Union president makes new proposals for teacher evaluations, discipline - washingtonpost.com
The president of the nation's second-largest teachers union on Tuesday proposed a new way to incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations and said she has asked a well-known mediator to develop methods of expediting disciplinary cases against teachers.
Randi Weingarten of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers gave a speech in downtown Washington that union officials described as a major effort to address flash points in labor-management relations.
The AFT, Weingarten said, 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."
Weingarten, also a key player in the District's drawn-out teacher contract talks, outlined a four-step approach to teacher evaluations: States should adopt standards for what teachers should know and be able to do; teachers should be assessed through multiple measures, including student test scores that gauge individual academic progress; administrators should be held accountable for putting the standards into motion; and teachers should receive help through mentoring and professional development.
But Weingarten added a caveat on the use of test scores. She said that teachers should not be evaluated on results that compare their current classes with the previous year's classes, which is the system states typically use under the No Child Left Behind law. That would appear to disqualify much, perhaps most, of the currently available state testing data from use in evaluation.
Both of you knock it off, now, or you will receive further consequences.
