<p>knowing that you can be replaced if you don’t do well does matter in the work force, regardless of the job. And knowing you won’t be replaced, and that it’s almost impossible to lose your job, can affect performance for a lot of people, regardless of the job.</p>
<p>I agree with this but as I said earlier that is due to poor administration practices.</p>
<p>But, see, Tom…what you are saying is that it CAN be changed. Because you did. Maybe the performance issue needs to begin at the top…as in reviewing the administration regularly for responsiveness and holding them accountable for the performance of thier schools. Then, those fantastic teachers can be paid what they are worth…who would compain about that??? Nobody.</p>
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<p>D1 attends an outstanding magnet school housed at a far larger residential school. The residential school is a Title I school. The levels of student performance, parent involvement, student quality, working conditions, basically everything is entirely different between the two schools. The dropout rate at the residential school is high. The kids who do graduate are often the first in their families to finish high school. The magnet school is populated by kids who are “typical” CC kids. Using test scores and peer/administration/parent evaluations, the magnet teachers are going to be the ones who’d be awarded merit pay. At least until the regular school teachers and administrators rebel over the unfair hand they’ve been dealt.</p>
<p>Merit pay should be based on the performance of the students in the particular schools…which is why I said peer review ought to be wieghted most heavily, WITHIN that particular school.</p>
<p>Tom is correct and it does take “retraining” to teach some first line managers that there needs to be a very real evaluation. The Lake Wobegon syndrome can apply to the workplace also. It’s a top down but bottom up approach that has to happen. It’s not fun to do a negative performance review (or to receive one) but if the concept is clearly to help people do better and that culture exists it can be a productive experience for the employee and the “company.” We have an elementary school that has a cadre of unbelievable teachers who think they have the very best principal and the kids that come out of that elementary school are pretty amazing. New teachers that come into that school, which is rare, quickly get what’s going on out there. There is just as much accountability on the individual school administration as with the teachers and the administrative evaluations should reflect the success or failure of the entire team of teachers as a group.</p>
<p>One supervisor basically wrote “perfect in every way” on all his subordinates performance reviews. He then had the nerve to tell me he could not meet the standards I set for him because his staff was no good.</p>
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<p>Whoa. Clearly I have no problem with merit pay as I stated above, as long as the assessor is objective. But I can’t imagine a more subjective group of people than parents when they believe they are protecting their kids.</p>
<p>You are taking that out of context. “Peer review would be weighted highest.” When I say based on the performance of the students in the school, I mean based on their ability and thier performance and not comparing charter students to local students…apples to apples, so to speak. I never said parent assessments should be weighted the highest. That would be ludicrous.</p>
<p>No. Tom I know. Believe me. I wasn’t just talking when I said I think this is more of an administration issue than a teacher issue.</p>
<p>Aw, heck. Let’s just give all teachers a standardized test and be done with it. That should weed 'em out. After all, that’s what we do to the kids.</p>
<p>Actually, in all seriousness, that’s what the National Board assessment is: a series of classroom videos, written papers on classroom content and assessment, and a standardized test. It’s a remarkably telling process.</p>
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<p>But the apples are not all the same apples. I work in a pretty homogenous district. Still…there are students who come to school without enough sleep, breakfast, appropriate clothing, etc. Some have parents who read to them, and take the to interesting places. Others barely have enough time in their days to provide basic care to their children. Some don’t speak English as their primary language. Their kids do. Some have special needs. Some are gifted. </p>
<p>There are things I can control for my students and these are the things I do in school AND the communication I have with their families. There are things I can NOT control.</p>
<p>I know enough about statistics to know that the independent and dependent variables need to be considered.</p>
<p>I like the idea of parent evaluations of teachers in the lower grades, and student evaluations of teachers in higher grades. This has been suggested in our district, but the administration is terrified of the idea. They are convinced parents will railroad an employee or that kids are going to write nasty, lying comments just for fun. Sure, there will be some useless and vindictive surveys submitted, but I think a pattern will emerge nonetheless. Besides, the evaluations should be used to improve teacher performance–not fire anyone, at least not before observations, warnings and interventions are conducted. We have had several high school teachers in our district who bragged about being able to do whatever they want without getting fired because they were union reps. They would leave kids alone in their classrooms for 20 minutes out of every 90 min. block to smoke outside, or would never grade papers and just invent grades when they had to submit them at the marking period’s end. Insanity. Another teacher has done some pretty outrageous and even dangerous things. In a recent incident he lost his temper and shoved a desk, knocking it over on top of a student and injuring her. The kids joked that he must have mafia connections because he obviously can’t be fired no matter what.</p>
<p>Parents WILL railroad a teacher - I’ve seen it happen, when my youngest daughter was in kindergarten. The teacher was new to the school, and a couple of moms in the class decided they didn’t like her. They rallied others to their cause: the administration didn’t support the teacher, and, with no tenure, she had no protection from those obnoxious, entitled parents. She left at midyear - my daughter was heartbroken, and I was outraged. </p>
<p>DH was talking tonight about his frustration with some kids in his class who have not yet mastered the basics of arithmetic. He’s trying to teach the class the state content standards in math, and can only devote so much class time to review without losing the kids who are working at grade level. He fears that there’s no way some of these kids will ever catch up, even with afterschool tutoring. In any given class, he’ll have English language learners, special ed students, gifted and talented kids, and slacker kids whose parents don’t give a damn, and their standardized test scores are all over the map. He’s a good, caring teacher, but with all these variables - and I hesitate to call living, breathing, children “variables” - exactly how will you judge whether or not he should receive merit pay?</p>
<p>And RE: “Student evaluations of teachers in the higher grades”- Ever looked at some of the comments on Ratemyprofessors.com? Do you consider those to be fair and unbiased evaluations? What makes you think that high school students will approach the task of evaluating their teachers with a greater level of maturity than the college students on that site do?</p>
<p>^At the college level we care very much about, and are strongly impacted by our students’ evaluations. Sure there is some error but its better than nothing and we would never think their voice should be discounted at all. When done appropriately- and I’m not talking Ratemyprofessor- its a huge source of valuable information. Over many students and many classes, using psychometrically validated subscales, there is meaning in the numbers. It is not remotely like ratemyprofessor and the students take it very seriously. If you lob off the tails at each end- say the lowest and highest 10%, you don’t have to worry about outliers and vindicative oddball students. The written feedback that student’s provide anonymously, which they know only goes to the faculty member, is extremely developmental as well. We also invite students at the undergrad level to conduct a phone interview of former students and to present the results when one is coming up for review or promotion. And we now video tape and observe a subset of lectures (and in addition faculty submit their teaching portfolio (syllabi, course developmental materials, sample handouts etc), which is used in the evaluation. And this is at a primarily RESEARCH intensive university.</p>
<p>I absolutely believe it can and should be adapted for highschool teachers. I fail to see any reason not to get their input into the quality of their teachers. Even if not used for actual appraisal, anonymous feedback from students would be extremely valuable for teachers (and I ahve no idea why teachers would not want this information).</p>
<p>again, very well said pamavision! </p>
<p>Hell hath no fury like a parent who has just been told that their kid “who has ‘always’ been a straight A student” was caught cheating, received and “F” on the test and can not retake it. More often than not the anger will be placed on the kid but it does happen that parents will take on the teacher and if in a position to do so, bring their minions along and create a situation like pamavision described.</p>
<p>It is naive to assume that parents and students will suspend human nature and acuarately and objectively assess the educators in their school. Some may be capable of it but there is no fair objective way to assess a teacher when so much of what they bring to the table that makes them high quality is intangible.</p>
<p>“It is naive to assume that teachers and administrators will suspend human nature and acurately and objectively assess the students in their school. Some may be capable of it but there isno fair objective way to assess a student when so much of what they bring to the table that makes them high quality is intangible.”</p>
<p>Nevertheless, we do. And as much as teachers might need to be “protected” from parents and students? Students need to be protected, too. I can’t even believe you are trying to say that teachers should not be evaluated for job performance. It’s no wonder it’s so different at the charter schools…for the students.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, I’ve always fought for teachers and for teachers raises and funding and back-up. This thread, if anything, has made me question THAT stance and not the need for stronger oversight.</p>
<p>^poppycock! its exactly this attitude that estranges teachers from their students and famlies…like students and parents can’t possibly evaluate a teacher. That is simply not true. Sure a given student or parent should not have so much biased voice to impact a teacher…but I assure you, that in NUMBERS when most students repeatedly report X and Y, year after year…its apparent when a teacher is good or bad. And when students have voice to tell the teacher directly what THEY SEE as the problem, teachers have a huge opportunity to learn and improve. </p>
<p>Intangibles are what matter and guess what? Students know it! My students evaluate myself and colleagues, for example, on issues such as fairness, showing concern and respect for students, availability and approachability, being organized, and so on and so on. Hardly tangible at all yet there is HUGE consistency across students year after year after year. That consistency speaks volumes and it is that large scale set of evaluations that can and should be taken very seriously.</p>
<p>Evaluations are already done informally by students and parents. It’s the reason why many kids who get assigned a certain teacher rush down to the guidance office on the first day of school to ask for a change in schedule. Only now the guidance dept. at our school has even less flexibility than before to make these changes, due to a state law that prohibits public schools from maintaining a class with fewer than 15 students. So if you snooze, you lose. The official evaluations by students could be substantiated by the GC’s, who have heard enough complaints over the years to tell who the poor teachers are. Most kids want to learn and be treated fairly. They may not want to work especially hard, but most don’t want to waste their time either. There will be certain recurring comments such that in the quantity of data an accurate picture can be discerned.</p>
<p>S2’s second grade teacher was the only one of four who had every single kid reading at well above grade level by the end of the year. He was also the teacher whose kid’s came down to Reading is Fundamental begging for books about colonial history which he clearly loved and got all his students to love too. It’s really not that hard to identify the gems. And everyone knew who the clunkers were. In fact one class shrank to 2/3 of it’s original size because the principal would remove kids whose parents complained about her. (Luckily she retired at the end of the year.) The principal did manage to shuffle another bad teacher to the library, though he was a rotten librarian too. He couldn’t even be bothered to read to the kids - he showed them Reading Rainbow videos. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>On the idea of teacher evaluations:</p>
<p>I don’t think asking the parents to evaluate a teacher would work in any grade level. However, once you get to middle school, I think that student evaluations on teachers would work wonderfully to gauge teacher performance and keep teacher performance up there.</p>
<p>Good teachers are nearly always well liked by students. Bad teachers are nearly always disliked by students. Yes, the pushover teachers are more likely to get higher grades but that can be factored in that you can’t compare an AP Calc or CS teacher evaluation to one from English.</p>
<p>My University has a great system of compulsory evaluations for every single class at the University. On the evaluation is about five or six different categories ranging from grading fairness to how much you learned, to his overall effectiveness. Usually, >75% of the enrolled students fill out the evaluation.</p>
<p>The problem with ratemyprofs is people often use it only when they have a problem with the teacher. When you make students do it regularly, you get a very accurate representation of how good the teachers actually are.</p>
<p>This has been useful in keeping teaching standards high. My Intro to Accounting professor got a fairly mediocre review 3.5/5 overall score the first quarter he taught intro to Accounting and it really made him reflect about where he made mistakes and needed to improve. Yes he had his excuses as to why the 125 people who took his class were wrong but in the end he admitted it is mostly his fault and he is genuinely a good teacher this quarter. He took it in stride made a joke of it and is now improving.</p>
<p>Another example is my calculus professor. This is his first time teaching a class to non math majors and he is doing absolutely terrible at it. I think part of it might be being terrified of being in front of 90 people since upper division courses are about a third the size of lower division courses. Anyways, he’ll get a low review and he’ll either get sent back up to the 400 level or change his ways. </p>
<p>Implement this in all high schools and middle schools across the country. Don’t let it determine pay for the first few years but rather let bad teacher that they are doing badly and need to improve. The improvement we’ll see in our education system will be huge.</p>
<p>Oh and I’d like to add that the stupid vice principal evaluations that he/she would do every year is about the dumbest idea ever and says absolutely nothing about the quality of a teacher. In fact, a good teacher would probably do worse than a good teacher because they wouldn’t put in any more effort than usual while the bad teacher would give it all he has.</p>
<p>Edit: The reason why parent evaluations wouldn’t work in K-5 is because most parents aren’t as obsessive about their kids academics as those on CC. Sometimes I think it’s forgotten that parents on CC are probably all in the top 5% most involved parents.</p>