Accountability for Thee, But Not for Me
The old adage dictates that events in life come in threes.
As the irreplaceable Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency points out, there are three separate ballot initiatives in California for which the state level Teachers Association is shelling out $3 million.
Not surprisingly, two out of three of these ballot initiatives have absolutely nothing to do with education. But hey, one out of three ain’t bad, and as for the third, the union at least has to look like it has a vested interest in education.
Converted into a percentage, one-third would be 33.3 percent, or slightly higher than the percentage of California fourth graders currently proficient in math.
The education-related third initiative by which the unions are terrified calls for incorporating student performance into teacher evaluations. In other words, the proposal would bring in a key indicator of job performance, to measure well, job performance. What a novel idea!
Called the “High Quality Teachers Act of 2014,” the initiative goes a step further by eliminating seniority from the teacher retention process, and is currently awaiting approval from the attorney general’s office.
This is in addition to the ongoing legal battle in which California student plaintiffs are asserting their inherent right to a quality education by attempting to strike down laws that do nothing to incentivize good teaching.
Rather than support accountability like 86% of the American public, the California Teachers Association is choosing to preserve a system that does anything but ensure the best teachers are in the classroom for California kids.
According to Antonucci, CTA members pitch in $36 per year for ballot initiatives so that union political operatives can ensure what they view as a bright, stable and secure future for the state’s educators. If only students had that same luxury.
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Measuring job performance is a hallmark of any professional practice, and the lack of comprehensive job performance measurement in teaching is laughable. It’s unconscionable that teachers’ abilities are not currently measured accurately or comprehensively in California. If teachers’ unions want respect for the profession, they need to disassociate from the practices of blue-collar worlds of work and begin to take responsibility for their professionals in ways that more closely resemble other theory-to-practice fields such as medicine and law.