Don’t Fall For The Teacher Tenure Boogey Man
Lots of very nice well meaning people were approached by a person standing outside their grocery store or library in the last several months and asked to sign a petition to get rid of teacher tenure so we could “finally get rid of the really bad teachers who were making our school system so awful.” I’ll bet these well intentioned folks probably took all of 8 seconds to agree that the teachers were the source of our educational woes. Recollections of the infamous New York rubber rooms where teachers who had done terrible things to students were being housed because the school system couldn’t fire them likely sprang to mind. Mainstream media headlines of America falling behind in international rankings may have made it to their subconscious. Maybe they even remembered a teacher they didn’t like because they were not very helpful to their child and they couldn’t understand how the district kept that person on the payroll. How great would it be to get rid of these people and all they had to do was sign a petition? Two hundred and seventy five thousand of such proactive education supporters did sign the petition which is now in the Secretary of States office for validation to put a measure on the statewide ballot in November eliminating teacher tenure. But what will we get for this measure?The petition says all public school districts would need to adopt evaluation standards that rely on “quantifiable student performance data” to guide decisions on promoting, demoting, firing and paying personnel. Ooooh, we like data. It sounds so objective. Make it quantifiable and we magically have a nice easy system to identify who the good guys and the bad guys are. Draw a line in the data. Everyone above this mark stays. Everyone below it goes. Where will this quantifiable data come from? From the standardized tests we give students every year. It sounds so good, why didn’t we think of this before?
To understand, first you have to understand exactly what standardized testing really is. Standardized tests take a snap shot of a students mental retrieval system on things that some centralized provider has decided are important. It does not care if children get anxious about performing on command. It is not even a good indicator of a curriculum’s effectiveness. That is why the vendors of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) state in their literature that “policy makers should not use results either to indict or commend education systems. Furthermore, they should not use the results to make important policy decisions.” So an international test developer says these types of test should not be used to make policy, decisions, but Teach Great says they are ideal for “requiring teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid.”
Christopher Tienken does not believe that standardized tests are a valid measure of student’s Don’t Fall For The Teacher Tenure Boogey Man | Missouri Education Watchdog: