Teachers Left Behind

As budgets are cut and standards raised, new evidence that teachers are growing disenchanted with their profession

athleen Knauth has had a rough school year. The principal of Hillview Elementary, near Buffalo, New York, has spent so much time typing teacher evaluations, entering data, and preparing for standardized testing, she barely had a minute to do what she used to do in her first 12 years of being a principal—drop in on classes, address parents’ concerns, or get to know students. When a school social worker stopped by her office a few months back to get Knauth’s take on which children might need her help, she realized she had hit a new low.

“Normally I’d say, ‘This one’s grandma is seriously ill. This child is going through a huge custody battle. This one has clothes that are too small. I could reel off six to eight things,” says Knauth. “But this year, I had nothing.”

Two weeks ago, after she was asked to raise the standards her students would be expected to meet for a fifth time this year, Knauth decided to resign and sent a public letter explaining that the educational reforms she’s been asked to implement are at odds with what’s important for kids.

Knauth is not the only one finding it tough to work in a public school these days—or, for that matter, detonating explosive public-resignation letters that only people with no hope of working in the public-school system again would send. (See, among others, the beautiful and heartbreaking retirement announcement sent by Syracuse social studies teacher Gerald Conti and the angrier but equally heartbreaking farewell sent by North Carolina math teacher Kris L. Nielson.)

read more at The American Prospect

 

Underfunded and Under Five

A new report shows that pre-K education is suffering

in a time of budget shortfalls and partisan politicking.

As we contemplate the possibly bright future of pre-K laid out in Obama’s state of the union address this year, in which the feds work together “with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America,” along comes a sobering glimpse of what public preschool looks like now. It’s not quite as rosy.

Rather than charting progress toward getting all four-year-olds ready for kindergarten, the National Institute for Early Education Research’s annual survey of programs, just issued last week, shows a system in disrepair—or perhaps even retreat. Even as recognition of the benefits of preschool for four-year-olds has grown, the actual implementation of it has stalled—and, in places, lost ground. Meanwhile state funding for pre-K has gone down by more than half a billion dollars in the last year, according to NIEER. In 2012, state spending per child fell to well below what it was ten years ago.

The backsliding, which can be blamed in great part on the recession, affects both the number of kids in public pre-K and the quality of education they get while there. “Even though the economies are bouncing back, you’re seeing state legislatures and governors are still slow to replace and or grow early learning programs,” says Kris Perry, executive director of the DC-based advocacy group the First Five Years Fund. The lag poses a serious threat to young kids, according to Perry. “It’s like when you defer maintenance on your home. You can put a bucket under the leak and survive another winter. But at some point, you’re going to jeopardize the health and safety of the children in your home. That’s what’s happening with pre-K.”

Consider Georgia, one of two states, along with Oklahoma, that Obama hailed as models when he unveiled his national pre-K plan. Despite the impressive reach and quality of its program, Georgia has hit a major financing hiccup. The state funds pre-K entirely through the state lottery, which also pays for the state’s college scholarship program. Though the lottery was thought to be a fairly steady funding source, in recent years its revenue began to dwindle even as tuition costs continued to rise, leaving less money for pre-K. To deal with the shortfall, the state increased pre-K class sizes, putting 22, rather than 20, four-year-olds in classrooms with two teachers. It also cut the pre-K school year from 180 to 160 days, leaving working parents of four-year-olds to scramble for childcare on the days without school.

click to read more at The American Prospect

Video From Annapolis Book Festival

A couple of weeks back, Hanna Rosin, of Atlantic and The End of Men fame, discussed whether women can have it all at the Annapolis Book Fair. Here’s the video

CAN WOMEN HAVE IT ALL?

40 Years Behind on Sick Leave Policy, But Catching Up

It’s too late for Tonisha Howard, the mother of three in Milwaukee who was fired for leaving work to be with her hospitalized two-year-old. And for Felix Trinidad, who was so afraid of losing his job at Golden Farm fruit store in Brooklyn that he didn’t take time off to go to the doctor—even after he vomited blood. Trinidad, a father of two who had stomach cancer, continued to work until just days before his death from stomach cancer at age 34. But for workers in Portland and perhaps Philadelphia, paid sick days just got much closer to becoming reality.

Last Wednesday, the city council in Portland, Oregon, voted unanimously for a bill granting most employees up to 40 hours of paid sick leave per year. On Thursday, the Philadelphia City Council passed a similar law—and, with only one vote short of a veto-proof majority, advocates are hopeful they can find the last member they need to get it past Michael Nutter, who vetoed a similar bill in 2011. Meanwhile, in New York City, advocates geared up for a hearing on a paid-sick-leave bill, even though Council Speaker Christine Quinn still stubbornly refuses to bring it to a vote. Overall, the sentiment seems to that be more paid leave victories are inevitable.

“We’re going to see a wave of wins,” predicts Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @Work, an advocacy group that has been working on paid sick days laws throughout the country for more than five years. “I think we’re growing toward a tipping point.”

Part of the reason for the recent successes may be that the earliest paid-sick-days laws—starting with San Francisco’s, which went into effect in 2006—have now been in place long enough for people to feel their effects. And there haven’t been very many negative ones. “The sky didn’t fall,” as Bravo puts it. The smooth transition into a world in which workers have some paid time off when they or their kids get sick flies in the face of dire predictions about cost and abuse of the law. “Our experience is that the business lobbyists complain, they fight against every little thing in the bills,” says Eileen Appelbaum, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “But once the law is in place, businesses quickly adapt to it.” Appelbaum has studied the effects of San Francisco’s paid sick days law and found that “most people don’t use all the days they have. They use, on average, three or four days a year.”

read more at The American Prospect

Leaning Out

I am leaning in just a little as I write this. OK, I’m not. But I am feeling a little sick as I ponder the next unpleasant installment of the “mommy wars” that’s hurtling toward us.

This past Friday, The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor assembled the ingredients for yet another bitter and prolonged back-and-forth about women and work. At its center is Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, a new book that purports to show American women the way out of our relative powerlessness. In it, Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, gives women advice on how to assume leadership roles by, among other things, understanding our strengths and reassessing how we hold our bodies in business meetings. On the other side of the ring, we have Anne Marie Slaughter, the Princeton Professor and former Obama Administration official, who with her viral “we can’t have it all” essay in The Atlantic this past summer, can serve as a foil to the first. Finally, critically, we have the media, who (myself included—so sorry) serve the essential and unfortunate role of stirring the pot. Let the battle begin!

Or not. Here’s wishing we can avert this particular conversation that will have little bearing on the issues most American women face. After all, the idea that these two incredibly powerful, wealthy, white professionals can represent the “dueling perspectives” on the majority of women is pretty silly.

First, there’s the problem that both have very similar messages. Even if Slaughter’s has been condensed into the statement that women can’t have it all, she’s been clear that this opinion is based on her own decision not to continue working 14 hours a day in a high-level State Department job while raising 12- and 14-year-old children. Her version of “opting out” involved returning to her gig as a tenured Princeton professor, while appearing regularly on TV, giving 40 to 50 speeches a year, being a contributing editor at The Atlantic and writing regularly for other publications. Clearly Slaughter hasn’t come down against women’s leadership—or at least her own leadership.

read more at The American Prospect

Good news for 4-year-olds – from the President!

Obama gave the country a glimpse of his new pre-K initiative in last night State of the Union address—and reason to hope that he’ll bring the rest of the country toward the national models set by states such as Georgia and Oklahoma.

About halfway through the roughly hour-long speech, the President proposed “working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America,”—an ambitious goal, given that only 27 percent of four-year-olds are currently in public pre-K. With his comment that “Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool”—which was met with an emphatic “that’s right” from the audience—Obama gave voice to a huge frustration of parents across the political spectrum.

Those close to the issue had already been tipped off to the new initiative at a January meeting with Health and Human Services official Linda Smith, who estimated that the expansion of pre-K would reach some 1.85 million children and cost as much as $10 billion.

In his two minutes on the topic, Obama couldn’t provide much detail about how he’ll get to this high bar, but a fact sheet circulated by the administration before the speech provides a few more details, specifically that the White House is aiming “to provide all low- and moderate-income 4-year-old children with high-quality preschool, while also expanding these programs to reach hundreds of thousands of additional middle-class children, while also incentivizing full-day kindergarten policies, so that all children enter kindergarten prepared for academic success.”

The next question, already alive on Twitter, is, of course, how we’ll pay for such a program. One answer might come from the Center for American Progress, which recently came out with its own proposal to expand early education. The plan entails expanding Head Start and pushing the federal government to match state spending up to $10,000 per child.

The other response to the question of cost? In the long run, early education saves money. Obama obliquely led with this thought by using jobs as a segue into the issue and then addressed it head on: “Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on – by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime.”

read more at The American Prospect

Going Back Too Soon

“Perla Saenz went back sore and exhausted just four weeks after giving birth—and two weeks after the incision from her C-section reopened. (She had heard her older child cough in the night and instinctively tried to pick him up, forgetting for a moment her doctor’s warning against lifting anything heavier than ten pounds.) Weak and sometimes feverish, she often found herself clutching the counter for support.

Bernadette Cano was back on the job five weeks after giving birth. Though she was in better physical shape, she wasn’t ready to be apart from her son. “I was thinking about the baby all the time,” she told me tearfully from the break room of Walmart, where she worked in the dressing room. Under normal circumstances, she enjoyed the job tidying up the dressing rooms and returning clothes to the racks. But with her newborn son at home, she couldn’t think of anything else and even broke the company policy against texting so she could check in with her family.”

These are two of the women I wrote about a piece commemorating the 20th anniversary of the FMLA today. There are plenty more, of course. The majority of working mothers in the U.S. are back at work before three months is up, according to census data. More than a quarter are at work within two months of giving birth, according to the latest census data, and one in ten—more than half a million women each year—are back at work in four weeks or less. Some go back to work just a few weeks—and sometimes days—after giving birth.

So we should celebrate today. (Yes, thanks, Bill Clinton.) And we should get moving on the next big fix – PAID time off.

 

Willie Parker, MD on Roe and MLK

 

wjp_hill shot 1(1)

Willie Parker is the kind of guy who seems to makes friends – or at least fans – easily. Chatting with him for this story, I got to thinking about the extent to which one’s inner exploration can guide his life. Parker clearly thinks deeply and hard about what’s right – a rare thing. But rarer still, he then lets his beliefs lead him places. Like Mississippi.

 

I’ve been intrigued with Mississippi – and the last remaining clinic there – since I wrote about it back in 2005. The clinic has remained embattled ever since. And it’s only because of the dedication of people like Parker; Susan Hill, who used to own the clinic; Betty Thomson, who’s been a counselor and tireless advocate of Jackson Women’s Health Organization; and Diane Derzis, who took Hill’s place when she died in 2010, that the place remains open.

 

I’ll leave you with words of Derzis, who says that, upon meeting the doctor, she became part of the “we’re the in-love-with-Willie Parker group.” “When I first met him I said,’ There is no way.’ I’m a little cynical. It was too good to be true,” says Derzis. “A man who loves women who loves that women are thinking entities who deserve reproductive freedom, whatever it is. Then you meet him and it’s even better.”

Oklahoma Pre-K Podcast

American Radioworks just made a podcast based on my Prospect piece about pre-K in Oklahoma, asking how the red, rural, poor state became a national model for early education. (Though perhaps this is a better link.)

The explanation for Oklahoma’s success is complicated, but as American Radioworks’ Stephen Smith teases out, part of it lies in the fact that the state started tacking early ed a long time ago. Another key part is that pre-K teachers get paid the same as teachers of older kid (as they ought to). Teachers also have to have four-year degrees plus special training in early education. And the state has made pre-K part of its overall education funding formula.

Anyway, as I’ve said before, it was a happy story. And here, below, are John Kaykay and his son, also named John – two of the loveliest people I met in the sooner state. Here’s to more happy stories – soon.

kaykays3

 

Call Cuomo! Your governor wants to hear from you

‘Tis the season – for getting what matters on the state legislative agenda.

The campaign to get family leave insurance in New York is now underway. But one of the first steps toward getting a law passed is have Governor Cuomo include family leave insurance in his State of the State address on January 9th at 1:30. It’s not too late to make sure he hears the message loud and clear.

It’s not too late—tell the Governor that you want him to champion family leave insurance in his State of the State address!

Governor Cuomo has said he will prioritize a woman’s right to choose, but true reproductive freedom also requires supporting parents with family leave insurance so they can spend time with their new babies without endangering their jobs.

Let the Governor know where you stand. Email him at gov.cuomo@chamber.state.ny.us or call him at (518) 474-8390.

Again, here is a sample email/script or you can craft your own:

Email Subject Line: Put Family Leave Insurance in Your State of the State Address!

Email message/Phone call script: Governor Cuomo, please champion family leave insurance in your State of the State address. Reproductive freedom means that men and women should be supported in their decision to start a family. The vast majority of workers cannot afford to take unpaid time off when they have a new child or need to take care of a family member and often have to choose between their jobs and their families — a choice no worker should have to make.

If you have already contacted the Governor, then please forward this email to other New Yorkers to encourage them to take action as well.

Thanks!

The War on Moms

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