Winning Allies For Education

On the same day late last month when the town’s budgetmakers were scratching their heads, trying to figure out their next move following the town’s fourth rejection of a proposed 2012-2013 budget, the state Board of Education was laying the groundwork for reforms that may help avoid the kind of political stalemate that derailed this year’s budget process. On June 27, the state board unanimously approved a set of teacher evaluation requirements that tie teacher assessments to, among other factors, student performance and peer and parent surveys. The new evaluation requirements will be implemented for the next school year in 16 pilot districts around the state (not including Newtown) and then rolled out statewide for the 2013-2014 school year. This system of evaluation is expected to start influencing local district decisions on tenure and dismissals in the 2014-2015 school year.

It has been hard to read the minds of this year’s budget voters, since there have been no advisory questions on the ballot, nor separate votes on the school and town budgets. (With luck and an expeditious charter revision commission, all that will change next year.) But a common theme in the arguments of the school budget’s most stubborn opponents has been that the teaching profession is not a meritocracy but a comfortable club with well-appointed contract provisions and the ultimate professional luxury — tenure. Forget that some of these critics have not spent much time in a public school since they were kids and are largely uninformed about the strides that have been made over the years in effective teaching methods and curricula. The perception persists among them that teaching is a coddled profession.

The real benefit of the state Board of Education’s new evaluation requirements for teachers is not that it will help identify and address underperforming teachers (which is will), but that it will identify and highlight teaching competence and innovation that may now be routinely overlooked and dismissed by the communities that highly effective educators serve. In any enterprise, it is useful to root out liabilities. It is also useful to remember that assets may as well be counted as liabilities when they are forgotten or unrecognized. Only through a serious, honest, and transparent system of evaluation can public confidence once again become an ally of educators in their important work.

For this to happen, however, the state will have to support the process with the funds and resources so the new system of evaluation does not become just another unfunded state mandate. The legislature has allocated $2.5 million to support the “pilot” districts in this effort in the coming year. So far, nothing has been budgeted by the state for subsequent years, and Hartford is notorious for passing along inconvenient costs to Connecticut’s towns and cities. Imagine the irony of implementing this new tool to improve the overall quality of public school teachers only to have to lay off some of them in order to pay for more administrators charged with their evaluation.

In the end, the best way to get skeptical voters on board with enhancing educational excellence locally is not to be dumb about how we go about achieving that excellence.