Channel Student’s Energy to Social-Justice Projects

Commentary by VIVA Teacher Leader Mark Anderson in the Albany Times-Union.
January 30, 2012

New York’s plans to implement its new teacher evaluation law have been met with outcries from principals, wariness from teachers and legal objections by the New York State United Teachers. All of that might have been averted if state leaders had more fully considered the perspective of educators before developing their implementation plans.

Last January, I was one of a group of teachers from across the state working with The VIVA Project to develop classroom-based solutions for effective teacher evaluation measures. We developed a set of policy recommendations and delivered them to Dr. John King Jr., New York’s senior deputy commissioner of education. Central to our proposal was the insight that the process of evaluating teachers must be tied directly and explicitly to the establishment of a professional learning community within each school and district.

A professional learning community is designed to engage teachers and administrators in continuous dialogue, feedback and support in order to improve teacher performance and, consequently, student learning. Without that, any evaluation process will inevitably devolve into checklists (no matter how advanced the instrument), ‘gotcha’ feedback, and more meaningless paperwork that has no impact on learning.

Our report also advocated for peer evaluations in addition to administrator observations. Teachers bring valuable understanding of the context of a given school, which is especially important in districts where students face daunting academic and life challenges. Working together, teachers can leverage the information from effective teacher evaluations to foster professional development, enhance instruction and nurture student growth and learning.

Without these classroom-based considerations, it is no surprise that New York is encountering this opposition. It has opted for shallow measures of teacher evaluation, such as allowing local districts to use state test scores to account for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

All teachers know that one summative measure of a test score cannot tell you all the information you need to know about an individual student’s personal growth in your classroom. Rather, teacher evaluations must account for student growth based upon measurements that gauge more accurately how much a student has progressed over the course of a school year.

For students who face great academic challenges, such as those with exceptional learning needs or students undergoing acute stress in their home lives, this consideration is paramount.

Policymakers are far removed from the realities and challenges of the classroom. They understandably place great emphasis on measures that are easily definable and quantifiable. But teachers know that ground-level implementation of any policy measure must take into consideration the context of a school and community in order to be implemented with fidelity.

Otherwise, this so-called evaluation is nothing more than a ruse to allow policymakers and politicians to check mandates off their list so they can garner federal money and more easily blame districts and teachers when they fail to measure up on disconnected data points.

Changing the cultures of schools requires much more than simple directives on how to evaluate teachers. It requires an understanding of evaluation measures like those we recommended in our VIVA Project report.

Only then can we build the sort of professional learning community necessary for an authentic conversation geared toward professional growth and improved student learning.

Mark Anderson is a fifth-grade teacher in an elementary school in the Bronx.