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How can 90% of teachers in a district be highly effective? If they were appropriately grading this, the results should be more like a bell curve with a small and relatively equal percentage of teachers being in the highly effective and not effective camps.
Funny how a school couldn't figure that out, but then again they never seem to get the yearly percentage in school tax increases correct either, lol.
How can 90% of teachers in a district be highly effective? If they were appropriately grading this, the results should be more like a bell curve with a small and relatively equal percentage of teachers being in the highly effective and not effective camps.
Funny how a school couldn't figure that out, but then again they never seem to get the yearly percentage in school tax increases correct either, lol.
Take a district like garden city where there are no free lunch kids, almost every kid is white and lives in a 2 parent home and the test scores are going to be high enough to balance and administrative review issues. My son had THE worst teacher I ever hope to have while we lived there and 5 years later we are still dealing with the fallout. Yet she remained in the classroom for years, despite requests from parents every year not to be placed in her class. I think they onlyr emo ed her from teaching because her test scores were dragging down the school. Now she has a BS job giving kids " extra help" all for the tidy sum of $110k a year. There is no way any administrator could give her a decent review if they were really doing their job. Because I wanted to cry just walking into that room it was such a hellhole.
How can 90% of teachers in a district be highly effective? If they were appropriately grading this, the results should be more like a bell curve with a small and relatively equal percentage of teachers being in the highly effective and not effective camps.
Funny how a school couldn't figure that out, but then again they never seem to get the yearly percentage in school tax increases correct either, lol.
Very easily - depends on the criteria of course and given the criteria there should be no expectation of a bell curve.
But I see your point and rest assured you have identified a minor flaw from amongst the 1 million major and minor flaws in the new and foolish teacher ratings scheme. Here is a second minor flaw: Did you know each Long Island District has different criteria and weights within its new and foolish rating system. You read that right. Good luck in comparisons between schools. It is almost not worth pointing out the ridiculous aspects of the nonsense because that might suggest a finite number of predicted and confirmed ridiculous aspects to the nonsense.
Just like ETS and Pearson, the new teacher evaluations are just another scheme to enrich a coporation affiliated with public education. This time the winner is Charlotte Danielson of Princeton, NJ. Many LI districts,as well as NYC BOE. have adopted the Danielson teacher evaluation scale and package. That means purchasing the Danielson package, spending additional money to train the personnel who will be using Danielson to evaluate the teachers, additional workshops for the evaluators to attend (not sure if travel expenses are paid by the district) for the latest and greatest updated versions, and my guess is a purchase for new software, which will periodically have to be updated. This tells you what? A teacher is highly effective, effective, and my favorite category-developing. What does any of that even mean? I'm sure that if someone wanted to take the trouble to do the research, it would be revealed that Danielson had some sort of poltical connection/lobby power to get school districts to buy this stuff. We used to have to worry about local school board member corruption and theft within a fairly narrow scope. Now we have corruption of education at a grander scale.
One other point about the Danielson scale. Teachers are being trained how to be "effective" according to the Danielson scale. It's like the school districts are paying for teachers to get the equivalent of SAT tutoring by sending them to in-service workshops on this stuff. How to get a good score on the Danielson scale. College teacher preparation programs are also prepping education majors how wo get a good score on this scale. The presumption is that if you teach in the manner that warrants a high score according to this evaluation system, you are good teacher. Someone is making a lot of money with this racket.
In the old days, principals evaluated a teacher and told them you're good or you stink. It wasn't objective and it wasn't fair, but it was cheap.
To VA Yankee - no one, including the teachers, are saying that teachers shouldn't be evaluated. It's the "how" they get evaluated that is the bone of contention. We all know teachers have always been evaluated and they were at the mercy of a good administrator or a bad one, along with the facts of their actual teaching abilities. For the most part, that system has worked for decades. The bad teachers usually got weeded out before gaining tenure.
Those in the "developing" stage of ratings now are the ones who have been told they need help in certain areas and have been given the chance to take courses, have a mentoring teacher and/or follow a prescribed plan from the administrator to improve.
The addition of using student's test scores is what throws a kink in the system. Obviously, not all students are alike, not all are "highly effective" themselves!!!! Teachers can end up with a lot of classes that are for very intelligent kids and others can end up with classes for kids who have been failing and need a lot of extra help. Test scores in those two groups are going to be very different, so how do the teachers get rated on an equal basis? Maybe teachers with great classes should get fewer "points" and teachers of lower level classes should get more "points" to try to equalize the ratings for them? In other words teachers of high level classes would have to work harder to earn a "highly effective" rating since the kids are already very successful. IDK, something has to be figured out since this rating system doesn't seem fair to anyone.
Isn't it true that parents in a district can see their individual teacher's ratings? The public has no need to see them as long as we get a general picture of how the district is doing.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 7CatMom
To VA Yankee - no one, including the teachers, are saying that teachers shouldn't be evaluated. It's the "how" they get evaluated that is the bone of contention. We all know teachers have always been evaluated and they were at the mercy of a good administrator or a bad one, along with the facts of their actual teaching abilities. For the most part, that system has worked for decades. The bad teachers usually got weeded out before gaining tenure.
Those in the "developing" stage of ratings now are the ones who have been told they need help in certain areas and have been given the chance to take courses, have a mentoring teacher and/or follow a prescribed plan from the administrator to improve.
The addition of using student's test scores is what throws a kink in the system. Obviously, not all students are alike, not all are "highly effective" themselves!!!! Teachers can end up with a lot of classes that are for very intelligent kids and others can end up with classes for kids who have been failing and need a lot of extra help. Test scores in those two groups are going to be very different, so how do the teachers get rated on an equal basis? Maybe teachers with great classes should get fewer "points" and teachers of lower level classes should get more "points" to try to equalize the ratings for them? In other words teachers of high level classes would have to work harder to earn a "highly effective" rating since the kids are already very successful. IDK, something has to be figured out since this rating system doesn't seem fair to anyone.
Isn't it true that parents in a district can see their individual teacher's ratings? The public has no need to see them as long as we get a general picture of how the district is doing.
Obviously my initial post was a response to anothers rant. I think your statement on Tenure is a key factor, once they get the "golden key" your stuck with them. I had many teachers that failed on many scales but had tenure so you couldn't let them go.
Our teachers/schools are evaluated on how well the kids do on the tests, it's not the most accurate but the idea is you need a standard way to rate a school. It continues to evolve and surprisingly the schools that are failing are those that we knew would fail. Prior to this system the districts evaluated their schools and weren't always honest.
I agree with your statements on class types expecting the lower 10% to perform like the top 10% is unrealistic but you have to start somewhere. Many people have a head in the sand outlook and don't want changes that could cause "their" schools to be ranked lower than they have been. I also agree that individual evaluations should not be public fodder but I think each schools overall grade not the collective district score should be made public. I think viewing it as a work in progress that will continue to evolve might be the best approach.
Originally Posted by Tracer88 What a farce. These numbers are MEANINGLESS!! Look at the disparity from school district to school district between Highly effective and effective. The principals doing the evaluations vary in judgement when doing evaluations. These ratings are all opinion and contain no facts to how effective a teacher is. What a waste of time and tax dollars!!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by VA Yankee
And why should teachers be exempt from evaluation? Show me a job where the quality of your evaluation is not based on the opinion & literary skills of the reviewer? Also realize that some districts may have more older/younger teachers that skew the reviews.
I don't think the commenter wrote that teachers should be exempt from evaluation. Just that the new evaluation scheme is completely meaningless for many many reasons. I believe teachers have been making this point for the last three years. At this point I think all concerned now finally agree.
(On a side note, determination of a teacher's effectiveness has been likened to nailing jello to a tree. It turns out that there is almost no correlation between individual teachers and immediate state exam performance of individual students. To some this is counter intuitive but nevertheless it is mathematically provable. One of the many flaws in the new and foolish evaluation system is a reliance on this almost non-existent (and individually non-measurable) correlation. Right then and there the new and foolish evaluation is less reliable than the traditional observation/feedback - based model. This is just one of the million flaws in the new and foolish system.)
LOL...98% rated as highly effective in my district (Herricks). Let's give them even bigger raises, they aren't being compensated fairly for their outstanding performance!!!
Those shouldnt really be the tell-all between districts... There are a lot of other factors that go into a good teacher than the current evaluations/testing...
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