‘Tough’ NM evals aimed at helping teachers, students

The good news is New Mexico is No. 1 when it comes to expecting great things from our K-12 public school teachers.

The bad news is the metric used to do that, teacher evaluations based on data and observations:

1. Was originally constructed and presented in a manner that at minimum caused teacher anxiety and at maximum teacher resignations, and

2. Was quickly targeted by lawsuits that have put any corrective action, most importantly guidance and mentoring for struggling teachers, on hold.

The take-away from a 24-state study and follow-up comments made by Brown University’s Matthew Kraft, an assistant professor of education and economics, are that the New Mexico Public Education Department certainly could have used more honey and less vinegar in 2012 as it instituted much-needed accountability in the system that gets $2.75 billion a year to educate more than 300,000 students.

Kraft says “‘tough’ would be one way to describe” New Mexico’s revamped eval system — which started out with as much as 50 percent of a teacher’s ranking based on student improvement on standardized tests. But the bulk of his paper criticizes the many states with teacher proficiency rates nearing 100 percent — states that rely almost entirely on subjective observations, not on student test score data.

Which is where New Mexico was pre-2012. But then New Mexico, unlike most other states, implemented a system that gives teachers, principals and parents a more objective way to know if teachers are helping students improve annually.

In 2015-16, New Mexico rated 28.7 percent of teachers below effective — more than twice as many as any other state in the study. In fact, most states had fewer than 5 percent of teachers rated below effective, a figure critics say is unrealistic.

Christopher Ruszkowski, New Mexico’s acting secretary of education, says that New Mexico’s teacher ratings demonstrate the state’s “commitment to putting students first.”

“The fact that other states have not always done that, to me, is more of a testament to the work that New Mexico has done and more of a black mark on those other states.”

Kraft does question whether New Mexico’s system is alienating too many teachers, and an argument can be made that the 50 percent test-score benchmark set in 2012 was simply too high; PED has since said the best data support the move down to 35 percent. But it’s also no secret the teacher unions aren’t any happier with the 35 percent and believe student improvement on standardized tests has no place in teacher evals, period. Hence their ongoing legal fight, and the requirement that, for the interim, struggling teachers keep on struggling. And, to Ruszkowski’s point, students keep struggling right along with them.

Kraft agrees student test scores have “a role to play in understanding the big and complicated picture of teachers’ performance on the job” and emphasizes evaluations that label everyone effective or proficient do not help teachers improve their skills. Since 2012, PED has met with teachers and made adjustments — reducing the weight of test scores to 35 percent, increasing sick days allowed, ensuring teachers are evaluated only on students they have taught (rather than grade-level or school performance), explaining how a rating has been determined, and training more qualified classroom observers while reducing the number of times high-performing teachers have to be observed.

New Mexico now has thousands more kids reading and doing math at grade level, and more teachers and schools rated as good or better or best.

So, yes, New Mexico’s teacher evaluations are tough and, yes, like every other workplace in the world, there are employees who need and deserve guidance and support. Let’s hope the legal fight ends soon and allows New Mexico’s teachers to receive that. In the end, it’s the students who win.