Monday, April 8, 2013
School board agrees on a number of measures to re-evaluate teacher workday, but associations say teachers "need relief now."
Fairfax County School Board members agreed Monday on four initiatives to address the system's years-long teacher workload issue, including the creation of a committee charged with returning to the board with recommendations on reducing teacher time demands by the end of the month. But the board did not agree on specific actions to relieve teachers in the short term, as teachers associations and some school board members had hoped. More analysis and discussions, they said, are "not enough" — and continuing for much longer without concrete action will begin to impact student achievement, if it hasn't already, they said. "I'm not happy. ... This has been the No.1 issue in my tenure," Michael Hairston said of his time as president of the …
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
At noon Friday, Patch readers can join a discussion with Fairfax County teachers' association leaders and school officials to discuss what some teachers have called an unsustainable work environment.
Some Fairfax County teachers say they've seen workloads increase for a few years now — but this is the first year it's becoming what they are calling "unsustainable." And they say they want a solution sooner rather than later. Join Patch at noon Friday to talk with the leaders of two of Fairfax County's teachers' associations, along with a school board member and an assistant superintendent about some of the issues surrounding teacher workload, including state and local testing, grading and evaluation systems and new curriculum initiatives. Readers can make comments or ask questions and get live responses throughout the course of the chat. To join: Bookmark this page and return at noon Friday, or sign up for an email reminder above. At a…
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
In town hall meeting with school board members Monday, teachers ask for solutions to workload and morale issues that, after half a decade, are as "worse as they've ever been."
Dan Hale has been a teacher in Fairfax County Public Schools for 20 years, but he’s never felt or seen his colleagues as overwhelmed as they are today. He used to know his students as readers and as writers, he says; now he only knows them as bits of data or ECART scores; pacing points and percentages. And after spending far more than eight hours at school, he leaves (with work in tow) thinking ‘What am I doing tomorrow?’ — planning time in the context of the school day, he says, is nearly nonexistent. The story was one of many shared by a few hundred teachers Monday night at a town hall sponsored by one of the county’s largest teachers unions, an effort to better connect school board members with teachers and workload issues that have …
Nein Juan Juan
12:21 pm on Thursday, April 11, 2013
The middle east is a big place. While there may be a few countries in the middle east with a better education system, I doubt most could make that claim. Although, the U.S. has nothing to brag about our education system. The problem is we throw money at the problem and add layers of bureaucracy instead of worrying about the basics, teaching the students. more ›