Rating teachers
Creating an objective system for evaluating Nevada teachers has proven to be a “gargantuan challenge” because 70 percent of teachers don’t administer standardized tests to their students, says Pamela Salazar, chairwoman of the Teachers and Leaders Council of Nevada, the group which the state Legislature created to develop the first-ever statewide evaluation system.
The Legislature is mandating that the new evaluation system use student achievement data for at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. But the only universal data come from the state’s standardized tests in English, writing and math courses in third through eighth grades and one grade in high school, complains Rorie Fitzpatrick, a council member and Nevada’s deputy superintendent of Instructional, Research and Evaluative Services.
“I don’t know if it will be achievable,” Assemblyman Lynn Stewart said Wednesday after hearing the council give a progress report.
Really? The Council is loaded with union teachers, whose rallying cry has always been that every teacher must be treated the same. Is it any surprise that the members thus claim to find a task which many in their profession don’t really want them to accomplish to be “insurmountable”?
Yes, the best measure of teacher quality is how far students under their tutelage advance in the course of a school year, as measured by standardized testing.
But as long ago as 1997, in their book “Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality,” Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky discovered a virtual unanimity among task forces studying teacher effectiveness that there were demonstrable correlations between teacher effectiveness and the selectiveness of the college or university that teacher attended.
For secondary school teachers, a degree in an academic subject rather than “education” was also found to correlate well with teaching effectiveness.
If the members of the Council want to assure the best teachers are retained and advanced, they could start by giving a leg up to those who have attained degrees in their area of expertise outside of a “school of education.”