THE CONSULTANT GAME

The entry below was submitted to NAPTA's chatboard by an anonymous person. We can't give that person credit since we don't know who she/he is. However, we appreciate your insights. Keep them coming. NAPTA

The Title II Grant money has been distributed to states throughout the United States. If you wish to see how much has gone to states go on the internet and type in The Reading Excellence Act. Forinstance, the state of California received 60million dollars. This is over and above the other moneys that the states receive. Now this money is to go to the schools that have failed. It is to go to teacher training. But some clever Superintendents have figured out that if they take the second language student test scores and the special education students test scores and average them into the classroom teachers' test scores then the school will fail and that will qualify the schools in the poorer neighborhoods for this grant money.

Of course, the public and parents in these kind of neighborhoods do not understand this and even if they did they have no political power to solve this situation.

Now let us focus on the schools and teachers in this type of crisis. The teachers obviously according to the test scores need to be retrained.So some of these Superintendents(many have been moved from district to district with purged files for unexplained reasons) figured out that if they created Educational Consult firms, their firms could be hired with this grant money to train the uneducated teachers.(you must understand that most of these teachers have masters plus many years of training.)

But then I speculate an even better option for their consultant firms. What if they harassed the older teachers out of the profession all together. They could hire brand new young teachers, hire them for one year only contracts and have the consultant firms come in year after year to train. Then some went even further. They would hire these young teachers as long term substitutes. They might possibly make only about 100 dollars a day tops and there would be no retirement to pay and not benefits of any kind to pay. And that would make everything much simpler because the district could follow the regulations in the No Child Left Behind Act because there would be no tenured teachers to battle with when their employment was discontinued when these type of schools continued to fail.

Briefly, I would like to mention the Title III money. This is to go to school districts with large Hispanic-Native American-African American school populations. The main focus of that money is to train-English As A Second Language Assistants. Now an Assistant is not a teacher but an aid for the classroom teacher. They can become that after earning 6 credit hours of TESOL training. If they are lucky, they will make 10 dollars an hour. Once again the districts that qualify for large amounts of grant money.

I speculate that in five years there will not be any Special Education Teachers, no Tesol Teacher and once the Title II money is used no Reading Specialists. The teaching responsibility will be the classroom teacher. Even as I write the inclusion of the Specialists in the classroom is being encouraged and demanded. That means that you are an aide to the classroom teacher. We have seen this before and people battled to reverse that policy 15 years ago but now it is back. It is only done in Schools At Risk. These are the schools who qualify for the Title I, II and III grant money.

The Educational Consultant Firms are all over the United States and I speculate that they were formed in the last six years. Many of us were not aware of their existence until a couple of years ago but also we were not aware of the enormous amount of Grant money in Title II and Title III programs. In away it was a relief to discover because it explained the harassment of very good older teachers in the United States. It was all about money not anyone's teaching ability.

WE WOULD LIKE TO ADD THAT IN OUR EXPERIENCE, MANY OF THESE CONSULTANT FIRMS ARE OWNED BY SUPERINTENDENT'S WIVES OR OTHER RELATIVES. THIS IS A BONANZA FOR OUR CORRUPT ADMINISTRATORS AND GUARANTEE THEIR RIDING A MERCEDES INTO THE SUNSET SINCE IT OFFERS WONDERFUL RETIREMENT POSSIBILITIES ONCE THEY RETIRE AND HAVE TO LIVE ON THEIR MEASLY $100,000 LIFETIME PENSIONS. IS THERE ANY WONDER WHY THE SYSTEM IS SETTING UP SO MANY ROADBLOCKS TO MAINTAIN STATUS QUO? NAPTA

Top

HOME