Respect over gifts

This has been a rough decade for teachers. In our ham-handed attempts to overhaul schools, we treated teachers as the stains on the carpet that had to be scrubbed clean or the weeds in the garden that had to be pulled.

Fixing schools came down to fixing teachers, as we ignored all the other variables in the success equation, including poverty, resources, parental involvement and school leadership.

As state legislatures whacked school budgets and school boards imposed furlough days, teachers were told it was up to them to do a lot more with a lot less.

“This is the only industry in America where failure is always blamed on the workers. Blame teachers? Bull. Blame leadership as you do in every other industry,” said Erroll Davis, the former Georgia chancellor who now leads Atlanta Public Schools, after a long career as a leader and CEO in industry.

Under pressure from No Child Left Behind, districts began a revolving door of new reforms, many of which were ill-conceived, in place too briefly to matter or piled on top of other ongoing reforms.

When he took inventory of Atlanta, Davis said he found more than 211 different reform initiatives under way.

The constant issuance of new marching orders sending them in different directions left teachers dazed, disillusioned and demoralized.

And the next decade doesn’t look much better as states begin a massive experiment in grading teachers based on how well their students perform on standardized tests, an imprecise science known as “value-added.”

No one disputes that we need a better system of evaluating teachers, 98 percent of whom now earn a satisfactory rating.

But under the propulsion of the federal Race to the Top grants, of which Georgia is a participating state, we appear to be running headlong toward review procedures that are not realistic or fair to the teachers being evaluated or to their evaluators.

Some Georgia districts that signed on to Race to the Top are field-testing teacher evaluations right now that hinge in large part on two annual 30-minute observations, one scheduled and one not.

The new evaluation is supposed to be in place in all 26 Race to the Top districts in August, but there are doubts that administrators will have the time for two annual observations of each teacher.

“I have had teachers share with me that they only had one observation, or in some cases, 10-minute observations,” said David Schutten of the Organization of DeKalb Educators. “This is a very time-consuming evaluation process. If some school administrators cannot effectively administer a pilot evaluation program with four or five teachers, how will they manage 30 to 100-plus teachers next year?”

Under Georgia’s new evaluation, student performance will count 50 percent in courses for which there are state exams and 30 percent in courses for which there are no standardized tests, such as art and music.

I’m not sure what is the best way to measure teacher performance, but I don’t think test scores are going to provide the right answer.

I don’t remember my son’s scores on the fourth-grade CRCT. What I do remember and will never forget is that his teacher came to his soccer game one fall weekend.

When my son told me that Ms. Theisen promised to attend one of his games, I explained to him that she had 25 students in her class and that it may not be possible for her to come to an outside activity of each of them.

“She’s coming,” he told me. And she did.

She also took a reserved child content to sit quietly — he was one of those kids who never got a turn on the carnival ride because everyone cut in front of them — and made him far more confident about speaking up and speaking out.

Did he learn a lot about math and science that year? Yes. But he learned other lessons, too.

He learned that his opinion was important, that it was OK to speak up, that a teacher could be a friend and supporter.

Those lessons were perhaps as valuable as any other he received, and no test score could show that progress.