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Ideas of KHSD
Topics: KHSD, mettler, Schools
Posted by dlollar67 Mon Jun 29, 2009 22:14:54 PDT
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      Recently, Kern High School District Trustee Ken Mettler shared rather curious ideas to assuage the current high school budget crisis. By suggesting teachers take a 5% pay cut, Mr. Mettler seems to be utilizing a negotiating strategy on his own accord and without the approval of the rest of the board.  The strategy works like this: if he threatens a 5% pay cut now, then teachers will be happy with no pay cut, instead of with the adjustments they’re negotiating.

     Before addressing Mr. Mettler’s ideas directly, my first suggestion to the budget crisis is to eliminate the health care benefits for the board members.  The board members have full time professional careers wherein they receive their health care benefits.  The benefits paid for by the KHSD are unnecessary and would save the district a bundle.  Now, on to the topic at hand.

     Mr. Mettler’s first suggestion is to reduce teacher pay by 5% to save junior varsity athletics.  Mr. Mettler seems to equate saving JV athletics to saving education.  Not surprisingly, some coaches and parents decry the loss of JV athletics, claiming it’s the only reason their kids go to school.  While that same argument has been legitimately made for students in every other extra-curricular or co-curricular program, it would appear that the message Mr. Mettler is sending, or its underlying subtext, is that JV sports means more to students, parents and taxpayers than does classroom education.

I would like to offer an alternative idea before the July 2, 8:30AM Board of Education meeting occurs, where this topic will be further discussed.

I suggest eliminating all athletics programs. They aren’t necessary for raising API scores, passing the CAHSEE, developing “college readiness,” or developing critical thinking skills in an English, Math, or Science class (that’s the part of school that matters—the “school” part). I’ve read the research proving that participation in the Performing Arts improves tests scores, cognitive abilities, and success in the workplace; I haven’t found similar data for sports.  And isn’t the job of a school to have, well, you know, school?  Cutting the financial incentive of the professional educator in order to preserve JV athletics is potentially detrimental to the classroom experience (again, the “school” part of school).  Imagine instructors, struggling to pay their bills, watching sophomores and juniors interrupting their classes by leaving early so they can run off to a JV game at the direct expense of that instructor.

Second, Mr. Mettler suggests cutting teacher pay by 5% to save summer school. Summer school is a credit recovery program, offering students who have failed core classes (required for graduation) another opportunity to pass them.  However, these students have ample opportunity to pass their classes during the regular school year.  Our high schools have a bewildering number of programs to intervene and remediate and ensure student success during the school year. Presently, schools are going so far as to offer online classes to at-risk students who previously would have been expelled.  In other words, students really have to try hard to fail.  With the federal NCLB mandate, the pressure on teachers to improve graduation rates, and the instructors’ willingness to help each student with the philosophy that “failure is not an option,” it almost seems to take more effort to fail than to pass a class these days.

Understanding that some students prefer summer school (for example, to get the PE requirement out of the way so they can take Drama during the regular year) and with apologies to them, I nonetheless believe that we should eliminate summer school completely.  Without summer school as an option, fewer students would choose to fail and grades in general would rise. If high school is a microcosm of the adult word, then eliminating the lack of consequences for a student’s actions might redefine school as a place of academic rigor instead of a free teenage daycare system for the few students who prefer to make up their classes in the summer.

I believe Mr. Mettler’s tactic in bringing this up may be a ploy to affect contract negotiations (something with which no other board member appears to agree).  And yet, I also know Mr. Mettler should begin with understanding or defining the school’s purpose.  Shouldn’t the message to parents be “your kids will be succeeding in the classroom, working rigorously on academics, training for the university or workplace, and all of this will occur under the supervision of a highly qualified, credentialed, highly trained, and highly degreed educator, because that’s what school is for”?  In the classroom, the student is the one who is learning to think, speak, read, and write as an independent adult under the tutelage of a highly credentialed, degreed, and trained professional.  At the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters, or at least all that’s required of a school?

If the board says the tens of millions we thought were in reserves aren’t really there and President Obama’s federal stimulus package of even more tens of millions of dollars doesn’t really exist, then I can acknowledge that we all should share the responsibility getting through this very difficult time. It would be hard, but I understand that all of us—executives, directors, and everyone across the board (no pun intended)—need to take one for the team.  But for Mr. Mettler (on his own and without the support of his fellow board members) to say that professional classroom instructors should be devalued to save a JV sport—well, that is a suggestion which sends a very disconcerting message to the community, and should give us all pause as to how it will directly and destructively affect the social, economic, and political future of us all.

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Comment From: jnealhicks

Well written. I agree that we should revisit the purpose of education, and that it should be more to produce students who demonstrate successful completion of work that is meaningful for them and for their communities, and less to produce students who 'know,' as measured by standardized tests. What students learn during sports and 'extra'-curricular activies are far more useful than what they memorize in math and science--the "school" part of school. Sports and other performing courses shoud be curricular, not extra-curricular. The idea of 'knowledge transfer' on which mainstream education is unquestioningly based, does not, and never has worked. What has worked, for centuries, is apprenticeship--the most effective form of education. Apprenticeship works because students do the tasks, not just prepare to do them, and later rely on the myth of transferability of skill. So let change the curriculum along this dimension--more vocational education, more sports, more applied versions of math and science. Read more at forumbakersfield.com