JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — After a summer plagued by a rocky student transfer process and a legislative session that featured multiple votes on polarizing education reform measures, House and Senate lawmakers are gearing up for legislative fixes across a wide swath of issues relating to public education.
In back-to-back hearings, the Joint Committee on Education and the House Interim Committee on Education discussed teacher tenure and a planned tour of schools across the state by statewide lawmakers, as well as a coming hearing about school accreditation and student transfers.
The Joint Committee on Education, chaired by Rep. Mike Lair, R-Chillicothe, focused on teacher tenure and possible reforms to the lifetime teacher tenure provided to Missouri public school teachers after five years of successful job performance.
“I have a problem with teacher tenure,” committee member and state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, said. “If a student is not given the tools they need to perform in our schools or a global economy, then that teacher should be fired immediately.”
Nasheed, who sponsored legislation last year eliminating tenure and calling on stricter evaluations for principles — the primary evaluators of teachers and their tenure — told The Missouri Times that she would offer the same measures again this year after last year’s measured failed.
While some committee members lauded tenure as a mechanism keeping poor teachers in schools without proper repercussions for bad performance, supporters of tenure said administrators could, and do, terminate poor teachers when it’s necessary.
“In schools, among teachers, tenure isn’t even discussed — it’s a non-issue,” Mike Wood, legislative director of the Missouri School Teachers Association, said. “Teachers don’t walk around making changes to their day-to-day teaching just because they suddenly got tenure. The discussions of who has tenure or who doesn’t or what that means, it’s just not part of the daily lives of educators.”
Missouri National Education Alliance spokesperson Otto Fajen echoed these remarks, saying the legislature should focus on making sure principles are going through the proper process of giving out, or revoking, tenure.
“A well-trained administrator can identify a poor teacher, offer them opportunities to succeed and if they [have gone] through the process of recommending termination,” Fajen said. “The process is largely dependent on the administrator and having a principle for example, who understands the process, who knows what to document and how, and who can communicate effectively with those educators.”
The Missouri School Boards Association associated executive director of advocacy, Mike Reid, told the committee they support reform to the tenure system and said his organization supports the elimination of lifetime teacher tenure in favor of multi-year employment contracts. Reid argued that the move would make the hiring and firing process for educators more fluid and could save local districts — who are responsible for the cost of terminating a teacher which can include legal fees should there be an official appeal — money and resources.
The House Interim Committee on Education is planning a bus tour near the end of the month, which will include stops in Saint Louis, Cape Girardeau, Poplar Bluff, Branson and Joplin. A later date has also been added for the Kansas City area. The tour will consist of public meetings before the committee. Committee chair Steve Cookson, R-Poplar Bluff, said the primary purpose was to listen to possible solutions offered by citizens and gauge which issues are most important.
“We’re a diverse state so people will want to talk about different things in different place,” Cookson told The Missouri Times. “We don’t just want people to complain, we want them to offer us their ideas and solutions, we want to leave the Capitol for a while and interact with the ‘real world’ if you will.”
The committee identified nine areas of focus for their bus tour, which they voted on in their last meeting. The issues, according to committee documents, include: transfer of students and a statewide plan for addressing persistently low achieving and failing school districts, early childhood education, quality educator evaluations and quality educators preparation programs, school calendar and increased hours of instruction, remediation and acceleration, common core standards, virtual schools and technology in the 21st century, school safety including bullying and harassment, parent-community-school relationships and transparency and finally, wrap-around services and community education.
The tour begins Monday, Sept. 23.
Collin Reischman was the Managing Editor for The Missouri Times, and a graduate of Webster University with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism.
