Gordon MacInnes, in today’s NJ Spotlight, advises that tying teaching evaluations to student growth is premature. The current teacher evaluation-tenure system,” he concedes, “is close to useless and needs to be improved. When a system reports that 98 percent of its practitioners are 'good' or 'great,' something is wrong.” But implementing a new system is potentially parlous to teachers who might be “left defenseless in the event of arbitrary, spiteful, uninformed, or undocumented evaluations." "Why not wait?” he says.
It's broken but let's not fix it.
Here’s what’s missing from MacInnes’ caution: any mention of the impact of "useless" evaluations on the education of students, especially those trapped in NJ school districts that have failed for decades. His editorial is all about protecting the adults from, say, Sen. Teresa Ruiz’s tenure reform bill or the DOE-administered teacher evaluation pilot program currently in its first year in 11 local districts. He describes NJ’s public education system as this “current mess,” but he’s not willing to risk any harm to the careers of educators even if that risk might benefit students.
Teachers are grown-ups. Grown-ups, in just about every other profession, withstand the occasional unfair assessments of their work. Who doesn’t know someone who’s complained of suffering through an especially harsh supervisor or getting passed over for a deserved promotion? We survive. We’re adults.
Not to get all sanctimonious here, but kids in Camden or Trenton or Newark are only in 1st grade once. They’re the ones who are defenseless. Professionals don’t need protection. Children do, or at least they need a shot at a proven cadre of instructors. If an improved teacher accountability system holds out any hope to kids, then isn't it worth a try?
Ironically, MacInnes uses the metaphor of an assembly line. That's how "reformers' view education, he says, because new data-driven evaluation systems are “mechanistic" and “if the products that come off the line don't sell, it must be the welders [teachers] who are to blame.” Of course, he’s playing off the now famous report “The Widget Effect,” which holds that current non-data-driven evaluations treat teachers like they’re on an assembly line, all interchangeable parts instead of highly-educated professionals. It’s an interesting point: his fear is that new methods of evaluation will reduce the art of teaching to scattergrams and we’ll sacrifice humanity. It’s a fair point but, again, it’s all about the grown-ups.
Right now just about all stakeholders -- NJEA leaders, school boards, parents, legislators -- are ready to come to terms on an improved method of teacher evaluation and tenure that uses student longitudinal growth as one measure, among others, of classroom effectiveness. MacInnes would have us retreat back to a twentieth century model that ignores students into order to protect teachers. That's condescending to the profession and unfair to kids.