“There are some things that are not real positive,” said Jerry Winters to a group of prospective teachers this past Wednesday, Oct. 10. Winters, a lobbyist in Nashville for the Tennessee Education Association (TEA), has been working for the Tennessee Legislature for over thirty years. He was invited by the on-campus organization STEA to come speak in order to outline the political issues concerning education that are presently up for debate.
Winters indicated that it was the Congressional Election of 2010 that changed everything for the education system in Tennessee. He suggested
that those who won were not friends of public education.
“When they came back [the following] January, the legislature did all kinds of things. They had a new strong Republican majority, and they decide[d] they [were] going to turn the education world upside down,” Winters said.
Winters went on to elaborate on all the significant changes that have taken place since the election. With great dismay, he spoke of the repeal of collective bargaining.
“It hurt me greatly to see it be repealed, because it is a law that allows professionals to sit down with boards of education and say, ‘Here are our concerns,’ and negotiate terms and conditions of employment, salaries, benefits and those kinds of things and put it in a contract. That’s gone,” Winters said.
The tenure law has also changed. Whereas before it took a probationary teacher three years to achieve tenure, now it takes five years, which according to Winters is a fundamentally illogical change in policy. He asked “If they’re not good teacher[s], then why do you want to keep them for five years?” He explained that if administration does not know by the end of three years whether or not someone is a good teacher, then it is the administration that is not doing its job.
Furthermore, Winters turned over the misconception that tenure guarantees a teacher a job for life. He explained that it only protects teachers’ rights by due process if they are dismissed.
Winters then went on to explain the type of evaluation now in effect, where teachers are ranked on a numerical scale from one to five.
“The people in the middle, the 3’s, are what the state has said are good, solid teachers. They’re teachers where your students are making one year of progress in one year of teaching. I mean, you’re doing what you’re asked to do, but yet, those 3’s can never get tenure under the new tenure law,” Winters said.
He then brought up the issue of charter schools. Charter schools used to be government-funded schools that had been performing poorly and were geared towards high-priority students. Now, Winters explained, any student can attend and also there can be any number of these schools. As a result, Winters says that this is going to create “boutique” schools– “basically private schools set up with tax dollars.” He then predicted that there will be people paying private school tuitions who will no longer want to do so and who would sooner have it paid for by the state.
Winters also criticized virtual schools not only for the money that they take away from the district where the children reside but also for their inferiority to face-to-face schooling.
“You’re never going to be able to replace a warm-body teacher with a computer. That human interaction is just critical,” Winters said.
The final issue on which Winters shed light was vouchers. Vouchers consist of the government giving the money that it takes to educate a child to the parents and allowing them to decide where to send that child.
“In the concept of choice, that might sound like a good idea,” Winters said, “but where that good idea content breaks down is, first of all, you are actually going to do irreparable damage to funding for regular public schools.”
He explained that much of the money that would go towards public schools would leave and go instead towards private schools and religious-affiliated schools, which would create problems on both a constitutional and financial level.
In his closing remarks, Winters elaborated on the importance of public education.
“It’s the only thing that is going to save this country. It’s the great equalizer. If this country is going to survive, public education has got to survive,” Winters said.
While Winters did not try to push for one particular candidate, he did encourage students to be “concerned and knowledgeable of [the] candidates who support education.”
When asked what important message he wished to impart, Winters said that good public education is what this country needs.
“I want to impress upon students the importance of public education surviving and prospering. It’s the one thing that is going to make this country the great country that it is, and some of the political maneuverings that are going on are, in fact, setting public education back, so we have got to keep this country on track by keeping public education on track,” Winters said.
