Articles tagged with tenure

Teacher evaulation process needs evaluation

Photo courtesy Stockvault

Photo courtesy Stockvault

There’s a reason school districts still rely on the same teacher evaluation model that’s been around for half a century.

Many are not ready for anything more ambitious.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of local school leaders who do a great job of evaluating teachers.

It’s just that, with everything else there is to do in today’s public schools, the teacher evaluation process can get lost in the shuffle. You just assume it’s working fine.

That’s why there are principals out there who are not adequately trained to evaluate their faculty. And why there is little money out there to provide that training.

And why lots of mediocre teachers get a “satisfactory” rating each year—because principals don’t feel qualified to make hard judgments or prefer to avoid the hassles of dealing with a struggling teacher.

Of course, there also are those schools that just avoid the issue altogether. That reality was revealed in a new report that concludes the Boston Public schools “routinely neglect a basic task: evaluating teachers.”

According to the Boston Globe, the report, commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, found that “half the city’s approximately 5,000 teachers have not received an evaluation in the past two years, and a quarter of the city’s 135 schools have not conducted evaluations during that period.”
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Naomi Dillon|February 25th, 2010|Categories: Governance, Leading Source, Teachers|Tags: , |

As they move to layoff thousands, L.A. officials up the ante, aim to change labor law

The Los Angeles school board is considering a task worthy of Sisyphus. Some board members want to convince lawmakers to rewrite state laws that make it “virtually impossible to fire teachers.”

That’s the word from the Los Angeles Daily News, which reports that school officials say “they need to cull bad teachers from the ranks or students will suffer in the classroom.”

Good luck with that. A few years ago, there was a ballot initiative in California proposing to extend the time it takes a new teacher to earn tenure from two years to five years. The California Teachers Association rallied the troops and raised a multi-million-dollar war chest to kill that idea.

You don’t fool around with teachers’ job security.

But some members of the L.A. school board want to try. As they see it, the current budget crisis has focused public attention on education-and teacher layoffs have sparked discussion on teacher quality and about how seniority rather than competence determines which teachers stay and teach the children.

So now is the time to put teacher dismissal and tenure laws on the table for discussion. “It’s about weeding out people who shouldn’t be working with our kids,” board member Tamar Galatzan told the News.

I can’t argue with that. But it’s inevitable that such an effort will turn into a no-quarter-given political donnybrook. That’s a shame. There is room for a reasoned compromise.

Let’s face it: the school board has a point. State laws make it so tough and expensive to fire teachers that only 31 have been dismissed in California over the past five years. Just 31!

But I do worry that the solutions aired so far would swing the pendulum too much the other way. According to the News, board members want “a new evaluation method that would automatically fire teachers if they received two consecutive poor performance reviews.”

Here’s where I must side with the teachers union.
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Naomi Dillon|April 23rd, 2009|Categories: Governance, Leading Source, Teachers|Tags: , , , |
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