Teachers subject to plenty of evaluation

In her Dec. 19 commentary, Esther Cepeda claimed that “the system for evaluating teachers gets a failing grade.” She said that “teacher evaluations are ineffective in identifying excellence or negligence” and that “this evaluation dysfunction makes it nearly impossible to get bad teachers out of classrooms.”

She further stated that she is now teaching in a public school.

Is she teaching on Mars? How else could she be so ignorant about the rigorous national standards for teacher performance that have permeated teacher evaluation in many states? Since 1987 the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has been recognized as the gold standard in teacher certification. The board believes higher standards for teachers mean better learning for students. NB certification is a challenging and rigorous process.

So what does a voluntary national certification process have to do with teacher evaluation? Plenty. For the past several years our state’s K-12 teachers have been evaluated using a detailed rubric that is based on the board. The Nevada Educator Performance Framework includes five standards for Instructional Practice and four for Professional Responsibilities. Each of these standards is broken down into three or four specific and objective indicators of observable actions that an evaluator can identify. The teacher is expected to provide evidence of meeting every indicator of each standard.

Ms. Cepeda quoted Mark Dynarski of Pemberton Research who said that “teacher observation scores and student test scores show little correlation.” He needs to get in touch with the National Board for data on how student test scores improved when their teachers had NB certification. More research does need to be done on this topic, and I am sure it is in progress.

As for firing ineffective or incompetent teachers, this is happening right now. I personally know five teachers who were recently forced to leave the Clark County School District. Two lost their teaching licenses and went into a different line of work. Two went into early retirement, and one is now teaching at a private school. Private schools are not always better than public schools, particularly when they hire the public school’s rejects.

Dikka Rian

Henderson

Small change

Thomas Odegard’s Tuesday letter to the Review-Journal (“Economic innovators are destroying jobs”) is wishful thinking. The old adage “the only constant in life is change” has always applied and always will, particularly in business.

Labor is the most expensive component of most organizations — between pay and raises, benefits, vacations and retirement — and any company (or even government entity) is always looking at ways to eliminate or lessen the effect of the human factor. Computers and computer-controlled processes (see: water and sewage plants, airport operations), robotics (see: manufacturing, such as buses, cars and trucks), new methodologies (see: mining and fracking) and regulation and off-shoring are all ways to lessen the impact of human intervention.

Some industries, such as coal, are crumbling in the face of other fuels, such as gas, which use far fewer humans for extraction and are cleaner. Using foreign labor is a means to lower the cost of production so these companies can compete in a world environment.

Change is evident everywhere, whether we like it or not — just look at the Review-Journal, which would not even exist without the invention of the printing press. (How many monks did that put out of a job?) I don’t think that innovators are destroying jobs — it is people, who look at jobs as a forever indulgence and are completely unprepared for change, as difficult as that may be.

And if you want to participate in change without finding a technical job, buy some stock in Amazon, Boeing, Ford or Microsoft, to name but four of thousands of companies that embrace change.

Jim Foley

Las Vegas