N.E.A. Shifts Position on Teacher Evaluations - NYTimes.com

N.E.A. Shifts Position on Teacher Evaluations - NYTimes.com

At its national meeting this week the NEA has showed signs that it gets what the nation, in general, wants to happen with teacher evaluations. That is, the NEA, has finally said that student growth should be a factor (at least somewhat) in teacher evaluations. The national organization had to make some changes as many of its local organizations and school based affiliates have made the same concession. Didn't really make sense for the national portion to be strongly against the idea while many of its members were already being evaluated or on the way to being evaluated using test data.

However, the NEA, is trying to play both ends. They are supporting the idea, but not really. From the article:

The policy calls for teacher practice, teacher collaboration within schools and student learning to be used in teacher evaluations. But for tests, only those shown to be “developmentally appropriate, scientifically valid and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher’s performance” should be used, the policy states, a bar that essentially excludes all existing tests, said Douglas N. Harris of the University of Wisconsin, a testing expert.

Mr. Eubanks said, “We believe that there are no tests ready to do that,” though he added that with the new national Common Core curriculum standards being rolled out, new tests might be created that could meet the bar.

So really that translates into the NEA will support the use of tests that don't exist yet and may never exist. Interesting. I am not opposed to using testing data to evaluate teachers but I do believe testing results are only one measurement of a teacher's impact on a student's learning. There should be multiple measures (as objective as possible) to measure a teacher's impact. It makes some teacher's cringe but I also believe that student and parent input (ie satisfaction) should play a role in those same evaluations.