Well, well, well. We’ve started quite a conversation here with the post about the Seattle teacher negotiations yesterday. There were some really thoughtful responses and a few ticked off folks blowing off steam. Your comments inspired me to continue the conversation and to clarify a couple of things.
Here we go:
“LEV sides with the Seattle School District.” No. LEV isn’t siding with anyone except kids and parents. There are parts of the proposal put forward by the district that seem to make sense to us and we support those elements.
“LEV loves tests.” Not really. But we do support giving teachers the tools to assess student’s progress and assessments that give us information about how our kids are doing as a district. If you’re not asking kids about what they’re learning, how do you know what or if they’re actually learning the content? You can call that tests or exams or assessments or Meredith. What you call it isn’t as important as what you learn from it and how you use what you learn. I know that when I was in college learning to be a teacher – and even in the early years of practice – this piece went missing.
“Principals are the key element in whether evaluation systems are effective.” YES. And since this is the teacher’s contract, there isn’t any talk of principals or other building administrators. Evaluation systems are only as effective as the people using them. Principals matter a lot – and we haven’t heard a lot about this aspect of the district’s plan.
“Test scores shouldn’t be used in evaluating teachers.” A scale of student progress should be an element of teacher evaluations. One test tells you almost nothing about effectiveness. What everyone should want to know is how much did a student learn? What is their level of mastery? Evaluating simply on whether the student is at grade level at the end of the course also doesn’t necessarily tell us about effectiveness. What we should be looking for is whether students made progress – ideally at least a year’s progress (or whatever the time frame that is appropriate based on the length of the course) or not?
“What happened to the evaluation system being developed in collaboration with SPS and SEA?” We are going to take a look at this issue and will offer more on it next week. The most important thing (after trust) is that the evaluation system being used actually gives teachers what they need to improve their practice.
“Longer school days are fine, but teachers need to get paid for working longer.” Yep. Amen.
“Teachers are blamed for everything that goes wrong.” Teachers share responsibility for academic outcomes of our students. They are not alone in the responsibility for improving student achievement. Everyone from the student to their parents to the principal to the district leadership shares responsibility. So if we’re wagging fingers and laying blame, there’s plenty of it to go around. But increasingly, research shows that teachers are the most important of all these folks. Teachers matter. The way they are paid, trained, supported and mentored matters. The way we talk about teachers matters. Categorizing all teachers, particularly those who have been in the profession for several years, as being ineffective or uncaring or unprofessional does nothing to elevate the conversation about what can be done to help all students succeed. But talking about effectiveness in and of itself is not teacher bashing.
I can’t think of any profession that is under more scrutiny right now. Except for oil company executives, maybe.
Teachers deserve to be paid for their work. Yes. I don’t work for free. Neither should our teachers if we are asking them for additional time.
I read the 5 comments on the blog post. All five struck me as thoughtful. None of them read like “ticked off folks blowing off steam”. You must have deleted those.
It is very very clear that the superintendent was essentially destroying the disregarding the collaborative work of the Prof Growth and Evaluation taskforce. It does not fit with her program to have the teachers themselves to be empowered partners in creating a more equitable and yes, more accountable system. She has to be in control.
And to say that the LEV doesn’t support testing uber alles when they support the SERVE proposal is complete and utter hogwash. The SERVE proposal sells out students and their opportunities for real learning for scripted curriculum, less classroom time, more stress, more competition and less empowered teachers.
This ain’t no education revolution I want any part of.
A scale of student progress should be an element of teacher evaluations. I see the appeal of this, but the quality of a teacher’s work doesn’t determine as much of student progress as other factors outside the teachers’ control. There isn’t much attribution analysis available on education, but I have seen a study that attributes over two-thirds of the academic achievement gap to home-based determinants.
Perhaps it would be more reasonable if student test scores – which do not equate to student academic progress – were, at most, a minor factor in teacher evaluations. Not nearly so much as the District is proposing.
I’m a bit disturbed that the LEV wants to interject itself – and wants others to interject themselves – into the contract negotiations yet you don’t know enough about what’s going on that you were informed about the evaluation system that the District and the union have been developing together over the past few years. It strikes me as imprudent and presumptious to jump into the middle of the situation and pretend to speak with authority when you don’t have the facts.
“What happened to the evaluation system being developed in collaboration with SPS and SEA?” We are going to take a look at this issue and will offer more on it next week.
Nu?