We are not going to find hoardes of brighter and better teachers (and schools and districts) somewhere out in the universe. We are going to have to build them, and that requires taking stock of progress from time to time.

Why don’t we start talking about a more harrowing CURRICULUM evaluation process? Or a SUPERINTENDENT evaluation process? Or an ED SCHOOL evaluation process (shut down those whose grads don’t raise test scores, or whose ideologies don’t raise test scores)? Or a CHARLATAN,oops, I mean EDUCATION CONSULTANT evaluation process? Or an EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY evaluation process (blackball companies that hawk expensive but ineffective products)?

Test scores, for me, quantify the process. However, they will be accompanied by a myriad of problems, initially.

Based on what I’ve read about William Sanders and value-added assessment I believe this is an avenue that needs to be explored, developed, and hopefully, refined to the point of being effective.

In the same breath, I’m cognizant of many of the issues John raises, especially in regard to educating urban youngsters. If John can remember, I’ve always maintained inner-city teachers are a special breed and should be compensated accordingly. They deal with problems those of us in suburbia could never imagine. And transient students are clearly at the head of the list.

So yes, I’d like to see a significant paradigm shift away from our existing model for evaluating teachers. It’s ineffective and needs to be dumped. The best prospect I’ve encountered is VAA and potential merit pay/performance pay as the primary alternative. If there are other models out there districts are employing (I’m not aware of any, at least on a wide scale).

So onward and upward with VA and refine it as we go. Sorry if that sounds a little cold and unfair to those who will be the guinea pigs (teachers and students) but that’s how bad the existing system has proven itself to be. BTW, it’s not necessarily the system, it’s administrators unwilling to do a thorough job of evaluating and take a stand on their assessments, and the lack of quantifiable data on a teacher available to them.

Districts cannot be overlooked either as the culprits. They’re all scared to death of the legal costs if a fight ensues (and it usually does) regarding the dismissal of a teacher. That perhaps is the primary reason I’m in favor of VAA, merit pay, etc. It provides the administrator and the district with a semblance of objective information on a teacher, data that could well, if gathered and presented appropriately, hold up in court.

HOWEVER, before we take any of these folks to court for dismissal I’d really like to see the information gathered from these tests used TO IMPROVE INSTRUCTION. Then, and only then, if they’re unwilling to amend their practice and improve on their performance, then you take them to court and run their sorry behinds out of the classroom.

I really like and agree with your comments above. If my principal decided to institute some of those policies into his evaluation process at the beginning of this school year, I wouldn’t be very resistant. Many times, it is how I check on my own teaching. When I see a student not doing well in my class, I check his/her progress in his other classes and conference with his/her other teachers to see if I am or am not the problem.

I also agree with Robert as well. There is so much talk of adopting a model that truly treats teachers as other professionals are treated, with merit based pay scales and the like. However, we are told to control so many things that we cannot control. And our society/government doesn’t seem to be ready to address the larger issues that affect student progress, not just poor teaching, but living in poverty, issues of diversity and racism, and the many family and peer issues that affect a child. It would be nice if someone went to effective teachers, asked them what they needed to be even more effective, and then tried to figure out ways to implement those suggestions instead of immediately assuming teachers are asking for the impossible.

I definitely consider myself to be among the ranks of effective teachers, but I have to admit that I would be extremely tempted to leave the profession if my progress was to solely be judged on test scores. I have had many moments of success with students in which the student’s test score was not what defined our success…success was defined as being able to actually master a learned skill without the teacher’s guidance, or, even, simply creating a regular routine for sitting down and completing homework when the student was previously ignoring the existence of work in general. Test scores don’t measure those things, and yet, if you ask me and those students, we accomplished alot.

I teach in Chicago, where Duncan was CEO of Chicago Public Schools. I didn’t like what he was doing as CEO, and I don’t like what he’s doing as the Secretary of Education. He’s proven himself to be a numbers man, and someone has to come and balance out that perspective. Education has never been a completely exact science, and I’m no sure it can be. But I’m definitely not a veteran teacher, so I eagerly welcome other perspectives on my comments.

To respond to GGW and others here: The creation of an “imperfect” teacher evaluation system, assuming that “imperfect” is automatically better than what we have, is not the answer. I agree with Robert and others that the current system is, more or less, a joke. So if we’re going to create a new teacher evaluation system–and I’m not necessarily saying we shouldn’t–it should come with three big safeguards built in:

1.) Student test scores should be compared across subjects in the same school year. If a kid is doing poorly in ALL subject areas, it is likely that he or she does not have five or six terrible teachers, but rather that he or she is having a hard time for some personal reason that is not attributable to a teacher.

2.) Peer review should be randomized and come from outside a school building. By this I mean a “jury duty” system that I have proposed elsewhere. A “jury pool” of teachers with, say, a certain amount of experience, education, interest, or respect within their communities would be pooled for a day or two here or there to go to different schools and observe teachers they don’t know. Teachers would be selected from this pool randomly. This would prevent teachers in a building from ganging up on an unpopular teacher.

3.) Test scores should be ONE factor in a teacher’s evaluation, not the be-all and end-all.

And to respond to Robert particularly: You are absolutely right in the comment I quoted. “Firing” students seems to be exactly what certain charter schools are up to, incidentally.

Why keep throwing up straw men? Why not address the real world statement just made by Robert? You don’t deny his point do you?

The point is not saving one teacher at a cost of thousands. What ratio would you approve? In any schools, for the reasons that Robert just explained, the cost to the innocent teachers would be much higher. Would you sacrifice one out of ten teachers? One out of twenty? One out of fifteen? Remember the Baby Boomers are going to be retiring and you’ll need to replace us, also.

Besides, you guys could get most of what you want, and what we want, if you’d see our points on our nonnegotiables and then compromise.

Frankly, I’m looking at this from the perspective of the inner city. Implement your systeem and our schools will empty of effective teachers. You may think that charters can take up the slack, but I wouldn’t gamble children’s futures on it. When you face ALL of our challenges, under your system charters would also empty.

Of all the ideas that have come to education from the business world, the one that seems not to have been considered is: hire good people and get out of their way. As a teacher, I do not have a curriculum, but pedagogy (how I teach) is tightly prescribed and monitored. I have limited authority to control student behavior and work habits. I have no control over family and peer factors that may actively undermine what I am trying to accomplish. I am, for all intents and purposes the only accountable person in the learning process and any student failure is my failure alone. This is, needless to say, breathtaking nonsense. As a business metaphor, we’re essentially saying you have no control over your process, your product, your working conditions, or your staff. Yet you are 100% responsible for their output and productivity.

I believe it’s a very reasonable argument to say the burden of proof is on the “changers.” Right now we have a system where basically nobody is evaluated. So anyone who wants to change it, one might argue, must show that their system is better.

I would agree with that.

Another argument – the most common – is that anyone who wants to change the system has a higher bar to clear. It’s that any change must not just be better, but perfect.

If a single teacher would be wrongly judged, better to protect that one, even if it ensures thousands of harmful teachers remain under the current system of no evaluation.

I don’t agree with that rationale. But it’s a fair question.

Others, like Dan W upthread, seem to be uncomfortable with the current “nobody gets evaluated” system. So he argues for rejecting data on outputs but allowing human observation of inputs exclusively, instead of a combination of both.

His method is equally subject to the issue of “a teacher could be wrongly judged.” He and others believe that teachers should be judged, but exclusively by observations, particularly if the observations are done by peers (teachers) rather than principals (former teachers).

Politically, of course, that is more popular. Empirically, hard to see why.

I used the example of what I know. I can’t know everything. You can’t know everything. And designers of Value Added Models can’t know everything.

Before I answer I have to remind you that your side has the burden of proof. It is advocates of systemic uses of growth models that have to prove that they are valid. You can’t just take one example and say that the VAM might work there. It has to be reliable across the entire system that is using it. And neither can Obama anticipate where and how those models could be used or misused.

To answer your question, last year our middle school had a higher dropout rate than the high school, which is something I never thought was possible. (In NYC, none of those middle schoolers would count as dropouts, by the way) Computer programmers aren’t going to account for something that was previously seen as impossible. So, in that case the 8th grade teachers would get screwed. But that’s OK, we’ve got plenty of math teachers who want to take on the toughest challenge in education, so middle school pre-algebra teachers are expendable.

You reminded me of our 8th grade math teacher who stunned everyone with her pass rate. I asked her if those students could bring our 9th grade pass rate out of the single digits. She could have posed as the muse, but she replied, “Of course not!” Then using terminology I couldn’t understand she explained how her increased scores were the result of a,b, and c, but that the test didn’t reveal their weaknesses in x,y, and z which they would need for Algebra. Soon afterwards, the State agreed and changed cut scores. We’re being told to expect a major drop. So if that’s true, should they fire her rather than give her the bonus that she would have earned if the preliminary pass rate of last spring had held?

You also remind me of a superstar principal whose test scores got him a promotion to a middle school. He explained that his 5th graders had produced great scores in June, but when they were promoted to 6th grade their September scores had collapsed. “I’m pretty good!” he exclaimed, “I can ruin a school in six weeks.!” Of course we both knew the reality. Any of his 5th graders who had a choice were able to exercise that choice and find another middle school. The only kids who go to the toughest neighborhood middle schools are the ones who have no choices.

In my city, at least, the market for charters, magnets, enterprise schools, etc. is completely over-saturated. The only option now is to improve the neighborhood schools. But data-driven evaluations would be suicidal. Then the last of the best neighborhood school teachers would have to seriously consider their choice options. But that gets me back to the arguments I just made.

Why not compare Alg 1 class to exact same kids scores from previous year in Grade 8 pre-alg?