Teacher Evaluations Gone Amok

Katherine here.

Today is my first day off after coaching my flock of teachers this year.  That's what I do.  I help interesting folks finish the requirements for Colorado teaching licenses.  These aren't teachers fresh out of college who've been through a traditional program.  These are people with degrees who are shifting careers.  They have amazing experience and often make remarkable teachers.

I've done this seven years now.  I've worked with a National League Baseball Umpire who is now a calculus teacher and baseball coach at Gateway in Aurora.  One teacher fought forest fires in New Mexico and became a superb science teacher for students expelled from Denver Public Schools (DPS).  I've worked with Broadway dancers, one comedian,  two real live rocket scientists and several remarkable artists.   This year's group included a Flamenco dancer from Mexico City, a mountain and ice climber from Venezuela. and a PROUD Latino Zumba instructor.  I love learning how each of them found a way to a classroom.

I see these folks twice a month and I get to know them.  When they worry, I worry.  I'm excited that two will get married this summer and one will travel to England.  I hope those having to take DPS ELA units can manage to find open classes that fit with their lives.  I want good things for them.

The job has been harder this year and not because of the 17 teachers I've been working with since last August.  Mostly it's the atmosphere of teacher oppression that wore me down.  There seems to be a universal attack on teachers that has lived a long time on editorial pages and blogs.  Teachers are scoundrels who do nothing and reap great retirement benefits--that sort of thing.

This year teacher hatred, however, has become very real for classroom teachers, especially DPS teachers living through their LEAP evaluations.  LEAP has created a culture of fear in lots of DPS schools--especially where there isn't a strong principal who really knows his staff thoroughly and accurately.

Here's as brief a synopsis of this situation as I can muster--listed in steps to keep me under control.

1.  The Colorado Legislature passed a law basically attaching problems in education (low test scores, etc) to "bad" teachers.  This is a new data-driven concept derived from a Harvard study showing that the biggest impact on student success was the teacher.  The legislature reversed the logic (along with many other state legislatures) and decided lack of success should be attributed to "bad" teachers.  In the Colorado Legislature's effort to get Federal Race To the Top dollars, they made districts responsible for large and sweeping changes in teacher evaluations with the goal of improving things by the elimination of all those "bad' teachers.

2.  DPS saw the huge cost factor and wrote grants leading to the creation of The New Teacher Project.  It was designed to create a massive and eventually high-risk evaluation system.

3.  The New Teacher Project, led by former Teach For America and DC Education Bureaucrat  Richard Greene, shared the program's goal at meetings with Metro State staff where I work.  Greene indicated that since data showed that 20% of teachers are "bad," the goal would be to eliminate 20% of teachers each year.  High expectations.

4.  The evaluation program, LEAP, that Greene designed and led, was staffed with a small army of Teach for America folks who all seem to be 28 years old, female, never wear coats even in cold weather, and behave as though their two years of Teach For America experience and a summer workshop with Greene and his statistics can cure all things educational.

5.  The LEAP army is supposed to see teachers 4 times a year.  Teachers are given notice of a two week window when an evaluation could take place. (often missed because the evaluators seem to always be running behind).  I think there are eight pages of teaching components the teacher is to demonstrate in any forty minute time the LEAP observer arrives.  It doesn't matter if it's a fire drill or the last day before a big vacation or if you happen to be giving a district assessment.  That forty minutes is your fate.

6.  There are 8 LEAP categories with sub-components that define master teaching.  If a teacher was part of "the pilot," he/she needed to score a 5 in 5 of the 8 categories in order to have the teaching contract renewed.   Student test scores can help the teacher if the teacher has enough students for the scores to count.  Greene changed the rules late this year and eliminated the bottom score--mostly because all pilot teachers would have to be non-renewed I think.   The non-pilot teachers have three years to get their numbers up to par and then their jobs are on the line too.

7.  The LEAP program sends fliers to all teachers with photographs of happy instructors smiling and saying, "I've been Leaped."  The fliers did not make my group of DPS teachers embrace the system.

This kind of high-stakes evaluation system isn't about helping teachers.  This LEAP system has turned an awful finger-pointing public symptom into something real and concrete for teachers in DPS.  These folks are doing well in their classrooms for beginners.   They might do even better without the threatening numerical system and the army of LEAPers who seem to know it all and have expectations I don't believe they could pull off themselves.

The Colorado Legislature blew it by making teachers the scapegoat for everything wrong in education and assuming a great evaluation program could be a panacea.  Denver Public Schools blew it because the district took the law so seriously.  They have made their own work force paranoid.  Paranoid people rarely grow and improve.  They are too busy being worried.  Really good teachers need to worry about kids, not their own LEAP scores.

So far there is nothing like the LEAP evaluation program in other Metro area districts.  Maybe they don't have skilled grant writers.  Maybe they felt the evaluation systems they had in place would do the trick if they just did a better job of following through with them.  Maybe there is some common sense in other districts.  Time will tell.

My job was harder this year.  My 16 DPS teachers worried more than they ever had.  There was a whole new level to their worry this year beyond meeting standards and helping their students grow.  It made me worry more too.  I'm ready for a break.