Teacher evaluations must consider students’ status

As educators, our instinctive reaction is to have a visceral frustration for legislators whoenact policies that impact our classrooms, assessments and evaluations, though most have never walked a day in a teacher’s shoes.

Research shows the new teacher evaluation model doesn’t make sense. Experts like Linda Darling-Hammondreport that student composition of a class is a stronger predictor of a teacher’s value-added model score than the model predicts.

Furthermore, the model precludes considering the student’s socioeconomic status, although this status is widely considered a leading indicator of student academic achievement. Ignoring it is turning a blind eye to the impact of poverty on academic achievement and educators’ opportunity to address the impact of poverty on education.

Research shows huge statistical variance using the VAMscore. Anyone whohas been inside a school knows that an effective teacher remains so from year to year. However, the statistical model swings greatly, and linking that arbitrary swing to the teacher’s compensation is unfair.

The stakes are too high for our children. We risk running talented teachers out of the profession by prematurely implementing an untested system of evaluation. The valueadded model may be successful in predicting systematic behavior in the business marketplace, but education is not a business; kids are not a commodity.

If we truly want Florida to “race to the top,” we need to take seriously the detrimental impact of ineffective teacher evaluations.

Darcey Addo

Will Obamaecho Romney?

Susan Shetrom in her letter to the editor on Tuesday writes that Mitt Romney should nowput “his private-sector money where his mouth is and create those [12 million] jobs.” The jobs referred to were not kept secret. He gave five points for howthose jobs would be created, among them increased drilling on public lands, a completed pipeline from Canada, increased trade with South America and reduction of the many job-killing regulations the Obama administration has introduced.

These are moves only the president and his administration can do, not a private citizen. In his first campaign, Obama made light of some of the strategies of the Bush administration but then implemented them as his own. Will he nowdo the same with Romney’s ideas? I think not, but time will tell.

Les Belikoff Maitland