to specifics.

read more>> (http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781)

December 14th updates

2011-12-14T20:16:00.000-08:00

    Hello my fellow educators. As most of us are aware of this by now, the district is sitting on $22 million. What you might not know is it looks like the district wants to increase the reserve to 10%. Now I could just be speculating here but it seems this $22 million might have something to do with it. It's important we try to get our hands on some of this money before they are allowed to sit on it forever. What happened to class size reduction? Taxpayers are still paying for this even though it's not being practiced. As we begin to negotiate our contact think about the issues you feel are important for our schools, members, and of course our children. It might be time to fight for our class sizes.
     Thinking about negotiations, if you were part of the calender committee (early release days) last year, you will be asked to fill out a survey about how this process went and how it has been going so far. We know there are a few kinks to iron out and therefore it is very important to fill out this survey so we know where to begin planning for next year's calendar.
On to new business, transitional kindergarten is going to roll out next year. There is still a lot to figure out and not a lot of time to do that. If you are a kindergarten teacher make sure you are aware of what is happening. It seems these kids will be taught kindergarten standards as a way to be better prepared them for kindergarten. A large emphasis will be played on their social skills and preparation for school. Your input will be greatly appreciated. Molly Barton is spearheading this program. A committee will be formed in January to get the ball rolling. New teachers will need to be hired, policies and procedures will need to be put into place, and a curriculum created. SMETA is following this very closely as this will effect us all as an organization.
SMETA is also very concerned about this new law making schools responsible for administering DIASTAT. Let me be very clear here. You DO NOT have to volunteer to administer this drug. Do not feel pressured! If you are not comfortable giving this drug you have a right to say no. You need to also understand that if you volunteer to go to the training of how to use this drug you are volunteering to administer it. So if you don't want to give i,t don't get trained! If you do volunteer, you might want to ask your administrator to put it in writing. The Good Samaritan law says it will protect you but it is really not all that clear how. We want better clarification on this. Until then, protect yourself first and foremost.
   OK let's talk fun stuff now. Don't forget about our upcoming bowling night. It would be a lot of fun to put a team together from your school. It doesn't matter if you can bowl or not. It's bowling. What kind of sport lets you drink beer and eat fried food while doing it? So see, how can you take it seriously? Just come out and have some fun, and maybe beer and a corn dog too. You might even win a prize. I hope to see you there.
Well that's all for now. I hope you have a wonderful winter break. May you be surrounded by the ones you love. Relax and enjoy. January will be here soon enough. Cheers!

Fabulous Friday!

2011-12-06T19:40:00.000-08:00

Join your fellow SMETA members for a fun filled afternoon of bowling.

When: January 27th, 4 to 6 PM
Where: Bel Mateo Bowl 4332 Olympic Ave. San Mateo
Cost: $10 cash per person. Price includes 2 fabulous games of bowling and shoes

RSVP to your SMETA rep by January 13, 2012

Website

2011-11-20T10:29:00.001-08:00

The SMETA website has been updated. Check it out at www.smeta.org

Thanks for setting this up!

2011-11-17T23:34:00.000-08:00

Hi Carrie, I am not sure if I went about this the right way?!?

Thanks so taking this on~

--Karen

Let's try this again, shall we?

2011-11-17T20:12:00.001-08:00

OK so Tumblr basically sucked. I am hoping blogspot impresses me. I am hoping to somehow linking our blog to our website so we can access both at the same time.
Carrie