JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Supporters of strengthening the ties between teacher evaluations and the performance of their students hadn’t made much progress in recent years by trying to change the policy through the Missouri General Assembly.

This year, Teach Great — a political action committee funded by St. Louis billionaire Rex Sinquefield to advance the issue — decided to take a different route: Remove the middle man and let voters decide on the controversial policy for themselves.

When voters head to the polls in November, one of the measures they will consider is Amendment 3, a change to the state’s constitution that would require more than half of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on a student’s performance and effectively outlaw teacher tenure in the state.
Secretary of State Jason Kander announced in August that Teach Great — which spent more than $1 million on petitioning — had collected the sufficient number of signatures and that he had certified the wording for the November ballot. At that point, it appeared political battle was set to begin.

But in early September, less than two months before Election Day, Teach Great made a puzzling announcement: It said that it was no longer going to campaign for the measure. In a news release, Kate Casas, who leads Teach Great, said at the time, “It has become clear that now is not the time to further pursue the Teach Great initiative.”

Casas, in an interview Friday, said the group’s decision to not campaign for Amendment 3 should not be taken to mean they do not support the policies within it. Instead, she said the issue was that voters just weren’t on her side or moving in her direction soon enough for the Nov. 3 election.

“This is a unique election,” she said. “Voter turnout is kind of a wild card, and it is difficult to get people to vote yes on a ballot initiative.”

Still, it was no secret that this year would be relatively dull on the political front since the only real race on the ballot is a nominally contested state auditor’s race. Mike Sherman, who is leading the political committee in opposition to Amendment 3, Protect Our Local Schools, said he suspects Teach Great saw some bad polling. Someone — he suspects Teach Great — was surveying Missouri voters by phone in late August, asking about Amendment 3.

Sherman said his own polling information from a survey earlier in the summer showed concerns among conservative voters who believe the amendment could further chip away at local control of local schools.
“We’ve had lots of Republicans come out against this amendment,” he said. “Most of them talk about the need for local control and the evaluation process for the school board and teachers, and the bureaucrats in Jefferson City shouldn’t get their hands involved.”

State Rep. Charlie Davis, R-Webb City, said he has heard concerns raised by conservatives involved in the campaign to end Common Core in Missouri that the amendment might in fact strengthen it.

“I saw an email from one person that this is a supporting mechanism for Common Core,” he said.

Since Teach Great dropped its support of Amendment 3, no other organization has moved in to fill the gap. That means there will be no favorable television ads, yard signs or even a positive hashtag for Twitter.
“When we said we shut down the campaign, we meant it,” Casas said.

Just because Teach Great has said it has dropped its campaign does not mean the issue is going away. Anthony Rossetti, superintendent of Webb City Schools, said he is not so sure the campaign on behalf of Amendment 3 is over and is urging people to maintain pressure against it.

“The best thing that could happen is this amendment is defeated and defeated soundly so that the next time someone wants to rearrange the Missouri Constitution specifically to target teachers, they might think twice,” he said.

Rossetti said the Webb City School Board might soon join the boards of education across the state in passing a resolution expressing its opposition to Amendment 3. Boards in Jasper County, one of the reddest districts in the state, have formally announced their opposition to Amendment 3.

“I can walk down a hallway and get a pretty good idea of who can teach and who doesn’t,” he said. “I don’t need some sort of assessment to tell me if they’re doing what they should be doing.”

Even so, Rossetti said that just this year, Missouri school districts have implemented new performance-based evaluation techniques. The shift was part of the deal Missouri agreed to with the federal government to waive some of the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, the same deal that got the state to implement the new academic standards known as Common Core.

A teacher evaluation, Rossetti said, “is a process, not just a checklist,” and is based on a wide range of criteria using guidance from the state’s education department. Rossetti sees problems with the state requiring school districts to base more than half of a teacher’s evaluation on student performance because there is not an exact way to quantify or define it.

In addition to the evaluation component, the measure would make it unconstitutional in Missouri for teachers to have contracts with anything longer than a three-year expiration date. The policy has been pursued in recent years by a mix of conservatives and even a handful of urban Democrats who believe it is too hard to fire a teacher who is not performing adequately.

Rossetti shrugged off that argument, noting that a tenure contract allows for “due process” if an administrator did want to fire a teacher.

Davis, who represents Rossetti and his school district in the Statehouse, said he agrees that “there are some problems” with Amendment 3 because of the vagueness in its definition of how to define student performance.

“How do you judge a teacher’s performance when you’re dealing with a special needs teacher? A football coach? A P.E. teacher? I like local school boards making the decision on hiring and firing,” he said.

While he is open to some performance based evaluations, Davis said he is opposed to getting rid of teacher tenure. He would not say how he plans to vote on Amendment 3.

Nearby, the Jasper School Board, in a resolution that it recently approved, cited a loss of local control as a major reason for its opposition to the proposal, Superintendent Rick Stark said.

“This amendment sound definitely be a loss of local control because we would be told how to evaluate our teachers,” he said.

Stark said the board opposes making student performance and test scores a significant factor in teacher evaluations on the basis that it could discourage good teachers from working in classrooms that have high numbers of low-achieving students.
Stark said the proposal could also add costs to districts that will have to provide tests to students that can be used for teacher evaluations.

That was one of the criticisms cited by a representative of the Joplin chapter of the National Education Association last month at a meeting of the Joplin School Board.

Crystal Stokes, president of the Joplin NEA and a middle school teacher, said the proposal could put a financial strain on districts by requiring that testing become part of evaluations.

“This (amendment) is going to take away money from our students and teachers because it’s unfunded testing,” she said.

It is not often that the Republican-leaning Missouri Farm Bureau and the Democratic-leaning teachers unions are on the same side of an issue, but that is what happened this past week when the agricultural advocacy group announced its opposition to Amendment 3.