I've been saying it for years

I hate to pull an Ambrose Bennett, but I've been saying this for years: School principals in the CNMI have too much power. Let me preface this by saying school principals are wildly underpaid here -- far more than teachers. Principal here is an awful job that barely pays more than teachers. These people don't get the summer break and they also get most of the abuse. Wild horses couldn't get me to take that job. I told my friend Betty Miller not to do it, but she forged ahead. My own administration is very fair and reasonable at SSHS, and they are about the only tandem to be in place for six years, which is one of the reasons that my school runs well. The administrative turnover at most schools is enormous. One of the reasons Hopwood is such a horror is the musical chairs taking place at the head of that place over the last few years.

People have been complaining about this woman in Tinian forever. Factoring in that it's Tinian, which let's face it, is a hard place to live and to recruit people to, makes the situation even stranger. I'm surprised this situation goes on.

Some of the people that become principals or vice principals in PSS are absolute dolts who shouldn't be running a children's mango stand on the side of the road -- and they're the ones empowered with hiring and firing responsiblity with little oversight. It's ridiculous, and it has been ridiculous for years. Of course, it wasn't until a pissing match occurred between a principal and a board member that this became an issue.

THE Board of Education will revisit the existing policy on the hiring and
firing discretion of school principals. During a special BOE meeting, Rota board
member Denise Tanya King questioned the existing procedures and policy of the
Public School System regarding the “authority” given to school principals.
“If the only person who will evaluate the teacher is her/his principal, I think
the system is giving our principals a tremendous power,” King told the board. It was earlier disclosed that 31 teachers have either resigned from their posts or their contracts were not renewed.

Twenty four new blogs out there

I finally thought my students were ready for it, so there are now twenty four new blogs out there by some of my students at Saipan Southern High School. Some of these young men and women have put together some very appealing blogs. Some are still a work very much in progress. At least half of these students do not speak English as their first language. Here is one of the blogs, and there are links to many others on that site. These are 14-year-olds finding their voice and finding out their voices matter. Feel free to leave them a comment, make suggestions, encourage them, even argue with them a bit to make them think.

Many of my students began the year thinking "Baby Ruth" was the first African-American in major league baseball, the governor determined the price of gas and World War II occurred in 1860 or 1960. Many expressed these thoughts in giant uni-paragraph essays with his and he's mixed up and subjects and verbs that agreed less often than Bruce Bateman and Lil Hammerhead. Those problems haven't been completely eradicated, but progress has been made. These students are also putting together a powerpoint presentation for the first public speaking engagement of their lives, and they will conclude the year by creating a podcast.

While I was on paternity leave I gave these students a giant research project. I asked them a series of questions, fifty to be exact, from all branches of world awareness. I had them find out for themselves everything from how to make chicken soup and better tasting coffee to details on the Kyoto Protocol to awareness of what mutual funds and equity derivatives are and what they can do, to the reasons for tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. I'm hoping they learned they can find things out on their own, and more importantly, I hope it lights a spark that ignites a raging intellectual curiosity. There are now many things they know something about that I didn't know at all until I was twice their age.

I have many faults as a teacher. I'm fairly impatient, I'm not as warm and fuzzy as I probably should be, I get frustrated and I'm from an area of the world where people talk quickly, so I have to remind myself to slow it down. I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing, but I don't talk to them like they are little kids or be any less honest and forthright with them than I am with anyone else. I think they appreciate that aspect, and the humor, which tempers the fact that I'm a demanding and sometimes tough SOB. I also brood about the state of education overall on this island too often, but in reviewing recently the progress these kids have made in these last ten months, I feel good about it today. A teacher needs those days.

More PSS woes

Here are the LAST four graphs of the PSS story in today's Variety:

The school system’s FY 2006 budget was cut by $2 million which the
administration promised to restore. “We can’t add personnel, we can’t even
replace some positions, and this may affect the regular opening of schools in
August,” Borja said.PSS has a current budget of $37.2 million of which $35
million is available for personnel following the across-the-board budget cuts
caused by the government’s declining revenue collections.“That’s already a
shortfall of over $2 million,” Borja said. “With the present number of personnel
actions that we have processed, we will have a shortfall in pay period 18 or
sometime in June.”

The schools need help, MV 13

By Jeffrey C. Turbitt

At the beginning of the school year, results are released detailing the performance of schools, principals, teachers and students via the SAT 10 scores. The infamous No Child Left Behind Act, and school rivalries, puts everyone under a lot of pressure to achieve higher scores. Apparently deficiencies in scores on this test are a result of "bad proctoring" by the teachers if comments from the associate commissioner and a tirade from my own vice principal at a recent, testy staff meeting are to be believed.

I've proctored these tests for four years, and there are many problems with education in these islands and these tests in particular. Proctoring is the least of the problems. First, the test is exceedingly long. It's a three day plus affair. It doesn't affect the students' grade or their ability to graduate. They know that.

Regular student attendance is always an issue in the best of times. I found it astonishing to see this quote in the paper from the associate commissioner. “Across all schools, we have a good attendance rate. Among the high schools, two recorded a 98 and 95 percent rate." There is that old saying about lies, damned lies and statistics. Here is the reality I've seen for five years now: Students disappear for weeks at a time in the high school for vague and I'm sure usually not very good reasons. To achieve that rate, these habitually absent students must be removed from the rosters to achieve that inflated attendance number. The students tend to come back later as if nothing happened with little or no explanation. One of the better reasons for absence, a death in the family, can mean twenty days of student absences. That's not something that can be easily overcome, and with large island families, there can be quite a few deaths in the family. The never ending war on betel nut on campuses leads to suspensions, as do other violations of school rules.

The SAT 10 tests are on grade level and the material more rigorous than students are used to, so they can be overwhelmed. Very few students take the even more difficult, and even more important SAT college admissions test, either. PSS classes, especially in the high school for the non-honors students, are not taught on grade level because so few students are actually on grade level. In four years I saw a staggering number of seniors, the near finished product, write essays lacking capital letters, punctuation, subject/verb agreement or using multiple paragraphs. That isn't something that can be glossed over, so I had to incorporate this largely grade two or three materials into grade twelve, which is not the type of thing that helps to prepare for SAT 10, but it does help in being educated on a basic level.

The SAT 10 test is also late in the school year when motivation decreases anyway. Beyond that, the SAT 10 test and the Standards Based Testing come within weeks of each other, and it leads to test fatigue. I’ve made this point to PSS leadership before. Some students simply just fill in answers at random or draw a picture of Bob Marley. I personally give stern admonitions on this issue. I've seen the scores for students who I knew were near grade level, yet their tests indicate they were six or seven grades behind, which makes for an inaccurate assessment. When I confronted the students, they admitted not taking it seriously, so I would agree student motivation on the test is an issue, but I don’t think teachers downplayed the test, as the scores reflect on the teachers. I once saw a student close the book within minutes. I reiterated to him the seriousness of the test. He went at it a few more minutes and quickly gave up and told me he just had no idea. I later had this student in class, got to know him, and understood why the test so overwhelmed him. He was about six grade levels behind.

There are two main victims to the fact that these islands have given short shrift to education since time immemorial. The student well behind grade level who can't get the academic intensive care he or she needs in classes of thirty plus, and the non-honors student at or slightly above grade level who gets a curriculum that isn't challenging enough and becomes bored.

There are real consequences to the fact that each year more and more students enter public schools that are less and less funded. Platitudes like "bear with us" or "be creative" are what get uttered to say something in this situation. I prefer those to verbal abuse -- especially since education is a partnership between teachers, parents, students and community leaders, but all the blame gets dumped on teachers. As a parent of two and soon to be three, I hold myself as the one primarily responsible for the education and development of my boys, not their teachers.

This news report also noted that elementary schools have better participation in the tests. This is hardly surprising. Parental involvement is much higher at the elementary school level. Kids tend to succumb to more negative influences as they get older. It doesn't help that the middle schools are wildly overcrowded, and Hopwood in particular is in a shocking state of disrepair. There is a large administrative and teacher turnover all around related to all kinds of reasons as the islands' economy continues to implode. My personal opinion is that many of our elementary schools are on par with decent schools in the states. Things fall apart at the middle school level, and the first two years of high school are more like middle school. Educational research shows this isn’t just a CNMI problem, either. Research shows there are problems at the middle schools as a whole, as this is the place where learning slows down. Staffing research also shows that teachers tend to prefer to work in elementary schools or high schools, and not middle schools. The New York Times had a large feature on this issue recently.

I have a child in San Vicente Elementary School, and I've always been happy with that school, and I've heard good things about other elementary schools. However, my sons would never go to public middle school on this island, and that isn't a knock on the good people who work at those schools, but a comment on the area that I believe is most harmed by the CNMI's longstanding unwillingness to fund its schools. The impact of poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms and demoralized staff doing their best with students at a precocious and vulnerable age is most evident in our middle schools, and the situation there and system wide needs attention, not excuses.

Jeffrey C. Turbitt is the language arts department chairman at Saipan Southern High School, as well as an avid scuba diver and traveler. He offers more thoughts in his blog “Hypercritical Thoughts” at: www.turbittj.blogspot.com/ He welcomes feedback, tips and story ideas at turbittj@yahoo.com. His column appears regularly on Wednesdays.

The Seven Year Itch

When I got the news of a third child on the way, my thoughts turned immediately to paying for three kids. My undergraduate degree is in newspaper journalism, and I left that field behind a long while ago. Lately I've thought that is where I should be, but journalism shares the same problem as teaching: low pay. I never planned or envisioned a life with soon to be three kids, but that is what happened since I came here. As a single man, a teacher's salary was fine enough, but no more.

I've been reading the salary guides for various locations in the states, and the salaries offered for veterans with graduate degrees and experience are scandalously low -- less than here in many cases. And for all our complaining, Saipan is a very cheap place to live with the exception of power. Saipan teacher wages are poor for the long term veteran, but for someone with a few years in and a graduate degree, they are very competitive, and the rents and taxes here are very minimal. Of course, the government here is so unstable, a person can never be sure where the game of financial musical chairs ends. Most people just blow off all the bad news and threats, and I admit, it is easier to live that way, but how many threats do you have to take before you lose the ability to complain when the threat gets carried out. I mean when the Retirement System breaks down completely, and the hospital can't help anyone anymore, can you really say the warning signs weren't there.

Teachers, like soldiers, get a warm and fuzzy public relations, usually, for doing a difficult job with meager pay, though most teachers, at least in the suburbs, don't run the same risk of violence as soldiers, so the soldiers' job is much harder. I don't believe that teachers should take a vow of poverty, and if that is what is expected, I would envision America's education system to continue its long, slow decline.

I have a friend who is my former journalism professor and he is extremely bummed out at the decline in intellectual activity at the university level. Schooling has continually moved in the direction of being grade based. The pursuit of knowledge, even among the better students, seems to be lacking for the singular focus on a grade. School is a grade, and to pass, ideally with a good grade, the mantra. It feels like the day to day classroom activity is viewed as an annoying speed bump to "the grade." I would get feedback from students, and my style doesn't fit everyone equally well as no one's does, that would say things like "the things I learned here blew my mind, but I just don't like school," or "thanks, but nothing can make me read." One famous comment was, "this class was terrible because you made us read and stuff."

The statistics on the number of teachers who quit within the first five years show an enormous movement out of the profession. I'm in year five here, seven overall, and I'm starting to understand why those statistics are what they are. It's a staggeringly difficult job to do well, and the pay just isn't there.

Get back to basics already

I suppose this is another post that might get me in trouble, but oh well, I'm honest and I'm calling it like it is, and I don't give a damn who it upsets. I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that this school system as it exists now is an abysmal failure. I'm not exempting myself from this criticism. Yes we're worlds better than other mini Pacific Islands in the region, if we look at them as the competition and I don't, but we're still not even in the vicinity of up to par in a globally competitive way. I dealt with the finished product, seniors, for four years, so I know exactly what students look like leaving the system, and it isn't pretty. I tried to fill in all the gaping holes as best I could while I was there with seniors. Now I'm with freshmen and trying to establish good habits, which is harder and much more exhausting, as there is so much more immaturity.

What is clear to me is that teachers system wide simply do not emphasize the basics enough. I would say a full half of the seniors could not write two sentences clearly differentiating plurals and possessives. I mean given instructions, and examples, and days of instruction, a student could not write two sentences such as "There are ten cats outside my house" followed by "The cat's tail is long and white" consistently if asked to do so. Forget about the wrinkle of plural possessive, that blows the situation up even worse. I suspect they were doing it the wrong way for so long it became ingrained. I wonder if the teachers in the past were correcting these things or providing any focus on basic grammar.

The English departments are decidedly from the mainland, and I believe many think they are still teaching there, as these teachers focus on traditional English areas like Shakespeare and various other pieces of classical literature. This to me is absurd given what I just described. I know for a fact many seniors can't grasp the local newspapers properly, let alone Hamlet. I talked to a long term veteran English teacher in New Jersey, one of my own teachers back in the day, and he related that grammar is hardly emphasized in the high schools there, even though instruction is needed. I've seen academic studies that diminish the importance of grammar, even though in the real world nothing screams I'm uneducated more than a lousy show of grammar. Many readers can probably recall that one board of education tried to make slang, aka Ebonics, its own language and therefore acceptable. I've got a higher degree in education, and if there is any discipline full of more absurd liberal bullshit than education, I haven't heard of it. This will be an entire post in the not so distant future. That's where things like Ebonics is a language come from.

If I had a nickel for every "his my friend" I've seen in a paper, I'd be buying Google tonight. Tense, subject/verb agreement and other mildly confusing subtle word differences like your/you're, its/it's are a train wreck. I've been working on these issues since school started this year, and a considerable number of students still can't do it consistently. Perhaps I suck as a teacher, I don't know anymore, but I'm growing weary and demoralized by this state of affairs -- already. The parents need to get involved. I've never really seen any involved, at least among the students that most need help. They seem to think that parental involvement is strictly an elementary school function. It isn't.

I told this plural/possessive story to an elementary school teacher, and she was incredulous -- probably because her fourth graders could do these tasks. I tested it on my own fourth grader and he sailed through it without any preparation. Somewhere along the line, students here lose the skill. My guess is middle school, which is wildly overcrowded and has had high turnover in teachers and administrators, not to mention an incredibly dilapidated facility full of students in the throes of puberty.

With seniors, I routinely received sentences without punctuation or capital letters -- far too many times I simply received giant uni-paragraph essays. I emphasize the correct fashion pointing out the most common problems almost daily, but it doesn't seem to matter much. I look over 120 of these displays a day, and it wears me down saying the same thing 50 times a day. Of all the classes, language arts needs a class size reduction, but it is the largest class across the board -- exactly the worst thing possible. PSS' solution a few years back was to dramatically increase instruction time in language arts, a full year 80 minutes as opposed to the required 50 or so, but that situation just taxes these understaffed departments more. A better solution would be a smaller class size going half a year and getting more individualized attention.

Grammar is hardly the only problem. World awareness is even worse. I've had students tell me that Toronto was a city in the country of "Europe," and that "Baby Ruth" was the first African-American in Major League Baseball. Students think the governor is in charge of every last detail of a civilization including the price of gas, and many can't give a ballpark time period for World War II. Others said Saipan was 60 miles long for closer to home cluelessness.

Teachers have a near impossible task here, I know this all too well, but I can say for sure they aren't ensuring mastery of the basics. It has to stop. A student at the very least upon graduation should be able to read and understand literature as simple as the Saipan Tribune and write in at least a reasonably grammatical fashion. They aren't right now, and it has to stop. Teachers need to focus on the basics first and parents need to help us.

The Tokyo subway and a CNMI classroom

The education commissioner takes a lot of heat. I don't know enough about how he does things to offer my thoughts on him personally, I'm not a principal, but he has always been cordial with me and open to my thoughts. I think he's doing his best and what he thinks is right. It's public record that two of the board members don't like him and didn't vote for him to be in that position. The Variety editorial page has been harsh with him -- too harsh in my opinion -- and repeatedly. He has instituted some policies that not all principals like -- so I've been told. He is also in an impossibly difficult situation with the state of the island's economy, and more so, the island's cultural aversion to accountability. The implementation of Praxis could have been handled better, but ultimately, don't you want your teachers to pass a basic skills test like doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants and other professionals? Doreen Tudela admitted stealing thousands of dollars as a school principal and hasn't been fired yet. That is what I mean by accountability.

Right now some fairly radical plans are being implemented by the PSS administration. Principals will be teaching classes. There are 86 fewer teachers than there were two years ago. That is a staggering reduction, especially since there are more students as many have transferred from the private schools. Coordinators and specialists are teaching classes as well. Naturally, I suspect principals and coordinators will be getting the best students in the best classes with the least disciplinary problems. Principals are overworked and essentially exploited here, this isn't a knock on them. However, it is wrong to push veteran, entrenched teachers aside and out of their classes to make room for this plan, as I know and suspect is and will be happening. A coordinator is being brought in to teach AP History and AP Government at my school. I know him, I like him, he's a good man. I'm sure he is a good teacher, but he shouldn't be taking all the AP classes. After four years with seniors, I'm being forced to teach freshman -- something I find appalling. A new teacher was brought in to teach my seniors. This lack of respect for seniority is vulgar. If conditions allowed, like if I found out about this last year, I'd quit -- or at least transfer. Another veteran teacher at my school is being pushed out of his chemistry class for a newcomer. These things send a terrible message. They destroy already low morale and they are simply unfair.

A news story indicates the student/teacher ratio is 24:1. That number is no doubt technically accurate. It is also misleading. The typical CNMI classroom is more crowded than the Tokyo subway at rush hour during an Ichiro Suzuki autograph session. I doubt most of us have as few as 24 in our class. I had 32, 32 and 27 last year in language arts classes. It has been like that most every year. That 24:1 ratio is skewed by special education, which has a very low ratio, and perhaps things like computer classes. In addition, some schools, like GTC, are significantly less crowded, while some schools are significantly more crowded-- notably the middle schools. My experiences as a teacher and parent with a child in the schools tell me that the massive overcrowding in the middle schools at a difficult age causes immense problems. There are inequities between schools. My colleague Angie Wheat wrote about this issue in the new teacher's blog at http://www.actnowcnmi.blogspot.com/.

Education isn't valued here at all. I routinely see parents try to stop their kids from going to college, which boggles the mind. Parents and students all over seem more concerned with "passing" than learning, which is why college degrees -- even graduate degrees -- have been demeaned and diminished. In fact all education is grade focused, not learning focused. People will find out eventually if you're competent. Your diploma won't convince them otherwise.

The economy is in shambles with our flawed model, so none of this is surprising. In today's world in a first world economy, being educated isn't a luxury, it is a necessity for any type of quality of life. There simply is no excuse for cramming your children like sardines into dilapidated facilities, while we have an obscene abundance of elected officials with too much discretionary money, other wasteful bureaucracies that don't need to exist like the municipal councils, and a ridiculous public relations firm and lobbyist being paid thousands of dollars for things we could do ourselves or shouldn't be trying to do at all. We are all to blame for this depressing mess. We are failing our children as a community and we should be embarrassed about that.

Back in my day

I guess this is one of those posts where I know I am getting old. I graduated high school in 1990 -- amazing enough to me as I remember the last day of school and graduation like it was yesterday. That was a distinct thought I had chaperoning the prom last week. I enjoy high school graduation, unlike most teachers, even though graduation is hot and long -- and coming up in two weeks. I think graduation is a great day in the students' lives and I enjoy their excitement.

I went to a middle class high school in New Jersey, a fairly wealthy state. The place where I grew up, a town called Sayreville, famous only for being Bon Jovi's boyhood home, did have, and as far as I know still has, a long history of not supporting the school system. In Asia they know Bon Jovi, but I gently nudge them toward Bruce Springsteen, much less known in Asia by the way.

In Sayreville, all the old people would vote against the school budget, as this was a Sayreville tradition, and their kids weren't in school and voting against school funding got them out of the house. In New Jersey voters must approve the school budget, and they all came from the Bruce Bateman School of Economics. Calling them out on it was the first public imbroglio I was involved in, and it started my general antipathy for the AARP. I was only seventeen at the time, which really irritated the blue haired voters. Little did I know that almost twenty years later I'd still be agitating for greater school funding against an equally intransigent force over here -- though obstinate for different reasons. It is a never ending fight Bonnie.

I actually ended up running for the school board as a high school senior and would have signed my own diploma if I had won. I got trounced largely because I was honest, attacking the old people for screwing the young kids, and that is why I decided to become a journalist, not a politician. Later I found out how silly a lot of journalism was and I was in the wilderness for a while.

This is from the Star Ledger archive 4-26-90, impossible to link directly to, and naturally called "School Budgets Fare Poorly in Middlesex County Vote."

"Sayreville had a somewhat unusual election this year, with two incumbents
knocked out of office and a teen-age candidate, who lost. Jeffrey Turbitt,
an 18-year-old senior at Sayreville War Memorial High School, did not pull
an upset but vowed he will return to the election ring in the future. 'In
four years I shall return,' Turbitt said. 'Definitely, I shall return.'
Turbitt said.

I wasn't MacArthur, I lied about returning as it "turns" out. None of this is my main point yet. In elementary school we would go on a class trip every year -- the Zoo, the Science Center in Philadelphia, a few Revolutionary War locales, NJ was key in that fight, the United Nations and one of the many New York museums. From seventh grade on, we didn't go anywhere. Zippo. Nothing.

Today, kids get to go all over the place -- even in a broke, won't fund education place like this. Now, a lot of the funding isn't public money, in fact probably most all of it is from fundraising. The funding comes from selling junk food that makes this place so diabetes stricken. This isn't unique to the CNMI. Fund raising via junk food was a staple then and now. Kids on island have gone to Cape Canaveral (Mt. Carmel I believe), Space Camp (SIS). Students here have gone to Guam and Korea on multiple occasions. The entire class from a Japanese high school visits here each year. The mock trial team makes it to various spots in the mainland. NHS has gone to Hawaii, Disneyworld and other locations. My son is going to the Wax Museum and World Resort tomorrow on a school trip. I don't begrudge them this at all, and I'm a firm supporter and believer in field trips. These kinds of activities rank high on Dale's Cone of Experience, a tool that ranks instructional methods. I'm just saying, back in my day we didn't get this kind of stuff.

God, I'm getting old already.