Boston Schools Superintendent Carol Johnson said today she is “distressed” by the way teachers are evaluated in the city, but couldn’t explain why evaluations aren’t being conducted regularly as required by contract.
At a forum to discuss a new study that highlights huge deficiencies in the district’s teacher evaluation and personnel policy systems, Johnson was on the defensive over the report’s finding that half of all Boston teachers had not had an evaluation in the past two years and that one-quarter of all schools did not carry out a single teacher review during that time period.
“We are distressed about the evaluation processes,” Johnson said of the review system, which only allows teachers to be rated unsatisfactory or satisfactory. But she offered little in the way of explanation for why evaluations haven’t been done every two years for all teachers, as required by contract.
State Rep. Marty Walz, the cochair of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education, was in the audience and made clear her exasperation with the school department’s performance. Walz, who helped write the state’s new education reform law, which grants administrators a lot of leeway to remove teachers from underperforming schools, told Johnson during a Q&A period following the panel discussion that these new powers are of little use if school administrators aren’t tracking the performance of teachers.
“While it’s great that you have more authority, what’s distressing is that you’re not using the authority you have,” said Walz. After Johnson tried to explain the process for handling teacher evaluations, Walz shot back that she still hadn’t explained why they weren’t being done routinely for all teachers.
The study was conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality and commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. The report criticizes the district for failing to conduct evaluations and says a wide range of reforms are needed, including autonomy for principals in teacher hiring, a much more robust evaluation process for reviewing teacher performance, and a more streamlined processes for terminating teachers whose performance does not improve following a unsatisfactory review.
