Meet Tim Graye--Our Newest Transformation Academy Associate

It was 2008 and I was vaulting through the air in the middle of my back flip at the Nationals.   I realized at that very moment how fortunate I was to be part of a dynasty.  At Hawaii Pacific, we didn't just win cheerleading championships, we revolutionized cheerleading at the college level.

I just joined another team that I believe will revolutionize education.  That team is Last Stand for Children First and they've already been doing some great work.  I know, because I spent two years as a teaching fellow where I taught high school chemistry and was head cheerleading coach in the Chicago Public Schools. 

I look at my role with LS4C as still being a cheerleader.   No matter what we get accused of or the disagreements we might have individually with our organization, it's important that remain overwhelmingly positive.  This is a long hard struggle that we face as education change agents and the only way to excel is to keep a positive attitude.  Who better to do that, then a former college cheerleader.  At nearly 26 years old, I am the second oldest person in our entire office and even though I'm new, I'm sort of the old man around here, but it's important this this reform be led by people of all ages under 35.

In Chicago, I've had the chance to see the greedy face of the teachers union and it saddened me.   Just this year, they turned down a raise of 2% this school year to teach only 29% more hours.   This extra time is necessary.  Chicago already has scandalously short school hours and the city is adding a new core standards test that will have to be administered 4 times this year.  The schools will never have time for the increased testing, yet alone the increased test preparation time until we lengthen the school day.

Give me an E
Give me a D
Give me an R
Give me an E
Give me an F
Give me an O
Give me an R
Give me an M
What does it spell Ed Reform...and it's about time.

Extending School Day is The Answer to All Our Problems

Last Stand for Children First has been involved in the education reform movement in Chicago since last winter when we were asked by Mayor elect Rahm Emanuel and business leaders in the Civic Federation to help with their grassroots efforts to fundamentally change education in the city.  This effort came to fruition with the passage of SB7 and now with Mayor Emanuel's attempts to impose a longer school day.

The teachers are being most uncooperative really.  After having their 4% raise voted down because the schools didn't have enough money, we promised to find a way to give them half their raise if they would only work another 327 1/2 hours.  That's a tidy little $3.08 per hour for a beginning teacher.   When Jimmy Carter signed the law in 1977 to raise the federal minimum wage to $2.90 an hour in 1979 and $3.10 an hour in 1980, I don't think he realized he was insulting teachers with this paltry raise.  Throughout the early 1980s beginning fast food workers and dishwashers lived on $3.10 an hour and were happy to get it.  However, teachers with their fancy degrees somehow think a 2% pay increase for 29% more work is beneath them.

In 1982, my father was working at Burger King making barely over $3.10 an hour, but he didn't complain.  He worked hard and after he graduated from Dartmouth, he became a very successful Hedge Fund Manager.   Surely, teachers can step up their effort just a little as well.

Many babysitters get only $5 or $10 an hour to watch one child.  It doesn't seem unfair to me to ask a teacher to supervise a room full of students.  After all, when you get to 35 or 40 students, they mostly just supervise themselves or at least the bigger students are able to impose their will on the smaller ones.

Even more insulting is that Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis refused to sit on the board to discuss how the extra 90 minutes would be imposed.  Is it too much to ask that she provide a little political cover by making it appear that the teachers were consulted?   After all, in exchange she would be on the panel giving the teachers in the city just much say in how the extra time would be spent as Father Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina’s Church or Robin Steans of Advance Illinois.

The value of a longer school day should be obvious.  Chicago grammar schools have 946 hours instruction in a year.  Houston grammar schools have 1305 hours of instruction per year and New York has 930.  Once our students are given that extra time, they will have 4 years more instruction than students in other big cities like New York and Los Angeles by the time they graduate.  Only then will Chicago students be able to rise to the level of education juggernauts like the Houston Public Schools.

New York Judge's Ruling Throws Fantasy Season Into Disarray

At the Last Stand for Children First offices this afternoon, things were going crazy.  Staffers were on their computers and phones trying to get the latest on a state court ruling in New York that ordered the New York city school draft to release the test data on all it's public school teachers.

This announcement immediately threw our Fantasy School Draft into disarray.  For the last few months we've all been scouting the Los Angeles school district statistics trying to put together our dream faculties for this season.  We always hold the draft on the weekend after Labor Day when classroom rosters have settled in a bit.  After all, one low achiever being transferred into your teacher's class can cost you valuable points.  Our season was very competitive last season and I believe I only lost because two different teachers were saddled with less than perfect students who were counseled out of Green Dot schools.

It’s just as exciting as other fantasy sports and gives you a rooting interest in standardized tests that you don’t normally care about.  The advantage of starting the league now, is the schools are fairly settled and you are less likely to have a student transfer or a surprise pregnancy spoiling your fantasy season.


The rules are rather simple.   You must select a faculty consisting of the following teachers:

• Two for each of the 8 primary grades
• Two substitute teachers taken from any grade
• One ESL teacher
• One Special Ed Teacher
• We are looking forward to President’s Physical Fitness results being online soon so that we can draft gym teachers.
• One Principal 
• One Assistant Principal

The draft can last for 4 or 5 hours before 24 schools in our fantasy school district are filled.  I was let down by my 6th and 3rd grade faculty.   Fortunately, there is no such thing as tenure in Fantasy School and they have been let go.   There are several scoring options, but we go by student improvement.   I have been pouring through newspapers and websites looking for  the teachers who I think will be on the top of their games.   I found out one of my early favorites is pregnant and another one who is from Teach for America is hedging her bets on staying in the classroom for the entire year.  It's always dicey when you select TFAers in their second year.

Because we go by the amount of improvement, taking the best students isn’t enough.  If some teacher out in the wealthy suburbs takes on  a homeroom where 95% of the students are meeting or exceeding standards, they can only get you 5 points and in fact they’ll probably go down.   On the other hand, a teacher at an inner city school who brings up students from 30% meeting standards to 52% meeting standards is going to win you the pot at the end of the year.  I try and look for young teachers who are still worried about their job and more likely to teach to the test.

With New York city teachers included, we now have very little time to scout a whole new group of teachers.  I have a few friends in New York that I hope I can hit up for scouting reports.  

1997 Studey Reveals the Power of Mediocrity in the classroom

As the new school year starts, millions of parents across this country are hoping their child will have an excellent teacher to help guide them through their new classes. However, never research into the data from a 1997 study of Dallas schoolchildren by Last Stand for Children First shows that a mediocre teacher may be better.


The 1997 study "Teacher Effects on Longitudinal Student Achievement" was not only a real page turner, this landmark Dallas study by Jordan, Mendro, and Weerasinghe has been frequently cited in the media by education reformers as evidence that a student who has 2 superior teachers in a row will probably go on to greatness, while a student will two poor teachers in a row, will probably be going through parks with a pointy stick looking for soda cans to sell to recyclers. Michelle Rhee in particular enjoys using this quote to show just how important great teachers are.


In a recent study funded by Last Stand for Children First and conducted at the Ponds Institute of Statistical Research has concluded that in the 1997 study who had 2 excellent teachers and one mediocre teacher in consecutive years showed a median score 8% higher than a student who had 3 excellent teachers in a row. This is groundbreaking research conducted on thousands of children, but little is known as to why mediocrity has such power.


Researchers conjecture that a mediocre teacher gives students a chance to relax, nap and generally catch a breath or possibly that mediocre teachers enhance the ability of students to develop filters to figure out what their teachers are saying that is actually important enough to listen to.


For more information on this landmark study, please see the following blog post, which while written from an anti-reform perspective summarizes the methodology very well and provides a link to the raw data itself.

What the data does show is that elevating the teaching profession and attracting excellent candidates and nurturing them to  become excellent teachers may not be the best strategy in increasing student learning.  Further study is needed to examine the negative impact of further excellent pedagogy on a student who has already had too many excellent teachers.  It also seems clear in layoff decisions, mediocre teachers need to be preserved as a priority, especially in a school that already has an issue with too many excellent ones.

Monica Caldwell Reacts to SOS March Showcasing Worst in Teaching

I had said earlier that I would not be attending the dreadful Save Our Schools March in Washington this past Saturday.  I can see now that I clearly made the right decision.   According to park service officials, approximately 8,000 teachers came to the nation's capital to see among others, Hollywood's number one jerk Matt Damon talk about education.   I find this laughable.  As a Hollywood actor, what does he know about teaching?  He needs to make some movies and leave education policy to the think tanks, philanthropists, politicians, and pundits.

What is probably most shocking is that teachers find Matt Damon to be a fitting role model for today's youth.  I did a little research on Mr. Damon and what I found was shocking.  Apparently, a late night comedian named Jimmy Kimmel was having a committed long term relationship with a comedian named Sarah Silverman (or so he thought).  While this was going on, Matt Damon and Ms. Silverman were actually involved in an elicit relationship.   They actually broke it to Kimmel live on his television show.   This is the kind of influence that's appropriate for kids.  Check out this clip of Mr. Hollywood admitting to the affair and showing absolutely no remorse of his actions.  The end is particularly shocking:



Petty? He's not the one who was having an affair. I lost all credibility for Matt Damon when I heard of this sleazy behavior. You can find the disgusting video that they showed here, but even with swearing bleeped out by the network, it's very disturbing.

Now, the march itself was almost as disturbing. It seemed to be one long diatribe to preserve the status quo, which is the education system exactly as it is now or I guess exactly as it was 15 years ago before reform, which is going great and will be perfected very soon.

One final note.  I heard a lot of teachers at the march complaining about the use of test scores for accountability with the complaint that the scores were out of the teacher's control.  Some new data from Washington, DC shows that many teachers rated poorly last year were rated very highly this year and vice versa.  It just goes to show you how much teachers can improve when they buckle down or decline when they slack off.

Last Stand for Children Announces Committee on Teacher Needs

This morning, Education Week had an excellent article entitled What Do Teachers Want?   The article concerned the difficulty of assessing exactly what it is that teachers want.  The author goes so far as suggesting that we must be mind readers like Mel Gibson's character in "What Women Want."   I don't know if I'd go that far, but finding out what teachers want can be as difficult as getting through Avon Barksdale's many layers of security in subterfuge to protect his drug empire on The Wire.

Some of the most groundbreaking work in the area of assessing what teachers want was done by Bill Gates and Scholastic who spared no expense in conducting a Harris Poll of 40,000 teachers.  However, if one poll was enough to tell us anything with certainty, President McCain would running for reelection.

This area of research is very important if we are to find a way to attract and keep highly capable teachers to the classroom while at the same time increasing their workload and cutting their salary, pension, and health care costs.  That is why Last Stand for Children has spent the last two years working hard to analyze the wants and needs of classroom teachers.   Today, we take a step closer to realizing the fruits of our labor by appointing a blue ribbon committee to study and analyze the needs and wants of America's classroom teachers.  The members of the panel are as follows:

Ryan Wilson - Chief Executive Director Last Stand for Children First
Winslow Thorpe - President of Northstar Investments
Linda Voight-Kampff - President and CEO of Tyrell Corporation
Dotti Walker - Chairwoman of Prosperity for Americans
Hank Scorpio - President and CEO of Globex Corporation
Jack Kimble - United States Representative, California's 54th District
Burt Kuper - President of The Foundations Group
Alma Davis - Chairwoman Education for The Best Tomorrow
Adrian Veidt - President and CEO of Veidt Industries
Virginia Wallace - Vice-President of The Alliance for Educational Excellence
Miles Drummond - President and CEO of Anderson Testing 


Together, this group will piggy back on existing research with the goal of producing an actionable plan for reforming education to better meet the wants and needs of teachers by 2013.

A Future Educator Talks About Changes She'd Like to See in Education

Katie Cunningham is a third grade student at the Our Lady of Perpetual Motion Elementary School in Glendale Valley, CA. She is an avid Irish dancer and loves to bake cookies and play Wii

I've wanted to be a teacher for sooo long. My mom says teachers are lazy, but I like Miss McCutcheon and I would like to help people just like her. During Summers I would go to Hawaii or Disney World and take care of all the animals.  It would be fun to tell students what to do and to send Nathan Wilcox to the principal's office if he was pulling people's hair.

First, I've been thinking maybe I don't want to be a teacher now.  What if I'm a really good teacher like Miss McCutcheon and the newspapers like the Wall Street Journal come do to a story on my class and even the President says I'm a great teacher, but they fire me instead of Miss Kearsey because she's so old.  Then I wouldn't have a job and I'd be homeless and die.   Why do you want me to die?  Don't you like me?  Please end Last in First Out policies.  I told my friend Matilda about this and now she wants to be a dancer instead of a teacher.  If this doesn't change you could be losing other great teachers to dancing.

Second, I also worry that when I get older teachers will do what's called collective bargaining.  That means if I'm a really good teacher, I get the same salary as Miss Kearsey.  That's not right.   I want to be paid a million dollars a year, but I can't do that this way or everybody gets a million dollars a year.  My dad said this is socialism.  He wants me to become a hedge fund manager. 

The last thing I worry about is that there won't be enough testing.  If I want to be a good teacher I need lots of data to make good choices like who does what worksheet.  We need more tests so we can have more data.

I know many of you are thinking why would I listen to a little girl who is still in school and not even a teacher yet? I don't know.  I do know I want to be a teacher someday, but my dad says before I can make a big decision like that I have to watch The Wire and he says I won't be old enough to watch that show until I'm 16.