Issue 2 May Have Failed, But New Teacher Evaluations Are Still On The Way

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November 15, 2011 | 6:30 AM

By Ida Lieszkovszky and Molly Bloom

Shelly S. / Flickr

It hasn’t even been a week since voters overturned Senate Bill 5 – the law that would have limited the bargaining rights of public employees. But for teachers, perhaps one of the most nerve-wracking provisions of that legislation is still on its way: a new, way of evaluating teachers based in part on their students’ academic performance.

New Ohio Teacher Evaluations On The WayThe new teacher evaluation system will be based in part on student performance, and in part on teacher reviews.Download

This new, broadly standardized method for evaluating teachers would have been included in Senate Bill 5.

But it was also part of a 2009 law. And it’s built into the federal Race to the Top program. And it was included in this year’s state budget. So Senate Bill 5′s trouncing is not going to derail the new Ohio Teacher Evaluation System.

That’s a framework for schools to assess teacher performance. Half of the evaluation will be based on subjective evaluations, such as principal or peer reviews and parent input. The other half will be based on student performance.

The State Board of Education will approve the foundation of the teacher evaluation system. Individual districts will then adopt their own evaluation policies, which must meet the guidelines approved by the state board.

But the State Board of Education still has to vote on the plan before it can be implemented. At Monday’s board meeting, member Mary Rose Oakar said she still has concerns, including how student progress will be measured and what will be done to keep principals from playing favorites.

“It is being heralded as the new wave in improving our system. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do evaluations, but it has to be fair,” Oakar said. “It has to be fair and thought-through.”

Oakar said her fears were not quelled by the idea that this will just be a framework within which local school districts can implement their own ways of evaluating teachers. Local control, Oakar said, “is always a little bit iffy” for Ohio.

Other board members had their own concerns about local districts having a lot of say in how they assess their teachers.

“We know the districts where the quality of the football team’s uniforms is more important than the quality of the algebra teachers,” Board member C. Todd Jones said.

While charter schools that do not receive federal Race to the Top funds do not have to use this new framework, Jones cautioned against requiring charter schools to do so in the future. Jones said performance-based teacher evaluations “should not be used as a cudgel to kill off school choice.”

Board member Michael Collins disagreed. “This needs to apply to every entity that receives public dollars for education,” he said.

If that happened, the new evaluation system could extend to charter schools, and possibly even private school that are part of the EdChoice scholarship program.

The general framework of the plan isn’t expected to change much – if at all – by the board’s December meeting, when the full board will vote on it.

That decision will be followed by the remainder of a year-long pilot period of more than 130 public and charter schools around the state, which may result in some tweaks and changes to the plan before it’s formally implemented by many of the schools participating in Race to the Top in the fall.

The rest of Ohio’s public school districts – currently excluding charter schools – have until July 2013 to implement the new evaluation system.

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Vicki

Great. Instead of focusing on how to teach our children to THINK – we will teach them to be great test takers. (which I know is already a problem with all the state mandated tests the kids have to take)
eraser1998

One serious problem –

Half of the evaluation is supposed to be done based on standardized test performance.

But the state doesn’t test every grade level. Whole groups of teachers will be unable to be evaluated under that scheme. Furthermore, some subjects (History, Physics, Chemistry, Foreign Languages, Economics, Biology, Music, Physical Education, Art) are not tested at all under any grade level. Last I saw it was estimated that 63% of Ohio’s teachers would not be able to be evaluated using that performance criteria. So what do you do for THEM?

Anonymous

eraser1998, this is a great question, and the solution isn’t clear yet. Currently, value-added is calculated for 4th and 8th graders in reading and math. From what the folks working on the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) have told me, they may rely on beginning and end of year exams to calculate student growth for the remaining teachers and classes, but this is one of the areas of OTES where we could see quite a bit of change.

eraser1998

IdaZL – so you’re hearing that they’ll institute standardized tests for all grades and all subjects? Sounds like a giveaway to the standardized test industry – I shudder to think how much they’ll make off the state now.

How about the Republicans in state government following what is actually in their party platform and just simply saying that the evaluation system used is up to the local district? Make it 100% observation – or 50/50 observation/tests – whatever the LOCAL groups want to do.

Anonymous

Questions of local control were actually raised at yesterday’s Board of Education meeting by some board members, and the general response from the people working on OTES is that this is a pretty rough outline that leaves a lot of freedom for districts to evaluate teachers as they see fit. Also, the requirement that half of the evaluation be based on student growth was set forth in Race to the Top, as I understand it. We will definitely follow this over the coming months to see how it plays out on the local level, though.

Anonymous

Ida’s right: There is room within this outline for districts to adopt their own teacher evaluation policies. But this new teacher evaluation framework, set by the Race to the Top agreements and by the budget passed earlier this year, will definitely change how teachers are evaluated in Ohio.

Sraswan

The problem still exists that even those teachers will be forced to focus on that test, not teaching the kids the subject. For example, I teach Spanish. I will know what is on the beginning test and the ending test (I would assume they’d be the same, at least close). I would have to choice but to focus on those things on the test and spend lots and lots of time drilling those things into my students’ heads, instead of making sure they are well-rounded, learn a broad scope of information, and branch out to explore areas such as culture, geography, etc.

Still, there will be those students who will love my class, be motivated, and have an aptitude for language. They will do well. However, there are those students who either don’t like me and will do poorly on the test on purpose, don’t like the class or subject, are going through family troubles, or who just don’t have an aptitude for foreign languages (we can’t all be a Picasso, Shakespeare, movie star or star athlete, nor can everyone excel at a foreign language).

This system will do nothing but bring our education system to its knees. Teachers who once loved to teach (like me) will be frustrated and perhaps even leave the profession. Young people will not want to go into education, because it pays horribly (the way things are going most schools will soon be charter schools, where teachers are paid a pittance and treated like slaves), and because they will be expected to perform miracles and practically walk on water.

Charlie44266

A teacher can “teach” her heart out and her students still do poorly on standardized tests of a few subjects. They do poorly because their community is a mess, their parents are unemployed or underemployed, the state hasn’t provided enough funds to have a decent infrastructure, etc. Where do these factors come into the teacher ratings?

This another example of the half-measures, broad promises and flawed theory that is present-day public education. Until these are addressed in the governor’s office, legislature, courts and education schools the public schools will fail too many children. We can’t make a car with poorly maintained, poorly designed and poorly understood engine perform well by changing how we test the tires.
Stephanie

What frightens me about the process is the localized control. There are some very religious and conservative areas of the state that may sack teachers for teaching evolution in science classes, for example. It could work another way to sack teachers who teach politically unpopular topics in any area of the state. I am all for merit-based evaluations of teachers, but not ones that have the potential to reinforce teaching to tests and politics. Using peer-reviews and principal evaluations can impact new teachers who don’t have the established relationships with peers or teachers who are great in the classroom but maybe don’t get along with their colleagues very well.
addy

I don’t know if I want to be a teacher anymore…..
I have always wanted to teach. I have known this was my dream since I was very little. Now, If my colleagues don’t like me or a parent doesn’t like me then I lose my job? I’m not letting someone else control my future. They are going to lose a lot of new teachers and some teachers that are already in the system. Teachers don’t get paid enough to deal with all the crap they have shoveled on them all the time.

Charlie44266

Of course you want to be a teacher, I did too. It’s a passion that gets stronger every time you see someone light up when they get it.

What you don’t want is to live in the political environment which has been created in the public schools. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of compulsory schooling laws which in turn were the outcome of a lot of lobbying by industrial owners who had trouble finding prepared laborers. A few taught new hires to read, write, calculate at a basic level, most did not. Instead they lobbied their communities, counties, states and nation to do the training for them. The idea was that the businesses would reap profits from the community’s investment in schools. The communities would benefit from increased tax revenue from businesses and have less problems with homelessness, poverty and crime. It worked for a time, but over the last 40 years some businesses have seen cutting their taxes as a way to increase profits (which went mostly to the top management rather than stockholders or workers). When a resource becomes scarce a political system is created to manage the distribution of it. What is scarce is teacher funding and the schools have become increasingly political.

The shortage is not in teachers it is in adequately paid teachers. The evaluation system is a political mechanism to control the distribution of salary and resources.

Until an adequate number of teachers are paid or compensated sufficiently that they don’t need to worry about food, shelter, security, health care and transportation the problem we see today will continue. The politicians (governor, legislators, administrators, and principals) have little incentive to create a system without scarcities they can manipulate, if they do they lose power.So we are left with a zero sum game at best; in many places its a shrinking sum game (like musical chairs or Biggest Loser).

Msckpalmer

One false argument given in support of using standardized tests as evaluation tools for public school teachers (PS teachers) is that private sector bosses (PS bosses) are partially evaluated on the performance of their subordinates. This argument is false because of two underlying circumstances. 1) PS bosses get to hire and fire the people that work for them. PS teachers have no say about who is in their class. 2) PS bosses oversee people that are highly motivated to perform because they want and need a job. PS teachers teach kids of all motivation levels, including no motivation at all. They teach kids with attendance problems, kids with learning disabilities, kids that never do their homework, kids that will eventually drop out, etc. There is absolutely no tangible motivating factor for a student to perform well on the tests that are being used for teacher evaluation. They, themselves, are not held responsible for any score they might get. It is not part of their grade and it is not required for graduation. Would a PS boss want to be evaluated under the same conditions as what a teacher faces? I think not…

Also, how will they evaluate teachers whose subject matter is not included in standardized tests?
Eldritchone

There would be less of a problem if they were based on Kirkpatrick’ s four levels of evaluation (2 & 3 particularly). Do a pretest. Do a postest. Follow up with another observation later to see if the work stuck.

You can then see relative improvement and following up later eliminates the teach to the test issue.

Charlie44266

I’m sorry. Pre/post testing just reinforces the bias toward the select few facts the testing industry favors. (when a body of knowledge has to be narrowed to just a few facts, politics come to the fore) Those favored factoids are easily handled in a discrete answer (choose the bubble), tend to be sound-bite length, lack subtle shading in meaning, emphasize tidy categorization over systemic understanding, favor those who can quickly answer superficial questions, and are based on outdated models of how learning occurs. While multiple tests may slightly reduce the high-stress, high-risk environment, the time might be more profitably spent encouraging and practicing critical thinking with a rich and diverse body of knowledge: the difference is the time spent in a neutral to negative task (the test) compared with a small positive (learning). Nobody has positive memories of what they learned during a test.

The best way to assess student progress is still extended longitudinal observation by a person familiar with the student’s cognitive and learning styles. In public schools the only people who have spent enough time to do that evaluation with any degree of integrity are a teacher, perhaps teacher’s aides and the student’s peers. Everyone else is merely a helicopter evaluator who necessarily emphasizes the superficialities and ignores the contemplative, reflective or experiential accomplishments of a student or a room of students.

Think on this: how would the OTES rate Socrates as a teacher or Plato as a student? Were Jesus’ teaching methods effective according to this standardized approach? Could we measure the genius of these people with any test available to public schools?

Sraswan

I agree with you. For one thing, as the teacher I can see that Johnny has struggled this year due to his parents’ divorce or his sister’s death, but I can also see that he has been working to pull through and has made progress. A piece of paper with bubbles on it cannot see this. We are losing focus on humanity and the ebb and flow of life. Not everyone progresses at the same rate, goes through the same life changes and challenges, and grasps concepts at the same pace. This system is way too “machinistic.”

Charlie44266

Point of reference Kirkpatrick’s levels are just a restatement of Demings’ Plan-Check-Do-Act cycle dating from 1950. Demings’ PDCA cycle is an industrial quality planning method designed to minimize product variation. It has been successful in manufacturing but less so in service provision. Education is a provider of services. Using Kirkpatrick’s similar model is likely to have similar results despite being stated in more acceptable ed school jargon. The core question: is human learning an industrial process seeking after a uniform outcome or is it a synthetic organic activity seeking to optimize manifold outcomes? I think it is the latter.

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