Aside from the proposal by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel that the RA should give the Obama administration an early no strings endorsement, an extra issue of concern for many members is the Policy Statement on Teacher Evaluation and Accountability.
While the policy statement probably doesn’t go far enough for IEA lame duck President Ken Swanson and IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin, the IEA leadership has already endorsed it as it is written.
This is the section that is of primary concern:
Indicators of Contribution to Student Learning and Growth
demonstrating a teacher’s impact on student learning and growth. Such indicators must be authentic, reflect that there are multiple factors that impact a student’s learning beyond a teacher’s control, and may include the following indicators or others chosen by a local or state affiliate: student learning objectives developed jointly by the teacher and principal/evaluator; teacher-created assessments, district or school assessments, student work (papers, portfolios, projects, presentations); teacher defined objectives for individual student growth; and valid, reliable, high quality standardized tests that provide meaningful information regarding student learning and growth. (My underline.)
The IEA leadership has already gone on record as supporting the existing language of the statement. I am hearing that there is concern among other state delegations.
Some want the language about the use of standardized test scores removed from the policy statement entirely.
Others want a qualifier such as, “However, these tests are inherently unreliable for measuring or assessing individual teacher effectiveness.”
That would be pretty goofy. On the one hand we support using student test scores to evaluate teacher performance and on the other hand we think they are inherently unreliable.
Go figure.
Clearly, the NEA leadership is not concerned with nuance. They want the story coming out of the RA to be that teachers support accountability.
In the current atmosphere of teacher bashing, the difficulty of doing teacher evaluation right is not going to get settled by a policy statement coming out of the RA.
The statement on test scores ought to be deleted.
Look for a spirited floor fight.
Fred Klonsky 