Archive
July 29, 2009
District Should Revamp Its Teacher Evaluations
City schools told ‘evaluation process is broken’
School districts should stop seeing their teachers as “widgets,” two consultants told the Pueblo City Schools Board of Education Tuesday night and address their individual needs for training and realistic evaluations.
Joan Schunck and Susan Sexton of the New Teacher Project formally delivered the results of a study the nonprofit education group had done to analyze teacher evaluation practices in the Pueblo district and 11 other districts in four states over the last two years.
Last fall, the project’s analysis of evaluations pointed to a number of shortcomings here, not the least of which was the fact that 97 percent of teacher evaluations were “satisfactory” even though principals and teachers all said privately there were faculty members who really shouldn’t be in the classroom. Still, no tenured teachers had been dismissed.
Tuesday night, Schunck and Sexton told the board that Pueblo was not alone in that situation although among the dozen districts studied, Pueblo had the highest number of teachers who believed that many teachers were transferred for poor performance who shouldn’t have been.
“The evaluation process is broken,” Sexton told the board. She went on to advocate sweeping changes in the way teachers are evaluated, paid and retained.
Principals need to learn how to better evaluate teachers and the district has to stop letting principals use involuntary transfers to solve their problems.
Principals on the receiving end of a low-performing teacher don’t like it and teachers don’t trust the system, especially since they may get a satisfactory rating and then find themselves transferred at the end of the year.
Schunck and Sexton acknowledged that the district remains hamstrung by legislation, such as the binary evaluation rule that calls for satisfactory or unsatisfactory ratings and leaves no room for more specific ratings.
In the long-term, they said the district should lobby for changes, adding that the environment was right now for that because the recently announced Race to the Top competition for $5 billion in federal education grants calls for changes in teacher evaluation.
The problem with the binary system, Sexton said, is that it treats teachers as if they were all the same. “We don’t know who the excellent teachers are just as we don’t know who the poor performers are.”
Teachers get a satisfactory rating because an unsatisfactory one seems too draconian. But then when a frustrated principal asks to have them transferred, “they feel like they’re being picked on or singled out.”
The system also is not fair to young teachers, probationary faculty members in their first, second or third year who by definition often need extra training but don’t get it because they’ve been rated satisfactory.
In addition, they said, too many probationary teachers are laid off arbitrarily in the spring and then rehired late in summer, if they’re still available.
Schunck said that the district should publicly announce that it would no longer do such blanket nonrenewals.
She praised the district for re-establishing its committee to establish evaluation standards.
