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D.C. teachers are still protesting their layoffs while school officials are moving forward with a new evaluation plan aimed at training and retaining effective teachers. (Jane Park/MNS)
WASHINGTON — On Capitol Hill and in local school districts nationwide, educators are pushing for teacher equity. The notion that every student should be taught by an excellent teacher — and that the highest-need students should get the best — is one of the biggest discussions on the road to reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act.
Strengthening teacher evaluation systems is at the heart of that discussion.
“Teacher evaluation systems are weak, and have nothing to do with the effectiveness in producing student learning,” said Linda Murray, executive director of Education Trust – West, at a recent House Education and Labor committee hearing.
In early October, the American Federation of Teachers awarded seven Innovation Fund Grants to eight local school districts that has proposed drastic measures to improve the quality of teaching.
“We’ll be creating meaningful evaluation systems intended to improve teacher effectiveness,” said grant recipient Richard Iannuzzi, president of the New York State United Teachers.
The Broward Teachers Union in Florida also received a grant to fund its plan to implement performance pay for teachers.
Not to be left out, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) introduced its own value-added teacher evaluation plan this fall — a $4 million system called IMPACT — to effectively identify the stronger teachers from the weaker ones.
“IMPACT is about ensuring that we have a highly effective teacher serving every child in the school system,” said Jason Kamras, director of human capital strategy at DCPS.
Kamras said the system is a comprehensive, objective look at teacher performance based on year-to-year student growth measures and test data, as well as a carefully laid-out teaching and learning framework. Teachers are evaluated by master educators through a series of classroom observations and given feedback on their performance in a post-conference.
But the program isn’t without growing pains. Some teachers are wary that the new system prematurely cost them their jobs.
That’s what happened to Crystal Proctor, a former 7th-grade social studies teacher at Jefferson Middle School in southwest Washington. She was recently laid off because her principal said she didn’t have a firm grasp of the teaching guidelines under IMPACT.
Proctor, however, said she was not given an adequate amount of time to get up to speed on new requirements.
Teachers are often not part of the development of the guidelines used to assess them.
Renee Moore, a National Board Certified teacher from Cleveland, Miss., said teacher evaluation systems are broken across the nation and they need to be fixed to create teacher equity.
“The main thing that most teachers I know don’t like about evaluations is that they don’t get the real feedback that they’re looking for,” she said after a Capitol Hill briefing on teacher equity.
“I want you to tell me what to do better,” she explained. “I don’t want you to tell me, ‘Check, you’re good.'”
Moore knows she’s good; she was Mississippi’s Teacher of the Year in 2001. But she still welcomes good evaluations. And she said that all these innovative, comprehensive evaluation systems should have one thing in common first: “I think teacher evaluation systems should be developed in cooperation with the teachers, not done to the teachers.”