With the introduction of the Great Teachers Great Schools initiative – An Act to Promote Excellence in Public Schools – earlier this month, and the subsequent lawsuit the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) filed to challenge Attorney General Martha Coakley’s decision to certify the initiative, a lot of information, some accurate and some inaccurate, has been circulating throughout the Commonwealth.
One point being made is that a recently updated and more rigorous teacher evaluation system is already being implemented. Stand for Children was proud to join the MTA, state education leaders, and other stakeholders in advocating for that new evaluation system. Not only did we sit on the task force that made an initial set of recommendations, we educated and mobilized our membership on the issue, generating 700 pieces of written testimony from educators and parents that were submitted to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
All groups involved in advocacy around the content of the regulations were unanimously committed to creating a more functional and productive evaluation system centered on improving teaching and learning. While these evaluations represent a step in the right direction, unless key changes are made to state law, there is still no promise that all school districts will be using them as a benchmark for teacher placement anytime soon.
That’s where the Great Teachers Great Schools campaign comes in. The proposed initiative:
- Will ensure that every classroom is led by an effective teacher. This is critical to closing the alarming achievement gap in Massachusetts.
- Takes current evaluation systems one step further by guaranteeing that they will be consistently implemented by schools across the Commonwealth.
- Has received significant statewide support – a UMASS Amherst poll showed 85% of MA voters believe teacher staffing decisions should be based on performance first rather than just how long a teacher has been in the classroom.
- Successfully passed all procedural and constitutional reviews for introduction into the state legislature
I invite you to learn more about the Great Teachers Great Schools campaign. Visit our website to learn the facts, take action online and get involved.
your thumbs the task force is all you did. You were invited. You contributed nothing. You never said anything about your agenda. Then you guys turn around, write a ballot question, purchase the signatures for it, and turn it in. Instead of buying the politicians, like you did in Illinois, you purchased a referendum question.
Your website is as slick and vacant as your post. Where, for example, is the link to your ballot question? I can’t find it on your website. Transparency is not a virtue with you guys unless its Jonah Edelman telling the Aspen Institute how Stand for Children bought control of the Illinois state legislature.
Mark, I went to their website and found both the ballot question text and the Attorney General’s summary right away under “The Facts” tab. Here’s a direct link: http://www.greatteachersgreatschools.org/index.cfm?objectid=99E79DB0-24FB-11E1-B178000C296BA163
Not that expect J. to be back until he has another press release to distribute, but this statement:
is disingenuous. All public school districts must have these implemented by contact year 2015. Mind, this does not apply to the exclusive private schools where Stand’s backers send their kids to mix with other progeny of the 1%.
..and I say that as a school committee member sitting here next to a three inch binder on how we’re implementing the new regulations.
If this gets on the ballot, the inside baseball stuff of these posts won’t matter.
Will voters care about Stand for Children’s role in the task force? Will they care about what happened in Illinois? Will they care if Stand for Children has an anti-union bias? I think not. When November 6 arrives, they will care about their kids and their schools. As a result, I think we should focus on the merits of the ballot question and not on all this other stuff.
Lets get to the facts. What does the ballot question actually do and is that a good or bad thing for kids? I care whether it is good or bad for teachers, but in the end what matters most to me, and I suspect to most voters, is whether the ballot question will lead to high quality teaching (and, by extension, a high quality public education for children). Let’s talk about that.
itself. I think I put a link to it somewhere. Here’s the summary.
What it does is impose a state-wide mandate for replaces seniority with teacher evaluations when it comes to hiring and firing. As the MTA notes,
If Stand for Children were honest, they would state that they believe union contracts are an impediment to progress because they protect incompetent teachers by keeping them in the classroom. SFC believes we can fire our way to better schools. If there were a big enough supply of promising teachers, they might have an argument.
The reasons for incompetent teachers are many, but the biggest reason is limited supply of promising in urban school systems. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t many good and great teachers in urban schools, but many leave because of poor working conditions. They are replaced with new teachers, many of whom are less promising. And given that it takes 3 to 5 years for a teacher to start to realize full effectiveness, and that 50% of the teachers leave the profession in first 5 years, firing them is not going to change anything. And it won’t change the underlying problem of education: poverty.
The new evaluation process invests in teachers, using evaluation as a tool for improvement, not merely firing.
Claiming to “care about children” when it in fact gives school administrators to ability to fire experienced (and more expensive) teachers, so they can hire less experienced (and much cheaper) teachers.
Sure it is wrapped in roses…claiming that hiring will be based on “performance”, but no objective standards are offered to define performance…unless you want to use MCAS tests…which have a role, but will completely dominate the education process if this passes.
So the unintended consequences will be kids being taught to take tests by less experienced and cheaper teachers. This approach is ripped from the pages of a Bain business plan.
And not an easy thing to do. It’s a four page morass without any organization or theme. Most of Stand for children’s own supporters and funders didn’t even know this was being done until the signature-gatherers were hired. Imagine the top 3 people at Greenpeace writing an initiative for environmentalism. You’d get demands for more wind turbines, higher taxes on oil, banning plastic bags — a whole bunch of detail ideas without a system in which to place them.
All that said, you have a fair point. What needs to happen is to tease out all the points that have led everyone from school committees through superintendents through teachers to oppose this.
There was some discussion on the diarist’s previous thread about how some of the goals are already being pursued prompted in part by a question I had and which I did find helpful. However, if it becomes an argument over seniority per se it’s going to be difficult to make a case that such a factor should be protected for its own sake. Yes seniority can equal experience, but it can also equal stuck in a rut/can’t teach an old dog new tricks, etc.
different from the new teacher evaluation system that is being implemented. SFC is trying to hijack the democratically produced evaluation reform by referencing those improvements. Their goal is to break teacher unions.
Seniority is just not that big a problem in education. People like to believe that workers will be more efficient if they are afraid they’ll be fired. In reality, people work better when they’re not afraid and given the chance to improve and develop.
The new evaluation system (as opposed to SFC’s initiative) will prevent teachers from being stuck in a rut by by improving evaluation, documenting teacher work, and creating improvement plans for all, not just the worst. Evaluation will be ongoing and serious focused on improving instruction; continuous improvement is the key to improving instruction. Continuous improvement is not a radical idea. W. Edwards Deming was all over it with total quality management, which given American ideology and Deming’s age, never really caught on here.
And I imagine that will be the content of the ads SFC’s out-of-state millionaires will buy. If we can’t find a way to express what’s wrong with this question here, to our fellow BMGers, we have a tough road ahead of us with the wider electorate. I think Mark’s crowdsourcing idea is a great place to start.
Circuit City, to save money, fired all its staff with seniority. Which meant customers could no longer get the quality service that made Circuit City a better store than Best Buy.
And Circuit City went bust.