Friday, July 20, 2012

Those Insane and Demoralizing Evaluations. « Diane Ravitch's blog

Those Insane and Demoralizing Evaluations. « Diane Ravitch's blog:


Those Insane and Demoralizing Evaluations.

A teacher faces the state’s new evaluation with anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and confusion. She has a great idea about how to game this invalid, meaningless, absurd and punitive system:

It’s not just in LA that teachers are afraid. VA is implementing new eval requirements that must include student progress worth 40% of a teacher’s overal eval. The plan at my former school (might be at the new school I will be working for in the fall as well) was to develop pre and post tests to show growth over the year for non-tested subjects (and first year of a subject wouldn’t count, since obviously students would be starting at zero. I wasn’t really sure about the logic there). Yet, I was unable to ever get clear answers on how they would be implented for teachers of multiple levels/preps. One idea was that only one level would count. After I pointed out that this would incentivize focusing on only the level that counted to the detriment of the non-counted levels, I was met with silence. When I asked who was picking, I was also met with confusion. Moreover, it also occurred to me