AFT’s Randi Weingarten weighs in
Wednesday’s endorsement of Senate Bill 191 by the American Federation of Teachers did not phase many in Colorado but caused quite a stir around the nation.
Nevertheless, AFT President Randi Weingarten said her organization’s support of the bill shouldn’t come as a surprise.
In January, Weingarten made a speech urging her 1.4 million members to accept a form of teacher evaluation that takes student achievement into account.
In that speech Weingarten called for more frequent and more rigorous evaluations and said she wanted standardized test scores and other measures of student performance to be part of the process.
Randi Weingarten
The high-profile national union leader on Wednesday told The Denver Post that she was able to support the bill offered by Sen. Michael Johnston, D-Denver, only after a handful of amendments were added at the behest of Colorado AFT President Brenda Smith.
“What’s happened here is they have totally worked, in terms of the amendments, to insure that evaluations are done with teachers not to teachers,” Weingarten said. “If you’ve watched this, this is very consistent with what the Douglas County teachers union and Douglas County School Board had agreed to a few weeks after the speech I made in January, where their evaluations will be overhauled in a way that helps assess both teacher practice and student learning, using multiple measures of student learning, not just test scores. That there be both a real voice and a grievance process to ensure the evaluation process is fair, that there is a voice in hiring in a way that there are hiring committees that include teachers to insure there is the right fit in a school and not simply a principal … and that seniority as well as performance is part of a (reduction in force) procedure.”
Still, Colorado’s largest teacher union, the Colorado Education Association, said on Thursday morning, hours before the House education committee met about the bill, that it is still “strongly opposed to the bill.”
CEA President Beverly Ingle released the statement saying the