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No, student performance should not be included in individual teacher evaluations. Why not you ask, when other professions are evaluatated on their performance? Because teachers wouldn’t be evaluated on THEIR perormance but on the performance of their students whichi is a big difference. Teachers who teach special education students would have little incentive to teach that population because often special ed students make slower progress toward objectives than other students such as honors or gifted classes. I think teachers should be evaluated on the basis of how they perform their job duties. Yes, there are teachers who are not performing up to expectations and administrators need to take action. But to base a teacher’s evaluation on the performance of their students would be an unfair measure of how the teacher performs his or her job.
student performance must be a part of an educator’s evaluation! no other profession shares more responsibilty to students, parents and the community than educators…education is a calling, not just a profession!
Yes. I am a teacher. I am wasting my time if the kids do not learn. Student performance, especially on skills, is a very important determiner of how well I and previous years’ teachers have done our job. The kids, the parents, the community, the future are all my customers. I live for those “aha” moments I see in kids’ eyes.
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How to do it fairly is the real question. Students’ home life the night before affects their ability to learn. Students’ previous school history affects their learning level and their attitude towards learning in school. Those are only two of the bigger variables. There are many more that affect the learning in my classroom. Evaluations that include student performance such as is being suggested typically do not control for many (most?) of the variables that affect student learning. Thus they are generally bogus and result in teachers usually and rightfullly saying “no”. Also, typically it is student performance on some standardized, sanitized paper/pencil test that is spoken of as being used in such evalations. This is a organizational attempt to control some of the variables that affect student learning, at the expense of leaving out most of what is important in learning. I could go on … but in conclusion:
Student performance is currently included in evaluations, as done by the teacher’s administrator on the written evaluation, and by the kids and parents attempting to “vote with their feet” as they sign up for next year’s classes/teachers. To include “data” would be good, after we figure out a way to make it fair by controlling for a host of variables that affect student learning.
I believe that student performance is and should continue to be a measure of a school and district success. It should also be one component of a supervisory relationship between teacher and principal. The goal of this relationship is to provide support over time for teacher and principal focus and growth. Student achievement as it relates to professional practice and decisions that a teacher makes is a necessary component of this conversation.
I am open to being influenced as it relates to evaluation, a process with a different goal and intent. Though I believe that we need to and want to move in this direction, it is one area that we must find ways to make collaborative decisions for the process to be successful and sustain over time. If the purpose of using the data is to remove teachers it will be an expensive and time consumg process given the current evaluation and non-renewal rules. I question whether this is the best use of resources, at least in our school system.
My daughter teaches for Teach for America. She is on the front lines of a very difficult social-economic dilemma that America hasn’t solved: How to get the worst performing students to learn in the worst possible environments.
There are schools being developed that are offering teachers $100k to become instructors of such students. These schools will have the luxury of picking and choosing only the best, high-powered teachers.
There is a superintendent in Washington, DC who is a Teach for America alumnae. She was advocating to install a motivational tool for teachers to be paid more for the rate of improvement that students make in the classroom. I would encourage this type of compensation system to be installed on a test basis. Over time, one could evaluate whether there is a direct relationship between bonus pay and student improvement. Obviously, strategic criteria would have to be devised to ensure fairness across the board for teachers in the same type of environment/classroom.
Unfortunately, the pendulum needs to swing back to “student rights” versus “teacher rights”…I believe that the unions have done a disservice and allowed bad teachers to languish/hold tenure at the expense of students.
I am of two minds on this issue.
It’s clear to me, as a parent in a stellar school district, that academically-minded families choose to live here based on the district’s reputation for excellence. Talk about a self selected group. A significant number of the students have the benefit of parents who are involved in and supportive of their educational experience. Not only that, these parents participate in school board meetings and fund raising for the schools foundation in the district. They demand excellent teachers. They vote for education levies. They create a culture of academic rigor.
The children in this district benefit educationally from ALL this. Despite the outstanding skill of our teachers, it would be naive to expect them to generate the same level of performance, or even improvement over the year, in students who lacked all these other advantages.
If not done with great care, compensating student performance effectively risks penalizing those teachers who dare to accept the challenge of teaching in areas where, for a host of reasons, a significant number of kids may not make their improvement targets.
More importantly, it may effectively limit the quality of education those kids get.
Where’s the research that shows connecting student achievement with teacher evaluation has a postivie imact on schools? I’ve only heard the opposite from David Berliner and Gerald Bracey. Research does show a correlation between economic level and student achievement. Why then aren’t we addressing poverty in the United States? That’s too difficult, isn’t it. Instead we go after teachers who work for little pay, help fund the education system with their own money, and try their best to educate all of our children, not just the wealthy privelaged students.
I am a general education classroom teacher and am dually certified in special education and general education, with a Master’s degree in counseling and a background in teaching students with severe emotional and behavioral difficulties. I am currently finishing up a program that will lead to an ELL (English Language Learner) endorsement.
Guess who gets the really tough kids? The teachers with additional training and experience like me are the ones who get the tough kids. However, we don’t get paid more for the extra work, time, and effort required by these students. We do it because we love what we do.
Despite the fact that I often work 60 or more hours a week and am considered a highly effective teacher by my district (I am also a National Board Certified Teacher), my really tough students sometimes don’t make a fourth of the yearly progress that average students do. Often their language, learning, or behavioral difficulties seriously interfere with their ability to learn. For some of these students, small gains or just holding their ground is cause for a celebration.
When I taught as an inclusion specialist, I saw what happened when the WASL started to matter. Lot’s of teachers said, “Don’t put that kid in my class.” If teachers’ incomes, and ability to support themselves and their families are in jeopardy, we might be hearing a whole lot more “Don’t put that kid in my class.” Who will teach these kids when that happens? I love my job. I love teaching. But, I still need to pay my bills and support my family – one of whom is a 25 year old with severe autism and is totally dependent on me.
I sincerely hope that before we rush to merit pay, these issues are seriously considered. I understand that we need to improve our educational system, but not at the expense of the kids who need us the most.
Merit Pay
This is an issue that is closely associated with charter schools and is a reiteration of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Basically, it requires that teachers pay be based on how well their students perform on standardized tests. For our students, it could be the WASL or a similar test. With the No Child Left Behind Act, teachers and staff were pressured to teach much of the class work to the standardized tests. With so much focus on the test, many other parts of knowledge building, creativity and understanding of subjects and their synthesis with other knowledge had to take a back seat. For many students, teaching to a test meant that they were not able to reach their full potential which would have been far beyond the level of the tests.
No one wins in this situation.
Part of the fallout also is that if a teacher’s pay is based on how well their students test, many teachers will want to teach in a school where they know that the students will perform better. Those schools are, for the most part, not the minority schools.
Some students do not perform well on standardized tests for many different reasons and yet a teacher’s pay can be tied to that student’s performance. High stakes testing also puts pressure and stress on the students who become burdened with the thought that they need to perform well on one test. The test becomes a focus with little opportunity to explore and have fun learning, creating and synthesizing new thoughts and ideas.
If we are to have merit pay in Seattle, it needs to be based on many factors and not just what is indicated on one standardized test.
And regarding student testing in Seattle, below is an excerpt to a friend of mine, Susan Ohanian, about the MAP testing that is happening now in schools around Seattle:
“Here in Seattle, thanks to the “generous” $9M donation by Gates, our school
system is testing students in kindergarten and up on computers. It’s new and
some of us are questioning the wisdom of testing students as young as five
years old, let alone expecting some of them to know how to use a computer.
The idea is totally ludicrous.
The funny part is that many of the students figured out how the test works.
If the questions are too difficult to answer, the questions get easier so
the students have learned to start out with intentionally wrong answers.
Then the test is easier and is over with more quickly for them. You know how
kids are, so the word has spread and I imagine that all of the students know
how to work the system now.”
If you want to know where all of these “innocent” questions are leading to, check out:
http://seattle-ed.blogspot.com
There is a long discussion of this at http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2009/11/thinking-more-about-new-gates.html.
I am copying here a comment I submitted to this strand, and which generated strong support and interest. The comment appears about 90% down the length of the column. Go to the blog (given above) to see what responses it generated.
Here is my comment in full:
With respect to teacher effectiveness, would it help to differentiate self-evaluation, parent/student evaluations, principal evaluation and district-evaluation?
My point is this: If the principal (as supervisor) and teacher are both making effective use of teacher effectiveness data to set and monitor fulfillment of individual teacher professional growth objectives, and if the school in the aggregate is performing on par or better than peer schools, then it is not necessary for the district to have a role in analyzing the same data to grade teachers on their effectiveness. For the District to have such a role has distinct, strong, disadvantages. TO me it seems better if teacher effectiveness evaluation occurs on the scale of school buildings, and doesn’t go up to district level.
Self-evaluation could include the following activities:
1) teachers make effective use of diagnostic, formative, and summative data to inform and improve their own instruction methods, and to select – for low-performing students – altermative measures of student achievement (The U.S. Secretary of Education now encourages multiple measures be used to quantify student achievement).
2) Each school year, each teacher sets effectiveness improvement objectives – call it professional growth objectives -, with strategies for fulfilling the objectives
Parent/student evaulations: Principals invite parents to write end-of-year reviews about the teachers that their child has been assigned to.
Principal evaluations could include the following activities:
1) Principal and teacher together review the available teacher effectiveness data (including, but not limited to parent/student comments and student diagnostic/formative/summative assessment data) to identify any “teacher effectiveness” issues or problem areas
2) Principal takes measures to see that teachers are effectively using diagnostic, formative, and summative evaluation to improve instruction, discourages teachers from teaching narrowly to the test, and sees that teachers have selected appropriate measures of achievement for students whose scores on state standardized exams are not – in the student’s/parent’s/teacher’s opinion – representative of the student’s academic achievement.
3)Principal and teacher together evaluate whether the teacher could benefit from targetted professional development; to prioritize professional development objectives; and to identify suitable professional development opportunities
4) Principal reviews each teacher’s sets effectiveness improvement plan, and together the principal and teacher finalize the plan. The plan will set a future date at which the principal and teacher will together review whether the objectives have been fulfilled.
5) seems to me that it would be constructive if a principal can dismiss a teacher whom s/he finds is not making a good faith effort to fulfill the professional growth goals, or is unable to.
District evaluation of teacher effectiveness: In this scheme, the district’s job is evaluate principal effectiveness. The district might want to take into consideration the overall performance of students in the building, how the school in the aggregate is doing compared to peer schools, and parent surveys of principal effectiveness. In this scheme, there is no direct role for the district to collect data on and directly evaluate teacher effectiveness.
11/28/09 5:28 PM
We know all students can learn. There are high poverty school districts where student achievement is also high. All excuses need to end for low student achievement, especially
blaming parents. That will get us nowhere.
Teachers should be evaluated on student performance. However, groupings of teachers should be jointly evaluated on student performance. One idea would be for K-4 teachers to all receive a bonus based on the 4th grade MSP score, 5-7th grade teachers on the 7th grade MSP score, and 8-12 on a combination of 10th grade HSPE score and graduation rates. One teacher’s effort cannot make enough difference. All teachers need to pull in the same direction and communicate with each other. This will only happen when teachers have incentive to make sure all their fellow teachers reach and teach all students.
Susan, you wrote “We know all students can learn.” We would probably get a lot of benefit from lookng for successful models for educating low-income minority children in non-charter public schools. A member of the LEV Board told me last night that a good place to look for research reviews of such models is Education Trust (.org). I haven’t followed up on this suggestion yet, but perhaps many of us could look at this before we insist that charter schools are the only way to have successful schools for this population.
What do you think of my suggestion that the District structure teacher evaluation so that the District is not directly responsible for teacher evaluation? Consistent with this scheme, principals are, in turn, evaluated by their supervisors (in SPS supervisors of principals are called Education Directors), based on appropriate data. This would increase the degree to which teachers (and principals) are treated as professionals, and would address the concerns that many parents and teachers have around centralized evaluation of teacher effectiveness..
Probably very few would disagree with you that teachers should be evaluated for their effectiveness. The disagreements mainly are about purpose and manner. I think that public debate about teacher effectivenss will be far more productive if we first work to reach a common, widely accepted statement of purpose.
Here is one proposal : Purpose of teacher effectiveness evaluation (TEE) is, most fundamentally, to support the fundamental mission of SPS, which is to raise achievement [this begs for a definition] of all students in SPS, but especially to raise the achievement of minority and low-income preK-12 students.
To serve this purpose, the core obective of TEE is to encourage and help teachers to become the best teachers they can be, and to identify (and then re-assign or fire) those teachers who unable or unwilling to improve their effectiveness?
As for manner of evaulating teacher effectiveness, I will say no more here than that I would like procedures that are fair, professional, and constructive. In my opinion, to use student test scores as the dominant factor in evaluating teachers is none of these: constructive, professional, and fair.
I hope you and others will react to my proposal and/or offer counter proposals.
This is very dangerous. Students are not automatons nor widgets made in a factory. A whole lot of people believe that we can “quality check” a teacher by checking out the “merchandise”. This misses out on the complexity of the education world, the diversity of students and the challenges teachers face.
Should teachers have increased accountability? Yes.
Should they be evaluated by their students’ performance? NO. This “performance” is invariably measured by standardized tests. Even if the tests were fair and valid (they are not) differences in demographics in different schools would lead to a situation where teachers would NOT want to teach in challenging situations (they should) and if the merit-pay schemes pushed by Gates, Broad Foundation and Arne Duncan succeed, the students’ performance on these tests would directly impact their salary. This is totally insane.
Education is not like making automobiles. Or even bushels of corn. You can’t base quality on a few indicators, for teachers or for students. We are human beings that are nuanced, challenged and diverse. Any scheme that denies are humanity such as this proposal should be called out for what it is- creeping privitization and the corporatization of public education. Say no.
The question is too broad. Joan ne got it right.
But I’ll tell you what, if student performance is weighted, how the hell do I go from an “Exceeds Expectations” one year to a damn “Proficient” or even “Below Expectations” due to my student scores?
Those factors are based on state standards and other factors you already know so I won’t preach to the choir.
This is already going on in districts especially with incentive pay and as a profession, we can’t seem to get it right. If so, teacher’s wouldn’t flee as quickly during those first 3 years and we would be a much better lot.
But regardless, I’m doing what I love. Underpaid and unappreciated, what do I care if they add a “your scores suck so you must suck” stamp to my file? Obviously, there is some intrinsic motivation to actually helping students.
A test score doesn’t define a student, so why should they define a teacher?
So if we are going to change our model of public education to simulate the business model of rewarding higher production, then I wonder what will happen to the students who appear to make no gains or very little over time? A savvy-minded, business person would neglect the students who show no or little gain and invest all of their time and energy into the students who do make gains. With that type of strategy, the net gain would be better than if one were to invest an equal amount of energy into all the students.
I believe that teacher evaluation should be a PART of a merit pay structure. Diverse measuring tools other than only standardized tests should be applied along with parent evaluations, student evaluations (when older) and principal evaluations linked to professional growth assessments. A teacher’s education, years of teaching and certifications should also be a part of this structure. But we should also be mentoring and supporting new teachers and not awarding “Masters” degrees to people who’ve only just completed a Bachelors. We need to support and train each other, share what we know, and help those who struggle or ask them to choose a new career when they are unwilling or unable to make appropriate changes.
Standardized test for art and music? For PE? How do those subjects fit in to your nice, neat little categories?
What if a teacher has a great class one year and the next year she/he has a class full of kids who don’t get it? That does happen. It happens to me all of the time as a teacher who introduces kids to architecture and design.
What if a student has had a bad day at home, or is hungry, or is sick or is worried about what will happen in the playground at recess and can’t concentrate? How do you factor those situations into the student’s score?
To base teacher’s pay on parameters that are beyond their control is unfair and dishonest.
How do you factor in a teacher’s performance based on high stakes testing in an economically depressed school where the parents might not have the wherewithal or time to help their children with their school work?
Exactly how would that work?
It sounds so easy and simple to say that you will judge a teacher by how a child does on a test but, as with most things in life, it is not that simple. The idea of merit pay based on high stakes testing is simplistic and does not stand up to logic.
And another question for you. How do you measure a student’s progress in this merit pay format? What happens when students scored higher than they did the year before because they are improving due to a teacher’s hard work and the student’s persistence but their score is still below or at average? How is that measured?