With $40 million needing to be cut from the school district budget, the school board has approved cuts of $31 million this week. Part of the cuts include Data and Literacy coaches that work with students that are having trouble keeping on grade level or need extra attention to complete the material to move forward with the needed achievement. Also going are the ITT’s or Instructional Technology Trainers. This takes the district from 43 in the 2007-08 school year to 17 in 08-09 to zero in 09-10.

While we continue to here that the cuts are supposed to not impact the students directly. I don’t see how the above cuts fall into that line. Certain School Board members have been quoted as saying that these cuts are not to be excuses for not continuing to achieve higher or better scores next year, but with all the structure that has already been placed on the teachers in their teaching day, I don’t know where they are going to find the time to add what is being taken away. Reading blocks, writing blocks, mandated 150 minutes of PE a day, lunch, testing, the list of things the teachers have to do is long and barely fits into the 7.5 hour day. Teachers are going to be overwhelmed, scores are going to plummet, they are going to stop using the new technology because they are not getting the continued training, or they don’t have time to call the service desk to get a piece of broken equipment fixed.

Here are some ideas for things to cut:

• The extra busing to the Gifted school
• All Field Trips
• Extracurricular activities in middle schools
• The $12 million for the AS400 upgrade
• Sports that are not breaking even
• Extra sports assistant coaches
• Administrative positions like the school district police force
• Energy savings like I suggest in the post: Holidays, Technology and Energy

The energy savings alone add up to $676,000.

I was reading my RSS Feeds when I came across this post from 43 Folders.

I also like to not re-invent the wheel as I have other things to do.

Source: Teacher’s Productivity Hampered by technology. No love. | 43 Folders

This to me shows a lack of understanding your students, the world around you and the need to grow with the newest developments in society. Why don’t we just go back to no calculators, typewriters, and the belief that the world is flat. I’m not sure if this teacher even knows what his students do in their spare time or what technology they use on a daily basis. It’s the digital age, you need to grow with the target audience. You need to learn how to grab their interest, which is best done with the technology that the kids are using and are best suited too. Not what you as a teacher are comfortable with.

Not only that, but moving to the new technology will in the long run make a teachers job easier. So you have to spend a little time an effort to make the change now, but you will make it up in saved time and better student participation and achievement. If you are not willing to grow, you are going to rot. Leaders take chances, leaders are on the bleeding edge of technology, leaders see the goal and grab for it with both hands.

The teacher in afore mentioned article has none of these character traits that I can see. Another Dinosaur that will freeze and become a fossil because he could or wouldn’t adapt, add to or change his teaching style. He already has enough to do and thinks that the wheel, US education, is fine as is. I hate to bring it up, but the US is one of the worst countries in education. It won’t get any better while we have teachers that think this way.

Ed Darrell writes about Class sizes swell, teacher incentives shrink in his blog Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

In Florida we have mandated class sizes, but unfortunately the districts use loopholes in the way you average or count classes to say they meet the class size when they really don’t.

Technorati tags: Class Size, Education, FCAT

The 2007 FCAT scores and School Grades are out. Both show a decrease from last year, but the county I work in did quite well. In fact all but one of 25 elementary schools got an A, while the other got a B. The high schools need work as 3 out of the six high schools dropped one letter grade, with one dropping to a D.

The FCAT has been around since 1999, and the kids from the elementary grades 3, 4, 5 should be 10th, 11th and 12th grade high school students. Why, if the elementary schools have been doing so well are the high schools lagging behind?

Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. Lack of standardization in teaching from elementary to high school.
2. Kids get older, are given more choices both in school and at home. They are not mature enough yet to know how to process those choices.
3. Outside of school the kids are more and more on their own with both parents working or a single parent household.

Here are some thoughts on how to correct them:

1. Standardize classes with reading, writing and science blocks.
2. Limit choices at school to 4 major topics of study and fewer elective classes in those major topics of study.
3. Segregate the freshmen classes in high schools to a certain building for most of the day. Allowing only grade intermingling during lunch, study hall and at school events.
4. Require more parent involvement.

One other thing that I don’t think some of the community understands or gets to see is that the high schools need to be the most up to date facilities that we have. Students cannot learn as well in a run down 40 year old school with exposed pipes as they can in a modern, clean, well maintained school.

Want FCAT results? We need to change, we need to follow new directions in our teaching.

Technorati tags: FCAT, Education, K12 Education, Standardized Testing, Florida, No Child Left Behind