State Rep. Jay Barnes, a Republican from Jefferson City who is vice chair of the House education committee, sent us a 1,000-word response to the past two weeks of coverage of Senate Bill 125, introduced by state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed (D-St. Louis), and the House Committee Substitute for the bill introduced by Barnes.
“Rather than discuss the actual contents of any legislation, you seem content to use ad hominem attacks and merely assume that opponents of reform legislation have the moral high ground,” Barnes writes.
As a matter of fact, the EYE did not discuss the legislation in detail. Our interest was in Nasheed bullying a fellow black Democrat from St. Louis, state Rep. Michael Butler, on the floor of the House – and doing so on behalf of legislation favored by ideologues (such as Rex Sinquefield) and their lobbyists who are, in our opinion, well-established, relentless enemies of public education and the professionals who teach it.
These alleged “ad hominem attacks” – “ad hominem,” by the way, is Latin for “against the man,” meaning an argument made against your opponent, rather than against your opponent’s position – must refer to the EYE’s snide allusions to Sinquefield. Perhaps Barnes is a new reader of this column and this paper, but our position against Sinquefield’s policies on public education are so well established they scarcely bear repeating.
However, if Barnes wants to discuss “the actual contents” of his legislation, we can do that too.
Evaluating evaluations
Barnes’ House Committee Substitute (HCS) for SB 125, he claims, “would have created a statewide teacher evaluation system, at least 33 percent of which would have been based upon student academic growth. The bill specified that student academic growth must be measured by the value each teacher adds to a student’s learning. This is possible through new technology and data analysis, which allows educators to chart individual student academic growth year-to-year. … In addition to student academic growth, the annual evaluations may include student surveys, multiple classroom observations by master teachers, administrators, or other professionals, and other measures aligned with student growth.”
The EYE has been reporting on a difference of policy opinion between two Democrats, Butler and Nasheed, both with districts in the city of St. Louis. Barnes’ data-wonking might sound good in the halls of the Show-Me Institute, but not so much in the St. Louis Public Schools, where the work in question is actually being done.
“Teacher evaluations already exist within the St. Louis Public Schools and do not improve teacher quality,” Butler says. “All evaluations do are inform the administration who is doing well and who isn’t; administrators already know this. Evaluations occur after student learning has occurred and do not help improve student achievement.”
Obama vs. Obama
Barnes – who seems to have read The American enough to know we are generally supportive of President Barack Obama and his policies – thinks Obama is on his side, not ours. Butler disagrees.
“There’s a growing national bi-partisan and cross-ideological consensus that teacher evaluations should be used as an effective tool to reward the best teachers and encourage other teachers to improve,” Barnes writes. “Don’t believe me? Ask President Obama, who has said that ‘fair, rigorous evaluations for teachers and leaders’ should ‘serve as a foundation for connecting educator performance with differentiated professional development, compensation, and career advancement.’”
Butler also sees an opportunity to improve conditions in public education, based on this Obama quote – just not the half of the quote that affirms teacher evaluations, which are already in place in SLPS.
“Notice the quote that Barnes has used from President Obama,” Butler writes: “teacher evaluations ‘serve as a foundation for connecting educator performance with differentiated professional development, compensation, and career advancement.’ Since, SLPS already has a teacher evaluation, and has for years, public school advocates are working for the professional development, compensation and career advancement opportunities.”
Ignoring solutions from educators
This touches upon a direct criticism levied against Barnes and his allies by the EYE which Barnes did not respond to.
In the May 16 EYE, Butler said that House Speaker Tim Jones, a Republican “birther” from Eureka, and his allies for “education reform” like Barnes “have ignored all of the solutions from actual educators in the building. Bills filed by educators haven’t even been given a hearing, and none have been given the chance for a vote. As a result citizens, superintendents, teachers and legislators from across the state are rejecting their terrible education policies.”
The problem is not only that Nasheed was helping the Republican leadership push a bill that was not good. The larger problem is she was helping a Republican leadership that denied a fair hearing all session to any of the education bills supported by the people who actually work in public education.
“We have constantly made conservatives and Sen. Nasheed know that investment in professional development are needed, and equality in compensation would help SLPS recruit better teachers,” Butler now says. “These solutions directly improve student achievement. Teacher evaluations will not produce the positive results as the solutions we are proposing.”
His position is not against teacher and administrator evaluations, but evaluations connected to “forced statewide human resource practices,” as Barnes’ legislation would have mandated. “I am against connecting these evaluations with forced statewide human resource practices,” Butler says. “These forced HR policies do not work, and have already been tried, and failed, in our public education system.”
Stripping it down
Barnes also objects to our description of his HCS for SB 125 as being loaded with a lot of language from a bill supported by Sinquefield that had just been shot down in the House.
“By the time SB 125 reached the floor for a vote, my amendment was stripped down to only evaluations for administrators,” Barnes claims.
Not true, insists Butler.
“When SB 125 reached the floor it was still full of Rex Sinquefield language,” Butler says. “Amendments were added by Rep. Steve Webb to strip all of the Rex Sinquefield language and Noel Torpey to introduce only administrator evaluations. Those amendments initially failed, but after some Republican arm-twisting, they barely passed. Even after that, the General Assembly still down voted SB 125 because any evaluation presented as a solution is terrible policy.”
SB 125 and Bush
In Butler’s view, he and his colleagues who defeated this legislation – in a Legislature with a Republican super-majority – merely helped Missouri to stop throwing good policy after bad by applying existing federal legislation that is failing students and applying it to teachers and administrators. He says SB 125, in basic terms, is No Child Left Behind for teachers
“Conservative legislators have gotten education wrong for a long time. In their attempt to privatize public schools they closed public schools by force with then-Pres. George W. Bush‘s terrible education policy. No Child Left Behind forced a nationwide evaluation of all public schools (not private or charter), and if any school was deemed failing by the federal government standards then those schools were made by law to close. Thousands of schools were closed across the nation, and many in the St. Louis area,” Butler says.
“Yet, our public school system has not improved. This is because if you deem a system failing without offering any new solutions or new investment, it continues to fail. This is the exact same concept in SB 125 for the teachers in Missouri. This is why superintendents, teachers, legislators and citizens who know good education policy are crying out to conservatives that SB 125 and statewide teacher and administrator evaluations when coupled with forced human resources practices will not work!”
Repaying Nasheed
Barnes also buddies up to Nasheed, who has taken a beating in the EYE for two weeks straight for carrying his legislation a bit too aggressively. “Though I do not always agree with her,” Barnes says, “Sen. Nasheed is a champion for her constituents.”
Not surprisingly, Butler hears something else going on in Barnes’ expression of support: “Rep. Barnes is clearly attempting to repay support for Sen. Nasheed and not giving the facts about SB 125.”
