Problems with D.C. teacher evaluation
Marni Barron, an innovative educator, shares my discomfort with many Washington area school districts that rate nearly 100.percent of their teachers as satisfactory. (I’m not kidding: Alexandria says 99.percent, Fairfax County, 99.1.percent, Montgomery County, 95, Loudoun County, 99, Prince George’s County, 95.6, and so on.)
But we disagree over the region’s most daring effort to assess educators honestly, the D.C. schools’ IMPACT program. I think it is a worthy experiment. Barron thinks it needs to do much more than it is designed to do to train teachers in its intricacies and demands.
Barron, 38, has been teaching, or coaching teachers, for 15 years. She works with the IMPACT system daily as the instructional coach assigned to help 15 teachers achieve and maintain excellence at Phoebe Hearst Elementary School in Northwest Washington. I (age withheld) have never taught a day of school in my life, and know no more about IMPACT than what I have read and heard from teachers.
Which of us are you going to believe?
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Achievement gap among best and brightest
My guest today is Debra Viadero, who reports on education research for Education Week and writes a daily blog called Inside School Research.
By Debra Viadero
When it comes to achievement gaps between students of different racial, socioeconomic and gender groups, the good news in recent years has been that the distances between those groups seem to be narrowing. The bad news: Not so for everyone.
When it comes to achievement gaps between students of different racial, socioeconomic and gender groups, the good news in recent years has been that the distances between those groups seem to be narrowing. The bad news: Not so for everyone.
For the nation's best and brightest, a new report says, academic gaps between girls and boys, between white students and disadvantaged minority students, between poor students and their better-off peers, and between English-language learners and their English-speaking counterparts have only widened, stagnated, or declined by a hair since the late 1990s.
If present trends continue, the authors of this new report say, black 4th graders won't catch up to their white classmates on mathematics tests until 2107!
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DCPS feeling IMPACT?
The District has told the Education Department that it "can barely keep up" with the demands of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's ambitious new teacher evaluation system, called IMPACT. That's according to D.C's recently completed application for "Race to the Top," the Obama administration's multi-billion dollar grant competition to fund education reforms.
School officials have said they are pleased with IMPACT's rollout so far, although it has received mixed reviews from teachers and scorn from union leaders. Launched last fall at a cost of $4 million, IMPACT uses test scores and an elaborate new "teaching and learning framework" to assess educators on everything from how clearly they deliver information to their commitment to the school community.
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