Making the evaluations public creates many problems:
1) parents will start comparing one teacher's review vs. another's and all of a sudden administrators will have to deal with parents who are constantly asking for teacher changes based on their interpretation of the reviews with no background to understand the context.
2) Different evaluators will reach different conclusions making them inherently unfair for someone outside the system.
3) If the evaluation are based on some measured metrics (eg a state test) then again the results might be very misleading - a good teacher who has the patients to work with kids with special needs or ADD distractability often get the most difficult kids so the results might be poorer because they were purposely selected to get the toughest kids for a reason and it is not a reflection on their ability - just the opposite.
4) teacher evaluations, like any other workplace evaluations, can often be political and a teacher might get a poor or overly good evaluation from a department head or principle who has ulterior motives to give a poor or a good review when it is inappropriate.
5) Reviews are meant, when properly used, to be a learning/teaching tool so good evaluations might be on the surface overly critical, and again misunderstood, to help guide teachers towards improvement - knowing they are public might cause evaluators to soften what they say.
and finally
6) Knowing they are public will change how the evaluator performs the evaluation and what they say - something that might be appropriate in a review could be a cause of action if viewed outside.
Neither students nor teachers will be helped with public reviews - it also might be a violation of the teacher's rights and violate contracts which matter to me too.
Ellen - 12 years ago
Often classes are arranged purposefully such as by grouping ESL students together depending upon their level (B,I,A,), or classes are "collaborative" which means Special Education students are put into a class with regular education students. These classes are made for a variety of reasons: staffing (it's easier to deliver instruction to ESL students if they are in 1 or 2 classes and grouped according to their English level of proficiency), to ensure that SPED students are exposed to a variety of levels of student abilities within their class which helps them learn more, a particular teacher may be better able to teach a certain type of child (ADD, ADHD, etc..) and therefore has higher # of unidentified special needs students, and so on. The bottom line is this : NOT all schools have the same type of student and NOT all classes within a school are arranged with the the SAME type of students and it would be a huge disservice to report and compare evaluations of teachers without knowing the composition of their class.
Making the evaluations public creates many problems:
1) parents will start comparing one teacher's review vs. another's and all of a sudden administrators will have to deal with parents who are constantly asking for teacher changes based on their interpretation of the reviews with no background to understand the context.
2) Different evaluators will reach different conclusions making them inherently unfair for someone outside the system.
3) If the evaluation are based on some measured metrics (eg a state test) then again the results might be very misleading - a good teacher who has the patients to work with kids with special needs or ADD distractability often get the most difficult kids so the results might be poorer because they were purposely selected to get the toughest kids for a reason and it is not a reflection on their ability - just the opposite.
4) teacher evaluations, like any other workplace evaluations, can often be political and a teacher might get a poor or overly good evaluation from a department head or principle who has ulterior motives to give a poor or a good review when it is inappropriate.
5) Reviews are meant, when properly used, to be a learning/teaching tool so good evaluations might be on the surface overly critical, and again misunderstood, to help guide teachers towards improvement - knowing they are public might cause evaluators to soften what they say.
and finally
6) Knowing they are public will change how the evaluator performs the evaluation and what they say - something that might be appropriate in a review could be a cause of action if viewed outside.
Neither students nor teachers will be helped with public reviews - it also might be a violation of the teacher's rights and violate contracts which matter to me too.
Often classes are arranged purposefully such as by grouping ESL students together depending upon their level (B,I,A,), or classes are "collaborative" which means Special Education students are put into a class with regular education students. These classes are made for a variety of reasons: staffing (it's easier to deliver instruction to ESL students if they are in 1 or 2 classes and grouped according to their English level of proficiency), to ensure that SPED students are exposed to a variety of levels of student abilities within their class which helps them learn more, a particular teacher may be better able to teach a certain type of child (ADD, ADHD, etc..) and therefore has higher # of unidentified special needs students, and so on. The bottom line is this : NOT all schools have the same type of student and NOT all classes within a school are arranged with the the SAME type of students and it would be a huge disservice to report and compare evaluations of teachers without knowing the composition of their class.