What is the Best Way to Evaluate Teachers?

[fuelair]

What was the point?

Does your school district provide extra services to the slow learners, do you even know?

It is generally required by the ADA so all school districts in the US certainly should be!!

 

[fuelair]

The problem with teacher evaluations is that schools teach to test in order to get additional funding. (at least here in NYC) and that schools are reluctant to fail students who deserve to be failed because it reflects poorly on the school.

Student evaluations that are matched with their results would be a good way to do it in my opinion.

Take the top ten and bottom ten percent of the class and have them evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher. Then examine the opinions as juxtaposed with performance. That would be one way to get a better picture.

Since you bring up t to t, I have heard that New York is going to drop the Regent's. Do you know if that is true and what they plan to replace it with. Curious because Florida is planning to start the functional equivalent of the Regent's over the next few years.

 

[Fnord]

I could never be a teacher.

I believe in self-motivation.
I believe in homework.
I believe in classroom discipline.
I believe in administrative support.
I believe in parental involvement.
I believe in promotion by merit.
I believe in self-representation.
I believe in measurable results.
I believe in earning privileges.

I could never be a teacher.

 

[Dancing David]

It is generally required by the ADA so all school districts in the US certainly should be!!

Nope, they do not meet the qualifications, they are slow not disabled, that is the point I am trying to make.

You have to have an IQ of ~70 or less to qualify as having a cognitive diability. It the mast it was 75 but it has moved down 5 pts. (Cut taxes, cut taxes, buy more guns, buy more guns.)

You have to have test and class room preformance that does not match your IQ to have a learning disability.

Slow learners fall in a gap, they do not receive special services.

they do not qualify fro either defintion for special services.

 

[Dancing David]

I could never be a teacher.

I believe in self-motivation.
I believe in homework.
I believe in classroom discipline.
I believe in administrative support.
I believe in parental involvement.
I believe in promotion by merit.
I believe in self-representation.
I believe in measurable results.
I believe in earning privileges.

I could never be a teacher.

What makes you think teachers would not agree with you?

They work in a system, most teachers i work with have large amounts of 'table', 'desk' and 'centers' work. All use self motivation.

Most send work home that is not compleated as homework.

Most use class room management, otherwise they can't teach. (I means seriously kindergarteners working at their tasks while the teacher runs a reading group, that sounds like management to me)

Depends on what you mean by adminsitrative support. You can't refer students for class room management issues.

Promotion by merit, that is a school board issue, sorry. Local politics are always strange.

Grades are measure based, they are not drawn from a hat.

Earning privileges, um I wonder how many children I see loose privileges everyday? (Six in the lab yesterday, no computer as a consequence of not controlling themselves, first graders, teacher's system. Sitting out recess is another, we have vast rewards system for bus behavior and cafeteria behaviors as well, or hall way behavior)

The real issue is that 5% of the children generate 80% of the issues.

Now I work in a rather progressive and competant school district.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Nope, they do not meet teh qualifications, they are slow not disabled, that is the point I am trying to make.

You have to have an IQ of ~70 or less to qualify as having a cognitive diability.

You have to have test and class room preformance that does not match your IQ to have a learning disability.

Slow learners fall in a gap, they do not receive special services.

they do not qualify fro either defintion for special services.

That is not my experience. One of the benefits of the testing our kids suffer through is that slow leathers are identified and given extra help. Our schools are judged on overall grades as well as sub pops. Bringing up the slow leathers is an easy way to improve both.

 

[Fnord]

I could never be a teacher.

I believe in self-motivation.
I believe in homework.
I believe in classroom discipline.
I believe in administrative support.
I believe in parental involvement.
I believe in promotion by merit.
I believe in self-representation.
I believe in measurable results.
I believe in earning privileges.

I could never be a teacher.

What makes you think teachers would not agree with you?

I do not think that.

It's just that I believe in these ideals to such a great degree that my first contract would never be renewed.

This is based on my experiences as a maths tutor in the military. There, my classes had three students at the most, and the failure rate was still about half. I had to deal with students who showed up late (if they showed up at all), never did homework, cracked jokes, and either expected to be spoon-fed the answers or have their evals pencil-whipped into a passing grade. I also had to deal with higher-ups who either wanted 100% success "no matter what it takes" ( ), or who didn't care if anyone showed up for remedial tutoring. No one seemed to care at all if those remedials actually learned anything, as long I signed off on their remediation. This frustrating experience is one of the many reasons why I did not re-up.

I could never be a teacher. Their problems are at least ten-fold of what I went through, and I did it for only one year.

 

[Dancing David]

That is not my experience. One of the benefits of the testing our kids suffer through is that slow leathers are identified and given extra help. Our schools are judged on overall grades as well as sub pops. Bringing up the slow leathers is an easy way to improve both.

Must be nice, but then Illinois is now like 48 in education funding.

 

[Dancing David]

I do not think that.

It's just that I believe in these ideals to such a great degree that my first contract would never be renewed.

This is based on my experiences as a maths tutor in the military. There, my classes had three students at the most, and the failure rate was still about half. I had to deal with students who showed up late (if they showed up at all), never did homework, cracked jokes, and either expected to be spoon-fed the answers or have their evals pencil-whipped into a passing grade. I also had to deal with higher-ups who either wanted 100% success "no matter what it takes" ( ), or who didn't care if anyone showed up for remedial tutoring. No one seemed to care at all if those remedials actually learned anything, as long I signed off on their remediation. This frustrating experience is one of the many reasons why I did not re-up.

I could never be a teacher. Their problems are at least ten-fold of what I went through, and I did it for only one year.

Yuck, how horrible, one of the redeeming things of working with K-12 students is that most of them want to learn (not all of them). So once you establish the relationship and develop the patience it gets easier.

My dad when he was a prof at the U of I used to fail athletes despite all the

 

[Alt+F4]

You can get surprisingly far by just looking at the difference between a September test and a June test....

You're assuming that all those students who took the September test will still be with the same teacher in June. Highly unlikely in large, urban school districts where transience, long-term absenteeism and multiple schedule changes are common.

Even if you could track the same students from September to June, "value added" is still a poor way to evaluate teachers. If teacher A takes a special education or a English language learner from a 30 average in September to a 50 aveage in June, that's still considered a failure. All Obama, Duncan (and now Cathy Black) want are passing test scores, nothing else matter. They care very little if the kids are learning anything, all they care about is the stats.

The focus on education in the United States should be more on parent evaluation -- but then no one gets elected with a speach on parental apathy.

 

[Alt+F4]

It doesn't matter how they are evaluated until the teacher unions are broken so something can actually be done with these evaluations.

Such as?

 

[Alt+F4]

Oh, I agree that teachers are important. But if parents are "orders of magnitude" more important, and we keep throwing money at teachers, and education outcomes keep not improving the way we would like, don't we at some point have to consider the possibility that we're throwing money in the wrong direction? Don't we at some point have to consider the possibility that we've been throwing money in the wrong direction for some time, and that the solution isn't to throw more money at teachers, but rather less (and maybe throw more money at parents instead)?

Yeah, but how does throwing money at the parents make them better parents? How do you get a parent to sit down with their kids for an hour and help them with their homework? Do we pay parents $20 to attend a parent/teacher meeting?

 

[Alt+F4]

Since you bring up t to t, I have heard that New York is going to drop the Regent's. Do you know if that is true and what they plan to replace it with. Curious because Florida is planning to start the functional equivalent of the Regent's over the next few years.

It's my understanding that it's only the January Regents that the state is thinking of dropping, for budgetary reasons. Students can still take the exams in June and August.

For those that think that standardized testing in the best way to evalutate teachers, what do we do with the approximate 70% of high school teachers who's courses don't end in a standardized test?

 

[blutoski]

Yeah, there's a lot of myths about education. Unionization doesn't seem to be an important factor. (80% of magnet schools are non-unionized and on average they underperform unionized public schools on standardized testing - there are a mix of reasons for this, but that's the point)

I read a study that indicated if districts were to replace underperforming teachers with outsiders (as opposed to hiring an underperforming teacher laid off from another district) that in order to achieve 90% grade targets in the NCLB, the USA would have to gradute something like 2 million teachers in the next 5 years to go through the test/terminate process, OR not replace them, and have the remaining top-performing teachers handle classes of approximately 120 students each. That's not going to happen, so 'firing the bad teachers' is not mechanically going to solve the problem of poor teachers in the system.



The one mechanism for teacher evalutation that hasn't been mentioned is peer evaluation. There are some districts that identify their bottom-performing teachers through anonymous peer surveys. The premise is that a crappy grade 5 math teacher makes extra work for the grade 6 math teachers, so they are motivated to resolve the problem, even if it means replacing the occasional teacher.

 

[Saggy]

Teachers should be evaluated the way they were 20 years ago, the way most employees are evaluated, by their superiors, in this case the school principal, using all the information at his/her command.

We have completely lost faith in teachers, principals, and the entire educational system, because the system is being forced to attempt to educate students that are for all practical purposes un-educatable and discipline problems to boot.

The scapegoat is the teacher. Teacher evaluations are not the problem.

I'll go further. I have a kid in Catholic school even though I'm not Catholic. The teachers are reasonably intelligent, well motivated, and well meaning. The curriculum is so standardized that everything is taught straight out of books, page by page. We're talking grade school here. Given good students and a benign environment there is no way they could botch the job, and they don't. The school is excellent.

 

[Dancing David]

Very few students are "un-educatable" and there is a range of discipline problems. You works with what ya gets.

The issue is that the students are who they are, in all their wonder and problems. But a school does not have the resources to address the issues of poverty and violence, chaotic families, absent parents and the myriad of issues.

Yet it works, many students who are hard to reach are reached and they learn.

The issues we see in my school district are amazing, especially since we have good job opportunities in my area, we get many many many people from all sorts of places.

What amazes me is the crap people who have never worked in a school say, about schools.

For example:

"They need to run on a business model"

My school district has something like 16 schools in it, with 22 servers and about 2,000 computers, but only 11 people to manage the whole thing, one of whom is the director and another who is the assistant director and go to lots and lots of meetings, one server tech, two IT administrative staff, one web and sharepoint guy and six techs. Apparently this is sort of low for a corporate structure our size.

Or my two grade schools, they both are 4-strand schools so read about 20 regular class room with one art and music teacher, 1.5 PE, two SPED, one speech pathologist, etc... Each build has around 500 students.

What do we have for administration? One principal, one assistant principal and two very busy office staff. I have worked in many many retail settings, where you have much higher administration to staff ratios for having 30 staff members and 500 customers.

 

[Saggy]

The issue is that the students are who they are, in all their wonder and problems. But a school does not have the resources to address the issues of poverty and violence, chaotic families, absent parents and the myriad of issues..

Well, just to stay on topic, how should teachers be evaluated?

And straying off topic, Just what resources do you need to address the issues of poverty and violence, chaotic families, absent parents and the myriad of issues ? And I'll note, these issues don't just apply to individuals, with some schools having warring factions.

Here's my answer - a magic wand. No amount of money will do it.

What's your answer?

And, what's the state's answer? The answer is to privatize education, starting with charter schools. Part of their program is to trash public education, and one of the ways they do it is by constantly attacking the teachers.

In NYC they've announced big teacher lay-offs for next year. Half the legislature has passed a law restructuring hiring practices to suit the school critics, but it probably will die. The new gov. is cooking up another scheme to go after the teachers.

But, get this, the school board has, as I understand it, just agreed to put teacher evaluations on the WEB ! LOL. This way every parent can get in on the criticism of the teachers, it can be a community activity.

 

[Dancing David]

Lots to respond to there Saggy, more later. But community criticism, uh huh, okay, sure. I can see the real problems with that, like the BD kids who don't have a problem we are all just 'racists'.

Or the parents who get tresspass bars against them.

More money can help, especially to create safe places for children.

 

[tyr_13]

Has the swimsuit portion been mentioned yet?

 

[Dancing David]

Has the swimsuit portion been mentioned yet?

The talent show is kind of dull.