Cross-posted from the Failing Schools blog
Yesterday, Amy Slowthower shared her well-earned frustrations about the expensive, tiresome process of developing a new teacher evaluation system for DPS. I feel her pain; there’s nary an aspect of school reform where there aren’t people taking forever and a day to come up with some new plan, and squandering millions of dollars as they dither.
What I don’t understand is why we feel it’s necessary for DPS to come up with a new teacher evaluation system in the first place.
When I first learned about Denver’s teacher evaluation system, I was actually very impressed. The current system identifies five performance standards on which teachers are assessed (instruction, assessment, curriculum & planning, learning environment, and professional responsibilities). Each standard has between three and five expectations to be met, suggested indicators for each expectation, and a rubric to gauge whether teachers are not meeting, developing, meeting, or exceeding expectations for each standard. There is a space for teachers to enter self-comments, and their reflections on how they address each professional standard.
There is also a summary of evidence journal administrators are supposed to gather and complete to justify the ratings they give in each area. Before the final evaluation is submitted, teachers and administrators are expected to meet to discuss any discrepancies in their respective perceptions of the teacher’s performance. The meeting also provides teachers an opportunity to offer more evidence (artifacts, student work, input from peers or parents) of what’s going on in their classroom, and receive feedback they can use to immediately improve their practice.
The system isn’t perfect, of course, though as I look over the forms and standards themselves, the only improvement that immediately comes to mind is to differentiate the Comprehensive Performance Rating at the end. Currently, the only options are “satisfactory” and ‘unsatisfactory,” though the information culled from the rest of the evaluation could easily support an overall rating of “not meeting,” “developing,” “meeting,” or “exceeding”, or whatever terms one likes.
The problem isn’t with the system itself, but the people using it.
For instance, on my most recent evaluation, I was meeting or exceeding expectations in all but one indicator under one standard. Yet the evaluator comments are overwhelmingly negative and demonstrably false. In one area where my performance exceeded expectations (assessment), the evaluator comments are similarly inaccurate, and easily disproven with even the quickest glance at my students’ data (yes, that data, that I try not to focus on, and everyone else claims to value so highly!).
Several friends of mine have described similar situations at that and other DPS schools. One DPS teacher even told me he was never observed, but the principal just wrote that he “deemed him to be a competent teacher” and didn’t bother to fill out the rest of the document. That evaluation was enough to grant this third-year teacher non-probationary (“tenured”) status. Some principals don’t bother to have the final meeting, others don’t give teachers their documents in enough time to respond…it’s a mess.
Why does this happen? Because overworked (and/or underhanded) principals know they can put just about anything on those forms and it won’t matter– no one is checking up on them. There is no meaningful oversight in this area– no close reading by the instructional superintendent to check for glaring omissions or inaccuracies, no timely investigation of teachers’ claims of misuse, no central office audits of the accuracy of what has been entered into the record, no nothing. Everything gets signed and kicked to the next location until it eventually lands in a file that’s rarely–if ever– opened. Whatever new system comes out of this current work won’t be any more effective if it suffers the same fate.
The higher-ups at DPS are probably as overwhelmed as the rank-and-file educators they’re supposed to support. But the path to advancement in such a place requires you to be more concerned about keeping up with the latest trendy school reform than stopping to seriously examine and address what’s going on out in the schools. (And why bother with that, anyway? There’s more money to be won from reinventing the wheel than fixing and using the tires you’ve got.)
So they’ve spent ten months, and a few million dollars, working on this. Spend ten years, and a billion dollars if you want. Or don’t. Who cares? Until the “look-busy-and-talk-smooth” culture at 900 Grant changes, it won’t make a whit of difference.
Popularity: 6% [?]
A classic pattern, in DPS and other bureaucracies. Come up with a good plan. Implement badly. Blame the plan. Repeat the cycle.
I agree with some of your points except for the fact that current system does not identify effective teachers or get rid of bad ones. Do you disagree? I’m sure you are aware of TNTP’s widget report from a few years ago. I don’t see how anyone can defend the current system or set of practices for most big school systems. Even Randi says we should fire poor performers even if she has not provided any means to do so
1- What do you mean by effective? I’d say someone is effective if they’re meeting or exceeding expectations in areas we all agree are important, and can demonstrate that students are growing (a portfolio with authentic evidence of growth over time). There’s room for all of that in the current system.
Some people are trying to make “effectiveness” all about measurable outcomes, but the means we have to do that are pretty shoddy at present. I’m with the National Academy of Sciences, EPI, AERA, etc. on that one- I don’t consider VAM to be credible for individual teachers. I also don’t see how it can be part of mandatory yearly evaluations, given that the error rate is around 35% when you use just one year of data, and 20-25% when you use three. In order to get data that passes the smell test (even for people who trust those numbers way more than I do!), you’re going to have to change how students are assigned to teachers, and keep potentially “bad” teachers in their classrooms for longer than the current remediation period.
2- Systems don’t promote or remove employees, *people* do. Systems merely provide a systematic way of gathering and analyzing the information necessary to make such decisions. It’s very possible to use the current system to get rid of bad teachers. You observe teachers, offer feedback, and gather evidence. If the teacher is unsatisfactory, he or she goes on remediation, and is removed from the classroom if there’s no improvement. This process is not that difficult, it just requires that people do their jobs and use the system fairly and properly.
Like I said, replace this one with the next new thing or don’t; the quality of a system doesn’t matter if it’s not being properly used.
Well I somewhat agree with you in regards to having portfolios and other measures of student growth. No one I know is arguing on a single measure of effectiveness. I think there should be multiple measures of effectiveness (status scores, growth scores, interim assessments, student work portfolios, student/parent feedback etc. Just because there is a disagreement about the value and use of VAM does not mean it is invalid.
You should here what the testing folks say about student work portfolios….I witnessed the destruction of great projects in CA and VT that were destroyed because of these narrow arguments.
On the getting rid of poor performing teachers, it is clearly very difficult given the number of teachers that are dismissed every year. We should see something like 5% dismissed not less than 1%. Ask any principal in dps if it’s easy, hardly.
And by the way while every other industry was taking pay cuts and layoffs, teachers in most places still got increases and kept their jobs in spite of all the talk that the sky was falling. There was something like a 2% increase in the number of teachers over this recession. Teachers have been totally protected unless you happen to be a first or second year teacher without tenure in a place like LA.
Ooh! Just realized I missed something when I submitted my last reply–
Disagreement over VAM is not what makes it invalid. The fact that it has such huge error rates, and the fact that the scores are based on measures (standardized tests taken by students) which were never intended for this use (teacher evaluation) is what makes it invalid.
“it is clearly very difficult given the number of teachers that are dismissed every year”
Correlation is not causation. Principals have too many other things to do seems like an equally likely explanation, especially since I’ve had more than one principal tell me it’s not as hard as everyone seems to believe to get rid of a poorly performing teacher.
Is the dismissal rate at charters closer to your 5% figure? I believe they’re mostly or all at-will employees so the “it’s too hard to fire bad teachers” complaint no longer applies.
Or Denver…Watch this board meeting, starting at around two notches before the two-hour mark. (You can click to start wherever you like once it loads: http://genome.dpsk12.org/1/watch/559.aspx) This is the session at which I and several other probationary teachers (and students & community members) spoke about being non-renewed/banned from working in DPS this past year. It speaks to a number of the issues we’re talking about now.
Also, on what are you basing the claim that there “should” be “something like 5% dismissed”?
Yes I saw it. You were probationary and not tenured. No tenured teachers were fired due to low performance. 5% was based on the turnover in other professions.
When my husband quit after working for dps over 26 years of his life, he complained about administrative cronyism in the classified ranks, and other inappropriate working practices he personally observed at the district.
He was promptly banned from re-employment and has never been allowed back to dps to discuss what happened to him after 26 years of dedicated service!! However, the district did get rid of all the people he complained about.
This unethical institution is not serious about reform — or the many people who appear before the board would receive the decency of a responsible reply and the name of a person with whom they can share their concerns. (Don’t tell me dps doesn’t have enough money to provide such a person, I don’t believe it.).
dps will never know how many lives it has ruined in the same of “childhood education” and will never care. Sorry but that has been my conclusion after ten years of my own dedicated efforts spent in the sewers of corrupt dps hr practices, expensive administrative waste, and the plain old ordinary low values held by those in power. ALL of those in power, from the top down to the most invisible classified worker spending his life in “at will” service for a public entity that didn’t even bother to evaluate workers at all — much less actualize its promises made to the most ethical of them.
The sole “point in common” that I’ve had with other bloggers on this site is this: children deserve better than they get at “traditional” dps schools. I’ve come to agree with those bloggers that their only way out is to get signed up with a charter but this is not because I used to be pro charter. Rather, I became convinced that dps is so big and so corrupt that it is literally unable to do the right thing, or even to identify that distinction in the first place. The “powers that be” are more worried about being “insulted” than doing the ethical thing — which is why the author will never hear from dps anymore than we have.
Please pardon this addition but I feel it’s an important one:
Longterm employees who cannot return to dps are usually forced to liquidate their pension accounts. Then they have NO retirement security at all, and they never will since they’ll not live long enough to benefit from SS.
Readers should really — and I mean really — ponder this.