Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of talk about changing the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES). That’s because the system has failed to accomplish its intended purposes: It doesn’t differentiate teachers based on performance, nor does it help them improve their practice. It’s also unfair to many educators, it’s a paperwork pileup for administrators, and it’s a time-suck for students who must take local tests solely for the purposes of teacher evaluation. Taken together, Ohio has a policy ripe for major changes.
Enter Senate Bill 240, legislation introduced last December. It adopts the majority of the Educator Standards Board’s recent recommendations, including some promising proposals that if implemented well could change the evaluation system for the better. The most significant change would get rid of Ohio’s various frameworks and weighting percentages. Under the new system, teachers would no longer have a specific, state-mandated percentage of their summative rating determined by student growth measures. Instead, student growth and achievement would be used as evidence of a teacher mastering the various domains of a revised classroom observation rubric. This is definitely a more organic way to measure student growth, but until it’s put in place, we won’t know for sure if it’s a better way.
Not everyone is thrilled with the proposed changes. Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) CEO Eric Gordon has said that he is reluctant to “move away from the importance of having a student’s performance as part of a teacher’s results.” His disapproval comes despite the fact that the legislation appears to give Cleveland the right to opt out of the new framework and continue implementing existing teacher evaluation law.
As a former teacher who has been evaluated based on student performance, I tend to agree that Gordon is right to want to hold his teachers accountable for student learning. The stakes are too high to do anything less. Unfortunately, OTES doesn’t accurately attribute student performance to all teachers. As previous calculations indicate, 66 percent of Ohio teachers have been judged on student growth using locally developed measures. These measures can include “shared attribution,” which evaluates teachers based on test scores from subjects they don’t even teach, and Student Learning Objectives (SLOs), which are extremely difficult to implement consistently and rigorously, often fail to effectively differentiate teacher performance, and add enormously to the testing burden. It’s possible that Gordon has found a way to fairly hold teachers accountable for student growth in Cleveland, but much of the rest of the state is still struggling with the mechanics of that monumental task.
Potentially fueling Gordon’s interest in this issue is one of the signature aspects of the Cleveland Plan: The district can terminate a teacher who earns an overall evaluation rating of ineffective for two consecutive years. This gives teacher evaluations in Cleveland more teeth than most places, since a similar policy doesn’t exist statewide.
It also brings up an interesting question: If state law changes and removes some of the explicit focus on tying student achievement to teacher evaluations, will a district like Cleveland find it harder to keep its policies in place over time? If that is indeed what happens, Gordon’s district could be forced to keep some low-performing teachers whom it may have otherwise dismissed. It’s hard to blame the superintendent of one of the lowest-performing districts in the state for trying to ensure that his students have the best possible teachers.
The potential solution to this dilemma is three-fold:
First, the state should continue to support the reform efforts known as the Cleveland Plan. The partnership that the General Assembly, Governor Kasich, and Mayor Jackson developed to implement robust reform should be honored. If the state decides to change its broader teacher evaluation package, that’s fine. However, it needs to be crystal clear that CMSD can continue its efforts.
Second, the revised observational rubric that SB 240 calls for must be rigorous and rigorously implemented. It is a waste of time, effort, and money to transition from one system that fails to differentiate teacher performance to another. The department needs to call in a wide array of stakeholders and experts—including leaders like Gordon—to craft a rubric that will accurately differentiate between teacher performances.
Third, the General Assembly needs to recognize that some of the flexibilities Cleveland schools enjoy, like making it easier to dismiss the relatively small number of chronic poor performers, could be useful in other districts. Parents don’t want their kids taught by these teachers, principals don’t want them in their buildings, and other teachers don’t want to work alongside them. If there is a clear, documented history of ineffectiveness, principals should be empowered to do right by students and remove that individual from the classroom. Otherwise, students will pay the price.
