Employee Attachment Letter to 2014 to 2015 School Year Evaluation

To Whom It May Concern:

The procedure for processing annual evaluations agreed on by the ______Education Association and the ______District bargaining allows an employee to attach a letter of rebuttal/ explanation to his/her evaluation.

Please accept the statement below as an additional statement to be included with my annual evaluation. I taught ______in the school year 2014-2015 for this particular evaluation. However, due to the fact that this summary evaluation score relies, in part, upon Student Growth Objectives (SGO) and Student Growth Percentiles (SGP), I wish to state for the record that, regardless of the results of this evaluation, whether positive or negative, I dispute its validity for the following reasons:

1. SGP does not account for differences in student intelligence, aptitude,background, societal influence, maturity level, socio-economic status, or a myriad of other similar factors that differentiate students as unique and, therefore, unpredictable conglomerations of inherent influences, over which students and teachers have little, if any, control.

2. SGPs are not backed by research with regard to estimating teacher effectiveness. Research has actually shown them to be poor at isolating teacher performance.

3. No research supports the use of SGOs. There is little evidence of any statistical properties.

4. High-stakes testing is detrimental to students’ perception of and desire for

education as a personally edifying process, encouraging the perception that “if what is taught isn’t tested, it isn’t important,” and often results in an exorbitant amount of stress for students who are already overloaded.

5. Tests only assess a student’s retention of facts – they do not allow for the

assessment of complex reasoning processes, performance-based skills, or creativity – components that are highly important to individual success.

6. High-stakes tests are not, in many cases, designed or assessed by members of the practicing teaching community – they are largely designed by “for profit” companies who claim to “consult” educators – resulting in a confusing test that, itself, often contains errors of the sort that students would not to be able to avoid.

I wish to state, for the record, that I am also in moral opposition to any evaluationprocess that violates professional and personal ethics. It pits teacher against teacher and school district against school district in a fight over limited funds, and thus discourages collaboration and peer-review in favor of vicious competition. Tests such as these attempt to assign a “numerical” value to people to justify their worth, “puts the best interests of students in conflict with the best interests of the adults who serve them” (Carol Burris, New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year). These tests, clearly not understood by neither the studentsbeing assessednor their parents,attempt to evaluate certain teachers’ effectiveness through a process that promotes discrimination, racial segregation, and the phenomenon of “separate and unequal” in public education.

Please acknowledge that this attachment has been placed with this year’s evaluation.

Sincerely,

______

(Name) (Date)

______

(Administrator Name) (Date)