But there’s a growing sentiment among state and federal legislators, school administrators and the general public that a simple up or down rating isn’t sufficient, especially with a growing sentiment that teachers, like workers in the private sector, should have some if not all of their pay based on how good a job they’re doing.
But as a result of House Bill 153 and the federal Race to the Top initiative, the way teachers are evaluated is about to go through a thorough re-boot. By the 2013-14 school year, each of Ohio’s 614 public school districts will be using the same formula for evaluations that will place each teacher in one of four categories based on a series of observations, goal setting and conferences with administrators and on how much their students progress in their knowledge in the course of the school year.
While efforts to tie these new ratings to teacher compensation have not yet come to fruition, there have been attempts at legislating it.
And while no one expects it to go away, no one knows how a compensation system based on performance might actually work.
Current practices
While a statewide evaluation model is only a school year away, a JournalNews/Middletown Journal examination of current practices finds that most county schools are already using similar procedures.
The Middletown City School District evaluates teachers each of their first three years, then after that, every three years unless they are transferred within the district or put on re-evaluation.
While Middletown — a Race to the Top school that is part of a prototype of the new evaluation system that factors in student academic growth — has strengthened its grip this year on how it evaluates teachers, a greater emphasis has also been placed on professional development.
“You can’t just go in and write up evaluations,” Middletown Superintendent Greg Rasmussen said. “We want to help them get better, and that takes more ongoing support, training, coaching, more of a back-and-forth formative evaluation. That’s what we’re after, but it’s time consuming. We have limited resources, and it’s a challenge all of us will have to deal with when we move into the new system for sure.”
When a Middletown teacher is up for an evaluation, an administrator will have at least three formal observations of 20 to 40 minutes in length to go along with 3-to-5-minute unscheduled walkthroughs.
Teachers also are observed in how they interact with parents and students, with the entire process — which is capped off with a final evaluation — revolving around “goal setting,” Rasmussen said.
Middletown High School Principal Carmela Cotter has 117 teachers on her staff, and nearly half — 54 — are being evaluated this school year.
Cotter, who believes teachers are evaluated regularly enough, said evaluations center around three areas: goals set by the teacher and mutually agreed upon with the evaluator; instructional effectiveness; and professionalism.
“When you find somebody who has a deficiency,” Cotter said, “the first goal is to correct those deficiencies. When you have a very formal structure that you go by and everybody knows the seriousness of the structure, it inspires people to be their best. It’s a really good thing.”
Like Middletown, the Monroe Local School District has created a more in-depth system to replace its previous system, which was more or less a checklist for the evaluator to complete.
Monroe teachers are evaluated their first three years in the district, when they are eligible for a continuing contract and their first year at a new building if they are transferred within the district. Otherwise, teachers on a limited contract (year by year) are evaluated every three years and every five years for teachers on a continuing contract (tenure).
For every teacher to be evaluated every year, Monroe Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli said it’d be “almost an impossible task for administrators to do that many formal observations.”
Ross has been using a three-tiered evaluation system that Young said has been serving them well for over 20 years, Young said.
At Phase One, a teacher is evaluated every year and is given a rating based on a point system. When the teacher scores high enough, he or she advances to Phase Two, where they are comprehensively evaluated every other year with goal setting in the off-year. When they achieve a high enough rating to advance to Phase Three, they receive a comprehensive review every fifth year with goal-setting in the off-years.
“The number keeps getting higher because more is expected of you as you go through your career,” Young said.
“I’m comfortable with this because we’re focusing our efforts on teachers who need help. If they don’t get enough points to move to the next phase, they’re going to stay on a comprehensive evaluation every year no matter how many years they have,” he said.
The new model
Starting in the 2013-14 school year, every district will have come up with a plan to evaluate teachers according to official Standards for the Teaching Profession as established by state law.
“The idea of more uniformity across the state is a positive change,” said Sheryl Burk, principal of Hamilton’s Wilson Middle School. Burk and Bridgeport Elementary Principal Terri Fitton have volunteered to do trial evaluations of three teachers each to help prepare the district for the new system.
“We wanted to be part of the pilot because it is absolutely essential that we continue to monitor where the district is going so we can make good decisions about our process,” said Hamilton Assistant Superintendent Kathy Leist.
Young said that the state will allow districts to use their own evaluation models as long as they address the seven state standards, so one thing Ross is doing this year is conducting a “crosswalk” between the rubric they currently use and the state standards before submitting it to the state for approval.
Under the new evaluation matrix, teachers will be given a rating from 1 to 4 based on a series of observations, walk-throughs, conferences with administrators and their success on the goal-setting part of the process.
This rating will then be cross-referenced to student growth during the school year to give the teacher a final rating of Ineffective, Developing, Proficient or Accomplished.
“It’s going to be more difficult for some grade levels and subject areas than others,” Young said. “We also have to figure out how to measure student growth in some of the trickier areas like physical education, art and music.”
Perhaps the biggest challenges for districts, however, is that under the current plan, every teacher in every district will go through the new evaluation process during the 2013-14 school year and every year thereafter. Only if a teacher reaches the highest Accomplished designation would he or she go to an every-other-year evaluation, but that designation has been set as a high bar that few teachers will be able to reach immediately.
“In the old evaluation process, there was a lack of specifics,” said Hamilton’s 2010 teacher of the year Kristin Yordy. “The new system is more specific, easier to understand and more measurable, much cleaner.”
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