A Teachable Moment: Character In An Anti-Teacher Climate
It’s a question on a lot of parents’ minds these days: How do we teach character?
New York Times columnist David Brooks was in Cleveland on Monday to talk about his new book, “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.” During the audience Q-and-A, the self-described conservative was asked how he would design high school curriculum to include the teaching of character.
Brooks shared a memory of his own teachers: “I don’t remember what they taught me, but I remember how they behaved.” Many in the audience nodded and murmured in agreement.
Like most people, I could easily rattle off the names of several teachers who changed my life by the way they lived theirs. I’ll spare you that walk down my memory lane.
Instead, I want to quote another self-described conservative who had a lot to say about character. His recent e-mail to me echoed the sentiments expressed by many readers who object to various states’ legislative attacks against public school teachers, including those in Ohio. These letters and e-mails are not from teachers, but from those who love them.
This particular reader is a business analyst. He made it clear that, while our dads held similar blue-collar jobs, he and I grew up to disagree on many issues. He’s not a fan.
But he does share my high regard for the men and women paid by taxpayers to teach America’s children. He’s been married to one of those dedicated public servants in Cleveland for nearly 14 years.
“We spend tons of money on supplies for the kids,” he wrote. “I have begged her to leave Cleveland and she refuses to because it is her calling. I should be so lucky.”
To insulate this man and his wife from the current blood sport of teacher-bashing, I won’t name them. He did give me permission to share the recent letter of apology he wrote to his wife:
Dear Honey,
I’m sorry.
I am a conservative husband, belong to the Tea Party and I voted for John Kasich. I have been married to a Cleveland teacher for almost 14 years and my vote let her down.
I apologize:
For letting people tease you about having the summer off and not asking them to thank you for the tough days ahead that begin in early August. I know for a fact you work more hours in those 10 months than many people do in 12. All those hours are earned.
For complaining that my Sunday is limited with you because you must work.
For making you think you have to ask permission to buy a student socks, gloves and hats.
For not understanding that you walk through a metal detector for work.
For leaving dirty dishes in the sink [when you awoke] for your 4 a.m. work session. I should know you have to prepare.
For thinking you took advantage of the taxpayers. Our governor continues to live off the taxpayer dole, not you.
For counting the time and money you spend to buy school supplies.
For not saying “thank you” enough for making the world and me better.
I love you.
In this husband’s apology, we learn a lot about the remarkable teacher who is his wife. Her students sure are lucky. Every day that she shows up with such optimism is another day her students get a chance to believe in a better version of themselves.
Thankfully, this teacher is not an anomaly. Despite recent attacks on their pay, motives and even their supposed lifestyle, the majority of public school teachers across the country continue to bring their talent and high ideals to some of our most troubled districts.
Consider the take-home message for America’s schoolchildren:
Conservative politicians emboldened by brand-new legislative majorities insist that children are our most precious resource, but then pass bills guaranteed to undermine the teachers entrusted with our children’s future.
Nevertheless, those same public school teachers under attack continue to report for duty every day.
We know that children watch, and learn. And what they are sure to understand is that, unlike those politicians, their teachers refuse to give up on them.
Talk about a lesson in character.
By: Connie Schultz, Syndicated Columnist, The Plain Dealer and Creators Syndicated, Published March 16, 2011, Cleveland.com
Sen. Snowe Puts Mainers Out In The Cold To Win Favor From Tea Party
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, acted in the best interests of her party's far right, not her constituents, when she voted last week in favor of the federal budget bill. (2009 AP file)
Sen. Olympia Snowe has apparently decided that it is better to bow to political pressure from the tea party movement than to stand up for the interests of Maine.
How else to explain her vote last week for a federal spending measure that would harm Maine’s economy while punishing thousands of Mainers, including seniors, veterans, preschool children, college students and families struggling to keep their oil furnace running?
It turns out that the tea party does not have to defeat U.S. senators to claim their seat. It just has to threaten them. If what Snowe voted for last week becomes law, 700,000 jobs are likely to be lost in Maine and across the country.
This is not according to a Democratic think-tank, but an economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, Mark Zandi.
NO TO HEAT ASSISTANCE
Snowe voted to throw tens of thousands of Maine families off of a lifeline that enables them to get through a Maine winter. She voted to cut the emergency energy assistance program — LIHEAP — by 66 percent, literally tossing Maine families out of the program and into the cold.
She voted to undermine services to Maine seniors who benefit from the Medicare program. Payments benefitting seniors who participate in the Medicare Advantage program, for instance, would be suspended, according to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. And Snowe’s vote would create “significant disruption” to providers, suppliers and seniors who use Medicare.
Snowe voted to cut 3,500 positions from the Social Security administration, guaranteeing extended delays in the distribution of basic retirement claims and disability payments. She voted to eliminate 10,000 supportive housing vouchers for homeless veterans.
Sen. Snowe voted to knock 218,000 kids out of the Head Start program and force 16,000 classrooms to close while cutting 1.7 million college students from the Pell Grant program — their lifeline to a college education.
From the seat once held by the environmental champion Sen. Edmund Muskie, Snowe voted to cut land and water conservation, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, and one-third of the entire Environmental Protection Agency’s budget.
Make no mistake — this was not a vote about doing the difficult but right thing to confront the federal budget deficit.
A sober debate about reining in long-term federal deficits begins by recognizing that the first step to fiscal health is an economy that produces decent-paying jobs.
Jobs fill pockets with money to spend on goods and services that in turn create more jobs. These jobs produce revenue that reduces the federal deficit. You are not serious about fueling a fragile economic recovery when you slash hundreds of thousands of jobs with one vote.
You are not serious about balancing the federal deficit when you support maintaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans at a price of $2.5 trillion over 10 years — exactly the amount that congressional Republicans want to slash and burn from the federal budget over this same time period.
You are not serious about addressing the federal budget deficit when you repeatedly vote to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars for the war in Afghanistan.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone account for 23 percent of the federal budget deficit since 2003.
STATE CUTS HURT TOO
The Portland Press Herald’s Bill Nemitz quoted a Portland middle school librarian who drove to the State House in Augusta last week to testify against similar tea party-driven cuts to Maine’s state budget.
Kelley McDaniel described the cuts this way: “It’s not economically sound. It’s not morally sound. And I think you know that. I would be embarrassed to support something so ludicrous — taking from the poor to give to the rich. Maybe you are testing us, checking to see if we, your constituents, are really paying attention, really listening. I hope that’s what’s going on, because the alternative involves me losing faith in representative government, in democracy, and in you, the elected officials.”
Our fragile economic recovery, our kids, college students, seniors, veterans, environment and our health all took a hit on the floor of the U.S. Senate from a senator who was once described as independent.
Sen. Snowe might think that she made a prudent political calculation by bowing to the radical right of her party and placing her political interests ahead of the interests of her constituents. But she needs to know that Mainers are paying attention. And that the seat she is holding is Maine’s U.S. Senate seat. Not the tea party’s.
By: Tom Andrews, Former Maine U.S. Congressman, The Portland Press Herald, March 15, 2011
U.S. Is Urged to Raise Teachers’ Status
To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.
Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.
“Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation,” Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. “Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.”
The conference, convened by the federal Department of Education, was expected to bring together education ministers and leaders of teachers’ unions from 16 countries as well as state superintendents from nine American states. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that he hoped educational leaders would use the conference to share strategies for raising student achievement.
“We’re all facing similar challenges,” Mr. Duncan said in an interview.
The meeting occurs at a time when teachers’ rights, roles and responsibilities are being widely debated in the United States.
Republicans in Wisconsin and several other states have been pushing legislation to limit teachers’ collective bargaining rights and reduce taxpayer contributions to their pensions.
President Obama has been trying to promote a different view.
“In South Korea, teachers are known as ‘nation builders,’ and I think it’s time we treated our teachers with the same level of respect,” Mr. Obama said in a speech on education on Monday.
Mr. Schleicher is a senior official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., a Paris group that includes the world’s major industrial powers. He wrote the new report, “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts,” with Steven L. Paine, a CTB/McGraw-Hill vice president who is a former West Virginia schools superintendent, for the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation.
It draws on data from the Program for International Student Assessment, which periodically tests 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries in math, reading or science.
On the most recent Pisa, the top-scoring countries were Finland and Singapore in science, Korea and Finland in reading and Singapore and Korea in math. On average, American teenagers came in 15th in reading and 19th in science. American students placed 27th in math. Only 2 percent of American students scored at the highest proficiency level, compared with 8 percent in Korea and 5 percent in Finland.
The “five things U.S. education reformers could learn” from the high-performing countries, the report says, include adopting common academic standards — an effort well under way here, led by state governors — developing better tests for use by teachers in diagnosing students’ day-to-day learning needs and training more effective school leaders.
“Make a concerted effort to raise the status of the teaching profession” was the top recommendation.
University teaching programs in the high-scoring countries admit only the best students, and “teaching education programs in the U.S. must become more selective and more rigorous,” the report says.
Raising teachers’ status is not mainly about raising salaries, the report says, but pay is a factor.
According to O.E.C.D. data, the average salary of a veteran elementary teacher here was $44,172 in 2008, higher than the average of $39,426 across all O.E.C.D countries (the figures were converted to compare the purchasing power of each currency).
But that salary level was 40 percent below the average salary of other American college graduates. In Finland, by comparison, the veteran teacher’s salary was 13 percent less than that of the average college graduate’s.
In an interview, Mr. Schleicher said the point was not that the United States spends too little on public education — only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but rather that American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities.
“You can spend a lot of money on education, but if you don’t spend it wisely, on improving the quality of instruction, you won’t get higher student outcomes,” Mr. Schleicher said.
By: Sam Dillon, The New York Times, March 16, 2011
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