Over the last several months, I have noted that Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro has worked with district superintendents, bypassing local boards of education to make sure that the state is well on its way to implementing Common Core Standards.Apparently, Ms. Nicastro has also been doing her level best to stab Missouri teachers in the back.
The Missouri NEA uncovered documents through Sunshine Law requests proving that Ms. Nicastro worked with retired billionaire Rex Sinquefield's people on an effort to eliminate tenure for Missouri teachers.
Apparently, Ms. Nicastro has also been doing her level best to stab Missouri teachers in the back.
The Missouri NEA uncovered documents through Sunshine Law requests proving that Ms. Nicastro worked with retired billionaire Rex Sinquefield's people on an effort to eliminate tenure for Missouri teachers.
State email records show commissioner Chris Nicastro met with an advocate of the ballot initiative more than a year ago, suggested specific wording and reviewed a final draft of the initiative before it was filed this March with the secretary of state's office.
Nicastro's involvement is detailed in emails released by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in response to a Sunshine Law request filed by the Missouri chapter of the National Education Association. The teachers' union, which opposed the initiative, provided the emails to The Associated Press.
The group said Nicastro's involvement went beyond what was appropriate for a nonpartisan appointee of the State Board of Education.
Nicastro said Wednesday that she has no position on the initiative but provided the group information just as she would with anyone proposing a change in state law.
"I think it's our responsibility to work with everybody," Nicastro said.
But Mark Jones, the political director for the MNEA, said, "What you're seeing here is simply a level of collaboration and collusion that is just concerning."
It must also be noted that along side the issue of removing tenure for teachers, in that same motion she is pushing for the new Common Core assessments to be aligned to the new teacher eval system in Missouri. Thus, she is removing the safety net of tenure to protect teachers from this untested, EXPERIMENT in education. How do what know what DESE classifies as ineffective is the same thing that parents would classify ineffective. In this upside down world of Common Core, the ineffective teachers may soon be those who refuse to harm kids with the new curriculum and teaching methods pushed by Common Core.
ReplyDeleteEducation has become so hostile toward teachers and so friendly toward big business that it has become an unbearable profession. It would seem that the more bureaucracy there is and the more involved outside entities become that the worse education becomes.
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