by
Brian Mann on June 21st, 2012
North Country state Senator Betty Little, who herself was an elementary school teacher on Staten Island and in Queensbury, will vote in favor of Governor Cuomo’s teacher evaluation bill, despite concerns about public disclosure.
Little said in an interview with NCPR a short time ago that she still worries that too much information about teacher performance will be made public before teachers have a chance to improve their methods and before districts can make proper management changes.
But Little said without the bill, newspapers would be free to publish teacher evaluation grades for entire school districts on line, which she argued could create “chaos” as parents demand that their students be moved to different classes.
A vote is expected shortly.
The In Box blog is a general news and discussion site for the News Department of North Country Public Radio. In Box contact information
Latest NCPR News
Good news. Teachers often complain about being glorified babysitters but often they act like that. Complacency is all too common amongst our teachers. I know it’s a difficult job but so is mine and I get tired of outrageous tax bills. No bang for your buck.
I find it kind of depressing that you would have to pass a bill to force evaluation. It would seem like evaluation is part of good education and good school systems.
I am for evaluation I am not really for state mandated one size fits all evaluation, you may end up with the whole test mania problems this time for teacher evaluations.
There couldn’t be too much public information available! Public money, public employees, public information. It is time taxpayers/parents knew what their money was being spent on. I am interested to learn.
If we are going to post teacher evaluations, let’s post evaluations on everyone including the governor and state police.
I’m with you on that, Pete. Public money, etc. The Gov. is already publicly evaluated: it’s called an election.
We need accountability and we need to trust school systems to hold their teachers accountable for performance standards. But in teaching you need to look at a long run trend, you need in class monitoring by supervisors, and you need coaching for teachers having a hard time. Most principles and most teachers and I think most students, know who the bad teachers are and who should not be in the field. I am not sure however the value of posting individual teacher evaluations which may be flawed in and of themselves.
The bill seems to be saying we don’t trust the schools to do their job.
Larry and all, I was thinking we could have the Republican evaluate the Democrats and the Democrats evaluate the Republicans.
In the departments, we could have the DOH evaluate the State Police, the State Police evaluate the DOT and so forth and so on.
In this way everyone would have an excuse for not doing much of anything because they would be too busy evaluating each other.
I have my complaints with some in the education field and the education unions, however it DOES look like they are being singled out for public critique much more than other public servants. Where are the public and posted evaluations for the Highway patrol officers? How about posting the evaluations for all of the mental health workers or the department of health workers? Even within the school systems why just the teachers? How about the counselors, the administrators, and all of the other employees of the school?
You don’t make people better by blaming them, from what I can tell classroom teachers are the BEST thing going on in the schools, the rest of them, not so much.
Interesting idea, Pete, and one with a lot of merit.
Before Walker chimes in with what he/she thinks I really meant, let me emphasize that my praise of Pete’s idea is totally sincere.
On the surface this would appear to be a step in the right direction, …but.
My little Johnny is going in to the third grade. I look at the public evals for the three third grade teachers. Teacher A has a stronger eval tha teachers B and C. I call central office requesting Johnny get teacher A. District says we can’t honor parent requests. I go to a board meeting and complain. Board decides maybe life is easier if all third grade teachers have a similar eval. Teacher C is now up for tenure. Not a real strong teacher but evals don’t support not granting it. Even the gov warned that the evals are not designed for “shopping for a teacher”. If we made these available why not evals for ALL workers paid with tax payer monies?
Every parent wants the best teacher they can have for their children.
However teachers fit different kids in different ways. What you want to avoid are the very bad teachers. There are very bad teachers and they are a tiny minority of classroom teachers. The school administration, the unions and the state department of education should devise a process of identifying those particular teachers and helping them find a field more suited to them.
Posting evaluations won’t have an impact and probably will simply end up being more administration, more cost and the system will be gamed as Gary points out above. How many grievances would be filed how long would it take to dispute those? The incentive is just as Gary says, make them all about the same or make the incomprehensible, of course you will have to hire more people to administer all of this.
I want to be able to read the performance evaluations of wakeup, mervel, Larry, and Gary.
There is already a system in place to evaluate teacher performance. The system should be used to make sure that all teachers are effective. But not every teacher is going to be a perfect fit for every student.
And frankly, teachers have to deal with a lot of kids who are brats. All the time that teachers have to spend dealing with undisciplined students takes away from their ability to be effective teachers. Your bratty kids are costing everyone tax money. So let’s get to the bottom of the issue. Why are so many kids such little brats? Why are some kids so slow to catch on to the lessons being taught? Other kids are waiting to move on with their studies. It is costing us all tax money!!!!!
So I want to have public reports of all student’s grades and any disciplinary actions against them. I want an email sent out when Johnny or Jill have to go to Time-Out. And I want parenting evaluations. I want to know which community members are costing me money by sending their little brats to public schools.
Maybe we can have bumper stickers printed that say “My child is a Brat at XYZ School” and force parents of kids who are problems or don’t have a B average to drive around in shame.
KHL’s idea about evaluating the parents is a good one, but I think it would be difficult to administer.
Maybe the bumper sticker could read, “My BRAT goes to XYZ School and is the reason that your honor student can’t get a decent education.” When the parents get repeated bad evals, would the children be removed from the home? When the evaluation shows that there is no good reason for a gene combination to be repeated, would the parents be sterilized? You don’t need a license or permit to be a parent. Maybe that should change.
If you can figure out the logistics of such a policy, it could help with the over population issue.
Everyone knows that the tenure system, originally intended to promote academic integrity, now often shields under-performing and marginally effective teachers from the discipline and corrective action they would face if they were in a competitive environment where income is based on performance. I believe this is the sticking point that causes many to demand access to evaluations. I’m merely pointing out what I think is cause and effect, not recommending a change at this point.
If the evaluation is poor, then what? Will tenured teachers get the boot? If they do (is it even possible) will we then see lawsuits by the teachers getting the boot? If so, how much will this cost?
Exactly Pete.
This is another unfunded mandate is what it is.
If I was an administrator I would give them all great evaluations. This won’t help education.
I’d have no problem with teacher evaluations being made public if performance reviews of all other state public sector workers were also made public, such as cops, sheriff deputies, state police, corrections officers, National Guardsmen…
Most jobs have strict rules about keeping personnel evaluations confidential. No one, I hope, is insisting that teacher personnel evaluations are to be made public. I believe what is being suggested is that student performance in individual teacher’s classes be made public. Most concerned parents already know who is the best teacher and do what they can to get their kids the best teachers. Those teachers get more of the best kids with the most concerned parents, and those kids will improve the most. The “bad” teacher will get stuck with more kids of parents who either don’t care or don’t understand the system. Those kids will perform less well on the tests due to the combination of poor teaching, unruly class, and less involved parents.
If the evaluations are made public, more parents will demand the better teachers, making it more difficult or impossible for any parent to influence which teachers their kids get. The bad teachers will get more of the “good” students, and their “performance” will improve.
Pete Klein, makes an excellent point before you can use any of the data you need to come up with a way to actually re-train or get rid of the teachers that are doing a crummy job. Down in NYC there are air conditioned trailers full of bad teachers that are not teaching that cannot be fired. They are getting full pay and benefits and don’t have to do anything but show up with a book to read.
In 2009 it cost taxpayers an estimated 65 million dollars to pay these folks to do nothing:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/new-york-teachers-paid-to_n_219336.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill
It looks like they tried to fix this in 2010 but I wonder what kind of progress they have made on getting rid of the 700 they had in 2009?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html
Check it out they paid this guy around a million dollars over a decade to do nothing. Now he has a 90,000 a year pension.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-02-10/news/31048116_1_rubber-room-problem-teachers-teachers-union
Peter is right this is what would happen.
But I think the bill already passed so now we have another thing for the schools to do. Will we have to hire a data administrator (certified by the NYS DOE of course) to manage and monitor this new program?
If we don’t trust the school, which is what these sorts of mandates are saying; than we have a problem with the administration, this bill makes no sense.
This bill makes no sense and will cost a lot of money.
I haven’t seen enough detail to know exactly what info, format, etc. will be released or how it is intended to be used.
I suspect the legislation is more political than practical.
I agree myown. Who can tell anyone what is in the eval. For instance; can the public see that teacher A worked with 25 socially (age promoted) underachieving students and teacher B worked with 13 above average students? It is way to early to weigh in on this and appears to be totally political.
The schools should have a tenure system similar to all higher educational institutions. Once you are evaluated for tenure and you are performing poorly you should be let go. Not everyone is cut out for every field they go into. The trick is to make sure that we are not keeping folks that don’t know what they are doing. All the information that was used to evaluate a teacher for tenure (including things like evaluations from students and parents included) should be made public.
Is there a realistic number of teachers being let go each year? If there is not we are kidding ourselves and keeping people that are doing a crummy job. Maybe that is part of the reason the graduation rates we saw earlier this week are so low in some places.
There already is significant teacher turnover (both voluntary and not) for many reasons, including low pay, the hard work and poor performance.
According to the New York State Report Card, the state average teacher turnover rate for the three years (2007-08 through 2009-10) is 22 percent for teachers with less than five years of experience. Nationally, the National Education Association says about 50 percent of teachers leave their jobs within their first five years.
The result of high teacher turnover has its own costs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/20/AR2007062002300.html
And here it a site with lots of data on NY schools:
https://reportcards.nysed.gov/
And maybe the new legislation will employ the latest and greatest teacher evaluaton method – bracelets. No kidding:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/11-million-plus-gates-grants-galvanic-bracelets-that-measure-student-engagement/2012/06/10/gJQAgAUbTV_blog.html
Of course you can be pretty “engaged” with even a crummy teacher so I don’t think this is very helpful. Maybe.
“There already is significant teacher turnover (both voluntary and not) for many reasons, including low pay, the hard work and poor performance.”
I think the bigger issue is the in-voluntary TO rate. myown, I can’t find that in the links you sent. Do you have a link for that.
First I wonder how is performance linked to compensation? Is it?
The next thing to look at is what is the turnover-rate for well paid teachers. If there is NO link for pay and performance and the TO rate is lower for well paid teachers than we are getting rid of our better performing teachers just because they have less seniority and lower pay.
In my district it seems like we have done a good job during this budget crunch to use retiring teachers as the way to limit any layoffs. That may mean that we are losing the best teachers instead of the ones we probably don’t maybe want at the schools.
myown, I rarely hear about layoffs in this district for performance issues. Is it really very common? What do you think about the story I linked to above where 700 teachers in NYC couldn’t be laid off even after gross incompetence. You seem to know a lot about this. Is it easy enough to fire teachers when you need to?
What percentage of a school systems budget is actually spent on classroom teachers?
” I believe what is being suggested is that student performance in individual teacher’s classes be made public. ”
But how does that work? One would expect someone who teaches advance classes to have better “results” than one who teaches regular or particularly remedial classes.
Teacher evaluation is important and needs to be created in such a way that will positively affect students’ learning outcomes. I do not think public disclosure will do that.
I am confused by how evaluation techniques will take into account the teacher who has a class with a larger population of children whose are dealing with emotional issues such as parent separation, abuse, hunger, etc. or has a larger population of children with behavior problems or learning disabilities or children with special needs or just poor test takers. Conversely, a teacher may have a class where the majority of students have strong parent involvement. How can these factors be taken into consideration and measured? Tests do not measure this. Children are not assembly line products.
Evaluation of teachers must keep in mind that it’s the children and their learning that is the important issue.
Teaching is one of the most complex and difficult jobs there is. Teacher evaluations are important but I do not think that making public an individual teacher’s evaluation or testing record will help improve that teacher’s success or more importantly help students achievement. Evaluation of teachers is the school district’s job.
We need to find ways to support teachers’ growth and effectiveness. Teachers need to feel free to share, work and support each other,. Let’s make sure that whatever evaluations are used does not pit teacher against teacher in a competitive way but encourages sharing and supportive techniques that will result in a better education for the children.
I too think that all of this is a political tactic. Our children are too important to be caught in the middle of it.