Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired

[somone]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/education/28evals.html

Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired
By SAM DILLON

WASHINGTON — Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city’s roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. “It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job,” Ms. Strzelecki said.

Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city’s 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation’s highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.

The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.

Its admirers say the system, a centerpiece of the tempestuous three-year tenure of Washington’s former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, has brought clear teaching standards to a district that lacked them and is setting a new standard by establishing dismissal as a consequence of ineffective teaching...

[IndyPragmatist]

1. I've never been a fan of grading teachers

if we had a reliable way to do this, that would be one thing, but every method of grading teachers that I have seen isnt fair. I have no idea what a fair way of grading them would be, but if there is one, I would definitely consider it.

However, I have found the research of Eric Hanushek to be very interesting. His ideas on the development of students with good teachers versus bad teachers is interesting and I plan on reading more of his work.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

4. Most professions are graded in one form or another

I see no reason why teaching should be exempt.

[RC]

6. The problem is who is doing the grading and their criteria.

Teachers have always been graded.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

7. For many years, even as an NEA member I critized union leadership for not taking point on evals

Now we are being run over by a system none of us wanted. If our leaders had stepped up and not stuck their heads in the sand there could have been a jointly developed and supported evaluation system. Instead...

[IndyPragmatist]

12. I'm completely for teacher evaluations, but

I haven't seen a method that doesnt punish teachers for things out of their control.

For example, a friend of mine is a high school math teacher. She teaches Calculus to seniors as well as remedial math for freshmen. I'm sure she would be graded very favorably in her calculus course because the students care and are willing to learn. Conversely, she would probably look like a terrible teacher in her remedial class because the students don't care, as long as they get a D-, most of them are happy.

My mother was a teacher. Some of her friends would say terrible things about the students. Some would make it obvious that they didn't care a bit about the kids. However, others were the complete opposite. I would like to see more discussion on this subject. It seems that since its the Republicans that are pushing education reform, the Democratic response must be to completely oppose it. Because the Republicans started the push for teacher evaluations, the Democrats act like that is the end of the world. I just wish we could get past the partisan bullsh*t and look for solutions instead of political victories.

[a la izquierda]

18. Let me ask you this:

what do you think of evals for college professors?

[ProgressiveProfessor]

19. No different than any other professional

I get them every term.

[a la izquierda]

23. I do as well. 99% of them are good.

I always get a few each year who whine that I assign too much reading, that I don't teach X or Y country (when I have to teach the history of Latin America), that my grading is too hard, etc...
Can I ask what you teach?
I'd be fearful that students with axes to grind, whose complaints have little merit, will force valuable professors from their field. Conversely, professors wanting to curry favor from students inflate their grades (in fact, one of my former profs is writing on this at the moment).

[kenfrequed]

17. Most of those that insist on grading teachers

Have a considerable political axe to grind. They would as soon have teaching not funded at all or to turn the whole enterprise over to the 'free market.'

[mike_c]

16. the biggest problem is that teaching and learning are a partnership....

At the very least, they're a partnership between teachers and students, more broadly, a partnership that includes everyone with any influence on the outcomes of student learning success. But ignoring those broader influences for just a moment, we're still left with the essential classroom partnership between teachers and students. Punishing teachers when students perform poorly ignores the real dynamics of the classroom AND IT WILL NEVER IMPROVE EDUCATION. Each student is themselves a lynchpin in the teaching and learning dynamic, as is their teacher.

I'm an excellent case in point to illustrate this. Today I'm a tenured full professor and academic scientist-- presumably that's testament of some sort about my ability and intelligence. Nonetheless, I dropped out of high school at my first opportunity, roughly 16 years old, and didn't actually pass a class through my own efforts after, oh-- fifth grade or so? I did nothing in middle and high school. Totally unmotivated, totally unengaged. Remember that kid who was way older than everyone else in his class because he kept being held back? That was me, until I dropped out. I was "officially" in something like the eighth grade when I dropped out at 16.

In today's climate administrators, politicians, and the media would blame my failure on my teachers. In retrospect, I had some crummy teachers, I had some mediocre teachers, and I had some rockin' excellent teachers. Still, I failed EVERY class I took throughout most of my primary and high school years. Despite being exposed to a full range of teaching aptitude and accomplishment, I nonetheless failed everything.

Was that really my teachers' faults? Really? Or might my apathy and disengagement have something to do with my poor performance? Having seen this process from inside the head of a student who genuinely didn't give a rat's buttocks whether he performed poorly or otherwise, it's damned hard to blame my teachers.

Today I teach university life science classes. I do the best job I know how. I use modern higher education pedagogies that research suggests are most effective whenever I can. I know my field. My colleagues respect my work, both in the laboratory and in the classroom. Yet a proportion of my students-- most of whom have proven themselves capable of academically rigorous work-- fail every semester. And these are the students who have already self selected as being among the most accomplished and brightest. They're paying to sit in my classes-- no one compelled them to attend.

Teacher evals ignore the roles that students play in the teaching/learning partnership. The BEST teachers on Earth cannot improve the performance of apathetic and disengaged students, and they cannot yet zip open their heads and forcibly pour knowledge-- or even interest-- into their brains. THAT is why punishing teachers when students under-perform will never improve educational outcomes (although it's likely to create emphasis on new outcomes that mask the underlying failures of the system)-- teachers do not have the ability to determine the outcome, no matter how skilled or dedicated they might be. That ability rests solely with the students, and with their decisions about whether to be interested, engaged, and challenged.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

21. I agree, which is one of the reasons I feel that our union leaders screwed us all by being in denial

about what was coming. Instead they should have been out front designing a system that was both effective and fair.

Judging purely on student performance is specious but so is claiming that there is no way to fairly rate and evaluate teachers.

[mike_c]

22. but what means would you suggest for "fairly" rating and evaluating teachers...?

Frankly, my opinion is that teachers should be peer reviewed, preferably by colleagues who specialize in pedagogy and who ADVISE teachers when they find classroom performance that can be improved, not judge them or make personnel recommendations except in truly egregious instances-- and in those instances there need to be clear guidelines and layers of administrative review and appeal. This is, of course, similar to the collegial evaluations that we undergo annually on my campus, with colleagues (usually from the same department) visiting classes and writing letters of support, criticism, and evaluation. Such letters are genuinely useful, often containing pedagogical recommendations and insights that we can incorporate into our teaching. They are almost never "negative" in the sense of framing the context for dismissal or anything similar-- but they can be and have been on very rare occasions. Mostly, those occasions are rare because we put a lot of work into the interview and hiring process and because we have little to gain by canning colleagues whose performance can be improved with a little mentoring (this almost always involves junior colleagues who are still a bit new to teaching-- remember, we get virtually no pedagogical training in our disciplines, so many of us start with whatever was modeled for us in our own educations before learning better methods).

But the process of education is not circumscribed by steps that need to be accomplished, or by specific universal outcomes. We can evaluate the performance of a factory worker BECAUSE that person's job actions can be easily described-- "fit tab A into hole B and do it as fast as you can without making mistakes." That's oversimplified, of course, but you see my point-- performance can be evaluated because there is a specific outcome expected (the criteria) and the worker is mostly in control of accomplishing that outcome (by being skilled). Teaching is not nearly so straightforward, it's processes are not circumscribed except within broad limits (curriculum is a different matter), and teachers have little or no control over whether students actually achieve desired outcomes. The only thing left to rate is whether teachers make a professional go of doing well and demonstrate commitment to student success (let's turn the usual metric on it's head and track whether ANY students perform well rather than whether they all do or whether any perform poorly). People outside the profession won't understand, of course.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

25. My current favorite approach is to make Dept Heads take on most of it

They are active senior teachers and aware of the day to day challenges. That should provide more realistic and effective evaluations than administrators.

[dkf]

10. Maybe grading students isn't fair either.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. I question the academic credentials and experience of the evaluators

to truly know when a teacher is ineffective in a particular subject, i.e., the intricacies of experimentation in a science lab with procedure, observation, conclusion and proof. You can't superficially watch a classroom and decide "this isn't working".

[Hissyspit]

13. Of course not. In fact , many evaluation systems

often have the opposite effect of what is ( supposedly) intended.

[izquierdista]

3. That's an appropriate picture

"Get Schooled" signs for a drop-out.

[RC]

5. First they won't let teachers teach, then they fire them because the students didn't pass the test.

We have too many "experts" with an agenda destroying our children's future in a global world.

[WatsonT]

8. I don't see any problem with evaluating teachers for their performance

that happens in most every line of work and teaching is very important.

Although I'm sure this isn't the best way to go about it.

[woo me with science]

9. Agree. Rating interactions by checklist is a corporate model that can't work.

It reminds me of customer service reps in other companies who are "graded" by upper management on their interactions with customers using a checklist. The problem is that every customer isn't the same, and it is impossible to come up with a checklist that will accurately reflect what happens in the encounter. Every class is different, and every student is different. Good teachers will adapt, and what they do in the classroom in third period may be completely different from the way they act in fifth period.

It doesn't even necessarily work in corporate settings. I have talked to many corporate drones who describe "shifting to the script" when the evaluators are around, because they know the boxes that have to be checked. The mediocre employees follow the corporate script all the time. The good ones follow their own instincts and the customers' needs.

That said, I will add that I saw a list of techniques that good teachers often use in the classroom, that was part of an article on the charter school movement. Many of them were excellent and were things I would not have thought of myself and that were not taught in the grad. education classes I took. There is a huge difference, though, between giving good training and mentorship to new teachers so that they have access to these techniques, and creating a top-down system of ratings that rigidly and blindly requires the use of technique X so many times per hour in order for a teacher to keep her job.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

20. One of the reasons unions should have taken the lead in teacher evaluations is to get a system that

works and is fair

[Hissyspit]

14. It is quite possibly worthless.

Even counterproductive.

[dembotoz]

11. if me and a couple of buddies hated our teacher

all we would have to do is act out when the grim reaper showed up.

get the teacher fired

cool

[LetTimmySmoke]

15. All this will do is push turnover at low income schools even higher.

[roody]

24. The first year is very hard.

You learn to manage kids by doing it. No class can really teach kid management.