Legislative
Educator Advocacy:
Your Voice Makes All the Difference! By Josh Stephens, PAGE Legislative Policy Analyst
I
magine yourself in the shoes of your legislators. Throughout the course of a 40-day legislative session and beyond, scores of people contact you each day — constituents, other legislators, lobbyists and other advocates — about a wide variety of policy issues. Now, imagine receiving thousands of emails and phone calls in the course of a week in strong support of a bill that would reduce the amount of mandated standardized testing throughout the state and decrease the emphasis of standardized test scores in teacher and administrator evaluations. That would, without a doubt, have a huge impact on how you vote on that bill. That’s exactly what you all — our members — helped accomplish during the 2016 session of the Georgia
General Assembly. By reaching out to your legislators on a consistent basis and partnering with PAGE’s messaging about Senate Bill 364 with your personal experiences in the classroom, your voice was heard loud and clear. On several occasions throughout the session, Sen. Lindsey Tippins (R-Marietta), chairman of the Senate Education and Youth Committee, and Rep. Brooks Coleman (R-Duluth), chairman of the House Education Committee, mentioned the impact that your calls and emails were making on crafting the bill and ensuring its advancement through the legislative process. In December, President Barack Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act, the latest iteration of federal education legislation. The bill
passed both the U.S. House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support from the Georgia congressional delegation with only two dissenting votes in the House. Due to a growing national debate about the proper use for and amount of student testing, Congress listened, and this new law began the process of decreasing emphasis on standardized tests. Since 2013, when House Bill 244 — the bill creating the TKES and LKES systems used by local districts to evaluate teachers and administrators — was signed into law, PAGE has raised concerns with the amount of standardized testing taking place in the classroom and the over-emphasis of standardized test scores in educator evaluations. For the past three years, PAGE’s top legislative
2016 PAGE and GAEL Day on Capitol Hill
12 PAGE ONE
May/June 2016
