03/16/2014
Every additional star in a restaurant review on Yelp means a 9-percent increase in revenue. One in four Americans chooses a primary-care doctor from online ratings. At Carnegie Mellon University, where I've taught for over a decade, anyone can see my student evaluations online and these reviews determine whether I will remain a part-time professor there. Relying on ratings and evaluations of everything from restaurants and muffler shops to doctors and lawyers is now an accepted and essential part of our daily lives.
What would happen if Pittsburgh Public Schools teacher evaluations were available online? That is not likely to happen anytime soon (state law forbids it) but recently, public schools in our city did the next best thing. Some five years ago, teacher evaluations seemed to be the viable course for change and, after investing over $24 million from a grant from the Gates Foundation, Pittsburgh Public Schools worked with the teachers union and other key players to develop the Research-Based Inclusive System of Evaluation, also known as RISE.
The architects of RISE wanted to replace the nearly useless binary teacher evaluation system of “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” that is common across the commonwealth with something far more discerning and meaningful for students and teachers alike. Can you imagine asking a friend to recommend a pediatrician and getting a “satisfactory” response?
A year after implementing RISE, not surprisingly, the results showed our city's public school teachers falling into four broad categories. Those in the top group, 15 percent, were found to be teaching heroes, producing results at often twice the level of a second group of “proficient”-rated teachers. It is these proficient teachers who deliver a good product and, hopefully, are on a path of continuous improvement to becoming teaching heroes as well. Then there's a third group of teachers who, for different reasons, “need improvement.” That is, they need targeted professional development to become proficient.
Finally, one of the most significant results of RISE was the finding of a fourth group, about 10 percent of Pittsburgh Public Schools teachers. These teachers, based on multiple, sophisticated measures, are, in fact, failing our city's students. These teachers are in need of serious developmental remediation or, in some cases, termination.
A crude “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” never would have identified either the excellent teachers or the failing ones, let alone discerned the proficient ones from those needing improvement. Many factors affect student performance, yet failing to use the readily available and proven assessment tools now common in a host of high-skill professions like teaching means failing to acknowledge excellence and embracing mediocrity while contributing to still further dismal performance.
But ominous forces may undermine the extraordinary innovation that is RISE. For one, Pittsburgh Public Schools will be bankrupt by 2016, absent major immediate change. This is surprising (or maybe not, depending on how you view it), as our city's schools spend almost $19,000 per pupil, which is about $4,000 more than the per-pupil spending average throughout Pennsylvania public schools and about $5,000 more than the national average for per-pupil spending. Meanwhile, our city's students still fall far short of meeting even minimal academic standards.
The consequence of going broke is layoffs, and if they come under the current status-quo system of hiring and firing, the last teachers hired — no matter how good in the classroom they may be — will be the first ones fired. Our best and most promising teachers, as determined by RISE, simply have no protection. The pain of last-in-first-out layoffs will not be evenly felt across our city either, as schools serving low-income and minority students are twice as likely to have an ineffective teacher.
Worse, the existence of the RISE innovation itself is threatened because the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers is mounting a campaign to dilute the “cut score” component, making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify teachers in need of remedial support or termination. If we are not able to separate the excellent, good and trying-hard teachers from the failing teachers, then any evaluation system loses its purpose and meaning and we return to mediocrity or worse.
Some local leaders know we're at a moment of truth for our city's public schools. In 2013, Superintendent Linda Lane formed an extraordinary partnership with foundations, civil rights organizations and education nonprofits to make the case that the Pittsburgh schools should have more flexibility over furlough decisions in order to protect effective teachers, particularly in the city's most hard-to-staff schools. Sadly, the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers opposed this effort, too.
Every student in our city deserves the highest quality teaching possible and we must be willing to do everything to provide it. Fairness for both the provider and receiver of services is the prime motivator for any effective evaluation system, whether it is for something as mundane as finding a coffee shop or as vital as finding excellent teachers and great schools.
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