Arne on Teacher Evaluation Metrics and Celebrating Success in STEM

Arne recently sat down to answer a couple of questions posted to his Facebook page. In response to Lori’s question about teacher evaluation metrics, Arne said that we have to look at multiple measures in order to see how much students are improving, and how much they are growing each year. Other measures include peer assistance, principal evaluation, portfolios, what teachers are doing in terms of their own professional development, and what leadership teachers provide to their school and community.

“Whether it is a teacher, a principal, anyone in education, anyone in any other field, you have to look at multiples measures, student’s growth and achievement being a part of that, and a significant part, but just one piece of that overall equation,” Duncan said.

Nils commented on the need to celebrate the success in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) areas just as we celebrate great athletes. Arne agreed and said that a good starting point is to recruit about 100,000 additional STEM teachers over the next decade so that not only high school students, but 4th, and 5th, and 6th graders have a chance to be taught by teachers who are passionate about and love the STEM fields.

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Once Nearly 100%, Teacher Tenure Rate Drops to 58% as Rules Tighten

The era of automatic tenure for teachers in New York City is over, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Wednesday.

Under tougher evaluation guidelines that the city put into effect this year, 58 percent of teachers eligible for tenure received it, the mayor said at a news conference at the Department of Education. A decision on tenure was deferred for 39 percent of eligible teachers, up from 8 percent a year ago. Three percent of eligible teachers were denied tenure outright in both years.

Five years ago, roughly 99 percent of eligible teachers — those who had completed their third year on the job — received tenure, mirroring statistics in school districts around the nation.

While state law outlines the general procedures for awarding tenure to teachers, the details are left to individual districts. “We’ve turned what had been a joke interpretation of the state law,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “to make it something that you have to work hard, earn, and show that you are better than the average bear” to get.

Under the city’s new standards, teachers are rated on a four-point scale as highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective, based on students’ tests scores, classroom observations, feedback from parents, and other factors. (Previously, they were simply rated satisfactory or not.) Principals, who make recommendations on tenure, and supervisors, who make the decisions, were allowed to give tenure only to teachers who were rated effective or better for two consecutive years.

But as city officials predicted that the new policy would improve the quality of the teaching force, the results raised questions about its current state since so many teachers up for tenure were not rated effective.

The teachers’ union, defending the performance of its workers, objected to the way some of the evaluations by administrators were performed, and said it did not find the results, in terms of tenure, credible.

Many teachers, said Michael Mendel, the secretary of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, believed that their principals recommended against tenure for reasons not directly tied to performance.

Mr. Mandel said principals were told by supervisors that if they did not do enough teacher observations, they “didn’t see them enough times to be able to judge.” Principals new to their schools, Mr. Mandel said, were told that because they had been there a year or less, they “didn’t have enough time to make a decision.”

The city said that it had given no such guidance, and defended its system as accurate.

Some teachers complained that the evaluation standards were unclear. At one middle school in Manhattan, for example, teachers were given two weeks to prepare portfolios of students’ work, with little guidance.

One math teacher who has a business background said she had rushed to put together a three-inch binder of student work to submit along with other data, including a number of satisfactory evaluations. But she may have been penalized, she said, because her students’ standardized test scores dropped in her second year. Speaking anonymously because she feared retribution, she said that a decision on tenure for her had been deferred. Only about 15 percent of those who qualified for tenure at her school got it.

“We all decided that if it looks this way again in January,” she said, “we will just all quit and the principal will be left holding the bag.”

The percentage of teachers not granted tenure in the city has been steadily rising. In 2005, less than 1 percent of the roughly 6,250 teachers up for tenure failed to get it. By 2009, 11 percent of teachers up for tenure were passed over. That shift is being driven mostly by teachers who are given an extra year of probation. Outright tenure denials — the equivalent of being dismissed — remain rare. Even as the number of teachers given an extra year of probation leapt to 2,024 this year from 465 in the 2009-10 school year, the number of teachers denied tenure dropped to 151 from 234 in the 2009-10 school year.

Mr. Bloomberg said that the city would help train the teachers who now will work a fourth year without tenure, and that he hoped they would all earn tenure eventually. There is no limit to the number of years a teacher can remain on probation, although last year, one-third of those whose probation had been extended were dismissed.

The mayor rejected the idea that the teachers who were given an extra year to improve were unfit for the classroom. “It’s not that they are bad,” Mr. Bloomberg said of those teachers. “It’s that they are not up to our standards yet.”

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School Officials and Union Agree on Pilot Program for Teacher Evaluations

In a step toward reshaping how all teachers in New York City’s 1,700 public schools are judged, the Department of Education and the city teachers’ union agreed on Friday to a pilot teacher-evaluation system that will take effect next year in 33 struggling schools.

The deal, which ended months of disagreement, was needed for the city’s continued participation in a federal grant program that could bring up to $65 million in grants — up to $6 million for some schools — over the next three years.

City officials announced months ago that they had applied for the grants for the 33 schools. But the application was stalled by the state, which had to approve it and which said it was dissatisfied with proposals for how the money would be used and how teachers would be evaluated.

As of Friday, the city had not yet submitted its revised plans to Albany, state officials said, making it impossible to know for sure whether the schools would continue to receive the money.

Under the deal, announced by the city, all teachers in the struggling schools — schools with low graduation rates and low student test scores — will be rated annually as either ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective. In the current system, in place for decades, teachers have been rated simply satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

The revised system mirrors a recent state law that will require that four-tier evaluation scale to be used for all public school teachers statewide in the coming years. The troubled schools will be a testing ground for that system, union and city officials said.

”If we have an opportunity to look at this on a small scale, we might come to a better understanding of some of the issues inside of that legislation,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teacher’s union.

But the city and the union remain a long way from a deal on reforming evaluations for all teachers, and many details of the evaluation system even within the pilot program have not been worked out.

Two of the most contentious unresolved issues are how much weight students’ standardized test scores will be given in a teacher’s evaluation alongside other measures of progress, and whether the union would agree to new standardized tests that the city is considering.

Several problems have beset the city’s effort to acquire the school improvement grants. Eleven schools were due to receive the grants starting last year, but delays in the application process meant that the money did not begin flowing until January, limiting its effectiveness. The city was also forced to reshape its plans for many of the remaining schools because of disagreements with the union.

Talks between the union and the city about the evaluation system foundered over whether a teacher would be allowed to ask for a meeting with a principal after a negative evaluation and whether the union could file a grievance on behalf of a teacher if such a meeting was not held, both parties said.

In the end, the city agreed to most of the union’s requests on that issue, in exchange for requiring that a record of a negative evaluation remain in a teacher’s file, said Matt Mittenthal, a Department of Education spokesman.

The federal grants were intended to help the city devise a plan for the struggling schools, most of which are high schools, to avoid having to close them. The grant can pay for additional training for teachers and would give principals the ability to hire “master teachers” who would be paid a 30 percent premium and would work extra hours.

Some of the schools will be taken over by a nonprofit organization under a plan called a “restart” in the federal government’s grant language.

The schools eligible for the grants include Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Boys & Girls High School and John Dewey High School in Brooklyn; Flushing High School and Long Island City High School in Queens; Herbert H. Lehman High School and Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx; and Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.

Brian Rosenbloom, the principal of Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, one of the schools that had begun to receive grant funding this year, said news of the deal was not surprising in light of the budget accord last month that saved the jobs of 4,100 teachers.

“I figured they would come up with an agreement as soon as they decided they wouldn’t lay anyone off,” he said.

There was a sense of relief that after months of uncertainty, the grant money, particularly needed in a time of budget cuts, had been secured, even though the hard work lies ahead.

“It’s fantastic that there will be additional resources put into high-needs schools,” said Robert Hughes, the executive director of New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that has applied to manage five struggling schools. “Now we have to make sure that those resources are effectively used.”

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