By Joe Williams
(From The Daytona Beach News-Journal, February 9, 2011)
The first principle of education policy in Florida and across our country should acknowledge that an excellent teacher in the classroom is the most important determinant of a child’s educational success.
The only way to close the significant achievement gap and transform public education in Florida is by recruiting, developing and retaining excellent teachers and principals. What’s required is a productive structure for identifying and rewarding greatness in classroom teaching and school leadership. Existing evaluation and tenure systems are not equipped to measure excellence; all too often, these systems accept mediocrity as the fullest extent of a teacher’s potential. We owe it to our children to set the bar higher. Currently, in most states, the best we can hope for stops at “satisfactory” teachers and “acceptable” schools.
But now Florida has a chance to make excellence the cornerstone of the state’s public education system, one that will be a model for the country. The transformative power of an effective tenure system is great: Florida will retain and promote its best teachers, ensure that struggling teachers get the resources they need to improve, and, when necessary, be able to replace ineffective teachers with better ones. However, a structure that yields these results cannot exist without a rigorous teacher evaluation system, which requires four central components:
· We need to acknowledge the origin of tenure systems in protecting teachers from abuse and arbitrary dismissal. These were real obstacles for earlier generations of educators, and today’s teachers still need and deserve protection against unfair treatment. An effective tenure and evaluation system will be unbiased, fair, transparent and expeditious and will ensure that teachers are treated like professionals.
· Florida’s teacher evaluation system must be based at least 50 percent on student academic progress, using valid and reliable measures, such as classroom observation developed with on-the-ground teacher input.
The evaluation system must also provide teachers with a meaningful opportunity to improve, by incorporating useful feedback and directing targeted resources to areas in need of development. This feature enables teachers to succeed in their chosen profession, and is a necessary step between measuring performance and replacing ineffective teachers.
· The system’s evaluations must be central to the hiring, promotion and dismissal processes in Florida schools. The current “last in, first out” system often forces out excellent young teachers exactly the kind of people Florida needs to recruit for its schools by giving blind preference to teachers solely based on seniority. Experience can make a great teacher better; but experience alone cannot outweigh excellence during job decisions.
Across the country, the uneven quality of teaching from district to district, reinforced by the failure to implement rigorous evaluation systems, has a disproportionately negative impact on students in schools with high proportions of poor and minority children. This injustice is often compounded by dilapidated school facilities, scant textbooks and key resources, and other traditional markers of educational inequity.
Florida can lead the country by creating a rigorous teacher evaluation and tenure system. To be certain of that, we need only look at the failing status quo. Teacher evaluations in other states, to the extent that they currently exist, are–for the most part–neither rigorous nor fair. Most states and districts use a binary rating system for teachers: satisfactory or unsatisfactory. It is typical for 99 percent of teachers to be placed in the top category. A system that passes 99 percent of its subjects simply isn’t reviewing very much. A 2007 New Teacher Project study found that 87 percent of Chicago’s city schools — 87 percent — did not issue even a single “unsatisfactory” rating from 2003 to 2006. During that time, 69 of those schools were declared educationally failing. The system is broken.
Like a “satisfactory” evaluation, tenure — the ultimate reward — is bestowed upon nearly every teacher who can outlast the perfunctory waiting period. In 2008, the National Council on Teacher Quality reported that 41 states received failing grades for tenure policies, with only two states requiring evidence of effectiveness for tenure decisions.
How likely are we to ensure that every student has a talented, dedicated and effective teacher with the perverse incentives offered by existing tenure systems? How can the interests of children — who will form our workforce and citizenry — ever be the first priority with such a broken structure?
Florida will do a real service to its children by establishing a meaningful tenure system that is based on rigorous, impartial and effective evaluations of its teachers and principals.