Dallas Blog

I am genuinely curious. Has there ever been any means or method of judging the merits of a teachers' effectiveness that has ever been embraced by a majority (or even large minority) of teachers?

For instance, we could run a spell checker against Carla Ranger's anonymous teacher and get a feel for his level of attention to detail when writing a letter to a public official.

How can student test scores be used as part of the formula when some of the students may not have taken any tests at all. See DISD grading system.

Crisatunity:
NPR did a story a few months ago on some system in Michigan where teachers have accepted a system and where it does appear to do a good job of (1) identifying ineffective teachers (2) separating the hopeless ones from the ones who could benefit from assistance (3) actually removing the teachers who can't or don't improve and (4) sustaining the decision (as I recall, it's a combo of fired teachers accepting the decision and possibly of the rare court challenges being unsuccessful). It can be done.

If DISD and the company that makes the CEI system were more transparent, and if they then had a genuine process for reconsidering exceptional cases when they addressed the flaws, I might not have SUCH a problem with it. In theory, when I first heard it laid out, it sounded reasonable, but the fact is, many teachers end up having CEIs based on a tiny fraction of their students, which means that little differences in their test performance can skew a CEI skyward or hellward. Many students must be removed from the calculations because there's not a previous TAKS score by which to judge change. Additionally, while they remove students from the calculation if they were absent more than a certain number of days, that you'll still be counting kids who are present but whose behavior routinely gets them removed, kids who show up but don't do any of the work, etc.

In some subjects I've taught, it was based solely on change in TAKS scores relative to the change made by the students to whom that one was compared; in other cases, it also had a big impact from the ACP's, which are badly written, badly designed, basically indisputable, and scattershot in their coverage. I've also never heard indications that CEIs take into account that Diane's "Ashley" might be in a class of 34 kids in a student load of 155 kids, while my "Ashley" might be in a class of 12 kids in a student load of 110 kids ... or that her campus might be providing more support for English-language learners' distinct needs ... or that our campus might have had several Fridays in succession when classes were shortened 20% to make time for a faculty vs. student basketball game and the like ... or that her campus might have introduced an ill-planned inclusion experiment in which as much as 2/3 of her students in one class had special needs and just trying to keep order left her with precious little time to help the other 1/3 of the class.

None of that would necessarily be that big a deal if CEI's were one small part of an overall picture. Then you would look at the fact that I was in the top quintile one year and the next-to-lowest the following year, and you'd consult my evaluations and other pieces of the puzzle and figure out that year 2 was an atypical year (and yeah, maybe year 1 was, too :). However, since all we are told and given the chance to correct is which kids they have down as having been (or not been) in our class the requisite number of days -- and even THAT is provided to us so long after that I don't always have ready access to my old rolls to make sure they didn't omit someone -- the fact that they want to make the CEI the be-all and end-all of the decision is understandably scary and ill-advised.

Finally found that NPR piece I remembered, though it turns out it was in Ohio rather than Michigan (guess growing up in Texas taught me to hear "unions" and think of certain states!) --

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91327130

"Teachers' unions are often blamed for protecting educators who are burned out or should never have been allowed to teach in the first place.

"Every year for the past 27 years, a panel of Toledo administrators and teachers has met behind closed doors to discuss teachers who've been deemed 'incompetent.'

"Under peer review, a team of master teachers called 'consultants' meticulously monitors and evaluates teachers in several areas: how they prepare, plan and present lessons, how well they know the material they teach, how they engage and discipline students — even a teacher's punctuality and dress are scrutinized.

"A recommendation to terminate a teacher for doing poorly in these areas can be overturned, but it almost never is. A teacher can appeal, but that's rare too."

The piece that aired on NPR also noted that they work to identify which teachers can be mentored into fixing their performance, and then follow up to see if it worked. This element is one too often forgotten -- that SOME teachers who perform poorly can be helped to improve rather than merely tolerated or ejected. The on-air version was more detailed than this, and I was fascinated.

What would be my bigger concern locally, of course, is that knowing DISD, all the wrong factors would go into choosing the evaluating board. ::sigh::