Hamilton County’s Board of Education continues to take one step forward and two – sometimes three – steps back.
Thursday night’s decision to delay a vote on a long-talked-about association with Teach for America to bring highly recruited new teachers into our high-needs schools seems at least three steps back.
Recall also that since June the school system’s equity study has languished after some board members incorrectly confused work on student opportunity gaps with some imaginary call for forced busing. That’s more than a step backward; it’s a refusal to live in today’s world.
On Thursday, the board received an update on the staff’s work on an equity study. Chief Equity Officer Marsha Drake told the board that she’s working in focus areas with the Equity Task Force, and the panel will begin to meet again monthly in November. She said an agenda will be presented to board members. Hopefully we’ll soon see some progress there.
But Thursday’s more lengthy discussion was about delaying the Teach for America contract vote – never mind that our schools have a teacher shortage; that Teach for America recruits have a better track record in Tennessee than either national teacher ratings or retention, and that Teach for America’s deadline for teacher confirmations is Oct. 29, just nine days away.
The board did agree to take a vote sometime next week, but a specific date was not agreed upon.
Board Chairman Joe Wingate, a long-time educator, said he was frustrated “with the urgency” of the request to vote. He said he was tired of the board being presented with partnership proposals too close to deadline. He said the board needed to do more research before members agreed to a five-year, $250,000-a-year contract – a cost of $1.25 million.
But truth be told, this shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. Hamilton County school leaders have been pushing for months to bring in the well-known organization, which was founded in 1989 to combat teacher shortages. Jill Levine, the district’s Opportunity Zone chief and a Teach for America alum, tweeted about it in June: “Looking for a rockstar to launch @TeachForAmerica in Chattanooga! “
Gov. Bill Haslam and the state Department of Education have been in favor of expanding TFA in Tennessee from Memphis and Nashville to Chattanooga, and this year secured a $1.5 million appropriation in his budget for all three sites to fuel the expansion. The newspaper has written of teacher improvement efforts several times in recent weeks and months, and earlier this week cited Teach for America as one way to recruit good teachers to our priority schools. Finally, school board members get a meeting agenda and draft agreements almost a full week before each meeting.
Yes, there is some national controversy surrounding the program, which places teachers in classrooms for only two years. Teachers – particularly some national teachers’ unions – have pointed to that two-year placement as a high turnover rate that they say has a negative impact on schools and students.
But in Tennessee, at least, the program has an impressive record. In 2016, 49 percent of Memphis and Nashville’s Teach for America teachers received a 4 or 5 score on the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, known as TVAAS, for teacher effectiveness, indicating they are meeting or exceeding expectations. Of all other teachers, only 29 percent attained that score. Last year, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s program within the School of Education scored only a 2.
Additionally, Eric Dailey, deputy executive director for the Chattanooga site, told board members that Teach for America teachers continue teaching at higher rates than their peers, and when they do leave the classroom, many move on to leadership roles in education. Nationally, teachers are most likely to leave the profession within the first three to five years – as much as 17 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Certainly it’s not like we here in Hamilton County have a more stellar record to uphold: At the end of the 2017-18 school year, Hamilton County Schools had a 26 percent turnover rate for first-year teachers. Thankfully, our new superintendent has made this a priority and the system is revamping its own in-house program of how it trains and supports teachers in their first year.
Long-time board member Rhonda Thurman, of District 1, said Wednesday she is concerned about the use of funds.
“Can we not use that for something else? There’s a lot of things we can do for $250,000,” she said. “It’s just another group that is going to come in with their own agenda and their own thing. We have a new HR department. Put the word out there that we need some new teachers. Why do we have to have someone else hire us for new teachers?”
How about this answer: Because we don’t seem to be very good at it?
Former chairman Steve Highlander said he wanted to go over the contract “with a fine-toothed comb.”
Great, folks: We’re delighted that you’ve decided to dig in with job dedication. But this is a no-brainer with a deadline that should have seemed pretty clear just with the start date of our schools. Put on your reading glasses, and get to work before you get in the board room.