Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor

By: Ariel Schneider

         I do believe that a teacher should not be safe from being fired from their job just because they have tenure. Our number one priority should be about the kids and not about the adults. When people talk about this issue they always seemed to forget about how these changes will affect the students. With all these budget cuts on the education system, all of the new teachers, that could be really great at their job or only fired because of the fact that you can’t get rid of the teachers that are protected by their tenure. A teacher should be kept because they are doing a good job, not because they have been there longer then another teacher.
            Although I do believe that there should be some type of change to the teaching tenure, I do not think that teacher’s evaluations should be based on how well their students do on a test. By having the students tests determine how well the state believes the teacher is doing, is not only putting a lot of pressure on the teacher but it is also putting a lot of unneeded pressure on the student. If this bill will be allowed to pass I believe the kids today will be even worse off than they were be for in education. Having so many tests does not help a student learn, the only thing they are learning to do in school, is how to take a test.
             I believe that teachers should be evaluated every 5 years, but they needed to be evaluated based on observations done by the principle and these observations should not be told they are going to happen before hand. The teacher should not know that they are going to be observed, so they do not have time to prepare a great lesson for that day and then go back to their normal teaching patterns. This type of evaluation will take the stress of the student and will allow then more time to learn from their teacher and it will more accurately evaluate the teachers with tenures.