This week, there were 2 major education-related stories in the news. First, the State and the Teachers’ Union reached an agreement on teacher evaluations. And second, acting under a court order, the City Department of Education publicly released test-result-based evaluations of 18,000 teachers. Sadly, both of these events will not help improve education in the state.
The evaluation system is essentially this:
The agreement, announced at a news conference in Albany, allows school districts to base up to 40 percent of a teacher’s annual review on student performance on state standardized tests…
The remaining 60 percent of a teacher’s rating is to come from subjective measurements, primarily classroom observations by principals.
This is a huge missed opportunity for the state. First, there is a large portion of individual teachers’ evaluations based on test scores. This is a bad idea because it wastes classroom time teaching to the test. And the remaining 60% is based mostly on principal evaluations, which can be highly subjective. It would be better to have an evaluation system where parents and students can have a say in teacher ratings, in addition to principals. Furthermore, test-score based evaluations often lead school districts to bend ethical standards. It’s better to base evaluations on data that matters, like grading schools on their graduation rate, college attainment, incarceration rates, and employment of its students when they are adults. And finally, these evaluations have no teeth. Even if they were good measures of teacher achievement, there is no downside for tenured teachers who end up being evaluated poorly.
The publication of teacher’s evaluation scores by the City is also the wrong solution. All it will achieve is publicly humiliating the bottom 50% of teachers, and will leave the bottom 5% still teaching in our schools. A better solution would be to not hurt teacher morale and make teaching a less attractive career choice for our best and brightest. Let the worst 5% get fired, and constantly work to make the remaining 95% feel appreciated and empowered and pay them more and treat them like the professionals they are. But that is not currently on the agenda in New York.
Bill Gates had a good piece on this in the NYT last week: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/opinion/for-teachers-shame-is-no-solution.html
Yeah- that’s pretty much the consensus on this
I’m recommending Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System to everyone who cares about public education. She makes some really interesting points about how to encourage good teachers and quit scapegoating them for all the ills of our systems. A large number of poor teachers (and good teachers, too) drop out on their own, she points out.
As for Bill Gates, if you’ve read anything about his managerial techniques at Microsoft, you’d suspect he isn’t the most insightful person about personnel issues. Ravitch is critical of our turning over so much of our educational decision-making to foundations like Gates and Walton without any attempts to make them accountable.
Meanwhile, all the testing and evaluation of teachers and students has created a huge industry that rakes in money that could be spent on advancing a broader curriculum, better facilities and teacher salaries.
It’s complicated. But I agree with you, Rich, about the bargain struck.
If parents and student are to be included at all, it should be at a small percentage of the overall eval – say 10-20%. Just too emotional and reactive for most kids, and their parents too, in many cases. Test-taking is a “necessary evil” to some degree, like SAT and GRE, though it should not be the primary focus. Kids in school need some prep for taking tests in their lives, sadly.
I do agree that public humiliation of teachers with poor ratings is a poor idea – more constructively, work to rehabilitate poor teachers if possible, warn them, and then fire them if no improvements result. We do need to pay and reward teachers alot more if we truly want to attract capable, motivated people.
Thanks, Rich, for staying with this issue.
Thanks all for the kind comments- much appreciated!