Editorial

Let's do teacher evaluations right

Posted

Now that the State Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have apparently reached a budget agreement that includes a revised teacher evaluation system, we hope the State Education Department takes the time to create effective and judicious rules that work for those with the most invested in the outcome: our schools’ students.

The annual professional performance review in use now is based on classroom evaluations of teachers conducted by administrators (60 percent of a teacher’s rating), students’ performance on their schools’ testing and other local measures (20 percent) and their performance on state exams (20 percent).

According to the 2013-14 teacher evaluations, 95 percent of teachers statewide were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were categorized as “developing,” and 1 percent were rated ineffective.

State test scores, for the most part, don’t track well with the high rate of teacher effectiveness. As a result, many observers, including the governor, say the system needs an overhaul. Their point is that there should be some consistency between teachers’ ratings and students’ performance on standardized tests.

But another view is that the process of evaluating teachers — especially with the increased weight given to state test results that Cuomo has insisted on — has become a distraction for educators, parents and politicians. Teachers and school administrators are concerned about performance, and rightly so, but that can’t help but distort the educational progress by forcing teachers to focus more on preparing their students for tests than on educating them. Teachers say they’re coaching for tests instead of teaching.

Based on the growing “opt-out” campaigns spearheaded by parents, in which students don’t take the state tests — for reasons ranging from the pressure those tests heap on them to their parents’ contention that the exams don’t properly measure what the students are learning — many have concluded that our educational priorities are in dire need of re-examination.

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