After back-to-back years of low performance on
state-mandated teacher evaluations, five Metro Nashville teachers are facing
termination, while this same threat also led 23 others to resign or retire.
These would be the first teachers fired under Metro's new system that relies on
annual teacher evaluations to dismiss low-performing teachers. Steps were taken
to ensure that principals had qualified replacements for these teachers. However
these evaluations themselves have faced heavy criticism, mostly due to the fact
that 35 percent of the evaluation is based on student gains on tests, comparing
student scores to projections for future scores (50 percent from principal
evaluations, 15 percent from other student achievement metrics). On top of
that, principals are worried about the effects of replacing teachers in the
middle of a school year. Katie Cour, executive director of talent strategy at
Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) acknowledges that it will cause a
disruption, but also points to her belief that “whoever we replace them with
will be better than the teachers we currently have.”
Considering our discussion in class regarding
public versus private education, I support this move. The ultimate goal of this
move is to improve inner-city schooling by creating accountability for
teachers. As we found in the Seoul, Korea example, creating accountability for
teachers significantly improved their ability and motivation to teach. If
teachers are more motivated to teach their students, then maybe we will see a
decrease in the stratification that the current education system causes. I
understand that the current Nashville system might not be perfect considering
it might not be the best idea to force teachers to tailor lessons towards test
scores. However the goal of creating accountability seems to be working. As
later noted by the article, MNPS notified 70 teachers of their low performance after
the 2012-13 school year and 42 improved in the 2013-14 school year (20 just
resigned, 8 failed to improve).
Source: http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2014/10/13/nashville-teachers-face-firing-evaluations/17234427/
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