Senate Bill 191, Principal and Teacher Effectiveness

The bill’s long title is: Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Educator Effectiveness. From the beginning of April when I first saw a draft of SB 191, until Friday, April 23, when I voted on it the Senate Education Committee, I spent hours and hours negotiating with Senator Johnston (its main sponsor), the other Democrats on the Senate Education Committee, and the lobbyists for the Colorado Education Association about provisions of the bill.  SB 191 had apparently been through numerous revisions by the time I saw it and had been “toned down” a lot. All of the negotiating on the bill led to numerous amendments put on the bill in committee, many of which I didn’t get credit for in the press because of my work behind the scenes, but which made the bill much better.
 
The bill attempts to do “tenure reform” – and thus has created what the Denver Post aptly called “a firestorm of support and opposition,” being the biggest “hot potato” in the education community since Governor Owens’ SB 186 (which mandated CSAPs every year from grades 3 to 10 and used the tests to rate schools on the SAR, School Accountability Report – causing widespread dread and loathing of CSAP).  I received hundreds of e-mails from teachers begging me to kill SB 191. On April 23, hundreds of them stood in the pouring rain on the west steps of the Capitol protesting the bill.
 
The main things the bill does are to create a new system of performance evaluation of teachers and principals based on their effectiveness; to base 50% of the evaluation on “growth” of students on assessments; to utilize evaluations to remove teachers’ permanent status (referred to as “tenure” but technically called “non-probationary” in state law) if they have two consecutive years of evaluations showing that they are ineffective; to require educators to be rated “effective” for three years in order to gain or regain non-probationary status; to require that the principal and teacher mutually consent before a teacher can be placed in a school; and to allow districts to put displaced teachers on unpaid leave for up to two years.
 
I pushed hard for the following amendments, which were passed by the Senate Education Committee:
  • Listing the purposes of the council in the bill that had been stated in the Governor’s executive order creating the council, to ensure that the council’s mission remains the same, since the whole bill is built upon a presumption of these purposes.
  • Making the council an official state council, so it cannot be dissolved by the future Governor before its work is done (i.e., defining educator effectiveness and creating rubrics for performance evaluations, which are the key elements that must be in place before teachers can lose their non-probationary status based on ineffectiveness).
  • Listing the members of the council from the Governor’s executive order – so that the balance of educators and non-educators remains the same – and ensuring that the current members appointed by Governor Ritter will remain as members, giving continuity to the work they are doing.
  • Delaying the time that the council must make its recommendations from December 2010 to March 2011, so it has an additional 3 months to make its vital recommendations.
  • Delaying the time that the State Board of Education has to complete the rules it must base on the council’s recommendations, from March 2011 to September 2011, so it can go through its regular rule-making process, including holding public hearings on the draft rules, rather than rushing into making emergency rules.
  • Giving the Legislature more authority to review the SBE’s rules, by doing the rules review in a bill separate from the regular rules review bill, and delaying the date for passage of this bill from January 30 to February 15, so there will be enough time for legislators to adequately review it.
  • Expanding the definition of “educator” to include “other licensed personnel” besides teachers and principals, because educators like assistant principals and instructional coaches are considered “licensed personnel” in the part of state statute that the bill amends and because they have a vital role in instruction.
  • Ensuring that evaluations of educators take into consideration factors that include, but are not limited to, special education, mobility, and classrooms in which 95% of the students are “high-risk.” I proposed an amendment to include class size in this, but it didn’t pass.
  • Clarifying several provisions in the bill, including making the wording consistent throughout and ensuring that the current provisions in the law won’t be repealed before the new provisions take effect.
 
Despite all of these amendments being passed, I voted against the bill. I said that I could not, in good conscience, vote for it. My first reason is that it is funded by hopes of receiving “gifts, grants, and donations.” Neither the state nor districts currently have assessments to determine students’ growth in every subject that is taught in every school – yet half of the new educator evaluation system is based on these assessments. The cost of creating such assessments has been estimated between $80 million and $140 million. Some may say that Race to the Top would be the grant to provide this funding, but even if Colorado “wins” Round 2 of the competition for that grant (we were 14th out of 16 finalists in Round 1), the full amount won’t be over $175 million, and much of that is already needed for other aspects of our proposed plan to implement Race to the Top. 
 
My second reason is that the bill assumes principals will have the time to perform the evaluations on all teachers that it requires. Although one principal who testified said that she spends much of her time in classrooms with her teachers and does her other “office work” at night, most other principals have described their job as requiring hours of time during the school day dealing with discipline, financial issues, coordination of programs, meetings with other district staff, etc. And there is still the unanswered question about who will do the evaluations of principals’ effectiveness – will superintendents now have to spend hours and hours in all of their schools observing principals?
 
Finally, the bill neither creates the best solution for “fixing tenure” nor provides the best way to improve educators’ effectiveness. If the real goal of the bill is to help districts get rid of bad teachers more quickly and easily, there are changes to the dismissal law that could be made. If the goal is to improve the effectiveness of educators, research is clear that providing more professional development, mentoring, and collaboration are what work.
 
The state has just reduced funding for schools by $260 million. With staff being laid off in schools, programs being eliminated, class sizes being increased, and schools being closed in some districts, I can’t see how spending money to write new tests is the wisest use of districts’ funds. The bill would also presumably require districts to pay for training for principals to perform the new evaluations, as well as a considerable amount of money for tracking all the new data. It’s an unfunded mandate and the wrong “solution” to the wrong “problem.” To someone like me who was a teacher for 20 years, I hear the message that the biggest problem with public education is that there are many ineffective teachers that need to be fired. I would prefer to see a bill that has an innovative way to help the many students who come to our schools without the experience of quality preschool, without three nourishing meals a day, without parents who are able to be involved their education, or without enough one-on-one instruction.