A new report on principals conducting teacher evaluations in the CPS:
“There’s been concerns by unions that principals don’t know what is going on in the classroom in large high schools or they may know what’s going on but for personal reasons they don’t base decisions on who is most effective, but rather who they like,” Jacob said. “What we found is that principals can identify teachers who are more productive and that it’s important to them in making dismissals.”
Prior to the new union contract negotiated in Chicago in 2004, virtually no teacherswere dismissed for cause in the district, Jacob says. But when the new collective bargaining agreement went into effect, principals every spring could log into a district computer system and with “a click of a button” indicate whether the probationary teacher should be renewed. Although the principals were required to provide district officials with at least one reason for the firing, they were not required to justify or explain their reasoning.
At the time, teachers who had worked in the district for less than five consecutive years were on probation.
Looking at teacher personnel files, school demographic data and student test-score information, Jacob found that approximately 11 percent of the probationary teachers were dismissed each year from 2005 to 2007.
But the study showed that teachers whose performance evaluations dropped from a “superior” ranking to “satisfactory” were 22 percentage points more likely to be fired. Teachers who had more than 21 absences in a year saw a 13 percentage point increase in getting dismissed.
In grades and subjects in which students take standardized tests, Jacob found a 7 percentage point jump in elementary school teachers getting laid off because their students did not show as much academic improvement. Among high school teachers, the increase was 0.4 percentage points.
Part of the challenge for the CPS is demonstrating that the teacher evaluation process isn’t purely a punitive system. Far too often, reform has meant firing teachers to far too many people. The issue of accountability has become very confused during the debate. For many of us who have worked with inner city districts the idea of accountability was having district management accountable and focused on teaching students and not being worried about the political issues who does a teacher know or how much pressure was there to protect certain people.
To make matters worse, the Obama administration has extended NCLB to include teacher evaluations being partially based on student achievement data on state tests. The problem is those state tests don’t even measure student achievement well let alone evaluate how teachers perform. What a sane system would do is build upon the model used in Chicago above and not deal with student achievement data because those data are not suited to measuring teacher performance. What you want to know is whether a teacher is well prepared, using the proper pedagogical techniques, and how well they manage the classroom. Student performance on standardized tests tends to be only modestly affected by teachers. If a child lives in a poverty stricken neighborhood the ability to focus on school work is severely limited and hence, socio-economic status is the best predictor of how a student does on standardized tests. Good teachers are necessary, but not sufficient causes of student achievement. By focusing on data from standardized testing in teacher evaluation we are not measuring teacher effectiveness, but the entire life and environment of that student. If you focus on that sort of measure then you would end up firing teachers based more on who they teach than how they teach. This discourages good teachers from wanting jobs with the most challenging students.
When you look at the last paragraph, I can guarantee there are a bunch of people appalled that we aren’t firing probationary teachers at a higher rate who have students who don’t show improvement on standardized tests, but the relatively low number is due to a very poor correlation between standardized test results and quality teaching. Principals appear to be sorting that out when they are doing the evaluation and that’s a very good thing.
Illinois is introducing a new system starting in 2012 while it is a collaborative process, the key issue right now is whether the attempt to create a new system instead of adapting an existing one will be most effective.