TUSD needs better teacher evaluations, deseg master says

In an effort to better measure teacher effectiveness, the Tucson Unified School District has been advised to do independent teacher evaluations, instead of having principals do them.

Neither TUSD nor its teachers union support the idea, arguing school principals have a better understanding of what is happening in the classroom than an outsider would.

The proposal is from Special Master Willis Hawley — a national desegregation expert appointed by the federal court to oversee the district’s efforts to improve academic achievement for minority students.

Hawley is calling for expert teachers, instructional coaches and subject-area specialists from within the district to be trained to do this work.

School districts in a handful of states have introduced the independent evaluator model arguing that principals can be too lenient, and may not hold their teachers as accountable as an independent person would.

Though Hawley has requested that model be implemented for the upcoming school year — just six weeks away, he told the Arizona Daily Star if the training could not be done in the short run, it could be done later in the year, implementing the process in the spring.

Alternatively, Hawley said he may be open to a dual system in which both the principal and the independent party conduct evaluations and average the scores.

Hawley’s proposal is not mandatory, but in the past the court has tended to favor his recommendations over the district’s objections.

Though it has been argued that good teaching is just that, and can be recognized universally, TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez does not agree.

“It’s dismissive of the complexity of different schools, different neighborhoods, different age groups of children, different home environments, different socioeconomic status and students with different experiences,” Sanchez said. “It’s almost cliché and it’s hollow.”

While using existing TUSD employees would ensure a familiarity with district initiatives, Sanchez said each campus generates its own priorities as well.

He added such a practice would likely negatively impact the morale of the district’s 3,800 teachers.

“It’s a trust component, and you want the person who is your supervisor evaluating you, not someone who doesn’t know you or anything about your campus, your kids, or your neighborhood,” he said.

As it stands now, principals and assistant principals conduct teacher evaluations. They go through training and are required to pass a certification test.

As a rule of thumb, TUSD principals spend half of their time on administrative duties and the other half in the classroom, which Sanchez says improves student behavior and teacher instruction.

In reviewing teacher evaluations, TUSD has implemented a quality-assurance check of sorts, comparing student benchmark scores to teacher ratings.

For the most part, the two align, but Sanchez acknowledged there have been a few isolated cases of teachers receiving higher marks than deserved.

“We were one point away from being a B district and what really held us back is we had a couple of campuses that didn’t do as well,” Sanchez said.

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“If we were a ‘D’ or ‘F’ district and we were rating all of our teachers as if they were ‘A’ teachers there would be a problem, but by and large its been pretty consistent.”

Structured support is offered to struggling teachers, but when that is not enough, TUSD has dismissed some due to inadequate classroom performance.

Earlier this week, a Rincon High School English Language Development teacher was notified of the district’s intent to fire her after she failed to remedy deficiencies in her instruction.

The school’s principal, Cathy Comstock, made it a practice to visit classrooms at least four days a week, enabling her to get a sense of the instruction, the pace of the classroom, a sense of planning and the structure of the classroom as established by the teachers.

In Comstock’s daily visits to that teacher’s classroom, she did not see any sense of planned structure or get any sense of the instruction taking place, according to a statement of charges.

Her report said the teacher “often simply stood at the front of the room and spoke; there was little interaction or student engagement in the classroom.”

In one instance, Comstock visited the teacher’s Speaking and Listening class to find students working silently on a primary-level puzzle of the map of the United States.

She said when she questioned the activity, the teacher asserted it was an assessment so she could determine the level of English proficiency of the students, Comstock said.

“However, when no student is speaking or listening, such an assessment is impossible.”

The teacher was assigned two separate coaches, and was involved in designing a teacher support plan before a formal improvement plan was given to her.

But she said the teacher felt she did not need support, and ultimately failed to achieve a rating of “effective,” resulting in the dismissal notice.

Under TUSD’s desegregation order, a plan has been put in place to ensure that all students, especially African-American and Latino students, will learn at high levels, which is significantly influenced by the quality of teaching.

As part of the plan, the district is required to review, and amend as appropriate, evaluation instruments for teachers and principals, which Sanchez said has been done.

“I feel in a way we are put in a position of being a lab of sorts or a case study for things that haven’t been quite tested yet,” Sanchez said. “My sense is it’s a part of the (plan), but getting down to this level is going beyond that when it gets to this level of dictatory action.”

Sanchez hopes the district and Hawley can agree to work with what has already been developed and spend the year ahead exploring other options for the future.

Like Sanchez, the Tucson Education Association, which represents TUSD teachers and the support staff, is adamantly opposed to the independent evaluator model for the upcoming school year but is open to researching the concept and others as well.

“Having a quality robust education system is important to all of us,” TEA President Jason Freed said.

“But I don’t agree that our principals are evaluating teachers in such a way that teachers are getting scores they haven’t earned. We have an instrument that covers so many areas that it’s clear what a teacher is doing effectively and what needs improvement. To suggest that our system doesn’t work, I don’t agree.”