There there's headline from today's Oregonian:

Portland Public Schools gives up on Race to the Top efforts

Portland Public Schools has given up its chance to compete for up to $40 million in federal funds after failing to reach an agreement with its union about using test scores in teacher evaluations, one of the grant's requirements.

This is why I hang on to my ballot until the last minute. Bye-bye bond vote ...

What I see as a senior citizen and former teacher is a layer of expensive and unnecessary middle management in all the school systems today that has absolutely nothing to do with classroom instruction.
The so called advisors, grief counselors, administrators, and their ilk should be either fired or if they were once qualified teachers, sent back to the classrooms.
The profession of school teacher needs to be elevated and the good teachers rewarded with decent pay and benefits. The bad teachers have to be eliminated from all levels of the educational system from K through college. The old saying "if you can't do anything else teach school" has got to be ended.
Educating our children to be critical thinkers is vital to the successful continuation of our democracy.

I feel very fortunate that my stepdaughter is in a private high school where she is (finally) learning writing skills that were overlooked in her PPS middle school "education."
Why is it OK for PPS to be spending inordinate time and energy on PC ideology while disregarding the fundamentals?

The insanity going on in the Scott school is going to end in a civil suit against the district. It is just out of control. The ravings of Chuk Barber are cringe worthy.

1950: No, you can't be in a group with Whites because you're Black.
2012: No, you can't be in a group with Whites because you're Black.
What's changed?

Question for Portland Native, as you seem to have experience and expertise in this:

What percentage of teachers would you guess are truly bad enough to be removed?
Is placing them in an administrative role a sensible way to absorb the paperwork burden while removing them from the classroom?

Love the new PC term "kids of whiteness." GMAFB.

If Gutierrez is ok with “our drumming corps for black and brown sixth- to eighth-grade boys” I wonder how she would respond if someone wanted to start "our guitar class for white sixth- to eighth-grade boys"...??

Portland Public Schools has given up its chance to compete for up to $40 million in federal funds after failing to reach an agreement with its union about using test scores in teacher evaluations, one of the grant's requirements.

Good for them! Using test scores in teacher evaluations is a complete joke. It's one thing to ask teachers to improve their classes over the course of a year, but standardized tests don't measure that. They measure where a student actually is relative to where they should be. And where a 10th grader is is a function of all the teachers he's had from K-9th grade. Why should a 10th grade history teacher's performance be graded down because a kid arrives in his class having had nothing but horrible teachers for the past 9 years?

To piggyback on Roger... "Question for Portland Native..."

You say: "The profession of school teacher needs to be elevated and the good teachers rewarded with decent pay and benefits. The bad teachers have to be eliminated from all levels of the educational system from K through college."

Did you advocate for that when you where part of the union that continued to fight tooth and nail against "eliminating bad teachers"?

What is a "bad teacher", and how do you measure it?

The problem PPS and OEA is that they reject free money from Race to the Top because it measures teachers on performance rather than seniority.

Did you advocate for performance rather than seniority when you where not retired?

And finally, are you retired in state or out of the state of Oregon?

“PPS sent no less than 93 teachers, principals and administrators to San Antonio, Texas, to attend and present at the 4th Annual Summit on Courageous Conversations”
And which commingled PPS budget (from which the school district claims they have no money spend on hiring teachers and objectively educating kids) did the funding for this little extravagant jaunt come from?

thank god we don't have these silly discussions applying to the people that run Portland. last time I looked they we're all pretty much Lily white. of course, anyone who would send their children to PPS is crazy if they expect them to learn anything after all these committees and the focus on teacher benes instead of education.

Using test scores in teacher evaluations is a complete joke.

Don't you mean using anything in teacher evaluations is a complete joke?

From a speech I once heard: "Why is it we can evaluate the performance of a civil engineer, a violinist, a neurosurgeon, a librarian, and a botanist, but there are claims that it’s impossible to evaluate a classroom teacher?"

Dave J. said: Using test scores in teacher evaluations is a complete joke. ... They measure where a student actually is relative to where they should be.

That is one way to use test scores, but not the best way...

Using test scores as a component in teacher performance reviews is perfectly reasonable. But, you can't just look at a single score, you have to look at where the kid was at the beginning of the year and where they ended up at the end of the year. Then you judge the teacher by how they did on advancing all of their students. I wouldn't expect all of the kids to be at the same spot, but they should have all made significant progress, and the ones that didn't might need to be reviewed to see if it can be determined why they didn't advance and what can be done to help the kid succeed going forward.

The 3 "R's" use to be:

'readin, 'ritin, and 'rithmetic

Have been replaced by:

race relations reflux

Portland native - the myth of underpaid, overworked teachers is over.

Call me when the average private sector schmoe gets the 'decent pay and benefits' of an 8-month work year and a starting salary+benefit package averaging around $78,000/year.

Oh and they can't be fired ever.

Discussions of teachers and schools always degenerate in to discussions of wage and classroom teacher evaluations. I wish they'd morph into a discussion of what's actually being taught.

But Leaving, don't you know that they work extra hours grading papers and stuff? It's hard!

Actually, if teachers assigned less homework and did more in-class work, they'd have less to grade and wouldn't be able to use this excuse anymore...

Discussions of teachers and schools always degenerate in to discussions of wage and classroom teacher evaluations. I wish they'd morph into a discussion of what's actually being taught.

Long, long ago, the education system moved away from teaching as its focus. It's all about working conditions.

Portland Native, thanks for that link. PAT rep Sullivan makes an infuriatingly incomplete point. If test scores are not the best way to evaluate teacher performance, how DOES she propose evaluating teacher performance? The absence of an alternative doesn't lend her position much credibility.

Sorry -- I meant Garage Wine, not Portland Native. Big task, keeping track of all the pseudonyms around here!!

"Call me when the average private sector schmoe gets the 'decent pay and benefits' of an 8-month work year and a starting salary+benefit package averaging around $78,000/year."

Leaving very soon. I can tell that you're frustrated, but I'm not sure where you're getting your salary numbers. According to that bastion of liberal thinking, The Wall Street Journal, the only college majors whose graduates have lower starting salaries than Education majors at $34,900/year are Spanish and Religion. By mid-career Education majors are at the bottom. And yes, Drama majors are on the list.

The highest starting salaries go to Physician Assistants and various flavors of engineer. The full data are here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html

Leaving: Does the 78k include the value of the benefit package, including vacation, health insurance, etc.? If so, what private sector jobs pay less and require similar formal education requirements and experience? Also, do you think everyone should be paid the same, no matter what they do?

Mr. Wine: We can evaluate teachers. In fact, why not evaluate them the same way we evaluate the other professionals you mention? Let's judge them by their ability to build a bridge or design a highways system, or please our ears with lovely sound, or restore feeling and senses to our bodies, or identify which plants are plantiest, or curate the Dewey Decimal system.

Of course, the problem is precisely what Mr. Gilmore suggests: we don't have any consensus whatsoever on what our public education system should do. If you don't know what results a professional is supposed to obtain, then how can you evaluate that professional?

Maybe we should focus on what we want from an education system first, then we can start demanding that from our teachers and students.

Mr. Forsyth: Are you under the impression that teachers are not now, nor have ever been, evaluated?

K2: Thanks for that link, though I'm sad to learn that I don't meet the median level of earning for the 75th percentile of my major.

You also write: "By mid-career Education majors are at the bottom. And yes, Drama majors are on the list."

Good. Have you taken any education classes? They're utterly ridiculous. Good teachers don't major in education, they major in the subjects they eventually teach.

One of the things that frustrates me about our junior high and high school education system is that the teachers are too removed from the practical applications of their subjects. This something that has changed over time, and not for the better.

Ted I don't meet the median level of earning for the 75th percentile of my major either. :-/

"Have you taken any education classes? They're utterly ridiculous. Good teachers don't major in education, they major in the subjects they eventually teach."

No, I've never taken any education classes, luckily. I knew many ed majors as an undergrad many years ago, and an old roommate of mine is now a teacher. She went back to grad school after working in her field to become a teacher while we were still roommates. I remember how painful many of the classes sounded. She had an undergraduate science degree and now teaches middle school science. She is a far braver woman than I.

I believe that Oregon now requires middle and high school teachers to have an undergrad degree in a subject area, graduate schooling and passing a national subject knowledge exam before they can be endorsed in a subject, but I don't know much more about it than that.

When it comes to elementary school teachers, I don't know what they major in now.

"Are the Portland public schools going off deep end on race?" I think the answer is a resounding yes. Principal Gutierrez seems a little out of control.

All this nonsense is one of the reasons my dad retired from teacher back in the 1980's.. He was fed up with the inservice days where someone who had rarely worked in a classroom would tell the experienced teachers how they were doing it all wrong

Is anyone else concerned with middle school math in PPS? I have my own concerns, but keep running into other parents in parking lots and soccer fields who are also concerned about thei children who are advanced in being slowed down in math. District officials deal with families on an individual basis--which makes it easy to address the issue. Contact me if you are having a similar issue: yeigh@comast.net.

There needs to be a whole brand new discussion/paradigm for race. All discussion of race should be banished. Melanin content and geographic differences of genetic extraction deemed IRRELEVANT, except insofar as the discussion may relate to any statistical evidence of violence patterns between groups of differing melanin content.

Race discussions are being used uniquely as a lever for power now, and have absolutely nothing to do with education, except insofar as that lever for power is passed on to the next generation.

At the "center for inter cultural organizing" the other day on Killingsworth, I saw a poster of some interest. It was a call for race-based solidarity against foreclosures, in the form of mob demonstrations around the houses of members of a particular race. It featured a photograph of an all-black crowd protesting the foreclosure of a house in Portland. The center for intercultural organizing has been funded by the PDC, in their wisdom, for the purported purpose of ameliorating race relations.
What a crock.

I smell a big pork barrel out there connected to 'Courageous Conversations'..I'm sure there's a bunch of Federal money being used to keep it going. I'd like to have more history on who is making the BIG BUCKS.