Last week, the nation's press reported something that most teachers found unbelievable: Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that teachers should be evaluated by their students' test scores.
Teachers hate this idea because they know that teachers are not solely responsible for their students' scores. The students bear some responsibility, as do their families, for whether students do well or poorly on tests. District leaders bear some responsibility, depending on the resources they provide to schools. Teachers also are aware that the tests are not the only measure of what happens in their classrooms and that even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that we need better tests. There is a fairly sizable body of research demonstrating that test scores are affected by many factors beyond the teachers' control.
I was surprised too when I read the headlines and the press accounts.
But when I read Randi's speech on the AFT website, I discovered that the media stories were wrong. In fact, Randi offered a far more complicated and nuanced proposal than what was widely reported.
She laid out a far-ranging plan for evaluating teachers, which I suspect most teachers would find fair and reasonable. Here is what she said:
First, states should set out clear professional standards that describe clearly what teachers should know and be able to do. Then, to determine whether teachers meet these standards, districts should use "multiple means of evaluation," including classroom observations, self-evaluations, portfolio reviews, appraisal of lesson plans," and a variety of other tools, including student test scores. But the scores should be based on "valid and reliable assessments" and they should not be derived "by comparing the scores of last year's students with the scores of this year's students, but by assessing whether a teacher's students show real growth while in his classroom."
What this means is that districts would have to test students when they enter a specific classroom in the fall and again at the end of the school year to see how much progress they have made in that teacher's class. Hardly any district does this now. Most do exactly what Randi said was inappropriate: They test students in the spring and compare this year's students to last year's students. This is not a reasonable way to measure the teacher's effectiveness, since the groups will vary considerably from year to year.
Randi also said, as part of her package of prescriptions, that the goal of evaluation was not merely to identify teachers who were good or bad, but to help teachers get better at their work throughout their careers. So she proposed that every district should offer "solid induction, mentoring, ongoing professional development, and career opportunities that keep great teachers in the classroom."
In other words, Randi Weingarten laid out a very serious policy proposal, not a simplistic concession to allow schools to judge teachers by their students' scores. It is also an expensive proposal and very far removed from the now popular but simpleminded idea that teachers can be graded by whether their students get high or low test scores. Randi also made clear that the evaluation system must be adopted simultaneously with a fair system of due process. Neither alone is sufficient.
Only a day or so before Randi gave her speech at the National Press Club (January 12), the superintendent of schools in Houston and the Houston school board announced its intention to fire teachers based on their students' scores.
Houston, and other districts, should review Randi's ideas before proceeding.
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"The school board on Thursday gave initial approval to a policy that allows the district to dismiss teachers whose students consistent
Grier and school board members have emphasized that the district's goal is not to fire teachers but to help them improve. Teachers' job evaluation
-Certify and re-certify all teachers every couple years.
-Create a framework/
-Give school boards the flexibilit
-Give principals the flexibilit
-Reward teachers who are able to demonstrat
-Better compensate teachers, at the baseline level.
-Increase the incentives to motivate college students into becoming teachers, be it with grant money, loan assistance
-Cap class sizes, in all cases that doing so would not affect the quality of education that is received, at 25 students.
We never had the current problems a generation ago. So what went wrong? Why cannot we do what we did a generation ago or whats done in the rest of the world; which does a better job at education at a fraction of the costs???
Teachers are doing the same things they have always been doing, but they cannot make up for these things that create a classroom environmen
Whatever happened to having education be about the learning process or even the joy of learning?
With pressure to turn out students capable of high scores alone, teachers are forced to omit or minimize real education in favor of teaching-t
And... sigh... I know students need "real-worl
But it is just not true that unions prevent the firing of bad teachers. This is a myth. Teachers can be fired anywhere in America. It costs nothing to do it. It's an evaluation process.
People hope that the solution to problems in education are as simple as "better teachers." When you find out our teachers are just about as good as you can get (and I know a lot of really good teachers), you realize that the solutions are much more complex than you anticipate
Randi shouldn't agree to let teachers be even partially evaluated by their students' test scores because many students are absent for significan
You are correct. This is all about image, not truth. The union leadership should admit that tying test scores to teacher evaluation is wrong. However, Randi has always bee way too conciliato