As I reread yesterday’s post, I recalled the Alma Mater’s description of what courses high school students who wanted to go there should take. One sentence jumped to mind: "Four years of English, with constant practice in reading and writing." Other colleges had similar requirements. (I hope they still do.)
Do all students in Portland Public Schools’ high schools who want to go to college get four years of English, with constant practice in reading and writing? And if not, what will the district and its teachers do to see that the students get this level of education? I’d like to think that the students get this level of instruction already, but after reading the negative reactions of the teachers’ union to the Superintendent’s plan to require three papers a year from each student, I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
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Wouldn’t it be great if the “teacher’s union” and the best interests of the students, were congruent?
The PAT (of which I am a member) opposes the anchor papers because of the flawed lesson design (too open-ended) and the new four-point assessment (what’s wrong with the 6-point assessment we have been using for ten years?).
The teachers feel Dr. Vicki is really using this anchor paper thing to judge teachers.
That is NOT her job. Every single PPS principal has the power to hire and fire anyone and my school did just that last year.
Portia Hall, who is a teacher, summed up the struggle in the Oregonian’s story.
But, there is bigger news ahead, after the holidays.
Sid claims: “Every single PPS principal has the power to hire and fire anyone and my school did just that last year.”
Todd Murphy, Carla Wenzel and others said otherwise in November, 2002. The stumbling block is Article 10 of the PAT contract which the PPS teachers fight tooth and nail to block amendments to.
“Good teachers for bad schools,
The big question: Who gets to decide where teachers work,” BY TODD MURPHY, 11/22/2002
The Tribune.
“The most volatile disagreement between the Portland school district and its teachers union might be over a contract proposal that has nothing to do with cash. The proposed change would overhaul how teachers are assigned to schools. District leaders say the teacher contract must change to give principals and administrators the power to assign some of the district’s best teachers to some of its worst schools, and the power to keep good, young teachers in poorer schools instead of allowing them to transfer out, as they often do now. ‘It’s the single most important thing we can do that will affect student achievement,’ Karla Wenzel, chairwoman of the Portland school board, said of the district’s proposal. ‘It’s about a highly qualified teacher in every classroom in this district.’
But teachers across the district angrily decry the proposal — because, they say, it is both wrongheaded and disheartening.
The proposal is an attempt to address one of the most challenging issues in Portland, and in urban school districts across the country: how to get the best teachers into the worst schools, and thus improve learning for poor and minority students whose learning is often two or three grade levels behind where it should be. District leaders say the current teacher contract gives almost all power in placement to teacher choice and teacher seniority. ‘Right now, the needs of the programs and the needs of the kids in a school are not factors in identifying what teachers will teach in a building,’ Wenzel said. ‘It’s not relevant to the contract.’ (Article 10)
‘I think that undermining our security is really undermining the energy we need to do some superhuman work,’ said John Linder, a second- and third-grade teacher at Lent Elementary in far Southeast Portland.
People on both sides of the debate do agree on one thing: The current Portland teacher contract is unusual, at least in Oregon, in how it regulates teacher transfers. In most Oregon school districts, administrators ‘have the right of involuntary transfer,’ said Ron Wilson, a human resources expert with the Oregon School Boards Association. ‘They have the ability to tell a teacher, ‘You’re going to work in school X.’
Portland’s teacher contract — at least as it’s been interpreted by district officials —generally doesn’t allow that. Instead, teacher vacancies and teachers’ transfer requests are dealt with through a complicated process that involves three rounds of assignments.
In Round One, “contract teachers” who want to transfer, teachers with at least three years of district experience, are given first crack at vacancies. Round Two has district officials filling some of the remaining vacancies with teachers who have been on leave, or with low-seniority teachers who have been victims of enrollment-based staff cuts at district schools.
Only in Round Three are principals allowed to fill any of their remaining vacancies with teacher applicants from outside the Portland system. A consequence of the system, Portland principals say, is a general shift of experienced teachers away from the most challenging schools in which to teach — schools in some of Portland’s poorest neighborhoods, with some of the district’s worst student test scores — toward schools in more well-off neighborhoods. The system also creates higher turnover in poorer schools, principals say, as younger teachers transfer away when they get the three years of district experience that allow them to transfer.”