Yeah, I’m not even sure what that means. It could be very good or very bad or very bad because it doesn’t mean anything or is just horrendously written.

Hmm that’s 3:1 bad to good, so perhaps it is more likely on the bad side.

Eeeeek. Not really their finest moment right there.

This is no dereliction of duty, Dan. The dereliction, not to mention the confusion, is solely yours.

Effectiveness?

The very term is an insult to teachers everywhere. “Effective” at what? “Effective” at teaching? Based on what? How well students learned? There is no way to determine learning, as true learning comes from within, welling up out of the bosom of the youth, a bright light that shines in the darkness created by people like you, Dan, people who think that things liked “teaching” and “learning” can be evaluated in ways that speak of varying levels of value added to the knowledge and skill set of a young person.

Next, you’ll want to create hierarchies, implying that certain types of knowledge (say, algebra), are more valuable than the type of self-actualization the true teachers instill in young people as a matter of course. Maybe a bunch of statiticians in an ivory tower somewhere could measure a difference in how “effective” you were teaching so-called “standards,” but of course, we should not celebrate your heinous insistance in teaching to the test, which we know is one of the easiest things ever, as evidenced by the staggering percent of students achieving proficiency across this great land.

But it takes a true teacher, a true shaper of young minds, to foster a love of learning that must never fade, withstanding the mind-numbing standards assault of people like you, Dan, who goosestep toward Bethlehem, seeking to acknowledge differences between educators based on effectiveness, when the only real difference is the size of your heart.

For shame, Dan.

After giving this more thought that I ought to, it seems that what is going on here is that DC is an unusual case where essentially the same level of hierarchy is responsible for both licensing you and hiring you. They are usually separate state and local functions.

So it appears that the district is trying to use licensing as a way to get around the contract. We can’t fire you, we’ll drop your license.

In any actual state, this wouldn’t fly, because the state bureaucracy would be pissing everyone off firing local teachers by remote control. If the city and the state are the same, it is just a hack to get around the contract.

You could argue that teachers should have to demonstrate student achievement performance to retain their license, but as far as I know it is not done that way anywhere in the US, so the burden would be on you to make a really good argument (in lieu of evidence, unless you have some) that this would be a better system. Specifically, better to delicense teachers from the capitol than fire them locally.

Be happy that you are not up here, Dan. Our union:

-doesn’t think the high school exists

-drinks the CTA/NEA kool-aid like it’s going out of style

Dan, in light of the news that only 48% of California High Schools made AYP, I am curious as to where this topic leads your thinking. So let’s say 52% of teachers were fired for being “ineffective” based on exit exam results. Then what? I see this as a potential circular argument- did the schools not make AYP due to “ineffective” teachers or are the teachers only considered “ineffective” after the fact?

OK, so the exit exams are not a perfect measure. What assessment is? How then would we gauge the effectiveness of California high school teachers? If we base licensure on effectiveness as defined by exit exams, who is left to teach California students? If licensure and effectiveness are not linked to AYP or exit exam results, then what determines effectiveness? All in all, it just leads me to wonder what legitimate improvement to the model would actually look like.

@dan, I’m not in disagreement with the hypothetical conversation you mention with your department chair or principal. I am just struggling with how to accurately measure that added value within the world of oversimplified political answers. Not to be Captain Obvious, but the premise of NCLB is not anathema to what should be our mission. Once the non-educator public got involved in defining “effective” schools, it moved from realistic to foolish. To seriously suggest that measuring one disparate group of students against a different group of students the following year does not measure growth, however that became the definition of effective schools. I also struggle with the fact that each state’s measure of effectiveness is left to that state’s BOE. For example, California’s exit exams and Illinois’ use of the Prairie State Achievement Exam, which is really one day of ACT and one day of allegedly Work-related information, do not measure comparable items. Would an effective teacher in Illinois also be so in California or vice versa? So long as individual states determine the individual measures for assessment, I don’t know how we can reach a universal agreement that a link between “effectiveness” and employment is fair.

As an elementary principal, I am having those conversations with my teachers about their plans. I am asking how they plan to individualize students’ learning while also implementing research-based instructional strategies. And, they are doing it. That does not mean that they all fit under the same measure; they’re not all exactly equally effective. Just as we advocate differentiation of instruction for students, don’t we need to do the same to help our teachers all improve? Where is that individuality built into the conversation in DC?

@Dan – I thought it was probably…

@Tom Hoffman – The comparison to law and medicine is disingenuous. Once people find out a particular doctor is ineffective or has a high mortality rate among patients, or once people find out a lawyer loses a disproportionately high number of cases, they choose a different practitioner. There’s not really a need for the license board to get involved because the marketplace sorts it out.

Can you do that in a school? I know in my school, students aren’t allowed to switch teachers for the same class, they can only drop a class for a different subject. There is a need for something other than the marketplace to step in, and if a teacher refuses to improve their own effectiveness, then, as Dan points out, they should not be a teacher.

Evaluation of effectiveness is very subjective. Here in the UK we are measured beyond belief, yet it still nigh on impossible to remove an ineffective teacher due to the length of time involved (look up bbc news education and roll your eyes).

We have reached a point where we are graded unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good and outstanding for a series of individual lessons. We are told that satisfactory is no longer good enough. At last count there were 32 criteria to meet for good, including every student making progress during the lesson. Please ignore Jimmy whose mother died a week ago, he might not make progress. Fatima who is EAL and who we have no funds to support – ignore her too until my Arabic is good enough. Marcus who takes his 3 brothers to school each morning and misses 1/2 the lesson, better ignore him too. Oh yeah did I ention we are fully pastoral an “in loco parentis” here as well?

We even have to justify end of Key Stage tests – oh Jimmy got a level 3 not 4 because… Fatima no level because…. Marcus only a 4 because… and you better explain it in an educationally valid way!

Evaluation here is down to line managers, so better stay on speaking terms. I’d love a peer assessment system, I’d even welcome a weekly observation as part of this!

As for 150 hours PD – bring it on! In the past 2 years I have had 12 hours commercial, 120 in-house (of which at least 40 hours were actually meetings).

We have 99% fantastic teachers here whatever their official evaluation is. We also have 1% of dross who despite onerous complicated systems still manage to keep jobs. Be very carefull what you wish for American cousins, as it may in you dialect “come back to bite you in the ass”.

Wow. It’s good to know that you all think about DC and DCPS, a la distance. I think sometimes we feel forgotten/ignored by the rest of the country (read: taxed w/o representation). I think sometimes urban teachers feel forgotten/ignored by their principals, superintendents, union bosses, parents, taxpayers, etc… I think sometimes the reality of a city that is transient by design makes it difficult to hold any one person or any one school fully accountable for the performance of any one child. This commentary is neither in defense, nor in opposition to merit pay/tying performance to licensure. It’s merely to say that community development, public service, and education in our nation’s capitol are very complex issues whose essence does not rest in The Wire Season 4 or West Wing.

A momentary Google of the Mike Nifong case tells me that he was disbarred for ethics violations, not incompetence. There is a big difference. You can lose your teaching license (probably everywhere) for ethics violations.

Do you have a specific proposal for how you would like to see this done or are you just blowing smoke? Saying that you think effectiveness should be linked to licensure, but not specifying how isn’t very helpful. If teachers aren’t periodically providing evidence to renew their license, I don’t know it is happening.

“How do you compel teachers to improve without extrinsic incentives for good teaching or disincentives for lousy teaching? I don’t get this.”

@ddmeyer we’ve got to train & recruit teachers & education leaders who think about teaching as public service & not just as a “job.”

Given the parameters you’re describing, I agree with you, Dan. (Tom just had a heart attack.)

I’ve seen some teachers in schools that had no business teaching kids. And the problem is that in many cases, they bounce from school to school… often time from bad school to worse school until they either find a place where they aren’t the worst problem or they find an admin who is so overwhelmed that they can’t find a way (or the time) to get rid of them.

Every school has a way to rate a teacher unsatisfactory, which then has a long review process. Perhaps there should be a trigger for every teacher who is removed from a school for unsatisfactory performance, such that there is an investigation of whether or not the offense was so egregious as to make them lose their license with the state.

Chris,

I wouldn’t be against that kind of system — that gets the relationship between the state and local levels right. After you lose your job, you might lose your license.

I can, however, see the subsequent post on The Quick and the Ed:

Pennsylvania’s year old system for de-certifying teachers has rooted out… 8 incompetent teachers in the whole state. Problem solved!

The underlying problem is that no matter what the rules, principals have to carefully weigh how much time, energy and political capital they want to devote to getting rid of lousy teachers. Raising the stakes by adding decertification to the mix will only increase the pressure to not try to get rid of a teacher. I just don’t see more bureacracy solving the problem.

Is there a way in PA to get a record of where applicants have taught before without relying on the applicant’s references? Wouldn’t something like that be sufficient and less intrusive?

Michelle,

Actually, there is a similar system here in Rhode Island, and having experienced it, I can’t really imagine using it to weed out bad teachers. It is more busy work than evaluation. But you either need something like that, or test scores. Or you’re elevating issues like Chris describes, but I think Dan’s concern is that these things aren’t being handled locally in the first place.