Writing in an op-ed piece for The New York Post, current research darling of the Department of Education and university professor William Ouchi, offers this embedded gem:
In New York high schools, the traditional union contract has specified a maximum of 170 students in five classes of 34 students each. So, every semester, teachers must get to know up to 170 adolescents and form a sufficient bond with each one to be able to push them to do their best. Teachers say that’s impossible.
The challenge for principals is to get TSL (that’s “teacher:student load” another example of the way the current crop of corporate educators dehumanize kids and teachers in the search for bigger and better data tidbits) down to 80 or 90 students per teacher without extra funding. Our research shows that when principals control budgets, they work with teachers and staff to do exactly that.
So now we have large TSL and by implication large classes because of “traditional union contracts.” Like Sarah Palin, I’d like to laugh if it weren’t so scary.
2 Comments:
1 jd2718
· Oct 5, 2008 at 8:24 pm
In the past we’ve floated reasons that sounded legalistic, lawyerly, for not negotiating on class size. Maybe we need to move that item forward on our negotiating list for the next contract (the current one expires in just a year).
He got one thing right, 34 is too many, 170 is too many (though I’ve never had more than 167, myself).
I know we attacked this through CfE, and we won, and Bloomberg’s Chancellor misappropriated the funds, so us and the parents and the kids lost, and class size didn’t go down.
So maybe now we need to attack this across the table, no intermediaries, us against them, them against the kids.
Jonathan
2 Peter Goodman
· Oct 6, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Ouchi spoke at the Harvard Club a few weeks ago and I had the opportunity to listen, I responded to him in a blog
http://mets2006.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/ouchi-escher-and-school-governance-the-ceo-versus-the-school-leader-model-how-do-we-create-an-accountable-school-system/
Some of us see ourselves as being in the field of education, others, Klein/Ouchi see themselves in the school management biz … a growing trend across the nation.