Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill was flabbergasted on Monday’s edition of The Gill Report – broadcast on Knoxville’s 92.3 FM WETR – regarding the repeated incompetence displayed at the Tennessee Department of Education.
Gill commented, “The Tennessee Department of Education has stepped in it again.”
He continued:
One of the things the Department of Education has had to set up under state law, it is a requirement of state law. Is a Pre-K and Kindergarten portfolio assessment program. Now apparently the Tennessee Department of Education failed to set up the program appropriately and now they’ve had some computer glitches that have caused them to not have the assessments of teachers done in an appropriate, timely or accurate way. And they’ve apparently randomly assigned one on a scale of five, to some teachers because they couldn’t figure out what to do so they just gave them one’s.
Now this is supposedly not going to effect the teachers retention of their job, their pay raises, or anything else. But a lot of teachers aren’t really believing that. Professional Educators of Tennessee has some more details about this whole controversy, you can find out more there. Meanwhile, the Tennessee Teachers Association, the teachers union, is apparently encouraging teachers, educators to file grievances with their local school systems to try and gin up some lawsuits.
They’re also encouraging them to file grievances with the state when there is really no grievance procedure because these teachers are employed by their local school systems they are not state employees. Nevertheless, the TEA is trying to stir up a controversy when there is a basis for controversy but there may not be a basis for lawsuits and grievances and those sorts of things.
But the bottom line is that once again the state of Tennessee, The Department of Education, has failed to properly do an assessment of either student progress or teacher progress the same way that they’ve blown the test process year after year, in recent years costing taxpayers millions of dollars by failing to abide by the law.
Well they’ve done it again where they fail to properly assess teachers and rather than throw out the process or figure out that they’ve got to do a better job of explaining to teachers what they should do and how to do it so that they can meet the standards, instead they’re just randomly assigning scores or assessments to teachers that are going to punish them in the process of keeping their jobs and getting pay raises.
Even if the state says there are not going to use those numbers, they are still going to be in the teachers records. And there is no business for the state of Tennessee to be this incompetence time and time and time again!
If Candice McQueen who is the Commissioner of Education in Tennessee is not responsible, then she needs to be firing the people under her who are responsible for doing this the right way.
The same way that a professional coach or a head college football coach has to at some point fire assistants if there not getting the job done. And it’s passed time to do so.
Listen to the full segment:
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