Testimony of Daniel J. Montgomery
President, Illinois Federation of Teachers
Illinois House Education Reform Committee
December 16, 2010
Co-chairs Representative Chapa- Lavia, Representative Eddy and members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to speak today. I am Dan Montgomery and I am the president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers; an organization that represents 103,000 teachers, university professionals and school support personnel throughout the state of Illinois.
For 17 years I have been an English teacher at Niles North High School in Skokie. I received my teaching degree and a Masters in Education at Northwestern University. In my high school teaching I have taught all levels of English, students of Special Education, English language learners through the AP levels of gifted students.
[In my 17 years, I have been an active member of my IFT local serving in several offices from department rep, to council officer, to local President and now president of the IFT. For the last six years, I have been a member of the American Federation of Teachers Pre-k-12 Teacher Program and Policy Committee. Currently, I serve as co-chair. In those six years, my involvement with the union has provided me access to a variety of educational research and proposals. I am very knowledgeable of educational reform efforts throughout the nations from Washington, DC to central Falls, RI to Baltimore, MD to Colorado and many other places.]
Since 2006, I have been on the board of directors of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; the premier teacher organization that develops and recognizes accomplished teaching and the gold standard in teacher performance.
I want to talk about my students:
Our students in District 219 comes from all walks of life and social stations, speak 65 languages and we educate them to succeed—they go to Oakton Comm. College and the U of I, Yale, Michigan, Cornell, MIT, and Stanford. And they dedicate their lives to service, like David Walton, an MD who runs a medical program in Haiti. Or the students who go with their teachers on service trips to the Pine Ridge Reservation and New Orleans every year .And many of them go into teaching, and we have hired many of them like Albert Chan and Pankaj Sharma—who are fantastic teachers coming back to serve in their hometown communities. Sadly, I can say that if this package of proposed legislation passed as is, I could not in confidence counsel my students to become teachers in Illinois. I would urge them to go to another state where their voice as professionals would be far more respected.
Diane Ravitch has said about this package of proposals:
“ Only teachers will be held accountable.
This is not what successful nations do. The nations that regularly outperform us on international tests pay attention to teacher quality by recruiting well-prepared candidates, helping them become good teachers, and providing consistent support to help them become better teachers. High-performing nations build collaborative school climates, where experienced teachers mentor new teachers. They seek teamwork, not punishment. They invest in meaningful professional development that enables teachers to improve. “
When it comes to the education of our kids, teachers have a unique and special responsibility. Every day they engage with students at a very personal level—leading them through curriculum, nurturing their development, and advancing their growth and intellectual curiosity.
With this unmatched vantage point, teachers are critical to today’s policy debate about how to improve the education our kids need and deserve.
Teachers do have the most impact on a student’s growth INSIDE the schools. The impact of teachers is not as great as the home, the neighbor, and the parents. The positive impact of a teacher on a student is often mitigated by those factors and the culture of the school or district in which they teach.
Yes, there are many issues begging for resolution in Illinois public education. We in the IFT are ready and willing to take on the tough issues that often mean change. Change is not easy but change imposed adds to the issues, it does not resolve or ease the issues.
Unfortunately, teachers in Illinois were not involved with the proposed legislation we have just seen in the last few days. A number of these proposals have merit and are worth collaboration, but teachers and other educational stakeholders must be involved in creating the final product.
Teachers did have a seat at the table in reforming the teacher evaluation system. That process was not easy but did involve all of the stakeholders and we believe that procedure needs to be followed again in 2011.
There is ample time to come to an agreement on legislation before the General Assembly adjourns in May. If the cause is as great as the proposed legislation proponents say and we in education know, then take the time to get this right.
Let me address several key issues:
Achieving tenure should be at least as significant a milestone in a teaching career as achieving National Board Certification. Tenure in Illinois is not a life-long guarantee of employment. It is the right to due process after four years of probationary status under direct and ongoing review of the school district. No teacher should move from the fourth year to the fifth without being very good. The IFT does not understand why any school district would require less.
Tenure should be part of a well designed and tested evaluation system. Like National Board Certification evaluation should be a process that has great reliability and is research based. Many evaluators examine a teacher’s work before they gain board certification. We need to adopt an evaluation process in Illinois that gives us that same level of confidence before we begin to put a lot more weight on an imperfect system.
The IFT supports the development of a comprehensive system for evaluating and supporting effective teaching. Further, we urge consideration of the work that is being developed by Linda Darling-Hammond along with the AFT.
With the involvement of the IFT and the IEA, we believe teacher collaboration and buy-in of a new evaluation system will bring the support necessary to have an effective ongoing decision-making process for development and retention of successful teachers.
To that end, the IFT proposes the following
(1) a systematic approach, not the piecemeal one that seems to
be constantly applied;
(2) development and adoption of Common core standards for
student learning and teaching that are meaningful and shared;
(3) A performance-based state evaluation system guiding
preparation, induction, mentoring, licensure and advanced
certification;
(4) Local evaluation systems aligned to the same standards
supported by multiple sources of evidence about teaching
practice and student leaning;
(5) Support structures to ensure trained evaluators, mentoring
for teachers who need additional assistance and fair decisions
about personnel actions;
(6) Professional development and learning opportunities that
support the improvement of teachers and teaching quality: and
(7) Allowance for and promotion of innovative peer teacher
evaluation solutions.
In my school district, we negotiated PAR, peer assistance and review. To some it is a radically different evaluation process where expert consultant teachers are trained to go into the classroom of newly hired teachers. Often they spend as much as 15 of 17 hours in the first part of the year in the classroom of new teachers.
They help those teachers develop lessons and they coach them constantly. It’s been my experience that no administrator can give that amount of time. And the school district agreed to this proposal, it was a radical proposal that the union made. Everywhere it’s been done they end up releasing more non-tenured teachers than under the previous system. But it’s a system that has much more trust built into it because you have expert teachers who are evaluating. All decisions go before the PAR panel—composed of teachers and administrators. To really take on the ongoing evaluation of teachers there must be a role for the true teaching experts --- recognized highly successful classroom teachers.
The IFT recommends specifically that we perfect our evaluation systems first – the state has not yet finished its model but that effort is underway at this time.
The proposals here rely on the flawed premise that taking away teacher rights without fundamental reforms to the entire process will produce a better result. It won’t, and there is no reason why we should expect that it would.
Let me also say a word about streamlining the teacher dismissal procedures and reducing the cost of that process. This is an area where you will find we are willing to make changes now. In fact, we participated in talks in 2009 and reached agreement on substantial changes with many of the stakeholders. While the process was not completed at that time, we would recommend that we pick that effort up again and finish it. There is much room for agreement on this issue and no reason why we cannot be successful. We can do that without eliminating due process rights for teachers.
Let us go from these hearings on to Springfield to begin work on real, not hyped up solutions to teacher quality in Illinois.
The IFT raises objections to much of the proposed legislation simply because it assumes that school districts across Illinois have perfectly good evaluation systems and that if we make the consequences for a teacher much more punitive then somehow the evaluation systems and procedures will all magically get better. They won’t.
Any good teacher knows that you do not help students learn by punishing them into success—and no amount of punishment will create better evaluation systems. We need to redirect this conversion to help teachers and administrators to do a better job of effectively identifying and developing and retaining the best teachers to create the best schools we can. The IFT stands ready to engage in that meaningful conversation.
Thank you for this opportunity and I stand ready for questions.