Excerpted from Missouri NEA Daily Legislative Update — Week 9, No. 2, March 1, 2011

By Otto Fajen – MNEA Legislative Director

Today the Missouri House will meet to hear HB 628 (Scott Dieckhaus).  The Association strongly opposes the bill.  The bill would enact a massive intrusion on the operation of every school district in the state.  The bill repeals teacher tenure and minimum salary requirements for teachers with a Master’s degree.  Teacher tenure is not a guarantee of a job for life, just a process to address issues of concern and ensure teachers are not fired arbitrarily  The bill also mandates that every school district use a new, highly prescriptive, bureaucratic system of evaluation for administrators and teachers that is heavily determined by student test scores and that is used to determine both the length of a teacher’s contract and a teacher’s pay.  The bill is a massive overreach of state control that would undermine local systems already in place and stifle innovation in districts already working on new evaluation and compensation systems.   Teacher evaluation systems and teacher compensation systems should be determined locally by school districts and school employees through a collective bargaining process, not dictated by a one-size-fits-all state mandate.

You can download the full text of the bill here.