Thursday, June 21, 2012

publicizing teacher evaluations

Considering that high stakes testing results are not always released in a timely fashion (which count for 20% of a teacher's evaluation), this whole process will create more chaos than good. Public exposure using these methods may tell who are ineffective but it could potentially classify teachers as ineffective or developing when they really are not. We only need to look at the Value-Added scores being released in the New York Post several months ago to get an example of how scores can be wrong (How to Demoralize Teachers).

The question that I ponder is why is this so important? It feels as though politicians and reformers are looking to slap a scarlet letter on teachers in an effort to shame them out of the teaching profession. Bloomberg says "motivate", but it seems to be more of an effort to force schools into a corner. Will schools fight back instead of making all of these new mandates work?

Teacher evaluations are highly important. All teachers should be observed and appropriately evaluated by competent administrators. One of the reasons why this debate is coming up is that there are administrators who did not do their jobs and there are teachers who are not good at educating students. Once again, that is the exception and not the rule.

-- Ed Week

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