CMS’ Nuclear Option
Or how to blow up teachers, scorch parents and burnout students; call it what you will, it’s all part and parcel of Gorman & Company’s wonderful world of control central. In this case, it’s CMS running to Raleigh to get legislation approved that would allow the district to pull the trigger on its coveted teacher pay for performance initiative, without the approval of teachers.
The district already has a foothold that would allow it to revise the teacher pay scale, but it would require formal buy-in from a majority of teachers. The bill introduced this week by Rep. Ruth Samuelson, a Mecklenburg Republican, would bypass that condition.
School board member Trent Merchant tells the uptown paper that CMS is still committed to crafting a plan that could win teacher approval, but the new legislation would be a “nuclear option” if it can’t.
“When we started talking about this three years ago, we said it would be done with teachers, not to teachers,” Merchant says. “Right now it seems like teachers feel like something is being done to them. Right now it feels adversarial.”
So I’m certain tossing around threats about using a “nuclear option” if CMS can’t strongarm, er, convince enough teachers to support performance pay, that’ll help make it feel a whole lot less adversarial.
Most teachers I talk with have no problem with performance pay; they want to embrace it. It weeds out bad teachers who are often hanging onto jobs based on seniority and credentials instead of merit, while rewarding good teachers who show results in the classroom.
But the path CMS is headed down, critics argue, is paved with ambiguous, confusing and largely untested metrics that would be used to judge that performance and set that pay. A comprehensive study of performance pay done by Vanderbilt University, in fact, showed little demonstrable benefit in student achievement levels.
Central to the CMS scheme is a questionable “value-added” scale that CMS is developing to help gauge teacher performance that tosses into the mix everything from students’ past academic performances, gender and age to their social and home environments and their predicted future academic success.
Part and parcel of the performance pay initiative is a whole slate of new tests for students that are designed to help evaluate their teachers’ effectiveness. Scheduled to roll out this spring, there are 52 new tests in all for grades K-12 that cost the district about $2 million to create, along with another nearly $3 million in next year’s budget for the performance pay initiative. And let’s not forget the $300,000 it’s costing for administrators and bureaucrats to oversee the whole whiz-bang testing process.
Teachers and parents alike are balking at the barrage of new tests, with some of the later threatening to pull their kids from school during the testing period and launching an online petition in protest.
Teachers are in a similar uproar. In a “call-to-action alert” sent to her colleagues last night, Classroom Teachers Association president Judy Kidd simultaneously criticized the new “nuclear option” legislation that was introduced this week, as well as what looms in store on the teacher/student horizon:
I encourage all teachers, parents, and community members to write to as many of the electorate as possible emphasizing that this bill is NOT in the best interest of students of CMS, teachers of CMS and therefore the economic stability of Mecklenburg County.
The amount of instructional time in the critical lower grades, Kindergarten, First, Second, and Third grades alone should be a deterrent to passage. Teachers in these grade levels must administer the tests one on one (Teacher/student) requiring a minimum of 1.25 hours of instructional time per student. Multiply that by the number of students in the class (25 or More) and multiply that per quarter for formatives and then summative tests resulting in almost a month of instruction devoted to testing alone. Instruction becomes secondary to testing.
These tests are not meant to help students learn nor are they an effective means to determine teacher effectiveness. A nationally normed test would do a better job as well as cost substantially less than the >44 administrators in Accountability (none of which are paid on a teacher salary not to mention the cost of all of the support necessary to create all of these inadequate testing measures). A nationally normed test would allow us to compare the performance of our students to students around the state and country.
In standard CMS fashion, the district had responded from its Ed Shed bunker by releasing a five-minute video message from Gorman encouraging teachers to get more involved in the performance pay process.
At the very least, with a nearly $2 million, in-house PR department, you’d think CMS could produce some better spin. Or maybe they figure, why bother; what with a nuclear option and all in its pocket.
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