Accountability: A View from the Trenches

I adore my students, but by the end of the fall semester I was feeling discouraged.  Sometimes I can't go to sleep, thinking about what I am doing and how much more they need.  It was in this context that I had my first observation for this year.  I was teaching reading to a young lady who never attended school before last year; she really has made remarkable progress for someone who missed so much early schooling.

Mid-way through teaching this lesson, another student of mine, one who needs a lot of physical assistance, came to school tardy.  I had already sent my teaching assistant to the library with a group of EC students who were taking a test (most of them have 'separate setting' written into their IEPs, meaning they have a right to take quizzes and tests in a small group separate from the larger class).  So there in the middle of my reading lesson I began assisting one student with eating his breakfast while I taught the young lady... all while the principal did her observation.

Fortunately for me, everyone took this in stride, and the lesson went well enough that my principal gave me positive feedback.  During our conference I asked her about the new software the state is using that is supposed to rate our individual impact as teachers-- in other words, that is supposed to be a measure of individual teacher accountability.  We have been told that this software will "automatically populate" (complete) the section of our online evaluation that addresses a teacher's impact on student achievement (i.e., test scores).

Now, I have no problem with teacher accountability, but I do think it's fair to ask that I be judged by the growth (or lack thereof) of the students I actually teach.  However, it turns out that this is not the case.  As often as I have been in meetings where scores from EC students were identified and measured as a group (often broken down by grade level), I learned that somehow these data cannot be used to evaluate my performance.  My rating will be a reflection of the average growth of the entire student body.  So my rating in the "teacher accountability" section will NOT be based on EC students' growth at our school, much less the growth of my actual group of students.

This was disappointing to me, given the gains many of my students made last year.  One boy had never before scored above a level one on his EOGs, and he scored a level two on both Math and Reading.  Granted, it's not the stuff of fairy tales, there is still room for improvement.  However, I was excited for him, and he is a much better student this year after feeling it is possible for him to succeed.

One other issue I have with the software the state is using is that it is based on EOG scores, but it doesn't take into account students' retest scores.  In the past if a student took an EOG test and scored a level two, that student was automatically retested to see whether s/he could achieve a level three. This is not commonplace, but it does happen.  However, for some reason the software the state is using does not take retest scores into account-- so the report from that system might indicate that a student did not score at the proficient (level three) level the previous year, when in fact that student did achieve proficiency when retested.  This oversight will doubtless also have a small but meaningful impact on measuring teacher effectiveness.

Then again, it's hard to know what is coming, since NC joined the Common Core movement and the EOGs are being completely rewritten.  We are told there will be no retests given this year and that EOG scores from May 2013 will not be available until the fall.  The EOG test scores have to be "normed."  In other words, it is an entirely new metric, based on a new test, but we will carry on with the idea that the scores are somehow comparable to the old EOG scores.  DPI does not pretend to know where the cutoffs for proficiency will be, they are waiting to see how the test goes.  I have been told they will use, among other things, their expectations of how certain schools will perform as one means of setting the scoring levels.  In other words, they will get what they expect.  Rogue students or schools who break out of an underperforming mode don't fit well into this model.  In my bleaker moments it seems to me as if the state is saying "Yes, we're holding you accountable, but we're not going to take the trouble of trying to measure your actual, individual impact."

Still for me, next to my own children, the sun rises and sets over my students.  We'll carry on.