Dunno. Jeffrey Weiss, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, does a service to the public by seeking and publishing data from the Richardson ISD's teacher evaluation database. Only two teachers were rated "unsatisfactory" in any of the eight rating criteria used. Only 41 of 2,346 teachers were rated less than "proficient" in any criteria. Weiss says he's reminded of Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon where "all the children are above average."
Wait a minute. Weiss leaves the impression that the laws of mathematics demand that the raw scores should be plotted on a graph and every teacher below the mid-point be judged to have a performance "below expectations." But that's not what's being measured. The teachers aren't being rated against each other but against a standard. The goal, the plan, is that *all* teachers meet that standard, that is, all teachers should be "proficient" in their profession. If they aren't, they shouldn't have been hired in the first place. If they somehow slipped through the hiring process, they ought to receive mentoring and training to become proficient. If they are unable to, they ought to be let go. If the administrators are doing their jobs, any competent ISD (which the RISD arguably is) ought to have a very high percentage of teachers judged "proficient." Such a result does not mean that all the teachers are above average and the RISD is not making such a claim.
I suspect Weiss knows this, but was trying to be clever by bringing up the saying about Lake Wobegon's children. Weiss promises "more serious journalism about it anon." Let's hope so. Perhaps he'll explore how "proficiency" is measured, how objective it is, and whether it's a meaningful measure of the quality of classroom instruction or correlates with student achievement. Because even though the goal might be to have every teacher be proficient, a claim that as many as 98% or 99% are proficient just might be a tad optimistic.
3 comments:
Agreed on all points. I do think the DMN knows this and they just got lazy or cute with the Wobegon angle.
I'll plead guilty to "cute." Or at least "mildly humorous." No kidding: I was invoking a metaphor rather than making an absolute statistical claim.
It turns out, of which more anon, that there's a recent study of teacher evals across the country that shows similar extremely positive results. And at some of the districts, the claims of competency fly in the face of student performance. Not so much in Richardson, though...
Jeffrey Weiss/DMN
Jeffrey Weiss, thanks for the feedback. I figured as much. I felt compelled to clarify because some readers just might dismiss the RISD data as ridiculous and others might treat the data as confirming that no improvement is needed in the quality of teaching in the RISD. I look forward to your further reporting to give us all a more complete picture of the truth.
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