My Final Statement on SB 191

I am glad that 29 of my fellow Democrats in the Colorado House of Representatives had the wisdom and strength to vote against Senate Bill 191. I am sad that of the 13 other Democrats who originally voted against the bill when it passed the Senate on 3rd Reading, only 7 others voted against it the second time on readoption (Boyd, Carroll, Keller, Sandoval, Schwartz, Tochtrop, and Whitehead). 
 
Before that final vote after the Senate agreed to concur with the House amendments to SB 191 and voted to readopt the bill, I read a letter and made a statement. 
 
The letter I read was one I received from a teacher who expressed the concerns that many teachers have expressed about the bill:
  • That because so much of teachers’ evaluations will be based on students’ scores on tests, it will cause even more concentration on “drill and kill” and “teaching to the test” than we have now, which will further narrow the curriculum and take away the joy of learning and teaching.
  • That the new system will drive the best teachers away from the schools with the most challenges, poor students and English language learners, leaving those struggling schools with mediocre teachers.
  • That teachers’ performance will be based on things they have little control over, their students’ efforts and their principal’s subjective judgment.
 
I pointed out that the amendments made in the House don’t fix the fundamental problems with this bill:
  • They don’t pay for the new staff that will be necessary to implement this new labor-intensive system of evaluation.
  • They don’t pay for the new assessments that we’ll need to measure growth in every subject that every teacher teaches in every school.
  • They don’t change the fact that we’ll be going hog-wild into the “Axis of Eval,” testing every student in every subject that every teacher teaches in every school.
  • They don’t pay for all the mentoring and coaching we’ll need to help teachers become more effective.
  • They don’t address the question of how small rural districts will find effective teachers to fill all their positions when they can’t even fill them now.
 
The amendments we were allowed to make in the Senate and the House don’t address the fundamental concern teachers have with the bill – that at its heart, it assumes that the main problem with public education is that there are too many ineffective teachers.
 
The amendments made in the House and the Senate are lipstick on a pig. Oink!