More on the Suggested Pay Raise and Candidate Forum

Over the weekend, I told myself that I would take the time to listen to each candidate’s speech at the OSSBA/CCOSA candidate forum, transcribe their remarks, and provide them for you, my loyal readers. Realizing that this would take an inordinate amount of time – and that time is a resource that I don’t have in abundance – I looked for places that I could make cuts in my life, just to provide that little extra. Maybe I don’t need to spend so much time sleeping, working, eating, or tending to family.

I even thought maybe there would be some wisdom for me in old, discredited research about time management – some obscure report championed by a former leader who failed in a brief but controversial tenure as a …

Ok, this allegory is really not worth the effort I’m putting into it. Clearly I’m talking about Barresi’s reckless campaign ploy, suggesting that schools use a one-time resource to provide pay raises to teachers that would not be sustainable after this school year. The second part is a reference to Barresi’s commission that met today to discuss Oklahoma’s teacher shortage. One part of the meeting focused on the Michelle Rhee-founded group, The New Teacher Project, and their report, the Irreplaceables. I won’t get too much into the report, but you can read more from Diane Ravitch, who blistered their findings over a year ago.

I really did sit down for a while yesterday and start transcribing each of the speeches given on Saturday. I made it about halfway through the first one and realized that I was looking at about 14 hours of work. I took an hour to listen to all of them, and you should too. One of these seven people will likely be the State Superintendent of Public Instruction from January 2015 to January 2019. They all deserve to be heard – even the one who began her speech by saying how much she didn’t want to be there.

By the way, here are responses I saw in my Facebook news feed from two of the candidates who spoke Saturday:

Freda Deskin Not a metaphor, but an analogy: Having non-educators, micro-managing our educational system is like hiring a well-trained bus driver to take us safely to our destination of choice. However, this bus is loaded with back-seat drivers with megaphones and they are on the Los Angeles Freeway. These back-seat drivers don’t have a driver’s license and have never driven a bus, but they have sat in a school bus a time or two. The passengers in the bus yell at the driver on their bull-horns to go faster, refuse to let the driver stop for gas or a rest-stop and keep changing the destination. “Go this way, watch out, turn left, no, turn right, stop!, go!” Crash!?? Now, let’s all blame the bus driver for not know how to drive us safely to our destination. See any similarities???

 

Donna Anderson After telling a room full of board members and administrators, who have been weathering cuts since 2008, we need to dig deep into carry overs and cut non instructional costs by 2% to fund teacher raises she ran out the back door of the Cox Center. If I knew that little about school finance, I would run, too. I keep enough carry over to pay the bills from July to January. Bills run about 200,000 to 225,000 and we bring in about 100,000 a month. As you can see, without a carry over we don’t pay the bills. It’s an election year so she is trying to make schools look like the bad guy. Sort of like she blamed schools for the testing problems. Time to reopen her dental office and put an educator back in charge of education. Positive change in 2014 where children come first!

And as always, this is not an endorsement.