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The State of Florida, Inc. ??

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maybe there is someone here who has some first hand insight in how teachers are presently evaluated...
 
No wonder why Rick Scott loves Michelle Rhee and wants her involved in education policy in the state. Looks like she's possibly got honesty/fraud issues as well, so she's a peer in that regard:

Rhee faces renewed scrutiny over depiction of students' progress when she taught

At issue is a line in Rhee's resume from that year that described her record at Harlem Park Elementary School: "Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher."
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The study found modest, uneven gains in various grade levels at the school in a review of results from the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills. There were no separate results for Rhee or any other Harlem Park teacher. The study also noted that many students at the struggling Baltimore school were not tested.

But the results were presented in enough detail to raise questions about whether any single class could have made strides of the magnitude Rhee depicted on her resume.
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Could the problem be that people don't want a "black and white" way of evaluating students but people seem to want a "black and white" way to evaluate teachers?

That is why I like teachers negotiating their salaries individually with supervisors. There are simply too many variables (economic status of students, personal situations of students) to create a fair formula of how to grade teachers for pay.

But if teachers got to present their case and how much they think they should be paid relative to other teacher then that would be able to take into account the difficult circumstances that some teachers have to deal with.

Of course I understand that teacher unions would never go for such a system but that should be beside the point.
 
Mom was a public school teacher who ventured into the true 'dark side' of public education for a couple years- the central administration office. It was the part of the district that was non-union, and that translated into a truly mind-blowing level of neoptism, sexism, and racism in hiring, and pretty much zero protection when it came to protecting employees from hostile work environments. Want to get out of the secretarial pool? No need to put your years in if you just go ahead and sleep with the guy in charge of district athletics. Want an honest shot at getting a job? Sorry, the only people getting hired this year are related to either school board members or high-ranking administrators. (and for which we will pay them more than teachers with less than five years after giving them jobs effectively counting paperclips)
 
beachmouse said:
Mom was a public school teacher who ventured into the true 'dark side' of public education for a couple years- the central administration office. It was the part of the district that was non-union, and that translated into a truly mind-blowing level of neoptism, sexism, and racism in hiring, and pretty much zero protection when it came to protecting employees from hostile work environments. Want to get out of the secretarial pool? No need to put your years in if you just go ahead and sleep with the guy in charge of district athletics. Want an honest shot at getting a job? Sorry, the only people getting hired this year are related to either school board members or high-ranking administrators. (and for which we will pay them more than teachers with less than five years after giving them jobs effectively counting paperclips)
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Isn't that what happens in other industries every day?
 
Once again we are focused on the minutiae and exceptions, rather than finding a way to deal with the situation that will be occurring in the majority of cases.

Teachers are being compared to their peers. That means the same situations and pools of students apply equally to them within each school or district.

So in a school with a large amount of transients, all teachers have the same problems to deal with.

We are not talking about evaluating teaching skills to .001% accuracy, we are talking about finding a way to tell if a teacher is doing a good job of educating kids OR NOT.

If they are doing a good job, we want to reward them. If they are not, we want to either retrain them or find someone who CAN do a good job.

Either a teacher can control a classroom, inspire students, and teach them the basics of education they need OR can improve so that they can..............or they can't.

And one of the reasons I want a SIMPLE way to determine teaching skills is to help teachers regain authority and control in the schools - instead of parents usurping authority and undermining them.
 
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