Teacher Evaluation – What’s Coming? and What Next?
(from the New Action leaflet distributed at the September 2013 Citywide Chapter Leaders Meeting).
For a printable version click: NA/UFT DA Leaflet October 2013
What’s coming?
This storm is just starting. Many teachers have as yet to be observed. We are 11 months away from year-end ratings. Very few of us have begun to digest that low scores on the 20% State and 20% Local Measures Components will trump the judgment of a principal who supports you and thinks you are effective.
And we are a full year from teachers with I’s working in fear of their jobs, and teachers with D’s having to report both to their own principal and to an outside administrator.
And, little as we like to think of it, we are almost two years from at least hundreds of tenured teachers being fired.
What Next?
We should continue fighting problems caused by the DoE’s unfaithful implementation of the system King imposed. We should look to renegotiate many of the problematic aspects.
But at its core, this is a system that rests on rating teachers based on standardized test scores, that weakens tenure. We need to go back to Albany and advocate for a repeal of the misguided legislation that led to this evaluation system.
ahumbleteacher
The evaluation system is a disaster for teachers (and ultimately for their students) for two reasons
(a) the reason stated in this posting — that the 40% for scores derived from student tests trumps the 60% based on teacher observation, in a new “new math” that beats the old “new math”.
(b) the criteria on which supervisors (damned be the majority of their kind) are ordered to rate teachers for that 60% and the mode by which they have been (effectively) asked to do it — fly-throughs in which they check off 1-4 on the 22 criteria.
I know that there was an option which a teacher could choose in which they would have at least one full-period formal observation, but no one I know has chosen it because it was made clear that we would have to meet all 22 criteria in that paragon of a lesson.
Shame, shame, shame and more shame!