Kerrie Dallman
Kerrie Dallman is president of the Jefferson County Education Association, the teachers union in the state’s largest school district.
She also is a member of the Governor’s Council on Educator Effectiveness, created by executive order of Gov. Bill Ritter to overhaul the state’s teacher and principal evaluation system by 2012-13.
The group is to define what makes an effective teacher and principal and link at least 50 percent of their evaluations to measures of student achievement.
Dallman, a high school government teacher, opposes a bill introduced by state Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, which also requires that link between student academic growth and decisions about teacher pay, retention and dismissal.
Whether through the governor’s council or the Johnston bill, “We’re going to make that link,” Dallman said, “but it’s how we make that link.”
Johnston’s bill, Senate Bill 191, also would require teachers receive three consecutive years of positive evaluations to earn tenure and they could be returned to probationary status if they receive two years of poor ratings.
Education News Colorado sat down with Dallman to talk specifics about teachers’ concerns with the bill, which has the support of the State Board of Education and state Education Commissioner Dwight Jones but is opposed by the Colorado Education Association, the statewide teachers’ union.
Dallman testified against the bill Thursday. She was interviewed Monday.
Click below to hear Dallman talk about the difficulty of defining effective teaching and why it takes time:
Dallman talks about concerns with the current educator evaluation system and why it’s not working:
Dallman talks about linking student achievement to decisions about teacher pay, retention and dismissal:
Very well said Dallman! The governor and senator need to stand back and respect the work already being done concerning teacher evaluations and wait for the results before pushing this legislation. Everyone knows that the majority of students DO NOT take the CSAP tests seriously and why should they, they have ZERO effect upon a student’s grade. I know of students who decide to just choose “A” for every answer or make a pretty design on the answer sheet. And now Senator Johnston wants to base a teacher’s performance and evaluation on this meaningless test????? I am not a teacher, but even I can see this is wrong. I would also like to know, in a time when schools are being closed, where is the money going to come from to implement this legislation?
Amen, amen, amen. My thanks to Ms. Dallman for telling it like it is.
As I said on the Denver Post website, if you want high quality teachers, give them a high quality salary. Why do all of our brightest go to business school or science and technology? Because their intelligence is rewarded with high pay. Go to any education class and you start to fear for your own children. I was fearing for my children and I don’t even have any yet.
The answer is not in punishing current teachers, the answer is in recruiting driven and intelligent teachers and then rewarding them. And as No Child Left Behind has proven, high stakes testing does not improve student learning, so why would we assume that high stakes testing would improve teacher performance?
The term “high stakes” is certainly a misnomer for CSAP, as Mary indicates above. If we really want students (and parents) invested in a test, make graduation contingent on it. That, however, would simply make an awful plan less awful. The public sees teachers’ resistance to the current legislation as defensive and protectionist, so we need to make clear a number of factors. The first is that a standardized test can measure some skills, but it certainly can’t be the full measure of a teacher’s effectiveness. Secondly, if we accept the notion of testing for accountability, then tests must be given intemittently thoughout the year, to the same group of students in order to get an accurate measure of the teacher’s work with those students. Thirdly, (and this is the most challenging) we need meaningful, narrative measures of the myriad duties and skills a teacher employs that can never show up on a standardized test–the extra time they take for individual students, their coaching and activities they direct, committees they participate in, the individual challenges they create for themselves to continually improve their classroom delivery, the communicaton with parents, their attendance at IEP and 504 meetings, etc., etc. Some of this could probably even be measured by student evaluations, especially if the student knew we were taking their thoughts seriously. There are other issues, for sure, but addressing these three things would be a good start.