New Haven Independent

posted by: Threefifths on March 12, 2010  12:12pm

What makes a good teacher is that we let them do the job that they are train to do and that is educate the student. I am sick and tired of this attack on teachers and the public school system.Are there bad teachers yes, But there are bad performers in every profession. I was reading a article in which this person wrote this.Just because there are poor doctors no one talks about THE FAILING MEDICAL SYSTEM. Likewise, poor performing sanitation workers fail to produce banner headlines about OUR NATION’S DISASTROUS WASTE MANAGEMENT. In no other profession is the performance of the employees so tightly tied to the abilities already brought to the table by the “clientele.” Clearly we have a FAILURE OF PEDIATRICIANS because of the childhood obesity levels, right? I agree.But yet we put a hit on the teachers and the public school system. Read the word’s of Diane Ravitch from her book
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

Ravitch includes clear prescriptions for improving America’s schools:

leave decisions about schools to educators, not politicians or businessmen

Devise a truly national curriculum that sets
out what children in every grade should be learning

expect charter schools to educate the kids who need help the most, not to compete with public schools

pay teachers a fair wage for their work, not “merit pay” based on deeply flawed and unreliable test scores

encourage family involvement in education from an early age
 
This will give you your good teacher.

posted by: Sabrina on March 12, 2010  3:13pm

Frank - the link to the NY Times mag article you referenced is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?hpw 

Very interesting and above all, timely!

posted by: sandstorm on March 12, 2010  3:28pm

A Study of Teacher Evaluation in Five Charter Schools
SOURCE: AP/Stephen J. Boltano
Teacher Susan Oblinger of Centerville High School in Chantilly, Virginia looks over her students during a test in Honors Algebra II.

By Morgaen L. Donaldson, Heather G. Peske | March 10, 2010

Read also: Removing Chronically Ineffective Teachers and Treating Different Teachers Differently

Teacher evaluation and charter schools feature prominently in President Barack Obama’s proposals to transform our nation’s public schools. To be eligible for additional educational funding from the $4 billion Race to the Top program, for example, states must permit the use of student test scores in teacher evaluation and allow charter schools to expand and play a central role in efforts to turn around low-performing schools. In this way, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are highlighting teacher evaluation as a critical problem.

Indeed, the weaknesses of teacher evaluation systems are well known. Exerting scant influence on instruction, they tend to have little effect on student learning or achievement. The consequences of a poor teacher evaluation process are two-fold: little improvement in teachers’ instruction in the classroom and the continued employment of weak teachers. Given the profound influence that teachers have on student achievement, accurately evaluating their performance is a natural leverage point for increasing teacher quality and expanding student learning.

The importance of meaningful teacher evaluation is receiving national attention from other sources as well. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, for example, recently described a need for major changes in teacher evaluation and pledged support from the national union in this endeavor.

In addition to shining a spotlight on teacher evaluation, the Obama administration advances charter schools as a potential solution to the persistent failure of some public schools. There may be a natural link between these two policy emphases. Charter schools create their own teacher evaluation systems and are not usually constrained by school district mandates, union rules, or laws governing tenure and dismissal. This means they may tightly link appraisal to instruction, learning, and achievement and generate results with real consequences. But the operative word here is “may.”

Despite the potential of charter schools to more tightly link teacher evaluation with improvements in teacher quality, there is very little published research that examines the norms, practices, and outcomes of teacher evaluation in charter schools.4 As a result, a number of critical questions stand unanswered:

Does teacher evaluation in charter schools improve instruction, enhance student learning, and raise achievement?
Do charter school evaluation ratings exhibit wider variation than the narrow distribution of high marks commonly found in “conventional” public schools?
Are charter school administrators able to use teacher evaluation as a means to identify and dismiss teachers who are not effective or recognize and reward those who are?
If charter schools do, in fact, differ from regular public schools on these matters, policymakers need to understand the differences. Especially important is the question of whether the absence of tenure and contract protections in many charter schools accounts for variations in teacher evaluation, or whether there are other factors, such as instructional coherence, school culture, or school size, which are more responsible for divergences in policy and practice.

This paper reports the findings from our study of teacher evaluation practices in five charter schools affiliated with three well-established charter management organizations.5 Based on interviews with teachers, principals, and charter management organization officials, supplemented by document analysis, our study begins to answer the three defining questions listed above. While modest in scope and scale, this study is the first of its kind. It seeks to lay an initial foundation for further inquiry regarding teacher evaluation in charter schools.

As such, it examines the practices, procedures, and norms related to teacher evaluation. The study further explores influences on and outcomes of teacher evaluation in these five charter schools. In the pages that follow, we will first briefly explore the opportunities to innovate that charter schools generally enjoy compared to many of their conventional public school counterparts. Then, we will delve directly into the findings at five charter schools run by three different charter management organizations.

We selected three CMOs, which we call West, North, and National. All three organizations are nationally recognized for the achievement of their students, many of whom come from low-income and minority families living in urban areas. All three charter management organizations focus on preparing students for college and base their work on a small number of guiding principles.

West CMO is a group of schools serving students in two of the nation’s largest urban centers. It is a network of conversion and start-up charter schools in which teachers collectively bargain. North CMO is a network of schools serving students in several mediumsized cities in the northeast. This CMO spawned in a relatively small geographic region from one successful school. National CMO includes a larger number of schools than the other two organizations and serves about three to four times as many students in some of the nation’s largest cities as well as some of its medium ones. National CMO features a more decentralized CMO structure than West or North CMO.

What we found
Teachers in our sample report that the evaluation process they experience in these schools is more frequent and more robust than that of their former schools, whether charter or conventional public schools.
In general, the three charter management organizations and the five schools included in this study posit that the primary purpose of teacher evaluation is to continually improve teacher performance. As a result, they focus on the performance growth function of the evaluation process rather than summative assessment of individual teachers.
These schools seek to develop in teachers and administrators a mindset of continuous improvement rather than a checklist of appropriate teacher behaviors. In this way, evaluation in these settings seems to be focused on becoming a professional habit rather than an administrative act.
In all five charter schools, student performance played a key role in teachers’ evaluation. Yet none of these schools used value-added data in teacher evaluation. All three charter management organizations say they are considering doing so in the future, however.
Similarly, the practices and procedures at these charter schools differ from those governing teacher evaluation in many conventional schools. Specifically, these charter schools require:

Annual summative evaluations for every teacher
Frequent, structured observations of teachers accompanied by detailed feedback throughout the academic year
Attention to aculture of reflection and account ability in the day-to-day work of the school
Hiring as a crucial primary step in assessing the candidate’s commitment to continuous instructional improvement
Efforts to advance a “no surprise policy” so teachers and administrators are on the same page throughout the year about teachers’ performance so that the consequences for teachers’ jobs are predictable
Substantialtrainingforevaluatorsonhowtoobserveclassroominstructionand provide feedback.
In all five charter schools we researched, teachers’ evaluation ratings cover a slightly broader range than that reported in conventional schools. But somewhat to our surprise, only a slightly higher proportion of teachers are dismissed from these schools than from their conventional counterparts.

In tightening the links between teacher evaluation, instructional improvement, and student learning, and then implementing consequences for teacher performance, these charter schools encounter some of the same barriers to improving teacher performance as conventional settings. In the main section that follows, we explore in depth how these charter management organizations and charter schools conduct teacher evaluation and what it may mean to education policymakers in the Obama administration, in Congress, and in state and local school districts across the country.

posted by: FIX THE SCHOOLS on March 15, 2010  8:37am

1.  Elevate the profession to the status of medicine or law.  Attract and recruit undergrads into the teaching profession who are in the top quartile of their class, not the bottom third. 

2.  Modernize the ed school curriculum by focusing on training teaching and instruction, not pedagogical philosophy.  Lemov has it right.

3. Revamp the certification process by having “test-out” options in fields of expertise, and qualification ought to be based on what you can do, not how many credits you have.

4.  Tie teacher evaluation to student performance.  Throw out the tenure laws.  Weed out poor performers.

5.  Reward the best teachers with more pay.  Create a system in which the elite “master” teachers are encouraged to spread their knowledge to other teachers, impact hundreds of children (not just dozens), and earn as much as the highest earning administrator. 

6.  Encourage great teachers who work successfully with the toughest populations.  Higher pay, higher status, more recognition for these special teachers.

6.  Outlaw or weaken the current state laws which favors the collective bargaining process for teachers.  Free agency and short term annual contracts for all teachers.

posted by: EducationEnthusiast on March 20, 2010  12:02am

Once upon a time, there was a school that was a failure. The district failed to help it—even telling the principal to limit suspensions or she would be fired. A few years later, this it was finally closed. In its place is a brand-new IB school. The students who previously attended this school did not stay but fled to other nearby schools. One of these schools is the school I work at. It has now been identified as being in the bottom 5% of performing schools in my state. I have a 50-50 chance of being fired. It’s truly tragic. I had no idea it would happen so fast. Some of you other teachers may be thinking, “Poor teacher, I"m so glad it’s not me.” When this school closes, these students will be headed for your school, lowering your school’s achievement (although you might be increasing theirs). I live in a poor community and there are not many resources for us. If there was one thing we could have done to save ourselves it would have been to have common planning time. We could have moved mountains if our district would have provided this for us. I read other articles about how that is a punishment for teachers. Not at all! My state (Colorado) is a finalist for RTTT funds.  However we as a staff will not be allowed to transform our school with this simple addition to our day. Instead we are on the chopping block to be “turned around” with 50% of staff and 100% of the leadership replaced.  This will probably be provided for the reorganized school without many of us remaining to see the results. I wish we would have had this option to transform our school. It seems the only thing I can do is buy the book “Teach Like a Champion” mentioned in this article and polish my resume ...