Panel: City Can Do More For Its Teachers

To figure out how to better support and evaluate teachers in and outside of the classroom, ask the teachers what they need.

That was one of the suggestions from leading educators and policymakers offered during a ConnCAN-sponsored panel about boosting teacher quality, held at Nathan Hale School Thursday night.

New Haven Federation of Teachers President Dave Cicarella said the district could do a better of job of ​“gathering information about the practice of teaching” and ​“asking teachers what they need.”

The panelists lining the stage at Nathan Hale School’s auditorium included Cicarella, State Sens. Marty Looney and Gary Holder-Winfield; Nate Snow, executive director of Teach for America-Connecticut; Dr. Damaris Rau, the school system’s district director of instruction; Michael Crocco, district talent director; Ranjana Reddy, state director of a new New Haven-based statewide group called Educators 4 Excellence; and Justin Boucher, a 12-year New Haven teacher now managing a Gates Foundation grant the school district received to improve teacher professional development.

Teachers turned out to hear about ways to further fine tune the teacher evaluation system, as evidenced by their question submissions halfway through the event.

Boucher (at left in photo, with Rau) said one improvement in the works is to provide teachers with a ​“wider variety of support and connections” to other teachers. Often administrators evaluating teachers have different teaching backgrounds and cannot offer subject-specific advice.

Providing ​“development opportunities” to reach out to others in the district would help teachers plan their professional trajectories.

The evaluation system in New Haven seems to be on the right track, Reddy said, whose organization is just beginning to talk with the city’s teachers on how to get their voices heard at higher levels. In her experience with Educators for Excellence in Bridgeport and Hartford, high-performing teachers have felt left out of opportunities for more resources and professional development.

Evaluations should make all teachers better, ​“with an emphasis on the all,” she said.

Implementing equitable programs is even harder on a state level, Sen. Looney said. Thirty districts were identified as problems but the changes proposed were ​“system wide,” he said. ​“Many suburban schools thought nothing needed to change,” since their students were scoring high, and in a way they were right.

Holder-Winfield said that academic achievement does not necessarily mean educational standards are where they should be. ​“The question we should be asking is: ​‘What’s wrong with our schools?’” he said, in order to improve them.

Near the end of the night, panelists shared personal stories about meaningful experiences they had as teachers.

Rau said she was a ​“tough teacher” in the South Bronx, where she ​“got second-graders who didn’t know the alphabet.”

“There were no excuses,” she said. ​“There were no excuses. If a student wasn’t turning in his or her homework, he or she would have to stay with the teacher and finish it.” She met with parents and pastors of children to get help in having homework completed. The philosophy that ultimately paid off when all her students came out on grade level.

As a math teacher in New Haven, Crocco got to see one of his students come back and give a graduation speech to Wexler-Grant eighth graders. She said she was majoring in math in college because she had had Crocco as a teacher. After graduating from college, the student got a job teaching math at a New Haven school.

Reddy’s story described how her students surpassed her expectations on a classroom level. As a science teacher at Rise Academy charter school in Newark, she taught the same class of students from fifth through eighth grades (a practice known as ​“looping”). When the students reached seventh grade, she started to teach them more traditionally the way she had learned in high school and college.

During a laboratory experiment, Reddy asked the class a question. Tthere was ​“radio silence.” But she wanted her students to get the answer on their own. So she waited. Finally, one hand snuck up and a girl named Tiana David answered the question, and then others in the class joined in. Reddy knew she was getting through to them.

The event’s audience was full of teachers, not just from New Haven but from Hartford and Bridgeport as well, who heard about the panel through their involvement with Reddy’s group Educators for Excellence.

Christine O’Neill (pictured), a teacher at the Blackham School in Bridgeport, was one of a core group of teachers who worked on a proposal asking the district for more professional development opportunities for the city’s teachers.

She came to the panel to hear that discussion continue in another district.

Stuart Beckford (pictured), a teacher at the Burr Community School in Hartford, came at the recommendation of a former colleague now involved in Educators for Excellence. He listened eagerly to the conversation on how to measure teacher and student growth, especially when factoring in ​“intangibles” alongside data.

Read on for a live blog of the panel discussion, which was moderated by New Haven Independent Editor Paul Bass.

Live Blog

6:46 p.m. Nathan Hale auditorium is about three-quarters full, with individuals continually trickling in.

Jennifer Alexander, CEO of ConnCAN, starts the event by listing a few of her own past teachers who have impacted her life. ​“Great teachers can change everything for a child,” she says. But one negative teacher can also have a profound impact.

New Haven has been at the center of reform efforts, serving as the model for many actions taken by governor in recent years to improve teacher evaluation and support, she says.

6:52 p.m. Question: All over the country, there have been efforts to have formal evaluations become part of teacher contracts. How does it work in New Haven?

Dave Cicarella, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers: Previously the evaluations were binary: satisfactory or not. ​“It was a broken system. No one liked it.” One of the things we have to get over is the use of test scores, reducing a child to just a test score. There’s nothing wrong with the Connecticut Mastery Test, but those types of tests were never designed to evaluate teachers. Always tried to find someone to blame, if scores were low.

Now, he says, teacher objectives are factored into the evaluation process.

6:57 p.m. Question: How much do test scores factor in?

Cicarella: They’re a measure of assessment. Roughly half of the teachers’ evaluation based on student learning practice. Someone independent comes in and evaluates teachers, to ensure fairness in the process. Exemplary teachers are also evaluated.

If evaluations show the need for improvement by Nov. 1, teachers have by the end of the year to improve.

Question: How many asked to leave?

Cicarella: Sixty in past four years were removed by the system, of about 1800 teachers total.

7:00 p.m. Educator Justin Boucher says the current teacher evaluation system is a ​“significant improvement.” If evaluated by an administrator that had taught a different subject, that administrator’s evaluations might not be helpful. ​“One way we’re working to improve it to provide development opportunities” beyond what the principal has access to, he says. The district should ​“provide a wider variety of supports and connections” to other teachers.

Dr. Damaris Rau of NHPS: We found teachers were interested in becoming administrators. In the pioneering NHPS-AF Residency program for School Leadership, all of graduates have earned a position as administrators

7:07 p.m. Nate Snow: I would agree with Dave that the prior system in New Haven didn’t add a lot of value.

Ranjana Reddy (pictured) of Educators 4 Excellence, which has recently begun work organizing teachers in New Haven, says teachers in New Haven feel the evaluation system is on the right track, unlike in Bridgeport and Hartford. Teachers think it should be designed with the intent of making all teachers better ​“with an emphasis on the all.” The evaluation system should be pushing teachers at all levels.

7:10 p.m. Question: What aren’t they getting right at state level?

State Sen. Martin Looney says thirty districts were identified as in need of change, but the changes proposed were system-wide. Many suburban schools thought nothing needed to change. Those teachers were right to some extent — with students from homes with rich educational backgrounds, not much change that needs to be demonstrated in getting them to perform higher.

Looney says it’s hard to be equitable on a state level.

State Sen. Gary Holder-Winfield says part of the reason that it failed at the state level was because of short time limit after Senate Bill 24 was introduced. ​“It may not be true that you’re getting it right just because the majority of students are getting education that they appear to be getting,” he says. We should ask: ​“What’s wrong with our schools?”

7:17 p.m. Question: What is the challenge of recruiting diverse teachers?

Michael Crocco says it’s a matter of the current ​“climate.” He says it’s necessary to have ​“collegial conversations” at least three times per year. ​“We need to be able to sit and struggle with the problems that come up.”

Current model is focused on growth, which is a better developmental assessment of where students are, he says.

7:21 p.m. Reddy says that teachers want their voices to be heard as well as leadership positions outside of the classroom. These programs will also get teachers of color in leadership positions.

This past school year, across the country, 5,500 teachers joined the workforce through TFA, about 1 percent of total teachers, Snow says. Not a lot. When the district is hiring every year, starting with a small number of candidates of color. In Connecticut, 30 percent of incoming teachers identified as people of color. No district in the state is more than 28 percent teachers of color. One effort alone is not enough to bump that number up, he says.

Snow says it’s important to ask the question: ​“Who owns knowledge?” What does it tell white students in country if all their teachers are also white?

7:27 p.m. There are pros and cons to programs like TFA. Teacher turnover has a detrimental effect for schools long-term, studies show, Snow says. But other studies show it’s good for students to have good teachers, even for just a year or two.

The audience has submitted several questions, mostly on teacher evaluations.

Question: What kind of training do teacher evaluators receive?

Cicarella: We had a lot of input from teachers throughout the school year before coming up with the system. Training took place over the course of the summer. The first year was a little bit rocky, but adjustments were made afterward. Now in its fifth year, the training is much more extensive, he says.

Rau: Administrators were trained for three years in a row. All of the professional development had to do with calibration training.

Lightning round of questions, as time runs out.

Question: What do you hear about good ideas in other cities that we should bring here?

Boucher: We’re working on making teacher learning look like student learning.

Cicarella: Some districts use data differently. We don’t do enough of gathering information about the practice of teaching, asking teachers what they need and what they are doing.

Reddy: We had a team of teachers in Bridgeport last year to ask: What do we need to be doing for professional development of teachers? Development has to be ongoing with constant feedback, going back to Boucher’s point. The development also has to be tightly linked to evaluations to produce results.

7:37 p.m. Crocco: Career trajectory for administrators — why do teachers leave after three years?

Question: If state senators re-elected, what will you do next at state level to ensure students have good teachers and principals?

Holder-Winfield: We are currently working on better linking professional development and evaluations. Who will have access to data and on what levels?

Looney: We need to go back and look at what we do in teacher preparation during their undergraduate education. In the 1980s, one concern was that a disproportionately large number of education majors were mediocre students. We need to try to make sure teaching is a profession that attracts the best, most academically gifted students. Currently that is what TFA is doing.

He says his parents grew up in Ireland and said schoolmaster was the most respected person in the community. But teachers also need to command respect.

7:41 p.m. Panelists share personal stories about positive, meaningful experiences teaching.

Rau: I was a teacher in the South Bronx and got second graders who didn’t know the alphabet. I was a tough teacher. All of my kids came out grading on grade level. I worked them. There were no excuses. If a student wasn’t turning in his or her homework, he or she would have to stay with the teacher and finish it.

Part of the reason she was successful, Rau says, was because parents valued education.

Cicarella says teaching in Fair Haven, he worked to convince students that he was treating them fairly.

Reddy: In Newark, NJ, I stayed with a class for four years as a science teacher.

After two years of teaching them, Reddy says she decided to teach them more traditionally, the way she had learned in high school and college. During an experiment, Reddy asked a question and there was radio silence, until a girl named Tiana David raised her hand and answered the question.

Crocco: A young lady invited to talk at Wexler Grant’s eighth grade graduation said she was a math major because Crocco made learning math fun for her. She got a job teaching math in New Haven.

7:48 p.m. Holder-Winfield says it could be a good thing for teachers to stick with a class for a certain number of years.

Snow says he is unsure why it would be a state-implemented policy. Experiment, don’t make it state policy.

Holder-Winfield agrees.

Rau: It’s called ​“looping.”

Four years, like Reddy’s experience, is very long. New Haven teachers are currently ​“looping.”

7:48 p.m. Snow says it’s ​“possible” but not likely to be planned in advance.

He says it’s important to provide a wide door for entry into teaching, while maintaining high standards and holding teachers accountable for growth. New Haven is providing support for teachers early in their careers.

7:54 p.m. ConnCAN’s CEO Lawrence makes closing remarks, thanks panelists for keeping a difficult conversation productive.