Your link is bad - try http://www.publiccharters.org/

This is just another example of the teachers' union putting their own needs over those of students. One day they will finally figure out that it is about the students, not about them.

We are getting closer to that day now, thanks goodness.

This is the first time I have left a comment at this site, but I felt that I had to because of this issue. I feel that the Teacher's Union should be in support of a school that is successful. Students desire to learn and go to college. College is a mandatory and not an option. If the teachers and students want longer hours to work and play, so be it. Saturday schools and longer school hours keep kids out of trouble while they are begining educated. These kids are our future, not the teacher's union. We need educated future leader.
The teachers union is hindering the education and growth of our kids by being interested in teacher's salaries and not the positive outcomes that KIPP has created. Things like this discourages parents, teachers, and students. The teacher's union should allow students to strive to be the BEST they can be and not be so concerned about teacher's salary since the teachers their are content. If any teacher is not then they should leave and find another job. "If it's not broke don't fix it" The KIPP should is working, LEAVE THEM ALONE.

Oh please. KIPP takes the most motivated students with the most motivated parents and then pretends like they are more successful because of their "model." I'm willing to bet that if they stick to Union contract (and thus allow for their teachers to stick around for more than 1or 2 years), they would be just as successful.

I would like to know what some of you do for a living. As a teacher, it is the most frustrating thing that people expect you to live to standards that they could not meet. When you work overtime, you get paid 150% for each hour you work. Most teachers only have a seven hour workday and work five days a week. These teachers work 9 hours (which is longer than you probably work) as well as two Saturdays a month. If your boss asked you to work and extra two hours everyday as well as two extra days a month, would you think an 18% increase is enough? Teachers are underpaid as it is. Why shouldn't teachers want more money, especially when they are putting in much more work.
Technically, a teacher's schedule is only seven hours but we work more than that. The schedule only includes the time we are actually in class. It doesn't account for the time it takes to plan a lesson, grade papers, contact parents, hold coach class/tutorial, and do the other ridiculous amount of paperwork we are asked to do. The school will not fail just because the kids are not locked away in the school all day. If a child is in school 9 hours a day and on Saturdays, when do they have time to be a child? What extracurricular activities do they get to participate in? Stop asking so much of teachers. We already get blamed when things go wrong that are not in our control. I give a lot to my students. I stay after whenever my students need me to. I go to their basketball games, baseball games, school plays and concerts and whatever else they ask me to attend. If my school also wanted me to work longer hours on top of that, I think I should be paid acordingly.

It no mystery that the Union is does not have the best interest of the students at heart BUT I agree with them on this one. Someone complained and it is their job to investigate and resolve.

And it brings up a question, if the "innovation' developed at a charter school is neither sustainable nor reproducible, is it a viable option?

As a former teacher of the school system I never was a fan of the union. I found that the union stood in the way of getting rid of the individuals who had no right to be teachers. The union has lost the PR Battle against Dr. Alonso and this do nothing board. Until the union and teachers regain the high moral ground they will continue to be painted by the press, the public and the administration as greedy obstructionist. This story highlights this point.

All of this being said to say this. Its a union's job to protect it's membership. The union is to advance the cause of teachers in this case. It is not a student union it is a teacher union. Now being the good people teachers are its union also looks out for the best interests of students in addition and makes sure that it's goals are not contradictory of students needs.

In this case the administration is demanding more of it's workforce albeit for a noble cause but if they demand more the school should then compensate its teachers for the extra work beyond the legally negotiated contract with the school system.

There is a solution. KIPP could become a private school and negotiate it's compensation package with each individual teacher. Until then they receive funding from the school system and with that funding comes strings one of which is the teacher's contract for better or worse.

While I agree with most of what teacherman says above, we still need to acknowledge the many problems that teachers unions create or fail to address.

Perhaps the biggest and most pressing is their dutiful protection of their members, even those who don't deserve protection. If a teacher achieves tenure, after as little as two years in the classroom, they are almost guaranteed their job for life. It is nearly impossible to remove them. And its not hard to go into any school in the country and find teachers who are not doing half the work that teacherman above discusses.

The unions' work to protect so many bad teachers is harming students and their learning, and ultimately keeping new and perhaps better teachers out of the classroom. But, of course, as soon as those new teachers find jobs, the union will be hounding them to support every last initiative - the same kinds of initiatives that made it so hard to get a job in the first place.

If I remember correctly, teachers have to apply to KIPP. In other words, this is the school of their CHOOSING. Therefore, the instructional staff knows about the extended school day and weekend classes PRIOR to accepting the position. It is not as if someone forced them to work in the school!

Steph is dead wrong. KIPP takes the students most in need--and whose parents have much higher expectations than many of our teachers--and helps them succeed.

KIPP teachers know exactly what they are doing by going there--signing up for a hard job at a high performing model that has been proven in over 60 KIPP schools. Extra hours? Worth the results.

Listening to the inane MSTA ads as I post this, I only hope that others interested in public education reform that works will move beyond the issues that our obstructionist unions keep raising.

To teacherman:

What I do for a living is fight for a true quality public education. For me, unions are irrelevant; they represent only the teachers, not the objective.

I sacrifice in my work for my children so they can get the best education possible. And they get it not from union dominated institutions but from independent schools where the kids come first.

At the same time I fight for quality public education. In my experience this comes from outliers, not the entreched union drones.

Steve Kaiser

Now I will be the first to admit that the BTU is not a great union but what I find funny is that the teachers at KIPP are getting paid for what they do teach and help make the model work but yet I don't hear the public outcry when AAA has recieved a bonus when teachers are not getting a cost of living increase. He said out of his mouth that these are hard economic times and everyone should do their part to help City Schools. As the leader of City Schools he should set the example.

Steve:

I'm glad you "fight for quality public education." Good for you.

So do I. I just don't think you have to be a martyr to do it.

Thanks, Steph. Last I checked I am still living so not yet a martyr. Maybe we can both achieve our goal of helping all kids achieve?

As for Over the Top's comment about "not replicable," I would like to recommend to him and all the recent book, Work Hard Be Nice, by Jay Matthews, which discusses how one lone KIPP school has grown into a chain of 60+. Even here in Baltimore we just launched a KIPP elementary school.

Let's hear it for progress. Even if we can't always hear the President of the US in our classrooms,

Steve

Happy Labor Day weekend! Money grubbing unions. KIPP can only take in so many millions from corporate phlianthrocrats and can only afford to pays its execs multiple 6 figure salaries. Damn teachers! Won't work a 10 hour day for 8 hour pay.

At edwize.org, Leo Casey gets it right:

{/begin blockquote}
take the case of the Baltimore KIPP Ujima Village Academy. Missing from the Wall Street Journal’s account is this little fact: the 33% salary premium for the extra time worked by KIPP Ujima Village teachers was not some sort of unilateral demand of the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, but a rate agreed to by both KIPP and the BTU. KIPP management voluntarily entered into and signed a contract which set the 33% rate and kept the longer school day, week and year that KIPP saw as essential to its educational program. [KIPP schools generally have ten hour school days, six day school weeks and eleven month school years -- considerably more than 33% more time]. When KIPP and the BTU shook hands on the deal and the 33% rate, both sides estimated that an additional $120,000 would cover its costs and that such a sum was well within the school’s means. To put that sum in context, a few months earlier on September 9, 2008, the Baltimore Sun reported [$] that “[U. S.] Senator Benjamin L. Cardin and [U.S.] Representative Elijah E. Cummings presented a high performing charter middle school in Baltimore with a check for $243,677 yesterday. The money, federal funding secured by Cardin for KIPP Ujima Village Academy, will be used to support the school’s extended day, week and year.”

Note that in addition to public funds which come as revenue for its schools and government grants such as that secured by Cardin, KIPP nationwide has taken in more than $17.6 million from the Wal-Mart Walton Family Foundation over the last three years, and close to $120 million from various foundations since 2003. In each year of its existence, KIPP Baltimore has significantly increased its revenues and its end of the year bottom line balance, which is now close to $1 million on the positive side of the ledger. Moreover, KIPP Baltimore plans to open a second charter school in Baltimore in the coming school year. If we may be forgiven a little understatement, KIPP nationwide and KIPP Baltimore in particular are not exactly in the red.

But no sooner was the ink on that contract dry, than KIPP management decided it really shouldn’t have to negotiate such matters, and began a media campaign to that end. The program in the school was deliberately cut, and teachers’ hours cut in the most punitive way. To understand the full impact of what was going on, consider that KIPP Baltimore has a most interesting profile for an educational organization: it reports a total of 14 teachers, but 19 out of the classroom employees. Key KIPP Baltimore leadership figures, such as the Executive Director and the Principal, are very well-compensated with multiple sources of income — Baltimore charter school base pay, KIPP salary on more than one line, and salary as corporate officers of KIPP Baltimore, Inc. Baltimore KIPP financial documents are confusing — perhaps deliberately so — but one thing is clear: while Baltimore KIPP is now saying that it does not have enough money to pay its teachers the 33% premium on the charter school base pay it just negotiated, it has had no difficulty paying the Principal an additional premium at least 45% of her charter school base pay in at least one year with another 30% in at least one year as a corporate officer of Baltimore KIPP. But cuts were made only in teachers’ hours and in teacher positions.

And just to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about what they were doing, KIPP Baltimore administration sent a clear message. When the KIPP teacher who led the union in the Ujima Village school returned from a trip where he met with the KIPP AMP teachers who had just organized their school here in NYC, he was called into a meeting with management and told that his program and classes had been eliminated. His services were no longer needed.

There is an important moral here, just not the one that Moskowitz, the Wall Street Journal, Rotherham, NAPCS and Flypaper would have us draw. The oft-repeated complaint against teacher unions in those circles is that we stand in the way of education reform and innovation. But these battles have nothing to do with education; rather, they are all about money. The question they pose is simply this: are we to embark on a “race to the bottom” which targets the compensation of the most vulnerable of school employees, as this quintet would have it? Or do we insist that a quality public education system requires a foundation of fair compensation for the women and men who dedicate their professional lives to teaching and serving our school children, often at great cost and sacrifice to themselves?

Teacher unions have always been completely forthright that a central part of our mission is fairness and economic justice for the men and women who do the actual work of education. Now it is equally transparent that those who oppose teacher unions are pursuing an agenda of unfettered greed.
{/end blockquote}

@Steve - Read the article - produced 60+ KIPP schools expanding the franchise. My point was that if the lessons learned from KIPP are transferable, pick one of the zoned middle schools like lets say West Baltimore Middle and apply the technique...... can't too costly or better yet why weren't the lesson applied at now closed Pimilico Middle or displaced Roland Patterson they served the same area students.

True test... let's turn KIPP into a zoned school and see how it fares.

@lancer - If you go back to the original article, a couple of teachers did complain so maybe the work conditions were not that clearly established.

KIPP goes out of its way to select the children most challenged. Perhaps the difference is motivated parents, but is that a problem?

Pimlico and other middle schools failed because they weren't focused on student achievement. KIPP is.

The results speak for themselves. Let's get real here, OK?

Steve

Steve:

The message that I'm getting from you is that all of us teachers in zoned schools just aren't trying hard enough, that we don't care enough. Is that what you're saying? I'm just trying to figure out your position here.

I think people(me) get so defensive because KIPP people and TFA people want to scream at the top of their lungs about how great they are and how horrible and wrong everybody else is. That is not helpful, it's insulting.

@Steph -
I don't have any kids at KIPP and if my kids were ever taught by TFA teachers I wouldn't know. OTOH I do have experience/opinions about charter schools. I don't think the idea is that the teachers are better. I think for successful charters there is a shared purpose and vision that every one has or they wouldn't have chosen to be there. Add to that an empowered and motivated administration that is supporting the teachers at the school. IF a charter school is successful (defined by 2 applicants for each slot, or test scores, or involved parents or an inclusive and diverse student body or whatever one thinks measures the success of a school) this doesn't mean the staff or students or parents are better. It means that a shared vision and purposed united a team leading to good results.

That sounds like I'm preaching. I apologize, but I thought a non-teacher might bring a different (and less angry. perhaps) perspective to the conversation. BTW, of the 26 cumulative years of school my 3 kids have had, only 2 have been in a charter setting, so I realize I'm not an expert.

Actually, no. An emphatic no. Good teachers are good teahers; I know because I am married to a former one (now a principal who is dying to go back to the classroom). And a son-in-law of an excellent 1st grade teacher who has been teaching for almost 50 years.

And the son of a teacher; the father of a new teacher.

Yes, I do believe that TFA is a great program. That is because it puts new teachers with high expectations into schools. But I also believe that there are many teachers who already have the same expectations and should also believe in our schools.

I just don't believe that teachers' unions have the best interests of students at heart. Why should they? They represent teachers.

It is those who have been there or are interested in protecting those there who do not have the same expectations. And there are too many in BCPSS.

This should put you and me into alignment I hope. Thanks, and keep up the good fight,

Steve

@ AP

This whole embellishment about the charter school waiting list is just hype. Just about every citywide school has a waiting list and has had one for years.

Mervo, in the mist of You Tube posted hallway fights still had a waiting list,,,, Digital Harbor is still the number one choice of high school , has a long waiting list and had to kick out NAF to grow. Seen all the bad press its students get for "terrorizing" the inner harbor......got figure????

Having lived in the catchment area for KIPP, I know that the existing schools were sold as "bad" school so I would believe that many "parents" were not so much into the philosophy of the school but sending their children to what they believed is a SAFE place.

@OTT -
I guess I wasn't clear - I'm not sure what makes a school successful. I am sure that different people look for different things. I made an incomplete list of what people might consider signs of a successful school:
"defined by 2 applicants for each slot, or test scores, or involved parents or an inclusive and diverse student body or whatever one thinks measures the success of a school"
Waiting lists indicate popularity and/or legacy for established schools like Mervo and hopefulness and/or unhappiness with traditional for new schools (charters, transformation). I don't think that alone makes a school "successful". I could make a long list of what I'm looking for, but since I'm not ranking schools (just trying to figure out what schools my kids should attend in the era of school choice), I don't see the point.

Sorry if my original post wasn't clear.

@ steve

what evidence do you have that KIPP takes the "most difficult" kid?. The teachers that I know that worked in KIPP schools talk of students having to test into the school, behavior problems being sifted out, and special education students being "counseled" to attend zoned schools with more expansive special ed programs.

and yes, i do believe that it is unfair that some children, just because they do not have a parent or guardian able or willing to navigate the admissions process to a KIPP school, are automatically excluded from being able to attend. all students, regardless of their family circumstances deserve good schools with dedicated staff.

and you think it's tough now to attract teachers to the city schools, imagine if the union was gone and we had no one to advocate for salaries/working conditions. no one would choose to work their except for a handful of "martyrs."

@Mike -
If you think it shouldn't matter if a kid has involved parents or not, why does the school system put increasing parental involvement as one of it's top goals? From my experience quite a bit of successful parenting requires savvy navigation of systems starting with prenatal health care. If you want to see unfair, look at what happens to Special Ed students whose parents don't attend and strongly advocate at IEP meetings.

Taking your argument to the logical extreme kids get placed where teachers or the school system think they should be, regardless of parental input. If I saw any evidence of the level of caring and concern and love that I feel for my kids happening at a systemic level for all kids maybe I'd be ok with that approach. I don't see it, so you better believe I'll be navigating the system any way I can. This is for my kids benefit, but in the end I believe benefits the system as a whole.

The union is an extortion racket.

They force you to pay them even if you ask not to be a part of the union.

Whatever salary benefit they negotiate--which this year was zero--they take for themselves through their dues.

The bulk of their budget was spent lobbying for Fair Share legislation, which ensured their own job. In other words, the higher salary went to union dues, which paid to lobby to enforce union due payments.

If the BTU worked for their teachers--or gasp, the students--as hard as they do for their own six-figure salaries things would be better.

I would rather take a lower salary and see the union die.

@ a parent

Talking directly with KIPP personnel and having read the book on KIPP, I can honestly say my evidence is direct. If you have evidence that KIPP students have to test into a school please feel free to present it.

The admissions process? All it requires is a parent willing to be involved in his child's education. How hard is that?

And about the Union? Twenty years ago your question may have had some relevance. Today? I don''t think so. Let's look at the record of BCPSS since the Union has had its influence. Have things improved?

Maybe for teachers, but certainly not for students. Perhaps you should learn more about KIPP before going off against them?

As I am not a regular blog poster but someone who works hard to effect educational reform, I must applaud you for your interest but sign off from this discussion to continue to battle for real change in BCPSS.

Thanks for your insights though, and your interest,

Steve

@Steve -
huh? I think you're confusing me with Over The Top or Mike. I think we're in agreement about charters, although I have no knowledge about KIPP. I've got a kid in a different charter - no admission test, plenty of special needs kids in the school, lots of caring teachers and involved parents. I can't imagine being happier anywhere else.

I'm rushing to a school meeting right now, so don't think this blog is the only way I'm involved in school change.

@ a parent

Sorry. As I said previously I am a neophyte participant here. Please accept my apologies, and my congratulations for being involved.

As for Over the Top Mke, now I understand your moniker. Thanks,

Neophyte Steve

KIPP Ujima Village requires a test for students entering in 6th grade or higher. 5th graders don't have to test. The CEO and his wife, the former principal, receive salaries comparable to other principals in BCPSS. Teachers CHOOSE to come to KIPP with full knowledge of the hours and compensation. As union teachers, the union can fight for what they (the union) think is right/fair without asking the teachers for their opinions just like the bargain for the rest of the teachers in the system.

Yes, they counsel kids out, quite regularly!

Yes, it is a very difficult model when considering sustainability because it is HARD WORK with ridiculously LONG hours. Do the teachers do it? Yes! Why? Because good teachers, charter and school system, do whatever we feel is best for our kids.

poop