Anyone who has had students in this state’s K-12 education system knows that there are effective teachers who inspire and motivate their students. The result is students who reach for academic success.
Unfortunately, there are also teachers who seem to have lost their passion, lost their drive and simply go through the motions to collect their next paycheck. They are failing their students, but often get a passing grade on their evaluation.
It’s time – past time, actually – to get an effective measurement tool in place so those underperforming teachers can get some mentoring and guidance and if they still don’t perform, move them out the schoolhouse door.
On education matters, it’s hard to find anyone more knowledgeable than Dr. Thelma Jackson, former president of the North Thurston School Board, longtime board member, a leader in the African American community and staunch advocate for closing this state’s achievement gap between minority and white students. Jackson knows the importance of quality educators.
In a column for The Olympian a year ago, Jackson hit the nail on the head when she said, “The research is clear – an effective teacher is the most important factor in raising student achievement. If we provide an evaluation system that rewards and retains effective teachers and equips them with targeted professional development, we can give our students the teachers they need and deserve.”
We couldn’t agree more.
The report from the Gates Foundation drives home that very point. The report should prompt legislative action to get a new evaluation system in place.
The Gates study concluded that once-a-year evaluations aren’t enough to help teachers improve. In fact, school districts who use the weak evaluation model and infrequent classroom observations to decide who are their best teachers – and their worst – could be making some big mistakes, the study concluded.
The multi-year study from the foundation said good teacher evaluations require multiple nuanced observations by trained evaluators. Those results should be combined with other measures, such as student test scores and classroom surveys, to gather enough information to both evaluate teachers and help them improve, the researchers found after nationwide experiments involving thousands of teachers.
This study finding should not surprise anyone: The most common teacher evaluation method used by school districts today – a single classroom observation once every few years – has only a 33 percent chance of resulting in an accurate assessment of a teacher.
That’s not fair to the teacher or the students in the classroom.
“This confirms what many teachers have been saying for years: That when high-stakes decisions are being made, school districts should allow for more than one observation,” said Tom Kane, deputy director of the Seattle-based foundation’s education program and leader of the research project.
Vicki Phillips, director of the foundation’s education program said teachers across the nation are getting too little feedback and are being left alone to figure out what they need to do to improve.
The main conclusions of this report are:
• High-quality classroom observations require clear, specific standards, well-trained and certified evaluators and multiple observations per teacher.
• Classroom evaluation is not enough. That information should be combined with student feedback and data on improvement in student test scores. Combining the three kinds of evaluations offsets the weaknesses of each individual approach.
• The different evaluation methods still need to be refined, but they’re better than what most districts are using now.
The education reform measures passed by the Legislature in 2010 – without a funding source – called for eight pilot teacher evaluation projects around the state. North Thurston Public Schools was one of the test sites.
Local teachers who participated in that pilot said the four-tier system was superior to the standard evaluation process. They said the pilot evaluation system provided greater clarity in assessing performance against specific standards rather than broad state criteria, offered deeper and more meaningful professional discussions about performance between principals and teachers, and created more objectivity in determining level of performance through the use of a framework.
Principals also liked the more in-depth review process.
John Bash, chief operations officer for North Thurston, said, “Overall, our team believes these new models provide a clearer path to effectiveness and accountability for both teachers and principals.”
That’s great news.
Now it’s up to the state Legislature and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn to get new evaluation systems into place.
