Re: Stress in NJ Education is off the charts

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If you think NJ is bad, you can't even imagine how things are
in FL. We had the "Value added" model rammed through the
legislature this year. All teachers here are on annual
contracts forever now. (tenure gone for those who don't
already have it). Pay is in the gutter (my friend made $38,000
here and is now making $66,000 in NJ. She says family
insurance will be $80/month and here it costs us $800 a month
(yes, you read that correctly). There is NO COLA in our
pension anymore for younger teachers (again, rammed through
this year).

We got ZERO raises this year, while health insurance premiums
rose by $50 a month. We haven't had more than $200 raise in 6
years.

The state budget is short $2 BILLION again this year, so it
looks like education will be cut again (they cut 8% last
year!) Our state is mostly tea-partying old folks and
hillbillies with barely a high school education (hence, the
election of our Gov. Scott!).

In my school district, we have 2,300 homeless students and
almost 60% of our total student population is on free/reduced
lunch. (near Orlando)

Regarding this stupid push to eliminate tenure: Why is
granting tenure after 3 years a bad thing? 3 years is more
than enough time to determine if a teacher is fit to teach or
not. If there are bad teachers in the classrooms, I blame lazy
administrators. (and the teacher shortage which was very real
here 5 years ago! They were begging anyone to take the job
just 2 weeks before school started).

Why can't we at least grant tenure to the 'best' teachers?
(the ones who score "highly effective" on the new value-added
formula? NOPE - FL lawmakers crushed that proposal. So you are
the "best" and raise test scores year after year, but all you
are is a TEMP, contract employee whose job ENDS every June.
What a punch in the face that is.

Then they promise us "merit pay" raises for scoring in the top
two levels. Well, we don't even have the money to keep the
freakin lights on now! My district is considering a 4-day
school week because the budget keeps getting cut. Where is
merit pay going to come from when the state budget is in the
toilet year after year? Then we had lawmakers who pushed
through a tax CUT for education on top of the other cuts. So
our local education taxes FELL this year. (I pay more to the
city and county than for the school part anyway, and my family
pays way more for Medicare tax than we do for schools. Where
is the fairness?)

Our new value-added evaluation plan is 100% un-tested. There
is zero money for any teacher raises. The state is demanding a
list of teachers by name and evaluation scores to see if they
want to yank your teaching certificate. (yep) The value-added
model has up to a 30% ERROR RATE. How is that for fun times as
a teacher? In order for VA to be the most accurate, you have
to use multiple years of data. (3 is a good start) We are
going to use only 2, which makes a much higher error rate) AND
when comparing the test scores each year, FL just passed a law
that makes the scoring totally different and harder, so from
year 1 to year 2, you won't see anything similar, which
negates the entire basis of value-added comparison!

Finally, think about this: with NO tenure, teachers will be
forever in fear of losing their jobs. What better way to keep
them muzzled??? Nobody will be able to speak about about
waste, fraud, and abuse that they might see at work. Nope, we
will have to either lose our jobs or sweep it under the rug.
Nice way for Principals and the Board to decide to save $$$ by
denying services to students. (I saw that first hand in
Georgia - we just stopped giving services to ESOL and ESE
because we needed to keep those sub-groups small. I was
actually told that by the AP at my school).

FL will have a test in every single subject soon. 1st grade PE
= multiple choice test and the kiddies better pass or Coach
will be fired.

All this does is make the stupid testing companies RICH. You
should see all of the errors in our textbooks here. We find at
least 10 per week. Major errors with content and the mult.
choice questions. This is the same company that produces and
scores our standardized test that is the ONLY thing teachers
will be rated on for the value-added. (just one big test per
year - no other tests + your classroom evaluation, split 50/50
the test and your evaluations.

Things are just too screwed up for words in education today,
and then we have the Presidential candidates who want to de-
fund the Dept of Ed and close it down. We are going backwards
in all possible ways.

On 12/19/11, spedup wrote:
> Fellow teachers, Before anyone slams me for stating my
> opinion I want to say that I realize that economy is very
> tough right now and there are plenty of good people out of
> work in all fields but I need to state my opinion because
> in NJ we have a Governor who is trying to hold teachers
> accountable for the failings of the economy in general,
> specifically the banking industry, housing market, shoddy
> spending by previous NJ administrations and whatever else
> he can blame us for. Governor Christie is trying to get
> rid of tenure and on the face value people say, "That's a
> good thing because I don't have job security in my banking
> job." True, but trust me when I tell you that there are
> politics involved in every school and using student test
> scores to decide who is effective and who is not is truly
> one of the worst things that can happen. Administrations
> can twist and manuever scores any way they want to get the
> desired results. True, to get rid of a crappy teacher via
> the Tenure process is long and costly and does need to be
> streamlined a little, but to make a blanket policy that all
> teachers have to be judged highly effective or effective in
> order to retain their job is ridiculous. Before you slam
> that statement please wait. I don't mean that a teacher
> who is beyond a dought not doing their job shouldn't be
> removed. What I mean is the evaluation system cannot be
> trusted to adequately measure a teachers ability to teach
> or not. I can speak for my school only(and a few others)
> when I say that the system for evaluation changes yearly as
> do the makeup of the students from year to year. Some
> years, some classes I have had are absolutely a joy to work
> with while other years the kids are chronically absent,
> behind their peers gradewise, disruptive etc. I am not
> complaining because I know that is what I signed up for. I
> am just stating that I have little control of certain
> things. Some schools have wealthy families who will supply
> their children with the needed materials, while others such
> as mine have hard working families, good people but lots of
> single parent homes where parent needs to work 2-3 jobs to
> make ends meet and kids are left to fend for themselves a
> little more. It is not equal. The schools are not equal.
> Hence, the educators should not be judged by same criteria.
> I have not even begun to desribe the low morale in my
> school or the reasons why I think our Gov would bash the
> teaching profession, but it is a problem. It is real, the
> stress is real, and we need to stand up and not let
> Christie bully us anymore.

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