Nevada Teachers are Big-Time Screwed

With somebody who is completely hostile to public education as state superintendent of instruction, teachers in Nevada had better have a Plan B about what they are going to do after they are fired from WCSD and other Nevada districts when Guthrie, Martinez, and the rest decide you are too expensive to keep. Remember, this is all about saving money on salaries and pensions; these people couldn't care less about quality teachers. Given the low quality of the principals and those principals' lack of accountability for their own actions, teachers over 50 or who make over 50k a year are doomed.

The person who is in charge of the teacher incentive fund grant is a failed principal who should have been fired back in 2008 for her negligence and incompetence. Instead, she still gets to make six figures and pads her pension at my expense.

This guy hates teachers' guts:

Q: Is an evaluation system, based on test results, needed in Nevada?

A: It is badly needed. There are approximately 23,000 teachers in Nevada. I’m going to guess 2,000 or 2,500 are very good. I don’t know the exact number. Some number is quite ineffective. I don’t know how many or who they are. In any rational system, we would take our most effective teachers and put them where we need them the most.

But right now, we don’t know who they are.

So this will enable us to put our resources where they’re most needed. We will let the teachers know where their deficiencies are. Mrs. Jones can’t teach fractions, this will show it, and we can help her teach fractions.

In time, and not soon, it will enable us to create a career ladder for our teachers so you can remain a classroom teacher and be paid a good salary and take care of your family. And a good salary for an effective teacher should be just as much as the principal in the school.

I want to stop the perverse dysfunctional incentive system that says to earn a good living, you have to be an administrator.

I don’t want to hurt administrators, but I want to help effective classroom teachers stay in the classroom.

So let's see: 90 percent of teachers are shitty, so let's get rid of them. Let's make it easier for principals to treat them further like shit than they already are.

What a corrupt asshole. Merit pay plans do not work anywhere they have been tried.

Teachers in Nevada Are So Screwed

now with a George W. Bush crony as superintendent of public instruction in the Silver State. He wrote a piece for the LVRJ, which I am not going to excerpt for obvious reasons although Righthaven is pretty much history. He rattled off a series of lies about teachers and public education. This is a man who hasn't taught in public schools for many years but was put into a position as some kind of right-wing wonk.

A person has a series of posts following the piece refuting every single lie Guthrie peddles. Strangely, the poster himself thinks Democrats are the problem. Talk about disconnect.

There is no "verified" support for Guthrie's crap, just repeats of privatizer rhetoric.

Here is Guthrie's background. Note his advanced degrees which helped him in his career but he belittles for public school teachers:

Previously, he was the first appointed senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the George W. Bush Institute, a component of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, located on the Southern Methodist University campus (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, with a concurrent appointment as professor of education policy and leadership, in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU.

Dr. Guthrie formerly was the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. From 1999 through 2009, he served as chair of Peabody College’s Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, the nation’s highest ranked university educational administration department. He instructed both undergraduate and graduate courses, and conducted research on education policy and finance.

He is founder and chairman of the board of Management Analysis & Planning, Inc. (MAP), a private sector management consulting firm specializing in public finance, organizational studies, and litigation support, located in Davis, California. He is the founder and president of Class Act Partners (CAP), a corporation specializing in the printed and electronic provision of research based materials for education professionals.

Previously a public school science teacher and, then a professor and Graduate School of Education Dean at the University of California, Berkeley for 27 years, Dr. Guthrie holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Stanford University, and undertook postdoctoral study in public finance at Harvard. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford Brookes College, Oxford, England, and the Irving R. Melbo Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California.

Lots more:

link


By the way, this piece doesn't even mention Guthrie. He just says it was a wash that while UNR hired a local administrator, Sup of the Year Morrison decided to bail.