Randi Weingarten, the president of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, recently proposed a new way to incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations and said she has commissioned an independent expert to help revise due process rules for teachers accused of misconduct.
Weingarten said the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT) wants “a fair, transparent, and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers. But we know we won’t have that if we don’t have an evaluation system that is comprehensive and robust and really tells us who is or is not an effective teacher.”
She took pains to say that her union’s membership supports the work, pointing to an internal survey conducted by AFT showing that teachers, by a 4-to-1 ratio, said their union should put a higher priority on promoting good teaching than on defending the job rights of teachers facing disciplinary action.
Weingarten outlined a four-step approach to teacher evaluations:
Weingarten’s caveat on the use of test scores was that teachers should not be evaluated on results that compare their current classes with the previous year’s classes, which is the method states typically use. That would appear to disqualify much, perhaps most, of the currently available state testing data from use in evaluation.
“You can’t compare apples to oranges,” she said. “You have to have a system where you’re looking at student growth. . .we have to look at student learning, but we have to do it in the right way, in a way that is reliable and valid.”
For those educators accused of misconduct or malfeasance, Weingarten said it will tap mediator Kenneth Feinberg, who served as special master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and is currently the special master for executive compensation for the federal Troubled Assets Relief Program, to lead due-process revisions and help the AFT develop protocols for handling allegations of teacher misconduct. “Too often, due process can become glacial process,” Weingarten said. “We intend to change that.”
“Although I don’t think that it is a practical idea to premise a high-quality teacher force on firing, I also think a high-quality teacher force cannot be achieved without that particular tool in the arsenal,” said Kate Walsh, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based research group. “The laws that all states have on the books regarding teacher dismissals make it just too costly and time consuming to fire a teacher for merely being weak. Good for Randi Weingarten and the AFT for recognizing that fact.”
Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, said Weingarten “should be applauded” for being open to the use of student test data in teacher evaluations. “It is a difficult step for them,” he said.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan expressed support for Weingarten’s ideas. “I give Randi great credit for publicly sharing data showing that her members are more interested in professional stature than job security,” he said. “Randi is really showing courage by raising these issues.”
The speech marked Ms. Weingarten’s most elaborate vision to date of what a good teacher-evaluation system might look like. She presented a framework based on feedback from union leaders and teacher-quality researchers in which evaluations would be based on a clear set of performance standards. Such an evaluation system should include “implementation of benchmarks,” Ms. Weingarten said, to ensure that administrators charged with overseeing the system follow through on their duties and provide tools and assistance so teachers can improve.
—“AFT Chief Vows to Revise Teacher-Dismissal Process,” by Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week, Jan. 12, 2010.
