The state Board of Education next week will consider recommendations from the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council, a panel charged with reviewing the way teacher evaluations are performed, which will include proposals that teachers be evaluated, to a large degree, by how well their students perform on standardized tests.
The council also has suggested to the state board that annonymous input from parents and students be considered when teachers are evaluated, according to a report in the Connecticut Mirror.
The board will consider the council's recommendations when it meets next week.
The change in the way the state's 50,000 public school teachers are evaluated is the result of a sweeping education reform law that was pushed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in the last legislative session and approved by the General Assembly.
Malloy's reform proposals were widely criticized by teachers and their unions, but a compromise package was eventually approved. That deal sets in place, for the first time, a system by which teacher tenure and decisions on firing teachers will be tied to their evaluations, reviews that in turn will be tied to student performance.
The state Board of Education is now hammering out the details of how the new process will be implemented.
I’m not saying that’s easy. But that’s the mission. And whining about how much easier it would be if all the parents were like the best parents isn’t going to help. If our current educators don’t think they can do it, or prove by their performance that they cannot, then – teachers unions be damned – we need to replace them with folks who think they can and then go on to prove it. And we need to do it on an urgent basis. For if we write off a percentage of this generation of school kids as “uneducable” they will go and do what uneducated young kids do best – produce more uneducated/uneducable kids.
Trying to evaluate teachers and basing staffing decisions on evaluations is a good idea. But a better evaluation tool than the scores of their students on standardized tests needs to be used.