The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released guidelines this morning for districts impacted by the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding a Missouri law which allows students in failing districts to improve their education by enrolling in neighboring, more successful schools. See here: Student Transfer Guidance for Unaccredited Schools. There is no doubt that implementing these transfers will be difficult for administrators. And the guidelines released by DESE are a good effort to help districts think about implementation.

Districts, however, shouldn’t confuse one important guideline with actual state law. In particular, paragraph 4 of DESE’s guidelines recommends a non-discriminatory method for receiving districts to determine which students to accept and which not. It states as follows:

(4) If a school district does not have sufficient capacity to enroll all pupils who submit a timely application, the school district should institute an admissions process to ensure all applicants an equal chance of admission, except that a school district may give preference for admission to siblings of children who are already enrolled in the school district under this section.

However, §167.241 does not make a “sufficient capacity” exception. Its last sentence provides very clearly that, “Each pupil shall be free to attend the public school of his or her choice.” Full statute pasted below. There’s also no “receiving district’s recalcitrance” exception to this statutory right.  As a result, there can be no education lottery under §167.241. Administrators in receiving districts are going to have to figure out how to serve these new students seeking a better education.

To DESE’s credit, the guidelines do not take an explicit position on whether these lotteries comport with §167.241. Instead, the absence of any explicit position leads me to believe that paragraph 4 may have been crafted with the realization that some receiving districts may deny access under an “impossibility” argument and DESE wanted to be sure that , at the very least, receiving district’s which deny students only do so under the fairest policy possible. 

To the extent a receiving district is going to flagrantly flout state law by closing their doors to transfer students, I believe this is the best policy. DESE’s “equal chance” policy ensures that decisions aren’t made on improper bases such as income, race, familial status, neighborhood, politics, athletics, or previous academic results. But any district which adopts the “equal chance” policy is only going to do so after violating state law – and that’s unacceptable. The people of Missouri expect better from public institutions.

District not accredited shall pay tuition and transportation, when–amount charged.

167.131. 1. The board of education of each district in this state that does not maintain an accredited school pursuant to the authority of the state board of education to classify schools as established in section 161.092 shall pay the tuition of and provide transportation consistent with the provisions of section 167.241 for each pupil resident therein who attends an accredited school in another district of the same or an adjoining county.

2. The rate of tuition to be charged by the district attended and paid by the sending district is the per pupil cost of maintaining the district’s grade level grouping which includes the school attended. The cost of maintaining a grade level grouping shall be determined by the board of education of the district but in no case shall it exceed all amounts spent for teachers’ wages, incidental purposes, debt service, maintenance and replacements. The term “debt service”, as used in this section, means expenditures for the retirement of bonded indebtedness and expenditures for interest on bonded indebtedness. Per pupil cost of the grade level grouping shall be determined by dividing the cost of maintaining the grade level grouping by the average daily pupil attendance. If there is disagreement as to the amount of tuition to be paid, the facts shall be submitted to the state board of education, and its decision in the matter shall be final. Subject to the limitations of this section, each pupil shall be free to attend the public school of his or her choice.

Dear Editor:

It has been greatly disappointing to read your recent editorials on education legislation in our state capitol. Rather than discuss the actual contents of any legislation, you seem content to use ad hominem attacks and merely assume that opponents of reform legislation have the moral high ground. It is obvious from your commentary, however, that you have not reviewed what was actually in my amendment to SB 125.

The HCS for SB 125 would have created a statewide teacher evaluation system, at least 33 percent of which would have been based upon student academic growth. The bill specified that student academic growth must be measured by the value each teacher adds to a student’s learning. This is possible through new technology and data analysis, which allows educators to chart individual student academic growth year-to-year. It’s also eminently fair. This value-added model ensures that teachers are not penalized if they draw a class of students who have below-average achievement at the beginning of a school year. The reciprocal is also true. Teachers who are assigned a class of students with above-average do not unfairly benefit from their draw. In addition to student academic growth, the annual evaluations may include student surveys, multiple classroom observations by master teachers, administrators, or other professionals, and other measures aligned with student growth.

In your first editorial, published May 16, you assert that Sen. Nasheed’s support of teacher evaluation legislation is connected to enemies of President Obama. In fact, the opposite is true: there’s a growing national bi-partisan and cross-ideological consensus that teacher evaluations should be used as an effective tool to reward the best teachers and encourage other teachers to improve. Don’t believe me? Ask President Obama, who has said that “fair, rigorous evaluations for teachers and leaders” should “serve as a foundation for connecting educator performance with differentiated professional development, compensation, and career advancement.”

Indeed, the statewide teacher and administrator evaluation system which would have been implemented through my amendments to SB 125 are similar to systems championed by President Obama himself, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.  

Why is there growing widespread bi-partisan and cross-ideological support?

Because new research shows that, when done properly, teacher evaluations can better identify those teachers most likely to make a real difference year-after-year in the lives of students than any other measure. The non-partisan, non-ideological Gates Foundation conducted the largest study on teacher effectiveness in American history andfound the following:

Teaching is too complex for any single measure of performance to capture it accurately. Identifying great teachers requires multiple measures…The challenge is to combine measures in ways that support effective teaching while avoiding such intended consequences as too-narrow a focus on one aspect of effective teaching…The MET project’s report Gathering Feedback for Teaching showed that equally weighting three measures, including achievement gains, did a better job predicting teachers’ success (across several student outcomes) than teachers’ years of experience or master’s degrees.^[1]

In addition, the Foundation found that assigning 33 to 50 percent of teacher effectiveness scores to results on student achievement was the optimal amount:  

Our data suggest that assigning 50 percent or 33 percent of the weight to state test results maintains considerable predictive power, increases reliability, and potentially avoids the negative consequences from assigning too-heavy weights to a single measure.^[2]

The great irony of the Gates Foundation report is that, despite the reactionary opposition of teacher unions, it supports the idea that “teaching to the test” is harmful to children. The Gates report finds that evaluations should not rely too heavily on student test scores, but that it must rely on them for a significant proportion of the overall measure if the evaluations are meant to be reliable measures of teacher performance.   

Another irony is that my amendment would have done more to protect good teachers than the current tenure system. The reason is simple: as teacher unions often argue in the capitol, tenure is simply the right to a fair hearing at which the teacher has the opportunity to present evidence of why they shouldn’t be fired. If that’s the case, my amendment would have provided good teachers with all of the evidence they needed to prevent arbitrary termination. In other words, had my amendments passed, a good teacher would have years of good evaluations. If an administrator tried to fire that teacher without a good reason, the teacher would have years of evidence to present to save their job.

Finally, it’s worth noting that by the time SB 125 reached the floor for a vote, my amendment was stripped down to only evaluations for administrators. That stripped-down amendment would have required that at least 33 percent of the evaluations for building administrators be based on student achievement. It also capped the percentage based on evaluations to the level used by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to judge school performance. It also would have required parental input and confidential teacher surveys so that teachers could give honest assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of building principals.    

Presenting SB 125 in the House with Sen. Nasheed Watching

Though I do not always agree with her, Sen. Nasheed is a champion for her constituents. On this issue, she stands tall with conservatives like myself and liberals like President Obama and Mayor Emanuel in working to make education better for students and parents who want nothing more but a chance at a better life.

There is no doubt that improving education is one of, if not the most important issue your readership faces. As such, I challenge you to engage on the actual substance of my amendment to SB 125 which was defeated on the House floor by actually publishing this letter. Your attacks on teacher evaluations and Sen. Nasheed are attacks on both the Obama administration and conservative education reform governors – whether you know it or not. Rather than engage in personal attacks, I challenge you to explain to your readers why you disagree with President Obama, Mayor Emanuel, Gov. Christie, Gov. Jindal, and Gov. Jeb Bush on teacher evaluations.

Yours in service,

Rep. Jay Barnes