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Just Don't Get Me Started!

Jejak PandaSelamat Membaca Di Blog Kesayangan Anda
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Last week I strove to be positive, since it was the first post of the new year, but this week I have to vent a little. This Tuesday the education budget in Windham goes to referendum for the fifth time. Last night was a public lembaga on the budget, and by all accounts it was pretty vitriolic. Honestly, this is not the worst budget session I have experienced. When I was teaching at RHAM High School it took four referenda to get funding approved for new school construction, and then subsequently it took twelve referenda to approve an education budget. (I won’t get into the fact that at the same time on a separate vote football was approved to be added as a varsity sport on the first vote. We lost four teachers and suffered the departure of a fairly pro-teacher superintendent, but we got football as a solace for our losses. Don’t get me started!).

This budget vote has gotten me frustrated for myriad reasons. I am frustrated that the federal government can spend billions of dollars on war but so little on education. I am furious that the federal government spent billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions and auto makers but only recently approved a one time surplus for schools of ten billion dollars. It sounds like a significant amount of money, but consider that President Obama is currently seeking five times that amount for road construction. And furthermore, it is just a stop gap. The money will allow schools to save some jobs now, but what happens next year?

I am frustrated that the federal government is playing cat and mouse games with the Race to the Top funds, requiring states to erode tenure laws and place undue emphasis on standardized testing to qualify for the money, and then awarding money to so few states!

I am frustrated that the state contributes so little to local education. The high school reform act has been passed, with implementation deferred for several years, but there is no plan in place for how to fund implementation of the new law’s mandates when the time comes—and the federal stimulus money is gone.

I am frustrated that we continue to rely on property taxes for local education funding, which only creates an incredibly unequal system that results in incredible disparities in funding and thus quality of education. I hate that magnet schools and charter schools somewhat address this provincial approach to school funding but in ways that erode teachers’ professional rights, much as the demands of the Race to the Top grants do.

It drives me crazy to hear local politicians and newspaper editors and just local residents demean and blame the teachers and declare that they won’t vote yes for the school budget because the teachers have it too good and there are too many administrators. Do the folks who say this have any idea how much work it is to teach? Do the folks who say this really think their no vote is going to result in administrative positions being eliminated in the next budget round? Of course these are rhetorical questions. As a former colleague of mine used to say, the civilians would never understand.

When there are cuts we just lose teachers and wind up with larger class sizes. An acquaintance of mine said the other day that he liked when this sort of thing happened periodically because it forced the boards of education and finance to “trim the fat out of the budget.” I asked him if eliminating teachers, eliminating aides, increasing class sizes, and reducing or eliminating world language programs, art, and music was his idea of trimming out the fat. He admitted that he never really gave the details much thought.

I am insanely angry that the four referenda in Windham had voter turnouts of 13%, 12%, 11%, and 13% of eligible voters respectively. I don’t understand how so many people can just not bother, how so many people just don’t care. Apparently they don’t care if it passes or if it fails. They just don’t care. Period.

It drives me crazy to see so many talented pre-service or newly graduated teachers with such poor job prospects. These young men and women could be doing such wonderful work helping our students, and they are just idle—going back to school to ride out the recession, living home, leaving the profession, leaving the state, taking part time and non-traditional positions. And even the ones who still have jobs are taking second jobs. Before the educational enhancement acts of the 1980s, second jobs and part time jobs were, if not the norm, pretty common within the profession. Then they became rare because they became unnecessary. Now they are becoming quite common again. Several of my wife’s colleagues tend kafe and wait tables on Friday and Saturday nights. Just the other day I was in the supermarket and one of the teachers from my son’s school made me a turkey grinder at the deli station when I stopped in on the way home after a late night at work. Just trying to pay the bills, she told me. She’s young, new to the profession, and very good, but the pay in Windham doesn’t cut it.

This is why I want to scream when I hear some guy in the checkout line going on and on about how well paid teachers are and how little work they have to do and how bad they are at their jobs despite all this. And so he’s voting against the budget—again.

We’re hosting a secondary writing centers conference here in Storrs again next month, and all the participating schools are asking us for a couple hundred dollars here or there to pay for bus transportation, to purchase a table, purchase some chairs, books, maybe a laptop—just one. Please. Their schools just don’t have the funds and they hope the university does.

Please, just don’t get me started.

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