By Dr. Jessica McCordIt’s a busy time for education in New Mexico. This represents my effort to help continue these conversations that will help the public stay informed and involved and communicate with their lawmakers as they discuss, debate, and make decisions about important legislation.
Senate Bill 205 is being sponsored by Sen. John Sapien – Please support this bill! It would allow our state to take both this and the next school year to evaluate the utility of the PARCC assessment to grade our schools and evaluate teachers. I beg our state legislators to take the time to consider how to ensure accountability in a way that respects and involves teachers, students, school leaders, parents, and community members.
If this measure is truly worth using, the evidence and feedback gathered while carefully considering the results, struggles, and challenges of this first year of PARCC data statewide will be worth the wait to gain the confidence and support of the public and the schools. If it is a terrible disaster, then at least it will not have ruined the lives of countless educators, their school communities, and ultimately the students themselves, with the tinkering and stubborn resolve of our state leaders.
The current atmosphere of competition and distrust spurred by the poorly implemented PARCC and accompanying teacher evaluations is destroying our professional learning communities and relegating teachers back to their closed-door classrooms (or out the door to other professions…and those leaving are not the “bad” teachers that the stereotypical political conversations are based upon. I’m sorry…it’s not ever going to be that simple to ensure good teachers are in every classroom).
Accountability is vitally important to assuring that teachers have a positive impact on student learning. I agree completely that teachers who do not do their job well should not remain in this profession. The current accountability processes are counterintuitive, however, and will not help to achieve our common goal of an excellent and equitable education for our students.
Teachers do not need to be bullied into doing the right thing for their students. They need support, such as useful, continuous professional development about how to assess students productively and how to use that information to improve instruction. School leaders need to be supported as instructional leaders who have the time and energy to help their teachers and evaluate them effectively…by being involved in their schools’ classrooms, not by being bombarded with paperwork and state-required, overused “data”.
PARCC will never provide the information schools need to become better, and the all-encompassing, time consuming, high-stakes focus on PARCC is stealing the value of real assessment and evaluation from education. PARCC is a snapshot; that is its purpose, and it should be treated as such in both time and effort expended. However, when used as the primary measure of the relationship between student’s learning and a teacher’s effectiveness, it will truly only ever be constricting and destructive for all involved. We have the important responsibility to change that course, and SB 205 would be a step in the right direction.
Moving forward after this year’s legislative session, there will still be much work to do. It is idealistic, but I believe that our elected officials need to take on the responsibility of reaching out to their constituents, and not just during campaign season. We don’t elect people to make all the tough choices for us. They are there for one purpose, and that is to represent the interests of those they serve. It does take mutual commitment to each other to hold up our ends of the deal. Legislators should hold regular, well-advertised meetings with their constituents to talk about legislative priorities (like education, among others). My fellow citizens, that means we have to show up and be involved.
I believe that if this were to happen consistently, it would have an enormous impact on the quality of our state legislation and the satisfaction the wider public feels in knowing their voices are genuinely being represented. Public opinion is not likely taken for its full worth at this time of year when people have to scramble to protest, or testify to the legislature in 5 minute intervals under immense pressure, write powerful letters that go largely unnoticed, and attend each legislative session when it is very clear that by the time the session rolls around our policymakers’ minds are most probably already made up, leaving the public feeling helpless and resigned to our fate until the next session comes around.
We need to be fully invested in what our government does in our name. We need to be informed and invited to the conversations around these important decisions. We are all responsible, and if we don’t start insisting on that involvement we will continue to have things done to us instead of with and for us. We have strength in our collective voices, and in coming together to hold our government officials accountable for our shared well-being and values.
I refuse to give up on our democratic process despite the enormous hurdles in our path. We have to decide that our collective futures are worth the time and effort it takes to be involved, and we must continue to make that decision every day…especially when we feel like it won’t matter because today might be the day that it does.
