Are Maryland teacher's unions being too resistant to change?

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-maryland-schools-number-one-20100422,0,758859.story

In her recent Baltimore Sun article, Liz Bowie calls into question Maryland’s number one ranking by Education Week, wondering if Maryland is doing all it can to advance with school reform. Among the questions are that of whether or not the poor relationship between the governor and the state superintendent has prevented them from presenting “a united front,” and also the degree to which strong unions in Maryland are responsible for resisting reform.

The more I look, the more I see pay for performance measures advancing. Charter schools and merit-pay programs have apparently been typically supported by politicians to the political right, but, as we all know, the Obama administration also supports these pursuits and the result is that they’re happening all over. We are all also familiar with the argument that teacher’s unions often thwart change and with it, progress by maintaining positions that protect teachers and not students. In my personal opinion, though a strong union may resist change, that is not the same as opposing change. It is clear that strong unions in Maryland have not prevented an increasing number of jurisdictions (and the Maryland state legislature) from beginning to tie student achievement to teacher evaluation. As these experiments are conducted and good practices are explored and established, the teacher’s unions will respond, slowly, with greater openness. It may be a lofty challenge to sway the collective will of the teachers toward adopting reforms such as pay for performance, but it is a worthy one because winning the support of the unions will entail advancement to the transition stage mentioned by Beverly Anderson in her 1993 article on the stages of systemic change in schools, where the school policies as a whole begin to tip toward the new vision. It may well be that teacher’s unions will protect teachers and students by tempering the process of transition in such as way as to ensure it’s sustainability.

Q-Comp

In 2004, Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota made a series of education proposals, which included elements like performance pay for teachers and changes to teacher quality evaluation meant to help weed out ineffective teachers. Apparently, Pawlenty was disappointed to have only gotten through performance pay, in the form of Q-Comp, which is in operation in forty-four Minnesota school districts.

This is of great interest to me because I think that performance pay represents a necessary paradigm-shift. I think schools have already given themselves a chance in the last decade by rising to pay teachers a salary they can at least live off of, on which a family could conceivably survive. Schools are perhaps going to be able to exploit some of the momentum our generation is seeing built up (by us, in part) and could progress further, paying teachers fairly, rewarding those who are effective, identifying those who are not. In this way schools can invest in effective teachers and effective practices. It’s a myth that performance pay must be enslaved to standardized test scores. In Minnessota, schools have to propose a plan which satisfies about five different criteria, including job-embedded professional development and a stipulation that performance pay for teachers line up with a minimum of 60% of increases across the system. It didn’t offer too many detail, because it would seem those details are up to the schools or jurisdictions that are proposing to implement them. When these criteria are met, the schools in question receive and average of $200 additional per student.

Teachers need to address bullying: But how?

Before setting up my classroom in my first year of teaching, I was advised to develop a positive classroom culture in my classes. This made complete sense to me as an end goal, but still left me with the question of “how?” Throughout my first year, and into my second year, I have still struggled with this question of how. As a ninth grade teacher, I find that many of my students enter the classroom in the fall with their own set attitudes, behaviors, and habits, both positive and negative. I must shape all of these to fit in with what I had envisioned as a positive classroom. But how?

Baltimore City Public Schools have recently caught the attention of the country due to a few incidents of bullying which have gone too far. On Monday, Dr. Alonso released a statement addressing the issue of bullying. In it, he places the responsibility of addressing bullying on teachers, parents, and the community as a whole.

As a classroom teacher, I agree with his statement. Teachers only work with their students a certain number of hours in a day. When students leave the school building, they are also easily influenced by others they encounter, and the influences of the teachers do not necessarily follow the student. There is a need for the families and community to address the issue of bullying.

As I was told before my first year of teaching, I need to address bullying in the classroom and create a positive classroom environment. But I was never told how, and trust me, I struggled with this task. For new teachers, and even veteran teachers, I think it would be incredibly helpful to provide professional development about how to create this positive classroom culture. Strategies, examples, and modeling could be shared to provide teachers with an idea of where to begin. Because bullying is such an important thing to address, among other issues within a classroom, I think teachers need to be provided with a basic knowledge of how to develop classroom culture in order to better address these issues before they begin.