ABC Committee Campaign Speech

Recently I had the honor of running for the At-Large position for CTA's ABC Committee. This committee is in charge of administering CTA's PAC funds. The following was my speech to CTA's State Council:

David, Dean Gail, carolyn, Council,

It's truly an honor to address this body for the first time and I'm grateful to m colleagues in the Sweetwater Education Association for the opportunity to serve with each of you.

Although I've met many of you at conferences, committees and the Read Across America table, I should take a moment to introduce myself. I am the son of Ampelio and María Rodriguez; two hard working people who rose from humble origins, and who by example taught my brothers an I, the value of education, dedication, responsibility and service. Armed with these fundamental principles, I began a teaching career in 1987.

Since then I've worn many hats for my local: Site Rep, Elections Chair, State Council member, Secretary, Communications Chair and all around web guy. However, nobody is more surprised than I, to find myself asking for your vote today.

I've taken pride in being a foot soldier. I'm proud that the communications plan that Alex mentioned is being used in trainings; that CTA staff is sharing it with locals going through difficult bargaining. That's what foot soldiers do. They work hard and in anonymity. Under normal circumstances I would have been happy to continue in that role. But circumstances haven't been normal for a while now.

I seek the position of ABC Minority At-Large out of a sense of conviction. A conviction born from the powerful lessons I learned during SEA's last round of bargaining. From the start we faced a Superintendent with a clear strategy: intimidate and lie, weaken the union, fast track to factfinding, and impose a contract. That strategy failed.

That experience taught me that organizing is paramount; that communication with members is the cornerstone of success; that there is power in collective action and most importantly, that school boards matter.

During the eighteen months of stalled bargaining, our School Board was disengaged, negligent and at times outright hostile. They fully endorsed our superintendent's tactics. At one point, a board member suggested that a 15% pay-cut was NOT out line. And after approving over 150 RIFs, they extended the superintendent's contract. School Boards matter a great deal!

We are living in a time when the enemies of public education are well entrenched, and our traditional allies are at best unrecognizable.

We are living in a time when tens of thousands of teachers across the country helped elect a President and a Congress, who in turn have dedicated more federal dollars to education than we've ever seen before; yet the best they can come up with is "Race to the Top."

School Boards matter more than ever!

We must dedicate effort, time and financial resources to taking back our schools! And given what's happening in Washington and Sacramento, the only way to do so is one school board at a time.

I know I should be asking for your vote with a big smile and a sunny disposition but I can't. I'm frustrated an angry! I see what's happening to locals up and down the state. The ridiculous proposals; big pay cuts, unpaid furlough days, "do more with less." Increase the curriculum, shrink the school year and be accountable to the results. When did we become the national scapegoat?

I ask that you send me to ABC to be the voice of all minority groups in this room and of teachers of minority students, I will be an advocate and a liaison. I will work to bring in more minority leaders because we need more hands not fewer. Allow me to serve on a committee that recognizes you must have the resources you need to take back your schools!

Thank you.

Economic stimmulus package and education

As a California teacher I was curious to see CTA President David Sanchez behind Illinois Senator Dick Durbin at a Press Conference last week. Then I realized Durbin is on the Appropriations Committee. A key committee for the stimulus package. That led me to search for what is in the stimulus package for education. I found some answers in the New York Times.

The good news is that there is money for education in the Bill. The bad news is that while the House version had $150 billion for education, the Senate trimmed quite a bit of that. The Senate version contains about $83 billion for child care, public schools and universities.

The Senate bill is expected to pass today and then it goes to a Conference Committee where House and Senate leaders will work on a compromise bill that can be sent to President Obama for his signature.

If you'd like to read the full New York Times article click here...NYT.

Merging Career and College Paths.

 As we close another school year and high school graduates up and down the state go into the world armed with the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired, it’s important for us to reflect and look to the future. Education has always played multiple roles in the social development of our country. At the same time that schools are charged with maintaining and passing on our history and traditions, they are entrusted with giving tools to younger generations so that they can forge their paths into the future. Historically, while at times schools have been pillars that upheld the unequal and unjust social structures of segregation and ethnic biases, they’ve also been the laboratories where racial integration first took hold and has created generations of young adults for whom that era seems anachronistic and just plain odd. And as we embark on the 21st Century we must again ask ourselves what will California schools look like over the next 50 years?

For over two decades our state and our nation’s economy has moved away from industrial manufacturing towards a more service and information based economic model. We have moved from the creation and maintaining of widgets to the creation and managing of billions of gigabytes of information that travel around the world at amazing speeds. Furthermore, we continue to move from a nation based economy that competes with other nations in a zero-sum game to a globalized economy. Today’s graduates are some of the first graduates that will compete for jobs with a global workforce. And it’s not simply blue collar jobs factory jobs that are being outsourced, but jobs formerly considered “safe,” such as engineering and design are also up for grabs in this new “flat” world we live in. Given this, we must ask, are our schools doing all they can to prepare students for this new environment?

California schools operates under a model geared towards preparing every single child in high school for college. Every student follows a rigid academic program that adheres to the A-G curriculum required to enter California State Colleges. This is a laudable goal, to give every child the opportunity to go to college if he or she so desires. Especially because this came on the heels of tracking students, often with no other criteria than ethnicity, into either the “college track” or the “vocational/career path.” However, according to Edsource.com “in California, about half of public high school graduates go on to a publicly supported two- or four-year college. Others will attend private institutions in state, or private and public ones out of state.” Even if California does slightly better than the national average, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, roughly 30% of high school graduates in 2007 did not enroll in college. How are these students being served?

Perhaps a much better model is the Multiple Pathways proposal. The Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, out of UCLA,  has been studying Multiple Pathways and have put out a series of papers. The paper by Jeannie Oakes and Marisa Saunders caught my eye. It’s entitled “Reforming California’s High Schools: College Prep for All? Reinvigorated Career and Technical Education? Or Multiple Pathways to both?”  In this paper the authors tear down the dichotomy between preparing for college or vocational education and propose that “California can and should prepare all student for both college and careers by creating Multiple Pathways through high school.” They propose that California schools must adopt programs which include the following three elements:

1. A college preparatory academic core (satisfying the A-G requirements for entry into CA public universities; 

2. A professional/technical core well grounded in academic and real-world standards; and 

3. Increasingly more demanding opportunities for field-based learning that deepen students' understanding of academic and technical knowledge through application in authentic situations.

For over a decade we’ve been seeing the poverty gap widen in this country. In our state the median income isn’t enough to purchase the average home, even after the crash and credit crunch. I truly believe schools must be vigilant to maintain the role of education as the great equalizer, the Silver Bullet that gives all students a fighting chance in an a very competitive job market. College for all? Of course! This must continue to be out goal. However we can ill afford to create a social underclass by not giving the non-college bound high school graduate the important skills needed to navigate the new global economy. Moreover, these are real world skills that would benefit all high school graduates.

 While the devil is in the details. It’s clear that schools in the future must look vastly different than what they look like today. Currently schools find themselves preparing students  to enter a job market that does not yet exist and we can barely fathom.  Today’s jobs in the biomedical field, web engineering and e-commerce development were non-existent when today’s graduating Seniors were born. Schools cannot keep up with the changes that our economy faces, however this is an argument for strengthening our public schools by creating programs and alliances with private industry in which truly no child is left behind because they are prepared with the necessary tools to take on the jobs of the future and not an irrelevant multiple choice exam.

School enrollment to set record highs

Here is an interesting article from the Washington Post on the growing number of expected school enrollment...

Public school enrollment across the country will hit a record high this year with just under 50 million students, and the student population is becoming more diverse in large part because of growth in the Latino population, according to a new federal report. (Read the article)

As expected enrollment grows it becomes more and more important for education leaders, teachers and parents to ask themselves what schools will need to look like in the future. The answer is important to us all.

Pay teachers like babysitters.

A little humor that arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago...


Are you sick of high paid teachers? Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do - baby sit! We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they work; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan — that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children.

Now how many do they teach in day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET’S SEE…. That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 peryear. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student–a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!)

WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Overcoming the Teaching Penalty (First in a Series)

When my early thoughts of becoming a teacher first started nudging me, I resisted. I admired some of my teachers, but to be honest, the income level was a big deterrent. As time passed during my senior year in high school, and some of my friends were thinking of being lawyers and doctors and architects, I was increasingly considering, with a high degree of consternation, becoming a teacher. I knew that becoming a teacher meant giving up the ability to make more money in other professions. What I didn’t know was that teachers are in essence penalized for their career choice.

Don’t misunderstand me. I have yet to meet an educator who decided to step into the business of opening up the world of knowledge to children because of the money. Teachers are teachers because they are passionate about teaching, about learning, about their subject matter, but most of all, about their students. Not one of them expects to get rich. They expect to get paid fairly for an increasingly difficult job. However, over the past decade, as the demands on educators have increased, teacher salaries have fallen further out of step from equally educated peers with comparable jobs.

The Economic Policy Institute recently published a study entitled The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. In short the study concludes that not only do teachers make less than other professions, a study wasn’t required for that, but that over time teachers have been falling further and further behind comparably educated people in the US. Furthermore this penalty has been worse for women and those who’ve made teaching their lifetime career.

Here are some results from that study:

• Public school teachers in 2006 earned 15% lower weekly earnings than comparable workers. A gap in earnings that grew by 1% since the original study was done in 2003.

• From 1979 to 2006, teachers disadvantage in weekly earnings relative to comparable workers grew by 13.4 percentage points, with most of the erosion (9 percentage points) occurring in the last 10 years. In other words, teachers are falling behind at an accelerating rate.

• US Census data show that in 1960 female teachers had a wage advantage of 14.7% over other comparably educated women. Yet by 2000, that advantage had turned into a 13.2% wage disadvantage. A slide of 28 percentage points.

• Teacher's weekly wages were nearly on a par with those in comparable occupations in 1996 but are now 14.3%, below that of comparable occupations.

• If we take relative compensation data through the 1990s and break it down by age, nearly all of the increase in the weekly earnings gap between teachers and comparably educated and experienced workers occurred among mid-and senior-level teachers. Early career teachers (age 25-34) experience roughly the same wage disadvantage today as in 1990.

• In 15 states, public school teacher weekly wages lag by more than 25%. In contrast, there are only five states where teacher weekly wages are less than 10% behind. and no state where teacher pay is equal or better than that of other college graduates.

Even this brief summary offers a lot to think about. The one ray of light in the report is that benefits have helped ameliorate the wage gap when considering total compensation. While the weekly wage gap has grown by 15%, when benefits are considered as part of a total compensation package, teachers have only fallen behind by 12%. Yet, if like me, you’re a lifer, the results of the study are at best discouraging. What is clear is that, for the political leaders that make decisions on the future of education and the labor unions that represent teachers in our state and nationally, there are no simple solutions. Simplistic solutions like merit pay or performance-pay are no more than political sound-bites that, like “No Child Left Behind,” “Homeland Security” and “The Patriot Act” are nothing more than misnomers intended as tools of deception, a cloak for supplanting real improvements in education with a conservative agenda that advances the social goals of a few and the financial benefits of the privileged.

Teacher compensation is a hot potato issue these days, for political leaders, school boards and teachers unions. Nevertheless, it’s one that must be discussed soberly and honestly. And lets engage in that dialog by accepting that teachers’ incomes are below the average of comparably educated people and that there is no denying they are falling further behind. Over the next few weeks I’ll be digging more fully into the EPI report and the topic of teacher compensation. I’ll try to show all sides of a variety of proposals and I acknowledge that my 20 years as an educator may color my conclusions. Yet I intend to back up these views with what at time seems in short supply when it comes to the debate about the future of education: reason.

I welcome your suggestions and thoughts as we continue a discussion about shaping the future of education.

Happy Day of the Teacher!