Helping Teachers Wipe the Offal from Their Brows

Saw this on the Chattanoogan.com:

http://chattanoogan.com/articles/article_107248.asp

Hopefully they'll make the changes they're recommending, because right now, the state poops on teachers.

Full text:

TEA President Wiman Questions Who Will Teach In Tennessee
posted May 13, 2007

“Who will teach in Tennessee,” Dr. Earl H. Wiman, president of the Tennessee Education Association (TEA), asked the approximately 1,000 teachers and education support personnel serving as delegates to the annual Representative Assembly over the weekend at the Nashville Convention Center.

He said, “In Tennessee at this very moment six thousand teachers are eligible for retirement and another six thousand teachers will be eligible within the next five years.

“Without competitive teacher salaries, without competitive fringe benefits, with the lowest teacher retirement benefit of any southeastern state, who will teach in Tennessee? Almost fifty percent of Tennessee’s teacher graduates never teach in this state. Our school systems lose half of our newly hired teachers within their first five years.

“Tennessee continues to ‘bleed’ teachers across our borders to states with more competitive salaries and better benefits."

He told the story of a group of Memphis teachers who retired from Tennessee and then started teaching in Nevada in order to work the necessary years to retire there. He said this was the only way the teachers could support themselves in retirement because the Tennessee benefit was not enough alone.

The president challenged delegates to “testify” to elected officials and called a brief recess so that delegates could call state senators and state representatives from the floor of the assembly. Delegates asked their representatives to support at least a 40¢ per package cigarette tax increase and the funding formula changes proposed last week by the governor.

The Representative Assembly is TEA's highest governing body and is made up of delegate-members elected by teachers and education support professionals in every local school system in the state.

In other business, delegates elected several new officers, bestowed honors on outstanding educators and citizens set the organization's budget and legislative priorities for the upcoming year, and adopted resolutions and business items introduced by delegates.

Among the resolutions, delegates affirmed support for the use of alternative, appropriate assessments to accurately measure the academic success of students with special needs. They also affirmed TEA’s support for higher graduation standards, but strongly cautioned against rushing to “redesign” without an implementation timeline that recognizes the complexity of redesigning high school curriculum.

Delegates also strongly called for adequate instructional support — including adequate staffing, ongoing professional development with both pre-service and in-service training, additional collaborative planning time, strict adherence to planning time and duty free lunch periods, and revamping of the state’s “Caseload and Class Size Policy” — for all teachers charged with teaching special needs children through the practice of “inclusion” of these children in the regular classroom.

Delegates also revised the guiding principles and parameters for negotiating salary additions sometimes called alternative or diversified pay plans.

In new business, delegates took action to call for a 6% salary increase out of additional state revenues instead of the currently proposed 3%. They voted to push for revision of applicable Tennessee statutes to extend provision of duty-free lunch, planning time, and class size requirements to Pre-K teachers who are currently being denied these professional necessities in many school systems.

Delegates soundly approved the elimination of Tennessee’s Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS) due to continued misuse of the data that leads to false conclusions concerning teachers and schools. Delegates also called for release of test items once tests are scored in order for teachers and other education support professionals to know what specific skills and knowledge individual students have not mastered.

Delegates also called for an immediate end to the use of teacher Social Security numbers to track the records of students since the writing assessment currently requires the teacher’s Social Security number to be included as part of the tests that have later been processed by prisoners incarcerated in Tennessee prisons.

Elected to the TEA Board of Directors were Kimberly Waller of Knox County, Allen Nichols of Rutherford County, Amanda Fields of Robertson County, LaVerne Dickerson of Memphis, Charles New of Memphis, Julia Nicholson of Clarksville-Montgomery County, Barbara Gray of Shelby County, Marilda Smith of Robertson County, and Sarah Kennedy-Harper of Memphis.

Paula Brown of Knox County was re-elected to the National Education Association (NEA) Board of Directors.

Elected to the Tennessee Political Action Committee for Education (T-PACE) Executive Board were Sherry Morgan of Knox County, Marjorie Rios of Putnam County, Lise Triggs of Murfreesboro City, Daryl Brindley of Giles County, Christine Denton of Clarksville-Montgomery County, Patty Hester and Harold Smith of Memphis.

Clark Justis of Greene County was elected as a member of the Local Education Insurance Committee, and Traci Jefferson of Hamblen County was elected as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System.