Teacher Training

Students in the Southeast Delco School District may get some additional time off during the 1988-89 school year thanks to a proposal that would require teachers to attend a two-hour, in-service session one morning each month. At a school board committee meeting Monday night, Superintendent William C. Donato recommended that kindergarten through 12th-grade classes be delayed by two hours once a month so that teachers could attend the training sessions. If the proposal is approved by the board, classes will be delayed on the first Wednesday of each month, except in September and June.

The New Hope-Solebury School District has won two grants for teacher training, and the folks at the school board meeting Monday were mighty pleased about it. In fact, district parents, residents and teachers who were at the meeting burst into a loud round of applause when Superintendent Irene Bender announced the district would receive a $25,000 grant from the Coalition of Essential Schools and a $7,400 Lead Teacher Grant from the state....

Calling new state teacher training requirements "condescending" and blaming the Pennsylvania Department of Education for setting unrealistic deadlines, school superintendents, teachers and administrators spoke out against the program during a two-hour meeting Tuesday at Lionville Junior High School. Under a new law, Act 178, passed by the state legislature in December 1986, every school district in Pennsylvania must this year write a detailed plan to provide teachers with up-to-date training in education methods or face losing all state funding.

Little did Walter Carroll know that when he wrote the borough's school into his will in the late 1940s, his words would be causing administrators half a century later to run to the courts. And while there is no doubt among residents and administrators here that the Carroll educational trust fund is the best thing to hit the district in years, its terms have caused some mighty confusion, and some rather heated debate. The latest legal question is how the fund money is spent - and, more specifically, whether it is benefiting the students, as Carroll intended it to. At issue is whether part of the money has been unfairly used in the last decade to fund teacher-training sessions.

Throughout most of American history, public education has been revered as the mechanism to a better life: the pathway to equality of opportunity and the catalyst for understanding - and then ending - historic inequities between Americans of different races. And most Americans still have deep faith in the power of education and its connection to equity, polls show. But inequities in funding and teacher training that disproportionately affect minority and impoverished children threaten that faith.

A comprehensive study of technology in the nation's schools released yesterday found that Pennsylvania and New Jersey schools are lagging behind national averages in such key areas as the ratio of students to computers and technology training for teachers. The report, by the Educational Testing Service, the private educational testing institution based in Princeton, also found that, nationwide, poor and minority students have less access to computers than their wealthy and middle-class counterparts.

Amid controversy over its cost and merits, Superintendent David Hornbeck has received big bucks to support a massive school-reform plan. A $13.5 million grant from the William Penn Foundation was announced yesterday during a press conference at Andrew Hamilton School in West Philadelphia. With this grant, the School District will have raised $85 million towards the $100 million it needs to collect $50 million from philanthropist Walter Annenberg. The grant is the largest the foundation has ever given.

The Philadelphia School District has consistently failed to provide refugee Asian students with enough tutors, bilingual classes and free transportation to meet a federal court order, according to legal documents filed this week. Citing persistent violations of a four-year-old court order, attorneys for the nonprofit Education Law Center have asked U.S. District Court to appoint a "special monitor" to oversee the school district's compliance. The original lawsuit, filed by the Education Law Center in 1985, declared that the district was violating federal law by not helping the estimated 8,000 Asian immigrant children, mainly illiterate Cambodian refugees, bridge significant educational and cultural gaps.

Yes, teacher training does need revamping, but as The Inquirer does so often it throws away the baby with the bath water. The concept of training teachers on a graduate level only is not original. If the Carnegie teaching panel thinks that it has recommended something new it is mistaken. The University of Pennsylvania has had such a program, and European countries such as England still train teachers in this fashion. The University of Pennsylvania dropped its program years ago, and teacher training programs in Britain are subjects of constant criticism.

Last week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal signed the nation's most expansive school voucher program into law. Since the GOP sweep of statehouses in 2010, similar measures have been introduced by the legislatures of more than 30 states — including Pennsylvania, where a bipartisan school voucher bill was defeated in the House in December. Few doubt that there is a crisis in America's public schools. But focusing so much attention on where money is spent — instead of how — oversimplifies a complex problem.

More than 250 teachers from public and private schools in the Philadelphia area, and from Pittsburgh and other cities, gathered at the National Constitution Center on Sunday for a two-hour discussion about the state of teaching and education, part of a national conversation called "Education Nation. " With little electronic clickers that registered their choices on certain topics, 48 percent of the teachers in the Constitution Center's Kimmel Theater voted that merit pay for teachers should "in some way" be based on student performance - a middle-ground selection that also included choices of "completely" and "not at all. " They also chose poverty and family issues, plus lack of student motivation, as the biggest hindrances to learning; and from a list of five responses, they voted that teachers could perform better if they had more time to work with and learn from colleagues and had additional technology.

I confess: I dread this time of year. It might sound strange coming from the executive director of the National Women's Studies Association, but Women's History Month reminds me of our education system's failures. At home, I help my elementary school-age children assemble projects with such titles as "Important Women in History" or "A Woman I Admire. " We search the Internet for information that's not in their textbooks and assemble it on poster board. It comes home from school with "great job" penciled on the back and goes in the recycling bin. At work, I field e-mail requests from middle- and high-school students assigned to interview experts on female portrayals in film, women in American politics, and so on. I have come up with an equation for this time of year: incomplete textbooks + inadequate teacher training = poster board + interview requests.

As aging baby boomers retire from the classroom, there should be plenty of newly trained teachers coming up to replace them. By 2014, the country's 95,000 public schools will need to hire as many as a million teachers and principals. More than half will be trained at education colleges. But will they be prepared for the classroom? Probably not, shortchanging another generation of the high-quality education they deserve. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has sounded the alarm that more must be done to prepare future teachers, especially those sent to failing urban school systems such as those in Philadelphia and Camden.

Hundreds of new teachers who are taking on the challenge of instructing Philadelphia's students this year were asked a pointed question at the opening of the orientation yesterday. "What kind of teacher will you be?" asked Elois Brooks, a consultant for the district's Empowerment Schools. She posed that question to about 800 teachers who gathered at Edison High School, 151 Luzerne St., at the start of the two-day program for new teachers. Among them was actor Tony Danza, who will start teaching at Northeast High School next month for a reality-TV show tentatively airing next spring on the cable channel A&E. Brooks spoke on behalf of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who was absent because her father, the Rev. Bennie Randle, 85, died Sunday in St. Louis.

If the Philadelphia School District gets its way, a new teacher contract would include longer days, drastically different work rules in a third of all schools, and the end of job assignments based on seniority. The district and its largest union, the 16,000-member Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, are engaged in lengthy daily negotiations to reach a new contract agreement. The current pact expires at the end of the month. In a letter sent to its members and obtained by The Inquirer, the union warned its members of a list of proposals the district has put on the table.

Three South Philadelphia High School teachers say they are being pressured to pass all students, even those who can't multiply three-digit numbers or who have 100 or more absences. The pressure, both implicit and explicit, they say, has come from principal Alice Heller and other administrators in teacher-training sessions, meetings, and an April 27 memo asking them to give students makeup work and credit for fulfilling promises such as showing up on time and wearing a required school uniform.

GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. chief executive officer J.P. Garnier is known for unusual outspokenness as a global CEO. Now, he appears to be putting money where his mouth is. Last week, Garnier, who lives part of the time in Philadelphia, where the London-based drug giant has a U.S. headquarters, let loose during a Wharton health-care conference on the deficiencies of the U.S. education system. "In this country, you can take a college class in video games. It's appalling," Garnier told a roomful of aspiring corporate executives.

The state Department of Education, looking for help in rescuing the floundering Chester Upland School District, is looking to the Philadelphia School District. At a postelection news conference yesterday, Gov. Rendell said that the state was talking with Philadelphia officials about taking over the "educational programming" in Chester Upland. Education Department spokeswoman Sheila Ballen said yesterday that the state would like to see the Philadelphia district bring in everything from curriculum changes to teacher training and help with management tasks like making sure there are enough teachers, books and supplies.

Now that the Philadelphia School Reform Commission has extended Paul Vallas' contract, the city schools chief is focusing on the next three years. Buoyed by last week's decision to keep him here until at least July 2009, Vallas has to figure out how to keep test scores rising, boost high school graduation rates and reduce school violence. "I really feel energized - even more so than usual," quipped Vallas, 53, whose nearly manic approach to upgrading the city's schools has become well known since his arrival in July 2002.