A new study reported on the front page of yesterday’s Boston Globe echoes the findings of CommonWealth’s Fall 2009 cover story , which reported that teacher evaluations in Boston, as in nearly all school districts, are largely perfunctory exercises, with virtually every teacher given a good rating and little done to drive improvement in teacher effectiveness.
The report, commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, DC, policy organization, was due to be released tomorrow. But the Boston Teachers Union, which had been provided an embargoed copy to review for factual accuracy, released a draft copy of the report on Monday via its website, accompanied by a scathing indictment of the study as an attack on teachers that advances “a pro-business school model that masquerades as reform.”
“I found the report insulting and misleading,” union president Richard Stutman told the Globe. “They have planned a big celebration to announce this, and I wasn’t going to wait around three or four days for them to set up the release the way they wanted,” he added, explaining the union’s decision to break the embargo.
If this is a preview of where things are heading as teachers and the school department head into negotiations on a new three-year contract, it’s likely to be a very rocky ride.
Even though teachers are supposed to be evaluated every two years, the study reported that a quarter of all Boston schools had not conducted a single teacher evaluation over the past two years. Even when procedures are followed and teachers are reviewed, virtually all are given satisfactory ratings under the binary satisfactory/unsatisfactory evaluation system spelled out by the current contract. In CommonWealth’s story last year, we reported that 97 percent of all teachers evaluated over a five-year period from 2003 through 2008 were rated satisfactory, with not a single teacher given an unsatisfactory evaluation at more than half of the city’s schools, 15 of which had been flagged by state officials as chronically underperforming.
“Teacher evaluation in this country is fundamentally broken,” President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, told CommonWealth. “We don’t live in Lake Wobegon [where everyone is ‘above average’], but we have a system that pretends that we do. It hurts adults and it hurts children. It means, by definition, that the great teachers don’t get recognized and don’t get rewarded, and we don’t learn from them. The teachers in the middle don’t get the support they need to improve, and the teachers at the bottom — who, frankly, need to find another profession — don’t get moved out. For us to continue to do what we’re doing, or to just tinker around the edges, is crazy.”
In an email newsletter sent to its members on Monday, BTU leaders wrote that much of the premise of the new study is faulty: that “teachers need to be ‘fixed’ and the ‘fixing’ needs to be done to them, not with them.” The study, says the e-newsletter, “focuses almost entirely on what to do with teachers: how to pay them, how to move them, how to evaluate them, how to hire them, and how to terminate them. It’s not very creative.”
If those points aren’t particularly original, it is because they are becoming so widely accepted as the critical issues to address in efforts to improve urban schools serving lots of poor and minority students — the groups mired on the low-performing side of the achievement gap. Having a highly effective teacher in every classroom is increasingly regarded as the single most important variable schools can control that will improve student achievement. But none of our teacher policies are designed to further this goal. School districts provide limited review of teacher performance before granting tenure, and pay is based entirely on years of service and college credentials beyond a bachelor’s degree, neither of which is strongly linked to teacher effectiveness. As the new study of Boston’s schools and many others like it have shown, we don’t provide rigorous evaluation of teacher performance or do much to get rid of teachers who are not getting the job done.
There are many excellent teachers in public schools. But there are also too many teachers who are not effective in driving student learning. They are not being identified under our current systems and either provided the help needed to improve or moved out of the classroom, and students are the ones paying the price.
Teacher unions are at a crossroads. They regularly complain about not being respected or treated as professionals. But the BTU’s reaction risks painting teachers as hostile to reforms that would treat them as professionals — and less as the interchangeable parts they resemble under the industrial model that our schools have been operating under.
At the national level, there are some encouraging signs that union leaders understand that fundamental change is needed. In a speech last month, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the national union that the BTU is part of, called for an overhaul of teacher evaluation systems, including the incorporation of data on student achievement as part of the basis for reviewing teacher effectiveness.
The BTU certainly can’t be expected to agree with everything in the report released this week. But an acknowledgement that teacher evaluation systems are, as everyone from the union’s own national leader to the president’s education secretary says, fundamentally broken, would seem like a more productive starting point for upcoming contract negotiations than stunts like the unsanctioned early release of the study, a move that seemed more on par with the kid who slips a whoopie cushion onto the teacher’s seat.
