The party line from this crew was
that the new system, which would base half of scoring on measured student
learning progress and the other half on subjective evaluations similar to the
past, would make good teachers appear substandard. Of course, we never heard
complaints from these fiddlers that as the state continued to rank among the
lowest in student achievement, and lower than many with similar demographic
characteristics, about the fact that under the old completely subjective system
that only
one percent of all teachers were rated poorly enough to be subject to
dismissal for incompetence and that only a little over two percent get fired
for that reason.
Now the results
are out and, contrary to all the hyperbole, the system computed that only
four percent of teachers were judged “ineffective” and thus could be set up for
dismissal in the next two years, while only eight percent fell into the
category suggesting remediation before things got worse. That means more than
seven-eighths of all teachers were found at least adequate, despite the state’s
continued below-average showing – hardly the stuff of hyperventilating claims
of a “war on public education.”
And while the state’s Department
of Education noted there was rough congruence between student achievement and
district teacher results – better-achieving districts tended to have a higher
proportion of adequate-and-above teachers – some disturbing
trends emerged. This relationship held most strongly where state standards
were the basis of measuring student learning, but was much weaker where they
were not; for the core subjects, such standards exist, but for those areas of
instruction such as in the arts and physical education, local districts come up
with their own, somewhat more subjective, criteria. Also, in some districts
there was a much higher skew on the subjective observational portion towards
judgments of adequacy that brought the distribution of those scores into stark contrast
with the distributions for the objective testing portion that skewed much more
to inadequacy in teaching – a pattern
most evident among the lower-performing districts.
In other words, many districts –
with some notable exceptions concentrated among the higher-performers – were gaming
the system to pull some teachers out of inadequate ratings. For example, in
Ouachita Parish, while 97 percent of teachers were ranked in the upper two
categories according to the subjective half of scoring, only 79 percent were
from the objective half based on student outcomes, and in the City on Monroe
schools, 94 percent of teachers were in the upper categories by observation,
but just 82 percent were on the basis of student progress.
However, those results include
all classrooms. Limited only to the 21 to 43 percent in each district across the state only who teach
in the core areas – those where districts do not impose their own standards – in
Ouachita only 43 percent of teachers had student performance in the upper
categories while for Monroe just 34 percent did that well. Ineffective ratings
were assigned among these teachers on this standard to seven percent of them in
Ouachita and 24 percent in Monroe.
There were worse districts of
skew in this direction, and some among higher performing districts actually in
the opposite direction, but as a whole the lesson learned is, through the
observational component and when they set their own achievement standards, the
lower-performing the district’s schools, the weaker the relationship between
that and teacher evaluation because they are more likely to engage in behavior
that pumps up teacher overall scores. That’s not unexpected, since almost all local
administrators themselves once held teaching certificates and want to put
performances, on which their success may be judged, in the best possible light.
So the naysayers were correct –
except instead of the system being needlessly harsh on judging teachers, it is
too lenient and thereby reduces its value as a diagnostic tool. To fix that,
Louisiana needs to do what nearly half of all other states presently do:
evaluate teachers in part on their actual subject knowledge competency, in
addition to the other things.
As a college professor, I
encounter some students who cannot spell well or use grammar consistently correctly
and/or cannot figure out simple math such as computing a course’s overall grade
in progress. No student graduated from high school and admitted into college
should display this level of ineptitude, and the only way they would be able to
get this far is that teachers passed them along, either out of indifference or because
of their own ineptitude in teaching these skills. A subject area exam taken
every couple of years or so by teachers, developed by the state aligned to
learning expectancy standards of students at that grade level to ensure rigor,
would show decisively where the breakdown in knowledge transmission is
occurring that shortchanges some students.
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