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NYC To Release Teacher Evaluation Data Over Union Protests
langelgjm writes "Bringing a lengthy legal battle to a close, New York City's Department of Education will today release detailed evaluation reports on individual English and math teachers as a result of a request under public information laws. The city's teachers union has responded with full page ads (PDF) decrying the methodology used in the evaluations. The court's decision attempts to balance the public interest in this data against the rights of individual teachers. Across the country, a large number of states are moving to evaluate teachers based on student performance in an attempt to raise student achievement in the U.S."
There is nothing like the court of public opinion to prosecute bad teachers... Nothing like it at all. /sarcasm
Student performance is obviously important, but is the performance measurement metric just as transparent as these evals are going to be? Who is measuring the performance (and lack of bias) on the part of the evaluators and those who decide what tests to apply, when, and how much they will be weighted? There is a lot more to learning than passing a test.
Rather than focus on actual learning, teachers will be tempted to just focus on getting their students pass various tests, going as far as actively cheating or encouraging/enabling students to do so.
And here I thought everyone read Freakonomics...
I think the job performance of any public employee should be public information as long as it doesn't included protected information such as health (which it shouldn't). The union has every right to protest evaluation methods, but then they should work on changing the methods - not hiding the information.
Can you point us to your publicly-accessible evaluations?
While I detest the notion that a report of that sort would be kept secret from the people who are paying for, and entrusting their children to, those being reported on, I would be quite interested to know whether the evaluations are actually worthwhile, useless, or even worse than useless.
As with the story about Australia pruning academics who didn't push papers fast enough that we discussed yesterday, there are a lot of bad ways to measure teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, these include many of the easy ones and many of the popular ones.
Teachers aren't mystically unquantifiable flowers; but in a world where people can, with a straight face, propose 'Hey, just tot up their students' scores on the standardized test! Now you know which teachers are good!' without any sort of correction for such minor matters as 'student demographics' it is hard to be uniformly optimistic about teacher evaluations...
The other, broader, consideration is whether the teachers should feel justified in complaining about the level of public scrutiny that they are being subjected to relative to other state functionaries in positions of trust and authority... While there is a good argument to be made that teachers' job performance is a matter of public importance, I wonder if you could get a detailed evaluation of a NYC cop's record as easily as you could an NYC English teacher?
Before the rants start about over-entitled public employees I think it's worth thinking this situation through. How many people in the IT field would want their performance, as measured by some random measurement (such as the ever popular Lines-of-Code-per-Hour), published by their employer? For their clients and future employers and clients to see?
There are major problems with this approach. It gives even stronger incentives for the teachers to try to game the system, which is generally detrimental to the quality of teaching. It frequently punishes teachers working in badly run schools, while it rewards teachers for working in well run schools (as their performance will in most cases be better when they work in a well functioning school). In addition to this the statistics are rather jiffy...
There are much better ways to improve the educational system than this... Such as for example paying teachers a decent salary. The day an average teacher earns as much an average engineer you will start to huge improvements in your educational system. Of course it will take 20 years before that approach starts to really pay off, in having a better educated workforce.
On the other hand, who am I to offer advice on the American educational system? It offers us engineers in northern Europe a great competitive advantage. Please keep destroying it! ;)
"decrying the methodology used in the evaluations" loose translation: "we don't like it because it's not rigged to make us look good". Cry me a river. Most of the rest of us in the corporate world have regular evaluations, sometimes against unrealistic metrics and could lose our job based on the results. Welcome to the real world where you have to prove you're worth retaining. I can't blame it on the parents, my boss, my coworkers, the weather, lack of funding. Just be glad you can't be outsourced. yet.
Makes you wonder just how bad the results are if there's this much fuss from the union.
and start holding parents accountable. Oh, wait the culture of victimization says we have to blame somebody... The teachers, no the unions - If your kid sucks in school it is because you are a shitty parent, I know several people that went to Cleveland public schools and went on the get college educations and do well in the world, yeah - I am sure they had some good teachers some bad ones and everything in between but you know what they did have for sure? They had parents who expected and demanded no less they became educated and made something of themselves.
I agree, except that parents of elementary and secondary students are notoriously overbearing and bloodthirsty, and school boards are notoriously spineless and completely unwilling to stand up to oversensitive parents. If the parents have a reason to try to get a teacher fired, that teacher will get fired.
I see this causing more harm than good. With the way they get treated, it's a wonder we have any teachers at all.
Full disclosure - I am a teacher at a public middle school in an area with a 90% free and reduced lunch rate, high unemployment and 85% poor minority.
The problem is really how you evaluate teachers and schools, there are so many ways to take data and interpret that data. Do you give a standardized test and grade every student exactly the same and base a teacher’s performance off of the pass/fail ratio? If so, those teachers in buildings like mine which have traditionally low performing students will look bad. The cynics will say that it shouldn’t matter but I have many students who come to me from foreign countries who have had little to no formal education and do not speak English. Even after a few years in the United States their English is many time not proficient enough to pass a formal exam. The teachers in my building do a great job but I see more and more good teachers leaving our building for “better” students because the pressure is so high teaching traditionally low performing students and they don’t like being called a bad teacher when in fact they work their tails off to get the results they do.
Do you base a teacher’s performance off of the progress made by students while in that teacher’s classroom? Take a baseline score and see how they progress through the year. Critics of this method will argue that a failing grade is a failing grade no matter how much progress the students have made.
We have created a system in the US in which every child is treated exactly the same, assumed to be that same and assumed to be able to meet the exact same “high” standards. The realist among us realizes that this is far from the case. Because of this attitude that everyone is the same our high achieving students are being cheated because we teachers spend the majority of our time trying desperately to bring the low end up and ignore the high end while those in the middle are coasting along. We refuse as a nation to serve each student in the way they should be served. The trend in education today is to mix all students together in a classroom and this creates a nearly impossible scenario for a teacher who may have over thirty kids in a classroom (I know physics instructors in our district with over 40) in which they have to serve all levels of students at once.
I will step off my soapbox now.
The public teachers in NYC should take the critique and act upon it to make them better at their jobs.
You really expect us to believe these evaluations are accurate and unbiased enough to be taken as constructive criticism? Can it be guaranteed that nobody "fudged" the evaluations just because they had a personal problem with someone? As soon as someone's livelihood is trashed by way of false data, it's too late to undo it.
If it must happen, the data should be anonymized an only be as granular as school district or school itself, not individuals. If a school/district is a problem let the local governing bodies figure out how to bring their scores up.
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It's not that bad teachers would feel bad about themselves.
It's that most teachers are bad.
If we compensated teachers based on performance, we would have better teachers.
But since we don't, the people who will work hard for better compensation choose a different career path, creating a bias for those who DON'T want to perform better for better performance in the teaching profession.
Thus, even though pay for performance would attract better teachers to the teaching profession, CURRENT teachers don't want pay for performance, because the existing system is attractive primarily to those who don't want to perform.
Put another way, for most current teachers, supporting pay-for-performance doesn't mean more pay for current teachers, it means more pay for individuals who have avoided teaching as a profession due to poor pay who take the jobs from the current teachers.
(That's not to say all teachers are bad - I certainly had some great teachers who chose that profession despite the poor compensation because it's just what they wanted to do, and they were going to do it well no matter what. But I've had plenty of people who just showed up for the paycheck too.)
paintball