"Fear and rhetoric" distorted the intentions of bills that would have moved public school teachers to a performance management system, and led to defeat of the measures, Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Jill Tokuda said Thursday in a passionate speech to her colleagues.
"While the fear and rhetoric seems to have clouded and distorted the process … let me be clear: These measures put students first," Tokuda said in an address before the full Senate that lasted more than seven minutes. "If teachers look beyond the fear and rhetoric and read the measure we’ve put forward with an open mind, they would clearly see … (it) in no way infringes on their bargaining rights."
The bills died after strong lobbying efforts by the Hawaii State Teachers Association, which encouraged teachers to blast lawmakers with emails and phone calls about their concerns.
HSTA contends the bills would have curtailed collective bargaining rights by requiring that student academic growth be considered as one component in teacher evaluations and that those evaluations be used in high-stakes decisions, such as when considering teacher tenure, compensation and dismissal.
HSTA President Wil Okabe told members Thursday evening on the union’s Facebook page that "today was a fantastic day for public education and labor. The bills legislating teacher evaluation and tenure are now dead."
Shortly after the Senate recommitted a version of the performance management bill Thursday, effectively killing it this session, Okabe said he was happy teachers had been heard and that a revised evaluation system would be a matter for negotiations. The House took the same action Tuesday with another version of the measure.
"I believe the majority of the members in the House and the Senate realized that they had to decide if they believed in collective bargaining or not," Okabe told the Star-Advertiser.
Supporters of the measures, meanwhile, say that they would not have taken away collective bargaining rights, and point out state law already requires teachers be evaluated annually. They maintain that requiring a performance management system for teachers, just as the Legislature did for principals in 2004, is within the state’s authority.
(Eight years after passage of the law, the Hawaii Government Employees Association earlier this week agreed to performance contracts for principals, starting with those in more than 80 schools next school year.)
Speaking to the Senate, Tokuda said "business as usual … is not working" for schools or kids.
"If students in our schools are not seeing the kinds of gains we’d like to see, that is not acceptable," she said.
Okabe was also criticized by some lawmakers Thursday for comparing the effort to require performance evaluations to efforts to take away collective bargaining rights of public employees in Wisconsin, where there was a widespread labor backlash.
Rep. Roy Takumi (D, Pearl City-Pacific Palisades), chairman of the House Education Committee, took exception to Okabe’s comparison.
"Mr. Okabe, as a union leader and educator, should know that name-calling doesn’t get us anywhere," said Takumi, who works as a communications specialist for the Hawaii State AFL-CIO. "Besides, if we were doing the same thing as what happened in Wisconsin, there would be tens of thousands of members from every union protesting at the Capitol. And that hasn’t happened."
The move to a performance management system has emerged as among the highest-profile elements of the state’s ambitious Race to the Top-related goals, in large part because of a continuing labor dispute with teachers, which has raised questions about how the rating system will move forward.
Takumi noted that Hawaii is the only Race to the Top state without a law that requires teachers be evaluated in part on how their students perform.
Some worry the death of the bills this legislative session could prove detrimental to Hawaii’s efforts to demonstrate progress on key education reform efforts under its Race to the Top initiative. The state’s $75 million federal Race grant is in danger because of missed targets.
A law requiring that teacher evaluations take into account student growth "sends a message to the federal Department of Education," Takumi said. He added while Hawaii pledged to institute performance-based evaluations under Race to the Top, if the requirement for the evaluation is "not in law and it’s not in the teachers’ contract, that certainly doesn’t help" as the state looks to convince the federal education officials that it can make good on its pledges.
"By putting it into statute, that would have gone a long way in convincing the federal government that we’re committed in this area," he said.
Schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi said Thursday that despite the bills’ defeat, the state Education Department will continue to work toward instituting performance-based evaluations, which are being piloted with no consequences in more than 80 schools next school year.
"We’re going to go ahead," she said. "I think it’s important that we’re very steadfast."
Meanwhile the state and HSTA continue talks, which resumed April 5, with three bargaining sessions for next week.
In January teachers overwhelmingly voted down a proposed six-year contract that included a new evaluation system, performance-based compensations and tenure rule changes.
Teachers continue to work under a "last, best and final" contract offer with wage reductions imposed in July.
