community
By Dr. William Coale According to a recent study
conducted by Dr. Jonah Rock- off from the Columbia School of Business, “Somewhat sur- prisingly, shorter (teacher) absences have far more det- rimental effects on a per-day basis than longer absences. Ten single-day
absences
spread out over a year will be significantly worse for student achievement than a single two- week medical leave.” Clearly, something needs to be done to address this issue.
One possible solution is to
provide incentives for teachers to be at work every day. Seems logical, but actually off-target, given the fact that the result might simply be sick teachers in the classroom, which isn’t good for anybody. Believe me, teachers do not want to be out of their classrooms. A larger problem than illness exists: attending mandatory meetings and trainings (no matter how necessary) takes teachers out of the classroom far too often. This also creates a tremendous amount of additional work for teachers in terms of prepar- ing bulletproof lesson plans for substitutes who are not always “ready for prime time.” Worse yet, the educational impact upon students must be given great consideration, especially during these tough times when many schools are shortening the school year in order to save precious dollars. So what is to be done?
With nearly 100,000 teach-
ers in the state of Michigan, for example, the benefits from shifting money previously spent on substitute teachers toward increasing instruction- al days could be enormous, and the educational gains just as significant, by changing the way we do business. Instead of paying a substitute teacher for each day spent monitoring students while the classroom teacher is in a professional development (PD) activity, the money could go to the class- room teacher as a stipend. In return, the teacher would basi- cally agree to work those days at the substitute rate.
Perhaps the best plan of all
would be an agreement where the teachers kept 50% and al- lowed the district to save 50% to go toward increasing the number of instructional days to make the district more globally competitive. Again, in Michigan, the plan could cap- ture as much as $75,000,000 and add 10 days back into the school calendar, as well as bringing schools back to a minimum of 180 instructional days.
During the 10 new PD days,
teachers would be learning im- portant skills and gaining pro- fessional knowledge to help them improve their compe- tency, while avoiding leaving a classroom full of students with a substitute teacher. As it currently stands, our nation is far down the ranks inter- nationally in terms of length of the instructional year, as well as in the academic per- formance of our students. We
‘Green’ LED street-light products
Hella, a major automotive
lighting and electronics sup- plier, is introducing a new line of energy-efficient LED street and area-lighting products de- signed to replace conventional lighting on streets, parking lots and commercial property throughout North America. Based on more than 20 years of LED development and man- ufacturing experience, Hella has developed a unique “ret- rofit” module to replace con- ventional lamps on existing installations, as well as high- power LED modules for new installations.
The company’s new Eco
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Lietaert said the company
is launching its new LED prod- uct line this month with an installation program in Flora, Illinois.
A leader in converting mu-
nicipal and industrial lighting systems in Europe, Hella re- cently completed Germany’s largest municipal LED re- placement project, helping the City of Lippstadt cut energy consumption for lighting by 70 percent. A similar conver- sion project at EADS (Euro- pean Aeronautic and Defense Space Company), the largest industrial program of its kind in Germany, reduced that company’s energy costs by 68 percent.
For more information, visit
www.hella.com. Dr. William Coale
THE MICHIGAN CHRONICLE
August 4-10, 2010
Page C-3 Teacher professional development needs overhaul
need to do something, and our options are limited.
So how do we make it
happen? First of all, the legis- lature would need to mandate 180 days of instruction plus 10 PD days, one per month, built into each ISD’s/RESA’s common calendar (ideally, dif- ferent days for each ISD/RESA, to increase capacity for deliv- ery of superb PD).
For districts currently at
less then 180 days of instruc- tion, teachers would receive 50% of the substitute rate for each PD day, and the district
could put their share toward increasing the number of in- structional days. For districts currently at 180 instructional days, the teachers would re- ceive the entire substitute salary per day as a professional development stipend (adding as much as $1000 to their annual salary as a result).
A feature that would allow
this legislative mandate (avoid- ing unfunded-mandate statute issues) is that there are no added costs. One could argue that the overall costs would actually be decreased, given the efficiencies in providing
professional development on a larger scale, as well as elimi- nating the workload of con- tinually arranging for substi- tute teachers for PD activities throughout the school year. PD could be done cooperative- ly if each Intermediate School District (ISD) had an assigned day each month.
This would also provide
ISDs/RESAs with the opportu- nity to provide a rich variety of targeted and robust PD activi- ties that would be truly mean- ingful to all teachers in atten- dance; much in contrast to the way PD is often delivered
at present. ISDs could also shoulder some or all of the PD costs to help relieve this financial burden from local districts. My only hope is that these ideas will generate some productive conversations, and, ultimately, increased student achievement.
Dr. William L. Coale, PhD.
is a retired Michigan teacher, school board member and su- perintendent who now serves as an educational consultant and licensed renewal coach. He can be reached at wm-
coale@CoaleGroup.com.
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