This will be my last year of blogging so I decided to take a different approach. I tend to “get on my soapbox” and express my feelings about some of the things that are going on in education today. For the rest of this school year, I will be throwing the soapbox away and share tips and techniques I have used in my classroom to be an effective teacher (and survive).
That being said, I have just this one last rant from my soapbox. I will relate my feelings about teacher evaluations and seniority in this blog. There is a lot being said about poor teachers. There is no question at all that there are bad teachers. Every school has their share of them. They are not always the experienced teachers, since being new is no guarantee of competence and greater enthusiasm for the job. I am entering my fortieth year in the classroom and still look forward to interacting with my students. Likewise I have seen first year teachers who bored their students to death or had no classroom control and were driven right out of teaching.
The biggest recent complaint about teacher evaluations has arisen due to all of the RIFing (teacher layoffs) that are taking place across the country. The news is full of comments about finding ways to layoff the “deadwood” and keep the young, energetic teachers in the classroom.
Historically seniority has always been the predominant method of laying off people in any industry or profession. I don’t hear government workers being laid off according to any criteria other than seniority. How about having open heart surgery performed by a surgeon fresh out of medical school instead of a surgeon who has done hundreds of those operations. Which would you prefer?
On the other hand, seniority does not guarantee competence in any profession and RIFing in any job or profession should be based upon performance, not duration. However, the fair evaluation of people in any job or career depends upon so many different factors that it is a very difficult process. Not the simple process advocated by a number of simpletons (simpleton in their understanding of the educational process).
Let’s look at each of these factors as they apply to teachers:
1. Students
a. Student opinions about teachers are nonfactors since most students like the friendliest teachers and dislike the teachers who work them the hardest. Of course parents hear all kinds of stories about what goes on in the classrooms and are infuenced by the stories that come home. Especially since their child would never lie about or embellish anything that goes on in school.
b. Student test results are a poor gauge of teacher competence since all students have different learning abilities. Teachers who teach students with involved parents will see good test results no matter how incompetent the teacher may be. Meanwhile, students who see no value in school (for many different reasons) will generally show moderate to no test improvements. Of course the administrator will say that is the fault of the teacher who has not been able to interest all students in his subject.
c. No matter what is done regarding seniority, there will always be a pecking order among faculty and the newer teachers will be predominantly given the more difficult classes, especially if student testing is part of the teaching evaluation criteria. I would prefer the advanced students if testing is part of my evaluation.
2. Principal
a. Not all principals are competent. Not all superintendents are able to make the best choices when selecting principals. The principals and superintendents hire teachers and are able to evaluate teachers for two or three years with no tenure considerations. If a poor teacher is hired, whose fault is that?
b. When evaluation criteria are changed and the principal’s evaluation determines who gets RIFed, almost all controversy regarding curriculum development and the teaching environment will go away. Who wants to aggravate a principal who is no longer held to a detailed due process to remove tenured faculty?
c. Many, if not most, principals warn teachers in advance before doing a formal evaluation. It gives the teacher plenty of time to prepare a “dog and pony” show for the day of the classroom observation. Drop-in evaluations are looked upon with a “He’s out to get me” attitude on the part of the teacher. The exception would be if the principal makes drop-ins a regular occurance and focuses on the positives as well as the negatives taking place in the classroom.
3. Peers
a. There is no way teachers will evaluate each other. Not only would personalities enter into the process, teachers don’t have the required training nor time to visit each other’s classrooms.
4. School board members
a. Since most of them never visit classrooms at all, let alone on any sort of a regular basis, they base their knowledge about their schools upon what they are told by their administrators and any of their own children who are enrolled in classes. That makes them a nonfactor in evaluating teachers, not a very popular thing to say on my part.
5. The most ignorant groups who don’t know what is really happening in the public schools would be the politicians and big money executives who want to fix all of the problems in the educational system by tearing it down. They base their opinions upon what they hear from special interest groups such as conservative “think tanks” who use skewed data collected and evaluated by someone who would be “eaten alive” in a typical classroom. They know how to evaluate teachers and want to remove job protections to “kick out” the bums doing a bad job. If only it was so simple.
There are fair ways to evaluate people and those methods need to be developed to remove incompetent teachers, worthless government employees outside of education, and politicians who refuse to live within a budget. Why just focus on the easiest target?
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