Will Seniority-Based Layoffs Undermine School Improvement Efforts in Washington State?
Posted on 04 May | 0 comments
A centerpiece of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s school reform agenda, School Improvement Grant (SIG) funds are intended to transform or turn around chronically failing schools. Analyzing Washington State personnel files, researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that teachers at risk of layoff are concentrated in schools receiving SIG funds. Many teachers in these schools are newly hired, chosen on the basis of high ability and commitment to education of disadvantaged children.
A new analysis by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, "Will Seniority-Based Layoffs Undermine School Improvement Efforts in Washington State?" finds that policies known as “last in, first out” may disproportionately affect schools receiving SIG funding. In Washington’s SIG schools, about 23% of teachers are in their first three years of teaching. That’s nearly twice the proportion of new teachers in other schools in the same districts. This analysis concludes: “Under current policy, teachers in these schools will face a higher risk for layoffs, potentially destabilizing schools and undermining turnaround efforts.”
Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems
Posted on 03 May | 0 comments
U.S. public schools are in the early stages of a revolution in how they go about evaluating teachers. In years past there was little more than intuition and anecdote to support the view that teachers vary in their quality and, as such, it has been nearly impossible to discover and act on performance differences among
teachers when documented records show them all to be the same.
A new generation of teacher evaluation systems seeks to make performance measurement and feedback more rigorous and useful. These systems incorporate multiple sources of information, including such metrics as systematic classroom observations, student and parent surveys, measures of professionalism and commitment to the school community, more differentiated principal ratings, and test score gains for students in each teacher’s classrooms.
This report, "Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems," by Brookings tackles some of the tough questions that states and districts will face as they implement a new teacher evaluation model. Including: how a state or the federal government could achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to school districts for the recognition of exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system on those district? How can individual school districts benchmark the performance of their teacher evaluation system against the performance of evaluation systems in other districts or against the previous version of their own evaluation system? In other words, how can teacher evaluation systems be compared, one to another?
