The HUNTER is RELENTLESS!

Bobb making sure DPS teachers get to teach

Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb has ordered a full audit of the district’s 5,200 teachers and how they spend their time to ensure that all are teach ing students.

The action is in re sponse to complaints that principals are as signing teachers admin istrative duties in lieu of teaching classes, some thing a district with class sizes as large as 50 students cannot afford.

The practice violates district policy, and combined with the number of teachers who teach only special educa tion, means the district has only about 3,900 teachers to teach more than 75,000 students — and that hundreds of students sit in overcrowded class rooms. 


Budget may be crunching teachers’ time

Let’s do the math: With 87,000 students and 5,200 teachers, the aver age class size in the Detroit Public Schools should be a very manageable 17 kids per room. Right?

Not even close.

Subtract about 1,300 teach ers and resource specialists who teach the nearly 14% of DPS students in special-educa tion classes.

Then subtract scores more teachers who handle only two or three classes per day — or maybe none at all — instead of their full complement of five, because they also are part time administrators for school principals.

Add in a budget crisis that prevents the district from hiring new teachers, and you wind up with some classes of up to 50 students and a district that has very little chance of being able to make its work force meet student needs. 

What makes the mission harder

As emergency financial manager Robert Bobb contin ues to pare down the district’s deficit, right-size its workforce and repair decades of damage done by more corruption and crises than any one district should face, the need to bal ance teacher specialties with student needs is yet one more daunting task. The current classroom workforce is not as diverse as DPS students deserve.

“There is no leeway to keep teachers for academic reasons because it (retention) is based on seniority,” said Patrick Falcuson, financial analyst and retirement counselor for the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

The majority of Detroit teachers are between ages 45-54. (At least 168 are over 65; 17 are over 75, and two are over 85. Only 111 are under age 25.) The average pay is $67,000, and 92% are at top scale. The district cannot af ford new teachers.

Bobb’s mission to give kids what they need is made harder for two reasons: 25% of the district’s teachers teach or work with the more than 12,000 DPS students in spe­cial- education classes and aren’t available for regular classrooms, and some princi pals use teachers for adminis trative duties that used to be done by assistants. “We have an inordinate amount of special-education teachers because we have an inordinate amount of special education classrooms,” said Detroit Federation of Teach ers President Keith Johnson.

Bobb also has said Detroit doesn’t classify students as needing special education until fifth or sixth grade, much later than other districts do. But like other districts, he said, Detroit pushes black boys into special education because of behavioral problems that sometimes result from them not being able to read.

Bobb faces an additional— and unusual — problem as he figures out how best to use teachers: Some aren’t teach ing.

Teachers are supposed to teach five classes periods, but often, for whatever reason, “the principal decides he needs help,” said Falcuson.

The years-long practice violates district policy, and became worse after Bobb cut administrators to reduce the deficit. Union officials fear that it is now so widespread that it may be impossible to end.

“There would be no way of knowing (where teachers are),” Falcuson said. “It’s un der the table. On paper, often times, administrators have them (teachers) down as teaching five classes when they’re not.” 

Getting to the truth of the matter

Johnson said he has com plained to Bobb about the misuse of teachers’ time for everything from computeriz ing student attendance re cords to doing budgets, but got no response. Bobb, through a spokesman, said Monday that he has ordered a full audit of teachers’ time.

“Given the dire financial situation the district is in, we cannot afford for any to not be in front of students on a daily basis,” said Steve Wasko, Bobb’s spokesman. He added that Bobb plans to make sure the audit is accurate.

Johnson said he has heard it before.

“I told him about this in a meeting at the beginning of the year,” he said. “How can you do an audit if someone gives you false paperwork?”

Johnson said the only way to solve the problem is to do surprise school visits.

I say this problem is yet one more embarrassing example of adults failing children in a city that should know better.

Let’s hope the audit works.

If not, there is one other way Bobb can find out who’s teach ing: He can ask students. 



Teachers’ math anxiety could be influencing young girls, study says

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

ASSOCIATED PRESS 

WASHINGTON — Little girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers.

Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in some areas of math achieve ment, and the question of why has provoked controversy.

Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the an swer: Female elementary school teachers concerned about their own math skills could be passing that concern along to the little girls they teach.

Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math may re inforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian Beilock, an associate professor in psy chology at the University of Chicago.

Beilock and colleagues studied 52 boys and 65 girls in classes taught by 17 teachers. Ninety percent of U.S. ele mentary school teachers are women, as were all of those in the study.

Student math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety at the start of the school year, the researchers report in today’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female stu dents were to agree that “boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading.”

Teacher math anxiety was measured on a 25-question test about situations that made them anxious, such as reading a cash register re ceipt or studying for a math test.

A separate test checked the math skills of the teach ers, who worked in a large Midwestern school district.