- Was the Instructor prepared and organized?
- Was the Instructor knowledgeable in the class content?
- Did the Instructor encourage participation?
- Did the Instructor answer questions adequately?
- etc, etc, etc
Then, to my chagrin I learn that our local RAS community education classes do have the kids fill out class and Instructor evaluations. Now this is part of the Public School district, and they value the student /parents perspective... So why doesn't the majority of the District? Thoughts?
G2A Attacking Unions or Saving Students?
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25 comments:
Quite obviously, it is because Comm. Ed. classes survive only by providing good value to willing "customers." The public schools are a monopoly with a captive audience. They do not have to provide any level of quality to survive, and get paid the same rather little Johnny learns anything or not. Get through the year and they get a raise, in fact.
It's an interesting idea, but flawed, I think.
Here in 281, I've filled out evals for ECFE but not for the comm ed classes my child has taken, so I'm not sure that they're always used.
As for why they're useful in some but not all settings? I imagine it's that in ECFE or college or professional training, the person filling out the eval is generally not graded and has no "ulterior motive" other than the knowledge they gain--ie, no ax to grind. I can't believe that most junior high or elementary students would be objective in filling out an eval, and parents--myself included--don't spend nearly enough time in the classroom to provide an informed opinion.
For instance--If your kid messes around and gets a C, and you're one of the "my kid can do no wrong" parents, you'll give the teacher a poor review. Parents would probably catch most "bad" teachers in their reviews, but they'd probably also give a lot of low scores to teachers who their kids thought were too mean or graded too hard or gave too much homework. Or imagine a science teacher who didn't give class time to creationism, being graded by a creationist parent.
For another instance--I remember a jr high English teacher whose classroom conduct, in hindsight, was reprehensible and entirely inappropriate. But at the time everyone thought he was infinitely cool and fun. He would have gotten great student reviews.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be part of the mix, but I can see this kind of tool being totally skewed. Peer reviews? Maybe better. A better version of managerial reviews (because the current ones are lame)? Best.
--Annie
Annie,
Are trying to tell me that you think college students don't get graded? By the way, many professional training opportunities end with tests that must be passed before you are certified or licensed.
Also, it is apparently the kids that fill out the community ed evals. That is why I did not know about them until I was talking with one of my girls about the topic.
I have to go with J on this one. RAS Administrators can't do much with poor Teachers, so why collect the data and give Parents hope. It takes years of serious concerns and complaints to fire a deficient Teacher. (I've been watching a couple for 3 yrs now...) Whereas Community Ed Instructors had best perform or they will not be asked back. ( ie bad classes &/or bad Instructors means no students or revenue)
And yes this would only be one aspect of their performance review. Principal eval and peer eval could be another part. And maybe even something based on the learning growth experienced by the kids in their class. What a creative idea...
Perhaps students and their parents could jointly fill out teacher evaluations while sitting around waiting for their turn at conferences. I wouldn't have much feedback other than what my kids tell me. When I ask them to help me fill out other district evaluations, like about the gifted program or the math curriculum they usually have worthwhile comments.
Most of the criteria you suggest parents will know little about, aside from what their child tells them. I could comment on the amount of homework, which seems to little to me, but then again my kids could be working harder on what they are given (they are not straight A students.) I could also comment on parent communication, which in most cases seems too little.
Most of teacher performance is best evaluated by school personal, but I think it is worthwhile to come up with a way to solicit feedback from parents and students.
The worst Teachers we have experienced have been in the middle school years. Some of the Elementary Teachers were not ideal, but overall they all seemed to get the job done. (ie different strokes for different folks)
The few worst Teachers in middle school are known for losing assignments and blaming kids, losing assignments and just giving the kids 100%, leaving the classroom unsupervised, not maintaining discipline in general, assigning homework and then changing their minds and not grading it, reading the newspaper in class, totally losing it in front of the class, etc, etc, etc.
It seems that these Teachers got in over their capability level and they are frazzled, Lord knows that age group is a handful. I'd feel sorry for them if there weren't ~30 kids each hour counting on them to be proficient Teachers.
Each yr us Parents just warn the others to make photocopies before handing in the assignments. And advise them to try avoid having that group of Teachers if possible.
High school has had some interesting characters, but I haven't heard the strange disturbing stories that I hear from middle school.
I think there is room for "age-appropriate" teacher reviews by students. At least by high school, and possibly starting in middle school, you can ask any kid who the bad teachers are and they can tell you. You couple that with evaluations from parents, but ONLY those parents who attend conferences (bit of an incentive program there), and with peer and administrator reviews, and the objective basis of student performance improvement, and voila! you have a solid basis for merit pay. Exactly as you ought to have.
Coupled with my children's reports home about their teachers, it only took one evening of conferences to verify their assessments as correct. Had I thought there was a prayer of getting the worst of them canned, or at least denied a raise, I would have written a scathing review of at least one of them. Fortunately there are only a few. Unfortunately they're still there.
It's interesting to me how many people with no experience working in schools often have strong opinions about how teachers should be evaluated and paid. I am open to changes, but have major reservations about many of the reforms proposed.
I have seen how some reforms work in practice and expect most would have unintended consequences. I know one teacher who has the ethical dilemma on whether to fudge data collected re student mastery of math vocabulary to meet a goal he/she set for her students at the start of the school yr. What if this teacher worked hard ensuring students mastered other math skills and intends to use some of the bonus $ collected for additional teaching resources?
What about when schools possibly cheat to get higher test scores (see DC and Michelle Rhea) or have spec. ed kids take an alternate test? What about when school administrators choose teacher leaders for added responsibility and pay who are not the most effective teachers or leaders?
Ed reform is just not as easy as the many arm chair experts believe. Why shouldn't teachers have a role in developing evaluation and compensation reforms, rather than having a business model, that is in many ways a poor fit to education, imposed on schools.
Laurie,
I don't believe anyone has said to leave the teachers out of the process? I understand that the professional teachers and administration have had YEARS to come up with evaluation of ALL employees in K-12 education and HAVE NOT DONE THEIR JOB.
Therefore, the public (parents, taxpayers and others) are now saying if the K-12 education professionals are not going to clean their our house, We the people will do it for them!!
This is a discussion that has been happening for YEARS with NOT progress. When I graduated over 30 years ago people knew that some educators should not be in K-12 any longer. What has changed in 30 years. Nothing, we are still talking with NO action.
I have taught in the classroom and I WAS evaluated by the students. I didn't get a say at all in what the questions or criteria were. I've also been evaluated in the private sector, where, as a professional, I DID have some input into what work I undertook and only because of that did I have an input into my evaluation-- setting the criteria of "success" but subject to override (if I made my job too easy) by management.
That is what evaluations DO, measure employees against objectives (some subjective, some objective, some of them able to be "fudged" if the underlying assumptions don't play out). ONLY if you evaluate do you find the "bad" teachers or leaders. Right now, we have no way to know.
Laurie,
Da Boys have a few good points... How would you improve the ranks of Teachers? Or would you just let everyone stay once they got hired? No matter how burnt out, unorganized, behind the times, indifferent, etc they became...
If you choose to let the status quo rule. (ie high job security and paid for time served) How will you look the students that are forced to waste a year with these "Teachers" in the eye?
I concede there is room for reform / improvement in the evaluation, compensation and job security for teachers. It just seems to me the current level of teacher bashing is disproportionate to the problem.
Teachers are easily terminated for performance related reasonss during their first three yrs, which I think happens more often than to employees in other fields. Schools do have pathway to terminate long term teachers as well, though most administrators won't put the effort into using it.
Working in charter schools in recent years I have seen some of the reforms in practice, both what's good and bad. In one school I know, the director went way over budget taking students on a 2 week trip overseas. When June rolled around it seemed several of the experienced staff and higher paid staff had performance deficiencies and needed to be replaced by teachers fresh out of college.
I am sort of a softy and have met very few teachers I would fire, though given a choice I would definitely pick certain teachers over others for my kids. In my experience the bad teachers will often choose to leave the field on their own. I know of a school with a challenging student population to teach that is on its fourth science teacher this yr, two quit, one was fired, and the current one is able to manage the kids.
Anyhow, to wrap it up, ed. reform is not so easy and I agree schools could do slightly better in getting rid of the least effective teachers.
Laurie,
In my mind the biggest reason to do teacher evaluations is so that we can reward good teachers, which I believe are the vast majority, and to point out to the bad teachers that they need to improve. Far from being punitive, I see it is being a positive for all teachers. I think it's going to cost us more money to pay the good teachers more, since there are more of them, and only a few really bad teachers will fail to improve, and their lack of salary increases will eventually drive them from the profession, which is as it should be.
Since the number one factor in student achievement is a well-paid and effective teacher, these evaluations are necessary to drive the merit pay program that in turn drives improved student achievement.
There are all kinds of ways to do teacher evaluations, of course, but almost anything is better than the nothing we have now.
In this case I am not that patient, the students can not wait for attrition due to flat salaries. The dead weight folks usually hold on for quite awhile, for fear of the unknown. I vote for the immediate termination of the bottom 3% to 5% of Teachers. (tenured or not)
C'mon now, this would only be 3 to 5 out of each 100 Teachers. Now I am sure each District could pretty much find them in their ranks... And we are certain the Principals know who they hear the most complaints about... From Peers and Parents...
As for high cost Teachers being at greater risk... They are and should be if they are expected to earn that higher income.
Shouldn't they be providing significantly more value for that significantly higher comp? If not, maybe 2 newbies is better for the kids?
In order to use merit as a tool for dismissing ineffective – a.k.a. bad – teachers, you would need two things: first, an evaluation system that was reasonably objective upon which such dismissal actions could be predicated and defended, and a way of jamming this perfectly sensible notion down the unions' throat.
Using an evaluation system as the basis for merit pay increases would be an easier, though still exceedingly difficult, cram-downbut in the long run might lead to quicker dismissals. Most bad teachers would leave after a couple of years of bad reviews and zero raises, not because of pay but because they would not be getting the "respect" to which they felt entitled. They would be correct and we would be well shut of them.
There is one other way to do this, with more immediate results. You still have to establish that dismissals or layoffs are to be done by merit rather than seniority, but what you do is to include the ability to handle a larger class size as a key element of merit. Then all you have to do is to "consolidate" students under the better teachers and the bad teachers, having no students, become unnecessary. The beauty of this approach is that we can then pay the better teachers more money without increasing the total school budget!
That's what I found so interesting about Laurie's response. I got the sense that she felt random firings would be run rampant in this reformed world.
From my experience, private companies are pretty hesitant to fire anyone without good cause and a paper trail. Here are some reasons:
- expensive to rehire and train
- Spvr's are softies and don't want to deal with the conflict or tears.
- Spvr's are busy and don't want to deal with the paperwork.
- opens company to potential law suits ( especially from older folk and the other protected classes)
- risk of getting a bad reputation that will make it harder to find new good employees
Odds are the Districts already have the paperwork started on this 3 to 5%. Its just too bad that all the good "Union" Teachers keep protecting the inferior Teachers that are giving their profession the black eye.
Maybe I should start protecting fellow Engineers that design things that break and harm people. It would be similar... Correct?
one of the things I've seen private industry do, rather than fire people out right which, as you say, is terribly messy and somewhat costly, is to simply shuffle people around and slot them into jobs for which they are better suited. One of the old jokes around our shop was that we promoted based on merit, and that was sometimes a terrible mistake; we lost our best engineer and gained a terrible manager. What I had seen done on a number of occasions was the opposite, to promote a poor engineer to a management position, where their skills were better matched and they sometimes even excelled! We could do this with teachers, too, if we could get around the silly union rules to do it. We might end up with some highly paid but highly effective hall monitors, but be able to hire a couple of really good math teachers to replace him.
I'd just like to say my paranoia or mistrust of administrators is grounded in my knowledge of more than a dozen cases of teachers being fired. I could share specific details but I won't. I really don't know any friends or relatives that have been fired, aside from teachers.
Maybe there is an upside to teacher turnover in charter schools, as the job I hold currently is due to the preceding teacher being fired. It seems the job for which her performance was deemed deficient was set up for failure, as she was replaced by two spec. ed. teachers.
I'm surprised to hear that any teacher gets fired, but if that is possible there can still be problems if we don't have a proper evaluation procedure in place, and good managers administering it, and sensible policies that minimize the disruption of lives because a manager lacks a little imagination. Or options.
Again, I would like to see schools adopt the whole private-business merit pay paradigm, which manages employees as the important resource they are, not to be squandered, but improving them as necessary.
I just read a story about a "turnaround" school in Baltimore that Obama is using to tout his "Race to the Top" initiative. the first step in this turnaround program is to fire all the teachers and require them to reapply for their positions. "Only three were retained," the story says. This tells me that there are a lot of poor teachers out there, that they are disproportionately congregated in the schools with the poorest performance, that the studies saying the most important factor in academic achievement is a good teacher are correct, and that if we had a simple evaluation and merit pay system for teachers we could have done this long ago and with no Washington money or dictates.
Given this new confirmation of what we all knew but that some denied, how long before we can "turn around" ALL of our schools?
about merit pay for teachers, it has been found to be ineffective in raising achievemnt. See D. Ravitch's new blog post Social Norms Beat Market Norms
Laurie, oftentimes a study will "find" what it sets out to find, and that seems to be the case here. A fella with a PhD in education just might be trying to defend the status quo in education, and I can understand that. All of us look for facts that support our argument and tend to discard those that do not. Reading any of these studies (and I used to teach classes in this) require that one reads between the lines and find what is not said, and the facts that are missing.
In this case we are told that merit pay is not effective in improving academic results. There is no mention of how much pay, to whom paid, nor most particularly what the definition of merit was on which it was based. Furthermore, just paying teachers more money shouldn't be expected to improve results, because we have been doing that for many years and gotten essentially nothing for it. Merit pay by itself is almost worthless unless it is coupled with a rigorous evaluation system, feedback on performance, and on giving teachers the freedom and incentive to improve. I really like your suggestion that successful schools and teachers should be teaching all schools and teachers to be effective, but you may notice that does not happen. I believe it is because teachers and school districts are paid the same whether kids learn anything or not, and it is that attitude which needs to be "evaluated" and then eliminated. You don't do that just by giving teachers a few extra bucks.
I can also tell this is a biased piece because he takes shots at charter schools and vouchers, two very high profile school reform methods. He carefully points out how vouchers have failed to make a difference in Milwaukee, but doesn't even mention how wildly successful they have been in Washington, DC. One cannot condemn all voucher systems based on Milwaukee, but we CAN perhaps all learn something from the success in DC. The whole trick seems to be that, in education, we need to define success, we need to encourage it, measure it and finally reward it. It is evaluation that is the key process, but it is the alignment of attitudes with objectives, as set in the evaluations, that makes success happen.
We're veering off topic here, but @Jerry, I'd be cautious about the effusive praise for the turnaround schools in DC. Several of the city's "Shining Stars" were recently found to have statistically improbable rates of wrong-to-right erasures on their standardized tests, indicating that teachers or administrators cheated in order to achieve the mandated improvements (and received merit pay for the results). http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm
Also, you'll want to brush up on your D.Ravich info because she's a pretty important voice right now. Diane Ravich was a Bush1 appointee in the Dept of Ed who was an early proponent for charter schools. She has more recently become a critic, after seeing them fail to live up to their promise. She's a thorn in the side of both the left and the right, but is generally seen as smart and informed.
As always, I maintain the fix will be neither simple nor cheap.
--Annie
Should have known that "D. Ravitch" would be a she, like "J. Ewing." But truth is where you find it, and there is certainly trouble in charter schools. Part of that, I think, is that they tend to use the public school model and, indeed, are often part of a public school district. They are becoming increasingly unionized, which seems to doom reform efforts.
I am still of the opinion and hope that the fix WILL be simple and cheap, but those solutions are "impolitic" I am told. This discussion has made me understand that a full system of evaluation, based on alignment to goals and rewarding of results, would be the key to true reform, as D. Ravitch implies but seems not to have stated clearly.
With all the attention being given to schools these days maybe we can have some effective reforms that don't need to cost a great deal more money. For more on teacher evaluation:
Teacher-Evaluation Logistics Challenge States
and
Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness
While the study I linked previoulsly found that merit bonuses based only on higher test scores were ineffective, other forms of merit pay, based on multiple measures and a career ladder could raise achievement I think
Laurie, thank you for the links. They once again make clear why the educational establishment cannot seem to reform itself. They have long been convinced that education is just so, so complicated that only they can understand it and that only its cloistered acolytes are qualified to dictate its convoluted catechism. In other words, it is both in their nature and in their best interests to make it sound complicated and to wrap it in obfuscatory language. It seems like every report I have seen discussing educational reform, from the local school district on up, employs this gobbledygook, this Ed-speak, to mask the fact that they either don't want to do anything, or don't know how to do it, or both.
My point is that I think you and I could probably put together a successful evaluation system in a day and a half, and everybody without an education degree would understand it, and probably agree with it. And because of that, the educators, the guardians of the Temple of wisdom, would resist it to the bitter end.
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