Legislature will consider teacher report cards

First and foremost, I am not a teacher and have never been a teacher. I have volunteered for years in various school systems and have found that respect for teachers has continued on a downward spiral based, it seems, on legislative misinformation and continuing criticism through the media. Until those who vote on new requirements for teacher evaluations are willing to spend one week teaching in a public school and being responsible for the ridiculous amount of report building required for each day’s successes and failures, pretest and post test results, lesson plans, report cards, behavior plans, illnesses both real and feigned, student discipline, making copies, returning emails from parents, and attending incessant “team” and “staff” meetings I will never agree with such legislation. Those who are removed from the classroom do not have enough knowledge of today’s changes in student needs.
Observation is not a sufficient method of evaluation . No principal should be allowed to evaluate a teacher’s ability to teach based on one scheduled “horse and pony” show. Nor should that principal be so removed from the classroom that he or she would be unable to teach a group of students at the same level as expected for teachers at the drop of a hat. When the legislators determine that every person involved in a child’s education is to be evaluated by parents, teachers, administrators and community members not selected by the school principal then I will support their efforts to legislate teacher evaluations.
Education is not a business. It can not be judged by a comparison between how a school system operates and how corporate America operates. I believe that the comparison between the two would only be closely aligned in so much as both are top heavy with overpaid executives. Performance based compensation can not be determined by test scores. Test scores are not evidence of effective teaching. Test scores can be skewed by an empty stomach, a late baseball practice (yes, parents still take their children to scheduled practices during testing periods), how much review the student has done on his/her own, mood, special needs, and a multitude of other individual situations. In the business world performance can be judged by work product and/or sales. Those two things are based on individual performance on individual tasks. The life learned knowledge of an adult should be enough to produce objective performance evaluations. No one test is the determining factor and the evaluation is based on year long productivity. If there are school systems that have found an effective way of evaluating teachers based on test results I would be very interested in learning how their evaluations methods were developed and who participated in their development. Education is not a constant that can be scientifically tested and evaluated. Should the 2011 Georgia Legislature vote to require compensation based on performance for educators I see a mass exodus of excellent teachers on the horizon. That exodus will create an environment of business relocations, smaller tax revenues, and a public education system that can not function.

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As a high school teacher who has nothing but high stakes testing classes, I am very curious how this would all play out. My first question would be simple – how do you judge a U.S. History or Economics teacher against a World History teacher? World History does not have a state test to use as a judging tool. Can you get an accurate comparison without this tool?

Secondly, let’s presume that you use the Georgia High School Graduation Test scores to judge teachers. For example, would I get graded on how a student I taught last year did on the US History portion of the test? Should I be judged a year later on something I taught them? What if I did not teach anyone who took those tests? What if I only teach seniors? Can I be compared to people who teach subjects that are on the graduation test?

There are a lot of flaws in this theory. What if this is the first time you have ever taught this subject and your scores are lower than someone who has taught it for 5 years? As anyone in the job market knows, experience makes you better and improves performance. Should you judge a new person their first time out against an experienced person? Do you allow for deviation based on experience in teaching the subject?

Another example, what if I teach regular level students but my colleague teaches ESOL students (these are students who have lower levels of English comprehension as they haven’t been in the country for very long). Should we be judged equally even though we aren’t teaching the same type of students? What deviation will you allow for that?

Of what if I teach students who inform me the only reason they come to school is because their parole officer makes them but someone at another school has all college prep students? Should I be penalized for having admittedly lower motivated students? If I have even three students like the parole officer student, I will have lower scores than the college prep teacher. Does this make me a worse teacher? Should I be graded on that scale then?

This is not an easy solution to wave about and promise it will “fix” schools. As someone who teaches in a low-socioeconomic school that has not made AYP it concerns me. No one really looks at why we don’t make AYP, they don’t look at real solutions to fix the problem (our administration has not changed ONE SINGLE plan for improving our graduation rate, in fact they actually removed some of the programs that were previously used and had real data showing improvements were being made), instead they point at the teachers and say you must be bad.

Really? Am I a bad teacher if my students come for the free and reduced lunch but refuse to come to class? Am I a bad teacher if I call home and the parent tells me “well he’s grown and I don’t know what you expect me to do”? Am I a bad teacher if I tell a student to put their phone away, they refuse, I write them up, administration gets around to it three weeks later and the parent asks if we even have the right to deal with their phone? If I am a bad teacher, I would love for these experts who know more than me to come show me how to improve. Not just for one day mind you but how about a few weeks? Come to my classroom for a while and talk to my students, get to know them and then show me how to be a better teacher. I’d welcome that.

As a final note, I don’t want people to think all my students are horrible – I have great students and this past semester had the highest passing rates for my classes in the whole school. But that is my school – if you compared me to other more affluent schools in our county, I’d look like a poor teacher.

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