Friday, July 27, 2012 For Immediate Release For More Information Contact: The South Carolina Education Association Roger Smith, Executive Director 803 261-6399 rsmith@thescea.org
State Set to Release Unfair and Ineffective Teacher & Principal Evaluation The South Carolina Department of Education, under the supervision of Superintendent Zais, will soon release the 2012 School Improvement Grant (SIG) Enhanced ADEPT, a part of the 2012 SIG Educator Evaluation Project, which is intended to provide a framework for updating, enhancing, and expanding the process of evaluating teachers and principals. This 24-page document can be found at: http://ed.sc.gov/agency/lpa/documents/Proposed_SC_EdEval_Guidelines_06252012.pdf The proposal is patently unfair, will cost millions of taxpayer dollars and take years to implement. The South Carolina Education Association (The SCEA) urges the Department to consider an alternative proposal for teacher evaluation which it is developing. The SCEA evaluation system will be fair, will cost taxpayers nothing and immediate implementation will be possible.
What’s Wrong with the Zais’ Proposal? Included in the convoluted framework is the widely discredited “value-added method”, or VAM. VAM takes a student’s results from last year’s tests as the baseline for measuring the teacher’s contribution to their progress in the current year. The National Academy and about every respected statistician, researcher, evaluator, and expert argues that standardized test results should not be used as a measurement of teacher performance when making important personnel decisions. Here’s why:
To be fair and reliable, students must be assigned to a teacher randomly, something that does not happen in any school. There is no proven way to calibrate a teacher’s contribution for students who change schools in December or February. In most low-income school districts, the mobility rate hovers between 20 percent and 40 percent. Because sample sizes are so small (about 25 in elementary classes) results can swing wildly year to year. One large study found that over a three-year period, 40 percent of teachers who had been in the top fifth the first year were not in the second year and that a third of them slipped to the bottom 40 percent by the third year.
Students keep learning during the summer, but there is no way to capture the contribution for those who go to math camp or are tutored. Yet the VAM system assumes that a student’s performance can be explained by just one teacher.
SC is just now introducing the Core Content standards. The state assessment will have to change to assess those standards. Those assessments then have to be given on a trial basis to establish validity and reliability. This takes at least a year. Teachers would have to give these tests for at least three years before a score can be given. It seems the SC DOE proposes to use current test scores as a “baseline” for later comparison to results on a different test, which is patently unfair. The teachers and schools are in a changing instruction and curriculum environment. They have to have new assessments because they have new standards.
What System is The SCEA Considering? Any evaluation system should give teachers feedback that they can use to strengthen and improve their practice. The SCEA believes the following ten-point criteria should be included in the evaluation system: The teacher employs effective strategies to:
Involve students’ family members in the students’ learning and the school community Engage students in activities that lead to independent learning Demonstrate students’ increased knowledge of the curriculum for their discipline and/or grade-level Demonstrate students’ increased reading ability Demonstrate students’ increased writing ability Contribute to the improvement of the school community beyond their teaching assignment Create a classroom environment conducive to teaching and learning Model a love of learning for students and colleagues Make the administrative tasks related to their position efficient and effective Demonstrate an ongoing commitment to professional development
Together the teacher and supervisor should discuss the level of progress, providing teachers with formative feedback they could use to guide their practice as well as provide the administration with an accurate and fair assessment of the teacher’s performance. The SCEA offers these concepts as a starting point in what we hope will be a statewide discussion among teachers, principals, parents and policy makers. We invite and welcome comments from all.