We post a fiery letter from an OUSD teacher who attended GO Public Schools’ event Wednesday night. There GO and a coalition of other organizations (including SEIU 1021, Youth Together, Youth Uprising, OCO, and Education Trust-West) proposed to evaluate, fire, and hire teachers according to student test score data. Click here for the report. The teacher is as angry for what it leaves out as what it proposes. A must read on a very relevant issue for Oakland, as GO and Tony Smith appear to be making a full-court press to evaluate teachers by test scores.
Dear Great Oakland Public Schools, National Council for Teacher Quality and the Oakland Effective Teaching Coalition,
These are my thoughts about your “Teacher Quality Roadmap” and your event tonight, March 20th.
You presentation was based on an analysis of exceptional, average and weak teachers.
The only brief explanation of how you determine who is an exceptional teacher, average or weak teachers was in the number of years a student’s learning increases within a school year (based on standardized test scores I imagine although this was not explicitly stated). They said that highly effective teachers can raised student achievement by 1.5 years in a single year, average teachers can raise achievement by 1 year and weak teachers raise it by less than 1 year. As a teacher, this definition of effectiveness in teaching seems ignorant at best and quite honestly, insulting.
How dare you limit the way you understand my students’ success to their numbers on an undetermined test? How dare you assess how will I invest in, am creative with, care for, discipline, instruct, evaluate, grow with, develop respect with, inspire and nurture my students with this single figure? Without any consideration of all of the factors out of my control and out of my students control? Without any assessment of all other kinds of growth that happen in my classroom, in my conversations with parents, in the after school and before school tutoring hours? These may not show up on whether the student progressed 1 year or 1.5 years.
When my students show up to school everyday to learn even when people are getting mugged outside at 7am in the morning, even when a middle school student got shot last week walking to school, even when family members are being deported and laid off, even when their mothers are dealing with domestic violence and they fear for the lives of their baby siblings, even when because they are undocumented this district refuses to pay them the stipends that other students get, when they have childcare to do at home, when the district just decided to cut the classes that teach their parents how to help them with homework – they are exceptional, no matter what the number they score on your rubric.
Tags: Budget Cuts, Community Organizing, Corporate De-Form, GO Public Schools, National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Non-Profits, Oakland Effective Teaching Coalition (OETC), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Superintendent Tony Smith, Teachers
