Please Vote!

I suspect the majority of you who read my blog are not from Oregon, but for those of you who are, I want to urge you to vote, and to vote against Ron Saxton (and for Ted Kulongoski) for governor. Now ... I honestly don't know much about Kulungowski, but I do know a decent amount about the changes that Saxton is trying to push on Oregon. If you ever watch an TV, and have seen one of his many ads, you know that he has been heavily basing his campaign on education reform. Education reform is great. I think that the schools here in Oregon could use some work (read: more money). The classroom sizes are way to large for one thing, and I am sure there are other problems that could be addressed to improve the educations of our children. However, what Ron Saxton is proposing to do to reform our schools is outrageous.


Now ... I don't consider myself an expert on education, but now that Janel is a teacher I do have a chance to talk to a lot of them on a regular basis :) ... and so I think I know (or can at least regurgitate) a thing or two. Yes ... teachers are almost always Dem's ... but this is not a simple partisan election where teachers are afraid of loosing funding if a Rep gets elected. Saxton's plans are far worse that just that. There are two major "reforms" he plans on making to improve our schools. (1) He wants to institute a "Merit Based" system for giving raises to our teachers. (2) He wants to make it so that students can go to whatever schools they want. Lets talk about these two "reforms" and the many holes in the logic behind them.


Before I get into the reforms, I want to point out one interesting thing about Saxton. You may have seen an ad on TV talking about how poorly our schools have been "graded". This was totally taken out of context. Those grades were not for K-12, but for colleges in Oregon. Saxton blatantly mislead the voters in this campaign ad. It was not a simple mistake either where he did not completely fact check before supporting an ad. When challenged about the ad, his campaign continued to support it despite the blatant flaws and misleading nature of the ad.


Let get into merit-based pay. Paying teachers based on merit sounds like a great idea. Everyone else's salary is based on merit ... right? So then tell me, how do you *fairly* evaluate a teacher to determine if he or she deserves a raise (and to what degree)? The simple answer is test scores. You take your class's scores from the previous year, and compare them with the scores at the end of the year, and poof, a nice quantification of how good of a teacher you are. It just does not work that way. What happens in 40% of your students are ELL's (English Language Learners)? What happens if they are only in school because they have to be? There is only so much that teachers can do for their students. How is a student supposed to perform well on a test if he is homeless because his mother disappeared the night before, and he came home to an apartment where his key no longer worked? In my opinion, the teachers that teach the low-level classes that likely show little overall test score improvement deserve just as much salary as the calculus teachers out there. All a merit based system will do will be to cause teachers to fight for the "good" classes, and penalize those who get stuck (or even enjoy) teaching the more challenging students. Even worse, good teachers who teach in low-performing (generally low-income) schools will just leave and go to the strong (rich-kid) schools. That is just what our country needs right now.


OK ... now on to "Open Enrollment". The general idea here is that students can enroll wherever they want as long as there is room for them. So ... there are a couple of problems with this. (1) How do the students get to the new schools. Either their parents drive them, or transportation is provided to them. Both of these are bad options. If their parents drive them, then this is really just open to students of middle-class parents who can take the time to ferry their children around. That means that the children of the middle class leave and go to schools with other middle class kids, and some schools are just left with the lower-income bracket families. Providing transportation would cost a fortune, and last I checked, the schools are not exactly swimming in cash these days. (2) When students leave a school, their funding goes with them. If students are leaving a school, it is likely because they are not pleased with the education they are getting there. If schools loose money when students leave, how are they ever going to get better? There are positive sides to this proposal (unlike the merit-based pay which is just crazy). Students from some of the more over-crowded schools could go to those that are underpopulated and such; but in the opinion of many of the teachers that I have spoken with, the negatives far outweigh the positives in this situation.