Ideas can get lost in the forest in long posts. Here’s a short idea worth consideration. As far as testing goes, first you have to care. The problem with megatesting is sometimes students quit caring because all those fails hurt too much. Testing days actually are very easy for the teacher, but they are a trip in a leaky lifeboat for kids, especially young kids. After the first failure or two, a child may try to catch up, but I believe there comes a time when some kids decide the game is over, even if they still have another ten years to occupy various desks.

We can see this when we play board games. Certain kids with only a few Monopoly deeds will keep playing. Either they are O.K. with losing or they are hoping for some future miracle. Maybe the two kids with all the deeds will wipe each other out, for example. But a lot of kids simply quit. They may throw the dice in a desultory manner and keep moving around the board. They may pass monopoly money back and forth. Despite these gestures, though, they are mostly watching the TV in the background or talking to friends. They are no longer part of the game.

When we give too many tests where low scores are inevitable, I am certain we convince groups of students to check out of the learning game. Electronic distractions make this exit from learning easier than ever before. Why play if you cannot win?

If I was trying to figure out why so many kids are graduating from high school unable to complete a community college program for x-ray technicians, I’d scrutinize these inappropriate tests early on in my research process.

“Chicago teachers set April 1 for ‘showdown’ with schools” the article is titled.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The head of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) said on Friday that the district will hold off on a controversial cost-cutting move affecting teachers’ pension payments to allow for the labor contract process to play out.

But that move will not stop the Chicago Teachers Union from taking action that could involve a strike on April 1.

Union President Karen Lewis told reporters that everything, including a strike over unfair labor practices, was on the table for what she called an April 1 “showdown” with the nation’s third-largest public school system.

The cash-strapped district last month gave the union 30 days’ notice that it aims to save $65 million by reducing its contribution to teachers’ pension payments by 7 percent – a move condemned by the union, which in December overwhelmingly authorized a future strike.

While contending a teachers’ strike was not legally possible until mid-May, CPS Chief Executive Forrest Claypool told reporters on Friday that the plan to end the so-called pension pickup was on hold until an independent arbiter completes a fact-finding report on April 18. That report is part of a process to reach a new contract with the teachers’ union after the prior contract expired last year.

“We do not think it’s appropriate to exercise our rights right now because we’re still in negotiations,” Claypool said, referring to the pension payment plan.

CPS is struggling with a $1.1 billion structural budget deficit, caused largely by escalating annual pension payments that will reach $676 million this fiscal year.

Eduhonesty: I honestly don’t know what to think about this one. Hello, CPS? You have no money. You are trying to float a bond issue that is nearly a billion dollars that YOU DO NOT HAVE. Some concessions will have to be made.

Illinois and the Chicago Public Schools have been floating bond after bond with progressively higher interest rates in order to survive for one more day/month/year. The rates get higher as the risk gets higher. We have reached the point where Chicago Public Schools bonds are junk bonds, so risky that the schools have to guarantee a painful and disadvantageous rate of interest even in order to go to market — if they can go to market. The schools still are not sure they can float that bond issue. Governor Rauner is trying to shut the CPS bond deal down. If CPA can’t sell those bonds, as far as I can tell, they will be effectively bankrupt.

If this were a rich state, CPS could realistically appeal to the state for a rescue. But the state is broke. The state has not been paying various creditors, while social services are being shut down all over Illinois. I suspect we may be running short of bullets. I had a good laugh a couple of years ago when the state found itself unable to buy bullets for the Department of Corrections because the bullet makers refused to sell to the state of Illinois unless they were paid in advance. If readers are thinking that’s no laughing matter, they are right. I am a reader of zombie and apocalypse fiction, however, and I take my humor where I find it. If I were a naturally cheerier person, this might be a blog offering fashion tips for aging harridans instead of the education chronicle it has become.

Eduhonesty: That showdown will come. I suspect the world will be watching. Certainly, Chicago will make national news nightly for sometime. As the dialogs unfold, I will do my best to stand with the teachers, the foot soldiers of education, who give up their nights and weekends for kids, year after year. Everyone hates a pay cut. Many people are living near the edge of their paychecks as it is and they will have to scramble to manage any effective cut in pay.

But I will also remember the end of the Soviet Union. We did not bring down the Soviet Union with tanks and clever intelligence. Instead, we forced them to spend themselves into bankruptcy.

Money is real. You can’t simply print more, as people sometimes suggest. If that magic worked, the Confederacy would have been rich enough to buy all the arms and help it needed to win the Civil War. Confederate money had value at first, when people believed that the South would win the war and that their money would be the tender of a new nation. But as the South’s losses mounted, and the dream of a new country receded into blood-tinged mists, the price of bread kept rising until a loaf cost thousands of those Confederate dollars. Then that loaf could only be acquired through barter. People swapped their last turnips for bread. Once the South lost, the money had zero value, as no government stood behind those Confederate scraps of paper.

The following snippet from http://credit-help.biz/bank/139275 does a good job of explaining the issue of inflation:

Money can also lose its value when a government decides to print more of it, which can trigger inflation. In Germany during World War I. Germany borrowed heavily to pay its war costs. This led to inflation and by 1923; the inflation increased to the highest levels in history. Prices for goods and services doubled every few hours, and stampedes occurred to buy goods and services before the prices would go up again.

By late 1923 it took 200 billion marks (German dollars) to buy a loaf of bread. The German people found that their life’s savings would not buy a postage stamp. It got so bad that people would burn money to stay warm because it was cheaper to burn money than to buy firewood with the worthless money.

We can’t print money to get out of this mess. States obviously can’t print money anyway. When the bullet makers won’t take an IOU from the State of Illinois, we are in trouble. We have been in trouble for years, but various government bureaucracies just kept spending money they did not have, relying on rescues and bonds. We may be out of rescues and, at least at the moment, those school bonds remain iffy.

Wishing and hoping will not get us out this mess. Fiscal responsibility might, but fiscal responsibility will require sacrifices. Those sacrifices are inevitable now. Like the Soviet Union, we are getting close to being unable to pay the soldiers who guard the wall.

As the CPS dialogs unfold this spring, I hope that all participants will understand and remember that people cannot consume more than they produce. They can’t write checks on accounts without funds.

Readers, please pass this post along if you have time today. On the one-to-ten scale of posts that matter in the larger scheme of things, this one strikes me as 9.425.

I feel like going sideways today, into the heart of Chicago and law enforcement. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has 12,000 officers, enough to fill a small, resort town. To put the matter in perspective, 17 counties in Illinois contain fewer than 12,000 people (sea to shining sea of corn out there) and a few counties contain about 12,000 people. That’s lots of cops.

Recently, the video of a white officer shooting a black young man named Laquan McDonald captured the news, and rightfully so. That video shows what appears to be an unjustifiable and inexplicable shooting. The officer was charged with murder, the police superintendent fired and a federal investigation ensued.

Here is the part of that story that captured my full attention and made me believe I needed to add this story to eduhonesty.com: Street stops have fallen dramatically in the recent past. In January of last year, 61,330 contact cards were filled out, reflecting police stops. For January of this year, only 9,044 stops have been recorded on the new form that officers are now required to fill out for each stop. That’s a drop of 52,286 recorded stops. That’s a drop in stops of about 85%.

“‘The days of the hunch are over,’ said a sergeant with 20 years’ experience who works on the South Side.” (Most information and this quote are taken from the Sunday February 29, 2016 Chicago News Tribune)

What happened to those hunches? Government interventions happened to those hunches. Since January 1st, Chicago cops have been required to fill out detailed, multi-page reports every time they make a street stop as part of a new, state law and an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union. The new reports slow down street stops in two ways. First, they create a lengthy log that may be scrutinized later. This does prevent stops that might be tough to justify later. Second, the reports require a great deal of time to fill out, time that necessarily takes an officer off the street.

I can see readers saying to themselves, “well, those officers should not be making stops that cannot easily be justified.” But I am not certain I agree. I would like to refer readers to my post on April 4, 2015, “For Rick, who lives where he works,” and a few posts nearby in that time frame. The fact is that cops tend to know the local gang bangers. Especially in gang-ridden areas, cops know the kids and young adults who are active in local crime.

Street gangs in Chicago, Illinois

Asian street gangs in Chicago

Asian Boyz
Black Shadow
Black Widows
Hop Sing
Local Boys
Wolf Boys

Folk street gangs in Chicago

Ambrose
Allport Lovers
Black Disciples
Brazers
City Knights
Gangster Disciples (GD), branches include Eight ball Posse, Insane Gangster Disciples and Hellraisers
Gangster Party People
Harrison Gents
Insane C-Notes
Insane Campbell Boys
Insane Cullerton Deuces
Insane Deuces
Insane Dragons
Insane Guess Boys
Insane Latin Lovers
Insane Latin Jivers
Insane Orchestra Albany
Insane Popes (North Side)
Insane Spanish Cobras
Krazy Getdown Boys
King Cobras
La Raza
Latin Dragons
Latin Eagles
Latin Stylers
Latin Souls
Maniac Campbell Boys
Maniac Latin Disciples
Milwaukee Kings
Morgan Boys
Racine Boys
Satan Disciples (SD)
Simon City Royals
Spanish Gangster Disciples
Spanish Gangster Two Six
Two Two Boys
Young Latino Organization Cobras
Young Latino Organization Disciples

People street gangs in Chicago

Bishops
Black P Stones (braches include Apache Stones, Jet Black Stones, Titanic Stones, Ruben Night Stones, Jabari Stones, & Black Stone Villans)
Four Corner Hustlers
Familia Stones
Gaylords
Insane Popes (South Side)
Insane Unknowns
Latin Brothers
Latin Counts
Latin Pachucos
Latin Stones
Loco Boys
Mickey Cobras
Noble Knights
Outlaw Bloods
Party Players
Ridgeway Boys
Saints
Spanish Lords
Stoned Freaks
Twelvth Street Players
Vice Lords (Branches include the Conservative VLs, Unknown VLs, Insane VLs, Renegade VLs, Mafia Insane VLs, Imperial Insane VLs, Cicero Insane VLs, Spanish VLs, Traveler VLs, Outlaw Lunatic Traveler VLs, Ebony VLs, Gangster Stone VLs, Undertaker VLs, & 4VLs.)
Villalobos

Street gangs in Chicago

12th Street Players
Adidas Boys
Akrhos

Almighty Latin King / Queen Nation (ALKQN)
Aztecas
Aztec Souls
Black Cobras
Black Gangsters
Black Souls
Brown Pride
Brothers For Life
Cameron City Outlaws
Crazy Gangsters
Homicide Boys
Imperial Gangsters
La Onda
La Primera
Latin Mafia
Latin Players
Latin Pride
Lynch Mob
Netas
Nike Boys
Paulina Barry Community (PBC) [inactive]
South Deering Boys
Sawyer Boys
The Arabian Posse
Thugs Re-United
Vatos Locos
Whipple Boys
Whipple Brothers
Young Sinners
– See more at: http://www.streetgangs.com/cities/chicago#sthash.UkDkp18V.dpuf

Last year, the cops could have seen a group of Four Corner Hustlers standing together on the street and stopped. Now that stop is highly unlikely to occur. Standing in a group on the street is no crime. But some of those cop hunches of the past allowed for action anyway, allowed that cop to stop and address trouble that appeared likely to develop. According to the Tribune, law-abiding citizens in Chicago are upset at the lack of police support in getting troublemakers off known drug-selling corners. In the meantime, through February 21st, homicides doubled in the city while shooting incidents went up even more.

That new two-page questionnaire “contains about 70 questions, including detailed background information on those stopped as well as an explanation for their ‘reasonable articulable suspicion’ for the stop and pat-down. One officer says it takes about 20 minutes to fill out, compared with a few minutes for the previous (contact) cards,” according to the Tribune. In theory, the forms can be filled out on data terminals in cars, but sometimes those terminals are not working, and officers must finish their paperwork in the station, leaving the streets early. Supposedly, the forms are going to be simplified, but that won’t rescue January, February, March or however many months the reform requires. We can only hope that the new form requires much less time to complete. I’m honestly not hopeful, however. I taught school for too long.

Eduhonesty: Hi, readers who are wondering where the education went in this education blog. It’s about to come back, since in a way this post has been all about education. I view this as another tentacle of the legislative octopus that’s smothering us all. Readers know I have been subbing lately. I have discovered I like to work half days. Fortunately for me, the system posts many of these days. I can still pick up an afternoon if I want today. Why? Because of mandatory meetings that result from government regulations, teachers — especially special education teachers — are being dragged out of their classrooms all the time. Meetings, meetings, meeting. Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. Twenty-six page Individual Education Plans for students. Twenty-one page evaluations for teachers. Longer and longer self-evaluation forms. That last form sucked away hours of one of my evenings and then Lord Vader (otherwise known as my former Assistant Principal) did not even bother to read the thing.

Cops need to be able to do their jobs. Teachers need to be able to do their jobs. Well-meaning government interventions intended to fix problems frequently do a great deal more harm than good. I blogged this example from Chicago because I have seldom read anything more disheartening. I feel so sorry for those old men and women who are afraid to go out of their South Side houses right now. I feel so sorry for those teachers who are retiring early from a job they once loved.

Paperwork and oversight requirements are killing us out here.

P.S. On “Chicago Tonight,” they tried to explain away the rise in murder rates because warmer weather may have led to more people being out on the streets. Last year was an exceptionally warm winter, though, so I don’t see how this explanation accounts for the steep hike in deaths and mayhem. Besides, realistically, this version of warm weather can’t be leading that many more people to hang out on the streets. It’s been so cold that the air hurts people’s faces during most of this allegedly “warm” winter. I have to steel myself to walk the dog some days. The truth is that local lawmongers came up with a plan to fix the police and that plan seems to be misfiring all over the place.

(This post is for parents and educators.)

My post on school lunches  from a few days back discussed the problem of children throwing away lunches and essentially said the following: Many children throw away most or all of those lunches, and that wastage can’t be stopped. A few paraprofessionals and/or cafeteria workers manning a cafeteria with sometimes hundreds of kids will not be able to coax children to eat. For one thing, they are monitoring behavior, to make sure no child is being maltreated by another child during lunch. They can’t take time to push kids to finish their carrots.

(I was in the lunchroom again today and watched as the clock ran out. Many students were still nibbling, but lunch runs for one-half hour and then the trash cans are pushed through the aisles. If you brought your own lunchbox, you can stash the uneaten apple, but if you are eating a school lunch, the whole lunch will be tossed into the trash.)

Part of the problem in that cafeteria comes from the fact that adults in the cafeteria are watching problem behaviors more than they are watching food. Bullying takes place in hallways, classrooms, and just about everywhere in a school except maybe the Principal’s or social workers’ offices, but bathrooms and cafeterias are the worst. School busses have been notorious trouble spots for years. Social media opened up homes as bullying sites. ANY location where kids can communicate freely with each other with limited or no adult oversight has the potential to brew trouble.

Eduhonesty:  Is your kid complaining about the school bus ride? Do you think maybe your child may be dealing with a bully or bullies on that bus? If your child never wants to take the bus, I’d take time to find out why. Bullies can be at their meanest at the back of the bus and seats in the front are sometimes hard to come by, depending on a child’s place on the bus route.

It is wishful thinking to believe that a person can simultaneously drive a school bus and also manage forty or fifty kids, many of whom have not been taught to manage themselves. We used to do a great deal more whole child education, but manners and comportment are not on the annual state achievement test. As we push, push, push to boost those test score numbers, behavior may not get the same number of classroom minutes that it did in the past. For that matter, with or without whole child education, we have always had bullies on our busses. I remember one who slashed my purse strap with a razor blade decades ago. Many older people have their bully-on-the-bus stories.

Is your child dealing with bullying? If possible, drive your child or find a friend to carpool and share that driving. For some kids, the bus will not be a safe or friendly place. If you are an educator dealing with parents who have bullying concerns, I’d make the same recommendation: Tell mom or dad to find a way to get their kid off the bus.  A quiet bully can easily slip by unnoticed and a group of bullies can make sure that behavior goes unseen. Pack behavior can be scary and threatening, and will make a child feel extremely helpless.

I don’t blame the bus drivers, but in the end, a bus will be its own version of bullying waiting to happen for a small minority of kids. The bus driver can’t see what is happening in all those double seats, even if the bus driver had time to look, and I’d rather have that driver watching the road. Driving a bus takes full concentration.

Parents can go to the school and complain. That’s perfectly reasonable. Parents can go through official channels, and they should go through those channels. Bullies cannot be allowed to run loose on our busses. Bullying on the bus will spill over into school, too, and that bullying has to be shut down.

But I’d still get my child off the bus. I would not trust the school district to manage the matter for me. That one bus driver has too many kids and too much responsibility to be trusted to handle all the problem kids. Unless a district is willing to provide additional personnel on that bus on a regular basis, I would not trust the district to protect my child.

All social science wishes and theory aside, here is the reality: One person whose back is facing a whole busload of children cannot possibly know what is happening in the back of the bus.

So I ought to be able to rest. I ought to be able to sleep in.  But something appears to have gone wrong. I decided to join the rolls of substitute teachers. The process requires a bit of work, but I had time to fill out applications, gather transcripts, make phone calls, and get fingerprinted. Then fingerprinted again. Then fingerprinted again. Then fingerprinted two more times. Apparently, the prints of older persons can be hard to process. It’s a good thing I am so honest. I seem to be a natural for a life of crime. Those prints of mine are extremely tricky. But the FBI name check has come through and the feds will vouch for me. So I am off and running.

And I seem to be working every day I don’t specifically block off for other appointments or missions. Is this job a calling? If it’s not, what am I doing?

Today I discussed population density and technology with 4th graders. We worked on decimal points and place value. A good time was had by all, including me, although we did have to do a couple of refreshers on rules. Last week, I taught physical education to wee ones. That job’s definitely not me and I’ll pass in the future unless they plead with me for a rescue. Watching forty early elementary children run around screaming while playing a plague-outbreak-based game of freeze tag is more chaos than I can comfortably manage. I loved kindergarten. We had a great discussion on minions. Most of the kids wanted to be minions because they love bananas and candy. But then there was that one little guy who wanted a freeze ray and a shrink ray. Forget the bananas, he saw the real potential in being a little, yellow, one-eyed creature. Teaching Spanish to first and second graders was a trifle fast-paced with those 25 minute periods, but the kids seemed open to learning new words and they were IPad whizzes by second grade. I am working tomorrow too. Soon, I expect to start a maternity position for middle school Spanish.

I don’t have to do this. But I keep looking at those sub postings. I keep clicking on that accept button. If they call me, I virtually always commit unless I have a previous commitment.

Eduhonesty: This blog was created in the wake of testing madness and bureaucratic wackiness that stemmed from No Child Left Behind. I have been known to call it the Secret Blog of Gloom and Doom. But for those thinking of entering the field of teaching, well, I have to admit it can’t be all that bad. I keep happily wandering into the latest Classroom for a Day.

I am no nutrition Nazi. I have been known to eat that $1.49 McDonald’s hot fudge sundae. I buy half-price chocolates after Valentine’s Day. I pick organic strawberries, but I figure for a dollar less per pound, I can wash regular apples and pears. I mostly avoid chips and fries, but I am sometimes willing to spring for the sweet potato fries.

That said, this is a post for parents. I am going to suggest leaving the Fuego Takis and Dinamita Doritos on the grocery store shelf, especially if the kids beat you home from work on a regular basis. School lunches sometimes seem to feed more garbage cans than students. (What was that soupy, red bean stuff that was supposed to go on the whole wheat pita? The kids could not tell me. They also did not even bother to take the cellophane off the red bean box. Some of the hungry ones ate the pita plain.) I know students are sometimes starved when they go home. They tell me this. I know that some of them go home and fill up on Takis or Doritos. That’s what they say, anyway.

Those hyper-red Takis look toxic to me, but maybe the powder that kills tastebuds also kills germs. I don’t know. I do know that a snack of Takis may be fine, but a late lunch of a whole bunch of Takis can’t be good for a growing kid.

To my parent-readers: You may be assuming your child eats lunch at school. You may have paid for those lunches. But most kids don’t eat the whole lunch, only the parts they like. Sometimes kids eat fewer than 100 calories off that lunch plate.

You might be better off packing a lunch. Then you can be sure the food will appeal to your child because the two of you can select that school lunch together. You also might want to fill the house with apples, even if you have to buy boxes of caramel sauce to ensure the apples are eaten. Portioning out dinner leftovers in microwavable snack boxes might be another strategy. But I want to caution parents about purchasing afterschool snacks that lack nutritive value. Those snacks may become a kid’s late lunch as well as the day’s snack.

I know how hard it is to get kids to eat right and I don’t want to lecture. I just want to emphasize that the school lunch often ends up in the trash — moreso today than in the past, since we are forcing “healthier” options at kids. Those kids who used to eat the burger and fries are often tossing the red bean paste and whole wheat pita in the trash. The new healthier school lunch may have resulted in a much greater Taki and Dorito consumption rate, while increasing lunch wastage dramatically.

This post is for parents who remember eating most or all of their school lunch and assume their children are doing the same. They shifted the lunch landscape on us a few years ago and the lunch our children are receiving is nowhere near as appealing as the lunch we received, for the most part. Wealthier districts are still serving appetizing plates, but districts that must economize are another story.

You might try packing a lunch instead for a week and see what your child says about those new, homemade lunches. I have begun to believe in opting out of state standardized tests. I also think it may be time to opt out of school lunches when finances permit. The quality of lunches depends on districts and the tolerance for those lunches varies from child to child. But I would be having conversations with my children if they went to today’s schools, making sure that lunch was not a food-light, social opportunity that ended with overflowing garbage cans.

(A post for parents and teachers with midmorning crashers.)

Yahoo has article #234,908 on whether or not you should eat breakfast. Readers will no doubt be stunned to discover the answer is yes. But after doing cafeteria duty for a couple of days in the last week, I want to weigh in on the issue of breakfast. I have seen so much food thrown away, and much more in one district than another. The quality of school lunches directly affects how much food is eaten.

But this post is about breakfast. Should kids eat breakfast? I’ll run with the crowd and say yes, but breakfast does not strike me as a yes-or-no question. Individual children vary widely in how well they tolerate mornings without food. Certain kids crash in the middle of the morning when they have not eaten. Others power through.

Here’s the issue: Many kids are receiving breakfasts at school. Those breakfasts may be breakfast bars, cheese sticks, cereal boxes, French toast sticks or any number of options, often with fruit. Here’s the problem: Some kids don’t bother to go to the cafeteria or don’t bother to eat if they do. They toss most or even all their food in the trash. You would think that the daily 10:00 A.M. wipeout would lead to kids managing to stuff down their granola bars and apples, but kids live in the moment, and, in the moment, kids may dislike granola bars and figure the apple’s not worth the bother.

Eduhonesty: I recommend that parents of crashers feed their children at home before they leave for school. Parents can make sure that breakfast is eaten. Cafeteria personnel cannot be relied upon to do the same. They mostly become immune to overflowing garbage cans. They are also working and don’t have the time to sit down and coax the many kids who are chattering while their food languishes.

Yes, we are providing food, but that does not mean that the food is being consumed. We are also filling landfills. I think parents sometimes trust that their children’s nutritional needs are being met. But nobody stops Abdi or Kona from dumping their breakfast or lunch in the trash. Teachers and cafeteria workers may pause to say, “Don’t you like your sandwich?” but when Kona says, “No,” that usually cuts the conversation short. Three or four adults out on a floor in a cafeteria with a few hundred kids and only one-half hour for lunch or breakfast can only do so much.

I vote for feeding some kids before they leave home.

(A post for all but especially administrators.)

I am subbing in a kindergarten classroom in a school that has achieved national recognition for its excellence. This is one of those districts that cranks out National Merit Finalists and Ivy League attendees. These kindergartners can write a full page letter. Many of them can spell words like “people” and “movie.” Subbing this morning was a great deal of fun. We wrote letters, read poems, worked on literacy and talked.

At one point, a tall, well-dressed man walked into the classroom and was standing near the doorway just looking around. I left my spot on the rug and my tiny iPad users to go greet what I assumed was a dad. In fact, I was meeting the Superintendent for the district. He smiled as I introduced myself, and said he liked to walk around and look at classes. Later, he thanked me for helping out in his district. When the teachers aide looked up, she obviously recognized the Superintendent. She gave him a big smile.

in my last district, I don’t believe a superintendent ever once walked into my room. The Assistant Superintendent walked in once with a cadre from the State of Illinois, a group of outsiders come to rescue the academic disaster of that district. But I have no experience with roving superintendents. I did have a roving Principal and he was the best thing that ever happened to that school.

Maybe this man’s approach to his district has something to do with that national recognition the district has received. The best principals I ever had were in the hallways. They were out on the playing fields. They wandered into classrooms sometimes. They knew how their classrooms were operating on a daily basis. I did well with those Principals.

I am not offering some deep educational insight here. In fact, I’d call this an insight for any organization. The person or persons in charge of the organization should be out on the floor. Obviously, leaders have to sequester themselves in offices sometimes. But the best restaurants frequently have an owner who watches what comes out of the kitchen. The best retail outlets have a manager who asks customers what they think and listens to the answer.* The best schools have a Principal who knows the kids and the classrooms, a Principal who can walk into a classroom and tell the kids he needs them to give their best, and be taken seriously.

*I’d like to give kudos to a store named Marianos near my home. When the manager asked me about yogurts, I told him that he had too many duplicative fruit flavors and was missing a few signature flavors such as Dannon Coffee and Siggis Orange Ginger. Not too many weeks later, the yogurt flavors became more diverse and my coffee yogurt arrived.

Where Have All The Teachers Gone?

A look at the teacher shortage in Wisconsin

By Congressperson Mark Pocan – http://madison365.com/index.php/2015/11/03/where-have-all-the-teachers-gone/

Nov 3, 2015

Data obtained from the University of Wisconsin-Madison show the university’s School of Education has seen more than a 52% decline in applications between the ’10-11 and ’14-’15 school years. In 2010, there were 329 applicants to the school of education, for ’14-’15 there were 155.

The picture of this teacher shortage is even starker at the two largest education schools in Milwaukee. Both Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have reported significant drops in enrollment in their teaching programs. Marquette University’s enrollment dropped from 445 students in 2010 to 385 in 2014. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Education’s enrollment dropped from 2,135 in 2010 to 1,516 in 2014.

The question then becomes, why is there a sudden drop off in teachers?

Over the last few years polling shows teachers have become increasingly disillusioned about their jobs and the field of education as a whole.

Educators cite low pay, under resourced schools, increased testing requirements, loss of job protections, and unfair teacher evaluations as contributing factors to low morale. It’s no surprise schools with budgetary problems are seeing teacher shortages. In Wisconsin, Governor Walker’s K-12 budget, which proposes cutting $150 per pupil in coming school year, is certainly not helping with the teacher shortage.

Those enrollment drops may be canaries in our mine shaft. But I don’t know that this matter requires exhaustive research. I’d say it’s pretty simple. Teaching has never paid very well, at least in most areas of the country, but the creativity and intangible rewards made up for that lack of money. Happy kids, praise from administrators and parents, and the chance to create original lessons kept many teachers in the game, even if the pay was mediocre.

As new Common Core demands straitjacket expectations, while administrators plan the whole year’s lessons, and Charlotte Danielson’s teacher evaluation rubric results in 21 page evaluations that almost necessarily contain a fair number of negatives even when they contain many positives — teaching becomes less appealing. Many teachers have become disenchanted in the last decade and those teachers are talking.

“I would never tell anyone to go into teaching nowadays. They blame us for everything,” a favorite colleague recently said to me,

He’s a great teacher. My feelings have not yet become so negative, but a few years ago, I told a friend of my daughter’s that if she did go into teaching, she might want to consider teaching in a higher-income, higher-scoring area.

“They are holding you responsible for your students test scores,” I explained to the girl, “no matter what the students know when they come into the classroom. They will also tell you what you have to teach. Then if the kids don’t improve enough, they may fire or replace you, no matter how hard you worked. Your life will be a lot easier if you stay away from lower-scoring schools.”

The girl has since graduated from college and has taken a position with a software company. I don’t know that I talked her out of teaching, but I certainly did not talk her into it. Quite possibly the money in tech would have drowned out anything I might have said anyway.

A last quote from “Education Week,” published in print on October 22, 2014, as “Steep Drops Seen in Teacher-Prep Enrollment Numbers”:

“Separate state-by-state enrollment data collected under Title II of the Higher Education Act, meanwhile, suggest that the decline in teacher-preparation enrollments has accelerated in recent years, particularly since 2010. Under that collection, California, New York, and Texas, among the largest producers of teachers, have seen steep drops.”

Those enrollments are our teacher pipelines. Stay tuned. In five or ten years, I anticipate this situation will become the next crisis in education manufactured by government intervention — a genuine shortage of educators.

We still have plenty of history and early childhood teachers, but teachers who can (or will) teach coding and calculus are getting thin on the ground. High school Spanish and science positions can be difficult to fill in many locations. We will not fix that shortage of available teachers by making teaching less creative, while taking away job security and belittling teachers in evaluations, even as we add more students to increasingly larger classes.

We might make some dent in the impending shortage by increasing salaries, however.

Eduhonesty: For what it’s worth, I predict pay increases. As with the nursing shortage a few decades back, the upcoming teaching shortage will necessarily push pay up. In the end, teachers are not optional. We can’t stop teaching high school math and science. If we can’t get teachers to sign on for what we pay now, salaries will have to go up.