Measure 60

for those of you voters out there, i dont know where you get your information regarding measures in the upcoming elections, but today i was browsing the portland mercury and ran across measure 60. it was for a merit based pay scale for teachers, and the mercury staff said that this would reward the best and brightest teachers or some such shit. well, i wondered to myself if this was really the case. so i asked a real life teacher (for those of you who dont know, that would be my sister, and for all of our differences, i know her work ethic, and i know her abilities and her passion for teaching, let me tell you she gives this job her all, she works late hours, puts her own money into buying supplies, books for her kids to read (yes a parentheses to a parentheses, you should see her classrooms fucking library, every kind of effing book a kid could hope for), but most of all she challenges herself by working at a school with a relatively poor socio-economic area, my sister is THE SHIT when it comes to her job), and she is adamantly opposed to this measure for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is she states that you never know how well prepared her children are going to be year in and year out, they may or may not have supportive families, they may have a lot of issues at home which does not help them to succeed in the classroom, and at poorer schools there are less teachers and so classroom sizes are larger, not to mention many times they will have disabled children thrown into these classes, kids with aspergers or autism who are going to, by their very prescence, require more time and energy from the teacher, not to mention kids who do not speak english at home very much and are still struggling to learn the language, especially when it comes to reading, essentially this takes time away from the individual time my sister has to spend on the children in her class, whereas schools in better areas, say alameda, where more students have supportive parents, where the parents essentially have the ability to "buy more teachers" (my sis's words, i think they do this through fundraisers and whatnot), and thereby have more teachers and smaller class sizes, and where the majority of the students come from english speaking homes, and had parents who had the money to send their children to pre-school to give them familiarity with things we take for granted like the alphabet, numbers, and other early learning tools that many kids in poorer socio-economic areas do not receive, essentially leaving it so that the teachers at these schools will have a much easier time getting the kids in their classes to get better scores on standardized tests (which is what merit based pay will be based upon). This is not a correct way to measure a teachers capability, nor their desire, abilities, value, or skills. My sister teaches at the school she does because she enjoys the challenge of it, im sure she could go to another school, hell she lives right down the street from alameda (and about 20-30 minutes away from her own school, maybe more) but she doesnt want to, she knows that kids at her school are going to need teachers like her in order to help them do better than they would be able to if they didnt have teachers like her, if they just had teachers who were there because they want to collect a paycheck.

basically if you read this blog and are voting in the upcoming election, please, please, please, heed my words and fucking vote NO on Measure 60, no one affiliated with the world of teaching in oregon supports this bill (ie the teachers union), so dont fuck over amazing teachers like my sister, who are amazing at what they do, enjoy the challenge of teaching students who really need their help, and who shouldnt get paid based off of whatever some bullshit test says they should, not to mention the bill is sponsored by bill sizemore, who got sued by the teacher association and lost money to them which is why he wrote this piece of crap in the first place.... asshole

oh and vote for obama