What Do We Want? A Contract! When Do We want it? Now!

By Cecily Myart-Cruz West Area Chair & Emerson Middle School

Now is time to focus our full and undivided attention on mobilization for a fair and equitable contract. LAUSD has insulted teachers and health and human service professionals once again by offering a contract proposal that falls far short of economic and professional realities. The teachers and HHS professionals, who are responsible for recent gains across the district and who day in and day out are the ones serving our children, get slapped once again in the face. This district is essentially saying that we are next to worthless. While at the same time the bureaucrats continue to bloat and siphon off the resources the state gives LAUSD. It’s time to get mad and it’s time to mobilize! We need to show LAUSD that we are the backbone of this distinct; we are the ones who everyday encourage our children to come to school, which in turn generates ADA that the district turns around and lavishes on the bureaucracy. The district says the money is not there to meet our demands. The money is there, if they would just get a grip on reality and spend the money on keeping the good teachers and HHS professionals they have, who everyday make a difference in the lives of our children. Do bureaucrats and administrators make a difference everyday like we do? Not! They’re never in the classrooms! We are in the classrooms everyday and its time we were treated equitably for the work we do! We need to mobilize! We need to stand up and be counted! At the end of the day, LAUSD will tally our voices, our feet, our red T-shirts, our bodies at Beaudry and District #1 headquarters to see how strong we are. Stay active. Stay informed and participate in any and all upcoming UTLA mobilization events. It is simple, my fellow UTLA members; it has worked time and again when we faced a great challenge like this. We need to stand and be counted so that the district will listen to us and take us seriously. They cannot have hundreds of thousands of students on the streets. Don’t forget the spirit of ’89. Let’s make a difference.

TIME: TEACHING OR TESTING

By Gail E. Jackson-Bassett Castle Heights Elementary

Time, and respect for teachers seems lacking these days in the eyes of the district. As many dedicated teachers know, setting up your classroom for a new school year takes time. Decisions need to be made about how our classrooms will be arranged, and which learning centers will be used. Where will supplies be placed so students have easy access to them? How will the flow of traffic in the classroom affect student learning? Then, once the school year begins, it takes time to teach students new classroom procedures/management; how to work independently and in groups, how to communicate with each other, how to transition smoothly from one learning center or subject to the next. Most importantly, it takes time to build a cohesive community of learners that respect individual and group differences. During the first month of school, teachers at one time were encouraged to pre-assess their students and gather accurate/current data pertaining to their students’ abilities. Once interpreted, this information would drive the needed instruction to meet the academic needs of their students. It had been customary for the first two weeks (at least) of the school year to establish and monitor this crucial period. These procedures lay the foundation for how successful the rest of the school year will develop. Unfortunately, within recent years, this professional freedom and judgment have been taken away from educators and replaced with the Open Court schedules, new Math Instructional Guides (MIG) and multiple quarterly district assessments. These prescribed jam-packed curriculums, fragmented mathematical concepts, and time consuming district assessments have become the focal point of instruction. The focus has been taken from needs assessment and remediation to focus on the district’s prescribed curriculum. The theory being that concepts spiral themselves around and students who miss a concept the first time around will comprehend it the next time around. Why must a child wait to grasp the standard when his teacher can make sound decisions to create meaningful tasks for the student to explore and build upon? Its teachable moments like this that effect student learning, but this takes time and the teacher must stay on the pacing plan. If one alters from this inflexible plan, teachers experience conflicting feelings. There is a deep sense of professional responsibility to teach in a manner that is in the best interest of our students, while at the same time experiencing the stress of keeping the secret that you are not on the designated story according to some arbitrary pacing plan. Regardless as to what gaps our students have, we must implement these uniformed predetermined programs. Why, because these programs have been designed to cover the skills that will appear on the California Standardized Test in the spring. Is this what should drive instruction, to pass a test? Is this what education has boiled down to, passing tests? It appears that the Art of Teaching has been replaced with Systematic Instruction. Educators are expected to follow the preset protocol of the prescribed programs. Students are expected to input information given, hard wire it to their main drive and retrieve it upon demand. Educating our youth today in an assembly line manufacturing style is not productive. The problem is the lack of consideration for the human element. Students come with varied experiences, different learning curves, multiple language differences and diverse backgrounds. We are educators teaching young children/young adults and each class from year to year differs. A one size fits all program focused on quantitative data is not an educational Holy Grail. There are no hard and fast answers to improving student learning. If we, as professional educators, have not realized it, there is a huge shift underway in education. R. DuFour a leading researcher states, “An underlying assumption of the movement seems to be that someone other than teachers--state legislatures, consultants, textbook publishers, etc-should determine the curriculum to be taught, the instructional strategies to be used, the pace to be followed, the acceptable materials to be utilized and the assessment instruments to be monitored.” This is our reality now! During these negotiations and soon after, we must begin to attack the district’s unrealistic demands on our professional wisdom. Certainly no one wants to go back to the old days where every school had its own curriculum, instead we must find middle ground between standardized curriculum and professional rights and responsibilities. Teachers must be allowed to create interesting, informative and challenging lessons for our students. Perhaps one day the district will once again start talking about quality education rather than test scores, test scores and test scores.