How do you measure a good teacher? Surely, the most important yardstick is his or her students. If they do well — if they learn basic reading and math — you can be pretty sure the teacher is doing his or her job well. If they consistently fail to demonstrate proficiency, or at least improvement, then the teacher might do better to seek a new career.
On Friday, The Examiner’s Lisa Gartner reported that District of Columbia Public Schools will be changing its teacher evaluation system — known as Impact — once again. This time, the changes will weaken the influence that basic math and reading test scores will have on teachers’ evaluations. Currently, they account for half of a teacher’s evaluation score, but under the new system they will account for only 35 percent of it.
The leftover 15 percent will be based on a “new measure of student learning, which will require each teacher to work with her or his principal to set rigorous achievement goals on an approved assessment other than the state test …” Some educators will surely take such a “choose-your-own-adventure” evaluation system seriously, finding rigorous methods that work to benefit students. But it isn’t hard to imagine that some will not. This new portion of the teacher evaluation, being less concrete and less standard than the others, might allow less conscientious educators to inflate their own grades at the expense of those who are more conscientious.
The Impact system has already helped the District’s public schools improve test scores in math, science and reading. For example, in 2012, 42 percent of secondary school students showed proficiency in reading, compared with just 30 percent in 2007. Forty-six percent showed proficiency in math, compared with 27 percent in 2007. This could be the beginning of a fantastic recovery from the poor reputation that District schools had earned from decades of serving students poorly. The last thing the schools need now is a return to the days before serious accountability standards existed for teachers.
Teaching is not just another job. Every inch of slack that is cut for poorly performing educators comes at the expense of the children who attend DC Public Schools and damages the reputation of the District’s best educators. We will not know the results of this change for some time, but we are concerned about any policy change that makes teacher standards fuzzier than they are now.
