Next year, thousands of Houston Independent School District teachers will be evaluated in part by student progress after the school board approved a policy to fire teachers whose students fall short on standardized tests.
In a heated meeting this month, the Houston school board voted to use a measure of student progress in evaluations of educators teaching core subjects in grades three through eight.
The vote was praised by parents, and protested by hundreds of teachers. The decision is a warning shot to more than 400 of the district’s underperforming teachers who could lose their jobs if they don’t improve, according to the Web site for radio station Majic 102.1.
Hallelujah.
It’s about time that a school board had the gumption to buck the status quo and implement meaningful reform with a focus on improving student learning. The current union-contrived tenure system has proven to produce far too many lackluster educators, with no incentive to improve. The HISD decision is a big step toward fixing the problem.
HISD Trustee Anna Eastman said the program “data has room to grow, but our kids deserve to have an effective teacher in every single classroom,” the radio station reported.
The board vowed to provide training and mentoring for weaker teachers, and reserve termination as a last resort. That was little comfort for the district’s two largest teachers groups, the Houston Federation of Teachers and the Congress of Houston Teachers.
“We do the best we can,” said middle school teacher Tuesdey Neal, the radio station reported. “I do not want to suffer and lose my job because I love what I do.”
Bill Perkins, a local businessman who attended the meeting, summed up our thoughts with an analogy to the airline industry.
“We have bad pilots. We know the results can be disastrous,” Perkins said. “We don’t have that many bad teachers, but we need to get rid of them.”
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten took the opportunity to condemn the board’s actions, despite a recent speech in which she called for linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.
“The plan has all the wrong components, and it’s one of the reasons why teachers and parents are opposed to standardized testing,” she said.
If Randi opposes the board’s decision, then we believe it surely has the potential to make a difference for Houston’s school kids.
We’re confident that the dozens of parents and business leaders who came to the meeting in support the new policy would agree.