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New Education Buzz Word |
Though it’s summer vacation, that doesn’t mean the business of educating our students has taken a break. There’s a new buzz phrase in education circles gaining momentum in Pennsylvania and across the country. It’s “effective teacher,” as in, “How effective was the teacher in preparing the student to advance successfully to the next grade?”
What does being an “effective teacher” mean, anyway? And how can we ensure every child, every year, has one?
An effective teacher is the most important school-based factor influencing school achievement and one of the missing links in assuring that every child learns at least a year’s worth of knowledge for every year spent in the classroom, from kindergarten through high school.
Most Pennsylvania teachers are highly committed professionals dedicated to ensuring their students succeed – yet highly committed doesn’t necessarily translate into “highly effective.” And when it comes to evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness, most school districts use a broad evaluation process that rates educators as “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” without consideration of their actual effectiveness in the classroom.
In fact, state law currently precludes student performance from being used to evaluate their teachers. But since we hire teachers so students can learn, student performance should be included as part of a set of multiple measures to evaluate teachers.
Today a new bill calling for student performance to be a component of teacher evaluation was voted out of the Senate Education Committee. Senate Bill 1087, introduced by Sen. Jeff Piccola and Sen. Andrew Dinniman, would require student performance to be a factor to be considered in determining teacher performance in school districts across the state. The bill now goes to the full Senate.
The vote came on the heels of a survey of school districts by PDE that gathered information on teacher and principal evaluations. In the survey, 99.4 percent of all teachers and 99.6 percent of all principals evaluated during the 2009-10 school year received a satisfactory rating,
But Education Secretary Tomalis questioned the results showing nearly all teachers and principals received satisfactory ratings.
“At first glance these results appear to be encouraging; however, they raise serious concerns about the quality of the evaluation system and whether it has any relevance to what happens in the classroom,” Tomalis said in a June 8 press release.
PDE compared the satisfactory ratings with state assessment data showing one-fourth of students are scoring below proficient in reading and one-third scoring below proficient in math. Tomalis questioned how nearly every teacher could be effective if there are students still scoring below proficient on basic assessments.
What is Pennsylvania doing to explore the importance of teacher effectiveness? There currently are a host of pilot projects underway in Pennsylvania to develop credible measurements of teacher effectiveness and to look at new teacher evaluation tools.
We believe every child deserves an effective teacher who prepares him or her to one day graduate ready for the rigors of college and career.
Joan L. Benso is president and CEO, PA Partnerships for Children
Secretary Tomalis should have stopped after noting the unlikelihood that such a high percentage of teachers and principals are satisfactory. Relating the percentage of satisfactory evaluations to the proportion of students scoring below proficiency on the PSSA’s is specious.
What proportion of students should we expect to pass tests for which PDE set 11th grade PSSA proficiency cut scores to reflect “college readiness without remediation?”
Consider this from "IQ Classifications in Educational Use"
(Wechsler, David. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third edition
Psychological Corporation, 1997):
About 23.2 percent of the general population had IQs of 89 or lower when the numbers were compiled for that study(c.1997). Almost all of those people would be, at best, using the terminology of the authors “borderline intellectual functioning.” According to the PSSA technical manuals, well over 5,000 of the children taking the regular PSSA tests in 2007 had IEPs that classified their primary disability as “mental retardation.”
So I ask again, what proportion of students would we expect to achieve proficiency on the PSSA tests? Why would we consider the fact that a quarter to one-third of students do not reach that level to be evidence of the unsatisfactory performance of principals and teachers? One could easily argue the opposite.
Finally, the Secretary’s comments also ignore the possibility that many under-performing teachers and principals voluntarily depart their positions before receiving an unsatisfactory rating. Clearly, if Pennsylvania hopes to move forward in evaluating educators, we should demand higher quality analysis from our policymakers.
I have been working in the childcare field for over twenty years. My comments are from my own experiences. Effective learning starts with effective parenting teaching their children how to be a respectable human that positively contributes to our society. How effective is the parent's teaching in preparing THEIR child/ren upon entering into a social environment?