Arguing for an initiative that would set strict teacher evaluation standards, Jennifer Rush, a parent from Lowell, said her daughter should attend a school where she does not have to rely on luck to have a good teacher.
Rush, a parent and member of Stand for Children Massachusetts, said on Tuesday in front of the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Education that she had to choose between her job and her child’s public school education upon receiving the news that her child had to be held back.
“It was a hard choice, but my child’s education came first,” Rush said. “Within weeks, her reading fluency and comprehension improved significantly. I realized the [classroom environment] was destroying her confidence.”
Rush left her job to work with her first-grade child on reading comprehension because she was told her daughter was “basically illiterate.”
Rush and other members of SFCM advocated before the state’s Education Committee for a petition that would require every school district to adopt a “comprehensive educator evaluation system” by the 2013 school year, according to the petition.
Under the new petition, schools would consider such evaluations in their decision to hire, dismiss, demote or promote teachers.
“I’ve seen as a student and as a teacher the powerful impact of high quality educators,” said Jason Williams, executive director of SFCM. “The policy proposal will allow Massachusetts to build upon its reputation as our nation’s leader in education.”
But Williams said accurately measuring a teacher’s quality is not simple.
Researchers consistently document how layoffs fail to keep the best teachers in classrooms, he said.
Therefore, all state schools should “prioritize a teacher’s effectiveness rather than his or her length of time in the system and . . . protect the rights of children to access a high-quality education and the rights for teachers to keep their jobs,” Williams said.
The petition requires school districts to focus first on teachers’ certification and ability rather than seniority or past level of experience.
Nicole Costello, a special education teaching assistant from Winchester, said seniority should not be the most important factor when schools make staffing decisions.
“Anyone who has ever worked in a school knows that there is so much more to a teacher than simply the number of years [worked],” Costello said.
But other community leaders voiced their concerns about the petition in light of the new regulations approved in June by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which require school committees to adopt teacher evaluation systems.
Massachusetts Teachers Association President Paul Toner said they need a few years to work with the new evaluation system.
“Stand for Children had a representative on the 40-member task force,” he said. “Many of the issues that were addressed during the task force discussions were included in the regulations. Many of the things that are in this ballot initiative were never mentioned during those discussions.”
Former Massachusetts State PTA President Mary Ann Stewart said she served on this educator evaluation task force and did not spend hundreds of hours working for improvements to the evaluation system only to have a national group with no particular expertise in education threaten to impugn them.
“The PTA is the oldest and largest child advocacy association in the country,” Stewart said. “I think it’s safe to say that PTA has been standing for children longer than anyone.” Stewart said this proposal is way out of step with what is happening in state schools today.
“Parents and teachers do not disagree on the need for outstanding teachers and schools and we already have a rigorous evaluation system to do that,” Stewart said. “The task force recommended balanced changes to the evaluation system for all educators through a collaborative . . . process.”
Boston Public School teacher Jessica Tang said the initiative is a detriment to students’ and teachers’ ability to advocate for what they really need, which includes books and resources for the classroom.
“It undermines experience, and any teacher will tell you experience matters,” Tang said. “It’s an outrage to me after such an exemplary and inclusive process that offers a homeroom solution, we now run the [risk of] teachers at the mercy of a cookie-cutter proposal imported from outside the state.”
Stewart said districts across the Commonwealth are preparing for full implementation of these new regulations for the coming school year.
“We must give these evaluations a chance to work,” Stewart said. “There’s no need to implement another system before the new one is rolled out. We need to stay the course and not get distracted from the real issues.”
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Ms. Mom wants the best teacher.. she doesn’t want it to be luck, but is it the classroom environment that was killing her child’s confidence or the fact that so many of her daughter’s peers were beginning readers from the outset? The building blocks for literacy are in place prior to entry into the school system for most children. Parents who pay attention to their children build basic readers before they enter kindergarten. Unfortunately, many parents work too many hours or are not literate themselves or are unaware that early literacy is a leg up.
I was one such child. I didn’t know the alphabet when I entered first grade (1962). My first grade teacher (Ms. York, bless her) taught me to read after school for what must have been a year. I picked it up just fine and ended up with a perfect score on the English portion of my SATs some years later. So, it works out. Problem didn’t start with my bad teacher, though. It started with a parent who didn’t know to immerse me in literacy and who didn’t have the time to do it if she had.