Standardized test scores won’t be used to measure teacher effectiveness in Montgomery and Frederick counties for at least one more year, although they will be used everywhere else in Maryland, the Maryland Gazette reports.
Despite the fact that the other 22 public school districts in the state will have to use new teacher evaluation systems that do incorporate standardized test scores, most teachers say they aren’t ready for such a system. In a Washington Post report of a survey by the Maryland State Education Association, nearly two-thirds of the Maryland teachers surveyed said they were unprepared to teach students based on the more rigorous Common Core State Standards, and about 72 percent said they weren’t ready for new teacher and principal evaluation systems.
Frederick and Montgomery counties didn’t sign onto the state’s winning $250 million Race to the Top grant application three years ago, but legislators wrote into state law that a “substantial” portion of teachers’ evaluations must be based on some measure of student growth anyway. Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, Dr Lillian M Lowery, determined that the measure to be used was the state’s standardized tests, and the term “substantial” meant 20 percent.
Prior to that law, which helped Maryland secure a waiver from the US Department of Education and protect schools in the state from some of the more punitive consequences of No Child Left Behind, Montgomery County had used a system for teacher evaluation that incorporated measures of student growth. The evaluation was more flexible and determined almost on a case-by-case basis how much student growth data would count toward a teacher’s final score.
An updated teacher evaluation plan was due at the Maryland State Department of Education by June 14, but MSDE officials decided to continue negotiating with Montgomery and Frederick counties, the Gazette reported. Those negotiations may very well conclude with the two systems not being forced to comply with the 20 percent requirement, according to MSDE spokesman Bill Rienhard.
Any evaluation plan submitted will be judged anew as being compliant or non-compliant with the state’s demands. If plans submitted by Montgomery and Frederick aren’t compliant, schools will have to use an evaluation plan developed by the state for the 2013-2014 school year. Additional postponements of the approval process, however, may still be in the works. Whatever the outcome, Montgomery County plans to pilot some new teacher-evaluation metrics: student growth on two predetermined performance objectives will be used to evaluate teachers, and a school’s growth on two predetermined performance indicators will be used to evaluate principals.
Editorial
It’s tough to change a good thing, and the teacher evaluation system in Montgomery County was truly one of the nation’s exemplary teacher evaluation systems. It was working for schools in the district, and in my opinion, clocking two performance objectives for the evaluation of teachers may cause a narrowing of the curriculum to those two performance objectives and other objectives that support them in some way.
The objectives will be determined before the year starts. In February, right before the Maryland School Assessment is given to every student in every school in third through eighth grades, what if a teacher starts noticing her students aren’t mastering one of those two performance objectives? The tendency could be to focus instruction on that objective, since the teacher’s evaluation will depend on it. I’m not saying this is what will happen, but we seem to be leaving the system open for gaming by determining the objectives up front, especially if we tell the teachers what the objectives are.
Perhaps the objectives to be used will be kept secret, but then, that seems completely unfair. It’s a generally accepted workplace rule that workers should know how they’ll be evaluated. See how many problems using standardized tests to evaluate teachers can cause?
