I hope you read the two articles in
Another View in the UFT - on Danielson outrages. James Eterno has a petition up. Here is his full post on the ICE Caucus blog.
Thanks all who commented
on the original draft. Roseanne added some but MoveOn thought it was too long so the rationale is here at ICE.
Please sign and then share the
petition to repeal NYS Teacher Evaluation Law. Spread it to the world.
Petition to Repeal NYS Teacher Evaluation Laws 3012-c and 3012-d
We must return teacher
evaluation to local districts free from state mandates by repealing New York
State Education Laws 3012-c and 3012-d.
- Evaluating teachers based on student results on tests
and other student assessments that were never designed to rate educators
is neither a scientifically or educationally sound way to be used for a
Measure of Student Learning portion of a teacher's rating.
- The Measure of Teacher Practice portion of
teacher evaluations is subjective and highly unfair, particularly in NYC
where the Danielson Framework has been used not to help teachers grow as
professionals but as a weapon to frighten teachers into teaching to score
points on arbitrary rubrics in multiple unnecessary classroom
observations.
Why we are starting this petition?
The teacher
evaluation system in NYS is broken beyond repair. NYS passed a flawed
evaluation system into law in order to receive federal Race to the Top funds.
However, the current version of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act no longer requires states to rate teachers in part
based on student test results to receive federal funds. Rating teachers
on student exam scores is not recommended by the American Statistical Association as it is not a reliable way to measure teacher
performance yet in New York we only have a moratorium on using standardized
tests to rate certain teachers. Teachers are still rated on tests and other
assessments that were never designed to rate teachers. The Measures of Student
Learning portion of teacher ratings is highly unreliable. Many call it
"junk science."
NYS ELA tests
cannot measure student progress under any particular standard.From a
statistical standpoint, a handful of questions per standard is not a
statistically sound measure of a student’s mastery of that
standard. Additionally, test passages that are on, above or even
slightly below grade level cannot measure the progress of a struggling reader
who enters a class two to four years below grade level. These tests cannot
measure the progress of newcomers to our country who are learning English as a
new language. It takes many years for newcomers to master the
nuances of the English language. In effect, students such as these
described above can make more than a year’s worth of progress and yet still not
show progress on the NYS ELA due to the text complexity of all test passages.
The Measure of Teacher Practice portion of teacher ratings in New
York City is based on the Danielson Framework whose creator, Charlotte
Danielson, said this about teacher evaluation in Education
Week:
"There is ...little consensus on how the profession should
define "good teaching." Many state systems require districts to
evaluate teachers on the learning gains of their students. These policies have
been implemented despite the objections from many in the measurement community
regarding the limitations of available tests and the challenge of accurately
attributing student learning to individual teachers.
"Even when personnel policies define good teaching as the
teaching practices that promote student learning and are validated by
independent research, few jurisdictions require their evaluators to actually
demonstrate skill in making accurate judgments. But since evaluators must
assign a score, teaching is distilled to numbers, ratings, and rankings,
conveying a reductive nature to educators' professional worth and undermining
their overall confidence in the system.
"I'm deeply troubled by the transformation of teaching from a
complex profession requiring nuanced judgment to the performance of certain
behaviors that can be ticked off on a checklist. In fact, I (and many others in
the academic and policy communities) believe it's time for a major rethinking of
how we structure teacher evaluation to ensure that teachers, as professionals,
can benefit from numerous opportunities to continually refine their
craft."
The Danielson Rubric describes an ideal classroom setting and was
never intended to be used as an evaluative tool against teachers. Examples: A
rubric that rates a teacher "developing" when he/she "attempts
to respond to disrespectful behavior among students, with uneven results"
(Danielson 2a) is not a fair rubric. A rubric that rates a teacher ineffective
because "students' body language indicates feelings of hurt, discomfort,
or insecurity" (Danielson 2a) having nothing to do with how that
particular teacher treats her particular students is not a fair rubric for teacher
evaluations. Teachers do not just teach emotionally well-adjusted children from
idyllic families and communities. We teach all kinds of children who live under
various conditions. These conditions have a major impact on the emotional
well-being of children.
Children experiencing emotional
distress due to factors beyond
their teachers' control quite often have trouble concentrating in class
yet to
be considered "highly effective" under Danielson, Virtually all students
are intellectually engaged in the lesson." We teach children with
selective mutism and other speech and language and learning disabilities
yet Danielson doesn't take this into account. Students' emotions have
an impact on their academics, and
students' emotions are impacted by many factors beyond any teacher's
control
such as homelessness, marital stress in their home or divorce, loss of
employment of a caregiver, physical or emotional abuse, mental illness,
bullying outside of their classroom, personal illness or illness of a
loved one
and many other factors too numerous to list. Holding a teacher
accountable for
these factors that are beyond a teacher's control is not reasonable and
yet
that is what some of the components under Danielson demand.
Teachers in NY are frustrated and demoralized
by a teacher evaluation system that has robbed us of our professionalism.
We demand an end to this absurdity. We demand that NYS change its
education laws so teachers can return to the practice of seeing their students
as human beings who are so much more than a test score or a robot that must
adhere to absurd requirements under the Danielson Rubric in order for their
teacher to be judged "effective" or "highly effective." NYS
has created an adversarial relationship between students and their teachers and
this absurdity must end now.
Teachers have no confidence in the
evaluation system that reduces teacher worth into a meaningless series of
numbers and letters. Teachers in NYC fear classroom observations are not being
used to help them grow professionally, but instead teachers must teach to try
to score points on Ms. Danielson's often misused framework.
In NYC, there is a climate of fear
in the classroom which does not lead to improved teacher practice. Four
observations per year for veteran teachers is excessive. One per year or every
other year is sufficient for the vast majority of veteran teachers. Ms. Danielson
stated in Education Week that after three years in the classroom, teachers
become part of a "professional community" and should be treated
as such.
Danielson says:
Personnel policies for the
teachers not practicing below standard—approximately 94 percent of them—would
have, at their core, a focus on professional development, replacing the
emphasis on ratings with one on learning.
We agree. To get there we must
first repeal Education Law 3012-c and 3012-d and return teacher evaluation to
local districts, free from state mandates.
