So, you want to be a teacher. Fantastic!
Educating, be it at the primary or secondary level, is one of the noblest professions one can undertake. After earning your bachelor’s and master’s degrees and earning your certification, you should be more than qualified to mold minds.
But with the passage of Governor Bobby Jindal’s education reform, you’ll then want to seek employment at a private school or in another state.
The prime component of the reform’s teacher evaluation system, Compass, will do more to harm Louisiana teachers than any good the state plans it to do.
Now, everyone agrees students deserve the best teachers, but how can we judge who is or is not a great educator?
Before the passage of the reform, teachers would be evaluated solely by observation of their principal, who would judge whether or not teachers were adequately following their curriculum and effectively conferring information to their students.
Now, only 50 percent of evaluations are based on observation, with the other 50 based on standardized test scores and growth, meaning not only must students perform well on state tests, but they must have marked improvement for their teachers to be rated as good educators.
The three possible ratings a teacher can earn are highly effective, effective and ineffective.
This new method places an unfair burden on teachers, who are forced to rush through an entire year’s curriculum before spring, all in an effort to teach a test, as opposed to actually educating.
Imagine a class, almost equally divided between advanced students and average- to-low-achieving students. If the average students were to perform markedly better on the standardized test than the year prior, but the advanced ones were to perform the same, or even slightly poorer, that teacher would be labeled ineffective, regardless if the advanced students received high scores.
Two years of being labeled ineffective will earn you a lovely, well-written notice of termination, then you might as well throw your degrees in the trash because you are now out of a career.
What’s more, tenure is now given based on the Compass teacher ratings, as opposed to degree level or years of experience. Even then, only teachers rated highly effective can be eligible for tenure, and if an already tenured teacher is rated ineffective once, they are then moved to a probationary status.
Now, a Teach for America instructor who does not have to be a certified teacher can earn tenure over someone with a master’s degree and fifteen years of experience.
For those that do not know, TFA is a non-profit organization that gives recent college grads a five-week crash course in teaching before dropping them into a classroom and telling them to educate.
Awesome, right?
Wrong. What this will ultimately lead to is higher educated teachers taking jobs at private schools or moving out of state, leaving Louisiana students with pseudo-educators whose sole purpose is to teach how to take a standardized test.
However, this shift in favorability towards TFA instructors is unsurprising, given that the Governor’s newly handpicked state superintendent of education, John White, used to run Chicago’s TFA chapter before eventually ending up in Louisiana.
Everyone knows that our schools need help, and that students deserve better, but this new method of evaluation is going to screw good teachers out of careers and dissuade potentially good educators from entering the profession, leaving students to languish in mediocrity.
In fact, I encourage anyone seeking to be a teacher, or any teachers with their master’s young enough to start over to abandon Louisiana public
schools post-haste.
Your advanced degrees and certifications are now of no use to the state.