Teaching Standards

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What’s Wrong with Public Service?

The polarization of public officials and public employees should not come to this.  Only an employment system plagued by  inequities and neglectful of sound evaluation and promotion practices could bring us to this bitter stand-off.  The default of seniority has ruled the evaluation of public employees forever, because it is the simplest and cheapest way to evaluate personnel.

As public service employees are on the firing line for their alleged pension and health excesses, the debate about evaluation and job security of these employees has also been revived. No one disputes that publicly and privately funded employees should enjoy some kind of parity in pay and benefits, but many question whether the public employees are evaluated and promoted under the same principles of merit that exist in the private sector. At least this was the question addressed by Amanda Ripley the current (March 7, 2011) Time Magazine.

Professional employees in the private sector most often depend on the judgments of their supervisors for objective evaluations of their performance.  Indeed the requirements for successful administrators often include the thoughtful evaluation of personnel in their departments.  A successful corporation depends on reliable and apolitical evaluations of its professional employees.

In most public schools, this duty falls to the principal or assistant principal, who observe their teachers at least once, preferably twice a year.  The alleged flaws in this system, are the stringent controls of the tenure system, which protects teachers from unreasonable dismissal.  How much this applies to other professions on the public payroll, I cannot say.

But the rub in teacher evaluation often goes back to the skill of the evaluator. When I was a high school English teacher, I always received decent evaluations from my principal, but it was more because he was a former math teacher and felt very insecure about evaluating my discipline.  Once, after observing a lesson on poetry for an indifferent group of sophomores, he asked, “Do you really like this stuff?”  The ensuing discussion made it clear that he could not see any value in teaching poetry to students who were not college bound.

Clearly my boss did not feel confident and perhaps not competent to judge what an English teacher did.  And this is where the rubber hits the road for evaluation of teachers. They should be evaluated not by supervisors who do not understand their discipline, nor by so-called experts viewing a video of their classroom performance. They should not be evaluated by the performance of their students on standardized tests. None of this would be tolerated in the private sector, where performance evaluation is taken seriously.

Teachers should be evaluated by disciplinary specialists who know the context of their teaching and appreciate the skills needed for that context.  They should also self-evaluate and make their own case for tenure, as university professors do.  Under such conditions we could expect that the best teachers would be retained and the worst removed.  Under such conditions, all teachers would earn respectability, both from their profession and from a deserved compensation.

How much this applies to other public employees I would not presume to say, but the requirements of informed evaluators and mutual respect certainly should hold true.  What I do understand is that the public sector has never taken employee evaluation as seriously as the privater sector.

If government wants maximum productivity out of its employees, it should be prepared to invest in appropriate systems of evaluation and promotion. This is not a cost-saving proposal, but an efficiency proposal, intended to heal the adversarial relationship that has brought us to impasse in public service.

Public service doesn’t need exorbitant benefits to attract the best and the brightest. It just needs equity and respect.

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Teaching Together

Who is really accountable for good teaching, the teacher or the school she teaches in?

The Draft of the Model Core Teaching Standards (published July 19) suggests that accountability might be shared between the teacher and the school, by emphasizing “collaboration,” “communication,”  and “using data to support learning.”

A literal reading of the document shows that every statement begins with “the teacher” as if accountability rested solely on the individual, but much of what the teacher does to achieve these standards depends on collegiality within the school.  If you count up the “performances” that rely on “collaboration” or “communication,” they show 39% of teaching (25 of 64) is collaborative.  Standards 9 (Reflection and Continuous Growth) and 10 (Collaboration) are particularly rife with collaborative performances.

This is a far cry from holding teachers solely accountable for their students’ performances on standardized tests and using those results for tenure or promotion decisions.  In fact, regarding assessment, the document states, “The teacher uses multiple and appropriate types of assessment data to identify student learning needs and to develop differentiated learning experiences” (Standard #6e). The critical descriptors “multiple and appropriate,” applied to assessment, suggest that a single number will not be adequate to evaluate student performance and certainly insufficient to evaluate teacher performance.

If this document were taken as seriously as the Common Core State Standards for learning, it would revolutionize schooling, especially secondary schooling, in the United States. It would mean smaller classes, shared students, common planning time, and  strategic and consistent professional development focusing on identified student needs. It would require a huge transfusion of funding to hire more collaborative teachers, more funding to develop effective formative assessment, more professional development to “independently and collaboratively examine test and other performance data to  understand student progress and to guide planning” (6b).  For most secondary schools in this country, it would be a transformation of school culture.

You can not blame the fragmented school culture on teachers, because they are indoctrinated with collaborative education in their teacher preparation, almost to the consternation of their mentor teachers when they first observe their  student teachers.  Collaboration is not practiced in many secondary schools as it is preached in schools of education.  It is often a function of the size of classes and student load and the flexibility of the school schedule. Secondary schools tend to reinforce the Lone Ranger model of teaching.

The Coalition of Essential Schools provides good models of collaboration in secondary schools by limiting class size and giving autonomy to the principal and teachers. In their “Core Principles” (http://www.essentialschools.org/items/4), they include

Personalization Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum feasible extent. Efforts should be directed toward a goal that no teacher have direct responsibility for more than 80 students in the high school and middle school and no more than 20 in the elementary school.

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Resources dedicated to teaching and learning Ultimate administrative and budget targets should include student loads that promote personalization, substantial time for collective planning by teachers, competitive salaries for staff, and an ultimate per pupil cost not to exceed that at traditional schools by more than 10 percent. To accomplish this, administrative plans may have to show the phased reduction or elimination of some services now provided students in many traditional schools.

The details of this vision are better explained on their web site < essentialschools.org>

There is much to celebrate in the Model Core Teaching Standards, especially because they promote the importance of teaching together.   In this sense it is a true school reform document, one that deserves the attention of the educational foundations that place excellent teaching high on their agenda.  It will require the kind of financial transfusion that foundations can supply to implement these standards one school at a time.