Pa. eyes teacher evaluation pilot program
Pa. eyes teacher evaluation pilot program
Posted: Monday, August 1, 2011 1:40 pm
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania's state schools agency is developing a teacher-evaluation system that puts more emphasis on how students perform on standardized tests and plans this month to ask school districts to volunteer for a pilot program beginning this fall, a spokesman said Monday.
Department of Education spokesman Tim Eller said results of the pilot program would not be used for actual evaluations in the 2011-12 school year, but rather to determine whether the system can work.
Some schools are already asking to participate, and state officials believe that school administrators, as well as teachers, believe that the concept is worth exploring, Eller said.
"I'm not saying they agree on the exact mechanics of how it's been proposed, but they agree it's something that needs to be worked at to come up with the best system," Eller said.
State law currently precludes student performance from being used to evaluate teachers. But basing the evaluations of Pennsylvania's roughly 130,000 teachers on the standardized test scores of students is a major priority of Gov. Tom Corbett in a broader effort to improve the state's public schools.
President Barack Obama also supports the use of student performance in teacher evaluations. With states competing for a share of $3.4 billion in "Race to the Top" school reform grant prizes, a number of them made changes to teacher evaluation rules in an effort to make themselves more attractive to the contest judges.
However, critics of the concept say no one has developed a scientific way of using student achievement to identify the best teachers.
Eller said student performance on two different standardized test systems — the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment and the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System — will determine half of the scoring in the teacher-evaluation pilot. The PSSA is designed to track a student's learning growth from year to year, while the PVAAS is designed to track it from the beginning of the year to the end, Eller said.
The pilot would leave the other half of the scoring to the district, taking into account the measurements that local administrators view as being important as well as a principal's survey of a teacher's performance on things like lesson planning and classroom interaction, Eller said.
In the current system in which building principals normally do evaluations, 99 percent of teachers and principals were reported to be "satisfactory."
An unsatisfactory rating can put an employee at risk of being fired, but officials at teacher unions say the positive rankings are pervasive in part because many teachers facing unsatisfactory evaluations resign rather than go through dismissal procedures.
2 comments:
Score another one for 'Teaching to the Test' and bumper sticker philosophy that takes the thinking out of everything.
I favor the idea of merit pay, but the teacher's union is strongly against it.
However, I don't think you can use standardized testing as the source for determining who's best, who's satisfactory and who needs help (or to move on). It is too prone to either teaching to the test, as Anonymous stated, or, worse, teacher fraud/cheating (there's an interesting chapter about this in the book "Freakonomics").
Instead, I recommend coming up with a set of ideals on which the teachers and administration can agree will improve education and then rate them based on their adherence to those ideals.
Interestingly, all teachers I've ever debated with on the topic of merit pay are also against it. Oddly, even if they see themselves as an excellent teacher (and why wouldn't they) they would rather be paid the same as other teachers that they know are not as good, and instead base their pay on years of service/tenure. I realize that teachers are not motivated by money as many other people are -- if they were they probably wouldn't be teachers -- but this still strikes me as odd.
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