"Harder" to teach at a high-poverty Wake school?

Thank you for a great read. Very useful to know, and im sure I will need to check up on this article in the near future.

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This not about the payment but the hardwork. The school teachers are certainly working harder for the welfare of the children. Robinson

Teachers at high poverty wake schools definitely deserve more pay. It sure is a challenging task to teach school students.

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I like the idea, but how do you do deal with high school kids being in school at (approximately) the same time?

It may be that college kids are better alternatives because they have more flexible schedules.

John

Make the lower income schools attractive by giving teachers what they really need-- maybe assistants in each academic subject, and supplies requested by individual teachers which go beyond the skimpy materials meted out. Deliver more out of school experiences with field trips and enrichment opportunities such as dramas and concerts. Raleigh has a world of resources to draw from. Give perks to the teachers for doing that extra drudgery by treating them like humans entrusted with the education of humans. Merit pay itself is so subjective and nebulous. The system of rewarding teachers by their education and experience far outweighs the benefits of career ladder gobbledygook. Educators should be rewarded for being educated, and for working on skills which enables them to draw on their strengths. And give the educators more credit for their ideas for cross-curriculum activities. Ensure that all teachers are responsible for reading, writing, thinking, and computing. Reduce the classroom size in the low income classes, and give the teachers some opportunity to review the children, case by case. The teachers, and the parents, really do know what the children need-- not some pie-in-the-sky central office personnel. How can you get those personnel involved? Have them work in a classroom 50% of the time. Or better yet, give them responsibilities for nurturing the teachers by assisting them on a regular basis. And for goodness, put a moratorium on the testing programs which give the teachers mandates to not teach or create bright and shining moments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html?no_interstitial

The school’s founder, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, 32, a Yale graduate who founded a test prep company, has been grappling with just these issues. Over the past 15 months he conducted a nationwide search that was almost the American Idol of education — minus the popular vote, but complete with hometown visits (Mr. Vanderhoek crisscrossed the country to observe the top 35 applicants in their natural habitats) and misty-eyed fans (like the principal who got so emotional recommending Casey Ash that, Mr. Vanderhoek recalled, she was “basically crying on the phone with me, saying what a treasure he was.”)

Mr. Ash, 33, who teaches at an elementary school on the outskirts of Raleigh, N.C., will take the social studies slot.

Although I've long advocated for dealing with the discrepancies in poverty levels among the schools by adjusting funding where the needs are greater --- either by paying "extra duty" pay to incent teachers, or pay for more teachers and/or aides to reduce class sizes there, I think it would be wrong to jump on this funding right now, as tempting as it is.

First, our budget is in crisis, and likely will be for years. The last thing we need to do right now is sign on to something that will obligate us to providing additional funding levels for some a couple of years from now when we still have so much uncertainty on how many people we will be laying off due to budget shortfalls.

More important, though, is that what this system really needs to do is sit down and come up with a cohesive, equitable system for dealing with the fact that poverty is not distributed equally around the county.

We are in a crisis now because of the rampant distrust in a school system that is blatantly inequitable, and responds to complaints about inequity by belittling and insulting those who criticize the poor planning that has resulted in our current mishmosh of policies that do not meet the system's stated objectives.

We started with magnet schools in the urban Raleigh core of the county, to incent Raleigh families to attend a lower income school to provide a better racial (and, later, socioeconomic) mix at these schools. Then we added year round schools, which unexpectedly made things a lot worse, since these schools were overwhelmingly favored by more affluent families.

A problem with this system was that the magnets were all concentrated in the urban core of the county, too far away to be a practical alternative for a lot of families on the outer edge. There was not a lot of unrest about this inequity, though, because families were allowed to stay in their own communities. You knew the schools that were available when you moved in there.

Unrest really started when WCPSS decided voluntarily to change from its model of racial desegregation using magnets to one based on socioeconomic desegregation. This was when the community was told that if more than 40% of the students in a school were low income, that was a bad, bad thing. Before this point, the F&R percentages were not widely known, and most people didn't stress out whether the school down the road had 5% more of the demon low income children than their own schools.

The problem with going with this model is that getting ALL schools to <40% F&R could never be practically implemented because poverty is not distibuted homogeneously throughout the county. There are large pockets of poverty in inner city Raleigh and in the rural eastern parts of the county. North Raleigh and Western Wake were, by and large, more affluent.

Now people were VERY conscious of how many of those F&R kids were in their schools, and resentful if their schools approached or exceeded that limit.

WCPSS exacerbated the problem by poor location of schools. First, with the high concentrations of poverty in east Wake, locating magnets in east Raleigh sucked even more of the affluence out of eastern Wake schools. Also, WCPSS chose to export some of the poverty from Southeast Raleigh schools into Garner area schools, even though there was plenty of poverty there to begin with.

When population was growing around the edge of the county, WCPSS chose instead to build new schools inside the "busable rim", locating Dillard Drive and Yates Mill within a mile or so of each other and existing Swift Creek, even though it was clear that the capacity was in critical need in west Cary and Apex. The affluent suburbanites who should have formed the affluent core of those schools escaped the reassignments and instablity by choosing magnet schools instead, leaving these schools underenrolled and high poverty. WCPSS reacted to this by bussing in suburbanites from farther out in the county.

Noting that the voluntary magnets had created the least economically diverse schools in the county, WCPSS reacted by starting to force some low income families into them. Then WCPSS forcibly converted a number of county schools to mandatory year round as well.

This has resulted in a horribly unbalanced system. Raleigh families get a lot of extra funding thrown into Raleigh schools, giving those students the choice between a stable neighborhood school assignment, or a magnet school with lots of extras just a mile or so further away.

This is done at the cost of other schools in the county. They are told that they cannot offer electives that might compete with the magnets. Many of those in the South and East end up with even higher concentrations of poverty as their more affluent students are attracted in to the magnets, or low income SE Raleigh students are exported into their schools to make room for magnet seats in the inner city magnets. Many other cities in the county's edges are forced into having their families on different calendars.

The current system of providing goodies for Raleigh residents while negative aspects are reserved for those in the outer county is destroying public support for the school system. I fear that just haphazardly throwing dollars at a few schools would just create yet another set of haves and have nots among the schools.

Stop and come up with a comprehensive plan that addresses the needs and challenges of ALL the schools in the county. Giving extra funding where there are greater challenges could very likely be helpful in this process ---- but there MUST be a cohesive plan before we muck up the system with even more inequities.

Kindergartner Brings Gun To School
http://wake.mync.com/site/wake/news/story/36010/kindergartner-brings-gun-to-school

Sideburns--Lori claimed that while they might not have trouble filling the positions at high poverty schools, those teachers are still applying to other schools in hopes of leaving the high poverty school. I'd like to see numbers on this before I believe it to be true.