Let’s call this proposal “Operation: Negative Zebra.”

Operation: Negative Zebra

Phase 1 – Merit pay by commission

In this phase, teachers earn their pay by commission based on the income of adults who were once the teachers’ students. A teacher gets a percentage of each former-student’s income. The percentage a former-student pays into this “teacher tax” depends on the former-student’s income. The “teacher tax” is only levied against a former-student for his or her teachers from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Former-students who dropout pay the same amount of tax per school-year missed.

When this phase becomes tax law, each teacher is paid according to the incomes of the last five years’ worth of graduates who have entered the workforce who had the teacher for any grade between kindergarten and twelfth grade. Each of those 5 years of students is replaced as a new class graduates, and after the tenth year – once the classes granted retroactively to each teacher have been fully replaced by recent graduates – the teacher continues to earn against the first five replacement years and all subsequent tears of graduating former-students until the teacher’s death. This grandfathers out recently graduated former-students and former-students from past generations, it encourages teachers to stay in the classroom longer to earn more and more over time, and it obviates any need for state teacher retirement systems. This should also allow local politicians to dramatically lower property taxes and to claim credit for doing so.

School divisions stop paying salaries and benefits and instead use finance departments and student-information services to partner with the IRS in ensuring proper collection and disbursement of the “teacher tax.”

Former-students in the middle class should pay on a sliding scale commensurate with their income in such a way that that 13% of their income ever goes into the “teacher tax.” Upper-class former-students should pay back 26% annually. Thus, contributions to former teachers should be itemized to pay back 1% or 2% by school year and contributions to each year should be split amongst all the former-teachers-of-record for any given former-student during that year.

Teachers should not pay any tax on this income. Each school should be a coöperative of like-minded teachers who pay a subscription fee to use the school’s spaces and to support its upkeep, and teachers should purchase the materials they want to use. Local communities might vote to sustain school technology and materials budgets to attract teachers by providing some share of equipment. Schools should implement policies that attract popular teachers who help students find sustainable fiscal life-outcomes.

Former students living below the poverty line or in low-income bands of the economy should not have to pay back into a system that did not help secure them a more financially sound future.

Because schools would become teacher-led cooperatives, the most successful schools will the ones that best partner with parents, students, and communities to provide the best services according to local needs and to attract the most students to bankroll its teachers work and pay.

Phase 2 – Student futures trading

After the successful implementation of phase 1, Operation: Negative Zebra becomes a kind of educational stock-market. Teachers can apply to become brokers for their schools and offer to trade their school’s “dropout credits” – the units of flat tax paid by an individual who chooses to drop out of school – to other schools in return for “student futures” – a combination of the academic record and physical presence of a struggling student. The school trading away its “dropout credits” for “student futures” would be gambling that it could better educate and therefore gain better employment for the struggling students it adopts than could those students’ home schools.

This would let struggling schools try to adopt more struggling students, motivate those schools to improve (except in the most cynical sacs), and motivate those schools to positively impact students’ future earnings and therefore stay open longer than the schools would if they suffered constant attrition by dropout. As a struggling school’s dropout rate decreased, theoretically, its income would increase, slowly lessening the need for it to depend on the trade of “dropout credits” for “student futures.”

This might also encourage the creation of specialty schools funded additionally through corporate partnerships with companies willing to employ brokerage-schools’ graduates leaving those schools with specialized skills.

Frankly, phase 2 instinctively horrifies me in ways that phase 1 does not, but I wanted to share both ideas because I think the war over teacher pay has already been lost. The institution of schooling is not a new economy; therefore, I don’t expect it to be able to innovate enough to find alternative revenues streams to pay teachers “professional” salaries, let alone the kinds of pay earned by the brokers, bankers, and executives who use tax-payers’ businesses and savings and investments, as well as federal bail-outs and secret loans, like slush-funds. I think salaries will be capped by economic crises and the policies politicians sell voters during such times. I think teacher labor unions are fighting a rear-guard action against political expediency and the unwelcome realization that their product – teacher job security – is not popular outside the profession. When the storm is over, the beach will be gone.

If we want schools funded and teachers protected and sustained like the executives and institutions that somehow thrive under our collective derision, it’s worth asking ourselves how information-age, new-economy, and debt-trading we want to get as a profession. As much as phase 2 frightens me, I think that as a system we’re pretty close to it already. Does a community fighting (or embracing) corporate take-over of its schools or corporate charter school co-location see any difference between what we have now and phase 2?

Can any of us discern the negative zebra from its positive ilk? For example, how many of us know the extent of grade- and scoring-inflation across the country? In our home schools? How do K12 results stack up against post-secondary expectations? How do K12 participants’ skills stack up against those same expectations? Do we all understand how test companies validate their standardized tests into normative measures question-by-question? That a certain number of students must fail each item and test for it to be of market value? Are we convinced our public education sector isn’t headed for its own scandal and collapse?

It’s not tenable to keep going as we’ve gone; it’s not moral to follow in the footsteps of financial robber-barons. It will take money, influence, and a huge number of free alternative schools to shift public education, students, parents, and communities into embracing more democratic, inquiry-driven education.

What compromises are we going to make as educators? Are we going to deliver scripts meekly for less money? Focus aggressively on the tests for more? Develop new models of free teaching and learning that somehow generate sponsorship or optional subscription-based income? With whom will we partner?

I am a proponent of local change in the classroom. That means I believe that individual teachers can change what they do in public school classrooms to subvert the autocratic, punitive school culture of standardization and testing and to replace it with a compelling, inquiry-, community-, and democratically-driven education. That means I also believe we’re going to need to find new ways to fund this work so we can continue it unabated once we get to that crisis point at which the public school system – to preserve itself – cannot stand the presence of non-conformists in its midst.

Public school will punch progressives’ tickets before it gets its own ticket punched. It’s time to figure out how we can save up in order to strike out in new directions. This is going to be part of our work, or we are going to be locked out from it.

I’m hitting the wall separating what I saw and what I see. I need to pull an Inception and start dreaming the wall and walking on it instead of familiar ground.

I’m looping with our school’s inaugural class for the third straight year. I feel a desperate need to get it right. I feel a desperate need to decide what right is.

I’m reading tweets like this one and wondering about the fate of school choice in Virginia. I wish the law was flexible enough to let us spend Read 180 money (see page 6) on literacy coaches and arts teachers. I feel like we’ve given Toby to the Goblin King.

I’m reading posts like this one and wondering how to teach for the jobs that don’t exist from one that won’t exist. I’m imagining a lighter, mobile teaching force licensed to coffee shops and finding it still inadequate to the preservation of democracy and the widespread diffusion of community- and project-based learning and living for our kids.

I’m trying to figure out how to stop being such an outsider without going back inside.

More encouragingly, here’s what’s working:

• Kids who can count on one hand the number of books they’ve read should be finished reading and/or listening to The House of the Scorpion by Halloween after scripting conversations with their imaginary clones, drafting and debating clones’ rights bills, and drawing some conclusions about word choice on the way.
• By the end of October we also should have raised the money to start a class Kiva fund entirely through students’ self-directed service work in civics.
• And around that very same time we ought to have a gallery of portraits of citizen-artists including pieces about video game makers who have contributed to Child’s Play. I never would have learned about that charity without students’ inquiry into what makes an artist and how video game makers help their communities.

Given room to run, teaching and learning can always chase each other into the real world. We can all get better at getting out of the way.

Let me know if the materials scaffolding any of that learning would be useful to you.

Anyways, thanks for listening and for being polite.

Thank you for this opportunity to give input on the budget. My name is Chad Sansing. I teach at the Community Public Charter School.

We know as an audience, school system, and community what we have asked of you.

We know that as things stand, there is not enough revenue to truly move students’ learning forward into a world fundamentally different from the one in which we went to school.

We know that these are unprecedented times and that we share a common financial burden. I see it at school every day.

What I’d like for you to do with the rest of our time together is to put taxes aside and to put the idea of schools aside and just ask yourself what it is you want for the children in your lives.

Then I’d like to know what you expect from us with the revenue you plan to give schools.

I’d like to know if what you want for kids and what you’re willing to fund are one and the same.

I’d like to know that if they are not the same, that you’ve done everything you can to take extraordinary action on our students’ behalf during extraordinary times. I’d like to know that if we can’t fully fund the schools, it’s because we’ve exhausted our resources, and not our will.

What you can do, do.

What you want for our children, tell us.

What you expect, fund.

If any of the rhetoric is useful, rip, mix, & burn it into the conscience of your local funding agency.

089/365 Money...What Money by stuartpilbrow

Many school systems, mine included, face unprecedented budget challenges this year. I imagine that in addition to implementing or continuing pay freezes, many divisions also have to consider eliminating teacher leadership stipends. I worry that we’re going to lose great teacher leaders. Why take on more work without more compensation? With looming increases in class size and corresponding cuts in staffing and materials, including IT, teachers will have to do more with less next year regardless of their leadership roles. Is it fair to ask teachers to lead others while they have to negotiate their own responses to rapid change in working conditions?

Certainly a bevy of teachers lead now and will continue to lead with or without a stipend or title like “department chair.” Leaders may also take the loss of stipends as an opportunity to pass along their mantles and duties to a new leader and to coach their successors less formally.

I’m not at all cynical about educators’ desire to do right and to help one another help children.

I’m concerned that teacher leadership will become less attractive to teachers and that uncompensated leadership will become the status quo during the economic downturn.

How could teacher leadership and compensation for it be saved systematically without unfair expectations put on classroom teachers? What do you think? What kinds of compensation remain available to divisions and teacher leaders apart from stipends and IT?

Lately, I’m thinking a lot about grants. I think I can take a much more active role in securing the materials and technology I see my students using in the future. I’ve posted about how I might better resource my class. So far, I’ve pursued two grant opportunities – one for e-readers and another for the tools necessary for student app development and learning space design.

What if we used grants to help replace stipends? What if lead teacher positions rotated fairly and part of the lead teacher’s duty was grant-writing?

Imagine a lead teacher earning more time during the school day to pursue grants that benefit both the department and the lead teacher. Imagine a lead teacher drawing 3-5 more students a piece from concurrent classes in the same content area so the department reaches more children in a shorter amount of time.  Imagine a class size of 30-32 instead of 26-28.  Imagine the lead teacher earning an extra class period, half-block, or duty-period off for the pursuit of grants. Imagine 5% of the curriculum development line-item in each grant budget going to the lead teacher for the R&D necessary for the grant proposal.  This isn’t a new idea – awarding commissions to grant writers – but it could be systematized in a new way for teacher leadership.

Could that lead teacher recoup the cost of a lost stipend? Maybe. Could that lead teacher continue to model scholarship and innovation in best practices? Absolutely.

What do you think, teachers? Would you agree to greatly increased class size one or two periods a day to earn grant-writing time that could underwrite your stipend?

Another thought: what if a lead teacher or department social media maven could earn time to tweet and blog about the great work going on within the department? What if the division’s legal team created a framework for advertising professional texts or professional development on the blog with most of the revenue from clicks going to the department while 5-10% of the revenue went to the lead teacher/department blogger in place of a stipend?

poker chips by .pixel .

You know that song, “The Gambler?” I love that song. I loved listening to it in between G’n'R and Alice in Chains before high school football games. I love it when Kenny Rogers sings it. I love it when Mike Doughty sings it. Please comment below and tell me who else sings it. I can’t get enough of it.

I cleaned out my car today and found a CD with “The Gambler” on it. I made my kids listen to it. I sang it as if I was a cast member on Glee (Sue Sylvester?! Come on!  Destination: Re-take!). Then my teacher brain – which is like a live tweeter perched on my limbic system – took over and it was all like, “You know, you are, in fact, out of aces. Schools have to count their money at the table before state and federal dealing are done. You’ve got to know when -”

At which point I said, “Shut up!” (you know, in my mind) and kept singing to my son, who was getting into it, and to my daughter, who just wanted to know, “What time is it?!”

The song ended. We went inside the house. I kept my teacher-brain at bay imagining “The Gambler” on Glee. Until about now. Teacher-brain, if you will…

The temperatures in Central Virginia clawed above 40 degrees Fahrenheit this week melting much of the snow cover left over from the Blizzard of ‘09. I know we’re not exactly roughing it (I was a Yankee in a former life), but the warmth and sunlight are a welcome break from the flash frozen air of the past few weeks.

Whenever the sun comes out to stay this time of year I think about summer. Specifically, I think about summer school. Now is the time to pour through mid year data to begin identifying kids who could use another shot at this year’s curriculum. Now is the time to think about who could use a safe-harbor this summer. Now is the time to think about what I’d do if I had the first semester over again.

It’s also budget season – a lean one that calls for new ideas of how to take up the daunting challenge of fostering more learning with fewer resources. Education changes slowly, which makes abrupt cuts in revenue – like those facing school systems in the near future – especially hard to handle. For many divisions, it’s time to change education without the funds necessary to maintain the status quo. It’s hard to entertain sacrificing anything that could help a child. With these difficulties in mind, I’d like to suggest that we act now to save summer school and use it as a lab for ed reform.

Outside of high school credit recovery courses, elementary and middle school summer programs are just the right length and can accommodate just the right number of teacher and students to test out new structures, schedules, partnerships and pedagogy without impacting the bottom line of credit hours on a student’s progress towards his or her diploma.  By using summer school strategically as an innovation incubator, any division could create for itself a lab school.

Summer school is a great opportunity for aspiring reformers and teacher leaders to gain practical experience with remediation, extension, curriculum design, instruction, assessment, data-analysis and administration. Summer schools are microcosms of their host schools. Principals, in my experience, are eager to find directors who bring something new to the table, something that pulls students in need out of the academic dead-time of summer, something that hooks them on a compelling project and keeps them coming back day after day for as long as possible, keeping them as engaged and safe as possible. While polarized policy-makers line up to defend and decry charters, summer school gives us all an opportunity to innovate ideas about teaching and learning that can be site tested by pre- and post-assessments, attendance and discipline records, and feedback from teacher and student participants alike.

Take some time this budget season to think about your summer school pitch. If you had a shot to change something about your school, what would you aim for – scheduling? Leveling? Tracking? Entrepreneurship? Project-based learning? Service-learning? Technology infusion? How would you structure a day in your program? How would you structure a week? How would you assess student progress after a month or 6-weeks or a marking period? What would your school look like if you could remake it into what you think would work for your neediest students?

I keep having these STEM day dreams about upper elementary and middle school students transforming their schools’ walls into art.  Students work in a classroom with a teacher from their school and an artist from their community. First the kids form teams and use a digifab lab – or pencils and paper – to make scale models of their work surface. Then they propose mural designs and reach consensus as a group about which elements to incorporate in a final class design.  The class design then goes to review by a committee of teachers, administrators, parents, and community members who will see it daily.  The committee gives the kids feedback for revision and approves a final design.  When the final design is set, older students from the local career and technical education center visit school and help the kids recreate their small mural model as a 1/4- or 1/8-scale brick wall on a wooden cart. The older students teach the younger students some basic masonry skills, advertise their program, and get good press for mentoring the younger kids. Next the summer school kids scale up their design and paint it on both sides of their 1/4- or 1/8-scale wall using a different brand of paint on each side. For the next few weeks, the kids move the carts inside and outside and run experiments simulating different weather effects on each side of the wall and observe how the different brands of paint hold up to the elements. The kids evaluate which paint is best for the job and spend the last few weeks of summer school scaling-up and painting the mural on the school with help from their local artist who serves as a project-manager- and/or advisor-in-residence. Throughout the experience, the kids read daily from customized RSS feeds and blog about virtual field trips to murals around the world.

What’s your dream job? What are you doing in your Walter Mitty classroom? Could you try it out during summer school? Could you propose and direct a program? Collaborate on a proposal? Bring together a staff and leader other than yourself to follow? Could you draw in community partners? High-school mentors?

Giving up your summer is a sacrifice, but for a chance to find what works, in the seasons of sacrifice to come, it might be the most strategic sacrifice we can make. Think about your pitch; capture your vision; pass it on or run with it. Hold on to summer school; fight for it and present a vision of innovation that brings new value to what can be a flat remedial experience. With the economy folding and tax revenue running, don’t walk away from a chance to change school for the better if only for a few weeks. Every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, but the best that we can hope for is better than breaking even – we can hope that summer school helps us break out of education’s staid past into its uncertain and exciting future.

If you have an idea about ed reform, challenge yourself to test it this summer.

Thanks, teacher-brain! I’ll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, I gotta go on a Muppets, Glee, and “Gambler” YouTube binge.

Spell with flickr: Free?

After reading Pam Moran (@pammoran) and Chad Ratliff’s (@chadratliff’s) coauthored posts about this year’s budget cycle, I’m asking myself, What’s my part? How do I shelter my vision of teaching and learning in the classroom?

First, let me say that money isn’t everything; however, it helps distribute the future more evenly. Best practices in teaching and learning carry over between communications tools, and classroom discussion is a very social medium. Issues of instruction and management certainly persist across platforms. Despite obstacles to learning, gifted storytellers and community builders can help any classroom transcend its brick and mortar, pencil and paper boundaries through meaning-making and imagination. When money is lost, learning shouldn’t be.

I know that whatever successes I’ve had in the classroom have been inspired, strengthened, and synthesized by learning from others. Outside experts, colleagues connected by social media, and students publishing work the world over enrich my practice and offer me novel solutions to local dilemmas. While my colleagues and students teach me all the time, we can learn to look at our shared local problems from new perspectives and ask new questions about them by interacting with caring, inquisitive peers in other places and cultures. Partnerships like these also help make real for all learners the lessons in curiosity, community, and empathy we want to draw from class content.

That’s why I want to maintain 1:1 Internet access in my classroom in support of 1:1 learning. I want students to use social networking to find academic identities they won’t risk exploring in class. I want expert audiences to teach us how to learn better and better share our learning. I want my students to see that learning is life-long and universal.  I want my students to show others the same.  I don’t want financial constraints keeping the possibilities of learning with and from others around the world in check.

While it might not be possible for me to engineer a self-sustaining classroom, I’m thinking a lot this week about what I can do  to support my vision of what next year’s classroom should be and how it should engage students and support their learning.

At the extremely convoluted end, I wonder about incorporating as a non-profit for the explicit purpose of furnishing technology for students in my classroom. At a previous school, I served on a PTO board that incorporated as a non-profit in order to make itself more attractive to perspective donors. Would parents and community partners donate money managed for a single classroom to make sure that its learners have 1:1 access to the Internet? Maybe not, but the benefit of finding a dependable patron in this economy could repay the cost of incorporating, especially if a lawyer could be found to prepare the application and by-laws pro-bono. Would it be helpful (or even possible) to have a board offering accountability and regular feedback to me as a teacher? I like to think so. I think any time spent listening to the wants and needs of diverse stake-holders creates opportunities for learning unavailable to the isolated teacher. I’m interested in the potential of this possibility, but I wonder if it’s at all manageable. It might be better to serve on my PTO and encourage it to incorporate and better crowd-source the fund-raising. It might be better to incorporate a coalition of teachers with a shared vision across schools or divisions. There’s further reflection and learning to be done here.

Regardless of my (perhaps non-starter) non-profit status, it’s clearly time to pitch projects on DonorsChoose.org. For my state, donations supporting technology requests (24%) place third after those for classroom supplies (40%) and books (29%). In 2009 DonorsChoose.org raised over $250,000 for school projects here in Virginia. Twenty-four percent of $250,000 is $60,000 dollars. So, for example, with 5% of that pie ($3,000), I could get 15 iPods Touch at $199 a piece, download some apps, and .pdf-up some DIY flexbook goodness.  I might not outfit my entire classroom at once using this approach, but I can see a group of generous patrons helping us build up capacity over time to provide a class of 25 or 30 with 1:1 Net access.

Likewise, it’s time to get better at grant writing and prepare several this summer.

I’m thinking about school-business partnerships, as well. While it’s doubtful that an Apple or a Microsoft would negotiate special pricing or donations with a single classroom teacher, I think local businesses might be willing to pitch in and lend a hand or furnish a device, especially in return for good press from the division’s communications office, or in return for some kind of expo night for company personnel, board members, and local media to demonstrate how local businesses support local children. Maybe a local software developer would build a phone or web app from student design specs and then sell it online, but donate it to our class.

Finally, I’m thinking about monetizing student work, not-for-profit, to support programs that support students’ learning. I imagine an Etsy-esque online school boutique advertising student work and suggesting donations that support students’ schools. This idea seems workable – we have band fundraisers already, right? – and certainly commerce can lend an authenticity to students’ notions of audience and feedback. However, it’s important to strike a balance here between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, between service and consumerism, and between cooperation and competition. I wouldn’t want students rushing learning to create a product. I wouldn’t want students to lose sight of serving their school with their work. I wouldn’t want students to compete with one another over sales. I wouldn’t want to let “work” ever overshadow learning or ever be something a student felt pressured to do. I think all of these concerns can be addressed while building a classroom culture of learning, creativity, entrepreneurship, service, and choice, but it’s incredibly important to mind student and stake-holder notions of how commodifying student work supports learning.

The bottom line is that I want to help the bottom line.  I don’t just want to keep learning moving forward; I want to keep students’ learning moving out into the world.

Any free advice?