PED right, teachers must be rated on their students
It took two rounds of evaluations and lots of listening sessions, but the New Mexico Public Education Department has changed its protocol for rating new teachers, as well as for those who teach subjects not covered by standardized tests.
And despite the union line that it creates an unfair two-tier system — “a shell game” according to American Federation of Teachers New Mexico President Stephanie Ly — the modification fairly ensures all teachers can be evaluated based on the strides their own students make. And that’s how they should be evaluated. All any parent, taxpayer or student can expect from a teacher is that students leave his or her classroom better off than when they came in. It’s why the previous federal system, which demanded proficiency, was patently unfair to teachers who helped students who came in years behind their grade level move up, just not enough.
Unfortunately, in the first two years of state evaluations — a key component of the state’s waiver from the onerous No Child Left Behind Act — new teachers who had no student data, and teachers in grade levels and subjects not covered by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) or an endof-course exam, were saddled with being evaluated via “backup measures” that had nothing to do with those teachers’ own students. The options were all bad, ranging from the grade the teacher’s school received to the academic growth of the 25 percent of lowest-performing students in the teacher’s school.
Yes, PED had done the heavy lifting by creating an evaluation system out of whole cloth. But the point has always been to evaluate teachers on their effectiveness in their classrooms and the progress of their students.
As Secretary Hanna Skandera now concedes, there was “literally no connection between the new (and non-tested grade/subject) teachers and those (backup) measures.”
Now teachers in non-tested grades and subjects will be evaluated on what happens in their classrooms, as long as districts opt to use classroom observations and teacher attendance rather than random backup measures. (New teacher evals will automatically use observation and attendance data). That makes it possible to have classroom results at the heart of all teacher evaluations.
Which is how it should be.