*Disclaimer: I want to establish early on that I currently do not have a clear stance on teachers unions. I have seen, heard, and experienced both positive and negative things from them and do not wish to endorse or attack them at this time. For now, I want to comment on one particular issue that they have been entrenched in for years.*
People who don’t like what they see rarely look in the mirror. This is presumably a defense mechanism aimed at avoiding what you know is there. For decades, Teachers Unions have vehemently fought against the implementation of any meaningful evaluation system for teacher performance. Although it is difficult to admit, THERE ARE BAD TEACHERS. A colleague once told me that teacher effectiveness, like that of workers in any other industry, must be distributed much like a bell curve; there are some bad teachers, some great teachers, and most are probably middle of the line good. What politicians, teachers unions, administrators, and especially teachers struggle to concede is that these low tier teachers, unlike talking M&M’s and Santa Claus, do exist!
Midway through my second year teaching, the Florida Department of Education released its evaluations of teachers across the state. Even though I was excited to be rated “Highly Effective” I was also highly troubled by the data as a whole. According to the FLDOE, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (the third largest school district in the country) had one teacher that was rated “Developing/Unsatisfactory.” While it would be a great victory for any district to have all “effective” and “highly effective” teachers, it is statistically IMPOSSIBLE that out of thousands of teachers there is only one “bad” teacher in the entire district. If this was the case then Miami would have solved the problem in education and moved on to other matters of social justice/importance! Seeing how the ratings were given took away the excitement of my evaluation because it watered down the value of my score. Rather than being evidence to the strength of teacher performance in our state, these results show that our system is a joke. I went to great public schools in Miami but I know for a FACT that not all of my teachers were good and from my tenure as a teacher in the district I met many teachers who were a far cry from what the term “highly effective” connotes. We need an evaluation system that filters bad teachers out of education and supports/celebrates good teachers continuously.
Last month, a Florida judge ruled in favor of a newspaper’s suit claiming that the value added model (VAM) scores for individual teacher evaluations should be made public information. Reactions to the decision ranged from outrage to excitement. Teachers Unions immediately condemned the decision and said that it was essentially a spit in the face of educators. When I went onto the database to look up my own numbers I wasn’t upset at all, in fact I was proud. The top two VAM scores in my school went to teachers who worked with high need students with IEP’s that were enrolled in intensive and/or inclusion classes. These kids are some of the most challenging to work with and the growth that these teachers helped stimulate and guide is truly inspirational. The third highest score was mine. In my second year, I managed to have one of the top three VAM scores two years in a row. Looking at the data, I was unsure why there was such outrage. What are we afraid of? Why don’t we want to look in the mirror? I agree that my perspective is biased because I have always received high ratings but I strongly feel that my ratings were a result of my labor. If I got a poor rating (with the condition that I taught a core tested subject), instead of coiling up for an attack like a snake, I would go back and see what I could do better. If I couldn’t find ways to improve, then I would find a job that better suited my talents. This is harsh, but it’s realistic. I’m not artistic and have terrible handwriting; therefore I would never be good at graphic design, no matter how much I like art. Some people are simply not good at teaching, no matter how much they may like kids.
Teachers argue that the VAM system unfairly assigns scores to teachers outside of core subjects; I agree. They offer that teachers in untested subjects are unfairly judged; I agree. They state that the evaluation system overall is broken; I couldn’t agree more as evidenced by the paragraph above. All that being said, lets shift our focus from just regurgitating problems to coming up with solutions. If the teachers unions have enough money to hire a lawyer to fight a newspaper in court, they should allocate some funds towards hiring a statistician to formulate the algorithm that would produce a more equitable and fair evaluation system! Ignoring the flawed data we have is not the way to fix the system. Instead of working in a dichotomous us versus them system, we need to come together to devise a truly strong evaluation system that finds great teachers and highlights them but also finds bad teachers and gets rid of them. Without this, we will never get the sort of talent that we want in our classrooms leading our children and my T.H.U.G.’s. It’s time to look at the mirror on the wall…