Teacher evaluation bill 2012 priority
Fuentes says AB 5 is mostly ready
A bill that would vastly change how teachers are evaluated is 75 percent of the way there, the bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, reports.
Of course, it’s the last 25 percent – down to the last disputed detail – that will make or break bills as potentially contentious as AB 5. Already, those who believe the bill doesn’t go far enough in creating effective evaluations are proposing significant changes that the state’s teachers unions will just as strongly oppose. One current part of the bill that will generate controversy – and probably a lawsuit – would keep data tying student test results to teachers out of the hands of the public and the newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, which created an uproar last year by publishing “value-added” ratings of teachers based on test results. If used in teacher evaluations, the data would become part of a teacher’s personnel file – and private.
Last week Fuentes, a Democrat from San Fernando, agreed to delay a vote on the bill until next year. One reason is that there’s plenty of work to do; another is that Los Angeles Unified asked for the delay, pending the outcome of its legal dispute with United Teachers Los Angeles. The union has sought to stop the district from designing and piloting a new evaluation process. The extent to which districts must negotiate the details of the evaluation – or can decide criteria on their own – will be a key aspect of the bill.
The bill would require that all districts adopt teacher evaluation systems grounded in best practices as measured in a combination of ways, including evidence of teacher impact on student achievement and observations by trained observers. Those best practices would include the teacher’s ability to set high expectations, create an engaging learning environment, do differentiated instruction to reach pupils at various level of achievement, use student tests to improve classroom learning, collaborate with other teachers, and establish good relationships with parents, administrators, and the community.
Praise for the effort
Advocates for strong evaluations, including Los Angeles Unified and the non-profit Education Trust-West, praise Fuentes for taking on a tough issue and creating a sound framework.
“We have maintained from the start that the state has a role in setting parameters and providing guidance for best ways to grow and develop teachers and administrators,” said Drew Furedi, an adviser on evaluations to Los Angeles Unified Superintendent John Deasy.
But the district and Ed Trust-West have pointed to weaknesses of the bill or aspects they argue should be more explicit.
- Timing: In replacing the 30-year old**, weakly written Stull Act, AB 5 would be a state mandate, with funding by the state, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Because of that Fuentes would tie the bill to improved revenues, specifically the elimination of the “deficit factor” – a measure of how much the state is underfunding the revenue limit to K-12 schools (about $6 billion now). Fuentes, who chairs the Assembly Appropriations Committee, is confident it can be implemented in 2013-14, but others say that is based on wildly optimistic predictions of a better economy or higher taxes. Arun Ramanathan, executive director of Ed Trust-West, says the system should be adopted regardless of the current budget. The issue, he says, “is a matter of state guidance and local will, not funding.”
- Local discretion: In the bill’s current form, districts and unions would negotiate which measures to use in evaluations and how much weight they should be given. Teachers unions oppose using standardized test data as a significant factor, if at all, and point to research showing the unreliability of the data. Ed Trust-West, on the other hand, fears that districts will settle for “soft data” – a teacher’s relationship in the community – instead of “hard data” of student results. It wants the Legislature to require data on students’ academic growth as a “principal” component, counting at least 30 percent of an evaluation. Deasy also favors 30 percent and argues that districts under current law already have the discretion to require it.
- Dismissals: The bill is silent on how long a district would have to wait before dismissing teachers with unsatisfactory reviews, other than to say that they would continue to be reviewed annually until they were rated satisfactory or dismissed. Deasy recommends dismissal after two years of no progress under the guidance of a mentor through the Peer Assistance and Review program. Ed Trust-West recommends one year of remediation and then placing a poor-performing teacher in a probationary status.
- Levels of performance: The bill refers to either satisfactory or unsatisfactory performance ratings. That’s the way it is under the Stull Act, and a tiny percentage of teachers currently get bad ratings. Ed Trust-West wants the Legislature to add categories, such as “needs improvement,” setting up discussions with teachers’ plans for improvement. The biggest benefit of the bill, Fuentes told a Senate Education Committee earlier this summer, is not to weed out the 5 percent of bad teachers but to help the other 95 percent with “real-time feedback” to enhance classroom instruction.
- Frequency: The bill would require annual evaluations for probationary teachers, biannually for tenured teachers, and at least every five years for tenured teachers with a decade of experience. Ed Trust-West wants annual evaluations required for all teachers.
Fuentes says he will consider changes to the bill, such as incorporating teachers as peer reviewers and adding parental input, and will make AB 5 his top priority for next year. He plans to meet with Gov. Jerry Brown to discuss the financial implications and why the expenses for professional development are worth the investment.
** Correction: My math was off: The Stull Act (1971) is actually 40 years old.
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SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
Making the test data private is a mistake. It adds legitimacy to the idea that it means something. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and frankly I’m fine with the LA Times spending its money on data analysts. The longer people look at a data set like that, the more they’ll realize just how noisy and unreliable the data is for teacher evaluations.
I would also point out that for small schools, the data is already public and easy to see. (And noisy as all get-out.)
I reject the notion that the “value-add” data (that’s the name people use, but IMHO it’s misleading) or any test score data should be any fixed percentage. It is what it is, and it is best used as a starting point for an evaluation, a measure that poses questions about why those results are coming, and what is going well and what is not. Perhaps this teacher needs to go for professional development in science. Perhaps she had a cohort of unusually cooperative kids, or an unusually high percentage of english language learners. Perhaps this teacher had an especially bright class this year; perhaps snow days disrupted the schedule. What went well this year, what went poorly this year, what can we do to make next year the best ever?
All teachers should be evaluated annually. Every teacher should know what things she is doing well and what things he could do better. Humans need and thrive on good feedback.
I understand LAUSD has had more trouble than most districts at getting certain dismissals through the appeals process. Is there anything in this bill that addresses that?
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The notion that a bunch of political hacks in Sacramento have any clue as to how to evaluate teachers is a bit of a stretch.
It’s time for the state to simply delete the Stull Act and related Education Code provisions that dictate how schools and districts are to evaluate teachers. Let the unions and districts arm wrestle over how to evaluate. The ones that do it well will save the state a ton of mandated cost reimbursement funding and end up with better teachers and more effective colleagues. The ones that do it poorly will likely have their lunch eaten by charter schools.
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I share “el’s” mistrust of data for evaluation, and reject the underlying assumptions in “value-added.” I wholeheartedly agree that fixed percentages should not be legislated, and I don’t think they even have a place in the evaluation (but for folks who disagree, let them negotiate it locally).
Compared to Eric, I would take a slightly more generous view of (many) of the people in Sacramento, but I’ll agree with the larger point that the state should not be formalizing details of evaluation. I don’t think ed. code should be silent on the topic of evaluation, but rather, stick to some broad principles. How about this: until any standardized test is designed and validated for the specific purpose of teacher evaluation, the results can’t be used for that purpose, which would be a welcome bit of common sense. (I also freely admit I don’t think we’re going to see standardized tests that are designed and validated for that purpose any time soon – and that’s a good thing. We shouldn’t be testing students in order to evaluate teachers). As a backup, any teacher evaluated in any way based on test results has the right to examine the actual test. (Also not likely to happen in the current economic climate, as this step would raise the costs of producing new tests). Ed. code could also help us by supporting peer evaluation. And finally, it might help to put in some language somewhere to clarify the purpose(s) of evaluation. If it’s mainly for enforcement and minimal quality control, we’ll perpetuate some of the worst aspects of the current system. I think it could help to have something from the state level instructing districts to make evaluations focus on career-long growth and professional improvement. That principle, in turn, would hopefully force districts and schools to take a more distributed approach to evaluation and supervision, as our already over-burdened administrators can’t take on a significant increase in evaluation responsibilities.
Much of my thinking on this topic is reflected in a report on teacher evaluation that I helped to produce as part of my work in Accomplished California Teachers, and I invite interested readers to take a look:
http://accomplishedcaliforniateachers.wordpress.com/act-publications/
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I have witnessed situations where teacher observations are used to harass the teacher (5-7 walk-throughs and a formal observation in a week!) I believe that observations, when done in-house, may create a hostile environment. It would be better to have specifically trained observers from an unbiased outside source and make sure that the observers are trained in the subject matter that is taught with a good calibration protocol. Some administrator observers use “cheat cards” with lists of adjectives and verbs to determine the level of rigor of the lesson, and to determine whether or not higher levels of questions are asked, according to Bloom’s taxonomy.
Observers also need to be trained to recognize that scaffolding and cuing are important means of differentiating instruction in the classroom. We do not have “cookie cutter students” we teach students and some need more assistance in learning than others. Rubrics and narratives need to be available to describe specifically what the expected teacher behavior looks like. Observers need to understand the content strands and be able to deconstruct them to see how previous grade strands addressed the subject. If the observer does not understand the progression of mathematical thought he will totally miss higher order thinking that is implicit in the sequence and type of problems that are worked through with the students.
In most major studies the effectiveness of evaluating teachers on the basis of observation has been called into question. A large study looked at teachers from the lowest quartile of performance on their observation evaluations and teachers at the highest decile of performance on evaluations based on observations. It found that a lower quartile teacher’s instruction lead to a 3 percentile increase in standardized test scores, and a teacher from the highest decile had an increase of 6 percentile points in growth. Only a 3 percentile points difference in growth after a year?
Behavioral management made the largest single impact on improvement of scores. Maintaining a good learning environment is critical based on what was studied in observations. Teacher’s need to be able to rate their administrators on the basis of how well the California Education Code was followed with regard to student discipline. Every school needs to have an exclusion room for students to continue to work on their assignments if they chose to disrupt the learning environment. Inappropriate behavior in the classroom spreads like a wildfire if it is not addressed with firm and consistent boundaries. Ineffective administrators add to the problem by not maintaining good boundaries and enforcing the discipline policy uniformly.
There is no mention of teachers who are covered by the American’s with Disabilities Act who may need alternate methods of evaluation. All teacher evaluations need to be tied to research based studies that use multiple measures to evaluate strategies with regard to visible learning outcomes. We all want our students learning to be based on multiple measures. Why is that less true for teacher evaluation?
We need to define what a reliable source for this research looks like. I really don’t believe that a whitepaper put out by an institute that is funded by a corporation to promote their copyrighted curriculum should be accepted as research unless it meets some test of reliability. I’m tired of seeing bar graphs that show an increase or decrease in number of students in a category and compare it to multiple years without showing the number as a percentage of the population. I also want to see statistics with appropriate confidence intervals. We teach our students to think critically, and yet sometimes I think that districts fail miserably in this task when choosing consultants and curriculum.
Multiple measures of teaching need to be evaluated to get the full picture of what goes on in a classroom. Observation is probably not the best tool for this (although it has a supporting role) The observer’s presence modifies the environment that he is evaluating. We have observers who come in looking like they are ready for drinks at the Regency Club – most of our students are low income and only see suits at funerals. How do you think that makes the students feel when the observers are there? Is this the everyday classroom? Neither the students or the teacher behave normally in this situation.
Teacher discussion revolves more around how to prime your students for an upcoming observation, rather than concentrating on what that teacher knows is the most effective way to reach the students. In every classroom learning is negotiated by the teacher and students on the basis of their relationship. This is often cited as one of the top five traits of teacher effectiveness, yet there is no evaluation that is able to quantify it. Relationship is not measurable, you will know it when you see it. Good teaching has that same indescribable quality.
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