John King's NYC APPR System and the Illusion of Choice
We had a department meeting on Thursday. We discussed the MOSL, the measures of student learning by which we will be judged. We're ESL teachers, and as you may know, that means our kids are English language learners. So we have to determine some way that we will be judged by their test scores, because Bill Gates thinks that's the only thing that matters, and therefore Arne Duncan and Barack Obama think so too.We have a MOSL committee in our school, and in August we determined that we would spread the joy. That is, if your department were to be judged by test scores, you would be judged on department scores rather than individual ones. We did not want teachers to be in competition with one another, and we did not want anyone to feel that helping a kid not in your class would somehow have the potential to do you harm.
So, because somehow the decision had not been made in August, or John King had a new and even stupider idea than those he'd had previously, we were asked to make a department decision. One person said that since we were all good teachers, we ought to be judged individually. I said that there was no validity to judging any teacher, good, bad, or otherwise by test scores, and that a recent study suggested that variability in test scores was influenced only 1 to 14% by individual teachers.
Given that, I suggested we sink or swim together, and my department agreed. In fact, our MOSL committee had already made that decision. However, there remains the fact that we are gambling on one another, and that while some of my colleagues may do better as a result, others will certainly do worse. Can there be any validity to a teacher evaluation system that actually asks you to throw the dice and hope for the best?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I get a bad rating as a result of this. Does that, by any stretch of the imagination, make me a worse