Notes from MC

Save Our Schools--Why I'm Marching

2011-07-23T11:06:00.003-05:00

A few months ago when I decided to support the Save Our Schools March and Call to Action I had a long list of where I thought “education reform” had gone off the tracks. But it wasn’t what angered me or scared me that sparked my interest. It was finding a national community of people who matched the indomitable hope and determination that exists within me and the members of my union that we can do better together despite setbacks, insults, attacks and deliberate mischaracterizations.

Recently, I decided not just to support the Save Our Schools March and Call to Action; I decided to be there to march as well.

I’m marching for the teachers who joined me for the last 3 years in having the temerity to develop our own alternative licensure program for St. Paul: CareerTeacher--a better alternative to diversify our teaching force and meet the needs of all students.

I’m marching for the 4 years of work we’ve spent intentionally developing a full-spectrum, career-long, continuous-growth model teacher support and evaluation system based on peer assistance and review. I’m marching for an administration who believes in doing this work with us and not to us.

I’m marching with and on behalf of the St. Paul teachers who wanted a better, more direct relationship with parents and instituted a thoughtful parent home visit program.

I’m marching for the teachers who pitched the idea of a local union-delivered professional conference and then worked their tails off to deliver it six years in a row. And I’m marching for the 300+ teachers who have given up personal time that annual Saturday each spring to attend because they value learning from each other.

I’m marching for the veteran teachers who took monstrous amounts of their own free time to support me as I earned my National Board Certification. While Marlene Dietrich said something like “It’s the friends you can call at 2 in the morning that count” I know it’s the expert 20+ year veteran teachers you can email with questions in the middle of the night, who answer you back, who count for me.

I’m marching for the parents and teachers who want to set up site-governed schools.

I’m marching for the parents, community members and groups who have opened their doors and their ideas to our local union.

I’m marching for the success of the St. Paul Promise Neighborhood initiative, where a city, school district, community and union have come together to solve problems and meet the needs of people rather than point fingers.

I’m marching for every child who deserves a well-prepared and effective teacher, which is every child, by the way. Including my own. I march for my two children who, like their fellow public school peers, have one shot a great K-12 learning experience.

I'm marching for my dad and his peers who worked to improve the teaching profession I inherited from them with the understanding that I would not rest on their legacy but I would continue their work to improve teaching and learning as well.

The timing of the March could not be better for me to march for the State of Minnesota. We just finished a difficult and, in some cases, damaging shutdown by coming to some difficult and, in some cases, damaging conclusions.

However, I will march on Saturday with the stubborn, dogged determination of someone determined to work in community to make an opportunity out of every last policy-laden sentence of our new K-12 bill and maybe even the higher education one, too.

I will march for a statewide teacher support and evaluation framework that intentionally supports a teacher’s natural instinct to get stronger, not a system designed to play ‘gotcha.’

I will march with determination to reject someone’s intent to end integration aid and turn it into a vibrant, committed statewide conversation about ending racism and improving equity instead.

I will march to prove collective bargaining is the most powerful tool we have to reach our common goal as a state to meet the needs of every child.

I will march to do whatever I can to include parents in our work and in the conversations we’re going to have.

I will march for a principal support and evaluation program that most values support of good teaching and learning.

I will march for the work it will take to come together to prepare to deliver every child to post-secondary learning and assure that learning is affordable, accessible and excellent.

So, while my list of education reform gone off the tracks is long, my list of everything that suggests our best days in public education are ahead of us is longer, and more motivating. We can do this work together and so I invite you to join me where ever you can along this march.

Fighting the status quo since 1918

2011-06-29T13:37:00.000-05:00

Dear SPFT Community:

Our union is a powerful force for justice, innovation and democracy. That sentiment often comes out when SPFT leaders have a conversation about our narrative with fellow members. The “narrative conversation” that stewards have been trained to hold with members is meant to introduce all our members to a story about us that is told by us. It is not a story told by Waiting for Superman. It is not a story financed by Bill Gates. It is a story lived out by our members as we spend each workday meeting the needs of our students and families. Our narrative is the one that promotes the real reason we chose to work in education, when we could have chosen to work anywhere. Our narrative story is the one that illuminates the needs of the whole child, not because issues like poverty, violence or homelessness keep us from teaching, but because those issues in our students’ lives keep us up at night. Our story about our work puts us at the table willing and able to solve problems.

I think the phrase about our union's work for justice, innovation and democracy gets highlighted because it is both historical and an accurate reflection. Unions, by our very nature and definition, have historically and persistently challenged the status quo. We represent change and evolution. Unions represent progress. It is our union's job to challenge the status quo. The Labor Movement is responsible for child labor laws, for access to affordable health care, and safety standards. Unions helped put an end to discrimination of all kinds. Teachers unions, in particular, played a critical role in improving the school day and improving instruction by setting standards for the teaching profession. There is no statement more untrue in the deliberately debilitating education debate than “unions protect the status quo.”

Local 28, the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers, has a long history of effectively challenging the status quo. Managers, administrators, and politicians have sought to destroy unions throughout history for the plain fact that we consistently, and often effectively, challenge the status quo. We won equal pay for equal work to end salary discrimination against female teachers. SPFT was the first teachers union to go on strike to insist on healthy teaching and learning conditions.

Recently, our union challenged the status quo about teacher evaluations and traditional site governance. As a result, we won contract language that will build a promising, career-long, continuous support and evaluation system. Additionally, we now have agreed to a process for groups of educators to explore site governance within our district so teachers don’t have to take their innovative ideas to charter schools. We are active politically, too. This session we challenged the status quo argument that teachers aren’t accountable. We challenged the status quo by fighting for a fair economy and budget solution.

We have more status quo to challenge. Our state government needs a special session to finish their homework. We’re beginning contract negotiations. We’ve just elected our building stewards. This summer, another round of MCA scores will be released where the same things will be said by the same people. All of these events offer us an opportunity to continue to challenge the status quo and work collectively for justice, innovation and democracy.

Together,

mary cathryn

Teacher Appreciation Day

2011-05-02T23:58:00.001-05:00

May 3, 2011
Dear SPFT Community:

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day to all of our educators!

I celebrate this Teacher Appreciation Day with more reverence than ever.

As a student I had teachers who cared for me so greatly I can’t even begin to tell you what I actually learned from them, teachers I learned so much from I never noticed if they cared about me or not and I loved both experiences.

As I have shared before, I grew up in a family of teachers. I saw, firsthand, the work that went into getting ready to teach a new class in the fall. I knew the stress difficult negotiations put on a house. I knew the sleep lost over limited resources, student behavior, or colleagues.

As a teacher, I have experienced, firsthand, the lightening quick speed of a class period humming along on a well-tuned lesson and the abject pain of a clock ticking on a lesson that I can’t for the life of me figure out how it bombed.

I have had the privilege of spending time learning from some of this city’s best educators and I’ve spent time in deep distress with a teacher accused of failing to teach.

Now as a parent I’ve had 8 years of teachers in St. Paul Public Schools taking responsibility to teach my children. I’ve experienced, firsthand, the anticipation of parent/teacher conferences, the panic of bedtime due-date revelations, and the slope of the learning curve that is supporting your child through Everyday Math.

I celebrate your work on this Teacher Appreciation Day because I want everyone to recognize the teaching profession’s complexities as I have as a student, family member, practitioner, and parent.

I want students to understand and appreciate why, when you could have done anything, you chose to teach and I want those students to learn from you.

I want our families to see and be proud of the work we do.

I want every educator in the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers to know the thrill of that well-honed lesson and have the thorough support of our colleagues when we need help diagnosing what afflicted the other one.

I want a teaching and learning system designed for continuous growth and improvement for our teachers so we all get to learn from and become some of the best teachers in this city.

I want every parent in St. Paul to choose St. Paul Public Schools, to choose to have you educating their children because I know they would appreciate you like I do.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day! Please take care of yourself and take care of each other.

Together, mary cathryn

Solving the budget and learning deficit, together

2010-03-23T14:15:00.003-05:00

At the November SPFT membership meeting, the members present determined that we should go through a process of gathering input from members across the district about the just-then announced projected SPPS district budget deficit for 2010-11.

Building stewards and SPFT leaders took time in January and February to hold SPFT-community conversations about the SPPS budget in buildings and program sites. They brought over 61 unique ideas for cost-cutting or revenue-raising from our members to the February membership meeting to share. Our SPFT Executive Board looked at every idea and discussed them at length at our March meeting. We passed along every idea to Superintendent Valeria Silva and the SPFT Executive Board narrowed down the prioritized recommendations, based on the frequency with which they were mentioned or another relevant factor, to share with the Board of Education.

We owe much thanks to the building stewards and leaders who took time to have this important conversation with members. If our union and our members want to be a part of decision-making in St. Paul Public Schools, we must be part of the brain-storming and problem-solving as well. We will continue taking ideas and share them with the District until the final 2010-11 budget is passed.

This budget deficit was not created by a singular situation, and the solution will not be a singular one either. Every decision, whether complex, monumental and gut-wrenching like school closings or seemingly simple like no more dry erase markers, will have consequences.

Will it be possible to solve this financial deficit and better meet the needs of our students? Can we be just as mindful of the deficit that has built up in their education that doesn't get the same attention as the looming end to a fiscal year and the neatness of a balance sheet? How can we work together just as hard to insure that all of our students in St. Paul Public Schools have access to a high-quality, universal school experience that prepares them for a world that is evolving in front of us?

• Right now, students have a 100% chance of their hair stylist being properly licensed through a standards-based licensure program, but not a 100% chance of their teacher being properly licensed at the beginning of their teaching career.
• Right now, access to information doubles every 6 months because of technology, but our students are served in over 80 school libraries/media centers by just over a dozen full-time, licensed library-media specialists.
• Right now not a week goes by without some publication lamenting that there is an obesity epidemic in children, yet there is no guaranteed access to a licensed health/physical education specialist for elementary school children.

When will these deficits, and more that we could list and our members have the expertise to meet, be addressed as urgently? What role can our union members, together with our Board of Education and Superintendent Valeria Silva, play in addressing the learning needs of all our students so that we can proudly offer the best, high-quality, universal public school experience for every student in St. Paul?
It will be up to all of us to make sure that students are not merely still served as a result of these decisions, but that our students are actually better served whenever possible. If that is not possible, then we must be willing to admit that, and do everything we can collectively to remedy it.

Sorrow from Central High School

2010-03-17T21:55:00.003-05:00

The work that fills the days of all of us is put into perspective by the tragic death of a child, one of our students. Children are the reason we do any of this work: successful conferences, well-designed lesson plans, balancing a budget, negotiating professional working conditions. We do all of this work for those children and their families who trust us with their most precious resource.

When we lose a student, the rumors or innuendo swirling around what happened distract us from the profound loss we experience in a school, a district, and in our future. As the news spread about the accident that took a Central High School student’s life our first thoughts were of that student, then the family and school community, and then to the students we serve and would face the next day. For some of us our lessons today went exactly as planned, for others it was a teaching day they hope never to experience again. Regardless, many of us paused and looked at our students differently, maybe watched them walk to the bus a little longer than usual, or made an extra phone call home before ending a school day that we would never get back.

In high school I memorized a passage of Meditation XVII from John Donne, the metaphysical writer, because it was an assignment and I thought it was a cool piece of trivia to learn that one writer (Hemingway) could lift a line from another writer (Donne) and use it as his book title (For Whom the Bell Tolls). What I didn’t know is I would remember it because it speaks so accurately of our interconnectedness, in this case how all of us come together to make our district whole.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

While it speaks to how we are made lesser by our losses, our losses can also remind us to redouble our efforts to do our best work preparing for conferences, delivering lessons, settling the budget, negotiating for our members, and making our profession stronger on behalf of the students and families we serve as the best and only way to fill that void.

Devastating Race to the Top news

2010-03-04T13:50:00.003-06:00

Minnesota is not a finalist for the Phase 1 Race to the Top grant funds from the Federal Department of Education. The St. Paul Federation of Teachers first worked to learn about Race to the Top, we questioned it, we offered ideas and feedback to the Minnesota Department of Education at every opportunity and we decided to support Minnesota’s application. It is very disappointing that Minnesota was not named as a finalist today, yet we can be proud of the work we did on the application.

The restructuring we are required to do remains mandatory, but today's announcement means we will have to continue that work in the district with money we don’t have. The bolder innovation and further possibilities for innovation we just successfully negotiated into our contract are in serious financial jeopardy as a result.

With all of that said, this is not a moment to give up, but it is a moment to redouble our efforts and perhaps even find more creative solutions to funding our ideas—as we did with our teacher recruitment and preparation ideas that have become CareerTeacher, which is now funded with a 1-year planning grant from the AFT Innovation Fund. We will continue to pay attention to any next steps that evolve from this announcement or the Race to the Top program and determine what our involvement could be as well.

I am grateful for those who believed in our value in the discussion and application development.

To everything, a season

2010-01-22T17:21:00.005-06:00

The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers knew that we were going to have difficult contract negotiations when we formed our team last year. Starting in February 2009, the Board of Education publicly and prominently took every opportunity to unilaterally impose a non-negotiated wage and benefit freeze on us. Yet, while the economy was already daunting and the budget discussion at the legislature and Board of Education had our attention, what also had us concerned was that we were going to be negotiating a contract amidst a great deal of uncertainty. The superintendent was leaving, three school board members were up for re-election, two of our high schools were going through grueling and punishing restructuring, and American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds were being spent in our district without any teacher input.

We realized we had a choice: we could try to ride it out or we could show leadership ourselves and steer the ship. We decided to take the opportunity to show leadership and go into this round of contract negotiations with a powerful set of values guiding our agendas, our discussions, and our decisions. We focused our priorities in values that recognize the most important work in education occurs between educator and student,knowing that effective decision-making in education must arise from an educator’s professional practice in order to be good for students, and we wanted to ensure that educators are valued and that teaching is a sustainable profession. We were determined to show that our union is committed to help deliver excellent education to all learners and it can be done through our contract.

As a result, we sought to move the most important decisions made on behalf of students closer to students and into the hands of professional classroom teachers. Because of this focus, we won a significant opportunity for teachers and support staff to be integrally involved in their school restructuring when it has to occur, rather than forcing them to sit and watch it happen to their students and their school community. We won the opportunity to have a serious discussion about site-governed schools in our district, which will bring much-needed, community-specific conversations about what is best for students directly to the teachers who serve them. We won the ability to create a comprehensive, ‘full-spectrum’ peer assistance and review program that will substantially improve the support teachers get to remain effective as well as strengthening the achievement of tenure process during the three-year probationary period.

We reject the notion that our recent contract settlement was little more than a myopic agreement on wages. Our contract settlement signaled an opportunity to begin to trust teachers with decisions made about teaching and learning. Our very modest wage increases, despite the public and persistent pressure to freeze our salary and benefits, merely begin to recognize the additional responsibilities we have to our students. The decision-making agreed to offers an opportunity to continue steering the ship for our profession and the students we serve.

Tentative Agreement for Teachers

2010-01-11T21:00:00.003-06:00

The Values guiding our negotiating work:

• The most important work in education occurs between educator and student
• Effective decision-making in education must arise from educators’ professional practice
• By ensuring that educators are valued and that teaching is a sustainable profession, our union helps deliver excellent education to all learners

With these goals in mind, the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers achieved the following in our 2009 contract negotiations:
*A starting salary of $40,000+ for beginning teachers in 2010
*Stronger standards for achievement of tenure, both in additional administrative observations and in the development of a full-spectrum peer assistance and review program (see below).
*Moved significant decision-making into our professional hands:

Full-spectrum Peer Assistance and Review
The union successfully negotiated the development of a “full-spectrum” peer assistance and review program. Our PAR program will recognize teaching as a profession of life-long learning and move away from the deficit-based thinking about teacher evaluation. The St. Paul PAR program will be developed to offer support in the traditional peer assistance and review areas by offering a more comprehensive and thorough achievement of tenure program as well as offer assistance to teachers identified as struggling in addition to offering support for teachers who self-identify or anticipate difficulties in a new or returning assignment and want to be supported in order to prevent failing. The St. Paul PAR program will also have significant opportunities for already strong teachers to explore new professional pathways (such as becoming a Master teacher in the CareerTeacher program), challenges (such as earning National Board Certification), and other opportunities to enhance their professionalism and/or give back to the profession (training to become a mentor, for example.) Just as good teachers differentiate instruction to meet the needs of every learner, our peer assistance and review program will differentiate to meet the needs of every teacher and be an asset to the profession.

Transforming our schools through restructuring
The union successfully negotiated a comprehensive process for school restructuring when restructuring is called for by No Child Left Behind or by the Board of Education. The restructured school will have a complete “Election to Work” agreement presented to staff by February 15th the year before the proposed restructuring that will be developed cooperatively with the staff and mutually approved by the union and the district that explicitly outlines:
• The application and selection process for staff, if there is to be one
• The vision and expected instructional program of the school
• The hours of instruction and length of the school day as well as the expected degree of flexibility that will be required of the staff
• The length of the school year and the school calendar
• The expected length of time teachers may be required to be present in the school outside of the school’s instructional day
• Any additional compensation program that will apply to the particular Restructured School that is different from the standard compensation schedule.
Further, contract language was secured that would require an annual review of restructured schools to determine the success of the restructuring and to identify practices and approaches that should be duplicated or avoided.

Site-governed Schools
The union also won a statement of intent on Site-governed schools that will be added to the contract recognizing the extraordinary opportunity the Minnesota Site-governed school statute (123B.045) offers to create innovative school environments better designed for individual school populations. The district agreed to form a committee to begin exploring the opportunity this new legislation presents for our students immediately upon ratification of the contract to report and recommend to the superintendent and the SPFT Executive Board as soon as possible, but no later than May 1, 2011.

Thank You
The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers could not have won such comprehensive professional contract language if it wasn’t for the significant support, ideas and mentoring of our fellow local teachers unions. We owe a great deal of debt to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, the Toledo Federation of Teachers, the Rochester Federation of Teachers, the New Haven Federation of Teachers, the Hillsborough (FL) Classroom Teachers Association, and the leaders of the AFT Teachers Program and Policy Council. We are indebted to our state union Education Minnesota for their support of our members and our national union the American Federation of Teachers for their belief in our ideas. Finally and notably, we are grateful to our members in St. Paul for trusting us to negotiate a contract on behalf of them, the students we serve, and the profession to which we’re dedicated.

A process well-traveled

2009-11-23T16:16:00.002-06:00

Tonight the St. Paul Public Schools Board of Education will announce the results of their search for a new superintendent. This will be the 5th superintendent in my 4.5 years as president of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers. The members of Local 28 stand ready to work with this next superintendent and we are poised to offer our expertise to collectively meet the needs of our students and the families who trust us with their children. Much of what draws a member of the teacher’s union into education is probably shared with a good superintendent candidate: the belief that one person’s work can make a difference, the joy of working in community on a common goal, the belief of public education’s place in building a good society, the vexation with the barrier that race, socio-economic status, gender and more can play in the path to success and the determination to do something about it.

We believe that the most important work in public education occurs between an educator and a student. We look forward to a superintendent who will join us in this vital relationship.

In anticipation of that, I have appreciated the thoughtful work of the Board of Education in this search process starting with the outstanding and unprecedented action by Tom Goldstein of resigning to allow for Director Jean O’Connell to be actively involved in the final stage of the search. He is to be commended for his thoughtful and unselfish contribution to the search results.

I also appreciated the Board members taking time to attend and listen to all the staff/community sessions with each of the finalists. Their attention to and care of a broad opinion base speaks very highly of their intention to lead with us going forward. I am grateful for the time they have put into the search process and thank them for their careful deliberation.

And now, the envelope please...

Partners in education? Wait & See

2009-11-13T17:20:00.002-06:00

One of the two most prominent findings this fall, from the superintendent search firm Hazard, Young & Associates, was the identification of the severely fractured relationships in our district. Yet, no semi-finalist candidate identified at Wednesday night’s special Board of Education meeting—when they had the opportunity in professional biographies written in their own words—listed collaboration any place among their professional histories of “significant accomplishments.”

Leadership is clearly about accomplishing something and taking responsibility for your work, but leaders know that real partnerships are not only critical to creating great work, partnerships are essential to sustaining that great work, too. Otherwise you're just a manager directing people to do things. Are we supposed to believe that these candidates did what they did alone? Or are we to believe they did it by telling workers, parents and community what do do, how to do it and when it needed to be done?

The absence of any evidence, again that they had the opportunity to list in their own words, that they value a collaborative environment that brought them the success they were proud to list has me eager to listen as carefully as possible to their public interviews this weekend.

This weekend will offer one more chance for each of them, in their own words, to offer even a modicum of evidence that any of them expect to find value in the 6,000 employees and community of over a quarter million people that one of them may be poised to inherit.

Or we call a do-over.

Vote for Vallay Moua Varro and Jean O'Connell!

2009-11-02T10:44:00.003-06:00

The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers is looking forward to the future of St. Paul Public Schools, which is why we chose to endorse two candidates who are looking forward with us. Vallay Moua Varro and Jean O’Connell have both shown a propensity to listen thoughtfully, demonstrate leadership, and see the best of what our schools offer. Both Vallay and Jean are school board candidates in this race who care as much as we do about the future of all our students, rather than being stuck in the past with insulting stereotypes of ethnicity and gender. We reject the bullying and shallow politics that have divided us and we are inspired by both Vallay’s and Jean’s good ideas and their plans to bring them to fruition cooperatively.

Pat Igo’s gross mischaracterization of this school board race, in the October 26th StarTribune story, with his superficial, inaccurate race-baiting says more about the rhetoric of the past he would bring to the school board when what we need most is relevant and insightful direction for our district so we can move forward together.

You cannot roll up your sleeves to improve our future if you’re busy wringing your hands over the past. Fortunately for St. Paul voters we have two candidates who took different paths to this school board race but came to the same conclusion: St. Paul Public Schools is still poised to offer a world of opportunities for all of our students with all of us working together.

We are honored that they both chose to share their clear talents and leadership with us and proud to endorse them both. We look forward to working alongside Vallay Moua Varro and Jean O’Connell to meet the needs of our students.

(This posting was submitted to the StarTribune as a letter to the editor on October 27th.)

Back-to-school business

2009-09-10T21:52:00.002-05:00

Today as I was visiting two buildings, one elementary and one middle school, it struck me how much teachers build on the work of each other and how profoundly that can help students.

I walked into Paul and Sheila Wellstone at lunch time. There is no better time to witness the muscle that goes into the work of teaching than to visit a building at lunchtime. Lessons pour out of every corner: five teachers leaving the lunch room teaching each class of students sequencing, taking turns, and respect simultaneously and in Spanish, another three teachers are bringing their classes to the lunchroom while walking backwards and teaching the same lessons, and in adjacent classrooms teachers are teaching students how to focus on the lesson in the room rather than the classes walking by outside their doors.

That sequencing will come in handy during reading lessons, taking turns while teaching patterns, and respect absolutely everywhere it can. The focusing and routines they are learning these first days of school will be built on each year after that, which was entirely evident when I walked through some classes later today at Washington Technology Magnet. One classroom had students working in small groups. When I approached them to ask what they were doing they rattled off exactly what their small group work was, in the order it was to be done. They explained their complex math problem to me, explained what they had to do once they solved it and then explained how they were going to explain it with the materials they had. Sequencing.

Another room I walked into was setting up expectations for the year by completing a T-graph with “My Job” (for the teacher) and “Your Job” (for the students). A great lesson to not only establish routines and expectations for the year, but to infuse the language of career and responsibility in a very relevant way into their vocabulary. The teacher shared, then students shared, the teacher shared and then students shared again. Taking turns.

I walked into another classroom, jam-packed with students—not a desk or square inch of floor space to spare—and the teacher ushered me to the front after finishing his explanation of what he wanted students to do for the last 5 minutes of class. As he and I spoke quietly and surveyed his classroom of students everyone was working right up to the bell. Respect and focus.

These teachers and these classroom experiences were not accidental. Our teachers know the importance of creating the right classroom climate and establishing routines right away. Today, I had the privilege of seeing how it all comes together to benefit student learning in the long run. The expectations set at each grade level, are set for the next grade or class, too.

It’s clear that our teachers intend to make it a great year for our students. I am once again humbled by their work.

All in a day's work

2009-09-04T23:02:00.002-05:00

Questioning the motivation of reaching out to students. Reviled for wanting to spend time with them at all when there’s more Important work to be done. Given no credit for offering any inspiration and no hope of anything getting Accomplished by your work. Suspected of merely wasting time. Assuming that nothing Productive will come of it. Skeptical because there is no way to Measure the impact. With all of the significant ways to spend your time, why would anyone with talent and leadership skills spend it with kids?

Criticism of President Obama? Only in the last week, but this is the world teachers have lived in for quite a while. Yet we begin another school year with teachers well practiced in how to tune out the white noise of irrelevant critics or citywide commotion and focus on what matters: students learning. In St. Paul we just spent another workshop week getting ready in district-wide meetings, with small groups of our colleagues and independently working on lessons, only this time we face a rather normal first week of school with children, so if you would, please pardon us for not getting our collective noses out of joint around a little pep talk intended to be delivered to our students for a few minutes on Tuesday.

It was a different story this time last year because St. Paul, Minnesota was bracing for the Republican National Convention. A super majority of our bus routes had to be altered for the whole week. Teachers were trying to track down rumors of high school students planning protests. Our kindergartners stayed home two extra days (not because we were making them protest to the best of my knowledge, it was in case the bus routes got too long). Everyone was scrambling to find or share curriculum. A myriad of calls came to the union with hypothetical questions, but above all else, the over-riding attitude was “How do we make this work for our students?” by everyone.

This time last year I was at a staff meeting at Paul and Sheila Wellstone Elementary School, barely a few blocks from the site of the Republican National Convention and I had some members of my union ask me "What if President Bush wants to do a photo op at our school?"

I said, "We'll make sure he can because he's the President of the United States and it will be an experience that your students will remember for the rest of their lives." Every last teacher agreed that it would be an experience for their students that they would not pass up. They went on to say that maybe even Senator Norm Coleman would want to stop by since he used to have his staff tutor there when he was mayor of St. Paul.

Had any of it happened, it would've been extremely cool because Wellstone Elementary is the one St. Paul school his dad, President George H. W. Bush, had visited when he was president. Back then it was called Saturn-School of Tomorrow, or something similarly Jetson-y and hopeful of the 21st Century; however no school visits ever happened by any Republicans anywhere in the city.

This time last year it was also the first week of school for our students, with all the garden-variety, first-week-of-school technicalities, glitches, blessings, surprises, accidents, and sunrise-like expectations that a new year always brings. St. Paul Public Schools was, perhaps, the most inconvenienced school district in the nation, yet we all carried an attitude of making this work for our students. That is probably a huge reason it did. Many teachers capitalized on it like the once-in-a-lifetime teachable moment that it was. There was never a massive outcry from the community or a similar great gnashing of teeth that we were using the Republican National Convention to teach our students.

Some things MUST transcend politics.

Again, please pardon St. Paul if we treat this like one more teachable moment in the lives of our students. Our teachers are well-versed in tuning out the fracas and our community can handle it.

Oh, and welcome to our profession, President Obama. Speak even if your voice shakes. We do.

Let the games begin

2009-08-31T19:45:00.002-05:00

Recently the comment period for the US Department of Education proposed Race to the Top guidelines was closed. After reading through the proposed criteria (http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html) I submitted my thoughts to the Department of Education. I will share them over the next few days here.

Dear Secretary Duncan:

Thank you for the opportunity to submit comments on the proposed criteria for Race to the Top funding. I was honored to be invited to attend the announcement on July 24th as a guest of the American Federation of Teachers. There are many goals in Race to the Top that inspire me, and with the right detail in the finalized criteria, these unprecedented resources could transform my profession in a way that allows us to meet the needs of our students and their families like never before. Because the Department of Education is providing an opportunity to make comments I would like to express my ideas for targeting the criteria in a way that better sustains the best work teachers already do and supports us as we tap our collective experience and knowledge to bring our most innovative ideas to life.

State Standards & Teaching Standards:

The collaboration you have outlined for developing and establishing common state standards is evident and helpful. In the same way that you have clearly outlined the expectations for high quality state standards and assessments in A(3) of the State Reform Conditions Criteria, the expectation for teacher preparation and teacher readiness must include clear expectations as well. It is not enough to limit the definition of measurement for or the conversation about teacher effectiveness to “regulatory barriers to linking data on student achievement or student growth” as you have defined with this notice. Generic student achievement data will not relevantly evaluate a teacher. [C(2)]

In St. Paul, we have gotten an agreement from St. Paul Public Schools to develop a Peer Assistance and Review program that covers the spectrum of teaching quality. Our intention is to enhance our current Achievement of Tenure Program so that earning tenure is never accidental, to have high-quality and relevant support for struggling teachers with clear expectations for improvement, as well as to have opportunities for strong teachers to be conscientiously supported as they continue to grow. A deliberate, rigorous path to tenure, support for someone before they fail, and further support for already strong teachers should be the focus of any meaningful local way of addressing teacher quality. To merely frame the discussion as tied to standardized test scores is to ignore the vast amount of learning and assessment a teacher is responsible for during the majority of our school year. My position is for the proposed criteria to be written to include the deliberate inclusion of developing teaching standards and evaluations that measure the entire scope of the daily and aggregate work a teacher is expected to do. Locally developed, relevant evaluations will be applicable to the broadest range of teachers and better capture the number of grade levels, specialties, disciplines, and experience levels for the targeted expectations you have outlined for professional development.[C(2)i]

Educational Assistant Bargaining Issues

2009-07-21T19:28:00.001-05:00

Today the work of the Educational Assistant Bargaining Team, from the training in January-the surveying this spring-and the planning and research this summer, really took off.

The EA bargaining team (Sue Snyder, Ann Sirios, Terri Furman, Rosie O’Brien, Mary Cathryn Ricker, staffed by Gundy Gunderson and Amy Derwinski) met with the district and presented the topics critical to improvement of the 2009-2011 contract.

Since a lot of the “housekeeping” work has been done, today’s meeting was an opportunity to begin to define what a robust labor/management partnership could mean to the students we serve when we thoughtfully address
job descriptions,
professional development,
seniority and movement within jobs,
working conditions,
security,
retirement, and
benefits/compensation.

Even though these topics were listed individually, the discussion among the team-and presented to the district- focused on how these subjects are enhanced and improved, just like a staff, when working together rather than discussed in isolation. The best way to do that is through a sustained, committed labor/management partnership and that partnership can begin at this bargaining table.

The Contract Action Team will be meeting on July 30th and two members of the EA bargaining team will be there to share more.

Vallay Varro for St. Paul School Board

2009-06-26T20:36:00.003-05:00

The Committee On Political Education screened candidates for the 2 year school board seat being vacated by Tom Conlon. The COPE found 3 candidates to be exceptional: Vallay Varro, Louise Toscano Seeba, and Meg Lugar-Nikolai. As a result the COPE offered a recommendation of endorsement of all three. Last night Vallay Varro was endorsed by a special convention of the St. Paul DFL.

Vallay Varro has been Mayor Coleman’s Education Policy Director for the past three and a half years. She is a leader in the Mayor’s efforts to connect and enhance out-of-school learning opportunities for children in Saint Paul between the school district, the non-profit sector, communities of faith, Ramsey County and the city government. During this time she has established a network of service providers that are now ready to partner with the school district. An Early Childhood educator and literacy specialist, she offers a comprehensive, citywide resource mobilizing approach to closing the achievement gap as well as the acumen to maintain and expand the specialty programs that make our public schools unique and invaluable to the city.

Good luck to Vallay!

SPFT School Board Endorsement

2009-06-24T14:42:00.002-05:00

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the COPE Committee for their time, both in February and this week, as they seriously deliberated the eligible, interested field of candidates to determine who should earn the endorsement of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers. The discussions were substantive, thoughtful and deeply focused on our members and the work we need to do. The candidates who ultimately earned that endorsement or recommendation show genuine consideration for our union, our members, our work as well as dynamic thinking for how to actively demonstrate that consideration and engage in a real partnership with the workers of St. Paul Public Schools.

The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers, Local 28's Committee On Political Education (COPE) is pleased to announce that we are endorsing Jean O'Connell for one of the three four year seats in this year's school board race. COPE found O'Connell's mix of management experience, teacher training in college, significant school volunteering and substantive leadership in various Saint Paul Public School's task forces a reassuring blend for the current difficulties facing the district.

O'Connell gave our screening team a sense of confidence and reassurance. We believe Jean will bring strong and open communication and that we will be able to develop a direct relationship that is based on trust and openness. Furthermore, her respect for direct, collective bargaining is a refreshing opportunity to explore both traditional and non-traditional issues together considerately.

To date, Local 28 has not endorsed any other candidates in the three four year seats. The announcement on action taken for the 2-year special election is forthcoming.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

2009-05-02T14:07:00.002-05:00

There is an unprecedented opportunity to invest in the quality and the future of St. Paul Public Schools because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. President Obama, through Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has insisted that this money be used to meet the needs of students while saving and creating jobs. It is an audacious goal for short-term money, but the provision is substantial enough that wise investment could make a meaningful difference for the students of St. Paul in the long run.

Because we know that teacher quality is the number one indicator of student success, and because the Administration has been clear that teacher effectiveness is one of the four objectives for spending this money in a way that meets the needs of students while saving jobs, we believe this is the perfect time to introduce Peer Assistance and Review (PAR). Establishing Peer Assistance and Review for probationary teachers and tenured teachers identified as struggling, provides more aggressive, honest support and evaluation earlier. This will provide a comprehensive and rigorous measure early in the achievement of tenure process that will facilitate a meticulous and well-observed path to tenure in St. Paul Public Schools. Additionally, tenured teachers who have been identified as struggling will have a thorough assistance program to hone in on the areas in which they may be struggling alongside expert teachers who are dedicated to support them as they improve their teaching and get back on track to doing their best work in meeting the needs of their students.

ARRA will give us time to launch PAR in a way that allows us to reconstruct our existing funding of such current district programs such as the Achievement of Tenure program and job-embedded coaching so that we don’t fall off the funding cliff in two years. The time we have between the first ARRA funding and our responsibility to absorb the cost of what we have adopted will provide us time to measure our influence, especially on behalf of our experienced teachers, in order to be in the running for further funding through the competitive grant process outlined by the Department of Education.

Membership budget ideas

2009-03-23T22:20:00.002-05:00

Members have been spending time at each membership meeting since January working to address the budget dilemma that faces our school district. When we began this conversation in January we had a complicated problem facing us, and it has only gotten more complicated since then. At our January membership meeting, we discussed what feasible budget reductions looked like. We talked about what it might mean to “keep cuts away from the classroom.” And we all agreed to take the discussions back to our buildings as homework for our February membership meeting.

In addition to the discussions we conscientiously brought back to our buildings, the district announced a series of tentative proposals to balance the budget, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was signed into law, and our Governor, Senate and House all announced their own budget ideas that would affect our work as well.

We spent considerable time at our February meeting just brainstorming our ideas, I promised to bring them to our Executive Board to review them and make recommendations. Today, the membership approved forwarding a few of those ideas for the Board's respectful consideration. I will present these humble ideas in a way that frames them amidst some of the best discussions we have generated in these membership meetings and in special member-group meetings in the last year. The conversations became comprehensive discussions on what we want a high quality experience to be in St. Paul Public Schools, so what started out as an exercise to offer value in the district budget discussions, because of the grace of good ideas, member involvement, and President Obama, may lead to an opportunity to use these member ideas to captain the ship into the rising tide.

The district budget deficit is real. The state budget deficit is real. The Federal stimulus package is temporary, but the St. Paul Federation of Teachers will treat this like any other obstacle we have had in our past and we will turn it into an opportunity. In the past when female teachers would get fired for getting married or showing their pregnancies, unions didn’t just complain—we did something about it. When teachers weren’t getting planning time, we didn’t just complain—we did something about it. When we were asked to teach in the boiler room or the janitor’s closet, we didn’t just complain—we did something about it. For 90 years this union, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, has been a model of progressive service and this budget crisis just serves as one more opportunity for that service.

Of the more than 50 ideas that came from members in the brainstorming process, some money-saving ideas have been sent to our respective bargaining teams for consideration in contract negotiations and some are going to the Professional Issues Committee so they can be discussed before being made public. Some were discarded and the following were approved by the membership at our March 23rd meeting to be respectfully presented to the Board of Education for their consideration as the ultimate authority and decision-making rests with them.
• Streamline administration
• Commit to a local superintendent search
• Revisit comprehensive transportation study to announce transportation reform or to announce that no change will be made
• Make buildings energy efficient with ARRA funding
• Cut outside consultants for professional development
• Evaluate the cost of sponsoring charter schools

Elected officials and others who have looked at the state and district budget can be forgiven for starting with cutting their way to balance, but we know because our family and consumer science teachers and math teachers among others have taught us, that a budget problem can look to revenue as well. We hope our work inspires them to explore the same combination of options. There are a few promising opportunities for us.

First, from work done with our members who are special education service providers, we have a group of members who are committed to forming an ad hoc committee to determine how to improve the billing work of special education service providers to increase revenue. We look forward to their solutions and we are extremely grateful for their commitment to provide this progressive service.

Next, today the members approved the St. Paul Federation of Teachers enrollment campaign to bring students to St. Paul Public Schools. We understand that, demographically, there is a declining student population in St. Paul. We understand that St. Paul has had a vibrant history of school choice. However, we believe we are the key to the world-class opportunities offered by St. Paul Public Schools, so this spring members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers and our allies will be meeting with families across St. Paul. As we speak with families currently enrolled in St. Paul Public Schools, we will thank them and offer an outline for how to spend a fantastic and magnificent summer of learning in the city of St. Paul to capitalize on their school work. As we meet families not yet enrolled in St. Paul Public Schools we will invite them into a conversation about the work we do to meet the needs of every student. While we have been incubating this idea for almost 2 years, we believe that the strength of what our members have to offer the students of St. Paul coupled with conditions of the budget warrant significant invitations to our community to trust the work of St. Paul Public Schools.

Finally, as soon as possible St. Paul Public Schools should do what it takes to issue bonds for the $20 million per year Other Post-employment Benefits liability so that it stops being an annual liability.

I'm certain there's more where this came from. Members have indicated their willingness at each membership meeting to problem-solve the issues facing us as professionals. With a greater number of our stewards trained as Certified Member Rights Advocates, more members trained through the Teachers as Learners and Leaders program, and more involved in local, state and national committee work that matters, it seems we're just getting started on a whole new level.

What would teachers do?

2009-03-15T23:35:00.002-05:00

We have a lot of decisions to make in St. Paul Public Schools. There is a serious budget crisis to deal with, stimulus package money to spend directly on students in a way that saves jobs, no good news coming from our state capitol, and our school board needs to show some leadership and determine how to fill our superintendent vacancy and provide clear direction for that person.

All that being said, it is instructive to take a few minutes to wonder what would teachers do if we were in charge?

First, our SPPS budget crisis. Because teachers have been funding our classrooms for years, buying more than our fair share of books, supplies, stickers, inspirational posters and white board markers it would make a lot of sense to immediately turn over purchasing to a team of teachers.

Our educational assistants have been doing work that is growing exponentially in sophistication in the last 2 decades, yet remain low-wage workers and severely under insured. Somehow they manage to excel at their day jobs while juggling two or three others deep into their SPPS careers. Clearly, no one is better suited to navigate the simultaneous challenge in the stimulus package of raising student achievement while saving jobs like our EAs, and they'll most likely do it in at least 3 languages.

What would teachers do with our state capitol? For starters, a lesson in leadership is in order. Our social studies teachers could set examples from history of leaders who made tough choices, but stood by them and, just for fun, examples of leaders who failed to drum up one single, original idea and were summarily crushed by the populace. Our teachers would do this, naturally, entirely within the expectations of the Minnesota Academic Standards so that in April we could test all occupants of the capitol on their growth.

What would we do with this superintendent vacancy? You know, technically we do have contract language that states we can be directed to fill in for a colleague during our planning time. We have over 3,000 licensed teachers. If we each took an hour, and assumed 10 hour days, we could cover just over 300 days of work for the superintendent if we each just took one hour. If the board were to provide clear expectations, lesson plans as it were, we could just pick up where our colleague before us left off and leave a nice note for the person coming after us.

All of these huge decisions would still be coming at us at full speed. We'd just have each other to rely on to make them. So what would teachers do?

SPFT Budget Brainstorming

2009-02-25T12:39:00.000-06:00

At our January membership meeting, the members present began a thoughtful discussion about the state of the SPPS budget for 2009-10. At that meeting, everyone agreed to take the budget discussion back to their respective buildings for further input and bring those ideas back to the February membership meeting. At Monday’s membership meeting we spent considerable time brainstorming and discussing our ideas to help solve the district budget crisis. Twenty-two different ideas were brought up with an additional 22 ideas coming from the building-level budget discussions that were brought back as a result of our work in January.

We want to make the beginning of our budget discussion as thorough as possible so it was decided that if members had more ideas to share they could send them (or call them in) to the St. Paul Federation of Teachers by March 6th. The complete list would be put together and presented to the Executive Board for discussion at the March 9th Executive Board meeting. The Executive Board will then determine any recommendations that will be made from the list that should be acted on by the membership at our March 23rd membership meeting.

While much has been publicly discussed and “proposed” regarding the $25 million shortfall our district has predicted, much remains to be decided. The SPPS budget is determined through many important numbers that remain variables at this point, most importantly 2009-10 student enrollment, the State legislature and Governor’s decisions about school funding, and the Federal Economic Stimulus package. What remained constant during our entire conversation in January and again in February was our collective belief of what students need in a high quality, non-negotiable public school experience.

Please continue to gather ideas and share them. Also, please encourage members to visit http://www.spps.org/ConversationU.html for the documents concerning the budget and for an opportunity to complete a survey the district has assembled to gather feedback on the Large Scale Systems Change, which has some budget questions in it. Finally, please encourage members to attend the “community engagement” sessions. While we are still requesting that the District hold a series of specific Staff engagement sessions, we believe that we belong at any community session as stakeholders as well.

Below are the opportunities to be involved in the conversation throughout this spring as listed on the district website:

MARCH
• March: Parent/Advisory Committee (PAC) discussion on LSSC - Click here for schedule
• March 11 - April 10: Web feedback on Budget Shortfall Solutions 2009-2010 - via the website
• March 26: Board Listening Session (no topic - open forum)
APRIL
• April: Parent/Advisory Committee (PAC) discussion on LSSC - Click here for schedule
• April 7: Public Forum (location, date and time TBD)
• April 21: Board of Education - BOE meeting (Possible sharing of draft recommendations for LSSC and Budget)
• April 21 - May 14: Web Feedback on LSSC Recommendations
• April 28: Public Forum (location, date and time TBD)
MAY
• May: Parent/Advisory Committee (PAC) discussion on LSSC - Click here for schedule
• May 19: Board of Education - BOE meeting (Possible sharing of draft recommendations for LSSC)
• May 28: Board Listening Session (no topic - open forum)
JUNE
• June 16: Board of Education - BOE meeting (Possible sharing of draft recommendations for Shortfall Solutions and LSSC)
Note: Staff input on budget and large-scale system changes will be solicited at site, program and department levels. In addition, staff will be invited to attend public forums and give feedback through the website.

Thank you very much for your representation of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers and thank you very much for your continued work in St. Paul Public Schools.

Together, mary cathryn

Rally at the School Board meeting

2009-02-19T11:58:00.002-06:00

I am going to ask for the comments made by our members at the rally this past Tuesday so I can publish them here for all members to see. They were powerful, eloquent, and sincere statements about their passion for working with students and their learning communities. In the meantime, here are my comments from the rally.

Teachers at Arlington and Humboldt learned about their restructuring plans after a Committee of the Board meeting. Staff learned about budget proposals after a Committee of the Board meeting. We shouldn't be learning about these plans after meetings, we should be bringing plans to these meetings.

Teachers can be trusted to help find solutions to all the issues the district is tackling from restructuring to declining enrollment and capricious funding.

Our members who just spoke are right: We want to see restructuring strengthen schools, not weaken them. We want to see budgeting strengthen schools, not weaken them, we want to see decision-making strengthen the work we do, and not weaken it.

St. Paul Public Schools can be poised to do everything right. St Paul can – and should—be the model for all of the other districts in the state facing drastic budget challenges and restructuring mandates.
And who can make that happen? We can!
Who can strengthen our schools? We can!
Who can meet the needs of our students? We can!
Who can make St. Paul Public Schools better? We can!
We can and we will! And when we do our students win and when our students win our community wins!
Join your brothers and sisters from Arlington, join our members from Humboldt, join us at our February 23rd membership meeting as we offer ideas for the budget, join me tonight in the School Board meeting. Join the fight for our voice and the future of our students. Thank you!

Long time, no see--Sorry. I was just in the back of the class.

2009-01-11T19:02:00.003-06:00

Nothing like a new year to, albeit belatedly, get back into the swing of things.

I was alerted to an interesting posting in the Superintendent's Bulletin that suggested the impact of "good teachers" on student achievement. It
implied that a teacher "at the 85%" was the key to student learning. Class
size was deemed unimportant.

Some concerns were emailed to me regarding the idea that everyone in one career must be performing at the same level at all times. While I take exception to that, too (and I'm pretty sure it was the storyline of an old Twilight Zone that even included matching jumpsuits and hairstyles! I was a big fan of the brunette flip. Big surprise, I know.) I'm more disconcerted by these folks who are obsessed with proving that wall to wall students are NOT the problem. Ever.

I have seen various studies claiming that class size has no impact on student achievement and so then I'm compelled to ask, "What impact does it have on the profession?" Just because supposedly a teacher is good whether there are 16, 24, or 46 Second graders in a class, do we want that good teacher to teach for 5 years or to make a career out of it?

Invariably the answer seems to be, "So what if we chew them up and spit them out? At least we got 5 good years out of them. Now they can go and begin their REAL careers anyway."

These are the same education reformers who dream up 'career ladders' for teachers so we can climb out of our lowly classroom positions and we don't make the mistake of accidentally spending our whole careers in a classroom.

Good teachers can wade through damn near anything to have an impact, absolutely. But we need have a comprehensive discussion about our profession so we keep them around working their magic and support them for as long as possible. This is still a career to be proud of, not some starter profession to kill time until you get to make your impact on the world by researching the futility of smaller class sizes.

David Brooks' Reform School

2008-12-07T23:28:00.002-06:00

For someone with national credentials, columnist David Brooks’ education policy naivety is staggering.

In a recent column Mr. Brooks started out by saying, “As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.”

And then it just bogged down into repeating the cliched good vs. evil, educational equivalent of those-people-hate-our-freedom, you’re either with us or against us, “I’m the decider” arguments with all the authenticity of a good round of pro-wrestling, feather boa notwithstanding.

Which contradiction is my favorite? It’s so hard to decide from the generous 31 flavors offered up by Mr. Brooks. The first one, of course, is that merit pay for teachers is so obviously good, but the “greater funding” that might actually serve as the revenue stream for that merit pay is bad.

Charter schools: good. The smaller class sizes found in virtually every charter school in the country: bad.

Secure and undisclosed “tough accountability standards” are good. “Superficial reforms” like tougher standards to get into our teaching profession are just the kind of accountability that students can clearly do without.

Yes Mr. Brooks, there are some things that educational funding can’t buy, but luckily for those of us rolling up our sleeves working to make public schools better, there’s common sense.

Pass it on

2008-10-21T17:05:00.003-05:00

I've had an email forwarded to me several times and so I thought I would post the general response to the points it raises.

The responses below do not represent a comprehensive overview of the PEIP proposal, just a response to the points raised by the original email. For a comprehensive overview, I invite you to attend an informational meeting.

(Email with my points in bold and Italicised.)
1. You have to choose one clinic as your primary clinic. You have to go to only that clinic unless you have a referral from your doctor to go some where else. I know you can change what you list as your primary clinic so many times a year, but I don't know how many.

Yes, you have to choose one clinic as your primary clinic. You can change primary clinics monthly.

2. You need a referral to go to any other doctor (like a specialist of some kind) that isn't in your primary clinic. When I asked if that requires only one referral, I was told the doctor would have to list how many times you could see that other doctor. If you need to see the other doctor more times than was listed on the original referral form you would have to get another referral. It's not a blank referral that would say you could see them as many times as needed for a year. They have to list how many times that would be. I was told by Gundy at the union office that the reason referrals are required is because by doing that it cuts down on how many times people go to a specialist that usually costs more. -If you're like me, you want/need the freedom to go to doctors you choose without a referral. No one really knows when something will happen that will require a specialist or how many times they will need to go.

Actually, referrals are not needed for the 5 most commonly referred situations: chiropractic care, OB/GYN, chemical dependency care, mental health care, and vision care. Those 5 areas are self-referral. Other areas of care need a referral from a primary clinic and that referral is set for the number of times your medical doctor determines is appropriate. Actually, doctors have been trained to have the expertise to know what might happen when you experience certain symptoms and have a general idea of the method and frequency of treatments. .

Depending on the relationship your doctor has with you specialist and/or you the re-referral can happen a few different ways. The specialist calls your doctor after your last visit and says “Re-refer Patient A because I’m not done treating Medical Issue B.” The specialist sends you back to your doctor or the specialist asks you to phone your doctor and ask for the re-referral.

Whether Gundy is right or not, I can’t say. I do know the medical community is concerned with self-diagnoses. Perhaps this is a way to catch someone who believes they have one ailment soon enough to treat them successfully for the correct ailment so perhaps the referral system is intended to provide someone with the proper care.

2. The rate or tier you pay for all doctors you see (even those specialists you are referred to) depends on the rating your primary clinic has. This includes hospitals. Every place you go to you will pay according to the level/tier your primary clinic has been assigned. -The doctor I like to see for all my pre-op exams and other things is at a clinic that is rated a level 3. That means I would have to pay that rate when I go to any of my other doctors too. Currently my specialists have a lower co-pay than my regular doctor has. I'm thinking most people wouldn't want to be locked in to paying at the one level or tier that their clinic is rated. Of course, there is the option of changing doctors & naming a lower level/tier clinic as their primary clinic, but not everyone would want to change doctors.

This looks accurate for this person’s situation. Co-pays, etc. are rated by the Tier your primary clinic is in. Just over 80% of the clinics in the PEIP network are Tier 2 clinics but clearly that leaves 20% of the clinics to be Tiers 1, 3, or 4.

4. The co-pay cost for same day surgery or hospital stay surgery is higher. - Here is how it works for the Health Partners Distinction plan . Currently if I have surgery and stay in the hospital I pay nothing for a co-pay at a level 1 hospital and $250 for a level 2 hospital. On the new plan I would have to pay $450 for an inpatient surgery because my primary clinic is considered a level/tier 3 clinic. Currently if I have outpatient surgery I pay a $25 co-pay at a level 1 hospital and $50 at a level 2 hospital. On the new plan I would pay a $220 co-pay for any hospital outpatient surgery due to the classification of my primary clinic. I realize that might not be the same for everyone depending on what rating their primary care clinic is given, but it's something to think about. None of us know when we will need surgery. I had hardly been to a doctor until I retired and found out I had b.c..

These numbers are true for someone in the Distinctions plan. Here are some other numbers that would be applicable comparisons from Distinctions to Advantage as well: Chiropractic care: $30 (with Wellness Initiative) vs. $27. Ambulance: 80% coverage vs. 95% coverage. Prescription drugs: $12 for generics vs. $10, $24 for brand name vs. $16, non formulary NOT COVERED vs. $36, OutOfPocket Max: NONE vs. $800. A comprehensive comparison reveals savings and costs from both plans, which would apply differently to different people.

I do appreciate that she realizes that this is not the same for everyone. In addition to everyone’s unique set of circumstances, there are about 1,200 people who don’t take Distinctions. Ultimately everyone must do what this person did and that is study it from their own vantage point to determine how they feel about the potential of switching to PEIP from the district health insurance pool.

5. The difference in monthly cost between the Health Partners Distinction plan we currently have and the higher level of the public employee plan is $31.89 for one person, $72.02 for a single + 1 plan, and $90.51 for a family plan.
I'm wondering if you're like me and feel the advantage of going to any doctor you want without a referral is worth the small additional cost. The referral part alone makes it worth it to me. All it takes is 50% + 1 vote to switch to the public employee plan so everyone's vote really counts.

The difference in monthly costs is accurate. However, one person’s couch change is another’s college savings account. It is difficult to tell a member with an $11 pay check after health insurance expenses that $32, $72, or even $90 isn’t worth it. It is equally difficult to tell someone scared that their cancer will re-emerge that it’ll all be fine.

Clearly access to affordable and high-quality health care is important to everyone or we wouldn’t have spent so much time at so many membership meetings in the last 3 years on this subject. It is also clear that some members want access and quality so affordability isn’t an issue to them. It’s also clear that some members want quality and affordability so access is less of an issue to them.

In the aggregate, we need to work toward a balance of access, affordability and quality that meets the needs of our members. We have been trying to do that through our legislative advocacy, our bargaining team work, and through investigating the Public Employee Insurance Program (PEIP).

Every vote is important. However, this vote continues our discussion on a suitable solution to affordable, accessible, and high-quality health care, it does not finish it. Our bargaining teams' work needs to continue and our legislative advocacy needs to continue as well.

Jeanne Sedgwick, Minnesota School Nurse of the Year!

2008-10-17T08:41:00.002-05:00

NOTE: I need to take time out of our PEIP discussion to celebrate with everyone that Local 28's own Jeanne Sedgwick has been named Minnesota School Nurse of the Year by the School Nurse Organization of Minnesota. I was allowed to speak last night at Jeanne's award ceremony to congratulate her and so I'm sharing my comments below. Please join me in congratulating Jeanne and thanking all of our school nurses!

It is an honor to be here tonight to share my admiration with all of you for Jeanne Sedgwick. School nurses hold a very special place in education both for classroom teachers and for parents and I am eager to honor both Jeanne and all of you in either capacity. You may be familiar with Jeanne’s many leadership positions, from the Executive Board of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers to the American Federation of Teachers Health Care Program and Policy council. Leaders tap into Jeanne Sedgwick because of her positive attitude, her tenacious work-ethic, and her hopeful spirit grounded in a deep and powerful knowledge of good nursing

As grateful as I am to be one of those leaders who has Jeanne just a phone call away, I am much more humbled by the work she does for students. Students and families tap into Jeanne for many of the same reasons we do. They see her positive attitude as being consummately approachable. Her tenacious work-ethic is revealed in superior service to students in crisis and those with chronic conditions. Her hopeful spirit is evident to them by the sincere care she delivers, again all of this grounded in a deep and powerful knowledge of good nursing.

Amidst the health care crisis that pervades our communities and even our nation; in a state where we still seem to tolerate having over 80,000 children not covered by any insurance plan, school nurses stand ready with as many hours as you are given to be the first responders, the triage unit, and the urgent care center for our students. I know the work I did as a classroom teacher was more effective because of the school nurse in my building. I know that the work I do for all my members is made better by this school nurse on my executive board, and I know that the work of the School Nurse Organization of Minnesota will be made better with Jeanne Sedgwick as your school nurse of the year.

One of the ways the American Federation of Teachers advocates for students is by declaring "Every Child Needs a School Nurse." I think we can all agree that we need Jeanne Sedgwick, her attitude, work ethic, spirit and knowledge. On behalf of the membership of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, congratulations Jeanne!

Health Insurance Education

2008-10-14T21:29:00.002-05:00

The calls and emails I have gotten in the last week from members have been a series of diverse questions about personal circumstances, budgetary bottom lines, fact-checking, and union solidarity. All of the communications have had one thing in common: Members doing their best to immerse themselves in the issue of the best health insurance policy for the best money.

It's been a pleasure listening to, talking to, and emailing everyone and it makes me look forward to our information sessions as well. A few things are very clear to me already:

Members are voraciously educating themselves to make the most informed decision possible.
Members want high-quality health care.
Members want affordable, accessible health care.

All this leads me to believe even more that we were right to put this decision squarely in members' hands. These things are not new. Almost from the day I started I have fielded emails and phone calls, presided over membership meetings and contract discussions, and listened to members at staff meetings and come to the same conclusion.

We want high-quality health care. We hate to see our colleagues denied treatments when a family doctor is over-ruled by a hospital administrator or use crossing their fingers as their deductible plan.

We want it to be affordable for everyone. It kills us to see our brothers and sister in our union and in other unions bringing home 75 cent paychecks or working 3 jobs so they can have health insurance AND an income.

We want it to be accessible. We don't want health care rationed one way or the other. We want sick people to get the attention they need to be well and we want healthy people to get the attention they need to stay that way.

We want to be informed. Time and again members will read about it, study it, question it, and then read it again. We want to make the most educated decisions possible.

The above conclusions have made me realize that we were right to put this decision squarely in the hands of members because we are acting fabulously like the labor union we are. When we are informed we make good decisions. We are the sort of people who care intrinsically about others so we want to make collective decisions for the common good.

Use this blog for any discussions you would like, attend an informational meeting at the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, and return that ballot (being mailed to you on October 20th with instructions) by October 29th at 5 p.m.

More about PEIP

2008-10-05T21:20:00.003-05:00

Health insurance, like your paycheck, is a serious and often emotional issue. We have been researching the possibility of the Public Employee Insurance Pool for about 15 months as one of a few promising opportunities to improve the affordability of high quality health care for all our members. This is fundamentally important to the St. Paul Federation of Teachers for at least two reasons, one close to home and one grounded in our community.

The cost of health insurance has taken up more and more of that other serious and emotional issue, your paycheck. When the two most serious and emotional issues converge upon our members it leads to some untenable situations. Some members are taking home a few dollars on their paychecks after paying for health insurance. We also have members who have taken their healthy children out of our health insurance pool and insured them on the open market with catastrophic deductible plans so they can afford to keep working in the district. Sadly, we also have former members who have severed employment with St. Paul Schools for a job in a district that offers more affordable coverage, even when that means a cut in salary because the member still takes home more money at the end of the month.

Improving the health insurance situation of our members is a start, not a solution. The other reason this decision is fundamentally important to us is grounded in the same reason we chose to work in a public school district in the first place. We determined our talent and then sought out a career that would leave the world a little better than the way we found it. Similarly, unions are formed to improve peoples’ lives. Finding more affordable health insurance for us will not stop our work to improve access to affordable and high quality health insurance for our students and their families where we can. Strong public schools rely on healthy communities and healthy communities don’t exist where there are disparities in health care. We know that even when we are successful in attaining affordable health insurance, our working conditions will not improve until our students and their families have the same high quality, affordable health care that we have.

We are committed to continuing our work in partnership with Take Action Minnesota to create an affordable health care system for all in Minnesota. We will support the work of Education Minnesota for broad-ranging health care solutions. Most importantly right now though, we are dedicated to making the PEIP proposal a thoughtful decision among our membership.

Public Employee Insurance Pool

2008-09-30T23:21:00.002-05:00

Dear St. Paul Federation of Teachers Community:

The Executive Board of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers authorized a vote of the full eligible membership of every bargaining unit of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers to determine if we leave the school district health insurance pool and enter the Public Employee Insurance Pool.

We are excited to give you this power because we think it belongs to you. For 3 years I have heard stories, read emails and been copied on letters that have indicated you wanted something done about the rising cost of health insurance. We responded. We aggressively stepped up our efforts in advocating for a law that would form a statewide pool for all school employees as a way to control costs, sponsored by our state union Education Minnesota. We worked side by side with Take Action Minnesota to form a coalition of organizations with the common goal of affordable health care for all in the entire State of Minnesota that continues its work today, and we researched the possibility of the Public Employee Insurance Pool.

The result of 15 months of research and comparisons is this vote. We look forward to making this decision with you, not as the solution to the spiraling cost of health care, but as the start. We present it to you with the thoughtfulness of a contract settlement. We understand you need to measure it against your own situation and life circumstances and, as in contract settlements, we ask that you consider the possibility that this may be a moment, in the spirit of Margaret Mead, where one small group of people can, without a doubt, collectively improve our corner of the world.

Together,

Mary Cathryn D. Ricker, President
St. Paul Federation of Teachers, Local 28

For more information, visit www.spft.org and www.pbgp.org for meeting dates and cost and plan comparisons.

Do you like soup?

2008-09-29T22:02:00.002-05:00

Do you like soup?

So began the beguiling fund raising pitch of my daughter this time last year. It was the first year that the fund raising spiel at her school took and she was into it. The salesperson/performer had razzle-dazzled her sufficiently that she just had to sell. She was compelled to. I had tried my best to deflect by setting the information on the kitchen counter, changing the subject, reading a book, but she imperceptibly found the material and then jumped me with the “Do you like Soup, Mom?” question.

I am like a lot of mothers, or at least enough like my own mom, to love my children through food, so I answered. Of course I liked soup. I loved making soup. Why do you ask? And then I saw the brochure in her hand. How had she done that? –so well? What had they turned her into? –so quickly? Could this talent be harnessed for good, or would her future be as some waifish, yet tough-as-nails repo woman squeezing delinquent student loan payments out of unsuspecting college grads?

And then I started to get angry. How long had the assembly taken? What class did you miss to attend? How much time will it take your teacher to collect this material each morning? She didn’t know the answers really, but I was seething inside with even more percolating. You want to go around the neighborhood to sell, Sweetheart? Let’s start at 1006 Summit Avenue. Let’s go to our state senator’s house, and then let’s call on our state house representative. Next, let’s do the state senator to the south of us.

You get the point.

The thing is, I don’t really think the Governor and our collective state legislature get the point. I’m not sure our Federal elected officials get the point. Our children are fund raising for their own education because the adults in charge of funding their education don’t have the collective nerve to raise the funds to keep them from hawking wrapping paper, frozen pizzas, and cheap plastic crap. Not to mention the soup.

How did this happen?! What brought us to this and why the hell aren’t we angrier about it?

I can remember selling an embarrassment of trinkets, fruit cakes, and sundries to fund my high school band program, but I got a trip to Hawaii for the Aloha Bowl out of the deal. My brother sold kitchen gadgets and other items to fund new football jerseys for his team. Maybe those were gateway sales for the big money that fund raising is today and for the laundry list of materials and personnel needed to be funded by fund raisers, but it is a crime when our students need to fund raise to afford writer’s notebooks, school supplies or a host of other necessities.

Now I have 2 children who had the pleasure of being freshly deputized as junior salespeople on behalf of their own education. I might have to interrupt their neighborhood turf-cutting discussion just long enough to drive them to the Governor’s Residence and knock on that door.

I hope he likes soup.

Pawlenty of empty education ideas

2008-09-24T08:05:00.003-05:00

I am struggling to understand how a man who can get a law degree and go on to become Governor can be so naive about what it takes to become a teacher.

Governor Pawlenty has prescribed yet another series of education initiatives short on details and long on rhetoric. Perhaps the most shallow is his nebulous idea of fast-tracking other professionals into teaching. First he thinks that the recruitment and training of teachers can be done without spending much, according to this morning's StarTribune article.

Ask any teacher, but especially those who have gone through traditional teacher preparation programs, and you will hear that they believe it should actually take longer and be more rigorous to become a teacher. They will especially point to what can be precipitously short student-teacher assignments, one of the most crucial links to long-term teacher success as well as a powerful testing period to assure that the profession of teaching will stick.

What you need to know is that moving from a handful of weeks of student teaching to a high quality internship program is going to cost money. It is unconscionable to ask someone to leave their current job to practice teaching full time for 10 months and not expect to compensate them somehow. In short, asking them to commit themselves to the best internship experience possible and expect them to balance a part-time job at the same time is sinister.

Furthermore, Governor Pawlenty is quoted in the StarTribune as saying that mid-career professionals "...shouldn't have to go back to college for four years or six years to be certified to teach."

Huh?

Since when has any mid-career professional ever had to go back to school for 4-6 years? Even the longest, most comprehensive traditional post-baccalaureate teacher preparation programs are about 18 months long. The naivety of his comment should frighten all of us who care about this profession and the students we are committed to serving by becoming teachers.

There are over 70,000 experts in the state of Minnesota who have gone through traditional teacher preparation programs as well as used emergency waivers to enter the teaching profession and have then been able to test the strength of their preparation against the real-life, daily rigors of the job and every time I talk to them they have very thoughtful ideas about how to make preparation better.

The Governor needs to ask for these expert opinions, but then he has to want to hear the ideas.

How that conversation went...

2008-09-24T02:08:00.003-05:00

Monday night a cross section of members from across the district attended the meeting I called to discuss the powerpoint document that Superintendent Meria Carstarphen sent out to everyone on September 4th. (access the document at http://www.spps.org/System_Changes.html)

Members were receptive to my analogy of this being our 'Ed Harris moment' from Apollo 13 where he retorts to a panicked and paralyzed Mission Control, "With all due respect gentlemen, I think this could be NASA's finest hour." However, even though the members present wanted to resist the-sky-is-falling stark statistics and find jumping off points for opportunity, the mood was one of resignation.

The overall assumption is that decisions have been made and they will be revealed to us on a need to know basis. The perception of an educational October Surprise is hard to overcome, but until such plans are actually revealed we have no choice but to press forward engaging our members in discussions about this information.

What are our ideas for improving our schools at the same time we address the concerns raised by these numbers? How will we at teachers and educational assistants and school/community service professionals engage parents in a discussion, too?

Can we make hard decisions and come out of it stronger? Can this be our finest hour?

Only if we're allowed into Mission Control to help guide this ship.

A Conversation about the Future of St. Paul Schools

2008-09-21T22:39:00.002-05:00

Recently I sent out an invitation for members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers to attend a meeting tomorrow (4 p.m. at the SPFT office) to begin discussing the 100+ page document that Superintendent Meria Carstarphen sent out on September 4th.

The Superintendent's email compiled a lot of statistics relevant to the health of our district: busing costs, student populations, building capacity, etc. What the email didn't do was outline our issues definitively or suggest solutions. Reading between the lines the document certainly seems to suggest that we have busing cost issues, space issues, recruitment issues and more.

What the document didn't suggest was what opportunities may reside in those numbers or what solutions may exist and while there has been a repeated commitment to engage the public around these numbers, I didn't want to wait for someone to ask us.

I am holding the meeting tomorrow because I think our membership could have the keys to some of these solutions. At the very least we should not wait for someone to engage us in any fears, questions or uncertainty this data about our district may raise. At the most someone should ask us what we think and ask if we can make this district better with our ideas and based on our experience in and commitment to St. Paul Public Schools.

I am excited to begin this conversation with members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers. I just hope our union isn't the only one asking our members for this conversation. That would be a waste of the talent and energy of over 3,600 people and a huge loss to St. Paul Public Schools and our community.

What should school leadership look like?

2008-09-18T16:43:00.003-05:00

Today I am meeting with the AFT's Program and Policy Council and we began our day with this question. It was a valuable discussion because right now this question is being answered by everyone but teachers and our unions.

School leadership should include teachers as instructional leaders and it should include thoughtful and intentional collaboration.

Albert Einstein was credited with saying that we cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war. In the same way, teachers and educational support professionals cannot expect to carry out a sincere welcome and collaborative learning environment so that every student feels valued when we are drowning in the pervasive message that says we are not valued.

When people running school districts publicly state that education reform doesn't get anywhere when you cooperate with teachers, Like Washington, DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee said recently, I think we need to ask right back, "and how's it working for you to fight with teachers all the time?" Really. Where does that get you? And what does that do for students?

School leadership must start with collaboration, or it's not leadership; it's a military junta. We can be lead by leaders or we can be ruled by dictators, but we can't have both and I will not stand for people who do one thing but call it another for publicity sake.

So, what should school leadership look like?

BIG news, Our Future, and the AFL-CIO

2008-09-17T00:39:00.002-05:00

It seems that the St. Paul Federation of Teachers is surrounded by big news and we are in the thick of just about all of it.

First, the Superintendent has sent out a very comprehensive power point presentation that invites us to have a conversation about out future. Because so many members have been talking and/or asking about this we have scheduled a conversation to begin at the St. Paul Federation of Teachers on September 22nd at 4:15 p.m. because I think we are uniquely suited to begin this conversation about what will make our good school district great.

I have also been completely unapologetic in my blatant co-opting of Ed Harris' best line of Apollo 13 in insisting that, with all due respect, "this could be our finest hour" rather than a meek opportunity for hand-wringing and shoulder shrugging: two of my LEAST favorite pastimes.

I also just returned from the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention where one of the resolutions we passed concerned improved state funding for public education. While I absolutely agree that we need funding that is equitable, sustainable, predictable, and sufficient; I want to make sure that we define those things in a way that allows the St. Paul Public School District to meet the needs of the gorgeous cross-section of students we teach. It is up to us to make sure we are at the table to help define those characteristics.

Finally, the highlight of the AFL-CIO convention, indeed the highlight of St. Paul for the last 3 years, was Mayor Chris Coleman. Not only did the Mayor address the need for development and healthy labor relations both as economic development tools and city vitality, he spent considerable time outlining how he sees his job as a complement to our school work, not as usurping it. The Mayor stressed again and again how he looks to learn how to do things for teachers and for our school district rather than doing things to us without our input.

All of these current events point to opportunities for members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers to lead in our community.

I'm looking forward to it. I look forward to us.

Ask me

2008-09-11T22:22:00.002-05:00

The coverage of education issues and ideas in the presidential race is inconsistent at best. Probably because both candidates have chosen to focus on the Iraq war, the economy and energy matters instead. When education is talked about, as I have said here before, it is usually to use the phrase "teacher's union" as an expletive.

I, for one, am done with that.

There is no topic I would rather mobilize my members around more than their own, phenomenal expertise.

When you want to improve heart surgery, do you pull together a group of legislators or do you pull together some with-it heart surgeons?

If you wanted to develop an amazing, efficient and accurate software program for accounting, would you ask the National Governor's Association or recognized CPAs?

Let's say you wanted to design more durable heat shields for the space shuttle, would you focus group some college professors or engineers?

Pardon the rhetorical nature of all of the above, but why in John Dewey's name, are teachers the only group that is ever left out of the education reform discussions? Why are teacher's unions locked out of the secure and undisclosed brainstorming sessions around improving learning?

Why are you so scared of us?

We're teachers for Harriet Bishop's sake. We wear denim jumpers with wooden beads, our earrings resemble school houses, and we keep cardigan sweater manufacturers in business. Sometimes we wear our sandals with socks and ride our bikes to school in the snow.

Our summer vacations include fossil hunting, monuments of the Revolutionary War, and standing in awe of textbook examples of glacial moraines. We are over-represented in populations that collect state-specific quarters.

We are the sort of people who earn our National Board Certification for fun and buy bean seeds, potting soil, and Dixie Cups every spring for our class when we read Paul Fleishman's SeedFolks.

We're the people who put Newbery winners on the best seller list and write grants for all of our phy ed students to have their own pedometers.

We've been meeting for coffee and lesson planning on Saturday mornings long before that would have been called a Professional Learning Community and we run canned food drives, penny drives, book drives, winter coat drives and mitten drives.

We knit scarves and hold fund raisers to buy extra milk for our students.

On top of that, we hold video-conferences with scientists and astronauts. We bring professional writers and musicians in to work directly with our students.

We scrape together money to bring our students to the Weisman Art Museum in collaboration with other districts to improve cultural understanding and desegregate our learning. We help students turn current events into poetry, artwork, theater or dance.

We pull history out of literature and sentence fluency out of history. We tap into multi-genre writing to foster inter-disciplinary thinking. We demonstrate to students how a bill becomes a law by making blueberry the Official State Muffin.

So get over it. Don't let the denim jumper and overhead marker stains fool you.

We are the expertise for which you have been looking.

Just ask me. Better yet, ask my members.

Discipline Toolbox

2008-09-07T22:50:00.002-05:00

So, rumor has it that the teachers in one of our schools have been told that the discipline policy this year is that they are forbidden to send out any of their students from class at any time. For any reason. It has been deemed verboten to ask a student to leave no matter how creatively they conjugate certain Anglo-Saxon normatives and no matter the volume of the oral conjugation. No matter what.

Really?!

I was told that when teachers spoke up to ask about those extreme behaviors that happen from time to time, they were told 'that's what you all have a toolbox of management ideas for. Unless there is a weapon involved or a student is seriously hurt use something from your toolbox.'

Really?!

I almost don't know where to start with this one. I am tempted to start with the word "seriously" because it is begging for definition. As in, when you say "seriously hurt," exactly how conscious should the student be? Like, "It seems like he suffered a concussion, but it looked moderate, not serious." Do we quantify the loss of bodily fluids in categories? As in, "I would have sent her out of class but the blood loss was minor, not serious." However, the whole edict is so absurd that I struggle to focus.

Of course the toolbox comment is out of line, too. Obviously, we all have a toolbox for 95% of the behaviors we experience (which is why we don't send out 30 out of 32 students all the time, we only send out 2 of 32 students from time to time, for example) but we need support for those 5% of behaviors that we don't have the time, space, skill, wit, mutant gene, language, super power, Kevlar, or strength to handle.

We cannot, CANNOT, be expected to accurately predict, prevent, or react to 100% of the misbehavior we encounter 100% of the time while simultaneously teaching to a standard that we've written in kid-friendly language and posted on our wall, entertaining, requesting iPods-cellphones-pdas are put away, heterogeneously grouping, monitoring, adjusting, checking for understanding, watching for spitballs, picking up paperclips, handing back assignments, quieting students down for announcements, requesting about the iPods again, handing out a bathroom pass, diagnosing an illness as worthy of a school nurse visit or not, lending pencils, lending paper, collecting assignments, recording student wonderings on chart paper, collecting paper footballs, getting the box fan to blow on the students equally(or rotating equally who gets to sit by the heater), and answering the phone when the office calls.

Regardless, classrooms should never feel like they could even possibly become mere holding pens where the clock slows to a crawl as you pray for the period to end so that the belligerent student you can't send out, but who has successfully destroyed your lesson, your class, and your morale, can finally leave.

Luckily, we are at that beginning-of-the-year infatuation stage where anything is still possible and I think our student conduct contract language on page 66 is just the place to start. The St. Paul Federation of Teachers will be working with this building to fix this problem, and if you'd like, I'll keep you posted on our progress.

In the meantime, it looks like telling you to put cape on your back to school list a few entries ago could come in handy, couldn't it?

A Teacher's Answer

2008-09-04T22:45:00.004-05:00

I still find myself steamed at these education reformers who believe that education can be reformed by a rap on your knuckles with a ruler from some ivory tower or elected position, rather than from engaging teachers in discussions about what works to teach students and what fails to teach them. There is enough rhetoric about what needs to be done to teachers once they are finished with that ruler to fill an iPod. Merit pay, stricter accountability, abolishing tenure, unsustainable pilot programs, and the list goes on.

Tonight John McCain said, in a tone that suggested he thought it was a brand-new idea, that when he is president finally “teachers will answer to parents and students.”

Uh…Roger that John, except for the part where you think teachers don’t answer to parents and students. And except for the part where you listed parents before students. Teachers do answer to students and parents John, in that order. We always have. It’s why we got into this gig. We love our subject matter, we have a talent for teaching, and we picked an age level that dove tails with our talent.

All of you, John McCain included, can get over yourselves falling over each other to see who can insult teachers and our unions first and best.

Let me get this right, Sarah Palin can refer to her husband as a proud member of the Steelworkers, but I should somehow be ashamed to be a member of the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association?

And another thing, in the last 30 years you have been responsible for writing some of the most neglected education law in our country. In the last 30 years you have been responsible for under funding some of the most promising education laws in our country. Yet, somehow, teachers are the problem of the last 30 years of education? Say more about that…

We are teaching the children and young adults in our community. With the talent and care we bring to our jobs. With the resources we have. And with the determination to leave this world better than the way we found it. And we are represented by a union. So you can stop treating us like we’ve somehow gamed our way onto your 6-figure, platinum health care senate gravy train, John.

I believe in our members so strongly that I left the classroom I love to work for a better profession for all of us. Because the teachers, educational assistants, and school & community service professionals who believe in our work are also workers who deserve rights. Therefore, I will not apologize for working for more affordable health care. I will not apologize for wanting my members to be able to own a home in our community. I will not apologize for providing due process to members to inoculate them from unfair, vindictive, or bullying bosses. So help me God.

Leapfrog

2008-09-03T14:31:00.003-05:00

Mary Cathryn, St. Paul. First time caller, long time listener...

Yesterday our Governor spoke to a group about educational issues at "Time to Choose-- Children or the Bureaucracy" assembled by a 527 group founded by Newt Gingrich called American Solutions for Winning the Future. It has been reported that Pawlenty said that the government should work with teachers' unions to "accelerate changes" (StarTribune, 9.03.08) in education. He added that he couldn't "leapfrog" a group like Education Minnesota in a state like this.

I would like Governor Pawlenty to list the changes, accelerated or otherwise, that he has brought forward in partnership with Education Minnesota. The only one he seems to tout with any regularity is Q-Comp, but that is just TAP-- the Teacher Advancement Program (a Milken Family Foundation brainchild) --turned into legislation. There is nothing breath-taking or new about the ideas fostered by Q-Comp. In fact, I would argue that the St. Paul Public School District had the potential of being much more innovative with the well over $21 million increase of district health insurance premiums in the last few years than we ever could with the almost $9 million we would get in Q-Comp funding if we were interested. But neither the Governor nor our school board wanted to "accelerate changes" to a more innovative health insurance pool.

As a result the money goes into the black hole of a Health Partners renewal rather than

buying down class sizes,
assuring a school nurse for every child,
providing every child with physical education and a licensed librarian/media specialist,
offering teachers a common professional learning period commensurate to our planning period built into our school day,
adding professional days to the school year,
offering more innovative summer school options and school calendars, or
improving professional development for educational assistants.

Which still leaves my question to be answered: What changes has the Governor actively worked with Education Minnesota to accelerate?

I'll take my answer off the air.

Welcome to St. Paul-RNC

2008-08-31T21:48:00.002-05:00

The Republican National Convention opens in St. Paul tomorrow and I want and expect my city to shine.

I hope this becomes the world’s opportunity to see St. Paul as the sort of city that is open for business. While I trust the conventioneers will enjoy the plethora of things that make St. Paul a fabulous place to hold any convention, from our high quality restaurants, our promising entertainment venues, first-rate facilities, and I might add our excellent selection of local beers, I hope they have the opportunity to discover the other things that make St. Paul among America’s most livable cities.

I hope they can spend time enjoying our sterling city park system, notice our vibrant and distinct neighborhoods, marvel at our brilliant array of residents, appreciate our city leadership, travel the varied miles of our bike paths, and find out about our hard-working, high-quality, comprehensive pre-K through university schools, especially our up-and-coming St. Paul Public School District.

If they do, they might just decide to stay awhile.

I should know. I came to St. Paul from the Iron Range for college. I returned to St. Paul after time in Washington State, Oregon and South Korea to raise my family and teach. Being able to experience “all of the above” makes it easy not only to believe in St. Paul, but to live here, too.

Barack Obama makes history for all of us

2008-08-27T22:12:00.003-05:00

After a meeting earlier today, a colleague was conveying to me that his 6 year old son wanted to vote for Barack Obama. When his dad asked him “Why?” the 6 year old said, “Because his skin is brown like mine, Dad.” His father was a bit in awe.

At 7:07 p.m. tonight my phone buzzed with a text message and it was an SPFT member with the message: “It’s done. The first African American has just been nominated for president. History in the making!” Her joy was palpable.

I would argue that while the nomination is, in fact, done we are actually on the cusp of much more beginning in every other way for our country.

These things reminded me that this is not just any night for some people. Quite frankly, this should not be just any night for any of us.

It makes me that much more excited for our Obama Acceptance Speech Party tomorrow night at the Como Park Picnic Pavilion from 7:30 to 10 p.m. This is an event to watch with community, in the community.

Please join me!

Teachers are My Heroes

2008-08-26T18:08:00.001-05:00

I was sent a link to a blog this morning that I spent an inordinate amount of time perusing. While doing that I came across a website of Democrats for Education Reform (www.dfer.org), which listed their heroes in education

Most of the Heroes in the Democrats for Education Reform group were folks who champion charter schools. As someone who lives in the charter school capitol of North America, I understand that they are not vanishing from the landscape anytime soon. However, to believe that the only champions of education reform are those “daring enough” to be in the charter school movement is naive.

While charter schools will always have a place in education discussions, school districts will not be vanishing anytime soon either. School districts will continue to educate the majority of America’s children for a long, long time. In fact, I would argue that peering into the myriad of practices and school choice within a school district (let’s take mine, for example) will reveal some of the most promising educational practices of this century at the practitioner and school building level.

I would argue, with the St. Paul School District’s comprehensive city-wide district options, with St. Paul as the cradle of charter school law, and with our affordable parochial school system that there isn’t a better incubator of school choice in the country. Yet, an overwhelming majority of parents still choose St. Paul Public Schools. Why? Because we still do the best job of educating children. We are comprehensive enough to meet every child’s needs. We are small enough to be light on our feet to innovate. We tend to attract high quality, experienced teachers. We have smart, dedicated educational assistants.

Perhaps, no school district can truly meet every families needs, and so I will admit that the mother looking for the music-based, Montessori, Russian-immersion, 4 day week elementary school experience for her child will sadly be out of luck in St. Paul (for now), the students who stay with St. Paul Public Schools truly will graduate to something great.

Our high quality teaching force is a major reason for that success, and our teaching force is also first to reflect on what could be done better. Why else, with a pressure-cooker atmosphere and magnifying glass accountability, would I run in to teacher after teacher this opening week saying things to me like, “I’m ready” or “I’m excited” or “I can’t wait to start”?

These teachers are union members, they are my heroes, and I am honored to represent them.

Fever? Medicate with a corn dog!

2008-08-25T22:37:00.001-05:00

Just in time for the Great Minnesota Get-Together is a little health care advice. Make sure in all those steps you are walking (and no doubt logging on your flashy, trendy, go-with-anything, cheap-plastic-crap-is-the-new-black pedometer) that no harm comes to you if you are fortunate enough to attend the State Fair. You see, your school board is hard at work making Minnesota safe for the affordable corn dog, rather than the affordable urgent care visit from the regrettable results of one too many of them.

It is critical for our school board to address, in a public and meaningful way, the runaway costs of our health insurance. Yet, another legislative session went by without one instance of our school board supporting our efforts to find a solution to the rising health insurance costs that are devouring our district’s budget. Additionally, another renewal period for health insurance is upon us and still our school board remains quiet.

It is hard not to be insulted by their silence when the best collaboration they can offer is from the July 15th board meeting where they authorized a joint purchasing agreement with North Branch Area Schools “in order to further collaborative efforts and to enhance both districts’ buying power by participating in cooperative purchases, bids and contracts.”

Once again they have proven that they put a premium on saving money on corn dogs and copy paper, but they are absolutely content to turn their backs on any significant discussions on health insurance, let alone offer a solution. It is clear that they are comfortable allowing health insurance to continue festering the morale and working conditions of the member of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.

But, hey, I bet that corn dog will go down nicely with some ketchup, and then you’ve added a vegetable.

Gotta light?

2008-08-20T16:51:00.002-05:00

I seem to be a little in the dark here, not the first time and surely not the last, but I was just told by a teacher that she cannot have the lights on in her room when she comes into her building to work before opening week next week.

Some buildings were completely shut down this summer to save energy and despite the fact that principals and clerical staff reported for work on August 4th (with office lights, I hope) teachers who came in early to work were told that the lights would remain off until teachers officially reported back on August 25th.

For as long as I can remember teachers have been coming in to school in August to begin setting up our rooms, deliver school supplies purchased over the summer, or to meet with other teachers to plan. I have occasionally been asked to leave because of a mammoth construction project that wasn't quite finished yet, but this is the first time I have ever heard of someone not being allowed to use their lights until their contract year actually started.

It will be interesting to see if there is a mandatory "lights off" period when the school year starts. That sure would make "work to rule" easier to implement for our union.

Unity

2008-08-13T12:39:00.001-05:00

It was a weird goodbye ceremony today at the end of our week-long professional development class. After six teacher presentations that varied in quality, and a Yemeni television interview (“What do you think of the teachers you worked with? What are your future plans to work with this union?), we were treated to a completion ceremony where the president the General Union for Teaching and Education Professionals spent the better part of 10 minutes saying that he was not a liar, he does not associate himself with liars, he would not be sitting next to us if he was a liar, and may he never have the opportunity to be in the same room with us again if he is ever caught lying.

Well, now that we established that, I realized we got his show because we worked with the Yemeni Teachers Syndicate (their rival union and I suspect the aforementioned liars…) the week before them. He made it clear that he has no intention of recognizing them, let alone working with them. They obviously do not get along, so when it was my turn to speak I told them a story a friend of mine pointed out years ago. My friend said to me, “We could spend all day with you arguing that your football team is better and me arguing that my football team is better, or we could decide that it’s great that we both like football.”

As much as the fact that he was a Packer fan bugged me, he had a good point: One that I have tried to live by in many situations since that day. It is most applicable in my teaching life: growing up, in St. Paul, and here.

I grew up in an “FT” household. Over the years I watched my dad and his friends organize to get a majority of members in the Hibbing Federation of Teachers so they could bargain the next contract and I heard them grouse when they didn’t feel they were represented at the table. But when it came time for me to join the SCEA in St. Cloud, no one encouraged me more than my dad. When I moved back from the West Coast and Korea, it seemed to me that no one was more ready for the merger of the MFT and the MEA than my dad and the others who had lived through those years of bitterness and rancor. In Minnesota we had finally decided to stop arguing about whether my union was better or your union was better and decided to think it was great that we all wanted a better future for Minnesota’s students together as Education Minnesota.

I hope that the Yemeni Teacher’s Syndicate and the General Union of Teaching and Education Professionals decide someday that, despite these hard feelings that seem like they will never go away, they will think it is great that they all want a better future for Yemen’s children together.

I want that for them, too. And I was glad I was here to tell them that it can be done.

Teacher Interrupted

2008-08-12T16:36:00.001-05:00

You know your teaching has suffered a lot of interruptions when you find yourself wishing for the sanguine moments of a burgeoning learning walk of 15 adults whisking through your room merely wondering.

Our last day of teaching in Yemen is tomorrow and every day we have had multiple interruptions. The president of the union has stopped by every day and every day when he comes in he walks around to greet certain attendees genially and then says a few words to everyone. Today he interrupted us to say that he was inviting everyone to lunch in our honor, which brought spontaneous applause. That was in the middle of a lesson.

The president also brings random dignitaries in from the Sana’a Secretariat Education Ministry, the Government Oil and Mineral Ministry (?), and various others, who then also get to say a few words to us and the group assembled about how much they believe in education and how much they support teachers. Now granted, I’m not an administrator, nor have I played one on TV, but a little something I picked up from a couple principals I used to teach for: If you really want to support teachers, then let us actually teach! Criminy, what a concept!

On top of that, there are these random principals of different neighboring schools (this training is being held in a school) who are stopping by and insisting that we come for a tour during our breaks. The first principal who stopped by admonished us, “Why aren’t you holding your training in my school?” as if I had control of where the training was going to be held. One principal hounded us to 2 days to visit his school. On the bright side, the planets aligned enough that when we taught the “Time on Task” portion of our professional development we had secured a killer teachable moment. We gave them the definition and example of allotted time. “For example, we have from 12:45 to 2p.m. allotted in the schedule to teach you between these breaks. When you didn’t drive us back from the school visit until 1:05 and then we had a visit from Mr. Minister for 5 minutes, we lost 25 minutes of our allotted time. What then happened to our engaged time commensurately?”

This time, I don’t think anything was lost in translation.

Will a spoonful of sugar help?

2008-08-09T14:51:00.002-05:00

I suppose today could be characterized as a small dose of my own medicine. Amber and I began our training today offering the same professional development agenda to a new group, the General Union of Teaching and Educational Professionals (GUTEP).

Our first day with our new group today was a little more raucous. I felt a little more like I was teaching 7th grade again because there were many points where adults from every corner of the room were vying for our interpreter’s questions, so he could not focus on any one of them let alone us. That classroom management issue was only part of our struggle, however. There were also lots of experts in the room who raised their hand for the floor to expound on what they had learned in their last graduate class. Folks who listened to our ideas and then spent a considerable amount of energy coming up with reasons for why it couldn't be done in their classrooms rather than brainstorming how they might actually apply the idea. We even got the classic “Do I have to work with this group?” which, trust me, translates without interpretation even through a veil. Of course, none of these behaviors are exclusive to Yemen. All of them deserve diagnosing and some of them even deserve ownership.

I intend to own some of this professional development misbehavior because I believe my students were telling me something. They were struggling in various places to connect to our agenda and to see how it is relevant to their professional lives. I made a classic teaching mistake. I didn’t differentiate my agenda and I did not take their place along the learning continuum into account when planning this agenda. The agenda that was like a hot knife through butter for last week’s group (because it hit their zone of proximal development I would guess) fizzled out a bit on the first day because their needs hadn’t been assessed beforehand.

We had been told (as those professional developers who are flown in from afar often are) that the assessment of what these teachers needed had already been done and they just needed us to deliver the content of what was needed. We just needed to develop a five day training on classroom management, interactive direct instruction, time on task, and (whew) teacher praise to deliver to 2 different groups. Well, like the oldest definition of accountability in the book, no one knows a lesson is bombing faster than a teacher 2 minutes into class with 30 pairs of eyes looking to be simultaneously educated and entertained and feeling like they are getting neither education nor entertainment.

Amber and I scrambled to retool during both of our breaks and we worked through tonight for tomorrow’s lesson, but we are left second-guessing whether this group is getting what it needs from us. Right now we will just have to create more of a connection at the beginning of each lesson when we assess their prior knowledge. We will have to scaffold a little more critically. I don’t think our agenda is fatal and I have confidence that we can salvage meaningful and relevant learning for these students.

I know I will have fresh appreciation for those emailed agendas of professional development days and comments at membership meetings from the members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers. Additionally, if every experience, good or bad, is supposed to teach you something, I will make sure that this experience teaches me how to be an even better advocate for high-quality, meaningful professional development. Ultimately, for the members of SPFT that is going to include better contract language. Immediately, for the GUTEP teachers, that is just going to mean a little more work on my part. In the most delightful way.

What would we do if we knew we would not fail?

2008-08-08T15:03:00.002-05:00

I have that phrase on some paper weight in my house. I bought it because I love the line it draws in the sand. It challenges me to be daring, creative, a little courageous everyday. I know that I am not daring, creative, or courageous everyday. Although, it’s a great day when I find out exactly what I cannot fail at. Union work is about knowing when to pick that fight and knowing when to save your energy for the fight you are going to have to pick. Union work is also about reacting to a fight that gets picked with you. Union work is knowing when to stand in solidarity with someone and knowing when to ask for help.

I didn’t start this summer thinking I was going to Yemen, that I would need to actively defend the Employee Free Choice Act, or that I would get so fed up as to wash my hands of any remnant of No Child Left Behind at all. I did know that I was going to spend the summer connecting members with each other and our national affiliates. I knew I was going to make our ambitious professional development goals a reality. I knew I was going to spend time building our union’s ability to endorse and campaign for key state house seats, Al Franken, and Barack Obama.

As full as that plate is for the summer, I think the St. Paul Federation of Teachers has just begun to uncover our potential to answer that question collectively.

Tomorrow, Amber Prentice and I are going to lead the official Yemeni teacher’s union (GUTEP) through a series of exercises that evolve from “What are some common concerns facing your teachers?” through “How can this professional development class help your union?” We hope we have set up the time to be transformative and to bring them a perspective on union work we have been told that they’ve never had. In essence, we are asking them to name what they would do if they knew they would not fail.

Professional development is a union’s work and it is impossible for us to fail at it. We have the talent, the tenacity, and the collective strength within our ranks to set up powerful learning communities because a union already is a professional learning community.

Which leads me to ask the members of SPFT, what else would we do if we knew we would not fail?

I’m looking forward to hearing your answers.

A Note to Yemeni School Teachers:

2008-08-06T18:57:00.001-05:00

Seeing the culmination of your efforts today in your professional development presentations and plans was inspiring. I want you to know that you have much in common with teachers in St. Paul.

You attend professional development and get excited about new ideas despite persistently large class sizes.
You are eager to share ideas with your colleagues despite a demoralizing lack of safe and healthy buildings.
You are eager to learn new ideas from your colleagues despite crippling financial shortages in education.
You are not afraid of accountability despite administrative favoritism, student threats, and parental influence.
You belong to your union and you look for ways that you can work as a union member to improve your working conditions and student learning conditions.
You have entered the profession to make a difference to your community and the future of your country or as a way of giving back for what opportunities your community or country gave you.

I look forward to the day when I can introduce you to St. Paul teachers, and in solidarity, we can work together.

A Note to St. Paul Public School Teachers:

2008-08-06T18:56:00.001-05:00

After reading a few emails from teachers about AYP scores and/or the coverage that came from them, I am compelled to talk about this measurement system. These scores are designed to fail more and more schools. They are not designed to be encouraging to anyone.

That is what leads good people to say things like “We'll have to do more faster,” as an apology for the gains that students of St. Paul Public Schools made as not being large enough. Just as an FYI, we’ll be doing more faster with less money. We’ll be doing more faster with fewer educational assistants. We’ll be doing more faster with fewer social workers. We’ll be doing more faster with some of the lowest morale these buildings have ever seen.

Our students will be doing more faster with less physical education, less music, and less art. Our students will be doing more faster with fewer properly licensed library media specialists and less library time. Our students will be doing more faster with fewer enrichment opportunities.

Designing a measurement system with 16 ways to fail and only one to succeed, with an artificially chosen end date, with mandatory implementation but optional and capricious funding is malpractice. We need to recognize this is a measurement system that was designed to kill public education.

Admitting anything else is educational Stockholm Syndrome.

Don’t forget to put “red cape” on your school supply list. Last time I saw someone do this much more faster he was battling Lex Luthor.

Measuring Progress

2008-08-05T15:22:00.002-05:00

Today Adequate Yearly Progress(AYP) data was published for schools in St. Paul and across Minnesota, but that doesn’t tell the story of student learning. Unfortunately the scores that get reported are rather capricious, snapshots of a day. Many people will fret over these scores nonetheless, but I will focus on some encouraging news coming out of Ohio State University. It seems researchers there have studied a value-added way of measuring student learning that is promising and relevant to what matters in education. (www.plaind.com -for the archived story- Ohio State University researchers' study suggests new way of measuring school quality, by Scott Stephens)

While their study measurement is still intensively test-based, their rationale is student based. Test a student at the beginning of the year and test them at the end of the year. The end of the year measurement is then used to determine how well that school year went. When the student returns the next fall, the beginning of the school year test will be used to measure student learning over the summer or flag any student loss of learning over the summer so it can be corrected as soon as possible. This could be powerful information to a teacher just starting with the student in organizing group work, individualized instruction, and enrichment opportunities.

The test scores published today don't deserve the word adequate. Unless you like to punish people, then I suppose it is adequate.

Progress

2008-08-04T14:59:00.000-05:00

Must of the time the statistics and situations I find in Yemen cause me to stagger a bit. The unemployment rate, literacy, lack of access to education for girls, but today I came across something that gave me perspective.

As it often does, this perspective made me very hopeful, in this case for the future of Yemen.

I was reading the August 2nd edition of the Yemen Observer, a weekly English language newspaper here, (www.yobserver.com or for the Arabic version try www.yemenobserver.net) and the front page story was about President Saleh using the occasion of celebrating a national college graduation to call for more education reform. I could have stopped at that headline, just assuming I could have written the article myself considering the plethora of ‘education reform’ headlines that have come and gone in the United States in the last 10 years. However, I’m glad I kept reading on.

Yemeni reporter Mohammed al-Kibsi quoted some fairly encouraging statistics. The president had said “that 46 years ago there was not even a single university in Yemen and that only a few people” even finished a high school program. The university graduation ceremony President Saleh presided over had 28,400 graduates just in 2008. Yemen now counts over 240,000 university graduates in their country. Up from zero 46 years ago. They now have 8 universities in Yemen, when 46 years ago they didn’t have any.

Yemen is still direly short of trained teachers. Girls are still dropping out of school at rates that should make all of us blush with shame. There is still a critical fresh water supply problem, but it was good to take a minute to celebrate this progress for Yemen.

As we have a habit of saying when we see good data, this is trending in the right direction. Yemen has an opportunity to set an ambitious goal of college access for everyone within the next generation. Maybe we can even be successful enough with our work in St. Paul to show them how it’s done.

Arabic Numbers

2008-08-03T16:56:00.001-05:00

Maybe this is a question more for my dad than my blog in general, but here goes. Why was I taught when I was little that the numbers we most commonly use in the United States are called Arabic numbers?

Our numbers look not much at all like Arabic numbers and yet, I grew up calling them Arabic numbers.

Yesterday, Amber and I did, what we thought, was an extremely easy addition assignment of 8+8 just so we could demonstrate how to use some note cards as manipulatives to report answers. When we asked the teachers to hold up their answers, some held up 16, because, well that’s the right answer and, they wrote it in numbers that are commonly used in English. Many others held up what looked like 17 because they used Arabic numbers and the Arabic 6 looks like a 7. So these teachers had the numbers right, but as Amber looked around she started commenting that “some of you have the right answer of 16, but for those groups that have 17…” and I stopped her before the translation to say, “No, wait! Those are Arabic numbers Amber.” It only took her a second to recognize immediately what I meant.

Whew! Potential misunderstanding averted and yet the story is not quite over.

As I was talking about the incident to my interpreter Hallid today, explaining that the numbers I grew up calling Arabic sure don’t look Arabic at all, he told me that they also call the numbers we commonly use Arabic numbers and they call their numbers “Indian numbers.”

What?!

There is either a fascinating numeric-linguistic explanation for this or he is just pulling my leg. I’m not ruling either one out yet.

PD 101

2008-08-02T15:21:00.004-05:00

Unmistakably, if you read on, I am a little rusty at both my professional development planning as well as my cultural competency.

This morning Amber and I launched into our first day of professional development with teachers from the Yemeni Teachers Syndicate and I completely forgot to do the most basic PD opening of all time: announcing where to find the bathrooms, where to get coffee, and … where to take your prayer break.

Now I may get sanctioned by the National Staff Development Association, lose a draft pick, maybe have to pay a fine, for the omission of the bathroom location because being out of practice is no excuse I am sure, but the prayer break was complete rookie cultural literacy. Especially for someone who went to sleep the night before so pleased that she had set up a TIME, from 12:20 to 12:40, in the agenda for a prayer break.

So there we are at about 12:16 and the call goes off. I can clearly hear it inside the Hotel Sana’a. I am scribing for Amber and the translator is speaking for her, so there is a lot going on in the room when I try to get her attention. When I get it, I ask both she and the interpreter simultaneously “Should we just quit here until the break is over?” Something gets lost in the request momentarily and the interpreter tells us just to finish, at which point Amber and I both ask “Are you sure?” and his eyes get very large as he says “No, no, no, no, no let’s break here and then we will come back.”

Whew. I think we are back on the right track when I notice that everyone is getting up to leave but they are looking around.

Ack!!!

Of course men and women don’t pray together and we didn’t designate where each group should go during this break. Someone more with-it than me settles the matter quickly in Arabic and just like that we are in an empty room and I’m feeling somewhere just south of Rookie of the Year.

What teachers talk about

2008-08-02T14:49:00.002-05:00

Here is a summer quiz just to keep you sharp. Read the following list and determine if it was generated by:

A. St. Paul teachers, or
B. Yemeni teachers

When teachers have time to talk to one another, what do they talk about wanting to improve about teaching?
Crowded classrooms
Too much noise in the classroom
Discouraging environment inside and out
No ventilation, no lighting
Village schools have many different grade levels in the same room
Students drop out
Deficient curriculum
Lack of audio-visual aides
Weakness of some teacher’s performance
School buildings not suitable for teaching
Girls dropping out
Lack of modern technology
Syllabus much more rigorous than student ability
Students getting absentminded (day dreaming) in the afternoon
Lack of classroom space in villages so students study under trees
Students not interested in studies
Principals sometimes act like dictators with teachers
The new syllabus is not always suitable for teaching techniques needed in training
Scientific mistakes in books
Financial problems
Problems between teachers and principals and sometimes parents
Some teachers lack effective methods to hold student attention
Teacher training programs are inadequate
Social workers in some schools who don’t do anything
Families do not stress the importance of school
No specialization in some subjects
Some basic subjects in 1st-6th grade are too difficult
Lack of communication between school and family
The phenomenon of cheating
Some teachers interested in subject matter but don’t take responsibility to teach behavior
Syllabus not provided at the beginning of the school year
Teachers don’t do any professional development
Some colleagues spend a lot of time talking about negative things with nothing positive to say ever
Lack of access to teacher manuals—not given to the teacher
Some teachers are assigned to teach subjects that are not their specialty
School management does not cooperate with teachers; they interfere with a teacher’s work with students
Students fail, an influential person comes to school and the student is suddenly passing
School management deals with teachers according to political affiliation

If you picked “B. Yemeni teachers” you were right! You pass with honors if you used the testing strategies of context clues (the word “village”) and prior knowledge (knowing I am in Yemen) to choose the answer without even reading the passage carefully.

Of course, as I discussed with leaders and members of the Yemeni Teachers Syndicate today, it is easy to complain about our jobs. However, it is courageous and incumbent upon the richness of our union history to do something about it. That is exactly what each one of us can do as the voice of our union in our buildings, in our departments or grade levels, and in our district. We may not have every problem on this list, but each one of us can find one that we do recognize AND that we can collectively work to improve, whether it is 3 of us speaking up at a faculty meeting or 3000 of us standing up for each other.

Each act we carry out that improves our profession and the learning experience of our students makes us powerful.

Shoe Horn Professional Development

2008-08-01T16:07:00.001-05:00

When the AFT trainers came out this past winter to ascertain what would be beneficial to the Yemeni teachers, a 7 day training was put together. As usual, money—not the needs of teachers—became a central issue and so we have that 7 day training pared down to 5 days. As we were going over the agenda with an official from the Ministry of Education who works with the Yemeni Teachers Syndicate he asked, “Isn’t this a lot of material to teach them in 5 days?” and so the realities of professional development cannot be escaped no matter where we are.

As someone who guides the budget for our union, I understand and have a healthy respect for budgeting, saving money, and offering the best quality for the value in all areas. However, we must very, very soon draw a line in the sand for low budget professional development with high stakes expectations.

If there are clear expectations for what teachers should know in order to start a year, or start the profession for that matter, in order to meet the needs of our students in the 21st century, why are we continually forced to cram them into 19th and 20th century school years and school days? Why are there corners cut in professional development but the same mile-long expectations and accountability?

Let’s leave the expectations and accountability alone for now, but let’s stop shoe-horning in an hour of mining test data here, and 54 minutes of professional conversations there. Our union needs to lead the conversation around a professional day and year that allows us to do our jobs and meet the needs of our students, allows us to talk to each other regularly and not on the way to the bathroom or just before basketball practice, allows us to build relationships with students in meaningful ways (another day I will talk about the lunacy of “fresh-starting” teachers in our most vulnerable schools), and allows us at the end of the day to feel that we had the professional voice to shape the day and year we have because we are the professionals who understand how to meet the needs of our students.

Some people might call that ideal; I want to call that reality. In St. Paul, and hopefully someday here in Yemen, too.

Food Market

2008-07-31T13:56:00.001-05:00

Walking through the food market today the heady trance brought on by the sweet-tangy smells and glorious colors of abundant mounds of spices was broken by a stark conversation on the price of food in Yemen. Although the conversation was locally centered, the global undertones were hard to miss. When I was here in May 2007 it was impossible to walk down the narrow, tarp-covered spice aisles without bumping someone and replying “hello” in response to a chorus of “Welcome!” from half a dozen friendly Yemenis.

The slender aisles are quieter this time. We saw no one scooping up grain or beans in our time waiting out the rain. No one stopped to buy coffee, garlic, or fenugreek to make the magnificent Yemeni dish of ‘salta.’ We were told by our guide that the price of food in Yemen has gone up drastically, yet of course the population of Yemen has not precipitously fallen commensurately. Which leaves a person to ask: How are Yemenis getting their food? Where are they getting it? What are they doing without it? What are these merchants in the market doing in response to decreased sales? What do they forgo buying as a result of depressed sales? How does that further impact the economy? Who isn’t eating and what is the long-term implication of a country skipping meals that currently faces a staggering 40% unemployment rate, 20 million people with access to 90 million personal weapons, where 75% of the population is under 25 years old and has a 50% illiteracy rate?

Dusting off the blog as I'm back in Yemen

2008-07-31T13:55:00.000-05:00

Amber Prentice, SPFT member and AFT ELL Cadre member, and I are in Yemen to teach groups of teachers from both the official teacher’s union and the Yemeni Teachers Syndicate. We spent a lot of time during our flight from Frankfurt to Sana’a reshaping our lessons on classroom management, time on task, and teacher praise and still I am filled with questions about how it will go.

I would have liked time to observe more classrooms and talk to more teachers when I was here last to truly get an idea of where these teachers are starting and, therefore, what they need. Most of what we plan on teaching should be universally applicable but still I have questions. What sort of behavior do they see? What are typical methods of controlling behaviors now? What sort of barriers do students have to understanding lessons? How disparate are the abilities in a classroom of 80 students? How effective is any classroom management strategy in a classroom built for 30 holding 80+ students? I suppose I could just ask a choir, science, or physical education teacher in St. Paul some days.

At its most basic, the goal of these teacher unions is parallel to ours: Make the union the place you go to become professionally supported and enriched. Make the union the place you go to hold conversations that improve your individual classroom work as well as advance our profession. Ultimately, if that is what we have in common, then those questions above can be tackled during our training. I’m looking forward to learning the answers and sharing our conversations

Vetoed again

2008-05-18T22:18:00.002-05:00

Our locally-endorsed, Education Minnesota-sponsored Statewide Health Insurance for School Employees bill was vetoed again. The excuses were even weaker this year than the last.

Consider that Education Minnesota took last year's veto letter and spent the entire year addressing his concerns line by line. Several discussions with the Governor's office took place. Phone calls and conversations with the Commerce Department were made. The plan was redesigned to match the solutions to the Governor's concerns in every instance.

Our state union Education Minnesota negotiated in good faith.

Our state union worked repeatedly throughout the session to try to schedule conversations with the Governor and his staff to check in on our progress to address his concerns.

And he has the nerve to say "the structure of the pool was changed late in the session" as if that is our fault?!

Our own St. Paul School District was quoted in a newspaper as stating the cost of our health insurance in St. Paul increased by $21 million in a 4 year time span. An increase. That's not even the budget. That's just the increase.

And he has the nerve to say "It does not make sense for the state to mandate that school districts obtain health insurance from a health insurance pool if participating school districts do not achieve significant savings," as if significant savings hasn't been the point of this bill since its inception?!

He boasted at the beginning of the session that he was going to be happy to get a lot of use out of his "taxpayer protection pen" but Tim Pawlenty is clearly wrong here.

Larger pools save money. They mitigate the effects of unforeseen catastrophic care. They spread the risk. They do everything a good insurance pool should do.

Tim Pawlenty has left taxpayers in every school district extremely vulnerable with this veto.

Rule of 92?! MUCH better than nothing

2008-05-13T10:35:00.002-05:00

I have some exciting news to share with you, and an opportunity for action (of course!). Late last night the pension bill, which previously had absolutely no benefit improvement for active teachers, was amended by Paul Thissen to include a very healthy compromise. While his amendment is not the “true” Rule of 90, it is a significant improvement and deserves to move forward.

Representative Thissen’s amendment includes a few very important things:
1. It lowers the normal retirement age from 66 to 65
2. Provides a new 2.0 multiplier (improved from 1.7)
3. Permits retirement with no penalty if a teacher has 30 years of service and is 62 years old

I need you to encourage members of the House to pass this amended pension bill (House File 3082 including amendment 920) and send it to the conference committee. Please contact your House member. Tell them how excited you are that we have the opportunity to see a real pension benefit for active teachers. I have included the addresses and phone numbers of St. Paul House members as a start.

DO NOT USE YOUR SCHOOL EMAIL ACCOUNT OR YOUR SCHOOL PHONE TO CONTACT THEM. PLEASE USE YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL AND A PERSONAL PHONE. (Sorry if it seems like I yelled that part, it’s just really, really important. Thanks.)

House members can be reached by email with the following formula: rep.firstname.lastname@house.mn

Happy 30th Anniversary!

2008-05-13T01:24:00.002-05:00

Thirty years ago this week the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers began officially representing educational assistants. May 12, 1978 was the date of the first contract recognized for educational assistants in St. Paul Public Schools.

Happy 30th Anniversary!

In that time the role of an educational assistant has evolved from a nebulous, newly classified assistant to a true education support professional.

Educational assistants often work alongside teachers aiding our most vulnerable students: Our students in crisis, our students with disabilities, our students experiencing rage or profound grief. Our educational assistants are critical links into communities that otherwise might experience isolation because language would be a barrier. Educational assistants are a building's first responders: standing as sentinels at the door, watching over the cafeteria, or patrolling the hallways for safety. So much of our school communities run smoothly because of the myriad of jobs held by our educational assistants.

Thank you for your work and dedication to education in St. Paul Public Schools.

Let's celebrate together!

Thank a school nurse

2008-05-07T12:19:00.003-05:00

Happy School Nurse Appreciation Day!

School nurses are full partners in the education of our students. When I think of a the difference that having a school nurse in the building means to my students, I find myself simultaneously grateful for their work and furious at how we have to squeeze a budget to within an inch of its life to afford that access.

Today I want to make sure that everyone appreciates the work they do, including:

Oftentimes being the primary care provider for all the medical issues for many of our students and their families.
Working as a team with social workers and counselors to identify the needs of students. They then can be taken care of and stay in my classroom where I can meet the academic needs they have.
Educating students to meet their own, often chronic, medical needs so students leave class less often so I can meet the academic needs they have.

Every child needs a school nurse.

Every school nurse needs to be appreciated.

Thank you for your work, nurses. I literally couldn't do it without you.

Time to turn up the heat on the Legislature

2008-05-06T22:45:00.002-05:00

Local presidents across Minnesota received a note from Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher earlier tonight requesting urgent action before the end of this legislative session.

There are many, many legislators who self-identify as education-friendly. In screenings and meetings they listen to our priorities.

However, we need them to actually act on our priorities.

School funding increase. There is not a building or program in St. Paul Public Schools that does not intimately understand our desperate funding situation. We have all sat through enough extremely painful conversations, site counsel meetings, or budget surveys in the last 8 years, and especially 8 weeks, to know that we are sick and tired of hoping students don't get sick 3 days a week because we can only afford a nurse 2 days a week. Hoping students don't want to check out books or teachers don't need support with information literacy instruction because we can't afford a licensed librarian. Hoping our students can afford their own extracurricular activities because we can neither pay for the licensed physical education teacher nor the after school programs for our students.

We need a school funding increase. Call your legislator and tell them we need a school funding increase. Tell them how many teachers and EAs you cut from your building, too. Tell them how those professionals served your students.

Go to www.educationminnesota.org and click under "Take Action."

Statewide health insurance pool for school employees. Speaking of being sick and tired, I am at email 400 and counting on your response to my health insurance and wellness questions. We must do something to contain the rising cost of our health insurance. It is clear to me that you want access to high quality health insurance. It is also abundantly clear that the cost of that health care is crippling your already modest budgets. Many of you opened up to share that you are no longer one health disaster away from big financial trouble, you are already there. Large pools of people buying health insurance together spreads the risk. It helps contain the cost of health care. That's why huge Fortune 500 companies like 3M and General Mills and Wells Fargo do it.

We need the statewide health insurance pool for school employees. Call your legislator and tell them. Tell them how much your health insurance costs, too. Tell them that we want our health insurance pool to have the buying power that their health insurance pool has.

Go to www.educationminnesota.org and click under "Take Action."

Rule of 90. In 1989 the state legislature took away the Rule of 90 for anyone hired after 1989. (In the interest of full disclosure, this includes me.) Now that means that those of us hired after 1989 must work about 7 years longer to get the retirement benefit of someone who can retire under the Rule of 90. For example, my dad retired at age 59 under the Rule of 90. I will work until I am at least 66 for the same retirement benefit. This needs to be fixed. I am happy to talk to anyone who does not understand that active members like me take this issue very, very seriously, and it is not just because my 8th graders already thought I was old when I started teaching at 23 so who knows what they will think of me at 66.

We need the Rule of 90. Call your legislator and tell them that we all need the Rule of 90 and there is no time like the present to fix it.

Go to www.educationminnesota.org and click under "Take Action."

When you are finished, cap it off with a quick call to the Governor telling him that these bills are on their way to him and that you would be very grateful if he would sign them. Then drop me a line telling me how easy it was.

Go to www.educationminnesota.org and click under "Take Action."

Inspiring perspective

2008-05-06T00:20:00.002-05:00

We are part of a worldwide community working to leave the world better than the way we found it through education. Being a teacher in a free and democratic public education system puts you in solidarity with teachers around the world who have the same goals you have. Please know that the work you do is absolutely vital to the well-being of our local community and our global community.

As you got ready for work today wondering how you were going to help that student who lost a loved one, know that there are teachers in Iraq getting up today wondering the same thing. You would be inspired by how determined they are to breathe life into their educational system and you need to know that our work on behalf of public education inspires them, too.

As you brainstorm with the school social worker how to get extra uniforms for your students, know that teachers in Indonesia are doing the same thing. Here uniforms are a part of school choice. In Indonesia, no uniform means that a girl has no choice for any school. You need to know that our work on behalf of all students inspires them.

You steel your nerves, gather your courage, and speak from the heart of your expertise at a meeting, fully expecting the brunt of retaliation that may be coming. Know that there are teachers in detention in China for doing the same thing who are inspired by our organizing work.

You may decide at the end of the day to stand up for public education, stand up for your students, to stand up for your colleagues as your way of standing up for a free and democratic public education despite some vague threat of intimidation. Know that teachers in Zimbabwe stood up with you in the name of democracy as they acted as election poll watchers across their country and they are inspired by our activism.

Your work and the work of teachers across the world must continue for our future to have the promise it is supposed to have. We have much work to do to make that happen. Please continue to stand together with me as a member of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers to do it.

Thank you!

True Teacher Appreciation

2008-05-05T21:36:00.002-05:00

Teacher appreciation day is celebrated at roughly the same time of year in South Korea as it is here. When I taught in Seoul in 1997-98 I experienced the most lavish teacher appreciation day ever. By the end of the day I had more candy, make-up, lovely hankies, homemade jewelry and pillows than I knew what to do with. Despite my luggage restrictions however, at the end of my teaching experience there everything I couldn't eat made it home with me.

I found myself wondering if Teacher Appreciation Day could ever be that way in the United States, and if it could, would I want it to be?

Having had the opportunity to attend a few recognition and retirement dinners, I have heard 2 things over and over from retiring teachers. First, that those notes and mementos we get from students are often the only things we pack up and take home at the end of our careers, and second that the best appreciation gift we could get would be respect for what it takes to dedicate your life to teaching.

Over the years it is obvious that there are students we connect with, students who found us valuable. The notes they grace us with make it obvious that our students don't necessarily care when Teacher Appreciation Day falls on the calendar. In fact, it is often the extemporaneous, impetuous thank you that brings us to tears.

I am determined to see true teacher appreciation recognized someday in policy. It seems I can come up with a laundry list of how NOT to feel appreciated: PLCs prescribed to the minute, administrators who announce to a specific teacher at a staff meeting "You do know the voluntary transfer pool is open, don't you?", a promising statewide insurance pool idea stuck in neutral at the state capitol, jaw-dropping-eye-popping-hip-hopping-technology expectations that aren't paid for, and more mandates for license renewal yet more back doors into the profession.

I am thankful for that drawer full of notes, the homemade jewelry, and such. Those messages, especially, can do wonders at the end of a day filled with standardized tests, stolen computers, and stink-eyes. But it is time for a more vocal and permanent message that will endure in this profession long after we have taken our notes home with us and our profession is inherited by the next wave of bright and brave souls.

It is time for that message of respect.

Hypothermia

2008-04-25T10:56:00.002-05:00

If only the cost of health insurance and access to health care were all we had to worry about. Sadly, for as many health insurance stories as we have been collecting, the other not-so-little black raincloud hovering over us is the budget. As I get phone calls, read parent list-serves, and hear the site council stories, all I can think of is what I learned in science about hypothermia.

Our bodies react to hypothermia in a fascinating and efficient way. As the body temperature drops, fingers and toes--once crucial to balance, mobility, agility and even communication-- are sacrificed to move any meaningful body heat to our core area to just keep us alive.

In advanced hypothermia our core body area slowly and methodically continues to shut down. A reluctant trade-off to continue subsisting--to at least stay alive-- while abandoning quality of life and body functions that make us thrive.

Our schools are suffering from funding hypothermia. It is fascinating how schools find ways to efficiently subsist, but we are losing our ability to balance. Our agility at meeting the broadest range of needs and learning styles in our students is deteriorating.

We are cutting SEM specialists, G/T coordinators, and special education EAs and TAs.
We trade trained, licensed, high-quality library/media specialists for "library volunteers."
We are abandoning smaller class sizes and parent liaisons.
We are doing unspeakable things to the working conditions of our students and our colleagues.

Site councils have left behind Solomon-like decisions and have been forced to move on to ranking jobs in a school like those body systems. Who still has the heart for this work, pun intended?

And who isn't violently shivering at the thought?

We need a healthy, sustainable funding formula that meets the comprehensive mission of a high-quality public school system for every child across St. Paul and Minnesota.

It is time to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Insurance Stories

2008-04-23T22:23:00.002-05:00

When I sent out a request for stories at the end of last week I had no idea the response I would get. I thought I would hear from the usual suspects for sure. Hear from a few disgruntled members because they "forgot" to do a survey, or hear from a lot of people who felt maybe I thought the sky was falling. Well, it turns out that Soilent Green is people, folks, because I had 24 emails waiting for me that first evening. I did appreciate that 4 were positive specifically about 10,000 steps, and its impact on their lives, or just neutral about it. The rest ranged from tear-jerking "Thank God I had 'Distinctions' even though it is so expensive because I never knew I would get breast cancer" to sadly pragmatic, "The money is either going to come out of my pocket through a co-pay and deductible or through Distinctions, what's the difference?" Many people spoke of taking single Distinctions and then covering their healthy children cheaper on the open market. Many told of needing Distinctions because their child/spouse was not healthy and they had no other place to turn for insurance. Some used the email as our own Taxi Cab/10,000 Steps confession for gaming the system. Some resented the narrow offering of choices that didn't cost additional money. One lactose-intolerant member wondered why the end of her annual survey included a suggestion to drink more milk.

And the stories keep on coming. Stories arrived over the weekend. Members walked up to me at the 4th Congressional district convention on Saturday to share stories. Members called with stories. My email box keeps popping up with stories.

You thanked me for taking this on. You thanked the union for taking this on. You wondered aloud why anyone with a pulse would actually question why we would act to try to reduce health care costs for our members and the greater population. Some stunning metaphors were used to bring your wonderings home most accurately, which is high praise from a licensed English teacher. Some analogies made me blush, which I suppose is high praise from an Iron Ranger.

Obviously, we are going to keep pressing on. Cost and access to quality health care is a community problem, which is going to take an entire community to solve. We are an integral part of this community. We can lead this fight and we can win it. For us, for our students, for the families we serve, and for all of Minnesota.

Peer Assistance and Review

2008-04-15T21:28:00.002-05:00

This Monday our Executive Board had the chance to revisit the notion of Peer Assistance and Review(PAR) for the first time in many years. There was a lot of information shared, some great questions asked, and an overall feeling at the end of the day to pursue this.

Establishing a PAR program will not only help us begin to realize the power of our contract language included in the Career in Education Board section (Section 4, Subd. 4 and Section 5, Note) but it will begin to allow us an opportunity to take control of the quality of our profession as well.

Peer Assistance and Review could serve those entering our profession by being comprehensively supported and reviewed by a consulting teacher in a complementary license area. Ideally, a consulting teacher would spend hours with a probationary teacher while observing them at least 10 times. In practice now, a principal is responsible for observing a probationary teacher for 25-30 minutes three times a year. That is not nearly enough time to make an informed decision on a teacher's practice, and the principal may have no background in the teacher's license area as well.

PAR could serve those teachers in our Teacher Assistance Program as well. If a teacher has been identified as struggling in an area recognized in the Standards of Effective Teaching that teacher could have the option of continuing in the improvement plan process as currently written in the contract or accessing high-quality, confidential, peer assistance for a certain amount of time. Once that teacher chooses PAR, we could pair them up with a well-trained teacher to coach them on how to improve in areas in which improvement has been identified. The team would have a set amount of time to work. If progress is documented at the end of the coaching work, then a formal improvement plan would not be needed. If progress is not needed then the teacher needing improvement would move to the formal improvement plan.

The improvement plan language in our contract is meant to improve teachers who are struggling. The spirit of that language is meant to assist teachers and set them back on the course to working at their full potential. As stories have emerged from teachers on improvement plans, the reality is that some improvement plans feel like a mere witch hunt, some feel like retribution for asking questions at Site Council or speaking up at a staff meeting, and a few are doing what is intended: Improving teachers.

I want the opportunity for teachers to control the quality of our teaching profession. I want every improvement plan to be unconditionally dedicated to sincerely improving teachers. I want Peer Assistance and Review to be implemented in our district as one way to achieve both objectives.

Professional Issues

2008-04-13T22:24:00.004-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen:

There are reasons everywhere you turn for why our union needs to take central stage in tackling the issues in our profession. One of the latest I submit to you as further evidence that if we don't start controlling the direction of our profession and our working conditions, soon there will be no one left.

Exhibit A: An email sent to me by Kimberly Colbert at Central High School included this example: "Our secretary/purchaser was cleaning out leftover supplies and gave all of the staff some manila folders in their boxes. Staff response to her "gift" was a barrage of hysterical emails about whether or not we were supposed to "do something we hadn't heard about" with the folders."

Now I might be going out on a limb here, but no one freaks out over manila folders the first time they see them. No one. Imagine the years of conditioning and re-education that go into being startled by manila folders in your mail box. Empty ones.

Do I fill them with sharpened #2 pencils for the MCAs?
Are they for the photo-copies of the duplicate paperwork I copied in triplicate to justify testing that 2nd period student for special education services?
Did I miss the memo on using them to collect the time lines from our advisory lessons?
Seal the prom queen/king ballots in them to assure no voter fraud?
Do I self-label and file away my happy thoughts as a way to keep my co-pays down as part of the wellness plan?
Perhaps I file each year's 10,000 steps certificates alphabetically by each country I hypothetically walked to as a way to distract me from paying the sort of out-of-pocket costs for my family health insurance that will insure that I never actually can afford to visit one of these countries.

Regardless, it is a sad state of affairs when we are so dazed by the barrage of meaningless busy work, meetings for the sake of meetings, and directives at the drop of a hat that the site of manila folders automatically has us guessing that we did something wrong, that we somehow dropped the ball, or that we have somehow failed again.

We did not go into this profession to fail. We have not failed, but many outside of the classroom have failed at keeping the white noise of critics, fads, and red herrings at bay while we do our jobs.

Let's see what we can do about that.

Statewide Health Insurance Action Needed!

2008-04-11T15:01:00.005-05:00

All of our work, and the larger work of Education Minnesota, has put the Statewide Health Insurance for School Employees bills (SF 2747 and HF 3112) in the respective Finance Committees on their way to being passed and landing on Governor Pawlenty's desk.

Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher and a broader group of leaders, staff, and activists from Education Minnesota have all been working with the Governor and addressing the lingering concerns brought up in the May 2007 veto (see blog: Thursday, May 31, 2007 Time out for a word on that veto).

Education Minnesota is proud of the proposal that has been crafted for this legislative session and, as members, we should be too. The cost of health insurance in our district, and districts across Minnesota, has been untenable. Very few solutions have been put forward and no one has worked harder to find a solution for our members than the St. Paul Federation of Teachers and Education Minnesota.

At this point we need members to contact the Governor to stress the importance of implementing the statewide health insurance pool for school employees.

We need his signature.

Please contact Governor Pawlenty using the information below from your personal telephone and email account and ask him to sign the Statewide Health Insurance Bill when it comes to his desk.

Call the Governor at: 1.800.657.3717
Email the Governor at: tim.pawlenty@state.mn.us

Long time no see

2008-04-10T17:55:00.002-05:00

Back in the negotiating habit as we embark upon the contract renewal for our school and community service professionals (SCSP). We have some very clear goals for the SCSP group, especially around creative and equitable leave language and a balanced salary schedule.

In the meantime, I found an article in Teacher Magazine that seemed to cut across all three bargaining units, despite being focused around empowering teachers, because the focus is on creating a workplace that is conducive to doing your best work by addressing working conditions.

I invite you to check it out (I've included the link below) and let me know your reactions to it. I will share it with our SPFT Executive Board and any district official who will listen to me.

http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2008/03/01/02hirsch.h01.html?print=1

Professional Learning Communities

2008-03-08T15:29:00.002-06:00

Reducing the isolation teachers feel is crucial to doing our job well. Having meaningful professional conversations is crucial for re-enforcing our best work. Finding, supporting, and learning from expert teachers in our own buildings and programs can serve as critical links to enhancing our profession, retaining our teachers, and sustaining a healthy morale.

So why is it so hard to find a PLC that people feel good about?

Why do I get the feeling that teachers see PLCs as bad medicine and would like them to go the way of your average '80s hair band, reduced to the casino circuit? (LIVE at the Medina Ballroom: RATT and DuFours-- Singing their special cover: 'Schmoker in the Boys Room'!)

Why do I think that the concept of PLCs is too important to let this happen?

Judging by the way the wind is blowing the district would like to replace PDPs with PLCs and teachers will merely maliciously comply because they will feel it has being done to them instead of with them and that the PLC work just gets in the way of their real work in meeting the needs to kids.

If that happens, that's too bad. PLCs really are a great idea on paper. I mean that.

They could break down the isolation teachers tend to feel when teaching alone all day, they can help us recognize the expertise we have in our own buildings, they can have many minds trying to solve the same problem so we better meet the needs of our students, and can allow more professional conversations to happen more often.

They could even be a powerful professional development tool for our educational assistants who are charged with incredible professional responsibilities of their own, if they were invited to join a relevant one rather than asked to clean the refrigerator or put up poster paper on our professional development days.

Admitting some 'user error' in implementation, re-introducing them "with fidelity" and asking for a good-old-fashioned-playground do-over could go a long way in creating professional learning communities that we see as helping to meet student needs, rather than in the way of meeting student needs; helping to meet our professional needs, instead of wasting our professional time; discovering expertise among us, instead of assuming we know nothing; and in taking control of our professional learning needs, rather than having professional development done to us.

The "truth" about our statewide health care bill

2008-03-04T23:27:00.002-06:00

Tonight I had the opportunity to attend a Senate Commerce committee hearing on Education Minnesota's Statewide Health Care Pool for School Employees bill. This bill would create a statewide pool of 200,000 lives to control health care costs for all school employees across the state.

The St. Paul Federation of Teachers has supported this bill for the last 5 years and a couple of us were there tonight to hear the testimony. The testimony from Education Minnesota president Tom Dooher and a local president were very reflective of the discussions we have had at membership meetings and across St. Paul as we search for a solution to run-away health care costs that are pushing our families out of our pool and teachers out of our district.

However, the testimony that I found most interesting was that in opposition. First, the Minnesota State School Board association spoke against it. They argue that they value local control too much to support a bill that pools our health care costs. Here's the deal: the St. Paul School Board values their local control so much that they voted to authorize entering into a pool of school districts to purchase frozen food at a reduced price because they could better control the cost and get more value for their money. That's right Local 28 members, the school board takes the time to save some money on tater tots, but they have done nothing to ameliorate the insidious cost of family health insurance in our district or in our state. They value local control so much that they hide behind the position of the state school board association rather than researching the bill, talking to teachers and EAs in our district, and taking their own stand.

My next favorite testimony was from the Association of Insurance Underwriters because they took issue with the fact that in creating 6 different health insurance plans to most closely reflect the various plans that currently exist from district to district that one of the plans would be a "Cadillac" plan. This bothered the testifier a great deal because "the industry" is working to move people away from plans that insulate people from the cost of their health care plans. I appreciated his honesty a great deal. We always suspected that "the industry" was doing their best to design less health care for more money, but it was nice to have that confirmed in front of a live, studio audience. Sadly, someone forgot to cue the laugh track. "The industry" had every intention of making sure you feel the pain, just don't try to get affordable medication for it.

What to do with NCLB?

2008-02-20T14:58:00.002-06:00

In 1955 the Ford Motor Company introduced the Thunderbird. Sadly, I was not born yet so I could not see the first one roll off the lot. I imagine it would have been fabulous to see and I would have wanted one as much then as I would like one now.

Many years later, facing lackluster sales, stale performance, and an out-dated and unworkable design Ford abandoned the manufacturing of the T-bird, spent thoughtful time back at the drawing board, and reintroduced it with the best of the original concept and the best of 21st Century research and development.

I think we need the same approach with No Child Left Behind. We need to preserve the best of the original concept of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). We need to scrap what isn't working and we need to dedicate ourselves to the smartest thinking around education that our 21st Century teachers have to offer.

NCLB does not do for our children what ESEA set out to do. I do imagine that what we can do for our students will be fabulous and I want that as much now as I did when I entered this profession and even more than I want a Thunderbird.

Teacher Accountability

2008-02-14T17:52:00.003-06:00

“However, once teachers receive tenure status, evaluation and accountability diminish in many districts across Minnesota.”

-Tim Pawlenty, Governor-Minnesota in his February 13, 2008 State of the State Address

Clearly, Mr. Pawlenty has never stood in front of 5 distinctly different 7th grade English classrooms of 30 students each. Each of whom expect to be simultaneously and uniquely entertained and educated for 55 minutes. No one knows accountability better, more publicly, or more acutely than a teacher. In fact, I think we could teach him a thing or two about setting standards and meeting them.

Good teaching is the rule of our profession, not the exception, and I have examples of good teaching to show off throughout St. Paul Public Schools.

2008 State of Our Union

2008-01-28T19:15:00.000-06:00

Teachers told union organizers: “My mom and dad are union members. That’s why they had enough money for me to go to college. But…what kind of professional joins a union?”
-from Tough Liberal, Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy by Richard D. Kahlenberg

The question above begs an answer and I have it. Whether it is job shadowing an educational assistant or team-teaching with an ELL teacher, I have had the opportunity to see that you are that kind of professional. Every time I spend a day with a member, attend a staff meeting, or read your emails I can answer that question.

The kind of professional who joins a union seeks meaningful advanced degrees and professional certifications. We learn from our colleagues. We believe in students. We engage in our community. We set professional standards for ourselves and meet them because we believe in ourselves. We work to get better at what we do. Never mind that these things may show up in the Teacher Code of Ethics or the Standards of Effective Teaching, these are job expectations we have for ourselves.

SPFT, Local 28 members exemplify that kind of professional every day. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to be the kind of union a professional would join. This year we will mark the 30th anniversary of the recognition of our educational assistant bargaining group and the 90th anniversary of our union affiliating with the American Federation of Teachers.

2008 looks to be the year of Local 28, so let's make sure we are the kind of union that a professional would join.

Teacher Quality does Count...

2008-01-15T00:20:00.000-06:00

... so measure it. Last week both Rob Panningmiller and I were quoted in a StarTribune article about the edweek.org release of their annual "Quality Counts" measurement of education. What was curious was that "Teacher Quality" in Minnesota received a D+ and so that was the focus of the questions asked of both Rob and me. You have to go beyond the label and look at the measurement however. When I think of quality teachers, those I have taught with, those who have taught my children, and those I learned from, I immediately think of how well they grasped their subject matter. Was that counted in "Quality Counts"? No. I also think of what evidence of being a life-long learner is present so that my students and my children can see that learning takes many forms and they are encouraged to press on. Did "Quality Counts" measure saturation of advanced degrees in our state? Number of National Board Certifications? No and no.

I also love to teach with teachers who love to teach. That seems fairly common, so I don't think that makes me unique. However, from this job, I know that teachers do all we can to maintain that love of teaching amidst weak support. Programs that are rolled out poorly, mandates that are funded with dollars that used to go to music teachers, field trips, and custodial service; and administrators who are not ready for prime time, all contribute to high burnout and low morale.

Now that I think of it, I see who deserves the D+, but it's not our teachers.

What was your boat project?

2008-01-11T00:07:00.000-06:00

Now that contract negotiations are finished for 2 of our 3 groups, we can focus on the state and national issues that drain the joy from our careers. As difficult as contract negotiations were, the thought of renewing No Child Left Behind seems worse. What the preponderance of testing mandates and useless, late arriving, apples to oranges scores has done to our career was underscored by a story my husband told me the other night.

A colleague of his just ran into a former student. They recognized each other and the student said “Remember that boat-building project we did in 4th grade? I loved that project and now I’m in school to be an architect!” How many students are we going to hear say, “Remember that test prep we did? Now I’m working for Education Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey!”

Our students remember experiences that taught them something: something about themselves, how to think, how to collaborate. You don't remember the Gadsden Purchase unless it happened to fall on your birthday.

I hope teachers still have time to do "boat projects" with their students every year, and I hope they get to hear about the impact of their work. My plan is to make sure that this story is shared as a way of reminding all those adults hovering over the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind that they had boat projects that meant something to them, too.

The OTHER news we've been waiting for

2008-01-03T22:25:00.000-06:00

When we returned to the office on Wednesday we were greeted by a quick email from the manager of the Public Employee Insurance Pool (PEIP). He stated that he got the results from their study of our insurance pool and he would like to make a presentation of what it would cost to maintain the health coverage we have but to be insured through the PEIP rather than through the district pool.

(REMINDER: There is a state law that says a collective bargaining group—our union—can leave the group from which they are insured and join the Public Employee Insurance Pool. I learned about this over the summer, requested and obtained support from the Executive Board to pursue the feasibility study for obtaining more affordable insurance from PEIP for our pool of teachers, educational assistants, and school/community professionals, made the formal request and have been providing updates at each subsequent membership meeting.)

At this point I cannot tell you what sort of news he has for us, but there are a few comments I would like to make just knowing that there is news to report.

First, regardless of the news he has for us, this is a great example of our union looking for solutions to a very complex problem on behalf of our members and, ultimately, the families we serve as well. No matter what news PEIP has for us, we need to use this moment to recommit to finding a solution to the problem of access and affordability to quality health care that will work for our entire community.

Next, if PEIP can illustrate an opportunity to offer us the health insurance coverage we currently have, but less expensive than what we are currently paying to Health Partners through the district, our ENTIRE union will have a serious discussion about this decision and our ENTIRE union will make this decision. If the information is promising, I will bring it to the Executive Board for a full discussion and a vote to bring the information and opportunity to vote to the full membership. If the Executive Board votes to bring the information to the membership, we will have extensive information available and every member will have the opportunity to vote on whether or not our entire bargaining group will leave the district pool and join the Public Employee Insurance Pool instead.

Finally, know this: Our creativity and courage in exploring PEIP as a viable option has served as an inspiration to about a dozen other teachers’ unions in the state. Our step forward to request a quote from PEIP was noticed and other, smaller, unions were encouraged by it. Let us take this opportunity to continue to show leadership across the entire state during the legislative session regarding all viable health insurance legislation and in our work with Take Action Minnesota, so in the end, we will be proud of the role we played in creating a community solution to this problem.

Tentative Agreement for Teachers

2008-01-02T22:48:00.001-06:00

By now just about every building steward had picked up materials for their respective site and sat through an explanation of the highlights. In the next few days that information will be shared at each site and additional informational meetings will take place for all licenced staff (members and non-members) at the St. Paul Federation of Teachers office. Because the SPFT Executive Board has already approved bringing the tentative agreement forward to the membership for ratification, the following timeline will guide us through that process:

January 3rd: Building/site membership informational meetings
January 4th: 3 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. SPFT general informational meeting
January 7th: 3 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. SPFT general informational meeting
January 8th: 3 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. SPFT general informational meeting
January 9th: Vote in buildings/site (see building steward for details)
January 10th: St. Paul School Board scheduled to approve the agreement

As soon as we have a ratified agreement we can ascertain the date of our retroactive pay.

Amazing Results! A new weight loss plan

2008-01-01T23:02:00.000-06:00

WARNING: The following blog is intended for immature audiences only. Contract negotiations, 4-letter words like diet, and mild use of the drug-subculture lexicon for metaphorical purposes may all be referenced. Reader discretion is advised.

It seems that in the course of negotiating 2 contracts this year, I have lost 4 pounds. Just in time for the new year, I may have come across a potential new diet sensation: Union contract negotiating. At one point it was actually 7 pounds, but then the winter break came and I actually had dinner with my family a few times, so we’ll call it four. I could not have predicted this considering the nights when we were practically mainlining Doritos or speed-balling that 3rd can of Coke at 7:30 p.m. but there it is. I should have thought to attach that stupid, little pedometer to see if it would click away in recognition angst or ideas. Of course, I would have needed to find it. And I probably would have needed to take it out of the bubble packaging it came in, too. Regardless, it would be futile because, with this new contract-negotiating-is-more-effective-than-heroine diet I am going to get left behind if I am honest on the annual, standardized Health Partners test next open enrollment period.

Think of what this could do for the union movement if it catches on, too. Nationally it is said that union enrollment is declining, but wait until the unorganized workers of America realize that union involvement can help you lose a dress size. Move over Duchess, a new spokesperson for weight loss has emerged, and she’s hummin’ “Solidarity 4-eva.”

But wait! I have one contract left to negotiate. We are just starting to organize information for our School and Community Professionals contract. Kiss these dice Baby, because I could be rolling 7 after all.

EA Shout Out

2007-12-19T00:47:00.001-06:00

Earlier today I was informed that the tentative agreement for Educational Assistants was approved by our membership. It went to the school board tonight and they approved it as well. When I spoke about the work of our EA negotiations team at the public comment period, as well as the evolving career paths and professional expectations of our EAs, I was met with a lot of agreement. EAs in this district need to know that many people felt that my comments expressed their feelings for educational assistants as well. They see EAs as vital to school communities. In fact, some see various EA roles as powerful forces on school climate, culture, and reputation. That is a compliment to the work our EAs do, as well as some great expectations for those who come after you because you are obviously doing high-quality work.

Thank you, EAs, for the faith you put in out bargaining team. Keep those ideas coming in. Thank you for the work you do. Your work is worth fighting for!

click your heels three times...

2007-12-19T00:29:00.001-06:00

With all the ironing out we are doing, you would think we were negotiating for a pair of ruby-red slippers. No, only accessible and affordable health insurance. Now that I think of it, those shoes are probably more accessible and more affordable than health insurance has become for our members. We have spent a great amount of time as a team and in meetings with the district discerning exactly what is fair vs. equitable. In general, we are progressing and we are in agreement about the general situation for members and Minnesotans. Specifically, outside of the negotiating table, I would like a little something for the effort.

Health insurance costs are eating up more and more of the district's budget. Money that could be used to innovate, could be used to hire staff, could be used for high-quality professional development is being eaten up by rising health care costs. Yet, rather than offer some leadership on this, it has been our union, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, that has offered the only leadership on this issue. It is the St. Paul Federation of Teachers that has endorsed the Statewide Health Insurance Pool for School Employees for the last 4 years. It is the St. Paul Federation of Teachers that is researching the feasibility of getting our coverage cheaper through the Public Employee Insurance Pool, and it is the St. Paul Federation of Teachers that has committed to working with results-oriented groups like Take Action Minnesota to craft a real health care solution for all Minnesotans. We will work for everything we can at the bargaining table, but we are done with band-aids for health care. We will keep working for a solution, not just a settlement.

With that said, I do believe when you return from your winter break-in-service, you will have a settlement waiting for you, and your little dog, too.

Just keep swimming

2007-12-13T21:56:00.000-06:00

I am a bit of a Pixar junkie, so it is appropo that I find a metaphor for quite a lot in Finding Nemo. Pardon the Chris Farley, but remember that time when the face mask falls into deeper and darker water? Remember when Dori keeps uttering "Just keep swimming" to Nemo's dad (played fabulously by Albert Brooks) as a way to find the face mask? Then they find it and it is a seminal moment in Dori's life because she gets what she wants, which is to remember something in her long-term memory? Yeah?

I liked that part.

I am still confident that we are working toward a settlement, but we do keep working.

We met with the district yesterday and today. We will also meet again next week, including a meeting on Thursday scheduled to go all day again. We need to make sure that we have exhausted our proposals, our ideas, and our energy. When we do have a settlement to report, you can be assured that we have left no points on the bench. When we do have a settlement to report, you can also be assured that we will share who got the most penalty minutes, too, but not until you have read the tentative agreement.

We will get this wrapped up, voting and all, by January 15th. We are committed to that. Having that commitment brings a modicum of relief and focus on all the other matters governing the daily work of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers: our members' questions about programming changes, work to support those on improvement plans, our National Board Certification "Take One!" Federal Grant site, researching the implementation of Peer Assistance and Review, encouraging members to sign up for the Education Minnesota Representative Convention, recruiting members and others to present topics of expertise at the April 12th professional conference, expanding our ER&D courses, implementing our ambitious organizing plan, and staffing committees, boards and councils looking for SPFT input.

So close and yet so far

2007-12-09T16:40:00.000-06:00

The teacher bargaining team spent all last week negotiating. It was hard to know what to post because after each meeting we would find ourselves on the verge of progress, but not enough to announce anything. After 2 marathon sessions on Thursday and Friday we still found ourselves on the verge of something, but you know close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, as well as the occasional bocce ball game, I suppose. We have 2 sessions planned this week: Wednesday 3-7 and Thursday 3-7. We will do everything we can to have something ready to share before teachers leave for winter break.

It is aggravating, to say the least, to try to wrap up negotiations and bring forward a settlement we are not just willing to show members, but are proud to show members, and to have 7 different program changes going on as well. Any sort of change, even if it is exciting, expected, and good, can be scary because it involves giving up some or much of what you know for what you don't know. Add to that pages of the contract that don't get read by entire staffs very often, programs and teaching methods that some members are absolutely committed to, programs and teaching methods that some members are being asked to give up, staff teams who have been told they and their work is extremely valued, staff teams who have been told that their ideas just aren't cutting it, teachers who want a say in proposed changes, teachers who just want to be told what it is going to be so they can commit or move on, and other school staffs quietly waiting for the other shoe to drop on them and you have a heckuva time talking about contract language in the abstract. SPFT is completely committed to getting our contract settled and getting questions about these program changes answered simultaneously. It reminds me of my favorite quote from the Marines: The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.

Thanks EA Team!

2007-12-06T23:16:00.000-06:00

Negotiating contract language (or defense of it), quite honestly, falls into the Twain-ish category of laws and sausages unfortunately. While you should not want to see it made, invariably someone looks at the ingredients list and gets grossed out. Terri, Rosie, and Katie deserve much thanks for diving in with Terri Ellisen and me and grinding away until every last item was defended or bargained to within an inch of its existence. It is easy to look at what a tentative agreement does not have, and that is natural, but I was fortunate enough to watch these women work with tenacity up close. This was a team of experienced negotiators and experienced employees. They had a broad understanding of the contract and they were fabulous storytellers when we needed to highlight the professional needs of EAs.

I certainly came into this team with my own agenda: St. Paul's living wage ordinance as an inspiration when talking about salaries and professional/leave language that more closely matched the teachers' contract. As a teacher, my stories of EA wages, benefits and working conditions were all from colleagues, but I was familiar enough with EAs to know that some EAs work for health insurance for their families alone, some are still working 2 or 3 jobs deep into their careers as EAs to make ends meet, and that there needs to be a shift in thinking about EA work as career work. I am committed to the belief that progressive contract negotiating can address all of this.

I see the colloquial notion of EAs in the past and the growing sophistication of EA work now. Many still think of EAs as some sort of farm team that is waiting to be called up to the teaching ranks with the right offer. We know that EAs love their careers and see themselves as professionals adding value to the district with exactly what they are doing. Unfortunately, many still want to think of EA work as a "mom job" for a little extra income, when the reality is that these are now careers that need and deserve living wages. Some still want to see EAs as expendable helpers when sheer determination, self-worth, No Child Left Behind, and a high value on education has brought us a corps of experts in the work EAs do. I want to thank the EA team for representing this evolution of EA work so well at the bargaining table. I am proud of the work they did and I am determined to do what I can to encourage this evolution at every opportunity in order to honor the work they did.

Our friends in Minneapolis, Local 59

2007-12-04T22:07:00.000-06:00

The editorial in Sunday's StarTribune regarding one, specific issue being bargained was completely inappropriate. To have a local newspaper come out on one side of contract language that could still be live at the bargaining table sets up bargaining in good faith to fail. The specific issue addressed was the role teacher seniority plays in transferring from school to school. To take a shot at seniority as if it would be some magic bullet for the complexities of Minneapolis Public Schools is to have watched one too many Lone Ranger episodes. To assume that 'if we have what St. Paul has we'll be perfect" (while understandably a fabulous standard in which to aspire in so many other capacities) is to have listened to far too little Prairie Home Companion.

MFT, Local 59 and the Minneapolis School District were already in mediation when Sunday's editorial ran. The best use of soy ink spent on their negotiation process would have been wishing both sides well in their work on behalf of Minneapolis and the Metro area. To have suggested that the community should cheer for a successful, healing, and forward-thinking settlement would have acknowledged what many of us who actually care for the students, staff, and community of Minneapolis' public schools already know: the success of Minneapolis students is our collective success and the failure of Minneapolis students is our collective failure. Therefore, we all have a stake in the successful completion of these contract negotiations as well as the deliberation of a thoughtful strategic plan.

The teachers serving on MFT's bargaining team spend every day teaching the students of Minneapolis Public Schools. The teachers serving on MFT's bargaining team have their own children in Minneapolis Public Schools. I trust the teachers serving on MFT's bargaining team. Despite mediation, despite the StarTribune editorial, I wish the teachers serving on MFT's bargaining team well and I wish the staff and students of Minneapolis Public Schools much success.

What to expect when you're settling

2007-11-28T19:31:00.000-06:00

Teacher Team

We met all day with the district team and spent all of our time trying to wrap up how we address the reality of our workload with contract language, specifically:

Planning periods
Monthly meetings
Evening obligations

It is uncanny how you can spend 3 times the length of a planning period discussing a planning period. How could 50 little minutes cause so much consternation? What are planning periods used for? Why were they negotiated in the first place? Are you going to find out what kind of planning period you are having? What will you name your planning period? Should you automatically see the school nurse if you miss your planning period?

Monthly meetings and evening obligations had many of the same sort of questions, but of course not as many pictures in the family album as the first discussion.

Our discussion was thoughtful, the ideas plentiful, and the consensus is within reach, which leads to me the protocol we will follow when we do settle this contract.

After our team has reached a tentative agreement with the school district we will call an emergency meeting of the SPFT Executive Board to gain their support of the agreement.
Once we have secured their support a series of informational meetings will take place in order to let stewards learn of the tentative agreement.
Stewards will then bring the agreement back to their buildings and programs to share with SPFT members and non-members.
Finally, a district-wide vote will take place at each site and the results will be shared with the membership.

The agreement will become final when the St. Paul School Board votes in favor of it after the teachers. Cigars all around! (Shh, don't share it on your Health Partners survey though!)

A few of my favorite things

2007-11-27T21:16:00.000-06:00

Teacher Team

After some time off for conferences, conflicts and cranberry dressing tomorrow we are back at it. At last night's membership meeting some insightful questions were raised as well as some encouraging and provoking comments. It was great to see a membership room packed with SPFT members who care, even as they worry about the lack of tangible progress and express fear at potential disappointment. One great suggestion amidst our discussion of workload was for me to post the list of typical duties we have given the district in our workload discussions. Please feel free to add to it because I am going to go off the top of my head, and perhaps when we're finished we can get Julie Andrews or Barbara Streisand to set it to music for us. Here's to a contract settlement with blue satin sashes, folks, and the vigilance that assures we can afford to wrap our packages in more than brown paper and string.

Current typical planning period work to do:

choose books for author study
re-shelve books in classroom library
copy work for absent students
copy work for next lessons
post current standards in the classroom
post student work with applicable student-generated rubric, highlighting work to standard
run random sweatshirt, purse, mitten to the lost and found
check in with school nurse about medication, observation, student sick last period, or vaccinations
secure bus, chaperones, permission slips for field trip
count out field trip, book order, school photo order, school fundraising order money
check off field trip permission, homework completion note home
return phone calls
read, send, manage email
update Parent Portal, Campus grades, attendance, IEP records
get volunteer for career day, assembly, community organization, tutoring program
meet with grade level/subject area team, parent, special education teacher, ELL teacher, principal
wash off desks, empty pencil sharpener, dust room, vacuum carpet (if you have it) and wash black board/dry erase board
sign up for library or computer lab time
analyze student data from most recent standardized test
go to the bathroom

I know Denise Rodriguez did a great job adding to this list during the negotiations meeting so please add to what I missed, although you obviously won't have time during your planning period.

Ambition

2007-11-13T23:01:00.000-06:00

Our teacher team met tonight for a few hours just to recalibrate our commitment to proposals we have already made, interests still on the back burner, and to clarify not only where we stand on issues important to us, but why we are standing there as well. I am never disappointed by this team. While we have frequent reality checks concerning the 'world enough and time' we have to accomplish everything we want to accomplish, most often the discussion revolves around why our requests are more urgent than usual. We have a tremendous window of opportunity to make our contract a powerful tool to attract and retain a very high quality and sought after work force. In this economy, and with our typical level of education, SPPS is no longer competing with other school districts for employees. While that is still the case, that is only part of the story. We are now competing with other occupations for employees. Being mindful of that has lead to some interesting new contract language opportunities, as well as revisiting past contract language suggestions that are just as relevant now as they were when past bargaining teams first proposed them.

If we can be ambitious at the same time we address a healthy workload, we could be well on our way to leaving this career a little better than the way we found it for those teachers who will spend their entire careers in the 21st century. Having a conversation around a professional workday and the professional pay that goes with it is another opportunity to leave a legacy of respect and opportunity for our next generation of teachers. Opportunities like this remind me that in our union's history there were good men and women who believed I deserved to keep my job even if I got married, or believed I could keep teaching even though I was having a baby even in the middle of being denied those rights themselves. They thought beyond themselves, and now I am a beneficiary of their selflessness. That thinking is a perfect embodiment of what it means to work for the collective good in a union. I am profoundly grateful for those rights as well as others, and humbled by the opportunity I have, indeed our whole bargaining team has, to bring about rights for others in the same spirit.

An Educational Assistants update, too!

2007-11-13T22:59:00.000-06:00

EA Team November 8, 2007

This EA team of experienced negotiators not only has a breadth of experience in all facets of the contract (they have been laid off, moved, seen programs end, experience virtually all grade levels of collaboration with teachers and students) but they also have a clear picture of where the profession should go for educational assistants as well as a solid understanding of the role they play in the success of a program, building, or teacher in meeting the needs of our students. That is one of the reasons they have spent so much time articulating the professional development needs of EAs in a district as complex and ambitious as ours. My learning curve about the day-in-the-life of an EA is fairly steep, having simply appreciated the work of educational assistants in my building before being elected and getting to know EAs professionally through union volunteering and now work, but I am grateful for the opportunity to negotiate with such an experienced, dedicated, and tenacious team of Terri Furman, Rosemary O’Brien, Katie Wold and Terri Ellisen, SPFT Business Agent. We have work to do, but considering the team was still going strong almost 5 hours into our meeting time, this team plans to keep pressing on.

A momentous day! Well, almost.

2007-11-13T22:56:00.000-06:00

Teacher team November 7, 2007

Today we had the opportunity to take our interests around workload, look to the solutions we brainstormed, and offer some concrete “what if” sort of ideas for possible agreement. Earlier we had agreed that our agenda would have just 2 items since this was just a 3 hour meeting: Our reaction to “what if” ideas from last time and ironing out the workload issues that would cost little or no money. Our team had a lively and optimistic pre-meeting where we hammered out language around a number of workload issues that we were very excited about. Once our joint meeting got started we began with questions and discussion around some of the most promising “what if” ideas from last time. It was honest and pragmatic. There was a lot more agreement in the room than disagreement. Many of the “what ifs” proposed last time met the criteria for a number of our interests, but because there was a price tag attached, we had to put it aside in order to spend some time on agenda item number 2.

So what workload issues don’t actually cost money? A fair question. I suppose, like Kevin Bacon, everything can be traced back to some line item in some budget in 6 steps or fewer. However, all notions of a different school day, school year, school ratio aside, many of the most comforting workload ideas center around clarity of expectations, especially around evening/weekend/margins of your life student contact and professional development. This is what the SPFT team got so excited about as we met. This is what we will continue to bring up. This is what we intend to find some common ground around because our team has got some serious momentum. While we walked away after 3 ½ hours without any tentative or concrete agreements, (uff da!) we found our team even more fired up to press on.

The “It takes a village” discussion

2007-11-13T22:53:00.000-06:00

Teacher team October 24, 2007

In another all-day session with the district we managed to cover almost every surface of the membership room with butcher paper I think I recognized as a small forest I pass on my way to visit my folks on the Iron Range. Nonetheless, what we lost in trees we gained in identifying ways we can solve the workload issues we have been bringing up. Our discussion of how professional development has been implemented and how we want professional development implemented sparked a great deal of discussion and creativity, too.

Some magnificent ideas were brainstormed but we had no opportunity to determine what it would take to implement some, or what the feasibility would be of implementing others. This must become our priority if we are ever to come to some resolution about our workload, especially as it is affected by the district’s ambitious professional development goals. I must be confident that it will be a priority in November so we can bring some closure to workload and address some other topics important to the interests of teachers and SPPS as we work to meet the needs of St. Paul students.

We also spent a great deal of time recognizing the powerful role the community plays in our schools and the powerful role the community can have in our schools. In this case “the community” was not merely code language for ‘parental responsibility’ but a serious and creative discussion on how the city, parks, businesses, affinity groups, parents, and other public servants could be tapped for learning opportunities that would make St. Paul even more resourceful. While a great deal of this discussion fell outside of the opportunity to negotiate in our contract language, it was worthy to bring up in order to determine how and where we start to have conversations once our contract is settled and we get back to exclusively doing the work of delivering a world class education to every child.

Workload issues

2007-11-13T22:50:00.000-06:00

Teacher team October 17, 2007

“Keep the implementation real but let our expectations be creative.” After listening to much pragmatic discussion this phrase came to mind. We met with the district again and spent much of the time on setting some ground rules for how we would work together to evaluate the options we have around addressing the real need for our teachers to have some clarity and balance around workload issues, especially if we are to find balance in the rest of our lives. We have got to find the sort of solutions that feel like progress and actually help to support the critical academic work we are hired to do. Our time in the classroom is vital, and so is preparing for that time. Whatever encroaches on that time (chaperoning school dances, setting up/advertising/promoting/attending the school science fair/concert /play/literacy night/honors night/harvest festival) needs to have direct and explicit value to student learning. Our team is together on this and we are relentless.

Teacher Workload

2007-10-15T23:40:00.000-05:00

Our teacher team started the day today working with the district negotiating team on the norms we will follow as we discuss teacher workload and professional development. Together, both teams then identified our interests around addressing workload, what the current reality is around teacher workload, and what options might be relevant to addressing the issue. The district representatives were sincere in their interest to listen to all the workload and professional development issues brought up and ideas generated. While a lot needs to be ironed out, a lot of progress was made. We assigned ourselves some homework to continue thinking of solutions in preparation for a follow-up meeting with the district on Wednesday, October 17th after school.

In retrospect it felt a lot like the work you do as a teacher to build a classroom community. First you establish the sort of rules that will help you function, then you can introduce the interests that will guide your work. Most often in a class these are standards, with the implicit interest being the next skill or even grade level available, but at times the interests your students have and the interest you have as a teacher converge and are less tangible and more intrinsic. For me this would often happen when I had the chance to teach the elements of poetry by studying Langston Hughes. In the midst of a lesson about rhyme or meter or how he might play with space on a page, we would find ourselves lost in his words and discussing so much more. It almost seemed criminal to lasso the learning back to a mere academic standard when I had a glimpse of real-time learning blossom in front of me.

While we are going to have to be mindful of our January 15th deadline to complete our negotiating and all of the standards that pin-prick at our interests, it seems that we have a team that will look for every opportunity for real progress.

Peer Assistance and Review (PAR)

2007-10-13T20:50:00.000-05:00

This weekend I am in Silver Spring, Maryland for a 3 1/2 day workshop on peer assistance and review (PAR). I am very interested in PAR for a few reasons. First, I want teachers to be able to control the quality of our profession. Our union has organized teachers to address the quality of our wages, benefits, and working conditions but historically we have let our adversaries, or those politicians who know nothing about education, control the quality of our profession. I have been president for a very short time, but twice in that time probationary teachers have been let go despite being advocated for by a number of tenured teachers or experienced EAs who actually KNEW THEIR WORK as opposed to an administrator's 10 minute classroom visit and/or hearsay from another district. We are the group who should be the gatekeepers to the quality of our profession because we have dedicated ourselves to our profession. We do the work of teaching the students of St. Paul Schools everyday and we are responsible to build on the work of our colleagues. I can't wait to explore PAR with the building stewards, members, and Executive Board of SPFT, to determine how we can use this idea to ensure the quality and reputation of our profession.

We already have the language in the back of our contract that says we will develop PAR, now it is just up to us to do this in a way that supports and enhances a new teacher's achievement of tenure within some very clear standards that measure effective teaching. The more obvious we make it known that we have standards for quality in our teaching ranks, the more obvious it will be to everyone in St. Paul and Minnesota that St. Paul Public Schools and the St. Paul Federation of Teachers are both serious about working together to ensure a world-class education for every child.

"Team Teacher"

2007-10-11T22:45:00.000-05:00

Far more domestic, and certainly close to home, is the negotiating work I have been doing with the teacher and the EA teams. Because I had already started this blog for my study tour to the Middle East, I realized that this would be one 'real time' way to get out information about the process and progress of negotiations for the 2007-09 contracts for teachers and educational assistants in SPFT. Here is a start:

The teachers are a team. Wednesday night (the 10th) our teacher bargaining team met again in preparation for our all day meeting with the District on October 15th. It is an intense group and when our collective experience gets shared with each other we tend to agitate each other, make each other think, and most often inspire each other. These are feisty, articulate, thoughtful, and passionate representatives of SPFT who intend to advocate for healthier and more attractive working conditions at every opportunity. Last night's almost 3 hour, after school meeting was exclusively focused on the workload all of our teachers experience pre-k through 12 and within each license area. Even within the potentially demoralizing topic of workload though, there were stories of commitment to our students, our profession, and to each other. I am looking forward to our time with the District on the 15th because this team never fails to impress me with their focus and their dedication. I know we are determined to improve our profession. Keep your thoughts with us!

First thoughts on my last day in Yemen

2007-06-04T15:24:00.000-05:00

On June 2nd I was set to fly out of Yemen at 6:55 p.m. and I had a day packed with 4 meetings: The US Embassy, the USAID staff, UNICEF, and with the President of the Arab Sisters Forum. My last 2 meetings in Sana'a, Yemen were some of my most productive. The women from the UNICEF office challenged us to first ask the teachers' unions if they have committed to equalizing access to education for girls. I think that is entirely reasonable and I think we should make that a condition of our work with any trade union here. Improving the learning climate for girls needs to be our priority. As it stands, unless your family has money and a bit of a liberal attitude, there is absolutely no future for you except to be one of a man's possibly 4 wives having children until your uterus gives out, which can happen on your wedding day because of the genital mutilation you may have been subject to as an infant.

Conditions for Yemeni women were better before the 1st Gulf war when over 800,000 Yemeni expatriates came back with extremely conservative views, largely returning from Saudi Arabia. Now women are blatantly subjected to second-class citizenship, internalizing their own oppression, and the men we met with meanwhile are asking for time/decades/ centuries to correct it. Given what I know now, that is absolutely unacceptable. As an embassy official said this morning when I debriefed with her, "then let's fund their programs at 1885 figures, and see how much time they want to take for us to increase it." Needless to say, I LOVED her. Sadly, she is moving on to Tel Aviv in a few months.

The women at UNICEF went on to say that classroom management wouldn't be helpful unless there was some gender parity training to go with it. If boys are still the only ones called on, if secondary female students still get pushed out of school because of a lack of female teachers instead of letting them attend classes with a male teacher, if women are forced to leave the profession when they get married and have a family, when girls have to sit in the back of the room and are taught not to raise their hands, then we have much bigger problems than spitballs and talking back.

These women from UNICEF (one Dutch, one Yemeni) were amazing with their gentle but assured prodding. I was so inspired by their amazing focus on the state of women and girls. I felt like they were the first group all week to keep me totally honest about getting what I came for in Yemen.

My next meeting with Amal al Basha, the president of the Arab Sisters Forum will easily go down as a seminal moment in my life. I really felt like I was sitting at the feet of a master. Listening to her, I realized that I had merely been safely dabbling around the edges of social change. I was firmly tucked in my cocoon of half privilege safe enough to believe that there was just enough urgency for change that I merely had to offer bribes to my conscience to believe that I was doing good work for the world when in fact I am too comfortable. Her struggle will only become my struggle when I am in it as deeply as she is. Their struggle will become the world's struggle when we can successfully cause good people to lose enough sleep over the condition of women world-wide that we all do something about it. She showed me pictures of her in the paper that have her caricatured as the devil. She has been threatened with an immorality arrest for "denouncing Islam," which she never did. She is one of only 31 women in all of Yemen who do not cover their heads when they go out. Yet, she makes time in her amazingly busy schedule, and makes room in her home for this American woman she has never met. She listens to me, at this immature stage in my learning curve of the Middle East/Yemen, and offers encouragement and seems so sure of herself. She should be. She is on the side of what is right in everything she does. Is it any wonder that my meetings today were primarily with women and I felt that they were the most productive?! In all three, they essentially put the question directly to me, "How is this country going to be better for girls when you leave?" I will be honest, after talking with them, I realize now that is exactly the work I have cut out for me, for all of us.

Arabic spoken here

2007-06-01T07:56:00.000-05:00

I just returned from one of two trips I have now had the opportunity to take to the "sook," or market, in Sana'a where I am staying. This open-air market with its shoe-box sized stalls is where Yemenis go to get their spices, their clothing, shoes, kitchen utensils and to maybe grab a bite to eat. In both visits, we were eventually accompanied by a young man who was extremely helpful in guiding us around. Also, both times each of the young men had very strong English skills. They did not expect to get paid, they were not asking for "baksheesh" (money) , and although we were told that they more than likely got some sort of kick back from the owners of the stalls that they took us to, it seemed to me, with their interesting questions and polite conversation, that they were merely looking for an opportunity to practice their English.

Over the last 5 days my resolve to introduce Arabic language study to St. Paul has grown more and more. I have always been extremely proud of the work St. Paul schools has done to make world languages accessible to students. In fact, both of my children study Spanish and I hope they go on to study Chinese, French, German, Japanese or another language as secondary students. The world language teachers I have met in St. Paul are entirely dedicated to their work and quite cognizant of the importance of their work as our world grows together and communication gets easier. While I think St. Paul Public Schools should continue to invest in the languages it has, we should be working to expand the languages we offer and expand the opportunities for our students to access that learning.

Each time I log on to this computer I am convinced more and more that we should be just as serious about Arabic language study as every other language. Consistently, no matter what site I go to: cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, msnbc.com, yahoo.com; at least 3 out of 6 headlines are reporting news originating in or happening in Arabic speaking countries. Strategically, the United States is going to have a strong interest in this region for a long time to come. There are as many opportunities here as their are situations to resolve or problems to solve and although I am honored to be here studying what the American Federation of Teachers can do, I know that our work here is going to need to be continued by another generation. In fact, with an investment in language education, our current work could only be improved upon, and the world's relationship with the countries of the Middle East could actually evolve.

Right now we are playing catch up with Chinese languages. Let us use that as a lesson and not let it happen again with another one of the world's strategic languages.

Uncommon experiences travelling

2007-06-01T01:39:00.000-05:00

Most of my group left this morning for the 15 hour flight back to their various corners of the United States so I have had a bit of time before gearing up for my work in Yemen today. I have remained behind in order to determine how the AFT can help teachers over here with their work in the classroom as well as their work in building a successful, democratic trade union. In this time, I have had the opportunity to list all of the little things that I did not prepare for but came up anyway on this trip.

First of all, I am typing on an Arabic keyboard that has keys in slightly different places than my English keyboard at home. That and the fact that this website consistently comes up in German (I can't read German) has made for some entertaining work in managing this blog, spell-checking, and trying to make the best use of my limited Internet time. While I have had the some of the usual translation stories that accompany my limited language acquisition and my hosts limited English, I have been impressed over and over with how hard everyone works to understand each other when we don't share a language, how patient the Yemenis are with me, and how polite everyone has been. My perceptions of Islam and experiencing a Muslim country have been enlightened along the way.

In thinking about all of these opportunities to problem solve, I realize that this is exactly the sort of navigation we need to be teaching our students everyday. This world is theirs and we need to equip them with every skill possible so that when they find themselves in these situations in the future, whether that future is a business trip to Yemen or navigating a new social studies class and the culture, language/lexicon, expectations, and norms that follow, they are able to see the experience as an opportunity to problem solve as well at stretch, grow, and learn about themselves.

I went into teaching because I loved my subject and I loved the idea of a career in teaching, so it was work for me to remember that loving English/language arts (and being okay with 7th grade) wasn't native to every student. I had to bring them there. It seems common that our first reaction to change or to something new is to retreat. Travelling has certainly brought that instinct out in me from time to time, but I know in teaching it took time to reflect on my classroom to remember that sometimes all it took to retreat for my students was the time it took to travel down the hall to my room to feel foreign, to retreat, or to become defensive. Balancing the ambitious work of teaching with setting a classroom climate where it would be safe to take risks and use their time with me as an opportunity to stretch, to grow, to learn about themselves was always a challenge. The real issue became the time I had to reflect to improve myself, or rather, the lack of time.

Just as I have a break in my schedule this morning, those moments I had the opportunity to reflect amidst the break-neck pace of teaching helped me better meet the needs of my students. Too often I only found that time when I couldn't sleep at the end of the day because I was still too wound up from my day of teaching, reviewing my rotating list of things to do during my prep the next day and trying to figure out how I was going to get my children dropped off early enough before school (but after my day care opened) in order to do those things that could not wait until prep time.

Like travelling, all of us need down time to think and to reflect on our work. We need opportunities to remember that we may have made our classrooms native for us, but we are inviting all travellers who have only a short time to learn from us before we send them off to the care of our colleagues in the next grade, the next room, or the next step in their education. I believe that the St. Paul Federation of Teachers should make it our priority to carve out that time to reflect. Each of us as individual professionals will then make it our priority to use that time to welcome the world to learn with us.