Ohio Teacher Evaluation System: Dishonest, Unrealistic, and Not Fully Supported by Academic Research

A great article that appeared on Dailykos a few days ago

I've spent the past three days at an OTES (Ohio Teacher Evaluation System) training. This system is being phased in over the next two years, and will serve as the vehicle by which all teachers in Ohio are evaluated. The workshop culminates with a post-assessment, taken some time after the classes end, resulting in licensure and the ability to evaluate instructional staff. OTES is described by ODE as a system that will

provide educators with a richer and more detailed view of their performance, with a focus on specific strengths and opportunities for improvement.

I talked to a number of administrators and teachers who had already taken the training before attending. Without exception, they were all struck by the rigidity of the rubric. I agree, but there's more here. Any system that wields so much power must be realistic, honest, and rooted in the consensus of academic research. The OTES rubric fails this basic test.

Words Matter
Check out the Ohio Standards for the Teaching Profession (starting on page 16) approved in October of 2005. Now look at the OTES rubric. The first thing you will notice is that the OTES rubric has four levels, and that the Ohio Standards only have three. I think it's fair to say that the Ohio Standards did not include the lowest level. (The document says as much.) The top three levels of the OTES Rubric align with the three levels of the Ohio Standards. The snag? The terminology used in the OTES rubric. Proficient has been replaced by Developing, Accomplished by Proficient, and Distinguished by Accomplished. Each level has been relegated!

One might argue that this doesn't matter. But, it does. Teacher evaluations are public record. School performance, or at least the percentage of teachers that fall into each category, will be published. Newspapers will ask for names of teachers and their ratings. And, as we will see as I unpack the rubric in greater detail, the very best teachers are likely to fall into the Proficient category. What's the one relationship between public education and the word Proficient already burned into the minds of parents? The minimal level of performance required to pass the Ohio Graduation Test. Dishonest.

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The good, the bad and the uncertainty

Following up on our earlier piece, of experts warning of the dangerous of using student test results to evaluate teachers, Greg at Plunderbund brings into view the notion that HB153 also calls for the use of test results to evaluate principals. This brings forth the uncomfortable connundrum of having a faulty grading system grade principals as "unsatisfatory" and then having those very same "unsatisfactory" principals be responsible for evaluating teachers. As Greg notes, with a bit of math

Crunch the numbers with these components in place and we end up with 797 head principals and 412 assistant principals being categorized as “unsatisfactory” who will be assigned the responsibility for evaluating an estimated 22,000 teachers. Now, we don’t know the evaluation category of all of those teachers, but put yourself in the place of one of those professionals who is expected to take advice from an “unsatisfactory” leader. Wouldn’t you be a bit skeptical?

It's time that lawmakers start to get the sense that education is a team sport, not one of individual competition.

SB5 language In budget to get the axe?

Gongwer is reporting that house Republicans are not too keen to put S.B.5 language in the budget bill

House Republicans are resistant to the idea of tucking additional components from the recently passed collective bargaining law into the pending state budget bill, Speaker Bill Batchelder (R-Medina) said Wednesday.

The speaker, who had previously had indicated it was a possibility that provisions from the contentious union measure (SB 5) could end up in the voluminous biennium spending plan (HB 153), said after session that his members do not want to thwart the will of the voters in that regard. "At this time that is not contemplated, but obviously the committee is still working," he said, adding: "It would be extremely premature for me to make a bottom line on that."

Before we get to excited by this positive development, we need to be on gaurd to ensure that some of the provisions currently in the bill do get stripped out.

Current language in the budget bill (HB 153) will totally eliminate the ability of local associations to bargain salary. Instead, it would provide the authority to local school boards to annually adopt a teacher’s salary schedule with a minimum and maximum salary for each category of licensure (e.g. resident, professional, senior and lead) and designate salary placement for each teacher based on yet-to-be-determined evaluations, “highly qualified” status, and any other relevant factors, such as class size or assignment to hard-to-staff districts, subjects or at risk students.

These requirements supersede conflicting provisions of collective bargaining agreements entered into on or after the effective date of the bill (ORC 3317.14).