The LA Times has published it’s entire database of what it calls “Value Added” teacher ratings, scoring LAUSD teachers with a method that tracks individual students’ advancement as they pass through classrooms over the years.
Example of a teacher's rating
In support of this idea, State Assemblyman Chris Norby just sent the following letter to current school board members and to this year’s candidates. In the letter, Norby asks them to figure out how to publish similar rankings for Fullerton teachers and schools.
The LA Times’ controversial scoring method is supposed to reflect a teacher’s effectiveness at raising standardized test scores using seven years of student testing data. While the Times admits that the scores do not rate every aspect of a teacher’s effectiveness, they do “bear on the performance of public employees who provide and important service.”
In defense against the teachers’ union outcry over the release of this data, the Times asserts that parents and the rest of the public have a right to view all of this data for the benefit of children.
We’re anxious to find out how the candidates respond to Norby’s request. This information would be extremely beneficial for Fullerton parents.
The other day Fullerton school board candidate and self-described “fiscal conservative” Janny Meyer joyfully announced her acceptance of the Fullerton teachers’ union endorsement.
Well, it's kind of a gray area.
This registered Republican must not be interested in GOP support, since that party has forbidden candidates from taking any union money.
But more importantly, Janny’s campaign is now backed by the very same teachers’ union that has repeatedly sacrificed your child’s education at the alter of paycheck protection. The result? Furlough days and increased class sizes, not good education.
It’s also the same union leadership that fights to protect bad teachers at all costs while refusing to allow schools to reward good teachers. They will boycott anyone who attempts to help parents evaluate teacher performance. They’ve instituted a system which puts young, energetic teachers up on the chopping block while coddling tenured teachers without any regard for job performance.
It makes my head hurt.
Of course, the union would love to pass a new property tax in Fullerton next year so they can keep shoveling money into this flawed system. Any idea how that conflict would churn in the head of a self-styled conservative who is also beholden to the union?
Last week the LA Times released an in-depth analysis of LAUSD teacher performance data which shows a wide variance in teacher quality that can greatly detract from a child’s education.
The analysis angered the teachers unions, who have spent decades lobbying to hide teacher performance data from the public in order to protect bad teachers. As retribution for the LA Times’ disclosure of public information, the unions are attempting to organize a boycott of the newspaper.
State Assemblyman Chris Norby, who was a teacher himself for 17 years, sent out an email blast encouraging these disclosures and asking the public to pay attention to this story.
“Shielding poor-performing teachers hurt both the kids and the teacher. Recognizing and emulating high performers will help us all,” wrote Norby. He also highlighted another major find in the report: the discovery that the educational disparity between teachers within a given school is much greater than disparities between schools, suggesting that education can best be encouraged by holding teachers more accountable, rather than just pouring money into under-performing schools.
Perhaps someone will attempt disclosure and analysis of teacher performance in Fullerton school districts, although the unions would probably fight it every step of the way. For the good of the children, of course. What we really need are school boards and state legislators who will fight union efforts to coddle bad teachers.
Despite their enormous operating budgets, school boards rarely receive the attention and oversight they deserve. Perhaps the public is disheartened by the realization that school boards operate under behemoth state bureaucracies that leave little room for local input and control.
But in the next few years our schools will have a good shot at making serious improvements that affect the classroom. While they will continue to be challenged with budget cuts, there will be new opportunities to renegotiate bad union agreements and eliminate wasteful programs in favor of putting resources directly into the classroom.
Let’s hope voters decide to make some changes. Here are the starting lineups:
Fullerton School District – vote for 3
Board members Minard Duncan and Ellen Ballard decided not to run, which means there are three available seats and only one incumbent in the race. The candidates are:
Beverly Berryman, Incumbent
Janny Catlin Meyer, Retired Teacher
Aaruni Thakur, Children’s Court Attorney
Chris Thompson, Fullerton Businessman/Parent
Fullerton Joint Union High School District – vote for 3
All three incumbents are running for reelection. The candidates are:
Marilyn Buchi, Governing Board Member, Fullerton Joint Union High School District
Vicki R. Calhoun, Educator/Scholarship Administrator
Robert N. “Bob” Hathaway, Governing Board Member, Fullerton Joint Union High School District
Nadia Sanchez, Student/Care Provider
Robert A. “Bob” Singer, Governing Board Member, Fullerton Joint Union High School District
Wow. It’s sort of weird. I spend a few months in eastern Nevada and when I get back it seems like nothing has changed. It was way back in February that Joe did a recap on the doings of Pam Keller – and what a recap it was. We had over 130 comments, most from some pathetic Keller apologist calling him/herself 4th SD Observer.
And today I learned from a pretty reliable source that last night the Fullerton School Board renewed the Keller/Collaborative contract. You remember, the contract that permits Keller to be an FSD employee while in actuality she goes gallavanting around Fullerton, latte cup in hand, hobnobbing with other professional do-gooders, and taking credit for real philanthropy performed by others.
Anyway, I gather that the vote was 3-2, with Bev Berryman and Lynn Thornley, to their credit, dissenting. As usual Ed Royce liberals Hilda Sugarman and Ellen Ballard voted yes; and of course our old friend Minard Duncan had to go along, too. That figures. He has popped up here occasionally to inform us of how hard Pam works.
Parents, the PTA that you all belong to is behind trying to raise your property taxes by reducing the threshold for passage of parcel taxes.
The California State PTA has endorsed the “Local Control of Local Classrooms Funding Act” which reduces the voter approval requirement to raise taxes from 2/3rds down to 55%. This will make it much easier for local school districts to place new property taxes on local homeowners to benefit the teachers’ unions.
Your local PTA: Always thinking of the children
QUIT THE PTA. It is a bad lobbying organization disguised as an innocent thrower of classroom ice cream parties. It hurts children, families, the state and the country.
Moms and dads can help in the classroom, support schools and be great parents without supporting this organization which is stabbing you in the back as a pawn of teachers unions.
This video is from the South Pasadena School District. Fullerton School District Superintendent Mitch Hovey felt that this was a good enough example of how a school district could “send a message to Sacramento” to present it at the FSD School Board meeting the other night. Enjoy the manipulation of children by the same mindless fools who put our current legislature in office. You should have seen the FSD employees and most of the board members smiling and bopping their heads to the music.
Incidentally, South Pasadena passed a $120/year parcel tax last year.
Some man/woman calling him/herself 4th SD Observer started giving me and this blog a rasher o’ crap on a Pam Keller post yesterday; you know, we’re conspiratorialist wackos, yadda, yadda, yadda. This technique is common in blog circles: you try to color your political opponents as paranoid, nutsy, weird, tin foil-hatted, cross-dressing Nazis – whatever. And of course their objective is not only to marginalize you, but to divert attention from your point.
In response I was inspired to do a Pam Keller recap.
And just so my “true colors” are not seen to be in anyway unclear, here they are: Pam Keller is a hypocritical, shallow, self-serving, irresponsible public servant (and employee) whose manifest conflicts of interest make her unable to serve her constituents honestly, and who seems to be incapable of demanding accountability on the part of herself or her underlings.
There! I feel ever so much better! A veritable catharsis.
Now let’s take a peek at some of the Keller record; and I’ll keep it short(er) by just looking at stuff that has been written about her on what “admin” likes to call “our humble blog.”
Here are some items for your consideration:
1. When she ran for office in 2006 Keller promised that Fullerton residents would dictate the direction of development in town. And yet within two years Keller had voted to approve the gargantuan, staff/developer driven Amerige Court and Jefferson Commons monstrosities that involved huge get-rich-quick entitlements for their sponsors and that would stick the rest of us with the environmental impacts. Only the recession intervened.
2. When she ran for office for in 2006 Keller promised not to take money from developers. Instead she solicited developer’s contributions to her Collaborative, revenue that supported her employment. And the developers were proposing the Jefferson Commons and Amerige Court projects. Hypocrisy? Much?
3. In August of 2007, not even in office a year, Keller joined the now infamous Steve Sheldon (Jefferson Commons) $1000 per person drinkies-boat-ride-dinner fundraiser for Sharon Quirk. Also on board were the Pelican/Laing hucksters greasing the axles of their Amerige Court investment. Did Pam pay her way, or was it a gift from an importuning developer? Too easy. No prize for answering correctly.
4. Even though St. Jude’s Medical Center is a member and contributor to the Fullerton Collaborative of which Keller is the Executive director, Keller, as a city councilmember voted in December 2007 to approve their development entitlements for its massive project west of Harbor Boulevard. Conflict? Much?
5. In August and September of 2008 Keller supported keeping the public in the dark about the fact that she and her council colleagues were negotiating a retroactive pension spike for City employees. She publicly castigated Shawn Nelson for disclosing the fact that the topic was being deliberately concealed from the public.
6. In October 2008 Keller spent over $1200 in public funds for bills run up at a fancy hotel while attending a League of Cities conference in Long Beach – about 25 miles from her house.
7. In June 2009 Keller enlisted members of the OCCCO to publicly promote the fraudulent Redevelopment expansion. They sure owed her a favor since her Collaborative had funneled over $25,000 their way in 2007 for “community organizing.”
8. In June/July 2009 Keller voted for the bogus Redevelopment expansion with its evident failure to indicate any blight. The findings were a lie. Of course the expansion area had been redrawn to exclude a property Keller owns so she could vote on it. How’s that for fancy footwork?
9. Also in June 2009 Keller supported the relocation of a McDonald’s franchise about 150 feet to the corner across the street from Fullerton High – to tune of 6 million bucks. The childhood obesity issue was embarrassing since one of the Collaborative’s mission is to fight it, not facilitate it. Keller only backtracked when it became clear that the jig was up. Later that summer she proclaimed herself a “fiscal conservative.”
10. In July Keller proposed a City of Fullerton blog – without any bloggers, of course. In other words a City propaganda vehicle that would disseminate filtered information and necessarily involve city employees in censoring the unpleasantries often associated with participatory democracy on the internet.
11. In August and September 2009 our investigation into the Fullerton Collaborative and its doings discovered that the vast majority of Fullerton Collaborative expenses went to pay for Keller herself; that her hapless fellow boardmembers were woefully ignorant of her both her fund raising sources and her activities; and furthermore, that since she was considered an FSD teacher and public employee, she got to maintain her benefits thereof, but was cut loose from any District supervision to pursue her dream of philanthropy and self-promotion.
We connected the dots for you.
12. In October 2009 as a city council person she voted to postpone debt payments to the City from…her employer, the Fullerton School District. Sharing smiles with her boss who was sitting in the front row.
13. In December she voted to approve the fiasco-in-the-making Richman housing project scam – another staff/developer driven monstrosity (see #1, above) that even fails to address Fullerton’s most pressing housing needs (if you happen to be persuaded by such SCAG priorities).
14. In January 2010 it became apparent that for $50,000+ you can’t even hire an Executive Director that will take the time to update her organization’s on-line calendar events. Move along folks, nothing to see here!
15. In February 2010 we learned that even though Keller is a treated as teacher (for her own benefit) not only is she freed from the drudgery of the classroom, but she has apparently failed to account for her time away from FSD on political junkets, etc., as all teachers are required to do. Of course this means the accrual of unused sick/personal day time. It turns out that some real teachers resent it. How odd. Naturally FSD is clueless. Naughty!
Oh, well. That’s enough for now. No doubt more dubious Keller behavior will surface in the coming months, and as it does we will surely share it with you; and just as surely Keller’s Posse of Political Whatevers will make looking the other way into a full time job.
As a salaried teacher, Pam Keller is required to turn in a form to her boss whenever she is absent from work at the Fullerton School District. But unlike every other teacher, Pam has no boss and doesn’t answer to anybody, even the Superintendent.
Since we know that Pam was out for a dozen-or-so days over the last few years attending various civic events relating to her councilperson duties, we decided to ask the school district to produce those absence forms that Pam turned in.
Work is for suckers
The response from Assistant Superintendent Mark Douglas was nothing but a big pile of mush. He claims that the district looked for the forms, although he never acknowledges that he couldn’t find them. But he didn’t send them to us, so it’s reasonable to assume that Pam never turned them in.
Notice how Douglas tries to pass the buck along to the Fullerton Collaborative, as if a private organization is responsible for enforcing the school district’s rules on it’s own teachers. He never bothers to explain how Pam’s 60% employment is relevant or why Pam’s relationship with the Collaborative would give her a special exemption from the rules.
So now we know that Pam did not use her sick/personal days while she was out. She got paid even though she wasn’t at work and her sick time continues to accrue indefinitely. Teachers have been known to build up an entire year of sick time before they quit, leaving taxpayers on the hook for salary, pension and benefits for days never worked.
Some day, long after the Collaborative’s relationship with the school district is gone, Pam Keller will retire as a teacher. She will cash out all of those unused sick days at the expense of the taxpayer. We end up paying twice for all of her silly junkets, and the celebration of unaccountability continues.
Last month we warned you that CalSTRS (California teachers’ pension fund) was in a bad spot and they were hoping that nobody would notice.
Yesterday CalSTRS announced that investment losses have left the fund with a $42.6 billion dollar shortfall.
oops
Even more worrisome: the fund will be completely wiped out shortly after today’s young teachers enter retirement. To counteract that problem, the fund will need to start sucking in major contribution increases almost immediately.
Naturally the pension system wants to resolve the situation by sending more Sacramento lobbyists to persuade legislators to “take action”. And by “take action” they mean increase contributions to the fund. Since a majority of teachers’ pension contributions come from taxpayers… Well you know what that means.
