Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

The Cozy Dog.

• Home of the corn dog on a stick.

800 teachers, bus drivers and education support para-professionals are in Springfield today and tomorrow for the IEA Winter Advocacy Conference. Steve and I went to two workshops this afternoon.

One was on understanding the Consumer Price Index. Yes. I know. It was even more exciting than it sounds. And the other was about school budgets and finances. Yes. I know. It was even more exciting than it sounds.

We needed a break.

It so happens that Springfield is the home of the original corn dog on a stick. The corn dog itself was invented somewhere else by somebody else. But in 1942 the owner of the Cozy Dog on Route 66 in Springfield, Illinois saw the original corn dog being made, dipped in corn batter and fried in a pan, and figured it would go faster if you put a stick in the dog, dipped it in corn batter and deep fried it.

I happen to believe there are four things that count in what to consider as good food. One: Wrapped in dough. Two: On a stick. Three: deep fried. Four: Pig.

Which makes the corn dog go three for four. Unless it is a pork smoky link and then it is a four bagger.

So Steve and I went off to the south side of Springfield looking for the Cozy Dog. Found it. And two corn dogs and some onion rings later we were ready to return to school finances.

• More school blocking the internet stories.

Yesterday, a teacher I know was teaching some social studies. One of her students asked, “What were the first colonies to become states?”

“Well, that should be easy to find out. Let’s look it up on the internet,” she said.

Blocked. Arghhh!

David Warlick on his 2 cents blog says:

…the United States runs what is probably the most repressive education system on the planet, especially when compared with the access to information that learners have outside the classroom. “Students in China have e-mail,” he said. “Do your students?”

And Dangerously Irrelevant comments on the internet book burning of Wikipedia:

If the district is going to take a principled stand against Wikipedia because some information is biased or incorrect, is it also taking out all of the encyclopedias (which research has shown, on average, to be as inaccurate as Wikipedia)?

• Reg Weaver calls “pay for performance” “pay for test scores.”

“Merit pay,” “pay for performance,” “pay for test scores” – no matter what you call it, it has never proven to be an effective method of improving student achievement or the quality of teaching.

These schemes, as proposed by politicians at the national level, are simply ways to further control the teaching and learning process. Washington is a long way removed from the nation’s 14,000 school districts. Its involvement in how teachers are paid should be as well.

NEA’s position has been clear for decades. Teacher salaries and student learning conditions are best worked out between the educators in a local school district and the local school board.

What serves America best is to provide great public schools for every child, regardless of race or zip code. That requires increasing the size of the resource pie, rather than dividing up the same resources differently.

Pay for performance schemes reward only a few and, in many cases, exclude others from participation. In most cases, pay for performance plans are not based on an educator’s knowledge and practice but on the artificial system of student test scores. No matter what it’s called, performance pay plans have never worked, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.