Under a new evaluation system unveiled Monday, city teachers would be graded based on their students’ progress — but not just on their test scores.
Assistant Superintendent Garth Harries (pictured above) announced recommendations for the new evaluations at the Board of Education Monday evening. Under the proposal, New Haven’s 1,800 public school teachers would be ranked according to their instructional practices, their professional values, and how well their students do. That includes how well students perform on standardized tests, but it also includes whether or not students reach goals decided upon by teachers and principals at the beginning of the school year.
The recommendations were put together by a committee of teachers, administrators and parents over the past six months. The board reviewed them Monday but did not take a vote. A vote is expected at the board’s next meeting on May 10, when a system for evaluating principals will be presented.
The new evaluations are part of New Haven’s nationally recognized school reform drive. Last fall, New Haven received acclaim for a landmark contract with the teachers’ union. The contract paved the way for a new evaluation system — one that grades teachers on how their students perform.
New Haven will be among the first wave of districts in the country to incorporate student performance into teacher evaluations. It’s the kind of evaluation that has been encouraged by President Obama’s Race To The Top education initiative.
The new evaluation system would likely lead a few teachers to lose their jobs, but would also give them more resources for improvement and opportunities for leadership, said teachers union president Dave Cicarella. A survey that came out in January showed that city teachers welcome the change: They want to see truly bad teachers fired, not protected.
In past years, the idea of using student performance to evaluate teachers has been completely off the negotiating table for teachers, said union President Cicarella (pictured). What makes this system palatable for teachers is that it considers more than just test scores, Cicarella said.
On Monday evening, with the help of a PowerPoint presentation, Harries laid out the details of the proposed evaluation system, scheduled to go into effect in September.
It will use a scale from one — “Needs Improvement” — to five — “Exemplary.” Teachers will receive a preliminary score by Nov. 1. If teachers at level one have not improved by the end of the year, they will likely be fired, though that’s not an automatic outcome. Teachers at level two — “Developing” — will have to make it to level three — “Effective” — within two years or they too will face termination. Teacher scores will not be available to the public.
There will be three components to teacher scoring. Two of those, “instructional practice” and “professional values” are based on observations by administrators. For the former, teachers will have to show they are prepared for class, can manage their classrooms, and adjust their teaching based on student performance. For the latter, teachers will have to demonstrate professionalism, collegiality, and high expectations for students.
The third component is student performance. That includes standardized tests, where applicable. But it also includes other measures, including whether or not students achieve goals agreed upon by teachers and administrators at the beginning of the year.
For instance, art classes aren’t subject to standardized tests. Under the new system, an art teacher would meet with her principal at the beginning of the year. She might decide that an appropriate goal for third graders would be to have them conceive of, design, and implement an individual art project by the end of the year, Harries said after the meeting.
If at the end of the year, if the 9‑year-olds haven’t made their presidential portraits out of pasta or built their toilet-paper-tube robots, their teacher would not have met her goal and would be graded accordingly.
The three evaluation components are combined into an overall score. It wouldn’t be a simple average, Harries told school board members. The instructional practice score is combined with the professional values score at a rate of 80 percent to 20 percent. The resulting number would then be combined with the student performance score according to a grid (pictured) which gives more weight to student performance ratings that are either very high or very low. The result is that evaluations are “closely tied to student achievement,” Harries said. “But with integrity.”
The new system is not just about evaluation, it’s equally about teacher development, Harries said. Evaluation and teacher support will be ongoing throughout the school year. Support will include goal-setting, classroom observation by administrators, coaching, co-teaching, and feedback sessions.
“Teachers are constantly getting feedback to improve their performance,” Harries said.
Leadership opportunities would be available for teachers who receive scores of five. Teachers with scores of one would receive “immediate and sustained support,” Harries said. That support would come from the district and from the teachers’ union. If the teacher has not improved by the end of the year, he or she would be “exited,” Harries said.
As a check on the system, a peer evaluation system would kick in for scores of one or five. Such scores would be reviewed by former teachers who would “go into the classroom and confirm the principal’s judgment,” Harries said.
Two consultants with a national consulting non-profit spoke up at Monday’s meeting to provide some perspective for how New Haven’s teacher evaluations fit into a nationwide picture. Around the country, “teacher evaluation systems are broken,” said Jennifer Mulhern (at right in photo) with the New Teacher Project.
New Haven’s system on the other hand, “sets you at the forefront of a national conversation,” said Ellen Hur (at left). New Haven’s teacher evaluations would be set apart by its collaborative nature. Teachers worked closely on the project alongside school board officials, making the system very “credible,” Hur said.
The system is also notable because it incorporates student performance measurements, Hur said. That aspect is “absolutely critical,” and very rare, she said. It means you won’t see schools with failing students and highly rated teachers, she said.
Board member Alex Johnston (pictured) also praised the evaluation plan as putting on New Haven on the “edge” of school reform nationally.
After the meeting, Cicarella explained why his union supports the new teacher evaluations. For years, there were two things on which the teachers’ union would simply not negotiate. The first was tenure, the second was evaluating teachers based on student performance. Teachers are buying into the new evaluating system because it addresses both of those things in a fair way and it addresses two public perceptions that damage the union, Cicarella said.
People sometimes think that tenure allows unions to protect bad teachers, to simply “circle the wagons,” and make tenured teachers untouchable, he said.
Under the new system, tenured teachers are subject to the same evaluation procedures as new teachers, with the same consequences. But “we are not throwing tenured teachers to the curb,” Cicarella said. They’ll be offered “real assistance” and support, and they’ll also be fired if they don’t improve, he said.
Like new teachers, tenured teachers would be evaluated according to criteria they’ve agreed to with their supervisors. If they don’t improve, there would be a clear record of the efforts that were made by administrators to support them. That may make appeal hearings less likely for tenured teachers, Cicarella said.
The other public perception is that teachers should be fired when their students do poorly on tests, Cicarella said. “That’s what we’ve pushed back against.”
The response from teachers has always been that standardized tests are not designed to measure teacher performance, that it’s not a fair measure of how well a teacher is teaching. The new evaluation system addresses the issue by making standardized test scores just one way of measuring teacher performance.
Cicarella predicted that there may be some teacher terminations at the end of the next school year. Even if 99 percent of New Haven’s 1,800 teachers are teaching effectively, that still leaves 18 that aren’t, he said.