Your LNEA negotiations team is preparing for Factfinding, while continuing to explore and weigh every option to get the terms of your agreement for 2013-14 settled.
Movement for experience on the salary schedule (vertical movement) continues to be the sticking point. The district has told us multiple times that they can fund salary schedule movement for teachers who are not part of the special education cooperative, but that the Superintendents' Advisory Board for the cooperative restricts them from doing so for special education teachers.
For the first six months of negotiations, the district team insisted the cost of that movement for special education teachers was $196 thousand, and our team calculated that the cost was closer to $108 thousand. They have offered a one-time payment of $500 per returning teacher. This is only about $20,000 short of the cost of moving teachers to the appropriate step on the salary schedule. When the district team told us February 10 that they agreed with our lower cost of movement calculation, we hoped a deal could still be reached, but it looks as if we will proceed to the Fact Finding hearing soon.
Mr. Charles Krider has been appointed factfinder in this case. He contacted us today, and we will let you know the date for the hearing once it is set.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Local Representative Misquotes NEA President
Sent to the Leavenworth Times on 2/23/14: In his email update to constituents, John Bradford said Sunday that his Education Committee will work this week on House Bill 2621, which would declare the Kansas College and Career Ready Standards (Common Core) to be null and void.
He goes on to say that the President of the National Education Association (NEA) has called the standards "completely botched." This is incorrect. What NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said is that “in far too many states, implementation has been completely botched.” Why is that? In part, because of legislation like HB-2621.
About the standards themselves, Van Roekel says they “would help students develop the critical thinking and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the fast-changing world. . . . The promise of these high standards for all students is extraordinary.” He does say, “Teachers report that there has been little to no attempt to allow educators to share what's needed to get Common core implementation right. In fact, two thirds of all teachers report that they have not even been asked how to implement these new standards in their classrooms." The first statement is true in many Kansas schools, where school financing does not allow for the time in teacher schedules that they need to collaborate. The second statement is not true in Kansas. Here, getting implementation right is generally up to the teachers themselves. That is certainly true at Leavenworth High School.
Van Roekel goes on to say, “… Scuttling these standards will simply return us to the failed days of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), where rote memorization and bubble tests drove teaching and learning. NEA members don’t want to go backward; we know that won’t help students. Instead, we want states to make a strong course correction and move forward.”
Van Roekel also says that “the first step is for policymakers to treat teachers as professionals and listen to what we know is needed. Give us the resources and time—time to learn the standards, collaborate with each other, develop curriculum that is aligned to the standards, and time to field-test the standards in classrooms to determine what works and what needs adjustment. We also need the financial resources for updated textbooks and fully aligned teaching and learning materials.”
This is what the students and teachers of Kansas need their legislators to do for them. Instead, Representative Bradford proposed the legislation last session that would withdraw even more funding for the work teachers need to do, and this session he appears to support HB-2621, which would have the same effect.
Ginger Riddle
Mathematics Teacher at Leavenworth High School
Readers who want to read the rest of Dennis VanRoekel’s statement can visit http://neatoday.org/
Monday, February 17, 2014
House Bill 2621
Kansas Educators:
The House has introduced another bill (2621) to ban the Kansas College and Career Ready Standards. A hearing will be held on the bill on Wednesday beginning at 1:15. The bill is much farther reaching than last year. In addition to banning the standards in math, ELA, science, social studies, social/emotional and some tech ed, it would require schools to go back to assessments of 2012-13 and create a committee of mostly parents to develop standards from this point forward.
Please consider testifying or submitting a written testimony.
Below you will find a list of those who favor this Bill. Willie Dove is the author and there are many who are apt to support this Bill. I think it is important to publicize this list. We urge you to take action and contact those on this list who favor this Bill. Also, included is the email that I sent today to those likely to vote in favor of the Bill. In addition, I included William McCallum's testimony he did in Wisconsin.
Thank you for your advocacy and please let the KATM Board know if you have any questions.
Melisa Hancock
KATM Past-President
------------------------------
To: Whom It May Concern
The Common Core State Standards are logical "next steps" for our schools. They were developed at the grass-roots level (I served on the review/revision team-2009-2010) with teachers and educators, state legislators, school boards, and business leaders as collaborators. We ALL have the SAME GOAL: ensure that students are prepared academically for future opportunities.
Are you aware of the many hours Kansas educators have worked over the past THREE+ YEARS to implement these Standards and meet this goal? Are you aware of the millions of dollars that have been spent on professional development and training of teachers and teacher leaders, and the enormous amount of money we've spent purchasing textbooks and other resources? Yet, despite the time and effort and money that has been spent on implementing these Standards, they are once again under fire.
This Bill is a SLAP IN THE FACE of Kansas Educators!
Melisa Hancock
Math Consultant
------------------------------
The author of the bill is Willie Dove- willie.dove@house.ks.gov.
Others who are apt to support it include:
John Bradford john.bradford@house.ks,gov
Shanti Gandhi shanti.gandhi@house.ks.gov
Dennis Hedke dennis.hedke@house.ks.gov
Ron Highland ron.highland@house.ks.gov
Jerry Lunn jerry.lunn@house.ks.gov
Kasha Kelly (chair of the committee) kasha.kelley@house.ks.gov
Questionable includes:
Amanda Grosserode amanda.grosserode@house.ks.gov
Roderick Houston roderick.houston@house.ks.gov
Kelly Meigs kelly.meigs@house.ks.gov
Opposed to the bill will probably include:
Sue Boldra sue.boldra@house.ks.gov
Carolyn Bridges carolyn.bridges@house.ks.gov
Diana Dierks diana.dierks@house.ks.gov
John Ewy john.ewy@house.ks.gov
Nancy Lusk nancy.lusk@house.ks.gov
Melissa Rooker melissa.rooker@house.ks.gov
Valdenia Winn valdenia.winn@house.ks.gov
Ward Cassidy (vice chair of the committee) ward.cassidy@house.ks.gov
------------------------------
Here's a Testimony by: William G. McCallum, university-distinguished professor of mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona.
How the Standards Were Written:
The Common Core originated in 2007 with a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). For many years the states had been hearing that our mathematics curriculum was covering too many topics too
superficially. They recognized the power of an agreement to share standards that were focused, coherent, and rigorous. In Spring 2009 CCSSO was joined by the National Governors Association (NGA). Forty-eight states signed a memorandum of understanding to develop common standards in Mathematics and English Language Arts. NGA and CCSSO put together a team of about 80 mathematicians, teachers, educators, policy makers, and state department of education staff, divided into a working group and a feedback group. University of Wisconsin mathematician Richard Askey was an active member of the feedback group.
Three of us—myself, Phil Daro, and Jason Zimba—were designated as lead writers. The states were our bosses. We started from raw material produced by the working group and produced periodic drafts for them to review. Many states put together teams of teachers at each grade level to provide detailed feedback. We also received reviews from the feedback group, from national organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Federation of Teachers, and from prominent individuals and researchers. I remember in particular one
exhausting and exhilarating weekend with my fellow writer Jason Zimba listening to teams of teachers put together by the AFT, who had meticulously read the standards and shared detailed comments with us. In March of 2010 the standards were released for public review, and received over 10,000 public comments. Three months later, after
significant changes in reponse to these comments, the standards were released on 2 June 2010.
Throughout, we focused not on our opinions but on the evidence. Our job was to listen carefully and make considered decisions in response to the evidence, and to the amazing quantity of feedback we received from many sources, including from the state of Wisconsin, feedback that we found incredibly helpful.
Evidence and support for the standards These standards are built for American students, based on the evidence of the best standards in this country and around the world. For years, major national reports have called for us to abandon our mile-wide, inch-deep approach and embrace focus and coherence in school mathematics. The standards finally act on those reports. Research on high performing countries shows that their teachers tend to focus on fewer topics in each grade, teach them to greater mastery, and build on them the next year in a coherent sequence of topics.
Research by William Schmidt, a leading expert on international mathematics performance and a previous director of the U.S. TIMSS study, has compared the Common Core State Standards to high-performing countries up through grade 8. The agreement was found to be high. Moreover, no state's previous standards were as close a match to the high performing countries as the Common Core State Standards.
This agreement is no accident. Evidence from international comparisons strongly informed the development of the standards. The bibliography of the standards on pp. 91--93 lists some of the numerous studies, major reports, and international and state standards that were used during the development process.
These standards have been widely praised not just by the presidents of every major mathematical society in the country, but by classroom teachers. They know the standards won't be easy but they know they are the right thing for our students. To quote a teacher from a mixed rural/suburban school district in Missouri:
My dear colleagues teaching in my high school are no longer asking, "We never understood this stuff so why should the students be expected to?" ... We are recognizing the difference between students trained as robots vs. students who can think. ... Elementary school teachers are welcoming professional development so that fractions make sense to them.
The three principles on which the standards are based: focus, coherence, and rigor The first two evidence-based shifts embodied in the standards are focus and coherence.
Focus
The strong focus of the standards in early grades is arithmetic. That includes the concepts underlying arithmetic, the skills of fluent arithmetic computation, and the ability to apply arithmetic to solve problems. Arithmetic in the K--5 standards is an important life skill, as well as a thinking subject and a rehearsal for algebra in the middle grades.
Focus remains important through the middle and high school grades in order to prepare students for college and careers. National surveys have repeatedly concluded that postsecondary mathematics instructors value greater mastery of a smaller set of prerequisites over shallow exposure to a wide array of topics, so that students can build on what they know and apply what they know to solve substantial problems.
Coherence
Coherence is about making mathematics make sense. Mathematics should not seem like a sequence of disconnected tricks, but like a story in which ideas grow naturally on a trellis of sound basic principles, such as place value and the properties of operations.
Maintaining focus and coherence means not trying to fit everybody's pet topic in Grades K--5, where the focus is on arithmetic. Tools of data analysis, such as mean, median, and range, can wait until Grades 6--8, where students have the solid number sense to work with the more complicated data sets for which these tools are appropriate.
Focus and coherence also imply teaching students to draw on what they know, and make connections, instead of turning every single thing into its own separate topic. The standards require least common multiples, so that students can find least common denominators if helpful. The standards require factoring and recognizing prime numbers, so that
students can find prime factorizations if helpful. But least common denominators and prime factorizations themselves are not turned into separate requirements.
Some important topics in arithmetic were moved earlier than was previously the case in many state standards (e.g. fluency with two-digit addition from Grade 3 to Grade 2), while others were moved later (division of fractions from Grade 5 to Grade 6). Taken as a whole, the reorganization of topics replaces the plate-piled-high smorgasboard
approach of previous standards with a carefully thought out sequence of courses. This represents a smartening up of the curriculum.
Rigor
The Common Core received full marks for content and rigor in a 2010 review by the Fordham Institute. The standards call for a rigorous balance in what we seek to instill in students of mathematics during the K--12 years. Conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and applications are all required by the standards.
Let me emphasize some important specifics about the Common Core.
The Common Core requires students to demonstrate fluency with the standard algorithm for each of the four basic operations with whole numbers and decimals, as you will see on pages 29, 35, and 42 of the standards.
The Common Core requires students to know addition facts and multiplication facts from memory, as you will see on pages 19 and 23. There are no standards in the Common Core that call for students to invent, construct, or discover algorithms.
How do the standards prepare students for college?
The definition of college readiness in the standards is readiness for entry-level, credit-bearing courses in mathematics at four-year colleges as well as courses at two-year colleges that transfer for credit at four-year colleges.
The high school standards consist of easily three years of mathematics at the level of Algebra II. This certainly fits the definition of college readiness. But college readiness and STEM readiness are two different things. The mathematical demands that students face in college will vary dramatically depending on whether they are pursuing a STEM major or not. Students who intend to pursue STEM majors in college should know what is required. That was true before the Common Core, and it remains true today. States still can and still should provide a pathway to calculus for all students who are prepared to succeed on that pathway—not only because it is at the heart of many STEM fields, but also because the calculus is one of the greatest intellectual developments in human history.
The Common Core has every promise of increasing the number of students in our country who actually attain advanced levels of performance. Just because the Common Core standards end with Algebra II, that doesn't mean the high school curriculum is supposed to end there. California, for example, had calculus standards before adopting the Common Core, and the state still has them now. The difference in California today is that better standards can help more of California's students gain the strong foundations they need to succeed in calculus.
Concluding remarks
The standards are an historic agreement between the states and they are also a long overdue promise to our children. But without action the agreement is just empty words, and the promise is broken. We should be standing forward today to deliver on that promise. The road to faithful implementation of the standards is not easy. Tough standards don't implement themselves; that's up to states and local districts. There are many challenges ahead: improving curriculum, preparing teachers, and thoughtfully improving assessments. Shared standards help us meet those challenges. Let us take advantage of tough shared standards to give our nation's children a chance to learn the skills they need in order to prosper.
The House has introduced another bill (2621) to ban the Kansas College and Career Ready Standards. A hearing will be held on the bill on Wednesday beginning at 1:15. The bill is much farther reaching than last year. In addition to banning the standards in math, ELA, science, social studies, social/emotional and some tech ed, it would require schools to go back to assessments of 2012-13 and create a committee of mostly parents to develop standards from this point forward.
Please consider testifying or submitting a written testimony.
Below you will find a list of those who favor this Bill. Willie Dove is the author and there are many who are apt to support this Bill. I think it is important to publicize this list. We urge you to take action and contact those on this list who favor this Bill. Also, included is the email that I sent today to those likely to vote in favor of the Bill. In addition, I included William McCallum's testimony he did in Wisconsin.
Thank you for your advocacy and please let the KATM Board know if you have any questions.
Melisa Hancock
KATM Past-President
------------------------------
To: Whom It May Concern
The Common Core State Standards are logical "next steps" for our schools. They were developed at the grass-roots level (I served on the review/revision team-2009-2010) with teachers and educators, state legislators, school boards, and business leaders as collaborators. We ALL have the SAME GOAL: ensure that students are prepared academically for future opportunities.
Are you aware of the many hours Kansas educators have worked over the past THREE+ YEARS to implement these Standards and meet this goal? Are you aware of the millions of dollars that have been spent on professional development and training of teachers and teacher leaders, and the enormous amount of money we've spent purchasing textbooks and other resources? Yet, despite the time and effort and money that has been spent on implementing these Standards, they are once again under fire.
This Bill is a SLAP IN THE FACE of Kansas Educators!
Melisa Hancock
Math Consultant
------------------------------
The author of the bill is Willie Dove- willie.dove@house.ks.gov.
Others who are apt to support it include:
John Bradford john.bradford@house.ks,gov
Shanti Gandhi shanti.gandhi@house.ks.gov
Dennis Hedke dennis.hedke@house.ks.gov
Ron Highland ron.highland@house.ks.gov
Jerry Lunn jerry.lunn@house.ks.gov
Kasha Kelly (chair of the committee) kasha.kelley@house.ks.gov
Questionable includes:
Amanda Grosserode amanda.grosserode@house.ks.gov
Roderick Houston roderick.houston@house.ks.gov
Kelly Meigs kelly.meigs@house.ks.gov
Opposed to the bill will probably include:
Sue Boldra sue.boldra@house.ks.gov
Carolyn Bridges carolyn.bridges@house.ks.gov
Diana Dierks diana.dierks@house.ks.gov
John Ewy john.ewy@house.ks.gov
Nancy Lusk nancy.lusk@house.ks.gov
Melissa Rooker melissa.rooker@house.ks.gov
Valdenia Winn valdenia.winn@house.ks.gov
Ward Cassidy (vice chair of the committee) ward.cassidy@house.ks.gov
------------------------------
Here's a Testimony by: William G. McCallum, university-distinguished professor of mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona.
How the Standards Were Written:
The Common Core originated in 2007 with a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). For many years the states had been hearing that our mathematics curriculum was covering too many topics too
superficially. They recognized the power of an agreement to share standards that were focused, coherent, and rigorous. In Spring 2009 CCSSO was joined by the National Governors Association (NGA). Forty-eight states signed a memorandum of understanding to develop common standards in Mathematics and English Language Arts. NGA and CCSSO put together a team of about 80 mathematicians, teachers, educators, policy makers, and state department of education staff, divided into a working group and a feedback group. University of Wisconsin mathematician Richard Askey was an active member of the feedback group.
Three of us—myself, Phil Daro, and Jason Zimba—were designated as lead writers. The states were our bosses. We started from raw material produced by the working group and produced periodic drafts for them to review. Many states put together teams of teachers at each grade level to provide detailed feedback. We also received reviews from the feedback group, from national organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Federation of Teachers, and from prominent individuals and researchers. I remember in particular one
exhausting and exhilarating weekend with my fellow writer Jason Zimba listening to teams of teachers put together by the AFT, who had meticulously read the standards and shared detailed comments with us. In March of 2010 the standards were released for public review, and received over 10,000 public comments. Three months later, after
significant changes in reponse to these comments, the standards were released on 2 June 2010.
Throughout, we focused not on our opinions but on the evidence. Our job was to listen carefully and make considered decisions in response to the evidence, and to the amazing quantity of feedback we received from many sources, including from the state of Wisconsin, feedback that we found incredibly helpful.
Evidence and support for the standards These standards are built for American students, based on the evidence of the best standards in this country and around the world. For years, major national reports have called for us to abandon our mile-wide, inch-deep approach and embrace focus and coherence in school mathematics. The standards finally act on those reports. Research on high performing countries shows that their teachers tend to focus on fewer topics in each grade, teach them to greater mastery, and build on them the next year in a coherent sequence of topics.
Research by William Schmidt, a leading expert on international mathematics performance and a previous director of the U.S. TIMSS study, has compared the Common Core State Standards to high-performing countries up through grade 8. The agreement was found to be high. Moreover, no state's previous standards were as close a match to the high performing countries as the Common Core State Standards.
This agreement is no accident. Evidence from international comparisons strongly informed the development of the standards. The bibliography of the standards on pp. 91--93 lists some of the numerous studies, major reports, and international and state standards that were used during the development process.
These standards have been widely praised not just by the presidents of every major mathematical society in the country, but by classroom teachers. They know the standards won't be easy but they know they are the right thing for our students. To quote a teacher from a mixed rural/suburban school district in Missouri:
My dear colleagues teaching in my high school are no longer asking, "We never understood this stuff so why should the students be expected to?" ... We are recognizing the difference between students trained as robots vs. students who can think. ... Elementary school teachers are welcoming professional development so that fractions make sense to them.
The three principles on which the standards are based: focus, coherence, and rigor The first two evidence-based shifts embodied in the standards are focus and coherence.
Focus
The strong focus of the standards in early grades is arithmetic. That includes the concepts underlying arithmetic, the skills of fluent arithmetic computation, and the ability to apply arithmetic to solve problems. Arithmetic in the K--5 standards is an important life skill, as well as a thinking subject and a rehearsal for algebra in the middle grades.
Focus remains important through the middle and high school grades in order to prepare students for college and careers. National surveys have repeatedly concluded that postsecondary mathematics instructors value greater mastery of a smaller set of prerequisites over shallow exposure to a wide array of topics, so that students can build on what they know and apply what they know to solve substantial problems.
Coherence
Coherence is about making mathematics make sense. Mathematics should not seem like a sequence of disconnected tricks, but like a story in which ideas grow naturally on a trellis of sound basic principles, such as place value and the properties of operations.
Maintaining focus and coherence means not trying to fit everybody's pet topic in Grades K--5, where the focus is on arithmetic. Tools of data analysis, such as mean, median, and range, can wait until Grades 6--8, where students have the solid number sense to work with the more complicated data sets for which these tools are appropriate.
Focus and coherence also imply teaching students to draw on what they know, and make connections, instead of turning every single thing into its own separate topic. The standards require least common multiples, so that students can find least common denominators if helpful. The standards require factoring and recognizing prime numbers, so that
students can find prime factorizations if helpful. But least common denominators and prime factorizations themselves are not turned into separate requirements.
Some important topics in arithmetic were moved earlier than was previously the case in many state standards (e.g. fluency with two-digit addition from Grade 3 to Grade 2), while others were moved later (division of fractions from Grade 5 to Grade 6). Taken as a whole, the reorganization of topics replaces the plate-piled-high smorgasboard
approach of previous standards with a carefully thought out sequence of courses. This represents a smartening up of the curriculum.
Rigor
The Common Core received full marks for content and rigor in a 2010 review by the Fordham Institute. The standards call for a rigorous balance in what we seek to instill in students of mathematics during the K--12 years. Conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and applications are all required by the standards.
Let me emphasize some important specifics about the Common Core.
The Common Core requires students to demonstrate fluency with the standard algorithm for each of the four basic operations with whole numbers and decimals, as you will see on pages 29, 35, and 42 of the standards.
The Common Core requires students to know addition facts and multiplication facts from memory, as you will see on pages 19 and 23. There are no standards in the Common Core that call for students to invent, construct, or discover algorithms.
How do the standards prepare students for college?
The definition of college readiness in the standards is readiness for entry-level, credit-bearing courses in mathematics at four-year colleges as well as courses at two-year colleges that transfer for credit at four-year colleges.
The high school standards consist of easily three years of mathematics at the level of Algebra II. This certainly fits the definition of college readiness. But college readiness and STEM readiness are two different things. The mathematical demands that students face in college will vary dramatically depending on whether they are pursuing a STEM major or not. Students who intend to pursue STEM majors in college should know what is required. That was true before the Common Core, and it remains true today. States still can and still should provide a pathway to calculus for all students who are prepared to succeed on that pathway—not only because it is at the heart of many STEM fields, but also because the calculus is one of the greatest intellectual developments in human history.
The Common Core has every promise of increasing the number of students in our country who actually attain advanced levels of performance. Just because the Common Core standards end with Algebra II, that doesn't mean the high school curriculum is supposed to end there. California, for example, had calculus standards before adopting the Common Core, and the state still has them now. The difference in California today is that better standards can help more of California's students gain the strong foundations they need to succeed in calculus.
Concluding remarks
The standards are an historic agreement between the states and they are also a long overdue promise to our children. But without action the agreement is just empty words, and the promise is broken. We should be standing forward today to deliver on that promise. The road to faithful implementation of the standards is not easy. Tough standards don't implement themselves; that's up to states and local districts. There are many challenges ahead: improving curriculum, preparing teachers, and thoughtfully improving assessments. Shared standards help us meet those challenges. Let us take advantage of tough shared standards to give our nation's children a chance to learn the skills they need in order to prosper.
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