Educators' rankings don't move much

By Sarah D. Sparks

New teachers become much more effective with a few years of classroom experience, but a working paper by a team of researchers suggests the most—and least—effective elementary teachers show their colors at the very start of their careers.

"This is a fundamentally different time period for teachers, when we know they are going through changes," said lead author Allison Atteberry, a research associate in the Center on Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She discussed preliminary results of the study at a research meeting on K-12 and postsecondary education held by the Washington-based National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, known as CALDER, on Feb. 21.

By John Affeldt

Kudos to Jerry Brown for proposing to end the inequities in California school funding – and shame on the districts that seek to fossilize the advantages they have enjoyed for decades now.

Brown is the first governor in recent times to acknowledge what the education community and funding experts have known for years: Our public schools are funded irrationally and inequitably based on outdated formulas bearing no relation to student need. As the Getting Down to Facts studies and the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence acknowledged, similar sized districts with similar student demographics receive widely varying amounts of state support for no rational reason. A recent Education Trust–West analysis concluded that California’s highest poverty districts receive $620 less per student from state and local sources than the state’s wealthiest districts. Individual district comparisons evidence disparities running to thousands of dollars per student.

BY SUSAN HEADDEN

Patty Berganza is a chatty 16-year-old with a mouthful of braces, a thick mane of black hair, and a lightning fast brain. The last of these left her so bored at her previous Los Angeles high school that she racked up more than 49 unexcused absences in one year and earned a reputation as a slacker. Despite her dismal grade point average and enormous gaps in knowledge, she was continually promoted to the next grade. She never thought about college, because nobody ever talked about it. Indeed, she says of her previous high school, “I don’t think my teachers even knew my name.” In many ways, Patty represented countless students who graduate at abysmal rates but who have the capacity to do infinitely better. Unlike others, she found a new school that has helped her reach that capacity.

School officials in the East Bay town of Brentwood have claimed they couldn't fire a teacher who pulled a 5-year-old student from his chair in 2010 and kicked him as he lay on the ground. They said state teacher dismissal rules were too cumbersome.

They're wrong on the first point: There was plenty of evidence to pursue a dismissal case against Dina Holder, who eventually pleaded no contest to misdemeanor child abuse for the incident. And there was no rational reason for leaving her in the classroom for 2½ more years.

But Brentwood officials were right about the second point: The teacher discipline and dismissal process is too costly and drawn out. It discourages school officials from trying to get rid of ineffective and abusive teachers, even when they have good cases.