My “old” friend wrote in his e-mail, If we took out of each racial group in that racist standardized API test, all the individuals who scored above 90% and put them into group A, the next 80%-90% in group B, and so on, most of the Asians would fall in group A, most African-Americans in group F — everyone distributed into the various groups according to their score.
However, there’d be a lot of “bleed over” between the various groups — that is in group A along with the Asians you’d find some blacks, whites, Latinos, etc. and so on for the other groups.
This is not good. We want a ranking that will minimize bleed over, so let us create some.
The first is a homework ranking in the place of the racial API ranking. You will have A – F groups according to hours spent doing homework with group A doing the most, falling down to group F the least.
Do another ranking of the API racial groups this time according to each individual’s time spent participating in class. Group A individuals would be the highest participation down to group F the lowest.
Do another ranking that focuses on each individual’s test scores throughout the school year – group A the highest down to group F.
You would title these three rankings the following:
Academic Performance Index Growth by Student Class Participation – 2010 Growth API Comparison (includes class work, asking questions, taking part in discussions)
Academic Performance Index Growth by Student Classroom Test Scores – 2010 Growth API Comparison
There would be a 1-to-1 correspondence between the different group levels and their API scores. That is every A group would be the top API results down to the F group scoring the lowest API score.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry
her family and culture too.
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It is absurd and stupid to blame teachers for students that do not do class work, homework, and study for tests or read books outside class.
Washington D.C. and the president of the United States are demanding that teachers do the impossible.
We must repeal the No Child Left Behind Act and enact into law “No Student and/or Parent Ignored” (NSPI), because that is what we are doing—ignoring the students and parents.
An old friend suggested this idea, and it is how America will resolve its problems with public education.
The reason students do not show gains on the Academic Proficiency Index is NOT because of bad or boring teachers or teacher unions. It is because most of those students are not doing homework, studying for tests or reading outside of school and many are not reading in school.
Since no one in Washington D.C. and/or the White House has placed blame where it should be, on students and parents, then why should students work?
Students must be held responsible to learn but they are not. Instead, many are encouraged to feel good and have fun and/or are ignored by parents.
After all, thanks to “No Child Left Behind”, parents are not responsible for their child’s education—only teachers have been held responsible. However, teachers cannot follow 150 to 200 students home and make sure they do homework, read and study each day.
A Kaiser Generation M2 – Kids/Youth/Media Survey (January 2010) said, “Total Media Exposure for all 8 to 18 year old’s average amount of time spend with each medium in a typical day was 10:45 hours
That average 10:45 hours was divided up with 4:29 hours spent watching TV; 2:31 hours listening to music; 1:29 hours on the computer; 1:13 hours playing video games; 30 minutes reading print media, and 25 minutes watching a movie.
If this is what the “average” child is doing daily in the US, when are they doing homework, reading or studying?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Larry Summers cites in his debate with Amy Chua that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard emphasizing what those “two” achieved without a university education.
While Gates was building Microsoft and Zuckerberg Facebook, do you believe these two billionaires spent ten hours a day doing what the average American child (raised by SAPs such as Summers) does to enjoy the first quarter of his or her life?
Summers doesn’t mention that Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on the planet, attended the Wharton Business school at the University of Pennsylvania for two years then transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Working part time, he managed to graduate in only three years.
Summers doesn’t mention that it is common that the top one percent of executives with annual incomes of $500,000 or more often have Ivy league educations from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
“Asian countries value education more than other countries.”
Summers doesn’t mention that the top 15% of the upper-middle class are highly educated and often have graduate degrees while earning a high 5-figure annual income commonly above $100,000.
To be specific, the median personal income for a high school drop out in the US with less than a 9th grade education is $17,422, and with some college that medium income jumps to $31,054, while a person with a professional university degree earns an annual medium income of $82,473. Source: Wiki Academic Models (this source was citing US Census data).
It’s okay if Summers and his fellow SAPs let their children and teens have fun the first eighteen years of life, but don’t forget, the average life span in the US is 78.3 years.
What are those children going to do for enjoyment while working to earn a living the next 60.3 years as an adult?
Most children raised by Tiger Moms such as Amy Chua shouldn’t have to worry. Those children (as adults) will probably be in the top 15% of income earners and enjoy life much more than those earning less than $18 thousand annually.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
One definition of the word “SAP” means “a foolish gullible person”. I copied that from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, and Larry Summers sounds as if he were a member of the “SAP” generation.
A friend forwarded a link to Larry Summers vs. Tiger Mom, which was published in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on January 27, 2011.
Larry Summers, who has billed himself as a “hard ass”, was President Barack Obama’s top economic advisor for the last few years.
Summers recently left the White House to return to Harvard as a professor then had a debate with Chinese-American “Tiger Mom,” Amy Chua, who wrote an essay that appeared in the WSJ with a headline (she didn’t write), which said, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.
Summers said why go through all the trouble to earn a university education when computers are eventually going to do the work that requires discipline.
He also said, “People on average live a quarter of their lives as children. That’s a lot. It’s important that they be as happy as possible during those 18 years. That counts too.”
Summers isn’t alone in his belief that children should focus on being happy instead of academic excellence.
The average American parent belonging to the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness (more SAPs) spends less than five minutes a day encouraging his or her child to be happy, which explains why the average American child enjoys watching TV (4:29 hours daily); socializing on sites such as Facebook (1:29 hours); playing video games (1:13 hours); listening to music (2:31 hours) while managing to send an average of 50 text messages daily. Source: A Kaiser Generation M2 – Youth Media Survey in January 2010 (other studies support these numbers).
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
Less than 100 years ago, children were the property of parents and could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude. Children of the poor often ended in factories and coalmines as young as five years old and labored twelve-hour days six days a week. Then in 1938, the child labor law was passed and the pendulum swung the other way 180 degrees until today, we see incidents such as these taking place in American classrooms.
I knew an eighth grade English teacher that was knocked out by a student. The student ended with five days of suspension then was transferred to my English class where she walked in tardy one day and lifted a leg to fart in my face in front of about 34 students before sitting down. I never met the parents.
Between 1999 and 2000, 135,000 teachers were physically attacked by a student and over 300,000 elementary and secondary school teachers were threatened with injury in the United States. Source: Lib.Umn.edu
American teachers are not alone.
The Guardian in the UK reported, “A quarter of school staff have suffered violence at the hands of a student and a third have been confronted by aggressive parents.”
What’s needed is to swing the pendulum back half way and return to dunce caps and stools in the classroom corner, corporal punishment and fines or even jail time for parents and/or students of all ages.
Of course, we could swing the pendulum back to the 17th century when some of the American colonies had laws on the books that allowed the courts to execute children that did not change unacceptable, rebellious behavior by a certain age.
Maybe we should include the parents of those children too.
However, instead of the situation improving, President Obama wants to take away job security for public school teachers and no one in Washington D.C. mentions the parents or the students when academic performance is not improving.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Job security is perilous for teachers in America, and it’s growing worse.
A teacher is suspended for rattling a table to gain the students attention or pins a note about unacceptable classroom behavior to a child’s sweater because the mother hasn’t responded to earlier notes.
In both cases, the students were not paying attention in class or were misbehaving. The teachers were just doing his or her job.
For rattling a table, one girl ran from the room and dialed 911 to complain to the police and they came to the school. The school district put the teacher on leave. We may never know who the student was since the law protects children younger than 18.
In Florida, an angry mother complains and another teacher is put on leave. The reason was that the teacher stapled a note to the student’s sweater. The teacher wasn’t sure if the notes she was sending home were getting through since the child’s poor behavior in class hadn’t changed. Source: neatorama
The mother felt the teacher embarrassed her son on purpose. The wrong person got in trouble. The mother should have spend a month in jail for the trouble she caused.
I see no problem with embarrassing students and parents too when student behavior disrupts the learning enivronment. The classroom is where teaching and learning is supposed to take place. When a child’s behavior or academic progress is poor and parents are not doing their job, the next step should be to embarrass the child in front of his or her peers and have the parents spend 24 hours in jail.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
There has been a recent debate on the Internet and in the media that college is a waste of time. There is some truth to that.
However, that is also wrong.
Costco ran a piece in the April 2011 Costco Connection that’s worth mentioning, and I agree with Dr. Richard Vedder, who said “NO”!
Richard Vedder is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University and is the author of Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs too Much.
I taught for thirty years in California’s public schools. I started out teaching in fifth grade then substitute taught for a few years before moving up to middle school for ten.
I finished the last sixteen at Nogales High School in La Puente, California where I taught mostly English with seven years teaching one journalism class in addition to four English sections and ended by teaching reading to students far below grade level the last two years.
I asked two questions of my students annually for most of those thirty years.
I. How many of you eat breakfast?
2. How many plan to go to college?
For eating breakfast, about eight percent said yes but what they ate wasn’t that nutritious. More than 90% did not eat anything and most of them admitted that the first drink or food consumed each school day was a sugary soda, candy and/or a huge bag of greasy French fries.
The school also sold pizza slices dripping with cheese at lunch. For three thousands students, one large bowl of fruit was available.
For the second question, 97% said yes, they planned to go to college.
Yet, only 5% turned in homework on a regular basis. Most did not study for quizzes or tests. The failure rate often approached half of the students I taught. Most did not read outside of class (even though they were told to read daily) and many did not read in class.
Most of the students at the high school where I taught read below grade level and had no qualms saying they hated to read.
However, they were proud to say they were going to college.
A few years before I left teaching, I attended a workshop at CSU Cal Poly Pomona, where I earned my multiple-subject, life teaching credential in 1975-76.
At that meeting, there were English teachers from the high schools that fed students into CSU Cal Poly.
We were told that 60% of high school graduates entering Cal Poly as freshman could not understand nor do college level work and had to take “Bonehead English” classes to catch up.
At the time, there were five levels of “Bonehead English” (the lowest one was equal to 8th grade English) at CSU Cal Poly.
None of these “bonehead English” classes counted toward college graduation.
That’s why I agree with Dr.Vedder that college is not worth it for everyone.
Vedder said, “Students with excellent high school grades and college-entry test scores have a lower risk of failure and thus many should pursue a four-year degree. Students with poor high school grades and/or test scores have a higher probability of dropping out and or being unable to get a good job even if they are successful in graduating.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Dr. Mark J. Perry writes a Blog called Carpe Diem at Blogspot.com. He bills himself as an expert in economics and finances.
Due to his Blog’s search engine rank, he probably has a wide following so he is misleading many people when he says, “Teachers in CA Receive More in Retirement than Active Teachers in More than Half of the U.S. States.”
While his statement and the chart he included with his post may be true, it doesn’t report all the facts and may mislead many who will then blame California’s retired teachers for part of the financial problems in the US.
However, I’m one of those teachers that retired after working thirty years in California’s public schools often spending 60 to 100 hours a week ten months each year teaching, planning and correcting student work at school and at home all hours of the week and weekends with no pay during the summer break.
In addition, the work didn’t stop when the winter or spring break arrived. Most teachers take work home and spend many days of the three weeks of paid vacation time catching up correcting student work and filling in grades in the grade book.
The only time the work stops is during the summer when there was no monthly pay for two full months.
In fact, after teaching thirty or more years, most teachers are at the high end of the pay scale making the average pay appear higher for retired teachers, and the retirement amount is based on the average annual earnings of the last three years of teaching.
When I retired, the calculation was about 1.95% x 30 (years) = 60.45% times the average of my last three years of earnings. That means I retired with a cut in pay equal to almost 40% of what I was earning my last year in the classroom but it was still higher than a teacher starting out was.
That is why when an average is figured for all active teachers, many are at the low end of the pay scale since so many Boomers are retiring and younger Americans are taking their place in the classroom, which lowers the average annual pay for active teachers.
In addition, California has the highest population in the country, which means more teachers boost that average retirement number higher since there are more teachers in the equation.
When I started teaching full time under contract in the 1970s, I earned about $12,000 annually with medical benefits and paid 8% of my pay into the California State Teachers Retirement System (CALstrs) for the next thirty years with California matching my contribution.
Unlike Social Security (SS), which is broke because the federal government spent the SS money workers paid, CALstrs is a retirement fund with more than 130 billion dollars that is invested in the private sector earning a 7% or higher rate of return annually besides the money flowing into the fund from active teachers that are still paying their annual 8% before taxes and the state’s matching funds.
The money that pays teacher retirement in California does not come out of the general fund that taxpayers pay into except for those matching dollars.
CALstrs reported recently that it is fully funded and has enough money to pay full retirement benefits for the next forty years as long as nothing changes.
Unlike Social Security and many other retirement plans across the country, the American taxpayer is not stuck paying for a teacher’s retirement in California.
However, I’m sure there are many politicians drooling over those billions of dollars that fund the CALstrs retirement system. California governors have borrowed from CALstrs before to balance the state budget then refused to pay hundreds of millions of dollars back to keep the CALstrs system funded.
Then the CALstrs board took the governor and the state to court and won each time so that borrowed money was paid back keeping CALstrs solvent.
Although I worked more than ten years (I started working at 15) before I became a teacher in 1975 to 2005, I cannot collect any SS yet I earned it. The federal government calls that double dipping since I collect retirement from CALstrs and California collects Federal dollars to fund parts of its educational system.
I also retired without medical as most teachers do in California. Only one or two school district out of hundreds in California offers a medical plan as part of the retirement. The district I worked for did not offer one except for COBRA, which is expensive for the retired teacher and only lasts until the retired teacher qualifies for Medicare.
The pay a teacher earns while teaching full time is based on the number of years in the classroom and how many degrees/units one has earned from college/universities. Teachers at the high end of the pay scale in California after thirty years may earn about $75,000 annually while a beginning teacher earns about $38,000 starting out (these were the figures I knew of in 2005).
Each school district has its own pay scale negotiated between the local branch of the teachers union and the school board so pay varies between school districts. Rural school districts in California often pay less than urban ones.
I suspect that applies to the nation too.
Where cost of living is higher, the pay would be higher and real estate in urban areas of California are expensive so the cost of living is higher than most of America.
In California, a teacher that retires after 42 years with a Masters Degree will earn 100% of his or her active teaching pay. However, if the teacher retires after 20 years of teaching at age 55, which is the earliest a teacher may collect at a reduced rate, that retirement pay will not even be 40% of the active teacher’s annual earnings.
__________________________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Rolling Stone reported that all across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers. The legal theft of public pensions started in Road Island in 2011 as a test case. “In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America’s states and cities.”
Fortune Magazine in addition to In These Times, and KQED also reported on this legalized fraud being supported by corrupt elected representatives from the state level all the way to the White House.
In fact, during my full-time university days on the GI Bill [1968 – 1973] before I graduated with a BA in journalism, I learned how easy it was for the media to make mistakes—sometimes deliberately—while practicing what is known as Yellow/Hate journalism to boost profits.
And Yellow/Hate Journalism [based upon sensationalism and crude exaggerations] is what the Associated Press [AP] did when it ran Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny by Don Thompson on December 14, 2011.
For instance, how would you feel if you read, “Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif. with his daughter? His departure from the workaday world [he worked thirty-six years in public education and was the superintendent of one of California’s 1,600 school districts] is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.”
That previous quote was in the second paragraph of Thompson’s AP news piece, and it is extremely misleading because of what it doesn’t say.
What the AP piece doesn’t tell us is that in 2010 the average member-only benefit for retired public school educators in California was $4,256 a month before taxes [less than a third of what Godwin earned in retirement] and that is only 16% of educators that retired in 2010 who worked as long as Patrick Godwin did. The median years of service was 26.6, and if you were one of the educators that retired after 26.6 years of public service [the median] and was only 55 years old [the earliest you may retire], using the CalSTRS retirement calculator, that person earned about $2,130 a month before taxes—much less than the $14,525.66 that Godwin earns each month.
I calculated once that if a public school teacher in California taught for 42 years or more, his annual retirement income would equal what he earned the last year he worked.
But—and this is a very large BUT that we never hear about—in public education, less than 4% retire with full pay. In fact, 9% retired in 2010 with 10-15 years of service in public education, 11% with 14-20 years, 15% with 20-25 years, 12% with 25-30 years, 23% with 30-35 years, and 16% with 35-40 years. — CalSTRS
The reason why AP ran with Patrick Godwin’s retirement income as an example is called sensationalism designed to cause an emotional response (hate) so people who don’t know all the facts will talk about it. Word of mouth attracts readers and an audience and that stirs the hate.
In addition, Godwin was a school district superintendent at the top of the public education pay scale, which represents about 0.2% of the total number of retired educators in California. That means 99.8% of public educators in California do not earn as much as Godwin did in retirement.
The result is that many readers might be fooled to think that most public educators in California will retire with Patrick Godwin’s annual retirement income. However, that is far from the truth since most will not come close, but Thompson’s biased and misleading piece didn’t say that
The reason AP distorted the facts about teacher retirement plans as much as they did is because of audience share, which determines how much a media source [TV, newspapers, hate talk shows, magazines, Blogs, etc] may charge to advertisers, and balancing the news and telling the truth often does not achieve this goal, because profits are the foundation of the private sector media.
It’s a simple formula: if you don’t make a profit you go out of business and everyone working for you loses his or her job so almost everyone plays the same Yellow/Hate Journalism game, and then there is the politics of money.
To understand why Thompson wrote such a misleading news piece, it helps to understand the trend away from private-sector pensions that were once similar to current public sector-pensions and the answers are in the numbers.
Due to the politics of money, beginning early in the 1980s, during the Reagan era, there was a rapid shift away from private sector employer-based defined benefit pension plans to employee-controlled personal retirement accounts.
teacher pensions explained
Under President Reagan [1981 – 1989] this trend in the private sector was helped along by the Republican Party that controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987 giving President Reagan the leverage he needed to shift private sector pension money to the stock market and other risky investments—another part of the Reagan plan besides adding two trillion dollars to the national debt by cutting taxes on the wealthy; raising them on the working class by cutting deductions and spending more.
And since 1982 and Ronald Reagan’s infamous trickle down economic reform, profit expectations of American corporations have skyrocketed, and right behind have been the costs of health care, the cost of housing, the cost of military programs, the cost of banking, and the cost of many other products and services.” – The Agonist
In 1980, approximately 92 percent of private retirement saving contributions went to employer-based plans; 64 percent of these contributions were to defined benefit pension plans [similar to the public pension plans of today].
Then by 1999, [thanks to President Reagan and the Republican majority in the Senate while he was president] about 88 percent of private sector contributions were switched to defined contribution plans, the vast majority of personal retirement accounts being set up as 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA), and that ended in disaster.
I suggest your either Google the failure of 401 (K) or read what PBS.org said, “Most people don’t know that the 401(k) products are toxic and their behavior toward a 401(k) product is toxic because no one has been responsible for providing a safe product.
“The Congress has not put itself [out] as a responsible actor. Employers were told, “It’s up to your employees to choose,” and the banking industry and the mutual fund industry said, “Trust us.”
If you are a regular fan of hate media and trust no other source, you will probably dismiss anything from PBS. But what about CNBC.com, Forbes.com, NBC News.com, USA Today, or even the Los Angeles Times. Will you trust one of those sources over your favorite hate radio show? If not, then I suggest you read this from Mother Jones.com to discover who is behind the lies designed to fool and why.
Back to the public sector retirement plans that did not follow the risky 401 (k) path to retirement. The Public Sector stayed with employer-based defined benefit pension plans such as the one I have through CalSTRS.
It helps that the union membership rate for public sector workers is 36.2 percent and that is substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers at 6.9 percent.
Discover how California is fixing its public pensions
To understand the numbers better and why the media focuses its Yellow/Hate Journalism circus act to attract the biggest hating mob, in November 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were 20.4 million public sector employees [2 million work for the federal government—the rest work for the states or local county or city governments] and about 128 million private sector employees.
If you published a newspaper, a magazine, ran a TV news network, hosted a conservative talk show, or wrote a popular conservative Blog, which audience would you focus on to boost advertising rates? As I said, it’s all in the numbers
A, 20.4 million B. 128 million
Another example of how misleading Don Thompson’s AP piece, Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny, was: “With Americans increasingly likely to live well into their 80s, critics question whether paying lifetime pensions to retirees from age 55 or 60 is financially sustainable. An Associated Press survey earlier this year found the 50 states have a combined $690 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $418 billion in retiree health care obligations.”
What Thompson also doesn’t mention in his AP piece is that some states managed their pension funds better than others did.
A March 2011 report on the Best and Worst State Funded Pensions by Adam Corey Ross of The Fiscal Times offers a more balanced picture. Ross wrote, “State pension programs across the country have undergone a major transformation, as more and more of them are cutting back the amount of money they set aside for retired workers, gambling that they can meet their obligations through investments instead of savings …”
In fact, Ross lists the best fully-funded state pensions that existed then, which were: New York, Wisconsin, Delaware, North Carolina, Washington, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida and Georgia. He also lists the worst state pensions where the gamble did not pay off. However, with Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Cuomo of New York, the public pension plans for those two states are probably doomed along with the public unions in those states if the voters don’t get rid of them in the next election.
California fell between the two lists, but thanks to recent legislations plans to fill the funding gap in a more sensible way. In addition, nowhere does Ross or Thompson mention that California has two state pension plans—CalPERS and CalSTRS.
As Public Pensions Shift to Risky Wall Street, Local Politicians Rake in Political Cash
The California State Teachers’ Retirement System [CalSTRS], with a portfolio valued at $189.1 billion as of June 30, 2014, is the largest teacher pension fund and second largest public pension fund in the United States. In addition, CalSTRS makes it clear that “it’s important to understand that the risk of facing depleted assets exists approximately 30 years from now versus actually facing insolvency today.”
Due to losses from investments during the 2008 global financial crises, the CalSTRS retirement “fund took an enormous hit to its stock portfolio when the market plunged during the heart of the recession, losing nearly $43 billion—roughly 25 percent of its value—from June 2008 to June 2009.”
However, in June 2014, California’s Governor Brown signed Assembly Bill 1469 to stabilize CalSTRS funding in an effort to bridge the nearly $74 billion funding gap that would keep the fund solvent beyond 30 years. Teachers’ Retirement Board Chair Harry Keiley said, “Educators in California do not receive Social Security for their CalSTRS-covered employment and the benefit they earn from years in the classroom serves as the cornerstone of their retirement income. Today’s actions further strengthen the Governor and Legislature’s commitment to uphold the state’s promise of a secure retirement to teachers.”
The vote in the State Senate was 37 – 0, and in the Assembly was 76 – 1. – legislature.ca.gov
Critics of public pension plans like CalSTRS will claim that the cost of these plans are bankrupting states, but that is false—in fact it is a damn lie. For instance, the current annual budget of California is about $156 billion. The state’s annual contribution to the CalSTRS pension plan is usually about $1.4 billion or 0.89% of the total state budget. With the 30-year plan from AB 1469 to stabilize the funding gap to uphold the state’s promise of a secure retirement to teachers, the state will be paying $1.9 billion annually to CalSTRS (instead of $1.4 billion) or 1.12% of the total annual state budget of California. – ebudget.ca.gov
It’s a fact that misery loves company and when the accountants, carpenters, clerks, plumbers, reporters, salesmen, and secretaries, and many other professions in the private sector, read the Yellow/Hate Journalism in Don Thompson’s AP piece, Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny, many of these people in the private sector will say, “It isn’t fair. If we have to work longer and suffer, so do they.” In fact, that is already happening. Due to pressure from the private sector, this has led to: “Earlier in New Jersey, part of a legislative deal struck between Democrats and Republicans raised the normal retirement age from 62 to 65,” Thompson wrote.
Is Your Pension Safe? States Struggle With Pricey Challenges
On the other hand, when given a choice, many private sector employees do not save toward retirement other than Social Security. Many do not put money into 401 (k) plans or pay into tax deductible IRAs. Many that own homes take out equity loans to finance vacations, purchase new cars, pay off credit card debts, or go on spending sprees.
The result is that the average family in America cannot afford to retire as early as many public employees that paid into employer-based defined benefit pensions.
For example, total U.S. consumer debt was $2.43 trillion as of May 2011. Average credit card debt per household was $15,799. Average total debt in 2009 (including credit cards, mortgage, home equity, student loans and more) of U.S. households was $54,000. Source: Credit Card.com
As for me, instead of paying into Social Security while I taught, I paid 8% of my gross monthly pay for thirty years into CalSTRS, and the school district where I taught contributed a matching amount of about 8%. That means if I get any Social Security from the jobs I had outside of teaching, it isn’t going to be much.
In fact, to force public educators in California to work more years may cost more than it will save.
When I retired, the school district stopped paying me and saved the tax payers money since most teachers that retire after teaching 30 years or more are replaced by younger teachers that are paid much less.
Keeping older, higher paid teachers working longer will only cost the taxpayer more in the long run since those same teachers that are working longer will end up with a larger monthly pension check since the longer a teacher spends in the classroom, the larger the pension.
I’m impressed when a reporter does their job properly and balances the news instead of feeding the mob that bellies up to the slop-trough of Yellow Journalism, which is based on sensationalism and crude exaggerations.
In his piece, Hall wrote, “From state legislatures to Congress to tea party rallies, a vocal backlash is rising against what are perceived as too-generous retirement benefits for state and local government workers. However, that widespread perception doesn’t match reality.”
According the Hall, “Pension contributions from state and local employers aren’t blowing up budgets.” They amount to just 2.9 – 3.8 percent of state spending, on average.
In addition, Hall says, “Nor are state and local government pension funds broke. They’re underfunded …”
With those facts, we should ask what the real reason is why the far-right hate groups are turning on public-worker sector pension plans.
The answer may be Wall Street, Hedge Funds and US bank private-sector greed, the same risk-taking greed with someone else’s money that caused the 2007-08 global financial crises.
According The Council on State Governments, in 2006 before the crash, the total amount of money held by these federal, state and local public-pension plans was almost $6 trillion dollars, and greed—it seems—has no limits.
If you do not believe me, ask people such as Bernard Madoff [who robbed his victims of $50 billion], Scott Rothstein [$1.2 billion], Tom Peters [$3.7 billion], Allen Stanford [$8 billion], March Dreier [$400 million], Lou Pearlman [$500 million], Michael Kelly [$428 million], the Greater Ministries International Church [$500 million], Scientology minister Reed Slatkin [more than $600 million], and Nicholas Cosmo [$370 million].
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, who said greed was good when he came up with the theory of trickle down economics, must be dancing in hell.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Before I comment on what a friend—who is still in the classroom teaching—wrote in a recent e-mail about the district he/she teaches in, I want to mention my own thirty years as a teacher [1975 – 2005] as a way to establish that I know what I’m talking about.
During my early years in the classroom, many of my seventh and eighth grade students won half the poetry awards in a state-wide contest in California. The award ceremonies were held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
The poems that won came out of a workshop I developed, and that success led me to develop a short-story writing workshop where two of my eighth-grade students one-year ended up published in a special edition of a Los Angeles Times Magazine that showcased maybe twenty or thirty short stories out of more than 10,000 submitted from schools in Los Angeles County.
That was back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, over the years, I developed most of my own curriculum to teach English and writing that I used successfully for decades.
In the 1990s, when I taught journalism and was the advisor of a high-school newspaper—in addition to teaching four periods of English—my journalism students won national and international recognition for their work. In fact, you can read about it here. Just click on the next link to see what the Rowland Heights Highlander had to say: Extra! Nogales newspaper a five-time winner
In the late 1990’s, a vice principal told a room full of English teachers at the high school where I taught that my students outperformed—by a large margin—the students of every English teacher in the district at the same grade level when it came to writing. At another meeting, another VP would mention that my students—year after year—always showed gains, on average, on annual standardized tests.
I was a tough, no-nonsense teacher who often created his own curriculum units and that included getting ideas from other teachers who I worked with. Some of my best teaching methods were learned from other veteran teacher like my friend.
My friend, who is still teaching—with nearly 30 years of experience—is not happy with his/her school district. I’m deliberately avoiding revealing who he/she is, because I’ve seen what happens to teachers who break the omerta of an American public school district, and I have also been a victim—it shouldn’t be a secret that school districts in America hate bad press.
I’m not saying that the administrators in my friend’s school district will make his/her life miserable if they discover who he/she is but having been a teacher for thirty years, I don’t want to take any chances, because I’ve seen the lives of teachers destroyed by administrators and/or elected school board members.
Public school teachers have due process rights, but they do not have tenure.
A vice principal at the high school where I taught for sixteen of those thirty years, once told me—even with all that I had accomplished as a teacher—that because I was an outspoken critic of what I saw as poor leadership in the school district where I taught, that my name was on a black list, and she had been told to find a way to get rid of me. She didn’t do much to get rid of me and lost her job at the end of the school year.
One trick used to force teachers out of education is to assign them five-different classrooms with five-different subjects to teach. For example, instead of teaching five, tenth-grade English classes in the same room, each class would be different, so the teacher would have five different lesson plans to work on in addition to rushing to a different classroom every period.
In fact, I knew one teacher who had her teaching day split between two high schools several miles apart with a half-hour window to drive from the first high school to the second one after teaching three classes in the morning to teach two classes in the afternoon. And she was assigned to five different classrooms. That tactic worked, because she quit and left that district to find work elsewhere.
As you may see, it is a myth that public school teachers have total job protection known as tenure.
Back to my old friend who wrote in his/her email, “Regarding curriculum, I just attended a depressing workshop. The three-day workshop was about the new Common Core Standards (CCS). The first two days of the workshop were good. I learned about why the CCS was developed, and I also learned more about the CCS in the primary grade levels. It’s worthwhile to know what standards your students were exposed to earlier in their educational career.
This is an ad from the company that developed and sells Synced Solution
“However, on the third day of the workshop, I discovered that my district signed up for a software program called Synced Solution. Synced Solution maps out the daily standards for every day of the school year. Then, our teacher grade level teams mapped out the objectives for every day of the school year. Synced Solution represents the first step in lock-step teaching; moreover, my district [meaning elected school board members and district administrators] thinks it represents the Holy Grail of teaching.”
“My colleagues and I still have some control over the short stories we want to cover with our students but not when we teach them. Synced Solution even has us doing a full-day of teaching on the first day of school when I am telling my students where to sit (seating chart), taking my students on a room tour, and having them interview each other. I do class building on the first two-days of school, which this new program does not account for. Also, I cover a lot of grammar in my class, which is mostly absent from this program.”
My friend’s e-mail went on: “I feel like teaching has become ALL science-based. Education officials [elected school board members and district level administrators] forget that teaching is 50% of an art-form and 50% science. This curriculum does not allow me time to conduct classroom debates, infuse my curriculum with health science-based activities and articles, and to teach grammar in a systematic way …
“I think the Synced Solution software program would be good for a first-time teacher. New teachers could use the guidance and structure, but I resent it. I think there has to be more flexibility. For example, I think the program should say which standards should be covered on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis.
“My district wants to script my teaching; also, my district can now see if I am covering the standards using its timeline. We will have unit tests, and there is an area in the software program that we are supposed to check off (checking off the objectives and standards).
“The other teachers and I concurred that this software program will add at least an hour to our teaching day. Instead of technology assisting us, it is making our jobs even more cumbersome. Synced Solution is very cumbersome to navigate.
Teleparent is a program that teachers want and need. Who teaches students? Who makes the most phone calls to parents?
“I would rather have my school bring back TeleParent. I don’t know if you ever had this automated phone program when you were teaching [I didn’t], but we had it for two years, and then my school took it away.
“TeleParent allowed me to contact a group of students having the same negative academic behavior.”
“For example, 20 students forget their textbook. I could just go through my class list on TeleParent and check off the names of students who forgot their textbook. Then, I could check off the reason for the phone call, Forgot textbook. Teleparent would contact my parents in their primary language (Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, etc.).
“Also, it would use a different phone number so that my students would not know it was Teleparent; this prevented students from intercepting the corrective phone calls [which some students would do—believe me]. It exponentially increased my number of parent contacts. Negative classroom behaviors changed very quickly. Teleparent could easily raise the test scores for a high school. Every time my colleagues and I want a software program that makes our job easier, the district and/or my school rejects it. We wanted Turnitin.com, but my school refused.
Another valuable tool for teachers that teachers want.
“Turnitin.com is a powerful software program that detects plagiarism in essays and also in research papers. This software program would make my job so much easier. I would not have to hunt on the Internet to locate the research that a student copied into his paper.”
My friend teaches in the Chino Valley Unified School District.
I wrote back to my friend and said what was happening in his/her school district was nothing new. During my thirty years as a classroom teacher—especially after standardized testing became one of the gods of public education in the United States—what I call magic-pill programs like this Synced Solution thing came along and always promised to revolutionize education boosting the school’s standardized test scores.
And from my thirty years of experience, I can tell you that all of the magic pill programs teachers were often forced to use failed miserably—so bad that they often caused test scores to drop instead of increase—and a few years later these costly programs would be replaced by another magic-pill program.
I worked with some excellent principals and vice principals, but I do not have much praise for administrators who worked out of the district office.
In October 2000, The Los Angeles Times ran a piece about Education’s Failed Fads. The lead paragraph says, “Misguided and bumbled attempts to fix schools are nothing new, as education historian Diane Ravitch relates in painful detail in her new book, “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms” (Simon & Schuster, $30). I recommend that you click on the LA Times link and read about all the failed education fads to see what I’m talking about.
It is obvious to me that Synced Solution is another fad that will fail mainly because a majority of the teachers were not allowed to be part of the final decision.
For example, there was the Whole Language Approach to teaching reading in the 1980s and 1990s—that supported the idea that children can and should learn to read text in the same easy, natural way that they learn to understand speech. But in Finland “reading instruction is intense in grades 1 and 2, and is uniformly based on teaching phonemic analysis and phoneme-grapheme conversions. Source: THE GLOBALIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL FADS AND FALLACIES
It was my experience that teacher generated programs worked best the same as many of the programs I developed for the almost six-thousand students that I taught over a thirty-year period. This is what teachers in Finland do and Finland has one of the best school systems in the world.
Reading: Finland was in 3rd place vs. the United States at 17th
Mathematics: Finland was in 6th place vs. the United States at 31st
Science: Finland was in 2nd place vs. the United States at 23rd
Synced Solutions is nothing more than another popular, politically correct fad supported by another elected school board to be implemented by administrators with no job protection in a do-as-your-told-or-else educational environment adding another nail in America’s mediocre public-education system.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 