Idaho has proposed a Tiered Licensure rule that potentially ties a teacher’s license to student test scores and local evaluations. To bribe teachers to accept this bad idea, an ‘increased’ teacher salary would also be tied to these evaluations. Tiered licensure is bad for kids, taxpayers, and teachers.

Please sign this petition to oppose the proposed rule, and reject poor policy that will negatively impact our children, students, schools, and taxpayers.

BAD FOR KIDS

-More pressure to perform on high stakes tests

-More test prep

-Less differentiated instruction

-More time testing

-More test anxiety

-Fewer electives (and recess) in favor of more drill on tested topics

-Lower performing students will have less access to highly qualified teachers

-High poverty schools will have less access to highly qualified teachers

-Kids’ needs lose priority over pleasing administrators

 BAD FOR TAXPAYERS

 -$250 million initial price tag

-Reason to believe costs will increase

-Other states with tiered licensure are fighting lawsuits brought by teachers who unfairly lost their license

-More administrators will be needed in each school to be able to perform added evaluations

-More district personnel will be needed to compile and keep data for each certified employee

-More red tape and bureaucracy

-Less local control

BAD FOR TEACHERS

-Unfair

-There is not one tool that can measure student growth fairly for all teachers

-Initially math and language arts teachers will be judged at a time when curriculum has changed  drastically. Will growth be a measure of a teacher's’ effectiveness or will it actually measurethe effectiveness of this new curriculum?

-How will student growth be measured for the librarian? school nurse? math coach? reading coach?

-Special education teachers will be judged based on the population of students who, by definition, will not meet growth goals.

-The evaluation tool the state plans to use was never designed to be an evaluation tool

-The author of the evaluation tool has stated that “basic” means satisfactory, but the state wants  to take a teacher’s license if they receive “basic” scores

-Teachers lose the security of the current salary schedule

-Experience is not valued in this scheme

-Additional education is not valued in this scheme

-Teachers who have spent their own money and a lot of time to continue their

education will find  that it is meaningless to their license and salary

We know bad policy when we see it.  We want to keep control local, as it should be.  Please join us in rejecting this proposal.

For more information please visit IdahosPromise.Org