Hey, Watertown neighbors! Head to the Watertown Regional Library Saturday morning at 10 a.m. and help refer Governor Daugaard's destructive education "reform" bill to a public vote! Members of the Watertown Education Association—you know, real teachers, actual experts in how education works—will have petitions available to refer the now-notorious House Bill 1234 to a public vote in November.
And if you still have any of doubts about the demerits of this bill, those Watertown educators will be happy to sit and chat with you about what HB 1234 really will do—waste money, increase bureaucracy and in-school politics, increase time spent on standardized testing—and what it won't do—one darn thing to make your teachers better or your kids smarter.
Saturday morning, 10 a.m., Watertown Regional Library—Go! Sign! Win!
Update 21:15 MDT: Other HB 1234 referendum events around the state:
- Sioux Falls teachers and friends will be circulating petitions at the "Wells Fargo Cinco de Mayo Fiesta" at Falls Park. (First they privatize Mexican heritage; then they privatize public education—it all makes sense!)
- Rapid City educators will work the crowds at the Shrine Circus at both the 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. performances at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. (Elephant poop: yup, appropriate for discussions of Republican ideas on education.)
Vote to support 1.2.3.4! It gives money to the good teachers in your town, and removes protection of the slackards that feel entitled to their jobs!!!
Grudz. No.
To assume any teacher is a slackard is insult to all teachers.
Voters, the "protection" to which Grudz refers is one letter that administrators must write to a fourth-year or beyond teacher to whom they are not offering a contract for the following school year. Currently, to remove slackards at the end of the school year, administrators must write them a letter saying, essentially, "We are not asking to teach again for us next year because you are a slackard, as demonstrated by...." By all means, get rid of your slackards. But teachers who were good enough to get hired and rehired three years or more years in a row deserve at least an explanation of what changed.
And that's just the small potatoes of this bill. Don't let Grudz distract you (as he too often does me) with his shouting about alleged slackards (again, where? how many? and why aren't administrators and school boards using the tools they have now to improve or remove such underperforming teachers in a state where the teachers union has almost no power?). The big problem (among others) here is that the bonus pay is based on standardized tests, which don't measure the best teaching well and which will crowd out really good teaching in favor of more teaching to the test for all grades three times a year.
Mr. Johnson, it is insane to think that there are no sub-par teachers that don't need a kick in the pants or a little adjustment.
How many teachers are there in this state? 20,000? 50,000? Some of those people are sub-par. The rest, the majority, they can stand on their own performance. Which apparently is fine.
According to Governor Daugaard's State of the State Address this year, there are 8,452 certified teachers on the job in South Dakota. There are above-average and below-average performers (by definition) in every field.
Grudznick is a sub-par blogger.
[Technically, I would prefer to dub Grudz a commenter, not a blogger, as Grudz does not post his own blog (at least not that I'm aware of).]
I think of Grudz as an editorial cartoon performance artist who publishes his character sketches on blogs and challenges blog hosts to remove them. LOL.