The Maryland State Education Association, the teachers’ union that represents about 70,000 educators in the state, surveyed about 750 of its members and found they are struggling to implement two changes to their jobs, changes for which they say they didn’t have enough time, the Baltimore Sun reports.
- Implementing the Common Core State Standards in their classrooms
- Using the new teacher evaluation system in their schools
“I think it confirms what we have been trying to say: There is a lot of education reform coming at teachers and principals at one time,” the paper quoted Cheryl Bost, vice president of the Maryland State Education Association, as saying.
As for the evaluation system, the report stated that a “new evaluation system judges teachers for the first time on whether their students are making progress.”
That’s stretching it. Two points, here:
(1) Teachers have for a long time been “judged” based on how well their students are progressing. Most effective evaluation schemes in the past have included at least samples of student work and partially incorporated it into the evaluation score. What’s different this year, for the first time in Maryland, those judgments will be based, in part, on standardized test scores, which don’t provide much information about student progress, except on a very narrow focus of learning outcomes.
(2) The mere idea of judging teachers based on student progress assumes we’re able to assess student progress properly. Using statewide standardized test score, for example, in math, reading, and science, is not enough. Don’t get me wrong: every school system in the state incorporates much more than standardized test scores, and some of that is new as well. But ultimately, it’s the inclusion of standardized test scores in the teacher evaluation systems that marks the biggest change and the biggest problem.
Why? Because there are standards of learning that can’t be assessed on our standardized tests, and we would hope teachers are teaching those objectives as well as the ones on the standardized tests. In general, though,
progress ∝ nothing on a standardized test
The survey concludes that the schools haven’t prepared teachers adequately for the tests. It’s the tests, not the Common Core standards, that they’re going to be evaluated on. The tests are very different from the Common Core, which has problems of its own, but it is troubling that the state department is issuing a message that it’s all just fine and dandy, when we are hearing a very different message from the state’s own teachers.
Tests that mean nothing for students, such as the MSA, aren’t truly an acceptable way to measure student growth, anyway, even if the exams correctly covered everything we expect our schools to teach kids, which they don’t. One parent from Washington state writes:
We can’t go back, and I don’t want to go back, to teachers being secure in their jobs even when their children learned nothing. Looking at how much students grow under a teacher’s care is appropriate, but we must do it right. A margin of error is not acceptable. Holding a very small percentage of teachers accountable and giving the others a career off is not acceptable. Measuring a teacher’s effectiveness with assessments that mean everything to the teacher but nothing to the student is not acceptable. The End of Course exams, used to determine whether or not a child moves on, are much more credible measures of a child’s ability.
To Washington state’s end-of-course exams, I would add the following: student work samples, projects, and at the high school level, papers about the course material. But at the very least, students should have a stake in whatever instruments we use to evaluate their teachers.