Mixed messages from legislature

Greg Mild at Plunderbund delves into the 3rd grade reading guarantee and discovers that it's provisions could potentially cost teachers $17,000 out of their own pocket.

The same Ohio legislators who sought to reduce teacher compensation through Senate Bill 5 last year and who have cut public school funding (including to the Ohio Department of Education), included a requirement in the 3rd Grade Guarantee that will cost individual teachers over $17,000 each — most likely an out-of-pocket expense.
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Absent the revisions (where was ODE when this law was being passed in the first place?), all teachers working with students who fall under this law’s provisions will be required to have a reading endorsement as part of their teaching license.

Greg goes on to detail the costs.

But, let's back away from the details for a moment to look at the underlying policy itself. If the legislature truly believes that licensure is not one of the best ways to measure a teachers effectiveness, why then are they relying upon a license in the case of the 3rd grade reading guarantee?

Why are they not instead mandating that a principal assigns the most highly rated teacher to the task of providing 3rd grade reading remediation, rather than some potential slacker with a license?

Talk about mixed messages. Why would any teacher bother to go to the time and expense of getting this license, when there is clear policy that it bares no relationship to pay in the eyes on the legislature?

The good, the bad and the uncertainty

Following up on our earlier piece, of experts warning of the dangerous of using student test results to evaluate teachers, Greg at Plunderbund brings into view the notion that HB153 also calls for the use of test results to evaluate principals. This brings forth the uncomfortable connundrum of having a faulty grading system grade principals as "unsatisfatory" and then having those very same "unsatisfactory" principals be responsible for evaluating teachers. As Greg notes, with a bit of math

Crunch the numbers with these components in place and we end up with 797 head principals and 412 assistant principals being categorized as “unsatisfactory” who will be assigned the responsibility for evaluating an estimated 22,000 teachers. Now, we don’t know the evaluation category of all of those teachers, but put yourself in the place of one of those professionals who is expected to take advice from an “unsatisfactory” leader. Wouldn’t you be a bit skeptical?

It's time that lawmakers start to get the sense that education is a team sport, not one of individual competition.