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Overcast Teacher evaluation scores released
Weiss: Using 2-year-old assessments to judge district today is ‘absurd’
Last week, the New York State Department of Education released the Annual Professional Performance Review scores for the 2012-13 school year, which are meant to rate teachers’ effectiveness.
And while teachers in the Long Beach School District came away with average scores, Superintendent of Schools David Weiss said that at this point, focusing on results that detail where the district was two school years ago does nothing to improve the district today.
“I think it’s absurd,” Weiss said. “It’s wrong to be using student assessment scores from two years ago to judge accountability in the current school year. It would be like in baseball, MVP voting based on statistics from two years ago. Alex Rodriguez could still be eligible. It’s not up to date.”
APPR scores are determined by the district using a combination of student assessment scores, classroom observations and conferencing, and are then reported to the state.
Of Long Beach’s 333 teachers in 2012-13, 41 percent were scored “highly effective,” with scores of 91 to 100, and 59 percent were scored “effective,” with scores of 75 to 90, while none fell into the “developing” or “ineffective” categories. While the county and state had higher average percentages of highly effective teachers than Long Beach, they also had small percentages that fell into the two lowest categories, with scores below those of any Long Beach teachers.
Weiss took issue not only with the timing of the state’s release of the information, but with the standards against which teachers are measured — and students as well, under the state’s new Common Core curriculum. The numbers are not the most efficient way to determine what teachers need help with, Weiss said, adding that, similarly, the state assessments do not test crucial parts of what students should be learning in school.
The district, he explained, has had the data since September 2013, which the district reports and sends to the State Education Department, but the district was not permitted to release the scores at that time. Any issues that arose with teachers based on those results were addressed in the most recent school year, he said.
