Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/25821
vide useful insights and sugges- tions to help you do your job even better? Or was it a mere formality with no long-range practicality? Worse, was it a “gotcha” ordeal with an evaluator with an ax to grind? In an effort to be proactive and Evaluation Workgroup seeks members’ views H ow would you rate your last job performance evalu- ation experience? Did it pro- administrators, the sometimes staged nature of scheduled observa- tions, the often unrepresentative na- ture of announced drop-ins, and the lack of meaningful feedback. Many administrators also feel the current system isn’t working and doesn’t re- ally help improve instruction. help develop a more meaningful and effective evaluation system, CTA established the Evaluation Workgroup last year. The work- group is composed of leaders serv- ing on a number of CTA State Council committees and CTA staff. Since its first meeting last April, the work- group has consulted a wide array of re- sources and experts, and is working to make recommenda- tions for an evalua- tion model that helps educators do their jobs even better. Certificated evaluation proce- CTA members look at the issues Robert Ellis serves on the Mary Rose Ortega CTA Board member workgroup and is also chair of CTA’s Teacher Evaluation and Ac- ademic Freedom Committee. He sees numerous flaws in the current evaluation system, including a lack of adequate time in- volved and a lack of effective cross-disci- plinary training for administrators. “The current system fo- cuses on a few very small snapshots in time and isn’t really geared to improving practice,” he says. dures in California have remained largely unchanged since the 1970s, when the state Legislature passed what’s known as the Stull Act. Since then, the only significant changes have been the addition of an option for districts and local associations to bargain the inclusion of standards from the National Board for Profes- sional Teaching Standards and the referral of employees with unsatis- factory ratings to the Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program in dis- tricts where it still exists. Although there are differing opinions on how to improve the evaluation process, almost everyone agrees the current system needs to be improved. Criticisms are numer- ous — the lack of properly trained “We’d like to see an evaluation model that is truly helpful to teach- ers, one where they can learn and build on what they already know. Evaluation should support good teaching.” One area of ongoing debate is to what extent, if any, student test scores should be used in teacher evaluation. Although there has been pressure to link test scores to both evaluation and pay, few can agree on how much weight, if any, should be given to those scores. The issue notoriously gained national atten- tion last summer when the Los An- geles Times published an online da- tabase ranking of thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers from least to most effective based on their students’ scores. The Times used its own “value-added” model that purported to account 32 California Educator | FEBRUARY 2011 for external factors and past student performance. The outcry from the education community over this public “evalu- ation” was loud and nearly unani- mous. ”What the L.A. Times did was reprehensible,” says Mary Rose Ortega, the CTA Board member who serves as liaison to the work- group. “They used a badly designed rating system to mislabel thousands of dedicated educators.” Recently the National Education Policy Cen- ter released a study confirming that the Times value-added approach was deeply flawed. Experts weigh in Diane Ravitch is a policy expert and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Under- mining Education. She has spoken at CTA conferences and was last year’s NEA Friend of Education Award winner. A former undersec- retary of education under President George H.W. Bush, Ravitch is op- posed to using test score growth to measure teacher effectiveness. “I have been trying to figure out how a school would function if the advocates of tying test scores to teacher evaluation prevail,” Rav- itch wrote in her blog. “At least three years of data would be need- ed, though five years would be bet- ter. At the end of the three-to-five years, the teachers who did not get gains would be fired and replaced by teachers who have no track re- cord at all. Every year, a new group of teachers who had not produced gains would be fired, and another untested group of teachers would * Weigh in with your evaluation thoughts at: surveymonkey.com/s/CTAevalSurvey take their place.” Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor and nationally recognized education policy ex- pert whom the workgroup has consulted, believes California’s standards tests are particularly un- suited for use in teacher evaluation because they are grade-based and not vertically scaled. She points out that since only the skills for that particular grade are mea- sured, if a teacher brings a sixth- grader initially performing at a second-grade level up to a fourth- grade level, the test won’t show it. Despite the problems of using test scores for evaluation, federal programs like Race to the Top have encouraged the linkage, and some California lawmakers are support- ing legislation that would follow suit. Those approaches are geared toward tying evaluation to pay, or in some cases to firing teachers, as opposed to developing a tool to im- prove instructional practices. But if test scores aren’t neces- sarily the answer, what is? To find out what you think, the work- group has developed a survey that can be found at surveymonkey. com/s/CTAevalSurvey. A link to the survey is currently on the CTA home page. All certificated CTA members are encouraged to com- plete the survey and help the workgroup develop recommenda- tions for an evaluation system that works. “Any improvements to the current system CTA proposes are going to be member-driven as well as experience or research based,” says Ellis. “We want to make sure we get this right.”