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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

One firsthand account of how teachers could soon be observed | GothamSchools

One firsthand account of how teachers could soon be observed | GothamSchools

One firsthand account of how teachers could soon be observed

The fight over the state’s new teacher evaluations has focused on the 40 percent to be based on student test scores. But the other 60 percent, based on subjective measures like principal observations, could be just as tough.

That’s according to one teacher reporting from a school piloting the city’s stricter guidelines for classroom observations.

Commenting in our Community section yesterday, a reader posting as HS Biology Teacher said that system “seems to be designed to make it extremely easy to rate any teacher ineffective if the principal wants to.”

The DOE has drafted a rubric for rating classroom observations, but it is very tough. To be rated