Today, thanks to a front-page story in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I learned that State Senator Jane Cunningham, in a fit of spite, is willing to gut a program that affects 4000 preschool children. She wants to yank $11.8 million from the Missouri Preschool Project because she thinks that Kathy Thornberg of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (with the backing, incidentally, of the Commissioner of Education and the State Board of Education) has “defied” the legislature and, more to the point I suspect, the rampageous Senator Cunningham herself.

What did Thornberg do to fan Cunningham’s fury? She applied for federal preschool funding that would require the use of a Quality Rating System, or QRS, which the doctrinaire Ms. Cunningham claims is tantamount to “‘social engineering’ on children,” and would force “a ‘Kathy Thornburg one-size-fits-all’ mentality on child-rearing in Missouri.”

According to Cunningham, by applying for a federal Early Learning Challenge grant, “the state Board of Education has slapped us across the face, and we have nowhere else to go but the money.” Don’t you just feel the heat from her white-hot ego? Don’t dare defy crazy Queen Jane or it’ll be to hell with the kids. And all because a federal grant requires evaluative criteria based on what more impartial observers describe as “documented best-practice standards.”

Cunningham, of course, is all for evaluating performance when the criteria reflects her own personal prejudices. Witness the teacher evaluation mandates in her anti-tenure legislative efforts if you want to talk about imposing external, one-size-fits-all criteria. Take, for instance, this year’s effort to punish teachers and hobble teacher unions, SB806:

The bill also includes numerous mandates regarding teacher evaluation systems, such as requiring at least fifty percent of evaluations to be based on student test scores and prohibiting districts and employees from designing evaluation systems within collective bargaining negotiations.  The also repeals the minimum salary law for all teachers.

So standards are okay when they’re used to enforce Cunningham’s prejudices, but professionally developed educational benchmarks are a problem?

Do you maybe think somebody has a few control issues? Maybe little Janey needs to take a time out until she learns to play well with others.

Fortunately for us all, that’s just what’s going to happen. Cunningham has been redistricted out of office and will be gone after November (although I’m sure she’ll do whatever she can to regain some kind of fiefdom, elective or otherwise, from which she can meddle in Missourians’ lives). It does, however, seem like  even some fellow GOPers in the Senate might be getting tired of her high-handed approach:

Springfield Senator Bob Dixon strongly criticized Cunningham for running the bill [SB806] through her own general laws committee instead of it going to the education committee … “To try to bypass a committee that deals specifically with educations when we’re talking about an education bill … I just think that is … not unlike the substance that is referenced in the book of Nehemiah that was placed in a special part of the city after it is expelled from the back end of a camel,” he said.

(Teachers are the enemy? Not to most people. – promoted by Michael Bersin)

My home town paper, the Albany Ledger, recently ran a column by Senator Brad Lager titled “Quality Teachers Produce Quality State Results.” (I cannot provide a link to this column through the Ledger or through Sen. Lager’s Senate webpage.)

While I can’t argue with the headline, I’m not sure if quality state results are really at the heart of what I do as a teacher. None the less, the column was a typical constituent communication that relayed the Rhee-Sinquefield talking points about the abomination that is the Missouri Teacher Tenure Law of 1970.

I wasn’t too happy to read it, and have responded to the Senator.

I indicated that his column showed a lack of understanding of the Tenure Law. Let’s get this straight: Tenure does not guarantee a teacher a job. It guarantees due process. Administrators have the tools they need to remove poor teachers and replace them. If there is a fault to be found with the tenure process, it is with the carousel of administrators parading through most school districts, most for a short time, who kick the can down the road and do not process the necessary paperwork to move a poor teacher out of the district’s staff.

Short version: tenure makes the school district do its homework, too.

I am a tenured teacher, as is my wife, and as are several members of my immediate family. I work hard each day to provide my students with top-flight instruction and consider myself an asset to the teaching staff at my school. Through the years, have no doubt that without the protection of due process through tenure, ONE school board member with a bone to pick could have convinced three other board members to either reassign me or fire me. (Used to be two, until the law changed board memberships to seven.)

I asked the Senator, and I’ll ask you, gentle reader: Have you considered the impact on a community from a teacher with a long service history? Often, they are the most active, dependable people in their town. They own homes, contribute to the tax base, and are involved in church and civic organizations, all for the betterment of the community. They contribute a great deal to the identity of a community, and will often retire there. (My sixth-grade teacher tutored and mentored needy children in Albany well past retirement–almost up to the day of her passing, when in her late eighties.) My home town has an unbelievable number of retired teachers. They didn’t go there to retire, but the community embraced them and gave them the vote of confidence to stay and become a part of a larger family.

I’m not one of Sen. Lager’s constituents. I hope, however, readers of this blog site in NWMO will remind him that he owes his constituency the full story…and, it wouldn’t hurt to read the law before commenting on it.