Do you want to improve SCHOOL PERFORMANCE of poor and minority students? Then improve their lives: Provide their parents with living-wage jobs, adequate housing, medical, dental and mental health care and, yes, adequately funded schools with committed (sorry, TFA) and qualified teachers.

The US has a shamefully high infant and maternal death rate: why aren’t OB-GYNs being targeted with the same passion?

The US has lower life expectancy than other developed nations: where are the witchhunts against primary care doctors and other health care professionals (let alone the real “death panels,” the insurers)?

The US incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, most of them minority, and many of them warehoused in private, for-profit prisons, providing a structural incentive for continuing incarceration: where are the corporate think tanks, foundations and PR firms making noise about this “Civil Rights Issue of Our Time?”

The reason those debates have so little “juice” is because these fields have already been privatized, with free reign given to those who would count, measure, control and commodify and market everything. Public education, along with Social Security, is the last major universal, public good left to be taken over by the hedge funds, private equity parasites and venture capitalists. Thus, this unending campaign against teachers and their unions, and this absurd debate about teacher quality.

I’m not proposing witchhunts. My point is that this very discussion proves the success of corporate ed deform in framing the issue of education solely as one of teacher quality. Even the unions have allowed themselves to be suckered into this twisted, unfair discourse, which they can only lose.

Do you want to improve the lives of poor and minority students? Then improve the lives of poor and minority students: provide their parents with living-wage jobs, adequate housing, medical, dental and mental health care and, yes, adequately funded schools with committed (sorry, TFA) and qualified teachers. Until we open up that debate, teachers will be shouted into a corner by arrogant know-nothings with thick wallets, pursuing their own interests in the name of “The Underprivileged.”

As for edu-scientist (now that’s a hot one), I’d like to quote Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and early computer scientist, and coiner of the term “cyber:”

“The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and became the mode in the social sciences… so the economists (MF: and “psychometricians” as well the overwhelming majority of ideologically-subsidized “education researchers”) have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus.”

Norbert Wiener, “God and Golem, Inc.”

I know this dates me, but every time I hear a DOE/Ed Deform mouthpiece say “Research shows that…”, while pulling some self-serving nonsense out of their butt, I think of the old Trident gum ad:”Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend Trident to their patients who chew gum.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

GS,
Thank you for featuring the above teacher’s plight in “Chalk It Up.”

General Motors?
Bear Sterns?
The NY State legislature?
The Bush White House?

I would also like to add Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Lehman Bros., AIG, etc.

Every organization has to deal with people who lack competence. However, the education system is different where we are a “people entity” and not a “product entity”. Teachers have the opportunity to excel in this professional if provided with the best support from experienced administrators who were supposedly master teachers at one time. When I came into the system over 20 years ago, I was fortunate to have a retired, 36-year veteran as my mentor. She stayed with me for an entire year. Once a week she came in armed with teaching strategies material and with an open-arm to listen to my fears and that each week’s struggle. She also modeled lessons which today’s administrators will not do because of their lack of experience or no experience in the classroom. I feel that the union should provide a breakdown of reason behind the U’s. How many U’s were given to 1st, 2nd and 3rd year teachers? How many are from the TFA or NYCTF programs? How many received extensive support from administration? How many were mentored through the New Teacher Mentoring Program? How many full-period formal observations were done on these the U-rating teachers? How many of these teachers feel they were u-rated because their passing rates were too low? Or refused to be involved in these “credit-recovery” programs? How many of the tenured teachers received a u-rating because their educational philosophy clashed with the principal’s vision? How many chapter leaders received u-ratings?
I feel that a comprehensive report must be done to assess the reason for the increase of u-ratings. By the BoE flaunting this increase as “a concerted effort by school officials to make it easier for principals to terminate poorly performing teachers”, stated by Ann Forte, they are creating an environment of scare-tactics. Every probationary teacher will teach in fear, work in fear, collaborate in fear, and submit grades in fear! Teaching has always been a noble profession of people caring for the future of other people. I never thought that I would see the day where an incompetent, inexperienced administrator is given so much power to destroy the livelihood and career of an individual who is being deemed incompetent by an administrator who had probably watched a 5-hour video on how to be an effective leader! How do you destroy a large organization? Place fear in everyone’s heart, start with administrators losing their jobs where the fear will trickle down to the most vulnerable, untenured teachers!

First of all, I don’t think any teacher would object to being held accountable for their performance. How you measure performance is an ongoing dilemma. A/Ps have tenure while Principals don’t. In my experience, a principal is hard to get rid of even when the parents of the children in that school find the principal unacceptable. I have seen remarkably incompetent administrators hold on to their jobs year after year. I agree with Laromana, the only people really being held accountable are teachers – not administrators. The current zeitgeist is anit-teacher pro-management.

Principals may be forced to love their Progress Reports, but may have more reason to fear them — they are high stakes random letter generators.

I consider myself a good teacher by just about any criteria you’d care to mention. I know a lot of other teachers at my previous school who were equally good, if not better. Some of us were targeted because we we involved in union activity, and others because we had committed the unpardonable crime of climbing the salary scale. All of those teachers are now gone from that school. The ones who could retire, did. Lucky ones like me found jobs at better schools. Some lost their jobs. In the end, there were no really good teachers at that school–just a bunch of young people putting in their two years before they went off to Long Island or Yonkers. An environment of fear permeated the walls of that school. I hope never to teach in such a place again. But I know there are many such places around NYC, where principals rule by intimidation and U ratings are used to squash union activity and save money.

I do believe that most experienced teachers are quite good, by which I mean I’d have no objection to having my child taught by them. I would hate for my child to be taught by a TFA or a Fellow, because experience matters and I wouldn’t want services from any professional who wanted to put just two years in and bolt.

I’d support a system in which teachers evaluate each other, although I don’t think they should evaluate teachers in their own schools (too many opportunities for bias). If that happened, you might find an even higher rate of U’s given out, but they would be given out for the right reasons.

In addition to above commenters’ individual anecdotes, note that the main post cites the questionable quality of teacher evaluation SYSTEMS, of which I would suggest “binary” ones be included if not already.

I would also note the potential adverse effects on recruiting ANY teachers into a system perceived as capricious or arbitrary, let alone spiteful.

I am also struck by the shape of the graph: For three years, the “gap” stayed constant; in the fourth, big divergence.

I am not sure what you would consider “damn good” but by NYCDOE/BOE standards most teachers are satisfactory or high satisfactory. I said that in my initial post. Actually, I agree with everything you said you in your post. I have been in the DOE/BOE for 18 years. And I have ever seen a good teacher put their feet up & read the newspaper – NEVER. Any good educator has too much respect for children and their profession to do such a thing. We all know that.

I am not even talking about the mediocre teacher who tries their hardest but just doesn’t have the intangibles that makes someone from good to great. As long as they try and are willing to grow, they will be fine & and satisfactory.

I am talking about the whack jobs! The ones who are late to their classes repeatedly. The ones that are disheveled. The ones who don’t know how to talk to children, use profanity. The ones who put more effort into UFT meetings than they do their lessons. The ones who make no effort to grow professionally. The ones who sneak out when they think no one is watching. The ones who could care less about supporting their colleagues.

Certainly… you have seen that person in your career. Their is usually 1 – 5 in each building.

1 X 1500 schools would give you 1500 Unsatisfactory ratings. Finally people are doing their job.

However, it is a sad story about the U in someone’s 32nd year. It is sad to hear the U rating given out as punishment. I am sorry to say… I have seen that as well.

None of this would change under any administration. I think if we had message boards going back 50 years we would see the same type of posts.

I have come to the conclusion that this is simply the way it is always going to be. Unfortunately/fortunately it differs from school to school. Some schools get it… well run schools are partnerships between every member of the school community. Administrators don’t play “gotcha” and teachers understand that being a professional means growing. So when you introduce something like ARIS at a PD, they see the value and not sit back and gripe.

The education scientist stands up and starts singing at this point…

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me

Send them your heart
So they’ll know that someone cares
And their lives will be stronger and free
As God has shown us by turning stone to bread
So we all must lend a helping hand

General Motors?
Bear Sterns?
The NY State legislature?
The Bush White House?

Edu-scientist (whatever the hell that means)–do you really have any idea what goes on inside a classroom? Do you really think it’s possible for a teacher to just sit there, feet upon the desk, reading a newspaper, while the students dutifully work? Any such teacher, if they existed, would have a riot on their hands within a matter of hours. I’ve seen a few subs try this, but they didn’t last more than a day and were never asked back. I have never–NEVER–seen an experienced teacher do what you’re claiming.

So instead of engaging in histrionics, let’s look at the reality. Most teachers are pretty damn good. Some are mediocre. A few are hopeless. The hopeless ones should have been fired before they achieved tenure. The mediocre ones should be helped. And the pretty damn good ones should be given the latitude to do their jobs properly without the interference of a bunch of non-teacher bureaucrats who think they understand education because it seemed pretty easy to them back when they were in prep school.