Pay attention to positives: Why teacher eval system fails

I’m the computer science teacher quoted in Robert Nott’s story (“Unions question timing of eval changes,” April 5). I feel I need to add some crucial context to my first quote in the article.

For the past two years, I chose to teach math with one of our academies that had many students with low math abilities. I figured that my test scores wouldn’t be great, but I could do some really cool project-based math with these students, and so we designed communities to practice geometry, and learned about budgeting and zoning to practice algebra.

It’s hard to teach quadratic equations to students who are still counting on their fingers, so I tried to rekindle their interest in math as I presented the content to them as well. Unsurprisingly, my test scores were not great, but my ratings from my school evaluators were highly effective and effective, because they could see what I was doing with my students.

The key point is that even now, as I am teaching a new subject, those bad test scores will follow me for three years. Computer science doesn’t have any standardized tests that the state recognizes, and so the bad test score data from a subject that I don’t even teach anymore is going to bring down my evaluation for three years until the scores finally drop off my evaluation.

There is absolutely nothing I can do to change this. I’m stuck with that data and have no way to affect that part of my evaluation. That’s where my quote in Nott’s article (“Going from 50 to 35 percent may at least bump me up to minimally effective”) comes in — changing the test-score portion from 50 percent to 35 percent will probably bump me from ineffective to minimally effective, but there is nothing else I can do to change that portion of my evaluation.

I stand by my other quote (“It still bothers me, not as a teacher, but as a parent. If my kid gets sick and I need to take a day off to take care of my kid, and I have that held against me in my evaluation, that really sucks.”) It does suck that taking my contractually allowed days to care for my sick toddler negatively will impact my evaluation.