How dumb are we?

 How dumb are we?

 

The Blueprint for Education that the Maryland legislature passed a couple of years ago has a provision to increase teacher planning and collaboration time from the 20% of the day it is now to 40% of the day.   There is NO evidence that any real research was done to see if doing that would improve the quality of education for the children in these teachers classes.

What it would do is cost a great deal of money!  It is estimated that 15,000 additional teachers would be needed to implement this plan without increasing current class sizes.  Don’t let it bother you but we can’t find the teachers we need to fill the existing openings let alone add 15k MORE.  And, of course, there is a cost to that.  Assuming ( and yes I know the first 3 letters in the word assume) that all 15k teachers start at the beginning salary of $60,000, that would cost 900 MILLION DOLLARS.   Add another 18% for benefits, an additional 162 MILLION DOLLARS and you are looking at 1 BILLION dollars.  Is it any wonder the Governor decided to pause this element of the great plan.  Just think if those 15,000 teachers were hired to decrease class sizes instead of giving teachers more planning time with the same size or larger classes?   

It is not clear how or why that magical number of 40% of a teacher’s time for planning was determined.   It is said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, so maybe a committee came up with that number.   

Of course, the teachers’ union thinks that a fine idea.   After all, 15,000 more teachers means more members and more dues collected.  Even though the Supreme Court has determined that requiring teachers to be members of the union and collecting payroll deductions for dues is not legal, the union has managed to include that provision in their collective bargaining.

In the coming years, when the true price tag for the Blueprint begins to come due and more importantly when results begin to be measured against the cost, the Blueprint might become more of a “red” print.’

The State Superintendent has made it her mission to put the Science of Reading in every beginning elementary school classroom.  She says she has lots of research evidence to back up the worthiness of the cost.   Where is the research that backs up the cost vs. the benefit of the Blueprint investment?   Or is this just another case of throwing money at the wall and see what sticks?   Really, how dumb are we?