Evaluating Teachers is Hard Work

The New York Times author has an agenda? An anti-teacher agenda? Really?

And, look, this school gets high marks. It has both the curse and the blessing to serve a mostly immigrant Chinese student body.

But, in the rundown of the Principal's previous responsibilities, evaluating her teachers was not on the list. And, dedicating 10% of her 40-week year to this task is portrayed as a burden.

And, btw, the article implies that she only has one Assistant Principal, while the Parents Association website lists two: http://ps130pa.blogspot.com/

 

And I love the rhetoric here...

Oh, you are doing what we wanted you to do? Ha! We are write something bitching about the way you are doing what we wanted you to do.

School administrators are meant to be master teachers who can give guidance to other teachers. This program seems to be allowing them, or making them, do this. They found two administrators to bitch about it on the record? Mazel tov.

 

I am not wasting this day so you can avoid interacting with your family.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Administrators have always evaluated teachers, usually twice a year for more than 30 minutes each time. You add the 30 minutes it takes to document and sit down with each teacher and you have two hours per teacher. A school will have 40-50 teachers, and holy shit, the math adds up to two hours a week.

You can stay busy on your phone reading this...

http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/regulations/2011_guidelines_uniform_performance_standards_evaluation_criteria.pdf

 

I suspect these new approaches to teacher evaluation will put a serious dent in the U.S.'s life expectancy rankings.

 

Similar experience. Ex-lawyer with biglaw experience, followed by 6 years writing/editing for law and business trade pubs. Teaching -- aside from never having to travel for work -- is more physically exhausting than either of those careers and the grind (during the school year, to be fair) is a lot more grueling. To be fair, I still contribute weekly on the side to one of the papers I used to work for, which makes the grind feel worse, but even if teaching was all I did, it's a lot tougher physically, mentally and emotionally. And that's in an affluent suburban district. I can't even imagine what it's like in the inner city. Still, other than grading papers, I love it and couldn't imagine doing anything else.

 

You sound like an editor. The Bulls have games on back-to-back nights 15 times this year. In 2013, the Cubs had games on back-to-back nights IN DIFFERENT CITIES 16 times. Before the All-Star Break.

 

Having done both, the NBA travel is tougher. There's no such thing as a seven-city road trip in baseball (granting the one exception being the Braves for the Olympics back in 1996). I did a seven-cities-in-12-nights trip my first season on the NBA and a six-in-11 the next season. You never seem to catch up on rest after those trips.

 

At least I don't link power point presentations and pass it off as academia.

 

As stated on other threads, I am for teacher evaluations. The problem with a top down approach, however, is that it is very hard to create a checklist to evaluate great teaching. It would basically be like creating a checklist to evaluate great writing. And yet, in every school building I've ever been in, everyone knew who the great teachers were. It is also a mistake to assume that the average principal knows more about teaching than the average teacher does. If they are pulling "master teachers" in to evaluate, well, that's nice, but that's one less "master teacher" actually teaching. This is sort of related to another problem with education reform, the unspoken belief that there is one correct way to teach. That's wrong. South Korea and Finland have, for years, had the best performing school systems in the world, and their respective approaches to teaching could not be more different.

There also remains no extrinsic incentive to follow up on the helpful suggestions. What you often end up with is good/great teachers who have their time wasted and bad teachers who ignore everything they are told. And I'm not sure who that helps.

Actuarial results based approaches (the performance of your students vs. the expected performance of your students) is the way to go, but we are nowhere close to getting there.
p.s. Not crying a lot of tears for the principal in this story, in every school I've ever been in it was part of the principal's job to go into classrooms and evaluate teachers.

 

Republican candidate of Illinois puts out an add highlighting education reform. He mentions charter schools, merit pay, and "more control for parents, not union bosses":

#t=11

Is this a winnig strategy that will be embraced, or an unfair attack that will be rejected?

 

Probably work. People are really into paying for charter schools without looking into what a scam they are.

 

In order to have control, parents would first have to give a shit.