Is your child’s teacher effective?

By Sarah Campbell

scampbell@salisburypost.com

Parents have another way to evaluate the schools their children attend.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction recently rolled out a tool that grades teacher effectiveness.

“Quality teachers and principals make all the difference to students and their learning,” State Superintendent June Atkinson said in a press release. “That is why we developed this new evaluation system to focus on improving teacher and principal practices and providing support for professional growth.”

The data scores teachers on leadership, success in establishing a respectful environment for a diverse population of students, knowledge of their content area, how they facilitate learning and how they reflect on their practice. It is included on the school report cards, released online annually.

Ratings are based on principals evaluations.

Lynne Johnson, director for educator recruitment and development for the education department, told a Post reporter the process to add the teacher evaluations has been in the works since the officials began revamping the North Carolina Educator Evaluation System in 2006.

“Our education evaluation process is a growth model and one of the strengths of that is that it changes the conversation between principals and teachers and focuses on instructional improvements,” she said.

But the push to get the information to the masses came when the state landed $400 million in federal Race to the Top grant money.

“Part of that funding requests us to add teacher effectiveness ratings to our report cards just to be very transparent to the public,” Johnson said.

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Johnson said when putting together the evaluation system, which rates teachers on a scale of one to five with one indicating “not demonstrated” and five being “distinguished,” state education officials looked at what states like Kentucky, Tennessee and Florida were already using.

“We’re talking to other states to see what has worked well and what hasn’t worked well,” she said.

The state’s End of Grade and End of Course tests are one measure that were already in place as an indicator for student growth, but Johnson said at least 52 content areas don’t have such tests.

Johnson that’s why officials are looking at the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project being conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The project collects data through things like student feedback from surveys, student work, supplemental student assessments and teacher working conditions surveys.

“We’re looking at a research-based approach,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the state will pilot student surveys in 58 of the 115 school district’s in the next couple of months. Questions will be geared toward finding out how teachers approach students.

“There will be questions like ‘Does my teacher help me when I’m struggling,’” she said.

The Rowan-Salisbury School System is not one of the district’s piloting student surveys.

“It’s not mandatory because we want to see how the data behaves,” Johnson said. “Once we see what we think of the correlations we’ll go from there.”

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The majority of Rowan-Salisbury teachers who were evaluated in 2010-11 were rated in the middle of the scale at either “proficient” or “accomplished.”

No teachers fell into the lowest category of “not demonstrated.”

About 10 percent of teachers received the top rating of “distinguished.”

State education officials warn the 2010-11 data is incomplete because it does not include all teachers, only those in their first three years and tenured teachers whose licenses were up for renewal.

Starting this year, all teachers and administrators will be evaluated on an annual basis.

To view data for each individual school visit ncreportcards.org, select the school and click the “quality teachers’ tab.

Contact reporter Sarah Campbell at 704-797-7683.

Twitter: twitter.com/posteducation

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