Editor's note: All things considered
By:
Brian Taylor
Published: June 15, 2011
A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. —Oscar Wilde
The U.S. invaded Grenada the day my district superintendent observed the eighth-grade English class I was teaching. The military action turned out OK. The jury is still out on my class—or, if there was any verdict, I don’t remember it. I’m pretty sure the superintendent and I never discussed it in any detail. If he wrote up a report, maybe the dog ate it.
At any rate, the experience didn’t make much of an impression on me, and it didn’t affect my pedagogy or my employment. I left teaching for other reasons, just as American soldiers left Grenada. But too many approaches to teacher evaluations haven’t come far from my long-ago experience, judging from California Schools staff writer Kristi Garrett’s story: “Value-added: Do New Teacher Evaluation Methods Make the Grade?”
“Way too often, teacher evaluations are superficial. They’re subjective,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told AFT’s Teacher Evaluation Conference earlier this year, according to Garrett’s story. “They miss a prime opportunity to improve teacher practice and, thereby, increase student learning,” Weingarten said.
Gary Hogeboom can relate.
“Most teacher evaluation systems are a waste of time,” the Lucia Mar Unified School District superintendent told Garrett. “How do we help our teachers get the feedback and coaching to be the best they can be?”
Searching for the answer, Hogeboom became a proponent of the System for Teacher and Student Advancement (better known as TAP, the acronym of an earlier name for the program). Hogeboom and others make a good case for TAP, but Garrett also reports on other approaches to evaluation, including the Supporting All Employees Program used in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Speaking of Los Angeles, a major newspaper there published now-notorious “value-added” judgments of teacher effectiveness from standardized test scores—and besmirched teachers, by name and in print, who were deemed ineffective. The National Education Policy Center and other organizations effectively debunked the flawed analysis, but the episode stands as a cautionary tale about the misuse of data—and about uncalled-for besmirchings, something many school boards can relate to.
Garrett’s teacher evaluation story pairs so nicely with a National School Boards Association magazine article that we asked our NSBA colleagues to let us reprint the story from their April issue. In “Under Fire,” American School Board Journal senior editor Del Stover gives a national overview of attacks on teachers unions, including a fight here in California over union opposition to some school choice legislation. To get a local perspective, Stover contacted CSBA’s own Rick Pratt, who keeps a watchful eye on the state Capitol from his Governmental Relations Department across the street.
“It was just stirring the fire,” Pratt said of the anti-union attack. “None of it was really true. A lot of people who were watching up close saw an effort at real reform, with real concessions on everybody’s part. But the media had this anti-union sentiment.”
At CSBA, “We have a long history of working together [with the unions], primarily on funding and budget issues,” Pratt continued. “We don’t always agree on policy issues ... but we work together when it comes to fighting off proposed budget cuts or a voucher initiative.”
We also have freelance writer and educator Pamela Martineau’s take on summer homework (“Summer Reads”)—and a new department, “BoardWise", inviting readers to write in with questions about board governance.
“There are some issues that are too complicated to be resolved in a short space, but there are other issues where we think we can provide quick and practical advice to help boards, individual board members and superintendents to be effective in their governance work,” explained Holly Jacobson, CSBA’s assistant executive director who developed BoardWise with our governance consultants who write the responses.
Thanks for reading—and, if you submit a question to BoardWise, thanks for writing!
Brian Taylor ( btaylor@csba.org ) is the managing editor of California Schools.