“The rubber hits the road here,” said Karen Aronowitz, the president of United Teachers of Dade, which represents teachers in the country’s fourth-largest school district. “Why would you retain experienced teachers if they simply cost too much? You don’t have to provide a reason not to renew the contracts. You can be teacher of the year and be let go because there is no due process.”
Indeed. Also, widespread lying about student grades in New York City and the fact that Principals order teachers to scrub grades or lose their jobs and then charge them with changing grades or other actions related to their changing grades makes the tying of teacher pay to student performance absurd. Additionally, all a principal has to do is give an expensive teacher a class full of students with behavior problems, language difficulties, and/or academic disabilities, and the unwanted teacher is quickly run out of the school as "incompetent" (even though it might not be humanly possible to teach such a class). If a teacher has a classroom filled with gifted children who did above average - lets say 97% on their tests the previous year, and then these students get 97% the following year, the value-added is zero and the teacher is labelled "incompetent". See the excellent article about this by Mike Winerip, also below.
Betsy Combier
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| Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, center, with his wife, Ann, at the opening of the legislative session, which also brought a silent protest, left, and Tea Party members singing “God Bless America.” |
March 8, 2011
In Florida, Push to Link Teacher Pay to Student Performance
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ, NY Times
MIAMI — The Florida Legislature, convening its 60-day session on Tuesday, quickly set its sights on measures that would link the pay of new teachers to student performance and allow school boards to fire teachers more easily for mediocre results.
The final bill is expected to clear the Legislature next week. Unlike last year, when similar legislation was vetoed by the former governor, who considered it too extreme, this slightly softened version is expected to win Gov. Rick Scott’s approval easily.
The far-reaching bills in the House and Senate would shake up a system of pay and tenure in Florida that has existed for decades and would position Florida as a leader among those states taking on teachers’ unions. Supporters say it will make it easier to reward and promote the state’s best teachers, not by their longevity, but by their work in the classroom. This, they say, will ensure that the lowest-performing schools can lure more effective teachers.
Representative Erik Fresen, a Republican from Miami who is sponsoring the House bill, said the measure would do away with a system that did not benefit the best teachers or help struggling students and replace it with one that would actually assess how well a teacher performed.
“If you look across the board, one thing that is consistent is that teacher effectiveness is the most influential variable in a student’s learning,” Mr. Fresen said. “Teaching is disconnected from any other profession in the world. Every profession that I know has some effectiveness input in terms of a salary increase and whether you get promoted or get paid less or paid more.”
But teachers’ unions, who forcefully opposed the legislation last year, say the measure, which will mostly affect new teachers, is deeply flawed. It would serve, union officials say, only to demoralize a work force already battered by ever-shrinking resources and other demands.
“We are under siege by our own Legislature,” said Robert Dow, the president of the Palm Beach County Classroom Teachers Association. “People are extremely depressed. People are seeing this coming like a freight train, and no matter what you say, you can’t stop it.”
At rallies in Tallahassee and other Florida cities, state employees who say they fear for their jobs and benefits turned out to protest what they view as extreme measures on the part of Republicans in the House and Senate to make up a budget gap of $3.6 billion. Tea Party activists also streamed into the capital to support lawmakers in their plans to cut spending and create jobs.
“You are changing the country because people are listening to what you’re doing, whether it’s Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey or Texas,” Governor Scott, a Republican, told the Tea Party crowd, which helped elect him.
If passed, the education bills in the House and Senate would mean that starting in 2014 students’ performance on assessment tests would count for half of a new teacher’s evaluation. The other half would rest with the principal. Those evaluations would lead to yearly raises or dismissals, if poor ratings continued three to five years. Tenured teachers can opt into the merit pay system, if they choose, but they would face the possibility of dismissal because of unsatisfactory evaluations regardless.
New teachers would also be subject to one-year contracts beginning this July. Their ability to renew those contracts would rest squarely with their evaluations.
Mr. Fresen, the author of the House bill, said much of the bill’s framework in terms of pay had been laid out in the state’s applications for federal dollars in the Race to the Top program. The state was awarded $700 million in federal money to help develop measurable standards to evaluate teacher and student performance.
“The toxicity of the debate this year is much less than last year,” Mr. Fresen said. The overwhelming majority of school districts signed up for those federal dollars and the performance evaluations that were tied to them.
But the unions and most teachers oppose the Fresen bill, saying the move is premature. There are no reliable ways yet to evaluate teachers consistently, outside of testing, which does not necessarily capture a teacher’s worth. In addition, they say, the shift to yearly contracts will lead to hiring teachers on the cheap and will do little to attract the best candidates. They also argue that Florida’s schools have sharply improved in the past several years and are now ranked fifth in the nation, according to a yearly report by Education Week magazine. Teachers are doing something right, they say.
“The rubber hits the road here,” said Karen Aronowitz, the president of United Teachers of Dade, which represents teachers in the country’s fourth-largest school district. “Why would you retain experienced teachers if they simply cost too much? You don’t have to provide a reason not to renew the contracts. You can be teacher of the year and be let go because there is no due process.”
Gary Fineout contributed reporting from Tallahassee, Fla.
Teacher Evaluation And Effectiveness: What Exactly Do These Terms Mean?
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