Georgia recently won a $400 million Race to the Top federal grant. Under that proposal, educators will be evaluated under a new system, with student test scores counting for 50 percent of their annual review. Eventually, salary and their employment future will depend on whether or not their students show enough growth from one year to the next. Is the new evaluation process a good idea?
Brad Bryant, Georgia State school superintendent
Our children’s education depends on the quality of his/her teacher. Everything else has minimal impact compared to teacher quality.
To achieve our goal of a high-quality teacher in every classroom it is necessary to address our failure to differentiate teacher performance through the evaluation process. Effective teaching must be recognized, supported and rewarded.
Make no mistake: Our current system of teacher evaluation will not do this. Virtually all teachers are rated good or great. Nationally, less than 1 percent receives an unsatisfactory rating, and in Georgia six-tenths of 1 percent received an unsatisfactory rating last year. Georgia’s evaluation process included in the Race to the Top grant addresses the weaknesses in our current system in two ways.
First, the utilization of value added measurements of student academic growth over time has tremendous potential; it can become a meaningful component of teacher evaluation. Individual student academic growth linked to a specific teacher provides a fair method to measure teacher effectiveness, particularly a teacher serving the most disadvantaged student. Such a process represents a fundamentally positive shift away the rudimentary calculations of No Child Left Behind.
Second, Georgia’s evaluation model includes a peer review component which acknowledges that even though principals have a significant role in teacher evaluation, theirs should not be an exclusive role.
The failure of our current evaluation system to provide accurate and credible information demands that we reform it. The model in our state’s Race to the Top application is a great starting point for this reform.
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Allene Magill, executive director of the 80,000 member Professional Association of Georgia Educators, the state's largest teacher organization
Educators would support an evaluation system that is fair and comprehensive, one not administered “on the fly” by overworked and understaffed school administrators.
They would support principals trained to effectively evaluate educators no matter their level of experience. Such a system could include student test score improvements using what is known as longitudinal data collected on every student.
While the research is still not fully supportive of the so called “value added” approach, there is a place for student achievement in teacher evaluation, provided that the evaluations are comprehensive and include many other non-test-related factors which are the hallmarks of quality teaching. However, given the economic meltdown our state has suffered, our schools and county offices may not be equipped to handle the demands of a more robust system of evaluation.
Attempting to revolutionize an admittedly weak evaluation system without adequate resources of time, funding and personnel may prove to be disastrous.
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Compiled and edited by Tom Sabulis, tsabulis@ajc.com
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