New York Teacher Evaluations--revisited

anyone who who is a teacher and who has worked at schools knows how inherently subjective teacher evaluations are. Although I personally have always lucked out and had supportive supervisors, your evaluations by supervisors are inherently subjective and personal . In the end, I guess that it's the same in any industry, people are just subjective, will tend to help those that they like.

I raise this point because the proposed changes in teacher evaluations in New York will make, as far as I can tell, make it easier to terminate tenured teachers based on the apperance of 'objective' data. For instance, teachers will get a poor evaluation rating if their students' scores don't improve ...hmmm, that sounds great at first. But there are several flaws that are probably obvious to any teacher. Consider teaching high school math in New York. The first test that students must pass is the Integrated Algebra I exam--which is a joke and is ridiculously easy to pass. So if you teach Geometry, you are stuck in the unfortunate situation of teaching a class with a much more difficulty test with a lower pass rate-- What formula, if any, should be used to measure you 'improvement', given that the test your students must take is substantially harder than the one they took the prior year?

Of course, there are other problems with measuring improvement on tests...what about teachers who do not teach regents classes? Are they just luckier than the others.

The new rules are in the process of being created so let's see what their final shape will be.

Sleeping During Testimony

I spent 2 years in the New York city public school system at a rough inner manhattan school and, during that time, knew of 3 different teachers who received enough unsatisfactories to be 'tried' to see if they should retain their licenses. Now, I myself was never in their classrooms so I'm not writing to judge them or my school--but I couldn't help but be amazed by a recent article in the New York Times education . Apparently, 1 artibtrator who was in charge of deciding the fate of a new york city teacher's job and (I think license) actually feel asleep during testimony. Here's a direct quote from the times's article:

Arbitrator Goldberg’s sleep ‘episodes’ were witnessed by three department attorneys, as well as two hearing witnesses.”

Just had to share this one. Sometimes is truth is stranger than fiction

Should teachers be responsible for so much?

If you take a graduate education course, especially one focused on urban education, you will probably be inundated with data about how the most important factor that affects a child's success in a classroom is the teacher. There's a well known study about how even high performing students will suffer if a they have a teacher who is incompetent. After years of teaching various subjects and having taught lessons well and having taught lesson poorly, I can certainly say that you can confuse even the best and brightest if your lesson is poor, so--yes, of course an incompetent teacher can bring down the best and the brightest. However, often times it seems that administrators have taken this research and run with it.

Based on my personal experience and stories from other teachers in other schools, it's very common for public school administrators to affirm that no students should be failing your classes. Ok 'no students' is bit strong. But in the public schools I've worked in and several others I know about, you actually become a target of the administration if too many kids are failing your classes--regardless of the actions of the students. If you have a really low functioning class full of students with chronic absences, lateness and behavior problems....well, it's still your fault if that class has a low passing rate.


SO what's the connection between the study cited up above and public school administrators?

Only that administrators seem to have taken the responsibility of a teacher to new levels and seem to have placed the onus of student success and student effort squarely and completely onto the shoulders of teachers. Don't get me wrong. Teachers do play a critical role in the success or failure of a student. However, the expression about leading a horse to water comes to mind here, and often times when you listen to administrators you wonder if they remember what it was like being a teacher. Do they remember that even the best lessons with PowerPoints, with hands on activities, with exploration and whatehaveyou still require an active and willing participant?

I was directly told once by an administrator that 'students do not have the right to fail' And I remembered thinking Did anyone tell that to the students?