Evaluating and Devaluating Flint Area Teachers



Chicago Teachers are fighting harder for changes in how they are being evaluated than they are for a nominal pay raise. In a nutshell; the contracts, benefits and income of a teacher is now being based on an evaluation of their talents. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT!

Think about it as if you were a professional baseball coach or manager and you and all the coaches in the league were given a mandate that each of the players on your team, must hit .300, must hit 22 home runs, and must steal at least 22 bases! WOW! What a team you would have! But does it and can it happen? NO! Not in your wildest dreams. WHY? Because each of your players have different talents, both physically and mentally, each have different abilities and strengths, some are great infielders, some good hitter with the speed to steal a base, others hit massive home runs.

Now think about a classroom. The teacher is given a large group of children, each having different backgrounds. Some of the children come from homes were their parents’ actively prepare and help their children for school. Other parents have so many problems of their own, like putting food on the table, struggling with drug additions, and living in the perpetual circle of generational poverty or generational violence that preparing their child for school, let along giving them proper nurturing, is far from being one of their priorities!

Ladies and gentlemen, put yourself into a teachers’ position. Understand that all our schools and classrooms are different from another, yet even now, the influx of children of poverty, children with limited parental attention, is increasing within all our school systems! Teachers in Grand Blanc over the recent years are seeing more and more troubled children as their students. Even charter schools who for a time were secretly selective of the students they allowed in, have now, due to there need to increase their student population, thereby, increasing their profits, have to deal with this problem just like Public Schools have. They’re all seeing what the inner city schools deal with on a massive base every-single-day. LANSING, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!

What has the government done to correct this? They’ve connected their funding to evaluations of schools and school teachers based on every child having the potential of hitting .300, 22 home runs, and stealing at least 22 bases! WHAT!

Okay, I am not saying teachers and schools should not be evaluated and given goals to achieve within grade levels and overall testing scores. It’s how it’s being use to evaluate the teachers that is unfair.

I will suggest here as I have suggested before, that evaluation of teachers should not be done on student test scores, but be done by their peers and administrators. Those are the people at ground zero that can evaluate a teacher. Yes, for a time those administrators had their hands tied by the unions and others to actively remove poor performing teachers. That is not the case anymore.

The evaluation system being put in place is very, very bias. It’s base on good students, ready to learn, sitting within the classroom. That is not the reality of it!

Simply stated, the government looked at this situation and took the most simplest and simplistic route in dealing with it.  Connecting a teacher’s performance on an unrealistic, pie in the sky premise; that all children have the potential of hitting a home run! Sorry people, its time to see the truth, the awful truth, that some children do not have the potential of hitting a home run. Heirisy, you say! “Don’t we all have the potential to become President of the United States, or a chance to be an astronaut?!” We all do have a chance, but it gets slimmer and slimmer as poor parenting skills dominate a child’s life.

Don’t judge a teacher on what the world has done to a child, judge a teacher on their work in overcoming it!