PA: A Chance To Improve Teacher Evaluation

No sooner had I written about taking back teacher evaluation, then a note crossed my desk about SB 751 and HB 1607.

Pennsylvania's teacher evaluation system is currently pretty lousy. There is nominal commitment to the Danielson model, a time-consuming pre- and post- observation process that involves a big bunch of online paperwork and Q & A answering, a cumbersome process involving Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) that-- well, it might be a stretch to say that nobody really understands SLOs, but I think it's fair to say that how SLOs play out for teachers depends an awful lot on how your local administration interprets the process.

And after you suffer through all that, your evaluation score still depends a lot on scores on the Big Standardized Test (in the Commonwealth, that's PSSAs for elementary and Keystones for secondary).  Your school gets a rating (SPP/Future Ready Index) that is about 90% test score based (the numbers are massaged a couple of different ways then added back together). If you teach a tested subject, you get another little jolt of test score magic. After everything is all factored together, you'll find that you are somewhere in the acceptable middle. All PA administrators are apparently required by law to keep repeating, "Nobody lives in distinguished. You just visit." The state doesn't want a whole bunch of awesome teachers for some reason, but the practical result is a bunch of teachers who get to have one or two peak years and thereafter look like they went back to slacking off.

Currently evaluation is about 50% observation, and and the rest a combination of processed and reprocessed test scores (i.e. your SPP), plus, in some cases, your SLO.

Because the testing is weighted so heavily, high-poverty schools are at a disadvantage. And the SPP (which is morphing into the Future Ready PA Index) is largely test-score based, which means math and reading scores, which means every teacher in the system who doesn't teach those subjects is being evaluated on them anyway. Not that the state is very forthcoming about this-- here is how Pennsylvania explain the computing of school ratings on its FAQ:

Q: What is the source of the data used in the calculations? Who performs the calculations?
A: All data comes from PDE’s authoritative data sources such as PSSA results from Data Recognition Corporation, Bureau of Assessment and Accountability, Bureau of Special Education, Bureau of Career and Technical Education, Education Names and Addresses (EdNA), Pennsylvania Information Management System (PIMS), Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System (PVAAS) results from SAS, Inc., Advanced Placement (AP), SAT results from the College Board, and ACT results from ACT, Inc.

It's always a bad sign when your own FAQ page is dodging the question. SPP replaces AYP and is becoming Future Ready PA Index, with none of those changes actually involving a change of much more than rhetoric. FRP is more up-to-date gobble-dee-gook, but it's still mostly math and reading scores. Like SPP, it gives a few points for things like AP classes offered and AP tests taken (way to go, College Board marketing department).

SB 751 and HB 1607 would improve this in several ways.

The student scores on a Big Standardized Test (which students have no stake in because the legislature keeps losing its nerve about making test results a student graduation requirement, and may let them substitute something else) would be cut. The observation would be bumped up to 70%. Plus, everyone can be distinguished; no more just visiting for just a few.

The old system said that if you hit two "needs improvement" within a decade, you went to the naughty list; the proposal says it would take two low scores within four years. That maters because PA actually did away with FILO, saying that "unsatisfactory" teachers must be laid off first. The number of unsatisfactory-rated teachers in PA has always been small (usually a couple hundred out of 130,000-ish).

The Senate bill passed in June while the House bill is languishing in committee. If you're in PA, you might want to give someone a holler about that. The proposal is not perfect, and it doesn't solve the "my principal is a jerk" problem, but at least it gets us further away from the foolishness of a science teacher being evaluated on math and reading test results.