Evaluations for the rest of the workforce

Colorado is moving closer to a system for evaluating counselors, nurses and other school professionals who aren’t classroom teachers.

Bill would tweak evaluation law

A new House bill would require teachers’ unions to have a say when school districts develop their own educator evaluation systems.

Study details how to evaluate teachers

A three-year study of teacher evaluation methods supports Colorado’s standard of basing 50 percent of evaluations on student performance.

Johnston: SB191 delay not needed

Rollout of Colorado’s educator evaluation system doesn’t need to be pushed back says Sen. Mike Johnston, despite rumblings to the contrary.

LEAP a big step for teachers in DPS

Backers are banking on LEAP, Denver’s pilot teacher evaluation program, to represent a substantive shift in the way teachers are reviewed and professionally supported.

State Board adopts appeals rules

The State Board of Education has adopted rules that will govern appeals by teachers who receive two consecutive ineffective ratings.

Some thoughts on teacher effectiveness

I finished Steven Brill’s popular (infamous?) book about the school reform drama, “Class Struggle,” about a month ago.  No, I don’t plan on offering my take on the narrative.  Enough bytes have already been expended on that.  But even though I finished it and have read several other books since, one small, virtually inconsequential paragraph continues to resonate with me.

Brill describes a major frustration Eva Moskowitz, the brilliant creator of the Success Charter Network in NYC, experienced as a student at Stuyvesant High School:

Stuyvesant is New York’s star high school, from which an outsize portion of students, like Moskowiz, cruise into the Ivy League.  But to Moskowitz, many, if not most, of the teachers were anything but stars.  She thought half of the teachers were incompetent and vividly remembers math and science classes where “the students, who were all gifted, literally carried the class.  The teachers were cruising on the students’ talent,” she says.  “I remember one of the kids taught the rest of us physics, while the teacher sat there drunk . . . It was easy to be a teacher there.”

This stuck with me because, as a Stuyvesant alum myself (who did not go onto the Ivy Leagues), I totally agree.  I don’t think any of my teachers were drunk in class, but my high school memories are also littered with teacher experiences that demonstrate either severe incompetence or gross neglect.  Either way, I can’t think of any way to justify why these individuals were allowed to be instructing in any classroom.

Multiple measures in multiple venues

Several recent intersecting conversations lead me to this post: The North “credit recovery” issue, increasing discussions about using performance funding for Colorado higher ed and/or K12, evaluations of ProComp and other teacher incentive pay programs and Alex Oom’s valuable recent post.

If we want to incentivize or reward educational performance in some form (and we do), we need to pay careful attention to how we do that.   Nearly any output or outcome measure can potentially be “gamed” or cheated.  We see this with No Child Left Behind, where state tests are the key to school evaluation. As a result, states have produced considerable improvement on those tests, while not showing much improvement on NAEP, the national test that was not “dumbed down” to show greater proficiency of students.

It is also true that no single measure comes near being perfect.  In addition to cheating or gaming, reliance upon a single measure (and test scores are the one that most of us would lean towards), makes the assumption that this measure is capturing appropriately what we want to capture.  Currently, for state tests like CSAP, this is not the case, and we clearly need to find more, better tests.

In some ways, this is an obvious point – who can oppose multiple measures of evaluation?