| 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. |
