We know that teacher evaluation is not a science. Either it relies on principal judgment or peer judgment or both, which are subjective; or it relies on test scores, which are “objective,” but notoriously invalid and unreliable because they reflect which students are in the classroom, not teacher quality. Nothing could be more outrageous or demoralizing than tying teacher pay to teacher evaluations, which is what the Utah Board of Education is now considering.
Please write and let them know why this will be very harmful to teachers and students.
One of our readers (Threatened Out West) sent this notice:
The Utah State School Board is planning on voting on Friday to make teacher compensation based on teacher evaluations. This will be a DISASTER.
This is the quote from a newsletter that I saw from one of the members of the board: Proposed Rule Change Would Base District Compensation Primarily on Evaluations
The Utah State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to amendments to R277-531 Public Educator Evaluation Requirements (PEER) and to R277-533 District Educator Evaluation Systems that would require Utah school districts to base educator compensation systems primarily on the district’s educator evaluation system beginning in the 2018-19 school year. The changes also eliminate any provision in Board Rule that is not also required in state statute. The Board worked with the Utah School Superintendents Association to give districts enough leeway to make the rule’s implementation more feasible. Final approval will likely come during the Board’s November 4 meeting
Utah school board members MUST be contacted! Particularly in you’re in Utah, do it NOW. But we could use teachers in other states to also email and let the board know what a terrible idea this is. Thank you.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
And the crazy continues
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And the 2000 pound elephant in the room? Our now multiplying number of non-qualified and often VERY thin-skinned and even vengeful teacher “evaluators.” http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/check-it-out
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VAM Slammed!!!
The test-based “Value-Added Method” (VAM) of evaluating teachers has been “slammed” — quoting The Washington Post — by the very people who know the most about data measurement: The American Statistical Association (ASA). The findings of the ASA provide a firm basis by which every teacher who is unfavorably evaluated on students’ standardized test scores to vigorously oppose the evaluation, citing the ASA’s authoritative, detailed, seven-page VAM-slam “Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment”.
Even the anti-public school, anti-union Washington Post newspaper said this about the ASA Statement: “You can be certain that members of the American Statistical Association, the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, know a thing or two about data and measurement. The ASA just slammed the high-stakes ‘value-added method’ (VAM) of evaluating teachers that has been increasingly embraced in states as part of school-reform efforts. VAM purports to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the ‘value’ a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences and emerge with a valid assessment of how effective a particular teacher has been. THESE FORMULAS CAN’T ACTUALLY DO THIS (emphasis added) with sufficient reliability and validity, but school reformers have pushed this approach and now most states use VAM as part of teacher evaluations.”
The ASA Statement points out the following and many other failings of testing-based VAM:
“System-level conditions” include everything from overcrowded and underfunded classrooms to district-and site-level management of the schools and to student poverty.
A copy of the VAM-slamming ASA Statement should be posted on the union bulletin board at every school site throughout our nation and should be explained to every teacher by their union at individual site faculty meetings so that teachers are aware of what it says about how invalid it is to use standardized test results to evaluate teachers.
Fight back! Never, never, never give up!
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AGGGGH!
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“or it relies on test scores, which are “objective,” but notoriously invalid and unreliable”
NO! Those test scores are not “objective” as attested to your second statement of “notoriously invalid and unreliable.” How can something supposedly be “objective” if it is “notoriously invalid and unreliable”?
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Diane,
I enter this comment warily given the immediate emotional reactions above.
I have worked both as a teacher, first in the Peace Corps, later in public schools, and now in retirement as a math/science tutor. In the interim I spent many years in the software and biotech industries. You can see my background on my blog at eduissues.com where I am currently trying to raise local support to give our public school teachers a raise, so that they can afford the high cost of living in the Silicon Valley area.
Reactions like the above really complicate my efforts.
I worry that every time teachers react negatively to attempts to evaluate them, they destroy their credibility with the public at large. People are evaluated in every other profession, and, yes, those evaluation methods are subjective, and, yes, they are open to possible injustice and criticism, but for the most part life goes on successfully!!
I completely understand why test scores are problematic, but in virtually every other profession that I can think of, people are evaluated by some combination of feedback from their bosses and peers. Of course, there are “bad bosses” and people get screwed at times, but when the public sees that teachers can’t possibly agree to subject themselves to the same trials and tribulations that the rest of the public endures, the public does not get “fired up” to pay additional tax money to provide them with higher salaries! Why should they vote to give a raise to someone who is not evaluated like most other workers and, especially, when their child comes home and tells them that the teacher “didn’t do anything” that day?
When I returned to public school teaching, I was elated to find that, despite the bad press, most of my teaching colleagues were dedicated and hard-working.
Nonetheless, we all know that there is “dead wood” protected by the tenure system, and the common perception is that this “dead wood” is also protected by the teachers’ unions.
Instead of perpetuating the divisive, non-compromising attitudes that are destroying our country and that this current election is exacerbating to an unprecedented degree, when will teachers and their unions reach out constructively and try to resolve these issues?
Some kind of visible action towards compromise would go a long way towards stopping the drain of public funds to charter schools…
Teachers definitely need unions to fight for them in salary negotiations and to prevent their health benefits from being destroyed as is happening everywhere else these days (while some insurance companies report record profits). However, in my opinion unions need a “new offensive” to convince the public that they really are looking out for the good of school children instead of only protecting adults.
Making some progress on reasonable evaluations sure would help!
David Kristofferson
EduIssues.com
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I have NO problem being evaluated. I DO have a problem having my evaluation, done by an administrator who has no accountability, determining how much I get paid. Administrators do NOT have to account to anyone for their evaluations of teachers, nor do they have any accountability for the teacher evaluations of them.
So, if I get an administrator that hates me, or that is super strict with evaluations, I don’t get paid.
Keep in mind that Utah has the lowest per pupil expenditure in the nation, the 2nd largest class sizes, and the 4th or 5th lowest salaries for teachers. It’s already REALLY hard to be a teacher in Utah.
I already know teachers who are planning to leave the profession before this becomes official in 2018-19.
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David Kristofferson
I agree with you completely. I have worked in the private sector all my life with at will employment. At various times I have tried to say something like what you have stated, but have been criticized severely for my viewpoint. I have been called by various names in an attempt to silence me.
Let me assure you that any old organization accumulates dead wood and even what I call as petrified wood. If there is no way to get rid of these the organization is undergoing slow death. Protecting the dead wood or petrified wood in my book is wrong.
On the other hand rewarding excellence makes everyone work more efficiently and leads to overall improvement of the organization.
The unions protect deadwood as well as prevent rewards for excellence. This is an incentive killer. Unions job is to provide job security and fight for fair pay for the majority of its members.
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Thanks, Raj!
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I tend to agree with you. Having worked in public and private union environments as well as union and non-union workplaces, dead wood is what it is. Non-union shops tend to promote based less on merit than mythically portrayed, often relying on nepotism and cronyism. Hence, you find dead wood in management and those doing the company work are exploited and expendable. Union shops definitely protect poorly performing employees and other workers must pick up the slack for the deadbeats, who are near impossible to get rid of. But unions also protect good workers.
I’ve been through plenty of ineffective private sector evaluations, often writing them myself as my manager had little understanding of what I did. There never seemed to be any correlation between my evaluation and what actually occurred. When I thought I did poorly, I got bigger bonuses than times I worked hard and produced great results. So to use private sector evaluations as a gold standard is questionable. Perhaps teachers are on to something and being more forward thinking and innovative.
But, again, some evaluation is needed and I do agree. I find what teachers most object to is the blatant unfairness of the current “metric” based approaches using irrelevant data and flawed models. These approaches are very destructive and often far removed from the realities of the classroom. Also a concern is the competence of administrator evaluations that are performed superficially or without understanding. I was evaluated teaching Calculus by a Phys ed teacher, and I wouldn’t want a math teacher evaluating Phys ed.
Teachers also are targets, often making difficult, unpopular decisions. Teachers are frequently in tough, personal situations. Vindictive parents, angry students, and political school boards are a reality. Due process is a must.
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Sorry David K. but why should unions do the jobs of the principals and the administrators. It’s the job of the principals and administrators to observe and evaluate their teachers not the unions, they get paid big bucks to do that job. Tenure just means due process or do you believe in kangaroo courts for teachers? It’s the job of the union to defend teachers against false charges and false accusations. The unions do not hire the teachers in the first place, the principals do. TEACHERS ARE ALREADY BEING EVALUATED AS WE SPEAK!!!! I am fed up with this notion that teachers are somehow no being evaluated and rated by their “superiors.”
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Just returned home from a late night of tutoring and, not surprisingly, I see there were several responses to my comment about teacher evaluations. Thanks, everyone!
I am not bothered nor surprised by the disagreements, but I hope you will give me the courtesy of reading my responses to each of you. This is an extremely difficult problem to solve, but I remain hopeful that it can be solved if we discuss it calmly.
To “Threatened Out West”:
I agree with your concerns. I also don’t think that having evaluations done by a single principal is the solution. There are usually too many teachers in a school for one principal to evaluate effectively. Also, it is impossible for a principal to have expertise in all subject material, particularly in the higher grades, which hinders them from judging adequately the quality of a presentation. Business management theory usually caps the number of direct reports to a manager in the single digits, and this would also argue against the principal doing all evals.
It makes more sense to me to have evaluations, at least at the high school level, done by the department head, but also possibly in conjunction with other teachers in the department. Many small companies use a “360” review process in which everyone in a group gives feedback about each other. I have not taught in elementary school, but perhaps a similar 360 system could be employed with all of the teachers in a grade level doing the evaluations. I would love to hear more possible solutions from you!
Is this perfect? Clearly not! Cliques and cronyism can still prevail. In a small group everyone might exchange wonderful reviews and give each other big raises. All kinds of doo-doo might hit the fan! This is where a principal would possibly step in, to sanity check the reviewers, but not do the actual individual reviews.
Notice that I purposely said nothing about standardized tests in the section above.
To “Vale Math”:
My main point is that members of the taxpaying public put up with evaluation problems in their own jobs all the time!! You confirm this with examples in your reply. I am not, as you seemed to imply, holding up “private sector evaluations as a gold standard.” Private sector evals can have all of the flaws that you mention, but private companies also have a problem if the evaluation system is too screwed up. Over an extended period of time (sometimes really long in the case of big organizations), they eventually lose money and go out of business.
When the public hears teachers raise complaints against every method of evaluation without offering constructive proposals in return, they commonly react by thinking, “I have to put up with this crap in my work evaluations at times; why do teachers think they have a right to be immune?” This makes it much harder when I try to argue with members of the public for a pay raise on behalf of teachers.
I want to pay teachers like professionals, but other professionals often listen incredulously to teacher complaints about evaluations. To win over taxpayers, we need to offer solutions, not just complaints!
Finally, I agree completely with your statements in your final two paragraphs. I’ve known of teachers taking disciplinary actions for cheating only to be threatened by lawsuits from litigious parents, for example.
To “Joe”:
I am not sure why you thought I said anything about unions having to do the jobs of principals and administrators. I stated, “in virtually every other profession that I can think of, people are evaluated by some combination of feedback from their bosses and peers.” Please also refer to my response to “TOW” above.
No place did I say anything about believing in kangaroo courts for teachers. You stated that it is “the job of the union to defend teachers against false charges and false accusations.” I completely agree, and I don’t think that the public would disagree either.
I also stated that unions are needed to fight for good pay and benefits for teachers.
My objection, and that of most members of the public, is when unions protect incompetence. “Vale Math” acknowledges that this happens. Most teachers that I have spoken with over the years acknowledge cases of this too. I simply can not understand why unions do not become more responsive on this issue, especially because I believe making progress on this point would rally public support for public schools and lessen the appeal of charter schools.
I also have been a high school teacher, have been evaluated by “superiors” as you quote, and I never explicitly stated that teachers currently do not go through evaluations. My sentence beginning “People are evaluated in every other profession..” may have erroneously given this impression, and I apologize for any lack of clarity there. I was trying to say that teachers currently go through a variety of different evaluations, but seem to the public to complain about all of them, thereby leaving the public with the impression that they are trying to dodge all evaluations. This phrasing may still not make you happy, but I think that it reflects a public perception that needs to be addressed.
It’s after midnight now. Thanks again for reading if you made it this far!! I look forward to your replies.
David Kristofferson
EduIssues.com
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New Mexico Teachers have been under the standardized test evaluation system for the last six years. Now the standardized test that threatens the NM Teachers is the PARCC. All this came about under the leadership of Secretary of Education Hanna Skandera with the wholehearted support of Governor Martinez. She worked for Jeb Bush when he was Governor of Florida. That should tell you a lot about the direction this state has taken with its education. The biggest threat is to the Students’ education is the evaluation hammer held over the heads of the Teachers. Teachers are leaving left and right. New Mexico is now holds the position of being the second highest state for Teacher turn over. The start of this school year there was 600 Teachers left unfilled. This is all due to the way Teacher are evaluated using the PARCC, other standardized testing, and the degrading way Teachers are treated in NM. The NM Colleges of Education are now fighting to stay alive because of the low number of Students enrolling to be become Teachers.
I predict the same thing will happen to Utah. People like Skandara and NM Governor Martinez are out to kill public schools and turn them into schools for big corporations to make money. In the end there is a very good chance democracy was we know in this nation will be long gone.
Standardized testing and associated Teachers evaluations are more important to Skandera and Martinez and the education of New Mexico Students and the future of the State.
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Interestingly, it is illegal in Utah to base pay on standardized test scores. The state legislature passed this last March. BUT, instead, the school board is going with pay based on evaluations from unaccountable administrators, who can do whatever they want on evaluations, which cannot be changed once they enter the computer. Teachers can write rebuttals, which are supposedly uploaded into the same system—by the same administrators enter for you. I have no idea if my rebuttals are there, because we teachers can’t see them.
There is no way to fix those evaluations once they are done, and so now our pay will be based on that. But no one will hold those administrators accountable–not the district, not the state, no one.
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There are lots of “good ‘ol boys” clubs in Utah school districts, particularly in the smaller towns. You already know who will get the good evals (and now the higher pay) and who won’t. And woe to those who aren’t a part of the established theocracy in Utah. You’re doomed from the start.
Leave it to the Utah SBE to come up with yet another asinine idea to help further the Utah legislature’s cause of eradicating ALL public schools in favor of profits from privatized charter schools.
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How about making parents whose children do not come to school pay a hefty fine? How about garnishing the wages of parents who allow their children to come to school without homework? What about a fine when their child falls asleep in class? Let’s see…$50 for every missed homework assignment. $100 per day when their kids are truant and running around at the mall or off on their Disney vacation. We can have a rubric and an entire parent evaluation system. Oh, but you say that parents don’t have control over these things. Well, teachers don’t have control over their students’ test scores no matter how great the student is. The whole thing is preposterous.
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Diane, you’ve read the back and forth on my comments. I’d really like to know what you think. Thanks very much in advance!
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David,
I wrote in “Reign of Error” about the difficulty of establishing a good teacher evaluation system. Most states are putting too much weight on test scores, which is a very bad method.
The best, most reasonable program I discovered was the peer review program in Montgomery County, Maryland.
It assures that every new teacher gets a mentor to guide them, as do teachers whose principal think they need help. After a year of mentoring, the mentor makes a recommendation to a committee of teachers and administrators: the teacher is good, the teacher needs more help, the teacher should be terminated.
The union supports the program. It offers help before judgment. It removes lazy or incompetent teachers.
I haven’t heard anything better.
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I think to terminate a teacher after 1 year of experience would be pretty harsh. That teacher would have to be completely incompetent, and I would think that this would be noticeable in their time student teaching. They have put a lot of time and effort into their studies to that point, and a year isn’t enough. It takes years for teachers to become good at their craft. The underlying supposition in all of this is that teachers up to now have been “bad” and that we need to have a system to root them all out. Many seem to forget that times have changed. When my parents went to school, students were considered outcasts if they didn’t have their homework. Education was the student’s responsibility. Also, students didn’t have the distractions they have now. Teachers are in control of very little – divorcing parents, student mental illness and anxiety, hunger, lack of clothing, cell phone use, bullying, and the list goes on. If one spends any time teaching, this is clear.
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Mamie,
I agree, and I expect that mentors know that too and recommend young teachers for another year of help. Only those who are lazy or incompetent get weeded out, as it should be.
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Hi Diane. Thanks. I think as a new teacher, I would be afraid to confide in a mentor who I knew was going to make a recommendation about me as to whether I was fit to continue as a teacher. It puts an uncomfortable weight on both the mentor and mentee. For a new teacher, having the trust of a mentor is very important because mistakes will inevitably be made, and new teachers need to feel as if they have someone on their side. That’s why I’m not really in favor of this kind of system.
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Thank you for that info! I have not read that book of yours, but I read with great interest and enjoyed your book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” several years ago when I returned for a while to public school teaching.
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