Under a proposed new teacher-evaluation system, even Georgia kindergartners will evaluate their teacher’s effectiveness by marking a smiley face to indicate that their teacher explains things well.
Whether teachers will be grinning over this new evaluation system, which is about to be piloted around the state, is another matter.
It’s generally agreed that teacher evaluations are broken; 98 percent of teachers in this country earn a satisfactory grade on their evaluation. It would seem an easy fix. Find a fair method to evaluate teachers to drive improvement and put it in place.
But the impediment is that word “fair.”
Is it fair to use the same checklist to assess a teacher whose first-graders arrive already reading and a teacher whose children don’t even know their colors?
Is it fair to expect the same performance from a high school teacher whose students read on a college level and a high school teacher whose students read on a third-grade level?
The issue is pressing now because of the federal Race to the Top grants, which require that states that won them, including Georgia, use performance data to hold teachers accountable for growth in student learning. But it’s complicated to gauge growth.
How, for example, can a school system know for sure that eighth-graders improved in the state writing test because of their language arts teacher?
Maybe their seventh-grade history teacher forced them to write, edit and rewrite and was the actual catalyst for the jump in scores.
Despite the many uncertainties, the Georgia Department of Education is about to pilot a new evaluation tool in January in the 26 districts sharing in the $400 million Race to the Top grant. Teachers will be judged exemplary, proficient, developing or ineffective.
The new evaluation model incorporates many moving parts, including documentation of strong teaching practices through student work, planning materials, data analysis and student surveys.
A critical piece will be two 30-minute principal observations, one announced and one unannounced, and student performance as demonstrated by standardized test scores in which there are such scores and through other measures in which there are not.
The evaluation metrics applied to teachers in courses without standardized tests likely will prompt the most debate. DOE is creating student assessments that will be given before and after these classes to gauge progress.
So, for example, middle-school chorus students could be tested on sight-singing performances, with a goal of all students improving by at least one level. The question is who will administer these pre- and post-tests, and whether there’s too much room to game the system.
Teachers also may cringe at the prospect of student ratings. In the pilot, student surveys will be administered electronically once a year to students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
While the youngest students would mark one of three faces — the best rating being the smiley face and the lowest the frowny face — older students would rate teachers on a 1 to 5 agree/disagree scale.
A sample statement given to older students would be: “My teacher has deep knowledge about the subject.”
“I want to stress with the kindergarten to second-grade survey that we are pushing the bar, but given that we are piloting this, we thought we could see what we could learn from it,” said Teresa MacCartney, Georgia’s Race to the Top director deputy.
“It may or may not fly depending on what we learn,” said Martha Ann Todd of DOE’s Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Division.
In a major change, the new evaluations will be piloted among 10 percent of the teachers in the Race to the Top districts. That represents 4,700 teachers, who will be chosen at random. The task of piloting the new tool for all 47,000 teachers in those districts was too daunting in the tight time frame imposed by the grant.
Some districts will pilot the teacher/leader evaluation system in a single school that represents 10 percent of its total workforce, while others will pilot it in all their schools but only among a few teachers in each.
To ensure a teacher voice in this process, DOE hired Marietta Middle School language arts teacher Kathie Wood, a 2009 finalist for Georgia Teacher of the Year.
Ultimately, Wood predicts her colleagues around the state will welcome in-depth evaluations that enhance their skills, saying, “If somebody told me I wasn’t exemplary, it would kill me. I would want to improve.”
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