My kids currently attend NYC public schools. They likewise have some good teachers and some bad ones. My older child is in a selective high school and his classes are “streamed” so he takes all his classes with the same cohort of high-achieving students. The same thing was true in his non-selective middle school. Some of the teachers were good, some were mediocre, some were awful. Same kids, same parents, the only difference was the teacher. My younger daughter is in elementary school and her class gets pulled out for science with a teacher who shows videos about 75% of the time. What’s more, he shows the same videos to the same kids in successive years. The kids are bright, motivated, and well-behaved. Is he a good teacher? I can’t say with any certainty that the impact of these differences would be picked up on standardized tests. I can say that I see the impact on my children’s learning and they can themselves identify the difference between good, mediocre, and lousy teachers with complete clarity.

I work in a public NYC high school with an extremely high-need population. Some kids behave marvelously in one class and are “incorrigible” in another. Some teachers have cut rates well outside the norm for other teachers in the building — and the students who cut their classes show up for everyone else. And student outcomes align pretty strongly with these patterns. Do you not think the teacher might be playing a role here?

It’s one thing to be critical of this report or proposed reforms to teacher evaluation systems, but can we refrain from pretending that there aren’t meaningful differences among teachers’ when it comes to performance? And this is true even within the same building, working with the same exact kids. Anyone who has children, who works in a school, or whoever attended school knows that all teachers are not created equal. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.

Bad students = Bad teacher

1. This is exactly what so many teachers (and effective, seasoned principals) were asserting as far back as 2009 and into this past APPR debate; That good building leaders know very well how to get rid of subpar teachers and know how to keep the good ones. This report validates this painfully obvious truth: We need to focus the discussion on building -and then trusting- good school leaders. #duh

2.  I just wanted to stress a point made in the piece: That the idea of evaluating principals based on how well they retain their top performing teachers really is theoretical right now. And why? Because we (all of us really) have no idea whatsoever who the top performing teachers of a school or of a district are in this sense. And why’s that? Because there is no sophisticated evaluation system -like the APPR- currently in place in NYC (which is the city’s fault, by the way not the UFT’s. The UFT actually wants it -badly). 

And when the APPR finally does go into place, given the LACK of field testing, and LACK opportunity to refine it and given it’s heavy reliance on the as of yet unproven VAM (and that’s putting it mildly) this ‘sophisticated evaluation system’ is going to be so hotly debated and rebuffed -by people from both sides- that not many people may wind up taking it seriously enough to form real discussion around at all. That’s pretty sad, because it means that some urban schools are years away from implementing a few common sense approaches to keeping the good ones.

And that’s PARTLY due to the polarized atmosphere (that was PARTLY created by TNPT’s ’09 report) that we’re all living with now! But I guess that’s a different topic altogether.