The Race to the Top (RTTT) Fund, President Obama's educational initiative, provides competitive grants to encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for more education reform. These include: merit pay for teachers, using test scores for evaluating teachers, increasing the number of charter schools, firing teachers, firing principals, closing underperforming schools, and bolstering alternative routes to teacher licensure.
Massachusetts is one of the states applying for the RTTT Fund. To increase its chances of being awarded the grant, the Commonwealth wants commitments from stakeholders, specifically local superintendents, local school boards, and local teachers’ union leaders. For a school district to participate in the RTTT funding, the district has to have a signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) from all three stakeholders because a fundamental component of RTTT is a change in the teacher evaluation system. The teacher evaluation system is to be locally developed, but must include the use of a student growth percentile as a component of the evaluation system that is based upon teacher performance.
The district has to have criteria in place for removing both tenured and non-tenured faculty based upon student performance, as well as the development and implementation of a teacher improvement system that supports educator improvement. Teachers will have as a component of their evaluation a measure of student performance based upon MCAS and other evaluation tools. Teachers can be removed for poor student growth after they have been offered and completed multiple opportunities for professional development, mentoring, etc. An additional part of the evaluation system is merit pay for highly effective teachers and principals. However, at this time we do not believe this component will be based solely upon student growth, but this will be a factor.
The NEA recently stated that the RTTT contradicts the Obama administration's pledge to give states more flexibility in how they improve schools. It said: "We find this top-down approach disturbing; we have been down that road before with the failures of No Child Left Behind, and we cannot support yet another layer of federal mandates that have little or no research base of success and that usurp state and local government's responsibilities for public education."
One serious question locally that needs to be considered. How will teachers who do not participate in MCAS testing annually be measured? We think that the Commonwealth will use this RTTT funding to implement additional MCAS testing in more grades. We know that the Commonwealth is planning on moving to an online delivery system for MCAS so that results will be available quickly, and that the state has piloted a platform called Galileo that facilitates testing across a variety of subject areas, so we believe that further testing components will be put into place to support additional measures of student growth.
I know this is a lot to digest, but it is important to our future as educators. Please send us your thoughts, suggestions, or comments on the Race to the Top funding on our blog or email so that the NBEA can be pro-active in our response as a stakeholder in this process.
Race to the Top
9 comments:
Lou, this sounds like union busting. Just say, "NO".
How can we be sure that test results are genuine? Is there a component that will stop some unfair testing environments? I'm stopping short of saying "cheating" BUT this may cause desperate administrators and/or staff to cross lines.I question some of the results from last year....
Umm, excuse me but what if a child doesn't maintain good attendance? If a student is not present in school, then the teacher cannot do his/her job. But yet they will still be held accountable when the student fails? What if the child refuses to work? Will parents accompany them to school and "make" them? Until they start holding negligent parents accountable, they have NO RIGHT to ask this of teachers because it is a large majority of those students of neglectful parents that are consistently underperforming. Enough is enough already; find another scapegoat. Find a solution that works. Give the grant to ROTCs. They can build a barracks and hire a dozen drill instructors. Make citizens out of them. What this RTTT proposes just opens the window to mass corruption and employee abuse. We do not live in an idealistic world. Public Education, meet Capitalism. Goodbye Morality.
"Race to The Top"????? Who will come in last place? Teachers.
I thought Obama was on our side? I am tired of government programs that are failures. It happens with every new administration.
I agree with the comment "This sounds like union busting. Just say "NO."
Also, I would be leery of anything coming from our new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.....no teaching background, only CEO status in the education field.
Sounds like a push for more charter schools and goodbye public schools and unions! What a mess! Why do we support these politicians when they turn their backs on educators after the election???
It's my understanding that the state would like the unions to sign off on the MOU but don't need the union signatures to apply for the grant.
I just read Monday's School Committee Agenda. Item number 8.g.
"Approval to sign an agreement with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that establishes a framework of collaboration, roles and responsibilities in support of Massachusetts in its implementation of an approved Race to the Top grant project.
I have a problem with linking ANYTHING to testing. What about the kids that just doesn't care? What about the teachers who come in early and leave late day after day? What about the staff members in this district who give up their time, energy, and money to help all of his or her students? Apparantly none of that would matter. Until this country realizes that teachers can not do this alone, that we need responsible parents to take positive actions with their kids, none of this should count towards your evaluation. They are pushing the good teachers out the door, and making a lot of young teachers leave the profession!
If all student achievement is measured by some form of testing, how would the growth of the very lowest special education students be measured? These students often take multiple years to achieve growth and much of their growth is not measured by tests because it is social or developmental. Will teachers want their jobs tied to these students? Probably not, unless the criteria for measuring growth takes these students into account and treats the teachers fairly.
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