(As a teacher, I am used to reading reports from our state legislators that make my blood boil, missives that repeat verbatim the talking points of people like Michelle Rhee and her Students First. That organization met defeat in the state legislature this week when HB 631, sponsored by Rep. Kevin Elmer, R-Nixa, which would have eliminated tenure for Missouri classroom teachers and impose teacher evaluations that would have been based largely on students' standardized test scores. The bill not only failed, but it wasn't by a small margin. It lost by a 102-55 vote, with legislators from both sides joining the majority. One of those who voted against HB 631 was Rep. Keith Frederick, R-Rolla, and he explains that vote in his latest report.)
I am preparing this report on Thursday afternoon, April 11. We stayed on the House floor last night until around midnight, and I was pretty ‘wired’ at adjournment as were most of my colleagues. I engaged in discussions with fellow Representatives in the House Chamber after adjournment to review the events and issues we dealt with all day. Because of this I did not get to bed till around 1:00 a.m. I was up at around 5:30 a.m. to begin my morning routine, which here in Jeff City includes reading and responding to emails, reading newspaper articles from the Wall Street Journal and a variety of other daily papers, and researching issues I believe will come up on this day. This afternoon I feel as though I just pulled an ”all-nighter” as I did back in college or like I sometimes do after working on a trauma case from the Emergency Room in the middle of the night, which thankfully is infrequent.
What caused this late night session? Well, we dealt with quite a number of issues but one in particular kept the adrenaline flowing and the debate hot and heavy, HB 631. If you work at a school or are a teacher, administrator or principal you are probably very familiar with this bill. House Bill 631 seeks to revamp the environment in which teachers teach and would have changed in substantial ways how teachers are evaluated and retained. I received a lot of emails about the content of this bill. Every one of them felt that this bill was detrimental to teachers, students and our educational system. I have dealt with this issue at length in previous legislative sessions where I discussed the issue of teacher tenure with various members of school boards and administrators. They informed me that they were quite satisfied with the current process of identifying the occasional inept or unqualified teacher and that the steps to either assist that teacher in becoming a higher performing teacher or to remove that teacher using the due process mechanisms that provide for fairness for the teacher and look out for the interests of the students and parents and taxpayers. When I ran for re-election last year, one of my positions was that there is a tendency in the legislature to over-reach when seeking to reform education in our state. I felt that in the past, proposed legislation was punitive to teachers and I pledged to seek reasonableness and fairness.
I have gotten a lot of feedback on the problems associated with the proposed changes in teacher evaluation contained in HB 631. It has been pointed out to me very clearly that the undue reliance on MAP testing and the inherent problems with that method of evaluation are just two of the few problems that plague the current system. Students are not always motivated to perform well on such tests since there is no consequence to them regardless of the scores they achieve. Many of the problems associated with the current education system come from within our inner cities where students are often challenged by circumstances beyond their control. Societal and cultural problems, and the concept of Maslow’s triangle relating to whether basic human needs are being met, influence a student’s ability to learn. It is my view that we should not gather up all of these social and cultural problems and put them in a big basket and leave it on the doorstep of the teachers in our inner cities. If a student does not have warm clothes or enough to eat or if a parent is using drugs or is in prison, or any one of a number of other difficult situations exist, learning will be impaired substantially by those circumstances.
HB 631 proposed four levels of evaluations for a teacher to be graded on. In my view this proposed evaluation scale could have had a substantial negative effect on teacher morale and could have been counterproductive. In order to fully understand the concept that this bill was trying to implement, I imagined physicians (I am a doctor) being divided into four groups labeled as Missouri teachers would have been under this bill: “Highly Effective, “Effective”, “Minimally Effective” and “Ineffective”.
I suggest that a better idea would be to consider an approach that includes a professional development piece to it for our teachers. An outstanding and comprehensive teacher development, evaluation and compensation program has been developed by the Milkin Family Foundation and it is referred to as the TAP program. This program provides professional development resources, transparent accountability measures, and compensation based on performance. Here is a link to the program:http://www.tapsystem.org/
HB 631 was defeated by a vote of 55 to 102. I was a No vote. The House was well served in the late night hours last night by Representative Mike Lair, a man who has served nearly his entire life as an educator in various capacities and who has spent his entire career dealing with the complex set of human interactions that is education. He spoke eloquently last night of the challenges that teachers and students face. He spoke of the dedication of teachers, the need for accountability and spelled out for those of us who have not served as teachers the many ways that teachers are currently held accountable.
I cannot properly summarize his words, other than to say, he capsulized, at least for me, the current situation we find ourselves in Missouri regarding education. His words caused me to think about our teachers and schools and education in general. What came to my mind were the words of George Bailey in the classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The following paragraph are my words, not Representative Lair’s, but his words inspired me to write this [This teacher rabble you're talking about...they do much of the working and paying and living and dying in our communities. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die working in a decent school and making a decent living without being pushed around all the time? Anyway, Mike Lair doesn't think so. Teachers are human beings to him but to some they are just 'minimally effective' or 'ineffective' time clock punchers. Well, in my book Mike Lair is a champion for education and for our students and we should look to him for leadership in this arena.]
If you aren’t familiar with the film or don’t remember the scene, Here is the original script. “Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you'll ever be.”
I voted against HB 631 because I agree with Representative Lair that this piece of legislation was an overreach. I do believe that we should constantly strive to improve our efforts to educate our young people, and I do believe that teachers need to be accountable and need to provide the best instruction possible. However, HB 613 was not the answer. We need to acknowledge that we have cultural and societal problems that contribute greatly to poor achievement, and we should seek remedies to the root causes of our problems rather than simply telling the teachers to try harder.
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