Last fall, the Hillsborough County School District won a $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that will allow educators, administrators and the teachers union to create a model to measure teacher effectiveness and develop a teacher mentoring program. The District has already been using pay-for-performance incentives for the past couple of years, but the Gates money now puts that plan on steroids, with the likelihood that what comes out of the seven-year program will create standards that the rest of the nation will be able to emulate.
The grant comes as the Obama administration attempts to reconfigure the No Child Left Behind Act, with tough talk by the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan on teacher accountability that is earning praise from Republicans like Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich. That new tone led the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, to lay out a new approach for teacher evaluations, saying that a strong teacher development and evaluation system is crucial to improving teaching, and is essential for a fair and efficient due process system.
That need to improve standards is also the rage in Tallahassee this legislative session, and has been led by one man — John Thrasher. The former speaker of the house and close ally of former Governor Bush a decade ago is now enjoying a rebirthing as a GOP power broker. Elected last year in Jacksonville in a special election to replace the late Jim King in the state Senate, Thrasher unveiled a plan for education reform on the eve of the legislative session that received almost universal rebuke from unions, local school officials and Democrats, such as Miami Beach State Senator Dan Gelber, who says it "takes a sledgehammer to the teaching profession." It passed on a 21-17 vote in the Senate last week.
Among the many provisions in Senate Bill 6 (where debate began last week in the House on a companion bill) is a plan to eliminate teacher job security for new hires by putting them on a yearly contract until their fifth year, in which case they could only be renewed if they were deemed to be in one of the two top performing categories from the previous year.
The bill would also withhold state money from school districts that refuse to adopt teacher salary schedules based on merit pay — with those districts having to impose an extra tax to make up for lost funds, and requiring school districts to develop new end-of-course exams to judge the effectiveness of teachers who don't teach subjects covered by the FCAT (that test measures reading, writing, math and science).
St. Petersburg House Democrat Bill Heller says the bill is "unfriendly" to teachers and asks somewhat facetiously what they they ever did to torment John Thrasher. "It seems like every legislator has had one bad teacher in his or her life, and it's the bad teacher they want to get rid of," Heller, a longtime educator, says.
In floor debate last week, Democratic State Senator Dave Aronberg called the Thrasher plan a "runaway train that needs to be stopped." He also questioned how the state could be ranked as high as 8th in the country (by the publication Education Week) but still be in need of such radical change. He concluded, "We're shooting our missiles at the wrong target, and giving teachers another reason not to come to this state."
Aronberg proposed an amendment to the bill to have the state study what evolves out of the Gates Foundation work with Hillsborough County, but he was immediately shot down by Thrasher, who said the state has no time to "delay, delay delay." (However, Thrasher did allow an amendment that exempts Hillsborough from many of the provisions in SB 6 because of the Gates grant.)
Hillsborough County School Board member April Griffin agrees with Aronberg that Tallahassee should chill out this year and wait for data that will develop from the Gates-Hillsborough partnership. She says the reason Hillsborough was one of only four districts (out of over 16,000) in the country to be chosen by Gates is that the school district has already been doing "realistic" teacher evaluations and working with merit pay, which has been controversial with the teachers' unions historically.
But Hillsborough officials are the first to admit it didn't begin smoothly. A St. Pete Times study in February of 2008 showed that, after the first year of the plan, nearly 75 percent of the near 5,000 teachers who received merit pay worked at the county's more well-off campuses, while only 3 percent of teachers worked in low-income schools.
Jean Clements is president of the Hillsborough County Teachers Association. She said that the district studied why that disparity occurred, and made corrections the following year — such as separating teachers working in Title I schools from those that aren't — to insure that it wouldn't occur again.
Another factor that convinced the Gates Foundation to put its chips into the Hillsborough School District is what school board member Carol Kurdell calls the "synergy" between the union, superintendent MaryEllen Elia and school board members.
Union head Clements cites longevity as one reason why there's been a positive relationship between the union and the superintendent's office.
"We have superintendents who started as teachers," she said, referring to Elia and her predecessor, Earl Lennard. "As they moved through their career they saw the value of unions." Clements adds that it doesn't mean that there isn't friction on occasion, but "we've all worked as teachers. We know what works and what doesn't work."
The Thrasher bill says teachers hired after July 1, 2010 would work on a probationary contract for one year during which they could be fired without cause. Four years of annual contracts would follow for successful teachers, but rehiring after that would hinge on their performance ratings. The bill also says that, beginning in 2014, school districts will base 50 percent of all public school teacher salaries on student achievement. But with the Hillsborough/Gates plan, teachers will be assessed by three different criteria: 40 percent on student achievement, 30 percent on what is called a "pure" evaluator, and 30 percent on the judgment of that teacher's principal. Previously in Hillsborough, ratings were 100 percent driven by the principal.
Hillsborough County School Board member Jennifer Faliero says the problem with the previous system was the danger that the principal could be prejudiced in his or her opinion. "If you have student achievement and you have peer [review], that cancels out any bias there. So we believe this is a fairer way to get a more comprehensive evaluation of a teacher."
Mentoring programs will also be a key feature in the program, as the district looks at how to retain gifted new teachers.
So why won't Tallahassee wait and see what happens in Hillsborough? Sherman Dorn, the faculty union head at USF, says that John Thrasher's answer to critics would be, "'I may not know what's going on in classrooms, but education is the paramount issue of the state, and it's our obligation to provide oversight and supervise these local school boards.'"
Dorn says that SB 6 is a "heavy-handed strong-arm approach" that echoes Thrasher's actions of a decade ago when he eliminated the state's Board of Regents — a move that created such an uproar that state voters ultimately rejected it a few years later when they created the Board of Governors.
But though "repeal" is a popular term these days in our politics, don't expect any such effort to arise in Tallahassee. The only hope to kill the bill would be a veto from Governor Charlie Crist. But he has already said he supports it, and will sign it when it comes to his desk.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2010.