These changes are happening amid a national push for a better grading system for teachers. Half of Ohio school districts are developing new evaluations under the state’s $400 million Race to the Top grant.
Race to the Top schools — which include Middletown, Hamilton, Monroe and Ross — will be the prototype for the new evaluation system, said Patrick Gallaway, an Ohio Department of Education spokesperson.
“We’re beginning with those school districts on this initiative,” Gallaway said. “What will happen as Race to the Top goes through its four-year course — we’re going into the second year shortly — is that the best practices will flow out to other school districts who were non-participants.”
Districts that recently approved new contracts or contract extensions with their teachers unions — including Edgewood, Madison and New Miami — will find themselves sheltered from the state-level mandates until they honor the life of their contracts, Gallaway said.
Still, the new system the state is mandating would be used to set pay and allow for firing or laying off under-performing teachers regardless of seniority. Supporters argue the change is essential to improving Ohio schools.
“Obviously, we are falling behind and we have schools that are not producing for students,” said Connie Wehrkamp, spokeswoman for Gov. John Kasich. “We want to be sure students are taught by the best educators and the best educators are rewarded for the work they are doing.”
Educators involved in the process agree with that objective.
How to get there is up for debate.
Critics argue the state’s plan is moving too fast, isn’t consistent, will require more administration and won’t judge all teachers fairly. They say basing pay and employment largely on test scores and other “value-added” measures related to achievement won’t yield consistent results because students are assessed differently year-to-year and subject-to-subject.
“What I’m hearing from a lot of my counterparts is that the biggest challenge is the financial situation most districts find themselves in — they’ve had a lot of reductions in administrative staff,” said Edgewood City Schools Superintendent Doug Lantz. “It could make it a little more challenging being that every teacher has to be evaluated annually.”
Edgewood has reduced its administrative staff by 32 percent, or seven positions since April 2010.
Edgewood evaluates teachers through three phases. In the first phase, teachers undergo an annual comprehensive review. In the second, they are reviewed every other year and in the third every five years. All three phases consist of a minimum of three classroom observations and two evaluations.
Even though Edgewood isn’t a Race to the Top district and the school system has made significant administrative cuts, Lantz said he’s still in favor of pushing for annual employee evaluations.
“I truly do feel every employee should be evaluated every year,” he said. “Regardless of what the state comes out with ... I still feel we need to move in that direction. Right now, that’s something we’re going to be looking into.”
Ross Local School District uses a three-tier approach similar to Edgewood’s. Superintendent Greg Young said that it’s a good way to know early on in a teacher’s employment whether they’re a good fit or not.
“We want to make sure we are working with people who are better than average, so we work very hard their first three or four years,” he said. “If we feel they’re not going to be above average — you don’t want to continue to invest dollars and time in someone you know is not — we’ll suggest they move on or we’ll end the relationship.”
Every teacher, administrator, custodian and cook at Ross go through a goal-setting process even in the years they don’t get a comprehensive evaluation. Administrators, however, get a comprehensive evaluation every year.
“My concern with the proposed system is if we’ll have to do a full-blown comprehensive evaluation (on a teacher) every year, we don’t have the administrative staff to do that,” Young said. “By the time a teacher gets to Phase Three, we know they’re a good teacher and they don’t need to be evaluated every year.”
By the time the exact standards and mandates are ready to be handed down from the Ohio Department of Education, Young hopes that districts will have some leeway, that Ross’ goal-setting process will allow them to forego a rigorous process for experienced, proven teachers.
“We worked very hard on our process and we like it,” he said. “We’ll be very disappointed if we have to give it up entirely.”
New mandates
The budget bill gives the Ohio Department of Education just six months to develop a new evaluation process with 50 percent of a teacher’s score based on students’ academic growth. It must be approved by the state board of education and is expected to be implemented in time for the 2012-13 school year.
The state plans to use the current report card achievement tests in reading, writing, math, science and social studies as part of the evaluations, Gallaway said. New assessments are being developed for other subjects such as art and music as well as for grade levels and students who don’t take achievement tests.
Each year administrators will use these scores along with observations, input from parents and other reviews to assign teachers ratings of “highly effective,” “effective,” “needs improvement” and “unsatisfactory.”
The state superintendent will develop criteria for awarding those rankings, but how they play into hiring and firing decisions will be largely left up to individual school districts.
While achievement test scores aren’t a formal part of the evaluation process in most districts, they are a consideration.
Kathy Leist, assistant superintendent for human resources for the Hamilton City School District, said that test data is a “very important” part of the district’s evaluation process.
“Student achievement is always a part of the discussion with the principals or whoever is doing the evaluation,” she said. “They will sit down with the teacher in the fall to see where their test scores are, where they do well and what they may need to emphasize, and help them set their goals for next year.
At Ross, Young said that a few years ago they noticed that like many other districts their fifth grade math scores weren’t where they should be, so it was part of every fifth grade teacher’s goals to bring up the math scores with specific “achievement activities” as part of the plan.
“You have to look at student achievement to know if you’re being effective,” he said.
Emmy Partin, director of Ohio policy and research for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education reform advocate that has pushed for a new evaluation process, said there are problems with the system proposed under the budget bill.
It lacks uniformity and leaves many interpretations and decisions up to individual school districts, Partin said. There also is no mandate for removing “unsatisfactory” teachers.
“You are going to have a patchwork of different evaluations with different rigor and different consequences,” Partin said. “You could write a shiny new teacher evaluation system for each district that is business as usual, but you have complied with state law.”
To be effective the system should take the time to give districts a clear method for judging and rewarding performance, Partin said. She suggests using more than one year’s worth of achievement data and have specific training and standards for those doing the evaluations.
“There is a lot of potential, but also a lot of pitfalls,” Partin said.
Peer review
Educators say one way to avoid some of those “pitfalls” is to make peer review the heart of the evaluation process. Successful programs from Toledo to Washington, D.C., use highly trained “master educators” to assess teacher performance.
Deb Tully, of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, said well trained peer reviews can help administrators and school boards make informed employment decisions. Those reviews can be paired with “value-added” measures like test scores and measures of student growth.
“We don’t have a problem with using ‘value-added’ as a tool for professional development,” Tully said. “In concept it is a good theory. It can also be unreliable.”
Like Lantz and Young, Tully worries mandating evaluations for every teacher could overwhelm administrators. “Think about the almost physical impossibility of that. You’re setting people up to take shortcuts and then there is no way to be effective.”
Ross’ Greg Young said that the district has long had a policy of putting as much money into the classroom as possible, which means it is not heavily staffed with administrators. There are 10 administrators in the district, no assistant principals in the elementary schools, and 171 teachers.
“We’re pretty maxed out with what we’re doing,” he said. “But if teacher pay is going to be determined by their evaluations, we want to make sure we’re giving them the best evaluation we can, and if we have to give everyone a comprehensive review every year, we’re going to need to add administrative staff.”
Kasich spokeswoman Wehrkamp says that is the end goal of the process. “We are making sure kids are put first and are getting the best possible education,” she said. “The budget process makes huge strides in making sure student learning is kept at the forefront of education policy decisions.”
Parent and student input
The provisions included in the state budget bill regarding teacher evaluations asks for feedback from parents and students.
Alex Sims has a daughter entering Middletown High School and another preparing to enter sixth grade. He said his daughters grades speak to their teachers’ effectiveness.
“If I see my daughters bringing home As and Bs, then I feel that the teacher is explaining the material in a way they’re understanding it,” he said.
Jeannie Yazell, who’s daughter is a junior at Middletown High School and son is about to start eighth grade, said there has to be a better way to evaluate teachers than through classroom observations.
She favors peer-to-peer evaluations, inviting parents to sit in on classes and end-of-semester surveys for students, not unlike the kind administered at many universities.
“So many students learn in different ways,” she said. “It’s hard to meet it effectively.”
Like student test scores, however, districts use parent and student feedback in an anecdotal way during a teacher evaluation, but coming up with a reliable tool for measuring their input could prove difficult.
“If you get negative comments coming to you from different sources and different people, it sends up a red flag that something is wrong,” Young said. “Creating a formal process could be difficult because you’d have to ask very specific and pointed questions to make sure the parent isn’t just upset over a bad grade.
“But students can be a valuable resource, too,” he said. “If you took the seniors in high school and asked them to write down who the 10 best teachers in the school are, they’d be pretty accurate in predicting who the good teachers are.”
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