Education Short List

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2009/09/essay_why_i_loathe_goodnight_m.html

There was a time no other words could stir terror for my wife quite like these: “In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a picture of …”

In the dark places of her heart, the places we try never to let our children see, she loathed “Goodnight Moon.” I mean, loathed it.

I could sympathize. Some well-meaning friend gave us the board-book version of Margaret Wise Brown’s perennial best-seller as a baby shower gift before our daughter was born. And, for the first three, maybe four hundred times through I could manufacture an enthusiastic reading voice while she followed along, mesmerized by the little rabbit’s ingenious ploy to put off bedtime by saying goodnight to everything in the great green room.

Then a trace of nausea would set in. Who, I would ask myself as I read on auto-pilot, who in their right mind — other than the person who chose to slop yellow paint several shades brighter than the sun in our master bath — who would paint their walls traffic-signal green and then cover the floors in a red the color of rage?

As our girl graduated to playing “where’s the mouse” with each double-truck picture in the book, my mind would really wander. Why doesn’t the rabbit say goodnight to the telephone? I mean, it’s the FIRST object mentioned in the book. Why don’t the kittens eat the mouse and leave its tail and one foot on the porch, as our cat would? Why doesn’t the mouse finish off the bowl full of mush? Maybe it’s rancid because this book has been festering since the 1940s.

“Daddy,” she would say, pulling me back from the glassy-eyed brink of a coma, “keep reading.”

Clearly, we had to hide “Goodnight Moon.” It was us or the book. Our daughter embraced other stories and moved on. We were a happier family for it. It’s possible that gas prices dipped, the stock market rallied and violence in Iraq ebbed.

Then our son arrived. Our own little bedtime-fighter. Our fast crawler, early runner, fearless climber. Our nonbook lover.

In a house of readers, concern grew as fast as our second child. Encouragement to read books, doubled. Pediatrician, pressed for answers. Aunts with older kids, cornered at family gatherings.

Until almost age 2, when the books came out, he would wander off to roll a toy truck or chuck a Mega Blok or perfect his long ball on the Little Tikes basketball hoop.

Then, one day while dismantling his bedroom, he found it: “Goodnight Moon.” So, innocently, I started reading about “the old lady whispering ‘hush.’”

Somehow, it spoke to him. Before we sensed danger, he was chasing us down to read it. “Moon,” he would say, pounding the hard book into me until its spine started to crack. Soon my own spine wasn’t far behind. “MOOOOOOOON!”

That’s how I came to love “Goodnight Moon.” This simple bedtime ritual set to gaudy illustrations had turned my book-avoiding son into a reader. I owed it a debt of gratitude. I Googled it, Wikipedia’ed it, New York Times-onlined it.

I learned that Brown’s book nearly faded off the publisher’s list years ago before gradually growing into a classic. Today, it seems, many parents consider it more important than milk to raising a healthy child. Six decades after publication, the book is like Brad Pitt in that movie, the one where he gets younger and better-looking as time goes on. A publisher’s rep told me that “Goodnight Moon” now sells 1million copies a year, more than ever. She didn’t want to discuss the fortune they pay out in royalties.

I prefer to think all that money goes to that little bunny, the junior insomniac who this year turns 62 and becomes eligible for Social Security.

In reality, according to an old Wall Street Journal article I mined off the Internet, Brown’s will bequeathed “Goodnight Moon” royalties to a neighbor boy. He grew up to squander most of the wealth the book brought him.

I obsess about that wealth — or rather a lack of it — often these days. With parenthood I became a full-time father and a part-time writer. I’ll publish 700 or 800 words that bring in a few hundred extra dollars in the spaces between diaper duties and preschool pick-ups, while my wife earns the steady paychecks.

Then, not long ago, the Social Security Administration mailed my annual statement. My small income and the SSA’s assumption (perhaps correctly) that my earnings potential has peaked resulted in a calculation that my monthly benefit will be just $612 when I qualify in another couple of decades.

The royalties alone for all those copies of “Goodnight Moon,” all 130 words of it, bring several times that sum on every day’s sales, day in and day out. With no poopy diapers.

The other day, our copy of “Goodnight Moon” finally gave out. The back cover, weakened as my son smacked it against me, separated from the rest of the book, taking the last few pages with it. This was my chance.

But my wife by now had formed an uneasy truce with the book that turned our son into a little book guy. She painted our bright yellow bathroom a soothing green the paint store named “Balance” and then promptly went out and bought a new copy of “Goodnight Moon.” Its colors seem especially bright. Its cover is really hard.

At bedtime that night, our son grasped his new book and leaned over and bonked me in the head with it. “MOOOOOOOON!” he insisted, opening the book to the great green room.

Oh, how I loathe “Goodnight Moon.”

Here is another article about, what I am calling, ‘recession schools’. The term recession schools is to show the affects of what this current economic recession is doing to our public education system. As I include this new article from the New York Times; I am also discovering new information about how schools in Portland, Oregon are wanting educators to have five furlong days next year. Furthermore, the whole state is considering having all state employees take up to 24 days next year. Plus, this is a concept being contemplated for California state as well. Lots to think about – for those who want to consider a job in the public education school system and those families that have children going to public school.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/education/24teachers.html?_r=2&hp

The complete article follows.

May 24, 2009
The New Math: Teachers Share Recession’s Pain
By WINNIE HU

Bankers, lawyers and journalists have taken pay cuts and gone without raises to stay employed in a tough economy. Now similar givebacks are spreading to education, an industry once deemed to be recession-proof.

All 95 teachers and five administrators in the Tuckahoe school district in Westchester County agreed to give $1,000 each to next year’s school budget to keep the area’s tax increase below 3 percent. In the Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow district, 80 percent of the 500 school employees — including teachers, clerks, custodians and bus drivers — have pledged more than $150,000 from their own pockets to help close a $300,000 budget gap.

And on Long Island, the 733 teachers in the William Floyd district in Mastic Beach decided to collectively give up $1 million in salary increases next year to help restore 19 teaching positions that were to be eliminated.

New York State’s powerful teachers’ unions have rarely agreed to reopen contract negotiations in bad economic times, let alone make concessions. But as many school districts presented flat budgets to voters in recent weeks, teachers in at least a dozen suburban areas have opened the door to compromise to save jobs, preserve programs and smaller class sizes, and show support for the towns and villages where many of them have taught generations of families.

Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of the New York State United Teachers, said the last time teachers made so many concessions was during the 1970s.

“In a normal school year, in a normal economic situation, we would see very little of what’s going on now,” he said.

In New York City, where the Bloomberg administration said last week that schools would face a 5 percent cut, the United Federation of Teachers said there had been no discussion of reopening its contract, which runs through October. And in New Jersey and much of Connecticut, where districts face similarly tight times, calls for teacher givebacks have largely been ignored, or rejected.

The teachers’ union in Ridgewood, N.J., voted this spring against a district proposal to renegotiate salaries. “We’re sympathetic to the economic situation, but we just don’t believe that teachers and school employees are overpaid,” said Steve Baker, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association. “Our members are the same middle-class people feeling the pinch of this recession as well, so we don’t feel it’s appropriate to target them for givebacks.”

Even in some of the places where unions have voted to help out management, some members have balked. In the William Floyd district, 60 teachers — about 8 percent of the total — voted against giving up what amounted to $1,190 apiece, while 580 teachers voted to do so (those who voted no still have to forgo the money). In Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, donations have been kept confidential.

“We didn’t want people to feel that it’s some kind of contest,” said Howard Smith, the Tarrytown superintendent.

Richard Perugini, a physical education teacher who is president of the Tarrytown teachers’ union, said he had pledged to give money even though his wife, Carmen, a teacher’s aide, is to be laid off from a nearby school district in June. “We’ll be living paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

Tarrytown’s budget for next year is $62.5 million, a 3.8 percent increase. That is about half the amount that budgets grew in recent years, leading the district to cut four teaching spots, four teaching assistants and 10 bus drivers and monitors. White Plains’s increase, by contrast, is 0.74 percent, to $185.7 million, the smallest in decades.

Yonkers, Westchester’s largest school system, has a planned budget increase of 0.81 percent (to $487.1 million), after increases of at least 5 percent in each of the past two years. District officials say they must buy fewer supplies, negotiate lower rates for food and busing, suspend supplemental teacher training and pare special education costs by more than $3 million to cover rising expenses for salaries and benefits.

“There’s a real sense that we’ve reached a limit, and in many communities, that translates into, ‘We can’t even raise it one dollar,’ ” Dr. Smith said.

In most districts, personnel costs are the largest expenses, so renegotiating terms with teachers is one of the only ways to avoid cuts in the classroom.

In Cambridge, N.Y., about 50 miles north of Albany, the 980-student district had proposed to lay off a teacher, two teaching assistants and five aides. Instead, the teachers agreed, in a vote of 68 to 22, to reopen their contract and accept smaller stipends for advising clubs, coaching teams and chaperoning events. Savings to the district: $67,868.

“I laid out the problem,” said Daniel Severson, the superintendent. “Everybody knows everybody because it’s small; we all live in the same town.”

William Floyd teachers averted the layoffs of nine teachers, and helped the 9,600-student district restore 10 other teaching positions, by agreeing to give up part of their raises.

“We did not want to see any of our teachers lose their jobs, or good programs suspended, and that’s what was going to happen,” said Karen D’Esposito, a high school social studies teacher who is president of the union.

In Tuckahoe, teachers already contribute $10 annually to a $1,000 scholarship awarded to a graduating student. But last fall, Michael V. Yazurlo, the superintendent of the 1,000-student district, approached the union about trying to keep next year’s property tax increase at 2.88 percent, the lowest in more than a decade.

The teachers’ union had initially proposed that its members voluntarily contribute between $200 and $600, based on salary, to support the school budget. But that amount was rejected — as too little — by many teachers. The final amount was $1,000 per teacher.

Marianne Amato, a 12th-grade English teacher and president of the teachers’ union, said, “Everybody really understood that this is a different time and we have to do something to help as a community of teachers.”

There is a bit of irony involved with this article – as the majority of public schools across the country are in the midst of their yearly dose of state testing. Furthermore, college students have just finished up their finals for the year; at the same time, high schoolers get ready to take their exams for the end of this school year.

Nonetheless, it is a valid point – do our schools test too much? Personally, yes I do believe that our students are tested far beyond what they need to be. And this is a topic that I will be bringing up again at a later point. So until that happens, here’s another article from The New York Times.

Do Schools Test Too Much?

Daniel Koretz is a professor of education at Harvard. His book Measuring Up examines our national obsession with standardized tests.

Does U.S. education policy rely too heavily on test scores?

Yes. We need accountability in education, and standardized tests give comparable information from different schools. But tests don’t measure things like complex problem-solving ability, creativity, and persistence. High-stakes testing puts pressure on teachers to take shortcuts to raise scores and can give an illusion of progress.

Doesn’t an improved score show real progress?

Not necessarily. There are many ways to prepare students too narrowly for a specific test. If you substitute another test designed to measure similar knowledge and skills, the “improvements” sometimes shrink markedly or even vanish altogether. Employers and college professors don’t care how students do on a particular math test—they want them to know math.

Should teacher compensation be linked to test scores?

If pay is linked to performance, tests will have to be part of the package, but it would be a mistake to use them as the only criterion. A good teacher keeps students engaged, fosters curiosity, and helps students learn from their mistakes. Test scores alone can’t measure that.

— Lyric Wallwork Winik

Newspapers are in trouble. With adult readership sinking each year, we as educators can be pretty sure that fewer and fewer of our students are seeing newspapers in their homes at all, let alone having any sort of experience reading them. This is a shame, because newspaper articles can be used to teach a variety of state standards in English, language arts, and reading – fiction vs. nonfiction writing, recognizing opinion, identifying various forms of media, etc.

In light of all of this, I thought I would quickly share a cool opportunity offered by the New York Times with any teachers or parents out there who are looking for ways to introduce newspapers and newspaper articles to their students. The New York Times offers a daily lesson plan based on one of articles contained in the newspaper each day. The lesson plans can be chosen by age and/or subject matter and guide students through reading and interacting with the text. The New York Times has also archived all the previous lesson plans so if you don’t see something you can use in today’s paper, you can search for something that applies specifically to what you are teaching, a new topic you want to introduce, a unit you are wrapping up, etc.

To access this amazing database of lesson plans, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/index.html

From here, you can see today’s lesson plan, visit their archives, or sign up to have the daily lesson plan emailed directly to you every morning.