By Mary C. Tillotson, Watchdog.org
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that 86 percent of Americans support greater accountability in public schools.
Specifically, they support the ability to fire poorly performing teachers, according to a survey by the Center for Education Reform.
“That’s huge. There’s no other issue that 86 percent of the public can agree on,” said CER President Kara Kerwin.
According to the survey, 37 percent of respondents said public schools can fire poorly performing teachers and 54 percent said they could not.
Evaluations can be helpful to connect teachers with appropriate professional support, said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council for Teacher Quality.
“(Evaluations) can help us make all sorts of better decisions about how we assign teachers, how we target professional development so teachers are getting support, whether it’s a teacher who might be struggling who really needs intensive support, or a really good teacher who with some support could be a really great teacher,” she said.
“High-stakes testing” evaluations are often decried as unfair to teachers — students can have “bad days” on test days, or may be well-educated but have poor test-taking abilities — but “I don’t think anybody thinks that is fair. All the systems being developed are built on multiple measures,” she said.
Other measure include classroom observations that note whether the teacher asks critical-thinking questions and varies which students are called on. Preferably, multiple people, including administrators and highly effective teachers, would observe a teacher to mitigate the effects of an administrator’s personal feelings, she said.
Both schools and teachers need to be held accountable, Kerwin said. For schools, that doesn’t just mean charter schools.
“There’s a lot of hype: ‘We should close all these bad charters.’ Why aren’t we talking about closing or turning around all the schools?” she said.
Factors like parental satisfaction and financial health should be included in rating school quality, she said.
School administrators in private and parochial schools can fire teachers much more easily than public schools, she said. But all schools need to be able to fire poorly performing teachers, she said.
“It’s difficult because of current tenure laws, and the structure of collective bargaining and organized labor, in a profession that should be treated as professional, and not labor,” she said.
In a system where parents choose schools, accountability is built in.
“If schools aren’t performing, they won’t have kids in seats,” Kerwin said. “If parents aren’t happy, they won’t have kids in seats. If schools are underperforming, they’ll close down.”
Many of those surveyed said their state legislators have the most say in education, but 69 percent rate their legislators as doing a fair or poor job, according to the survey.
Almost half — 46 percent — of parents surveyed said they needed more power in decisions about their children’s education. More than half of parents polled said they would move their child to a different school if the current school didn’t meet annual testing standards (67 percent) or if the child wasn’t being challenged (71 percent).
The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted by telephone in September and October. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent. The full report can be read here.
Postcards from the Past – No. 4
In 1999, a coalition of anti-reformers, including teacher unions, was temporarily successful in obtaining an injunction against Cleveland, Ohio’s opportunity scholarship program. At the time, the injunction unnecessarily caused uncertainty for approximately 3,800 low-income students and their families slated to benefit from having choices.
But they failed in the end, and Cleveland along with the rest of Ohio, now have wide ranging choice programs, making the Buckeye State one of the most versatile states in enacting parent empowering policies.
Today, over 31,000 students are attending a school of their choosing according to the Ohio Department of Public Education.
But as reformers know, the BLOB always creeps back, and this time it’s in North Carolina where the state teacher association has filed suit against the opportunity scholarship program that is so new, families have not yet even had the opportunity to apply. Scholarship applications are slated to be available starting February 1, 2014.
This latest attempt to curtail the availability of options is, “a vile attempt to breach the civil rights of low-income parents and students most in need of educational options,” according to CER president Kara Kerwin.
Let’s hope North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program withstands this challenge, as other opportunity scholarship programs throughout the nation have, so that students most in need of educational options have a better chance at success.