The SCEA Bernadette R. Hampton today testified before the Senate Select Committee on Education: Here is a transcript: Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for the invitation to speak to this special committee on this topic. In the opinion of The South Carolina Education Association -- which celebrates its 133rd anniversary this year -- our state has no greater obligation to its citizens than its provision for high quality public education for all of its children. Mr. Chairman, I will be happy to make available a printed copy of my opening remarks, and I will make available to your staff the various documents and publications to which I will refer. I intend to address, in order, the questions that your staff provided to me. First, with regard to The South Carolina Education Associations role and responsibilities relevant to educators, I am happy to report that our mission is quite simple: It is to be the leading advocate for quality public education in South Carolina. This has been our mission and charge for more than a century. From our inception, we have engaged on behalf of students and public school educators in every important debate concerning public education. Thats every debate: from the establishment of child labor laws to compulsory education; to provisions for rural schools, student health and school meal programs; to provisions for students with special needs and for English-language learners; through our states unique challenges to school integration; and through the modern eras renewed emphasis on professional development, testing and accountability, and the role of technology and workforce readiness. At every turn, the men and women who devote their lives to the study and practice of teaching and to the related professions in public education, have found what we find today: That our students are best served -- in fact, that our state is best served -- when the voices of professional educators are included, and heard, and heeded, in decision-making for public education. Today, we pursue a simple set of important public-policy objectives: to advance quality public education as a basic right for all; to expand and protect the rights and further the professional and economic interests of all public education employees; and to advance and uphold human and civil rights. And, to that end, we keep educators in public schools apprised of proposals arising from the legislature and elsewhere that impact their lives and livelihoods, whether positively or negatively, and we advise them of the individuals or entities who promote these ideas -- so as to appropriately assign the credit or the blame, whatever the case may be. Ours is an organization of affiliates. Local education organizations across South Carolina make up our state organization, and both our local and state organizations are affiliated with the National Education Association. You may already know that NEA is Americas premier, largest and oldest association of education professionals, having been founded in 1857. We are proud to say that our national organizations annual Representative Assembly is the largest constitutionally and representatively-elected governing body in the nation -- in fact, the largest in the world, throughout all of history. This year, more than 9,000 professional educators, elected by their peers in every state, county and school district in the nation, gathered in Denver to conduct our organizational business. In those states where citizens and governments respect and recognize the right to bargain collectively, our sister-affiliates are unions. In South Carolina, we exist today as we always have existed: as a professional association, no different from the professional associations of attorneys, physicians, nurses, architects, accountants and every other kind of professionals. Your staff asked about the kinds of data that we are able to generate. Through NEA and its Research Department, we and our members are able to provide research and analysis on a wide variety of issues related to education; education funding and tax policy; teacher quality, and effective teaching and learning; student achievement and strategies to close the achievement gap; teacher turnover and teacher retention; the impacts of poverty on teaching and student achievement; education leadership and professional development; evaluation of educators; and many, many other aspects of our work. NEAs Research Department includes a number of exceptional, well-respected researchers and analysts, but it also benefits from partnerships and joint initiatives with others, such as Linda Darling-Hammond and Barnett Berry, founder and CEO of the Center for Teacher Quality, a national nonprofit organization based in North Carolina. Your staff asked me to comment on trends and issues that we foresee facing the teaching profession. As president of my organization, and as a practicing classroom teacher in Beaufort County, I know that the first word that springs to many educators minds in South Carolina is lack. Before we ever get to funding, educators across your own school districts will tell you there is a lack of professional respect, which has a real impact on effective teaching and learning; a lack of genuine professional empowerment and real collaboration; a lack of planning time, when the workday is so overly prescribed; a lack of coordination between teaching programs and public schools; a lack of institutional support from public officials, state leaders, including legislators and our states executive officers; a lack of balance in the share of responsibility for student achievement assigned to educators alone; a lack of common sense in proposals to evaluate professional educators; a lack of consistency in public education programming mandates from the legislature and the state department of education; a lack of consistency in addressing ineffective educators, and a lack of job security for even the very best educators. When we look at funding, we see a lack of consistency in funding the Education Finance Act formula since 1977. We see a lack of guidance counselors, and we see that existing guidance counselors have excessive caseloads that limit time and service to individual students. We see a lack of school resource officers, which contributes to a lack of safety and discipline in some schools. We see a lack of full-time school nurses, many schools do not have a school nurse on duty every day. We see a lack of funding for teaching positions and for necessary classroom supplies. Especially in South Carolinas famous Corridor of Shame -- but not only there -- we see a lack of urgency in meeting the costly needs of students from communities of high poverty, low household incomes and high unemployment. But these reports are not new. My predecessors in this office have made similar statements before legislative committees, decade upon decade. To foresee the trends of the future, we need only to consider the habits of our past. For generations, educators in South Carolina -- those who stay in the profession -- have heard three standard responses from their government: (1) We cant afford to meet that need right now; well consider it later. (2) We cant afford to do all that the need requires, but heres what we CAN afford; youll just have to do your best. (3) We cant afford to meet the need as it needs to be met, but heres a different idea that well adopt instead. I call these three responses delay, increment, and alternative. None of them have served all of our students well. But all of them have served to hold our students and our state back, decade after decade. This does not mean there are no potential opportunities for us. Despite the lack of professional respect and professional compensation, our educators know their value and their craft. They have carried the burden of heavier workloads and larger class sizes until they cannot anymore. Many of our students and their parents recognize their value. And, thanks to the influence of public school educators, there is a renewed emphasis on science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, the so-called STEM/STEAM curricula. Let me mention one trend that many education professionals foresee coming with great anxiety. In the past couple of decades, weve seen more and more students routed away from traditional public schools and toward various exciting alternatives. But as more students are given access to alternatives -- like “virtual” schools, or charter schools, and tax credits to attend private schools -- the populations left behind in traditional public schools will be those whose educational needs are greater and costlier, in terms of human resource and of funding. Your staff asked about key initiatives that our organization anticipates to begin, or that are already under way. We believe in encouraging educators to participate in their government, in order to help government make better policy decisions. As you know, our staffs are ever-present at the legislature and at the state board. In the past year, we have worked on behalf of our students and educators to establish a fairer evaluation system, and to develop and train education professionals on new student learning objectives (SLOs). We believe that literacy is the foundation of an informed electorate, so The SCEA continues to promote literacy through its active support of NEAs popular and successful Read Across America program. In addition to, our support of the concept for the recently passed Read To Succeed Bill and The SCEA’s work on increasing parental involvement in the bill and to ensuring that professional development for teachers are at not cost to the teachers. We believe in classroom innovation, so we encourage and assist our members in applying for grants from NEAs own National Foundation for Innovation in Education. We believe strongly in building educator-leaders through professional development. We also believe that the diversity of experience and expertise among our NEA brothers and sisters in other states is a unique asset to educators here. So, within South Carolina, we continue to offer a wide variety of professional development programs; this fall, we are sponsoring To Teach is to Lead, one of several annual, statewide conferences. We also offer programs at little or no cost to school districts and to individual schools. And, beyond our borders, we designate a number of our states educators to participate in various regional and national conferences and trainings that are sponsored by NEA throughout the year. They come back quite often with new, fresh ideas that enhance their own effectiveness as teachers and as citizens. We believe that only through collaboration with community leaders and parents will we be able to counteract the nationwide effort to corporative, privatize and profit-ize public education, and to expose the ideological agenda against public education pursued by organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council or (ALEC), so we engage actively in outreach to parents and communities. At the root of all of our initiatives is the conviction that teaching is a noble profession, and that teaching in public schools is an investment in our common future, and that these convictions should be held institutionally by our state and its elected and appointed leaders. Finally, your staff asked what we believe teacher quality means, and what are the impediments to it. Those are large questions. We believe that teacher quality refers to the combination of two sets of attributes: those that an educator brings to his or her work (knowledge, credentials, commitment, effectiveness, character, creativity and drive) and those provided by the state and the school district to help the educator become effective in the classroom (professional collaboration, empowerment, dedicated time for planning, protected time for teaching, freedom to innovate, guaranteed safety in the teaching and learning environment, student preparation, parental and institutional support, protected rights of due process, professional compensation based on credentials and experience, and job security). Thats a tall order but not insurmountable. In considering the impediments to teacher quality of this sort, I refer your attention again to the series of lacks that I described earlier in these remarks, and the three standard responses that educators are used to hearing from their government: delay, increment and alternative. But Ill add a few more. We believe an environment of toxic testing is an impediment to teacher quality, as well as the over-emphasis on the importance of standardized tests in determining student achievement. We believe that purposeful, ideological subversion of our profession and our professionals is an impediment to teacher quality. I would ask the members of this esteemed subcommittee just as one example: When was the last time you celebrated the work being done daily in our public school classrooms in your public remarks? When was the last time you celebrated those individuals, by name, who are doing that important work? With all due respect to our friends who are administrators, I dont mean our superintendents and principals. And I dont mean at the grand openings of brand-new school sites. I mean, when did you last appear with, and speak publicly about, the men and women who are working in challenging workplaces, the portable classrooms, the old school buildings. If you are already doing these things, we appreciate and applaud you. But too few lawmakers, public officials at the state and local level, seem to care about educators. That may be why educators in our organization cite one more significant impediment to teacher quality: The lack of strong, principled leadership among our lawmakers in support of traditional public schools and the professionals who serve students there. Mr. Chairman, that concludes my remarks.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:48:09 +0000
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