My district is facing huge budget cuts for next year. $24 million in cuts to be exact. Since our district is like most, where more than 70% of the budget goes to personnel, we are talking lots of jobs here.
Tough decisions will be made in the next few months. Decisions about which teachers will lose their jobs are based on our Master Agreement. Usually, non-tenured teachers are the first to go. Then, if you have all tenured teachers, you go to a special appendix in the agreement.
Here there are various formulas that you apply to teachers after which you assign points for each tenured teacher; low points=lost job. Points are given for years of service; you receive points for your level of education; and more points are awarded for extra-curricular activities that a teacher may sponsor, like hip-hop club. What would you award points for?
Does it matter? We are going to cut support personnel from the classroom. We will increase class size. Increase the duties that teachers will have to perform as in hall duty and so on. All of this will require the best teachers possible in the classroom. Yet, we won’t make our decisions as to who these teachers are based on their ability to handle the increased work-load. We will use longevity and levels of education to decide which teachers stay.
Perhaps our dire economic and budget situation will force to rethink how we assess teachers.
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Mark,
I completely agree. While not a Pueblo D70 parent, I wrote a similar blog back in December when they announced how they were going to make cuts. I use the term “check box” mentality. It’s a lot easier to look at some check boxes that are objective than to take a chance on real evaluation that might be considered subjective by some. So, instead of using the right measures, which approximate objectivity, they use the wrong measures because they are objective. Also, there is an interesting study that came out that shows that principal evaluations are actually one of the best guides to teacher quality. If that’s true, then let’s use them for something besides window dressing, right?
http://charterinsights.blogspot.com/2009/12/base-lay-offs-on-tenure-now-that-cant.html
Doug, can you post the study about the effectiveness of principals?
http://www.nasbe.org/leadership/about-linking-leadership-to-stimulus-funds
Could not agree more. Mark, why is it that teachers do not lobby harder for better criteria? I would trust the majority of teachers in a school, under the auspicious of the Principal, to make a far better decision that the collective bargaining formula. The Union represents teachers, why do teachers not use their influence more directly?