Amendment 3 is unadvisable meddling with constitution
By STEVE SCOTT
Proposed Amendment 3, placed on the Nov. 4 election ballot by initiative petition, should be soundly rejected by Missouri voters for many reasons. One very important reason is that it would improperly inject detailed education policies into the Missouri Constitution. Such matters are best left to local school boards and the state board of education. A constitution, by its nature, should focus on broad governing principles.
One such broad principle is the high value our state constitution places on public education, proclaiming, “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the general assembly shall establish and maintain free public schools.” This is backed up by another provision declaring the state must devote at least 25 percent of state revenue to supporting public schools.
These broad provisions are in striking contrast to Amendment 3, which would embed details into our constitution concerning the employment status and contract length of teachers, a teacher evaluation system based on standardized student tests, and the use of the evaluation system to determine teachers’ retention, promotion, demotion, compensation and dismissal. The amendment also would prohibit including the evaluation system in any collective bargaining agreement.
As a Columbia school board member from 1985 to 1994, I learned firsthand that evaluation of teachers is best carried out at the local level by principals and administrators who have discretion to take into account the demographics of each classroom and the resulting challenges faced by teachers. It is well documented that students from some backgrounds perform more poorly on standardized tests, and it is unfair and irrational for a teacher’s future to hinge on the chance makeup of her or his classroom.
Amendment 3, however, would mandate a one-size-fits-all approach to evaluating teachers entirely dependent on their students’ scores on standardized tests.
Speaking of standardized testing, who is going to pay to develop Missouri’s testing and evaluation system? The question virtually answers itself. We, the taxpayers, will pay, through local school system taxes and state appropriations. An Amendment 3 opposition group, Protect Our Local Schools, projects the cost to be upward of $1 billion.
Spending this much on developing more standardized testing would be outrageous, particularly when school needs are already greatly outpacing the funding made available by the state. And haven’t we already learned from No Child Left Behind that more standardized testing is not a panacea for our education woes?
What, then, is the way forward to improving our schools? I often hear it said you can’t solve the education problem by throwing money at it. I beg to differ. Many studies show smaller class sizes dramatically improve educational outcomes by allowing more attention to individual students, and this requires more money.
Unfortunately, Missouri and most of the rest of the country are still in the thrall of cultural attitudes that encourage trying to do education on the cheap. This is nothing new, as the historian Richard Hofstadter documented in his 1964 Pulizer-winning history of anti-intellectualism. From the very beginning of the public schools movement in the United States, Hofstadter said, teachers have been underpaid, underappreciated and confronted with too-large classrooms.
If we truly believe in the value of public education and its importance to the preservation of democracy, we must eschew simplistic and ill-thought-out proposals such as Amendment 3 and advocate instead for some things worth paying for — more school funding, smaller classrooms and more and better-paid teachers.
Steve Scott is a Columbia attorney and served on the Columbia Board of Education for nine years, including two years as board president.
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