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I am impressed with the Denver (Colorado?) system for evaluating teachers. The have a collection of experienced teachers who work part time teaching and part time observing and evaluating other teachers. The observing teacher visits each teacher several times during the year, not just once. They not only evaluate, they mentor and help the teachers work through problems with their class and thereby get better insight for the evaluations.
My understanding is the evaluation only counts as a portion of the teacher's raise/advancement however. Personally I think it should be 75% or 100%. Seems like a much better method than judging a teacher by the performance of their students (which depends on luck of the draw - did (s)he get good students this year?).
The downside I see is you could have issues due to personality conflicts. However that is always an issue in all walks of life. You could get around that by having more than one person evaluating (however I would still stick with one person who visits multiple times and becomes intimately knowledgeable about the teacher's practices - I think that is critical - and possibly another who visits once or twice just as a check on the fairness of the evaluations. It also seems like it might be expensive, but Denver schools are not rolling in money and they can afford it.
What do other teachers think of this approach? It seems to make a lot more sense to me than using student test results.
It also seems there should be a lot more weight placed on this for advancement and job retention. I never understood the logic behind treating lazy/bad/untalented teachers equally with great teachers based only on years of service. It should be more like the real world - years of service should be only minorly relevant.
As a teacher of 13 years I think a proper teacher evaluation needs a little bit of both human observation / evaluation and student performance. I say this only because I've seen some great teacher mentors / observers and I've seen some that shouldn't even have been teaching let alone guiding new / younger educators. I've also always wondered how classes like Art and Choir would be evaluated based on student performance. Math I get it. If the kid can't add then that's clearly an issue as far as student performance goes but with non-core electives it can be tough to properly evaluate student performance.
I also believe teacher evaluation should include what do you do to help enhance the students lives outside the classroom. I see way too many new teachers coming in to the profession and only being concerned with the classroom and essentially "walking at the bell". There was a time when you couldn't get a PE job unless you were going to coach at least 2 sports. Now I see newly hired PE teachers being hired who are only serving as classroom teachers.
I also feel that admins should be graded by teachers, students and parents annually and that they receive their base pay at whatever is the agreed upon amount and that school success as a whole along with evals from the above mentioned groups should dictate any additional pay for admins.
I ALSO feel that asst. principals should have 10 year cap placed on them. I see way too many AP's become complacent in their job / career because they get settled into being in charge of buses, books and buttheads and have no more career aspirations beyond. They become sluggish in their job performance as admins then.
As a teacher of 13 years I think a proper teacher evaluation needs a little bit of both human observation / evaluation and student performance. I say this only because I've seen some great teacher mentors / observers and I've seen some that shouldn't even have been teaching let alone guiding new / younger educators. I've also always wondered how classes like Art and Choir would be evaluated based on student performance. Math I get it. If the kid can't add then that's clearly an issue as far as student performance goes but with non-core electives it can be tough to properly evaluate student performance.
I also believe teacher evaluation should include what do you do to help enhance the students lives outside the classroom. I see way too many new teachers coming in to the profession and only being concerned with the classroom and essentially "walking at the bell". There was a time when you couldn't get a PE job unless you were going to coach at least 2 sports. Now I see newly hired PE teachers being hired who are only serving as classroom teachers.
I also feel that admins should be graded by teachers, students and parents annually and that they receive their base pay at whatever is the agreed upon amount and that school success as a whole along with evals from the above mentioned groups should dictate any additional pay for admins.
I ALSO feel that asst. principals should have 10 year cap placed on them. I see way too many AP's become complacent in their job / career because they get settled into being in charge of buses, books and buttheads and have no more career aspirations beyond. They become sluggish in their job performance as admins then.
Interesting post.
I don't think that APs should be restricted to 10 years, although I do think that there should restrictions as to how long APs should remain at one particular school. In fact, perhaps all staff should be restricted to some time limit at a particular school...at least in terms of districts with multiple schools. A new broom sweeps clean.
In Prince George's County, Maryland, back when I was there, principals were usually moved after several years, although that was done for the wrong reason.
As a teacher of 13 years I think a proper teacher evaluation needs a little bit of both human observation / evaluation and student performance. I say this only because I've seen some great teacher mentors / observers and I've seen some that shouldn't even have been teaching let alone guiding new / younger educators. I've also always wondered how classes like Art and Choir would be evaluated based on student performance. Math I get it. If the kid can't add then that's clearly an issue as far as student performance goes but with non-core electives it can be tough to properly evaluate student performance.
I also believe teacher evaluation should include what do you do to help enhance the students lives outside the classroom. I see way too many new teachers coming in to the profession and only being concerned with the classroom and essentially "walking at the bell". There was a time when you couldn't get a PE job unless you were going to coach at least 2 sports. Now I see newly hired PE teachers being hired who are only serving as classroom teachers.
I also feel that admins should be graded by teachers, students and parents annually and that they receive their base pay at whatever is the agreed upon amount and that school success as a whole along with evals from the above mentioned groups should dictate any additional pay for admins.
I ALSO feel that asst. principals should have 10 year cap placed on them. I see way too many AP's become complacent in their job / career because they get settled into being in charge of buses, books and buttheads and have no more career aspirations beyond. They become sluggish in their job performance as admins then.
I don't think anyone needs a cap placed on the position, but I do think that they should switch schools. When I was in Japan, no teacher was supposed to stay in a school more than 10 years (and that was extremely rare). The ideal length was around 6 years. That was the same for administrators and teachers. That gave everyone a chance to be in a leadership role within that school in their department(s) if they were talented at around year 4-6 and also allowed people with fresh ideas to come in.
In the district adjacent to where I am now they move people around a lot, but it's too often. People get moved every two years and it pushes people to apply to adjacent school districts. You don't even get to know your students or the school before you're pushed into another school. It's not even like they move people high school to high school. You might be moved high school to middle school, which is an incredibly challenging change to make.
I believe Hillsborough county/Tampa, FL tried a similar mentoring program to Denver as part of a grant and it was a disaster. The costs were far more than the grant provided because it's just so expensive to pay people NOT to be in a classroom. In order to truly see how a person is teaching, you can't just visit them once or twice. To hire enough mentors to be effective, you have to have multiple for each subject at each school/grade and then you'll need to also have teachers to fill in for slots opened up.
I don't think anyone needs a cap placed on the position, but I do think that they should switch schools. When I was in Japan, no teacher was supposed to stay in a school more than 10 years (and that was extremely rare). The ideal length was around 6 years. That was the same for administrators and teachers. That gave everyone a chance to be in a leadership role within that school in their department(s) if they were talented at around year 4-6 and also allowed people with fresh ideas to come in.
In the district adjacent to where I am now they move people around a lot, but it's too often. People get moved every two years and it pushes people to apply to adjacent school districts. You don't even get to know your students or the school before you're pushed into another school. It's not even like they move people high school to high school. You might be moved high school to middle school, which is an incredibly challenging change to make.
I believe Hillsborough county/Tampa, FL tried a similar mentoring program to Denver as part of a grant and it was a disaster. The costs were far more than the grant provided because it's just so expensive to pay people NOT to be in a classroom. In order to truly see how a person is teaching, you can't just visit them once or twice. To hire enough mentors to be effective, you have to have multiple for each subject at each school/grade and then you'll need to also have teachers to fill in for slots opened up.
Overall, I tend to agree with you.
On the one hand, staying in one position for a while career (and I know people who have, even in large systems) leads to people getting stale. 10 years is a fair amount of time in one position. Of course, in 1-school districts, not much choice.
The type of mentoring program you mention does have its challenges. The training required is immense, and, as you say, you are paying teachers not to teach.
One of the biggest challenge with many evaluation systems is training the evaluators not to simply reward teachers who teach like them. In my school I finally stopped letting department chairs interview prospective teachers with me, because I discovered they always wanted a department with 7 carbon copies of themselves, while I wanted teachers with a diversity of skills in each department.
My understanding is the evaluation only counts as a portion of the teacher's raise/advancement however. Personally I think it should be 75% or 100%. Seems like a much better method than judging a teacher by the performance of their students (which depends on luck of the draw - did (s)he get good students this year?).
Oh I'm so sick of hearing this.
Advocates of performance-based pay aren't saying "we're going to pay you more because you have 'good' kids". They're saying they want to pay teachers more who RAISE their students scores from the previous year. If Jose scored a 2460 on the SBAC test in 6th grade (Level 2 - Nearly Met Standard), and I get him up to a 2580 in the 7th grade (Level 3 - Met Standard), I should be compensated for this in the form of a performance bonus. Currently I'm not.
My first year teaching, I started the year off with 14 students who scored proficient/advanced on last year's state test. At the end of the year, 53 of my students scored proficient/advanced on the state test. This was only about 35% of my students scoring proficient/advanced, but under any reasonable performance-based system I would be measured as an effective teacher.
I earned $50,000 that year, while the teacher across the hall who taught the same subject as me earned $90,000, by decreasing the number of her proficient/advanced students from 28 to 25.
How on earth does that system exist in a capitalist economy?
Now, I wouldn't penalize my colleague because her students scores went down. Truancy is a big factor in this equation. Instead, I would make this a purely incentive based system, where a teacher would earn something like $500 for every student that has their performance level increased on the SBAC year over year.
This impacts schools in so many positive ways. The issue we have of the effective teachers never teaching the students who need them the most would change, as the top 20% of teachers who only teach accelerated students would have a meaningful incentive to take the classes with more challenging students.
In addition, the new teachers who join the profession and don't have the content knowledge, pedagogy, or classroom management to handle the lowest 20% of students would be able to teach classes that aren't littered with discipline problems, and wouldn't leave the school at the end of the year.
And then there's the elephant in the room that no one dare seems to criticize - the middle 60% of teachers who are largely ineffective, whose principal doesn't have the confidence to give them accelerated classes, but they're better than the new teachers so they don't teach the lowest students. They're just there each year because they don't have strong enough references or skills to transfer to a better school. They do the bare minimum to get by, teaching out of the same textbook they did 10 years ago, earning their $2000 raise each year, counting down the years until retirement. These teachers are now have motivation to do their jobs.
Then what about the teacher to gets gifted and talented students? A bunch of students who scored advanced on the 6th grade test and have no where to improve on the 7th grade test? Also, what about those who teach subject areas which are not tested? Music, art, PE, etc? Would the PE teacher then get the benefit of a raise if his/her students can run faster or retain content knowledge?
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