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The case for changing the educational hierarchy. Ex. 1 Decision Making
A school district has a parade on a Saturday morning to promote community literacy awareness and garner support for reading. The decision is almost assuredly made by administrators because it is doubtful professional teachers would spend time in such a manner on their own. It is also highly unlikely that such an action would occur in a state that had a strong teacher union.
It is not that teachers are not supportive of initiatives. It is just the amount of time they already spend in most cases no less than 60 hours a week and in most 70 or more, so they allocate their time wisely.
I do not believe anyone would dispute the admirable intent of such an endeavor. Furthermore, if someone did, they would appear to be sour grapes, not a team player, a dissenter, and any number of negative adjectives. It might even be reflected in their teacher evaluation. So coercion is certainly in play.
My personal read; the district administration probably felt compelled to show the community they are trying to do something to justify their positions, the number of them there are, and how much they earn. It is a never ending game of; the flavor of the week, change made for changes sake (usually prior to proper assessment can be made), and position justification using deflection.
So here’s the deal. Someone decided it was a good idea to go out, raise community awareness, put on a show, give away books and display commitment. But not so fast.
The schools are required to build floats.
School moral is low because teachers are dramatically overworked by overly critical and unreasonably demanding administrators. Probably because their bosses are the same way.
There is the pervasive expectation of win at all costs, failing is not an option,etc.
Suppose the district has 15 elementary schools, 3 junior highs, and 2 high schools in a town of say 30,000.
All schools are tasked to build floats with the best float winning a prize.
At the elementary level the assignment goes to teacher aides primarily.
Don’t leave out many of the administrators are extremely competitive.
Five paraprofessionals work on the floats all day for a week. 5 para x 6 hours conservatively = 30 hours times 5 workers is 150 hours.
Forty staff members are asked to give up their 45 minute conference period to work on the floats. 40 x .45 min = 30 hours.
20 staff put in an additional 5 hours each after school.
Discounting the after school time and figuring teacher aides make $12.00 an hour and teachers $20.
150 x 12 = $1800 + 30 x 20 = $600. So on average $2400 worth of man hours educating has been lost per campus.
Suppose only 12 campuses take it seriously and three principals are a bit rebellious.
12 x $2400 = $28,800 lost in district educating hours. This does not include any other financial contributions or hours lost at the upper grades. It is easy to see where such an endeavor could easily run $50,000 in terms of hours lost educating.
To my mind and financial considerations aside, here is the deal. Someone thought it was ok to take those paraprofessionals away from the kinder, first and second grades they were assigned to. They were assigned there for a reason and every teacher I know, knows what it is.
In grades k – 2 unless you are blessed, one or two children will take up 50% of the teachers time become they lack social skills in someway or another. When you take away the aide to make floats, you just caused the education of every kid in those rooms to suffer academically. The one or two who gets considerable attention because they need it and the other 18 kids in the room who were not taught at remotely the same quality as they would have been because of the distractions made by the two.
It was decided it was a prudent choice to raise community literacy with a parade because that was considered more important and relevant than;
adding to the overwhelming workload of a faculty and in many cases coercing faculty member participation,
spending $30,000 in educational hours,
depriving five teachers of 20 student classrooms their teacher aides at each campus for five days. That would equate out to 100 students at twelve campuses or 1200 students receiving far less quality education than they normally would have received.
A teacher decision would have been to keep the aides in the room and teach the kids.
The administration thought their idea would be a better use of resources.
Do we or do we not lead by example?
Ebola Observation
Every morning I make a pilgrimage to the local Starbucks where I satisfy my socialization, read world events from a variety of sources, and generally plan the rest of the day.
The first thing when I sit down is that someone has left the local paper there and as I glance over I notice in big bold letters ‘Ebola Fears Rising’. This is what they are leading with. For this to be posted in such a prominent way by the local media makes me take pause. Although I am someone who reads a lot, perhaps there is something about this situation that I have missed. So I begin to scour the web on the topic.
On Facebook the shares provided and folks comments certainly made me think I must have had it all wrong. This could really be something and we should all both be afraid and not trust the government to get it right. I continue to read and talk to a few folks. One young lady canceled a trip to Dallas. Numerous folks from my hometown think this is really something we should be concerned about and then of course there is that headline.
So I stop reading what common folks are saying and begin doing my own research. Within seconds I come across a reputable article by NBC that says as follows and I quote
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and just about every leading expert on infectious disease that you can find agrees: Ebola is very unlikely to spread in the United States. Even in a country affected by an outbreak, an individual’s chance of getting it are very low, but in the developed world, they’re virtually zero.”
It wasn’t even hard to find which brings me to my point,this is what the local newspaper leads with EBOLA FEARS RISING. Isn’t running something lacking scientific support to such a degree the worst type of journalism. It’s like, hey for all of you out there that really don’t know what is going on we’re going to try and raise your blood pressure, get you excited and raise sales all in one fell swoop by spreading inflammatory propaganda about something you probably know very little about.
This brought to you by the same folks that refuse to believe the experts who agreed nine hundred to zip that we are causing global warming I’ll betcha.
danoettel 