Karin Klein wrote education editorials for the Los Angeles Times for years. She now writes freelance, and she wrote this sensible article for the LA Times.
So-called reformers have advocated their view that the way to improve schools is to fire “bad” teachers. The way they would identify “bad” teachers is by whether the test scores of students went up or down or stayed flat. Reformers seldom acknowledged that test scores reflect family income far more than teacher quality.
This hunt for bad teachers has proved fruitless, as scores have misidentified good and bad teachers, good teachers are demoralized by an idiotic way of evaluating their work, and there are teacher shortages now in many districts, as good teachers leave and the pipeline of new teachers has diminishing numbers.
Linda Darling-Hammond once memorably said, “You can’t fire your way to Finland.”
Karin Klein agrees.
One day, when the current era of test-based evaluation is evaluated, reformers will be held accountable for the damage they have done to teachers, students, and public education. That day will come.
Teachers need help and support to become better teachers.
There is no waiting line of great teachers searching for a job.
School districts must work with the teachers they have, making sure they are encouraged and mentored. And paid well.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So, let me ask again. You have written about all the ways NOT to evaluate teachers. As I have asked before, what kind of evaluation (impartial, but with teeth) tool would you suggest? Or any teacher on this forum, for that matter.
By impartial I mean, not by teachers who could be evaluated by the one they evaluated because, obviously, if I evaluate my co-worker this year, but my co-worker evaluates me next year…
By “With teeth” I mean actual actionable items, and consequences.
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This is exactly the problem. A certain small group of people who want teacher evaluations to be based mostly on objective, numbers driven data.
Unfortunately, the flaw with this system is that students are not “widgets” that can all be produced at a constant rate with a single method.
Students are people with a huge variety of needs and learning styles all in the classroom of 30 students. Tests can be small parts of the process but much of evaluating teachers is subjective. Are they doing what is best for that group of students? Doing what is right for students is much more important.
I have had many students that were terrible test takers but could stand in front of me tell me the answers to the test verbally, but because they can’t do it on paper, then they are labeled unsuccessful. They are learning, just not in the way some people think of doing it traditionally.
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Rudy,
What’s the obsession with “teeth?”
The fact of the matter is that teachers, first and foremost, provide a public service that the public would rather not do: deal with and educate children between Kindergarten age and 21. Much like firefighters put out fires, garbage men pick up garbage, and police do police work, teachers provide a public service that the vast number of everyday people would rather not do.
Where are your calls for “teeth” in he annual reviews of firefighters, cops, garbage men, etc? Fact is there are some folks not doing stellar jobs in those careers…..but for the most part, you probably don’t care, so long as fires get put out, garbage gets picked up, and police don’t shoot anyone you know.
Your obsession about tooth-laden teacher evals is all about teacher-baiting, union-hating, and who knows what else. It’s not a thing. Until I hear these loud and vibrant calls for better firefighter evaluations with teeth, and garbagemen evals that have teeth, and robust evals for every other public sector profession, Ill place your arguments where they belong: in that bin reserved for folks with a strange focus on their dislike for teachers.
I’m sorry about that but please stop thinking that you have some kind of policy position. You don’t. You don’t like teachers. Thats all. Oh, and don’t get pious and play the whole “children are the future” line that people try to use to elevate their teacher-hating to really obnoxious heights. Fireman save kids too, and if the garbage isn’t piked up, kids will get sick….so don’t play that.
The pseudo-political obsession with teacher evals is either all about the privatizing of education, or for those who are personally earnest about it, all about teacher-baiting and dislike. Or they just hate public-service folks. Whatever.
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Holy cow! What a statement. I hate teachers?? Really? Why do you think I work in a school district and have done so for the past 19 years?
All my life as a parent I have NEVER taken my kids word over a teacher. I have been involved with education since my first one went to kindergarten in 1983.
I spent one full day a week as volunteer in the school until we moved to this country, 13 years later.
As soon as I moved here, I became again involved in my children’s education. The first year I worked for their school district on an on call basis, teaching teachers how to use computers.
So don’t you even begin to tell me I hate teachers.
I dislike ineffectual teachers. I dislike the damage they do to children, and some who have done that damage to my children.
When teachers do not teach, they waste my children’s time. Simple as that.
I understand the value of a good education. and for more reasons than increased pay. A good education makes a good person and a good citizen. A good education helps students to approach matters with a balanced point of view. How to listen to the arguments. How to do their own research and thinking.
So before you start spouting more nonsense, you may take a closer look at the things I have written about teachers. I have an enormous amount of respect for teachers who do their job conscientiously.
But how in the world can a teacher say that, “no, I don’t teach the curriculum. I’ll make up my own…” After all his coworkers in the same subject have taken issue with that. Tell me how that can be qualified as a “good teacher?
Out of the almost 1,300 teachers I get to work with, some are like that. Often, they are close to retirement. Why should I learn something new? They won’t fire me – words from a teacher!!
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Rudy,
Your working in a school district for the past 19 years changes nothing about what I said.
The fact remains that no matter your contact with schools and praise of those teachers you deem effective, your insistence on teacher evals with “teeth” comes from a place that is quite confusing, at best, considering your seeming lack of intensity for calling for some firefighter evaluations with teeth, district attorney evaluations with teeth, etc. The fact is that you have some type of visceral, emotional response to teachers you somehow have deemed ineffective.
All of us who have worked as teachers have come across less than stellar teachers. All of us have probably even come across one where we put our hand to forehead saying “wow, they give this profession a bad name!” I will say that those moments are actually not too frequent and when they happen my knee jerk response is not to impose some weird, “toothy” evaluation program. Basically my first thought is “this person needs some connections with some sharp teachers” and in those worst case scenarios I actually understand that the system will probably weed them out. I’ve been in no school where really shitty teaching lasts long. Admin sees it. Union people see it. Kids see it. They don’t last. Teaching is one of those careers you can’t really fake for that long. In most cases really crappy, unimprovable teachers bail out. Really, even here in NY which is one of the states where teaching smells a little of the lowest rungs of the middle class, the money and “pension” are not worth it if you hate it and suck.
So, as I stated before….when someone is so earnest and adamant about aggressive teacher evals, and they aren’t connected to the reform/privatizing movement, something else is up. Somehow you have assigned yourself the ability to judge teachers. You think you can see great and awful. And you may. But you get so emotionally engaged in that, you allow yourself to enter what is actually an absurd proposition: the rigorous “objective” consequence-laden assessment of a public service most folks in society don’t want to do.
Go down to your local fire station and start talking about some evaluations for firefighters with “teeth.” Same with the local sanitation department. Maybe it’s best to just be thankful there are folks that want to do the job.
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NYST speaks the TRUTH. Try listening to what he is saying instead of being so reactionary over the one or two bad teachers in your past. All of my fids had a few clunkers over 13 years – as we all did. Over the course of that 13 year marathon, even what you perceive as “harmful” teachers have little permanent effect on the trajectory of our children’s lives.
Cuomo begged for a teacher evaluation system with “teeth”. He wanted to nail all those ineffective incompetents. It was a fool’s errand.
Ask any one of the building principals you work with exactly how many teachers they would get rid of. Out of the 1,300 I bet it wouldn’t amount to a few. Then ask them why they are too lazy to document their incompetence or inappropriateness and then dismiss them via due process proceedings.
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Do you hate your own teachers? You should if you believe your inability to use the possessive is their fault.
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NYST
Nailed it! 1000%
Most principals go out of their way to protect the teaching staff they know. They have no desire to gamble on that magical, mystical pool of superstar teachers just waiting in the wings. The idea that the teaching ranks are filled with lazy incompetents who building principals couldn’t wait to get rid of is just one of countless false assumptions that reformers have made.
Three to four years of teaching, pre-tenure, in which a teacher can be dismissed for any reason – or no reason. Why doesn’t the standard, “fire at will” probationary period have enough teeth for you?
Try to remember Rudy, “accountability” in education is a bullshit concept created by those who want to stay in control.
Our true accountability is determined on a daily basis as our classrooms fill up with students, young people with their futures in front of them, relying on us to make it work for them. But people like you insist on putting some bullshit number on us as if it has any meaning to those kids and their hopes and their dreams.
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What “actionable items, and consequences” has so-called education reform, the current status quo, faced in its many years of failure and demonization of public education? These arrogant know-nothings invariably fail upward – witness Education Secretary John King, whose embarrassing failure as NYS Ed Commissioner led to his current position – leaving a series of gouged-out school systems, destroyed careers, ever-more segregated schools, and rampant cronyism among edu-preneurs.
As in the Hippocratic Oath, the first rule of any professional endeavor is, “First, Do No Harm.” That age-old maxim has been gleefully discarded by these people, who brag about “disruption” and “breaking things.” Yeah, that’s exactly what children, especially poor children, need. In fact, what they’re doing is much simpler, and fundamentally comes out of the police blotter despite: it’s Smash and Grab.
To answer your question, and in view of the above paragraph, the first thing to do is to stop the punitive, politically and ideologically-motivated attempt to tie teacher evaluations to invalid test scores. Second, re-institute (I know, I know, it’s not going to happen, but I can recommend it) if only on an interim basis, the traditional method of Principal (and a Principal who spent significant time in the classroom, not the two-year wonders reformers love) observations, until such time as the Augean Stables of so-called reform are washed away, and we can have an honest discussion of the topic.
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Sorry, delete that errant “despite” at the end of the second paragraph.
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Rudy, you make the terrible assumption that current evaluations by test scores and principal gotcha observations are “objective.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. It has been known for decades that standardized testing skews against minorities and the poor. And the gotcha evaluations depend on principals who will be honest, consistent, and fair.
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Rudy,
Why don’t you suggest how you think it should be done?
The system that existed before all this high stakes Common Core Crap worked if it was implemented properly. After all, that’s how it’s done in the private sector. Your immediate boss writes your evaluation and if improvement is needed, they advise what the employee must do. If there is no improvement, then the employee loses their job.
In public education the most common method was for someone in a public school’s administration to do one or more observations of every teacher in the school. There was a procedure those administrators used to observe and evaluate. After the observation, there’d be a meeting between the observing VP, principal or other administrator. For teachers found to be sub-par there would be a plan of action to improve their performance as a teacher. If that plan didn’t work, laws existed that allowed school districts to fire those teachers.
Why can’t the community based, locally controlled, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional pbulic school continue to do what most of the private sector does to evaluate employees?
For instance, Microsoft implement the same evaluation process the Bill Gates Cabal is pushing/fording on the public schools. It tanked and Microsoft returned to the old and tried system of immediate supervisors evaluating the employees that worked under them. And those supervisors are evaluated by the immediate supervisors in management above them all the way to the CEO who is evaluated by the board of directors and the major stock holders.
The facts are out there that prove using the old fashioned due process methods of getting rid of incompetent teachers works when the traditional system of employee evaluation is used. But like everything humans touch, it isn’t 100 percent perfect but it is way better than the Common Core VAM crap being pushed on this country by corrupted billionaire oligarchs.
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Lloyd Lofthouse: VAM aka stack ranking keeps trying to get in the back door.
Google: “Bill Gates” and “Microsoft” and “stack ranking” and “Vanity Fair” and “The Lost Decade.”].
[start excerpt]
By 2002 the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse as employees struggled to beat out their co-workers for promotions, bonuses, or just survival.
Microsoft’s managers, intentionally or not, pumped up the volume on the viciousness. What emerged—when combined with the bitterness about financial disparities among employees, the slow pace of development, and the power of the Windows and Office divisions to kill innovation—was a toxic stew of internal antagonism and warfare.
“If you don’t play the politics, it’s management by character assassination,” said Turkel.
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
Supposing Microsoft had managed to hire technology’s top players into a single unit before they made their names elsewhere—Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon—regardless of performance, under one of the iterations of stack ranking, two of them would have to be rated as below average, with one deemed disastrous.
[end excerpt]
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
In the interests of brevity I have left out quite a bit of material that is just as, or more, revealing.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Where I work, teachers are trained to be evaluators of their peers. I am not quite sure why no one realized the repercussions of such a system.
Some of our non-teaching staff were told to use the 360 method. And I am not quite sure why no one realized the repercussions of that method, either.
So an administrator can come in to a class room, evaluate the teacher – but that does not happen spontaneously, but the teacher receives a notice with time and date.
And, again, I am not quite sure why no one realized the repercussions of that method.
Apart from those issues, how do you objectively do a teacher evaluation? What objective standards exist?
Having been part of a rather unique class at college level, (2 year expedited program, 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week, 11 months a year) and graduated in ’78, I learned that my specific class was talked about for years after graduation. So I know that groups can have a major impact on the performance/results of teachers.
But those are rare. When a 3rd grade teacher consistently has difficulties getting material covered, and the next level teacher has to re-teach, what does that say about the 3rd grade teacher?
You can’t always blame the kids, right?
And I honestly want to know an answer.
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“Apart from those issues, how do you objectively do a teacher evaluation? What objective standards exist?”
There are no truly objective standards for teaching. It is a very artful and subjective craft that can be demonstrated in a countless variety of successful ways. As varied as the full spectrum of children in America.
If you want to see how many public schools are being forced to apply quasi-objective standards to teaching take a look here:
Click to access danielson_2014-2015_rubric.pdf
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I thought that the people in this forum were educators – at least, that’s what one contributor wrote.
I asked, what I thought to be, a straight forward question.
If there are so many different ways, tell me some of those ways. Teach me.
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Rudy,
You keep writing the same things over and over.
If you need a forum, start your own blog.
Good luck.
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“When a 3rd grade teacher consistently has difficulties getting material covered, and the next level teacher has to re-teach, what does that say about the 3rd grade teacher?”
It says they need help and support like any well intentioned worker who tries, but struggles. Maybe it says they need to be moved to second grade. maybe it says they need to be counseled into a different profession.
What does it say about the administrator who vetted the resumes, conducted the interview, hired, observed, evaluated, and tenured said teacher?
What it really says is welcome to the real world where the workplace is filled with mostly good and competent people, a very small handful of exemplars/superstars, and an extraordinarily small percent of incompetent workers who should have never been hired in the first place.
What it also says is that anyone who worries about academic efficiency in 3rd grade simply doesn’t understand what we really do. There isn’t a successful person on Earth who hasn’t survived one or two truly bad teachers. And there isn’t one academic failure who can blame those same teachers.
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Rudy needs to read Deming, the management guru, who says that management is responsible for hiring the right people, trading them, supporting them. If things go wrong, the fault lies with management
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“Teach me.”
What’s the topic?
Skills? Concepts? Facts? Other?
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As someone who has worked in management at both a TPS and at a charter, the ability to fire those who I deemed less than desirable with little red tape provided both good and bad results. There were times when the person I fired was ten times better than the person I got to replace her. And there were also times when I seemed to have an endless series of whack a mole replacements. Once in a while I hit upon a star after letting teacher go. Regardless, I have come to discover that the red tape or the contract or state laws (whatever you want to call it) actually provided me with some time to work with the teacher and to know if and when a firing was absolutely necessary. It provided some stability for the department, the school, the kids, and me. And, in a sense, I should have realized this sooner since this is what the good teachers do daily with their students–they do not live in a Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest; they live in a world where they have to work with what they have and see if they can make it work.
I also waded deep into the waters of VAM, which produced terrible results. I once had the stupid epiphany to give my most difficult youth to my most outstanding teacher because I was impressed with her ever rising VAM scores and her teaching practices. I then gave the high achieving students and the mediocre ones to the low to average teachers. The results: The teacher who I know in my heart and soul is perfect in every way “demonstrated” terrible VAM results, showing no growth (negative growth in some cases), and the teachers who had the average to advanced students and had dismal practices or serious troubles with task and behavior management had stellar results. There was one lady, I remember, who talked with the kids about feel good moments, whose rigor was so low anyone could meet the bar, and who hardly ever got to the state curriculum, and guess what? Her VAM scores were sparkling. I knew something was very wrong with this evaluation tool.
I had several other misadventures with VAM, but the best evaluation tool I found was visiting the kids in the classroom and seeing what they produced and watching the teacher perform her craft. I became the administrator who was in all teachers’ classrooms at least three times a week. I obviously had to give up doing other duties to achieve this, but actually seeing and feeling and knowing what went on in my school was more important than some kinda easy to use but totally flawed tool that told me very little about those teachers and my school.
In the end, the best evaluation tool for measuring teachers is gonna be the human one. It won’t be perfect–working with people never is– and we probably have to make sacrifices, but it is better than becoming an inept administrator and using a bogus number on a page to inform me about something, truthfully, it knows nothing about.
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And in a business, after the supervisor completes their review, the individual gets a 3 to 5% raise (or more) and then a yearly bonus.
Unfortunately, a school isn’t a business and teachers shouldn’t be rated as if they were working with identical students, all with the same abilities, intelligence, and motivation. Since all things are not equal, all results won’t be the same. Plus the idea that any teacher can consistently produce two or more years growth in their pupils in ten months (or less) is ludicrous (especially when the results are rigged for the majority of students to fail).
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I agree with what Lloyd said. The reformers talk as if there is no evaluation system in place, that teachers aren’t being evaluated. That’s totally false, teachers are being evaluated by their principals and/or administrators. It’s not a perfect system but there is no perfect system. Some principals are vengeful petty tyrants while others are very decent human beings not looking for blood and not operating out of spitefulness. The principals have all the tools in the world to get rid of bad or ineffective teachers. However, the idea that you can fire your way to great miracle schools is bogus and counterproductive; that you can staff your school with 100% super duper miracle workers is fantasy. The principals and other administrators hire the teachers in the first place, not the unions. The principals do the observations and evaluations not the unions during the trial period (4 years in NJ) and beyond the trial period.
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“One day, when the current era of test-based evaluation is evaluated, reformers will be held accountable for the damage they have done to teachers, students, and public education. That day will come.”
Please don’t hold your breath while waiting for that day of reckoning, Diane!
Tis fantasy to believe that those who are accountable for these malpractices will be held accountable. It doesn’t work that way. They get to implement nefarious malpractices but are almost never held accountable. Too many take the money and run.
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And somehow Charter Schools will attract those high quality teachers by paying less and requiring total allegiance to the school, requiring longer work days and weekend duties during an extended school year. Perfect for those into BDSM and misogyny.
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