Saturday, January 16, 2010

Louisiana Public Education: A Takedown in the Making

Public education has been dealt a serious blow with the ruling from the BESE board on Tuesday. President Haynes testified at the meeting and gave an emotional appeal to BESE not to continue their assault. She appealed to them to rethink their ideas to tie teachers' evaluations to a 50% student score. If the board approves this measure of teacher effectiveness, many great teachers will be threatened with losing their jobs. Teachers' evaluations should be more complex in design and should account for many qualitative measures, not only one simple quantitative measure. There are many social and economic factors that can cause students not to score well, none of which have anything to do with the effectiveness of the teacher. LAE will continue to speak in one voice to endeavor to have our concerns heard and considered. Our voice is loud and strong and represents our members.

1 comment:

Renegade said...

I couldn't agree more! With a large population of these thugs in the public school system, there is no teacher in the world that can get through to them! They lack home training and a desire to do anything productive with their lives. It is unfair to punish hard-working teachers for a poor student's lack of motivation and/or parental support.

I currently have 2 children in the EBR Public School System (with two more headed there soon) and I have nothing bad to say about their teachers or schools. My only issue is that the thugs create disruptions in class and force teachers to spend too much time on discipline.

My wife and I both spend many hours volunteering for functions at our children's schools and find all of the staff to be quite professional and enjoyable to be around.

C'mon BESE - give our teachers a break!