Touching on subjects from key education indicators, to state grading, to tenure and teaching salaries, Alabama State Board of Education representative Randy McKinney was the keynote speaker last week at the Rotary Club of Gulf Shores & Orange Beach.

McKinney, who represents District 1 covering Baldwin, Mobile and Escambia Counties, has served on the board for seven years and is presently the board’s vice president.

McKinney discussed the findings from the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) report released in January, showing Alabama ranks 25th in the country in education, with a grade of C+.

“That is a pretty impressive increase in the past several years,” McKinney said.

According to the study, states receive an overall grade from the average of scores in six graded categories: chance for success; K-12 achievement; transitions and alignment; school finance analysis; standards, assessments and accountability; and the teaching profession.

“In transitions and alignment we received a B- which is a good thing,” said McKinney. “We have been trying to align K-12 through post-secondary through higher education. During the time since I’ve been on the school board, we were one of the first ones to actually bring together all of those departments and have a meeting together.”

McKinney is putting together work sessions that includes the Alabama Commission on Higher Education to figure out ways to do even better.

“We have high school students that graduate and they have choices to make. They have to go into a career-ready field, or a technology field or continue their academic education, but we have to have them prepared to do whatever they choose.”

McKinney said sometimes there is pressure to put students on a specific career track at earlier grades, but he favors giving students options as long as possible.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I probably changed my major in college more than once, so to try to make a high school student decide in the ninth grade or 10th grade which path they need to choose is difficult. Very few students know what they want to do at that age.”

Tenure

“Tenure has been so perverted in the state of Alabama that it is almost not recognizable as something that is beneficial for an educational institution,” McKinney said.

Presently in Alabama, bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers can receive tenure.

“The original purpose of tenure, in my study and research, was to make sure that an individual didn’t get dismissed just because someone had a different political view. We’ve moved all of that into something very different, and very ugly, and very detrimental to quality education.”

McKinney said he supports the present education bill SB310 that would change tenure in Alabama, allowing principals to reassign, retrain or replace teachers that are not effectively doing their job.

“I want competent teachers in every classroom. Personally, and this is just me speaking, if we could have competent principals in every school, I would love for a principal to be able to say, if he has 70 teachers, he could hire the best 70 teachers he could find.”

McKinney says that is why he is willing to fight the fight to get the right to put quality teachers in every classroom.

“As long you are able to not be dismissed for political reasons or so someone could fire you to hire their cousin, as long as we can keep that out of the mix, which this bill will allow us to do, then I think we can end up with good people in every classroom.”

McKinney says the school board wants competent teachers that have a passion to teach.

“Ninety percent of our teachers fall into that category. We are talking about a number of teachers that aren’t effective in their area and they lack some competency to do it well.”

While the stance the Alabama Education Association (AEA) takes often clashes with the state school board, McKinney said there are people involved in the AEA that realize if Alabama really wants to improve education and quit being mediocre, some changes have to be made.

“Some of the people understand that it is wrong for them to protect jobs for people that commit felonies, that are ineffective and incompetent. One of these days, the people of Alabama will demand better than mediocrity and we will reach that plateau.”