Comments on: Smart report on teacher evaluations

By: Paul Muench

Paul Muench — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:20:34 +0000

David, thank you for the response. I had downloaded the report and read the executive summary and scanned some of the other sections. And from your comments I think I was left with a reasonable sense of the report, that making specific suggestions is subject to too many complications. Which seems to me to be why we as a state have such a hard time taking action on education.

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By: David B. Cohen

David B. Cohen — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:15:18 +0000

Thank you John, for the detailed write up, and Heidi and Paul for the interest shown in your comments. I am one of the authors of the report, and just wanted to offer some agreement with Heidi’s outlook, at least to the extent that “achievement” has become synonymous with scores, or grades. Paul, the report can be downloaded from the links John provided, or from our blog site. The capacity of any given school or district to do better evaluations is going to vary significantly. The size and stability of the teaching staff would be key factors, along with the type of evaluations they already do, and the professional development program they have in place. There are certainly going to be some costs associated with improvement. Our report points out that teacher turnover is also costly. The type of evaluation we envision is designed to help all teachers improve continually, which we believe would improve retention. It should also be noted that, as a state, California is among the worst in the nation in education spending. So, our report deals in broad principles and some examples of how they look in action, and does not address specific costs – there are just too many variables there. But speaking for myself, I’ll go the next step: yes, absolutely, we need to spend many millions more if we expect to move from a very poor quality system that over-burdens administrators, and end up with a high-quality system that spreads the burden appropriately among a high number of better-trained educators.

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By: Heidi Foster

Heidi Foster — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:41:53 +0000

The focus needs to be on learning, not achievement…student attitude, not drill and kill. All policy makers must take a serious look at primary influences on achievement or we will repeat current failures: 1) lost childhoods, 2) the production of successful test-takers vs. people who become creative, successful, and yes, happy adults, and 3) systems that further disadvantage the disadvantaged.

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By: Paul Muench

Paul Muench — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:18:10 +0000

So the expert teachers agree that doing good teacher evaluations is a lot more work than the typical school/school district allots to that task. And they also agree that overburdened principals can’t do much to fix the problem. So is the suggestion that there are experienced teachers in schools that have the time to do the quality evaluation work but just aren’t responsible for it? Or are they suggesting that schools need more people time and hence money before they can improve?

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