Would be nice if you stopped by?

 Would be nice if you stopped by?

 

 

The rate of chronic absenteeism in Baltimore City schools has dropped to 45% and they feel they are making progress.  Individuals with chronic absenteeism get lower grades, lower test scores, and lower graduation rates.   But it isn’t just the individual that is impacted.   When half of a class is absent, the teacher can hardly afford to move forward with the curriculum material.  Lessons are repeated and the kids who did come to school have to suffer the repeats.

In Baltimore City, charter schools and magnet schools had the lowest rates of chronic absenteeism.  

What’s the reason?  First of all, these schools tend to be smaller.  Smaller schools have teachers with better connections to kids. Never mind that despite all of the evidence regarding the benefits of smaller schools, we are still building bigger ones. Students with connections to their teachers feel wanted and understood, and they often are.  Also by coming to school more, students build relationships with their peers so they want to come to school for the socialization.   Schools that had admission criteria also had lower absenteeism.

One the other hand, schools with large populations had the highest absentee rates.  Alternative schools regularly have the highest number of chronic absenteeism.  One alternative school in the City had a chronic absentee rate of 95%!!   What was the point of having the school?

Students are missing school to take care of younger siblings, earn money to help their families or they just don’t think it’s valuable for their future.   There are also gang issues so that some kids don’t feel safe at school.

One strategy that is very expensive is calling or visiting the homes of kids who are chronically absent.  One school starts calling kids homes and then follows up with a visit after 3 days of absence.  Some schools offer rewards for good attendance.  But overall,  the most the most significant factors and check-ins at home AND check ins at school.  Attendance plans that require students to check in at school with a preferred adult.  

Progress is s l o w.   And it’s being made.  The question is, can the schools meet the added expense along with the rest of the higher budget expectations.

COVID gave kids an excuse to stay home, now we need to give them a reason to stop by.  Who knows with enough buy-in they might enjoy it.

Do you need an ID for that?

 Do You Need an ID for that?

 

People with developmental disabilities are seven times more likely to have a negative encounter with law enforcement than are typical people according to the U.S. Department of Justice.   Add that to the fact that law enforcement receives little to no training on the best ways to interact with these individuals AND they often cannot identify that a disability even exists.  Many of these disabilities are invisible to the untrained eye.

It is not unusual for people with disabilities and particularly people with disabilities of color to receive inappropriate treatment from law enforcement.  There have even been instances of accidental death when law enforcement over reacts to what is typical behavior for someone on the autism spectrum.

One solution to this problem is the issuance of an ID card indicating that the individual has a disability that is invisible to the eye but is just as real.  The idea being proposed to the state legislatures is that drivers’ licenses be marked with a code indicating the disability in the case of a traffic stop.  And that an official ID card be developed to show law enforcement if stopped in other situations.  Proponents of the bill are VERY clear that if passed the process should be entirely voluntary.

The idea has received a great deal of support but there are questions being offered.   One of the first questions is whether having either the ID or the noted drivers’ license will require the expense of a medical exam.   Another issue is will acknowledging that an individual has a disability prevent him or her from getting the license.  People were also concerned that the ID cards could be easily duplicated and that a number of people would benefit that should not.  There was also the concern that if the designation were to be on a driver’s license there would be a requirement for a medical exam prior to receiving a license.

The people who are strongly advocating for this opportunity say that the important element is that it be entirely voluntary; therefore, if the designation was too onerous on the person, then they could choose not to participate.  There was also the concern that this would be another benefit available only to those people who could afford it and that many people with disabilities are among the lower income strata of society.

The bill did not get out of committee in the 2024 Maryland legislative session.  Advocates are pushing hard for it to move towards passage in the 2025 session.  Maybe soon there will be an ID for that.

The Strike is on!

 The Strike is On

 

What union president receives a salary greater than that of the President of the United States or the Governor of Maryland?  It is probably surprising but that union is the National Education Association or NEA.  The union that represents over 3 million teacher members.  It seems the folks that work for the Union believe that their employer has violated the rules and has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.  It has also gone out on strike.

Employees for the Union have formed a union to protest the treatment they are receiving from the Union. 😅 The staff union say that the Union has wrongly halted overtime pay for holidays and it is contracting out over fifty million dollars worth of work that should have gone to full-time staff.  The NEA union calls for a strike when local school districts do that, now they are doing what they charge against others. 

The NEA is in a pickle.  Their convention was supposed to have been held this month.  Wanting to avoid the embarrassment of the NEA asking union members to cross a picket line of its own union workers, the NEA threatened to go to a virtual convention.   President Biden canceled his scheduled appearance.  Lots of delegates also canceled their intent to attend.

The Union itself has strayed from its stated intent of supporting education and teachers and has begun to engage in progressive political speak. Some Union members are demanding the NEA call for a cease fire in Gaza.  There is conflict between the Union, Union workers and Union members.

It is interesting to see the rank-and-file union workers calling out the well-paid Union bosses for collective-bargaining abuses.  The Union membership might be learning something about their leadership’s values when it comes to the leadership’s pocketbooks.  The President of the United States earns $400,000 a year.  The Governor of Maryland earns $150,000 a year.  But if you were president of the NEA, you would receive a salary of $495,787! And there are other perks too.

 Union employees are calling for fair labor relations.  Is no one worried about falling public schools?  No wonder The Strike is ON!

 

Can we still afford special education

 Can we still afford special education?

 

As more children qualify for special education, more school systems are deciding the provision of special education is a hill too high to climb.

In the 22-23 school year a record 7.5 million students accessed special education services in the United States.

Several factors are playing into the increase.  The pandemic left many kids at home with parents.  Sometimes the parents were doing school lessons and were discovering that the issues in learning their kids had were very real; they weren't all the teacher's or school's fault.   Secondly, the stigma for some disabilities is going down.   Autism spectrum disabilities are on the rise as are people on the spectrum being shown as very smart and maybe just a bit quirky so what’s so bad about that. 

Schools don’t have the money to provide the services and when they do, they can’t find the teachers.   Three in five special ed teachers leave in the first five years.   Then there is the issue of all those wonderful federal pandemic funds that are going away.

In Maryland the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is pumping lots of new state money into local school systems.  But that is not a free lunch.  The new money may only be spent in specific areas for the purposes of legislation.   And money begets money so, the local jurisdictions are required to increase their spending in those areas beyond the Maintenance of Effort amounts already established.

There is only so much money to go around.  Somethings are happening in Maryland that have seldom happened before.  Teachers are being laid off.  From the smaller systems such as Cecil County to the largest one, Montgomery county.  Programs are being cut; positions are eliminated in the Baltimore metro area as well.  All of this means involuntary teacher transfers  if teachers want to keep their jobs.  

Money being pumped into school systems is being allocated on a per pupil basis and that money goes to the schools where the kids are.  The money is not for general overhead to run the district.

Special education is more expensive than general ed.  Now that there is less money all around, the hard question of can we still afford special education has left the whisper stage and is being asked out loud.

We can end dropouts right now

 We can end dropouts right now

 

All men are not created equally.  And neither are students.  So why is it that we insist on pushing every child through the same knot holes in order to get a high school diploma?

Baltimore City has been working very hard to get students  who have dropped out during the pandemic and the virtual not instruction to return to school.   It is sending folks to homes and to student workplaces trying to convince them it is worth their time and energy to come back to school.

But is it really?   What will they get in high school that will change their lives besides a high school diploma.   For a teenager, a high school diploma is in never never land and now they can get $15 an hour in the service sector and that looks like big time earning.

If they return to school, they can get algebra 1, Shakespeare, and another foreign language.  What exactly are they going to do with that?  How will that make their lives better?

We talk a good game about college and career readiness.  In reality all we are preparing students for is college and there are lots of kids whose abilities and interests do not require college.

We need to drop many of the academic classes that we currently require kids to take.  Students need to learn to read and write grammatically correct English, would be good if they could speak it too.  They need some heavy coursework in financial literacy and civics so they can learn how the government is run and how to avoid being scammed by bad actors who want their money.  Current history would be valuable as well. Some science in how to manage and take care of the body that they live in.  Beyond that we need to start training kids for the jobs that are out there right now.   For some those jobs require college.  But for lots of other jobs, no college required.

Look around at the jobs that are going begging.  Georgia has an entire training program to prepare kids for the TV production industry.   Georgia is about to outpace California in that field.  Why, because they have skilled labor and they are preparing more and better skilled support staff for all of the theatre union performers.  

Maryland has huge vacancies in the construction trades and in commercial drivers.  We should be teaching students those skills and they might see some purpose in coming back to school.

We could eliminate dropouts in just a few years if we made school relevant to the students and to their interests and skill set instead of pandering to the politicians who are in white collar jobs that don’t require dirty hands.  Let’s take a giant step backwards to the olden days when there were academic (heading to college), commercial (heading to the business world) and vocational-technical (heading to skilled employment) diplomas.  More students finished high school because it was worth their time.

What's the Goldilocks Spot?

 What’s the Goldilocks Spot

 

Teachers are not paid nearly enough!  Teachers are paid way too much for the 190 days a year they work when the rest of us work a lot longer.   The average American works 260 days.  Teachers get great benefits.  They are very seldom fired.  They work a 6 ½ hour day and regularly have to take work home.  They get at least one free period during the school day to do lesson planning.  Some teachers get more than that.  They also receive fund to earn an advanced degree which will further increase their salaries.

The average teacher’s salary in Washington DC is $84,882.  It is among the top five in the country.   In Maryland, the average salary isn’t that far behind at $79,420.  In Montgomery County Maryland adjacent to Washington DC the average salary is $83,266.  Yet there are vacancies in all of these jurisdictions.  Maryland has a plan to start all beginning teachers at $60,000.  The idea is that this will attract more teachers and help to fill the vacancies that exist all year long.  People will tell you teachers are burned out.  They just have too much to do.  The question is, will more money make them less burned out?  Or are there other issues at play that we need to face.

Money doesn’t seem to be doing its job of attracting teachers.   But politicians have never been known to look at the data, so their answer to vacancies is to increase salaries. 

Part of the problem is there is a finite amount of money available to school systems.    So, if school districts are required to increase salaries, they only have a couple of options if they can’t get more money from county government.  They can decrease the number of teachers or they can reduce spending in other areas.  When they reduce the number of teachers, that means more students in each class or a reduction in course offerings.  Two school districts in Maryland have already canceled all virtual learning because of budget issues.  

Ideally school systems could engage unions in this discussion.  Sadly, unions only seem to be interested in increasing salaries not serving the needs of the students.

What is the Goldilocks sweet spot?   How much salary is not too hot and how much is not too cool.  When are we paying teachers an appropriate respectful amount representative of the importance of their jobs and when are we paying them too much so that it is impacting the rest of the system.   Where is Goldilocks when we need her?

Sex in the school house

 Sex in the school house

What’s going on here?   School used to be a safe place.   In the last couple of months alone, there have been three notable sexual offenses by professional staff in three different large school districts in Maryland.

The Montgomery County Public Schools have begun settlements with multiple staff members who were sexually assaulted by their principal.  Complaints were made by the staff.   Complaints were not only ignored by central administration the principal was up for a big promotion.  That was too much.  Teachers began to go public.  Of course, central admin insisted they knew nothing. Big question is WHY they knew nothing since complaints had been filed?  Now months later, the principal is out and the school system is out multiple thousands of dollars as they make financial settlements with the staff who were assaulted.

In Anne Arundel County, a middle school teacher has been charged with sexually abusing young girls from his school.  He has been charged and the judge refused to allow bail.  Had he not been fully charged and only accused he would still be working for the school district and receiving his full salary.   All of the major school districts have these bunkhouse rooms for staff who have been alleged to have committed misdeeds.   It’s sort of the land of administrative purgatory.  The person is not safe in the school but neither is he/she out of a job.  Gotta love the unions.  So the individual is assigned to a workspace room where they supposedly are working on curriculum.  A woman I know who was assigned there loved it.  She was a principal.  She said she didn’t need to arrive until 8.  There were no angry phone calls or annoying staff, or misbehaving students.  They just worked on whatever curriculum happened to be in process at the time.  They had mid-morning, lunch and mid-afternoon breaks.  They left at 4 and there was no work that needed doing that evening. And no evening meetings either.   They got their full salary and benefits.  She was disappointed when the investigation of her misdeeds was finished after just three months and she had to go back to work to actually earn her salary.  

The Anne Arundel County teacher didn’t get that kind of break because the charges against him were handled by the police.

Then there is the teacher in Prince George’s County.  He doesn’t understand why he is being accused of a misdeed.   He posted a video online of several of his girl students braiding his hair and painting his fingernails.  The little girls (8-10 year olds) were gathered around him laughing and happy.  Now there are people who consider that inappropriate behavior for a teacher.  He does not.  He claims the child painting his nails wants to be a nail technician when she grows up so this was a kind of vocational exploration.  You can’t make this stuff up!   Parents who saw the video on line were concerned.  Is this the meaning of helicopter parents?  Or was this grooming behavior on the part of the teacher?

Of course, the union is protecting him too even though the behavior does violate the schools system’s code of professional conduct.

Parents teach their kids all about stranger danger.   We never think that these “strangers” may be lurking in our school rooms as qualified professionals.   Maryland law requires fingerprinting prior to employment and attestation by all previous employers if you worked with children that there were no sexual offenses. 

Seems some folks are slipping through all those gateskeepers.   Doesn’t matter who the adult is, sex in the church, sex in the school house- Just say no.