In light of the Race to the Top grant that the Galt Elementary District recently received, I want to take a moment to explain why the GFCCE and high school District did not apply for the same grant.
The process for applying for this round of Race to the Top (RTT) grants required, among other things, the signature of the local union president. The union hesitated to sign the application because the grant would have had a critical impact on our staff in ways that were not entirely clear and the details of which we simply did not have time to work out with the district. In other words, we would have been signing a contract without knowing the true impact on our members and on the services we supply ours students.
The most significant impact was that the grant would have required student scores on various standardized tests to be a “significant factor” in teacher evaluations. The use of test scores would apply to all teachers, not just to those teaching tested subjects, and we were not able to work out the many complex details regarding this critical change to how we are evaluated. Again, our signature would require us to adhere to the conditions of the grant without knowing how it would affect our members.
In addition to our concern with how test scores would be used as part of the evaluation process, we know that drastic changes to the California state standards and testing will be coming soon, and we are not sure what those changes will be and how they might impact student test performance. This doesn’t seem to be the most logical time to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores.
While the impact of student test scores is our most critical area of concern, there are others:
- Many education authorities, including Diane Ravitch, believe the high-stakes testing required by Race to the Top is bad education policy and, in fact, can have a serious detrimental effect on public education including teacher burnout, decimation of elective offerings, and a loss of creativity and passion among both students and teachers.
- The District has been unnecessarily difficult in negotiations over the past few years and we were not confident that negotiating critical changes in teacher evaluations to include student data as a “significant factor” would have been collaborative or productive. We are also unsure how much input we would have in how grant moneys would be spent, though we would bear the burden of implementation.
- In early September we asked the District to make a public endorsement of Prop 30. Though they met four times after this request, the Board did not make such an endorsement. This was a critical time for us, as a failure of Prop 30 would have devastated our district and public education. The GFCE sought collaboration on a critical funding issue and we did not get a response.
- Over the past years, our District has chosen to sit on a large ending balance while cutting important programs and services, and thus hurting our students. There is no indication that the District intends on spending down this balance, and it was not clear how a new grant would change that.
- Finally, the results of our member survey were unmistakable: the members we represent were not ready at this point to make this commitment given our past relationship with the District and our current feelings of job-related stress. Moving forward with the grant would not have alleviated your high levels of stress or improved the teaching environment.
We wish the Elementary District well as they work to implement their grant. I have told Dr. Roberts that the Federation is interested in talking when the next round of grants come out. We would need to be involved in the planning from the beginning and have a framework in place for evaluations and other elements of the grant before signing off. However, we will not move forward until we see substantial evidence our membership is prepared for the commitment.
Please let me know if you have any questions, as I would be happy to explain all of this in more detail.
Alex Bauer
President, GFCCE