Teacher performance evaluations

[frankcor]

In the New Hartford Court topic, I opened my big mouth and wrote the following:

frankcor said:

I discovered demonstrated effective ways of conducting authentic teacher performance evaluations. They don't require state legislation. I even solicited legal opinions that they are legal in New York despite the Taylor Law and tenure rules. They are aimed at bringing sub-standard teachers up to standard or moving them out of the system. I am no longer on a school board because I am incapable of convincing enough people to grow the ... er ... wherewithall to implement authentic evaluations.

Naturally, I was asked to provide detail about the effective evaluation process I talked about above. Rather than hijack the Court thread, I started this one.

The discovery I refer to occurred over a 3-year period near the end of my 9-year tenure on the school board in Rome. I began on this particular search in my quest to find ways to improve the system I was charged to help govern by the voters.

When an engineer looks to improve a system, he or she identifies all the inputs to the system, all the outputs of the system, and then examines how changes within the system impact the inputs and outputs. I spent nearly six years just trying to figure out how the system worked, concluding that there was no way for me, or anyone really, to accurately model such a complex human enterprise as an 8000-student school district with over a 1000 employees.

But my process helped me to understand the critical elements that could be expected to yield the most dramatic improvement if the right changes could be applied. I concluded that it came down to essentially three elements; leadership, teachers and parents. There were many other elements, of course, but those three were ones I imagined could be "tweaked" to give the biggest bang for the bucks.

A school board is responsible only for policy -- the governance of the district. They have no control over day-to-day operations other than hiring the superintendent who is the only person they can hire or fire in the district. But that structure leads to providing to boards direct control of leadership, indirect control of teachers and limited control over parents. I found easy solutions for leadership. Teaching was a harder task but I have some ideas that I will discuss below. And I never got around to finding anything concrete on how to improve parents' contributions to kids' educations.

[frankcor]

I first heard about an innovative way of evaluating teacher performance from an attorney who had worked with Guilford County Schools in North Carolina. Kim, is that your school system?

In the early 90s, three large districts had just been combined into a county-wide district. The super-district served over 60,000 students, had over 9,000 employees in approximately 120 schools. An important decison was made early on and the first superintendent that the combined school board hired was an outsider, not one of the former superintendents of the original districts.

One of the first acts of the new leader was to arrange for a brief interview with each of the 120 principals conducted by teams of senior administrators and attorneys with experience in NC labor law, human resources and employee performance evaluations. Principals were called to central office with little or no notice. If two principals were known to be good friends, they were scheduled at the same time and interviewed simultaneously by two separate interview teams so that one couldn't warn the other of what was coming. All of the interviews were completed over a 2-day time frame.

The interview consisted mostly of one question for each principal: rate and rank each of your teachers. Ratings were on a numeric scale, something like: 1-far exceeds standards, 2-exceeds standards, 3-meets standards, 4-does not meet standards. Rankings were also numeric from 1 to whatever number of teachers were in the school from best to worst. The interview was over when the principal completed the task.

Over the next several months, administrators and attorneys reviewed all of the performance evaluations written by each principal with the principals. What they found was that there was almost no difference between evaluations of the highest rated teachers and lowest rated teachers and no difference between the evaluations of the best teacher and worst teacher in each school. Performance evaluations contained almost no objective observations but were very likely to contain phrases like "Mary is a joy to work with." or "Tom brings tremendous energy to the classroom."

The attorneys worked with administrators to revise the evaluation forms and develop training for principals on how to evaluate teachers and provide coaching to improve teachers. They spent the next year teaching principals how to evaluate teachers using the new system they had developed before implementing it.

The initial program was named Project H.E.L.P. or Project C.A.R.E. but it must have evolved beyond what I recall and doesn't exist today under that name. I was surprised to learn while searching to fill the gaps in my memory that even the NY Regents have adopted some of the elements contained in those original plans. More to follow.

[dgriffin]

This sounds like it will be good! I'll hold until you finish a comment regarding the intrusion of boards on the day to day operation of the district and why I think it is increasing, to the detriment of the schools. I mention it so I'll remember it.

[nhcitizen18]

Frankcor,

Is the stuff you're talking about similar to this?

tinyurl.com/2wnvu5


Pretty good article in Time Magazine. For some reason you need to copy and paste the post....some kind of weird problem where it won't link directly.

[frankcor]

Thanks, nhcitizen. (I think the problem may be that the BBS code doesn't recognize the commas while most browsers consider them valid.)

The info in the Time article is more advanced than what I had originally talked about. My initial search was to discover ways of evaluating teachers which seems to be a preliminary step to rewarding the best teachers with merit pay. I've found some of the things I recalled but since it was more than a decade ago, it's been difficult to track down what ever happened to the programs I was looking at back then. I'll report back soon.

[Ralph]

There ya go NH, fixed the link.

That's the problem with ProBoards Frank. I've found that even when you don't have the commas, after a certain amount of space is used it negates the rest of the addy.

[clarencebunsen]

There is a lot of food for thought in that article. I may have to start reading Time again.

[concerned]

Maybe if the teachers just taught there would be no need for evaluations. I bet those evalualtions have everything to do with controlling some of the animals in the classroom.

[dgriffin]

>>I bet those evalualtions have everything to do with controlling some of the animals in the classroom.<<
They certainly do. "Don't bother the administration" is the name of the game. Send a delinquent to the office so that a principal has to deal with something and you risk his/her ire. Put that principal in a posiiton where they have to interact with a parent and he/she will get nasty with your evaluation, one way or another.

[frankcor]

Control of a classroom is one element of teaching. Some teachers are better at it than others. By observing teachers, it should be easy to spot which ones are better and which ones need help. You can also observe the specific actions taken by the better teachers to control their classrooms and then coach the ones who need help on what the good teachers do.

It's really not rocket science.

[dgriffin]

Francor, I believe that is simplistic. You won't find very many teachers who feel that overall his/her administrators provide much discipline support. And, in fact, discipline is THE problem in the schools. When I taught after retirement, I found that parents were completely clueless about the amount of time and opportunity for education lost in the classroom because of discipline problems.

[frankcor]

Simple, yes. But perhaps not over simplistic. It is undeniable that some teachers can control a classroom better than others.

[dgriffin]

Oh, that's certainly true. But it would tend toward better, I believe, if the administration were really interested. In the two school systems in which I worked (2 years teaching, 5 years administration, not certified in latter) discipline was handled somewhat differently. In one, the job was given to the least senior member of the staff (asst. principal) and in the other it was assigned directly by the superintendent to a guy who truly saw it's importance, was willing to confront unruly parents and take the heat. Guess which school operated with less chaos.

[frankcor]

I have no argument with you Dave about the importance of a commitment by administrators to maintain order in their schools. Teachers are helpless without it.

I filled in some of what I have been able to rediscover about evaluating teachers in Post #2 in this topic. Please feel to question and comment as I continue adding more detail in posts to follow.