Roach challenges RINEA’s Walsh
Friday, October 22, 2010
The question I posed to NEARI Executive Director, Bob Walsh, I’ll pose to you:
Do you support greater accountability for teachers' performance? Why or why not??
Before we get to Walsh’s answer let’s think about why accountability is or is not important in our schools. Without a system of accountability for our teachers, teachers would be free to do whatever they pleased in the classroom. In a vacuum, that’s not inherently bad but we definitely want the level of education received by all children to be within a specific range not like the educational gulf between schools like Central and Classical. While all of the blame/success should not be put upon teachers, we need to have a systematic way of evaluating their performance and definitely paying them (or not) for that performance. So let’s see what Walsh had to say about accountability:GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST
I support accountability for teachers. The "greater" part of the question depends on the standards currently in place, which vary district by district, and the use and enforcement of the standards, which also varies greatly. In the districts represented by NEARI, the negotiated evaluation instrument, combined with the existing tenure law, which essentially means that teachers are at-will employees during their first three years of full-employment, and can be dismissed with just cause after that, seems sufficient. I do remain highly skeptical of the use of student test scores in individual teacher evaluations, and believe that concept will fall under its own weight.
Walsh does something interesting there that I hope you don’t miss. On the one hand he “supports” accountability but only during the first three years before they reach tenure and then “can be dismissed with just cause”. I think he’s missing the point of my question. Performance accountability doesn’t simply go one way in terms of bad teachers can be dismissed, but the other way in that very good teachers can be applauded and compensated for their exception work. I don’t disagree with Walsh that standards vary by district, but teachers work within whatever standards they are in and can be judged by those standards.
I think folks like Walsh like to say that standards vary and therefore we can’t really hold all teachers accountable so that they don’t have to deal with post year 3 accountability measures. But imagine if you worked a job for 3 years and unless you just decided to collect a paycheck and never go to work, you had a job? That’s essentially what Walsh is advocating as a good system. But, really is that good enough for our kids or their future?
Shouldn’t teachers be held accountable in the same way other employees are, compensated for that work and/or terminated because of a lack of performance? If you think I’m being too harsh, let me know, but when less and less children are performing at grade level something seems to be wrong with the system.
Don Roach, MINDSETTER™, lives in Cranston with his family and is in management with a Boston-based transportation firm.
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