Thursday, December 5, 2019
Wednesday, December 4, 2019
A long time has passed since my first year of teaching. Fifty years ago this September I began my 30-plus year career as a high school teacher. (Yes, I'm that old.) I taught in a one-high-school district outside of Riverside, California. The district wasn't my first choice, but it was the only job I was offered. Teaching jobs were scarce.
The next year I applied for a job in the Portland, Oregon, area. Again, only one district offered me a job, which I took. I stayed there until I retired in 2003.
I was an English teacher, which was a liability. Too many prospective English teachers were chasing too few jobs. But the jobs were there if you looked. By the time I had been teaching a few years, though, college education profs were warning their students, if you're planning to get a credential in English or social studies, you could be in trouble. Openings in those areas were few and far between. It would be a good idea, students were told, to get a second credential in another area to hedge your bets. People who could teach math, science and special education were in demand, not English and social studies teachers.
Over the years, I may have had some colleagues who didn't have traditional teaching credentials. If so, I don't remember them, and I'm sure they weren't in the English department. I can say with reasonable certainty, no classrooms in schools where I taught had full time substitutes. There were plenty of credentialed teachers to go around.
Today, too many Arizona teachers lack a teaching credential. Too many classes are being managed by full time substitutes. And Arizona is hardly alone. The same is true in other states.
Where have all the teachers gone?
I kept my 1969 contract, my version of taping the first dollar I made to the wall. My salary was $7,140. That's in 1969 dollars, of course. A 1969 dollar would be worth a little more than seven dollars today. So figuring for inflation, my first year salary was the equivalent of $50,000 today.
Today's average starting salary in Arizona is in the $35,000 range.
Tags: Teaching , Salaries , Arizona teacher salaries , Image
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Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Monday, December 2, 2019
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
The report, "The Carceral State of Arizona" was released by the Advancement Project and Puente this October, and alleges degrading and inhumane treatment of migrant detainees in the Eloy facility.
The report ranks Eloy as one of the deadliest ICE facilities in the country, claiming there is a lack of adequate emergency services, food and medications, among other mistreatments.
Grijalva, who has introduced legislation since 2015 to combat private prisons and detention centers, said that the Eloy Detention Center has been "plagued by a long and tragic history of neglect."
"Since 2003, there have been more than a dozen deaths," Grijalva said in a statement Wednesday. "Unfortunately, many of these deaths could have been prevented had the facility acted according to law. Yet, the reality is that for-profit detention centers and private prisons are motivated by profit, not human decency. The incarceration of pregnant women, individuals with serious health needs and immigrants must stop. The federal government continues to contract with the private prison complex who acts without accountability or oversight. We must end private prisons and immigration detention centers. Congress must provide that accountability and oversight."
In 2017, Grijalva introduced the Justice is Not For Sale Act which, along with requiring "federal, state, and local governments to directly operate and perform core services at adult prisons and detention centers," requires ICE to "use Alternatives to Detention, and increases oversight to prevent companies from overcharging inmates and their families for services like banking and telephone calls."
To see the full report, visit https://insideeloy.org/pdfs/carceral-state-report.pdf
Tags: reports , Eloy Detention Center , Grijalva , migrants , immigration , Image
It's the oddest thing. Ex-Superindent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal doesn't appear to like A-F state school grades any more than I do. And, to raise the level of oddity a notch, he was superintendent in 2011 when the state grading system went into effect.
I was a regular Huppenthal critic when he served as Education Superintendent from 2011 to 2015. These days, he is a frequent commenter on my posts, and I continue to disagree with him on almost every educational issue worth disagreeing on. But under my last post criticizing the state grading system, Huppenthal chimed in with a total of five comments, which he summed up when he wrote, "The letter grading system does more damage than good. And, I am the guy who originally put it into state law." He went on to write, "They mix two calculations which can't be mixed: growth and achievement."
I agree with every word.
As I wrote in the previous post, the A-F grading system doesn't help much when, to use the example of two elementary schools in TUSD, a school with about 25 percent of its students passing the state's high stakes test and another school with about 70 percent passing both got a "B" state grade in 2019.
It doesn't make any sense to regular human beings that schools with such widely different student passing rates should get the same grade. To understand, you have to know that the school with a 25 percent passing rate increased about ten points from 2018, while the 70 percent school dropped about four points. You also have to know that student growth makes up half of a school's grade.
Tags: High stakes test , State grades , Arizona Department of Education , TUSD , John Huppenthal , Image
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
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Monday, November 25, 2019
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