The President's Blog

After 16 hours of Fact Finding with no resolution, our colleagues in Elk Grove Unified have been placed in the same situation we faced two years ago. Hopefully their resolution will not end in a strike, but having gone through such an experience, what one piece of advice would you give to a colleague facing that possibility?

With the loss of federal “jobs bill” funding, continued declining enrollment (exacerbated by the expansion of Oxford Preparatory School), and the expectation of continued state funding at 20% less than we are entitled, the district budget is dismissal. Teachers and certificated support personnel at the schools themselves are many times the best source of information. Has anyone asked you for ideas? Well, we are asking.

Are there some cost-savings you can see at your own school? How about revenue raising programs like the one noted on the CUEA Facebook page? Share your ideas here on the CUEA President’s Blog.

Last Sunday marked the tenth anniversary of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush. Besides making all of us scurry around to prove that we were “Highly Qualified”, NCLB institutionalized standardized testing and the extreme scrutiny that accompanied it.

When he signed it, Bush said, “Today begins a new era, a new time in public education.” In a word, or phrase, tell us how you feel about this “new era”. Leave a comment below – CUEA would love to share, anonymously, comments left here..tell us how it has effected you as a teacher, your students, and the public perception of education.

Vicki Soderberg

Although the issue of moving the date of elementary parent conferences to mid-December may be of marginal interest to secondary teachers, the issue of a school board listening to teachers is of everyone’s interest.

Fortunately, three trustees, Pritchard, Alpay and Brick, did validate the importance of the teacher voice in this situation, but they were, sadly, outvoted by the remaining 4: Palazzo, Addonizio, Hattton and Bryson.

Speaking before the school board Monday night, I reminded them that the Calendar Committee never sought out the opinion of the very people to whom their decision most affected, and asked the board to reconvene the committee so as to revisit the decision in light of new information provided by the teachers themselves.

I told the board that every school polled by CUEA said that same thing: December is too late to meet with parents. I explained that the reasoning for moving parent conferences, to equalize the trimester, was of no issue to elementary teachers. I explained that teachers overwhelmingly like the November timing and being able to hold a conference with a report card. I reiterated that establishing a relationship with parents early in the school year was critical to student success.

Except for the three members mentioned above, my plea fell on deaf ears. Perhaps we were not loud enough….Vicki Soderberg, President, CUEA

For most of America, December 7 is “a date which will live in infamy”, but for Capistrano Unified, December 7, 2010, is a day that “pride was restored to CUSD.” A mere year ago, December 7, 2010, was the day Gary Pritchard, Lynn Hatton and John Alpay were sworn onto the CUSD School Board.

In the election the month before, it was teacher participation that made the difference. Parents and community members, after being awakened to the problems of CUSD during the strike, wanted to know from us how to “fix the problem”. We told them: recall Winsten and Lopez-Maddox; vote “yes” on Measure H; and elect CUEA endorsed candidates.

Our voice was heard far beyond the parents we contacted because we had the funds to pay for campaign direct mailers, phone banking, and school-neighborhood walks. This funding came from your payroll dues deductions, at $4 a month, as part of your CUEA dues.

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However, some people would rather have teachers be seen, but not heard.

That is the thrust of a November 2012 ballot initiative which would prohibit payroll deductions. Without monthly payroll deductions to the CUEA PAC fund, we never would have had the wherewithal to launch the campaign to restore normalcy the CUSD School Board.

If it passes, we will never have that opportunity again.

The Los Angeles Times is throwing a hissy fit because LA Unified is refusing to release teacher “value-added evaluations” to the newspaper. Using “value- added measures” (VAM) to evaluate teacher effectiveness is wrong to begin with, but at least Superintendent John Deasy had the good sense to deny the newspaper access.

Value-added measures, the latest fad to “fix” public education is neither fair nor accurate when judging a teacher’s effectiveness or making decisions about teacher compensation, promotion, and dismissal.

VAM uses student standardized test scores to determine how much “value” an individual teacher has “added” to a student’s growth during the school year. A seemingly a straightforward tool which appears to show that the better the teacher, the better the students will perform, it completely disregards other influences upon student test scores both inside and outside of school. Additionally, the instability of VAM has been proved in a RAND study in which a large percentage of teachers who were identified as “most effective” one year were then identified as “least effective” the next year.

The CTA website contains a clear statement of what we believe makes for a good evaluation system. Regarding VAM, it states, “The simplicity of this approach can be seductive, but it is inherently flawed and meaningless as it is not only unable to achieve its goal of evaluating teacher effectiveness, but also has severe negative consequences for the learning outcomes of students. Research shows that evaluating teachers mainly on standardized test scores leads to teaching to the test and a narrowing of the curriculum, conversely the goal should be providing all students a well-rounded curriculum that focuses on the development of critical thinking skills.”

Food for thought as we here in CUSD are instituting quarterly benchmark testing in secondary schools and expanding such testing in the elementary grade levels.

Voting “no” to the Tentative Agreement Monday night, board member Sue Palazzo asked, “Why should the district pay for the increases?” She was referring specifically to the POS offset, which is only a small portion of the entire agreement, yet that one portion apparently moved her to vote “no” on the entire agreement.

The answer to her question is simple. Because so many CUEA members moved from POS to HMO last year, significant savings were accrued and those savings were given back, in part, in the form of a full offset of increases to HMO, and half an offset to POS. Even with those offsets, CUSD is left with significant savings.

I stated so in my remarks to the board, but either Palazzo didn’t care, or didn’t get it. But I can tell you what I got from her comments: she could care less about employees. With only board member Addonizio voting “no” as well, these two remnants from the “old board” had little effect on the outcome.

Nevertheless, this incident serves to remind us of the significance of our sacrifice in the strike of April 2010, which, in turn, resulted in the voters ousting three of those members seven months later.

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