SENATE BILL: The Gaining Excellent Teachers (GET) Act (Law'd)

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Nay

[Oakvale]

Aye.

[Spamage]

/aye

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Vote on Amendment 53:37:

Aye (: Averroës Nix, Franzl, HagridoftheDeep, Napoleon, NC Yankee, Oakvale, Snowstalker and Spamage
Nay (2): Ben and jdb
Abstain (0):

Didn't Vote (0): Wow yeah, ewwww baby with sugar on it, thats how I like it eww... I can't even believe its truth, its like having every thing I ever wanted....

Since this has enough votes to pass, Duke can close it when he comes on.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Ban my account ffs!]

Do we have any idea how this would actually impact teacher quality?  it will only teach education students to excel on tests that simply cannot be formulated in a way that ensures the highest quality teachers do best.

All you're doing here is giving teachers in white suburban school districts a tax break.

How about we invest in reforms that improve education in needy areas like rural and inner city schools by supporting public charter schools.  Sure, they might get the "desirable" students.. but it allows those desirable students to excel while putting competition pressure on the traditional public schools.

A decentralized leadership structure that allows individual schools to serve their neighborhoods and communities will result in better education, regardless of teacher test scores.
And how about before and after school programs that keep kids in school until they can safely go home to a house that has a parent in it?  Bad parenting and lack of direction is the main cause of failing students/schools.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Vote on Amendment 53:37:

Aye (: Averroës Nix, Franzl, HagridoftheDeep, Napoleon, NC Yankee, Oakvale, Snowstalker and Spamage
Nay (2): Ben and jdb
Abstain (0):

Didn't Vote (0): Wow yeah, ewwww baby with sugar on it, thats how I like it eww... I can't even believe its truth, its like having every thing I ever wanted....

The amendment has been adopted.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Do we have any idea how this would actually impact teacher quality?  it will only teach education students to excel on tests that simply cannot be formulated in a way that ensures the highest quality teachers do best.

All you're doing here is giving teachers in white suburban school districts a tax break.

Ah what are you talking about? We kind of just stripped the tax provisions and left the bill that does basically that. Are you reading from the OP? Cause that simply doesn't reflect the current text of the bill, which gives a pay raise to those who teach in trouble schools, like rural and inner-city schools.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Ah, Mr. Secretary?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Anyway, I might have one more amendment here to tidy up a few things. Anyone else have anything to add while we are waiting for the Secretary to find his reading glasses?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor Feedback: Origination
Status: Senators have 24 hours to object.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The amendment has been adopted.

[Ban my account ffs!]

This amended bill is much better than the original.

As SoIA, and going by IRL education statistics, a heavier weight of funding will flow to the South and to inner cities in the Mideast, Northeast, and Pacific.

Not to worry Midwest.  You will receive adequate funding!  But the Midwestern schools are doing relatively well.  So keep up the good work.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Senators,

I think one thing that may be holding us back is that, while necessitated by experience, there is an expected limitation on what a Senator or Senator(s) offers or puts forward in terms of their ideas regarding say this education bill because it is narrowly focused and thus barely related items that address another sub-issue are often ignored. This is problematic because it limits and blocks potential solutions like the idea that I proposed concerning the pay of low performing schools, which has become the only portion of the bill that remains really, as ironic as that is.

The reason we have been hitting this piecemeal is because our experience with gigantic reform efforts is that they often start bad, get worse and take forever to be concluded and may even never get finished. That was the lesson of the Comprehensive Social Security Reform effort back in 2011.

On the flip side, we should refrain from having a comprehensive strategy and the identifying the key aspects and driving them forward through these separate bills. I do have a comprehensive strategy in the back of my mind and that is what drove my support for bills in the past Senate and this bill here. Perhaps it would help if I laid out what my general strategy is, let people look at it and offer there own competing vision. Then we can break it apart sub-issue by sub-issue and while some Senators may hate own thing, they may love another and together we can get a lot of the problems in the system addressed.

Part I: The Situation As I See It:

The problem facing the education system in my view is that it is discriminatory, it is a disappointment, it is destroying our country's economic future as it is destroying the lives of millions of people case by case, individual by individual. We have too many kids who don't even graduate and then amongst those who do, they lack the competence in not only the basic knowledge of reading, writing and math, but also the various skills that the economy needs. Skills that may include something as concrete as knowledge of a certain type of advanced math or science, or is more abstract like critical thinking, analysis and team work that aren't something that can be demonstrated on pen and paper at all, more or less on a standardized test. I find it most ironic (and I live for comedic irony, but here it makes you want to cry because it is destroying our future) is that perhaps the most misguided approach to "fixing education" ever, No Child Left Behind" was driven by mostly business centered interest. And admittedly, they have the most interest in seeing that our system works because they are on the front lines economically and see what is wrong and what it is doing to this country when they can't find the qualified people to fill the skilled posts and thus hundreds or thousands of low skilled jobs that would have come with them end up overseas too because they have the skilled workers. Yet the reform centered around enshrining a nationwide standard for testing that foisted tests on many states and the schools therein that didn't even test for the things that they needed most (this is where you start laughing only to have it give way to crying after a second or two).

We have millions of hard working teachers who go unrewarded for the seemingly miraculous results they manage to achieve working with poor and minority students and somehow manage to breakthrough. At the same time many ineffective teachers who don't work well with most kids or don't possess the necessary level of creativity to break through with even the average student, more or less those who are more challenged remain in the situation and continue to do a disservice to the kids and to the system.

We have many schools that often sold a bill of goods on whatever implement they may be acquiring, but lack the resources to ensure that they are getting what they actually need or want for the particular task. They can't compete with the resources of the corporate education supply chains that often come in town with big promises and even flashier demonstrations of what they can do for them. They most certainly can't oversee these operations and ensure that they aren't using robo-graders to grade these tests, tests which are really of poor quality to begin with and do not measure what matters most as I described above.

We have these rough schools in the inner cities and yes in the rural areas, that we acknowledge aren't up to par for reasons that are obvious. Primarily they lack the funding and thus don't have the resources that they need because the tax base is not there to support it. On the other hand, we have these schools that are in the wealthy and upscale suburban areas that we tend to think are doing well, but really aren't challenging their students and even worse are dumming down the education to make the grades look good so that some politicians can claim it is working and hard working middle and working class people, who don't have the time to police the quality of their kid's education, never realize they too are getting cheated or rather their kids are getting cheated out of their future.

Another problem is that out of a desperation to try and fix the mess, we have seen educational authority become centered Nyman and what is worse the old tried and failed FDR approach of "Try something and see if works" must have been guiding it because most of what has been tried at the Federal level has in fact made the problem worse, much worse. Many states, states like Massachusetts and Connecticut, the places that basically created the public school education system and led the nation in the fight to educate its populace and in the process helped lead the nation into the Industrial Age and beyond, have seen their systems corrupted and dummed down by misguided federal mandates and thus the quality of their systems have been reduced in a (yet more ironic stupidity) a likely attempt to export their success to Texas and Alabama. These states obviously need assistance, but results must guide our policy and the current interventions have not aided them so much as it has damaged the pioneers on this front.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Part II: Guiding Principles and Influences

I am not an unreasonable person, in that if I see a problem that has a tremendous impact on our future and prosperity, I am inclined to try and fix it. I have often mocked my friends on the left and including our current President as "The Fixers" as people who can't wait to rush in with often misguided, impractical and sometimes even dangerous solutions to sometimes exaggerated or non existent problems. I will call it as I see it on that front, however; education as being a problem is not an exaggeration, it is a fundamental crisis for our nation and its future. On the other hands some of the solutions often come from a flawed mindset that the only way to approach that is to destroy and throw principles to side, to squelch regional or state prerogatives on that matter.

I am not an anti-government libertarian who thinks all aspects of the Government should be eliminated. I do have a Conservative world view that says that government has a role in some areas, but has gone too far in some others and should be curtailed or reduced in those areas. I have some growing libertarian sympathies on areas of defense and social policy. I do support the education system, as a public system, because I think it is a critical institution to have when preserving a democracy.  An institution that will provide people with the history behind and the guiding principles upon which its systems are built and the people who forged it, as well as what they are thinking. An institution to give people the skills they need to make opportunity and advancement possible, so that said system won't come into question as people seek a better life but instead view that system as what helped allow them to achieve success by giving them the freedom to express themselves and also the skills to enable that. An institution that will enable the country to have the resources and its people the knowledge to defend and protect both themselves and their neighbors from external threats. I do think that some times Progressive ideas are necessary to implement, reapply or in some cases bring into full effect for everyone the freedoms and protections of a system that are called for in my view of Conservatism Thus a situationally progressive or even radical move like establishing public schools, or abolishing slavery and segregation, is not only okay, but necessary to be in line with my form of Conservatism (I would love to explain this dichotomy in detail, but this is long already ). The solutions I aim for, are those which I think will restore the system that has basically allowed the greatness that our countries has attained, to be rejuvenated an restored. To the extent I support school choice is aimed at motivating and driving that restoration.

As my record shows, I am not against fixing real problems with effective and creative solutions. At the same time I am also not keen on abandoning key principles as some discovered in the recent debate on the Vice President Reform Amendment, that was rejected by the Senate. I am off an opinion the education should be administered, and the policy thereof center, at the level that is as closest to the people as possible. However, the lower the level you get, the less resources you have present to address these problems. I am not against the Regions aiding the local governments, nor the Federal government aiding both the regions and the local level in effecting desired changes. The nature of the relationship though has to be one of respect for the local authority and assistance to that authority in its attempts to arrive at the desired results.

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of reading "The New American
 Story" by Bill Bradley. I had read other book in the past two years that touched on education or where entirely focused on education, including Mitt Romney's "No Apology" and Tony Wagner's, "The Global Achievement Gap: Why Our Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need and What We Can Do About It", which drew greatly from some of the ideas espoused by Tom Friedman. They all contain great ideas, but also all had their own disfavored ideas that they frowned upon. The former and the latter are driven from a left wing perspective obviously and yet I found that while they couched some of their ideas in combative footing comparing to a "right" defined by Bush education policy, I was struck by how few of them actually necessarily had to be defined as liberal on the ideological spectrum. Some criticized school choice and local control, while others criticized merit pay. Some go after both, and make the case for a completely centralized top-down system. Rather than look at it from a perspective that says any particular idea has to be bad or because they aren't popular in that person's circle, they thus have to scuttled, lets look at the motivation behind it first.

I think many of solutions can be effectuated, while maintaining local control of the education system. I think the federal government should provide resources and tools, and yes there has to be some standards in exchange to be sure, and thereby motivate Regions to pursue reforms and utilize these resources and tools as part of an effort to achieve reforms at their own levels. By keeping it local, we can also have greater experimentation on the aspects they require such, like new testing methods and revolutionary concepts as to how to test and measure the more abstract skills that are absolutely essential to our workforce whether they be college educated and skilled workers, or trade school educated technicians, or high school graduates in low skilled fields. Regions that have a great system and are pushing ahead should be allowed the exemptions and freedom necessary to pursue their desired ends.



to be continued

I am not arrogant enough to claim that I have covered all the problems, nor do I claim to have cited all my knowledge or experiences that have motivated me to pursue the solutions that I prefer with regards to education, which I shall detail in my next post. My purpose is to give a broad overview of the problem and then state what principles guide my solutions and who some of the people are that I have derived my ideas from when formulating those solutions.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Part III: What Should Be Done and Who Should It?

The answer to that question in its most simplest term should be for every concern Atlasian is whatever it needs to fix the problem and by whoever is in the position of responsibility most appropriate for getting the job done.

What that means is that at every level from the teacher in the classroom to the top of the federal level needs to asses what there area of responsibility is and the ask "what are we doing?", "Why we are doing it?", "How is that working?" and "Can it be done better and if so, then how?". We need new thinking, we need innovations in process and procedure, we need knew technologies and we need to examine closely what the relationship that each level has with the one(s) below it or the one(s) above it and what that entails.

What needs to happen is quite obvious. We need to revolutionize the way we deliver the education to the student, completely. If so many people aren't being reaching, if some many others are not being taught the skills that they need, then obviously we need a complete alteration in the way the system works and how it operates. Getting specific, that means we need a new curriculum that teaches people not only the necessary basic knowledge, but the ability to learn and work productively going forward. Not only the parts of the history that are most popular or most politically correct, but the whole story so that every student knows what was done at key points in history, why it was done and what the results of having done that was (positive, negative, or even both in cases where it was mixed). We need not only to teach kids what to know and how to learn, but how to express their talents and dreams.

That means making sure students know how to read, write, and do some kind of decent math at grade level, use computers and modern technology and know a foreign language by the time they graduate from high school. Even those kids who will not be going to college, will likely need to know how to use computers and speak a foreign language to be able to compete even in the unskilled fields and earn decent incomes. We need to teach kids how to learn, to produce and contribute to society. This ranges from civics and the needs of being responsible citizen (including understanding our systems of government, the reasons behind its creation and the history as unbiased and uncut as possible), to the various demands that businesses desperately plead for regarding critical thinking, teamwork, analysis, effective communication and other skills (I think there are twelve in all, but its been a while since I read Wagner's book) that are necessary as well to compete and produce any level of the skill scale. Finally we need to teach students to be able to express themselves. This includes bring the arts back into education in a diverse palette to allow students to be able to find not only their hobbies, but possibly even careers as students learn at the very least how to be creative and some of those 12 skills mentioned in the second necessity for productivity, which can in fact be taught through painting, singing, playing an instrument and so forth. Certainly determination, cooperation and many other important skills are honed in the process of doing that.

We revolutionize the content and we are moving forward, but if we don't change the delivery, then we are still stationary in my opinion. This requires technological integration to ensure that we are taking advantage of every possible opportunity provided by the developments in the field of digital technology. I am not saying waste money to get flashy new things so a politician can look good. I am completely practical here. If a school board can't get textbooks or can't afford them, then we should seek to get them in touch with portable technology instead which can provide texts, but also new and more interactive activities. I am not saying we should get rid of traditional pen and paper exercises, quite the contrary. I am calling for diversification of the learning environment, along with the integration of new technologies.

Essential in this process though of changing delivery means experimentation and creation of new teaching methods, but especially new tests. Tests not just for the students but also for the teaches. Tests that are innovative, tests that actually measure what we need and don't require us to change the needs so that it can be tested. We need less multiple choice and more fill in the blank. We need less memory recall and more creative thinking and analysis. We need less on pen and paper and more abstract and creative expressions of lessons learned. I realize the criticisms of testing and for the most part I share it. But rather then not measure, lets acknowledge that the reason it doesn't work is that we have doubled down on a yet another failed aspect of a failed system and called it a reform, rather then actually trying to reform the system inside and out to fix the problems present, especially when it comes to the quality and effectiveness of the testing.

Obviously, this requires a lot of decision making to be done at all levels from that teacher in the classroom, who needs to be creative in finding ways to reach out to those "disconnected students" to unlock their futures, thorough the whole chain of support stretching all the way back to the federal policy in Nyman and the decision making done here within its areas of responsibility. We should aim, within guidance, within reason and within certain guidelines to center as much flexibility, as much decision making, as is possible. Every classroom is unique and thus requires different approaches, different ideas and different technologies on how best to accomplish what I have described in the previous paragraph. In order to provide the experimentation and innovation in delivery, in testing and in teaching methods, such flexibility and freedom of action will be essential in developing the ways that will allow us to reach more students and get them into the game. As you move back up that chain, the closer to Nyman you get, the most broad, less onerous and more supportive the actions should be. At the very least, if we can't be supportive of that effort, then at the very least we should get out of the way of a region that cares, of a county, school board, or principle who is moving in the right direction and is making a difference.

The determination of the school calendar, the school day length, and the presence or lack thereof of school uniforms should rest entirely at the school board level. These decisions must be made in context of local needs and values and should not have a policy imposed on them by the country, state or Region and sure as hell not by a bunch do-gooder "fixers" in Nyman. In many instances the day needs to be lengthened and the numbers of days increased. I don't have a problem with encourage one or the other with extra federal dollars, but we should based that on numbers, not a mandated setup like "year-round school". The world has changed and in most every part of the country, the agricultural based need for the traditional calendar has died. However, if a town or county in Alabama still depends on it, they should not have Los Angeles' system imposed on them. I hate to speak ill of the dead here, but what is good for Newark isn't always just as good for Iowa.

I am not a religious person, nor do I believe that Genesis was anything more then a symbolic recording of events as a opposed to a literal time-line. Time is a rather arbitrary construct as we discovered a week ago when we had to change our clocks, suddenly an hour vanishes or appears simply because a the authority controlling it says so. So I don't find it hard to believe that in an ancient text, a day may not have been an actually day. For those of you who disagree I can respect your literal interpretations as being your own personal beliefs on the matter. If you can't bring yourself to do that then, what I say next might seem like a confession of bias. Since learning the details of Evolution, I have not only come to accept it as a scientific fact, well established over time, but it has become a topic of great interest to me. I am fascinated by where various cell components have originated and how it allowed different and more diverse organisms to evolve. My belief on policy is that government shouldn't impose into a science course what is not a scientific matter. If it is a religion course that is a different story, but biology is biology and it should be taught with the latest information derived and supported from the field.

Now that the areas of controversy have been removed, we should move on to the details of how we should actually move to fix our education system from the perspective of a Senator like myself or the President, should be doing in Nyman.

Our primary focus should be support, to unleash and guide the lower levels in the transition to a more effective educational system and that will free and unlock all the people of this nation to achieve the greatness, enjoy the prosperity and feel the true breadth of freedom that this country promises. Therefore, in part IV (OMG, He isn't done?!!!!!!), I will in fact be offering detailed and specific ideas of what can be done and even if not at our level, what our level of government can do to encourage and to help the lower levels pursue that. And yes, there were will be a bullet point format in that.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Part IV: Specific Ideas     INCOMPLETE: TO BE FINISHED TOMORROW!!!!!

Many of these are ideas from Bill Bradley's book mention in the previous post. There are some significant changes, for instance, he throws local control under the bus and I do not.

1. Standards and Guidelines for Performance

- While it is easy to blame local control for the lack of progress in many areas, it is not as if the record of centralizing authority has worked in those areas in which we have done so. Rather than blame the power structure and seek to torpedo, why can't the Federal Government try to respect it and provide a nationwide set of standards on math, science, reading and foreign language, etc.

- Rather than mandating adoption, instead incentivize it by providing more funding to those areas that seek to push and challenge their students their students the most.  The incentive, not to mention the desire to ensure that students succeed, should be more then enough to motivate local officials and staff to push towards or even beyond those guidelines. If not, then they need to be replaced.

- In order to test the standards to see where the students are in relation to them, complying districts will administer a set of tests that are the result of new research and actually measure what the students need to be learning, which I have described in my previous posts.

2. Teachers and Pay

- A lot of teachers are on the upper end of the age distribution scale for working people and thus they will be retiring. Therefore just to replace those people, we will need to lure a lot of young people into the profession. We need to go even beyond that as well to fill the fast growth areas and provide the most attention possible to challenged students.

- Also, having so many teachers coming from the bottom of the college performance scale is inherently a structually unsound way for an education system. Therefore we need to offer more in general and reward those up the performance scale, who then decide to go into the teaching profession. You will provide even more for those who elect to teach in the roughest schools. In Bradley's book, he recommends a CCC/Peace Corps like organization that will not only provide an organized means to ensure these extra financial incentives are distributed properly but will also call upon their inner desires to serve and improve the community. 

- Bradley does shockingly advocate for some kind of performance based pay, but he states that such should be based on school wide performance (detailed in Section 3) and that will incentive everyone to work together to create a better learning environment and encourage teaches to support the Principles when it comes to weeding out the bad ones.

3. Empower the Principles and the Teachers
- Both Principles and Teachers need on-going education to learn about the results of the various experiments being tried and new ways to improve the school/classroms, with the newest methods and technology. We also need to focus on teacher quality in general, based of the trend for the past several decades of how many teachers come from the bottom performers amongst college graduates. Both of these will involve testing, but just like above, the tests need to be different, more effective and give us a better, more all around look at the skills in question.

- Principles would be put in charge of ensuring the teachers that come in are up to par and have the flexibility to get rid of current teachers who are not. As Bradley recommends, rather then measuring their performance against all schools, it needs to be a school of comparable demographics with regards to student body. That way you are judging based on true results and improvement, not the poverty level of the student body or presence of minorities. The purpose of havign standards is to ensure that you are getting the most improvement where it is needed most, not to penalize those very same schools.

- We need to allow teachers and principles to innovate and then reward those who develop the best ideas, and provide the details and results to all the other schools, teachers and principles (through the on-going education described above) as a way to quickly find better ways to deliver the educational experience. 

- Require education PhDs, to contribute a unique and innovative idea to the field of study and thereby help improve the quality of the system, just like doctorate degrees in other fields already require be done before they can earn said degree.

4. Experimentation and Research
- We need to develop new and more aggressive curricula, more effective testing methods, find the best new technologies that can be used, test different combinations of school day length and calander changes, as well as find ways to streamline administrative, transportation and other organization costs.

- You set up district wide, or in some case even statewide experiments and then the distribute the results through the on-going education process for teachers and princples described above.

- Teachers and Principles who come up with the best ideas and innovations should have a competition of sorts that they can enter the idea in, with so many prizes awards annually for the best ideas.

- Federal funding for research into education needs to be increased.

5. Distributing the Results and Other Assistance by the Federal Gov't

- Rather than a federal bureaucracy that it is bloated and inefficient, you setup an agency that can send in experts to provide assistance. Including all the results from the various innovations, research and experiments described in section four.

- These people will come in as requested and help with implementing a set of reforms into a school.

- The same agency can review and study the various marketed items for effectiveness and then provide those "consumer reports" like information to school boards that are often inundated with glittzy advertising, but little real knowledge of the book or technology's effectiveness, nor even any way to find out with present resources.

6. Achievement Gap and Resegregation

- In Wagner's book he described a global achievement gap with us being on the losing end. No doubt a large part of the reason for that is because so many poor and minority students are on the losing end of the racial and poverty based ones internally.

- The solution for this, rather than busing and focusing students to go to a crappy school. Is to instead take the worst and turn them into the best, with the best teachers, technology and equiptment. The colleges will look favorably on these graduates and thus the tide of white flight based on the school, will be reversed. At least that is what Bradley hopes will happen and I tend to think it is better idea then trying to ensure they are are all equal in the dysfunction.

- To get better teachers, who performed better in college, you pay them more for teaching in the roughest schools.

- More important then that is recruiting kickass principals who will be responsible for overseeing the turnaround, and thus paid accoridng to the difficulty of the task at hand, namely more then normal principals.

- These schools will also need to take full advantage of the above mentioned results and resources to implement the best curriculum, testing, teching methods and technologies to maxmize the numbers of trouble students who are being "reached".

- School Choice (Described in Part 7), specifically charter schools

- Assistance with transportation, finance management and procurment

- Reductions in bureaucracy and patronage jobs.

7. A Leftist Form of School Choice, Say it Ain't So.

- Obviously if you succeed with the changes above, you won't get the "re-de-segregation" impact, without some kind of school choice. At the very least such would be slowed down as more people would have to move and thus get entangled with issues of housing and so forth.

- Bradley recommends that every student be given a per-capita amount of education funding that travels with them and then could be put towards improving some aspect of the school. He mentions security specifically, but other areas definately come to mind like building quality so forth. He doesn't explain what this would look like, though.

- Remove federal barriers to charter schools. Regions need to take advantage of these and their seems to be some desire to move in this area. The competative aspect will provide thus one more incentive for the worst schools to improve and move in the direction we have described above. However, rather then bleeding them, the resources and assistance will be their for them to improve and thus school choice helps moves us towards an improved public school system.

NOTE: Shockingly, this isn't complete. I wasn't expecting it to take two horus just to incorporates ideas from and those I derived or modified from just the one source. I plan to finish this tomorrow

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

This amended bill is much better than the original.

As SoIA, and going by IRL education statistics, a heavier weight of funding will flow to the South and to inner cities in the Mideast, Northeast, and Pacific.

Not to worry Midwest.  You will receive adequate funding!  But the Midwestern schools are doing relatively well.  So keep up the good work.

I thank the Secretary for his response.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Yes, I do actually, after I finish up on Part Four above. Which if I handed tried to make it into a bullet point list, would have served as a nice conclusion and then lead in to my next move.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It seems like every time I come on here, I lose time for something. Yesterday it was gov't paperwork and today it was a power outage.


To get a discusison going, what would the Senators think about adding the school Principals into the mix?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I was talking about in terms of low performing schools, which is now the primary focus of the bill.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

So was I. I really have no idea whether the low-performing schools in question have qualified applicants for administrative positions.

Your previous post seem to suggest the opposite with the "too many teachers..."

That is correct, for most schools.

However the theory is that these schools being the toughest to deal with, have more disciplinary issues, crime related things (students involved in gang activity on or off campus and thus some what of a revolving door with the local jail), teachers who are lower quality then the average and not to mention the inability to do anything about that. Also, the changes and efforts needed to effect a transformation of the kind envisioned would be necessary in order to basically make them magnet schools, would make qualified individuals far less likely to see those positions, would it not?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Well Nix, do you have anything to respond to what I said?

How about anyone else?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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How is this on for size?

There is one aspect that it still missing here. And I don't know whether it can reasonably be done here or would require a different bill. What do you guys think?