Witewashing of the Education Debacle (PART 7)

Most jobs and especially career positions have an evaluation process to insure productivity and accountability by the employee. This process is not absent in education. Although parents may not realize it their children’s teachers undergo rigorous evaluations and are held accountable for earning professional development continuing education credits. This is not new. New teachers in CT are deemed at will employees, meaning they can be dismissed at any time without cause, until they have worked successfully for 40 consecutive months, excluding summer work opportunities, in a single district. By CT State Statute they then have attained “Tenure” earning the right to full protection in their job by a union. After all, if we are doing a good job we all want the security and compensation our contract promises? Teachers are, even after attaining tenure, heavily scrutinized through rigorous objective evaluation processes by school administrations. The process also requires the school administrators to provide the necessary training, support and corrective measures for any teachers not performing sufficiently. Don’t let stories in the media tell you education unions and tenure protects bad or ineffective teachers. A poor administration that fails to perform its contractual obligations for training, support and correction of developing teachers is more than at fault for enabling and empowering such teachers to remain in service. Teachers are after all human beings and subject to all if not more stresses than many people in other industries. There is no formula to calculate why or when anyone in any vocation may suddenly become bad or ineffective at a task. That is why accountability is so important. As for the “new teachers”, they too are only human. Although we have been able to map out the entire human genome I am completely unaware that the new teacher failsafe gene has been identified.