Policy Research Project 32

Policy Research Project 32

Policy Research Project

EDLP 704

Virginia Commonwealth University

Michael Massa

Section 1: Description of Policy

Summary

The policy that this report is based on is the “Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers. The policy was approved by the Virginia Board of Education on April 28, 2011 and became effective July 1, 2012.

The policy is to create a universal teacher evaluation system throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia that assesses the effectiveness of classroom teachers, identifies areas the teachers may need growth, creates more specific professional development and improves instruction school wide. The policy is also in place to ensure that teacher feedback is given using quality and valid measures by administrators. The policy ensures that teachers will be observed for effectiveness individually. According to the policy, the authors also wanted a policy that would provide a valid, objective rating scale to recognize outstanding teachers separately from proficient teachers. The policy is also meant to be used to help give data to develop meaningful professional development, allow novice teachers additional feedback and to address inadequate performance.

The ultimate purpose of the policy is to create guidelines for performance standards and evaluation criteria for teachers and administrators and that all school systems in the Commonwealth of Virginia establish procedures for evaluating teachers and administrators that address academic progress and growth. (Figure 1) School systems across the Commonwealth of Virginia will use the standards to create tools and evaluation systems that are to meet the criteria of the guidelines as approved by the Board of Education.

Figure 1: Performance Standards

STANDARD / DESCRIPTION
Performance Standard 1: Professional Knowledge / The teacher demonstrates an understanding of the curriculum, subject content, and the developmental needs of student by providing relevant learning experiences.
Performance Standard 2: Instructional Planning / The teacher plans using the Virginia Standards of Learning, the school’s curriculum, effective
Strategies, resources, and data to meet the needs of all students.
Performance Standard 3: Instructional Delivery / The teacher effectively engages students in learning by using a variety of instructional strategies in order to meet individual learning needs.
Performance Standard 4: Assessment of and for Student Learning / The teacher systematically gathers, analyzes, and uses all relevant data to measure student
academic progress, guide instructional content and delivery methods, and provide timely
feedback to both students and parents throughout the school year.
Performance Standard 5: Learning Environment / The teacher uses resources, routines, and procedures to provide a respectful, positive, safe, student-centered environment that is conductive to learning.
Performance Standard 6: Professionalism / The teacher maintains a commitment to professional ethics, communicates effectively, and takes responsibility for and participates in professional growth that results in enhanced student learning.
Performance Standard 7: Student Academic Progress / The work of the teacher results in acceptable, measurable, and appropriate student academic progress.

Policy Type

The Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers is an example of a regulatory policy. The policy formalizes teacher evaluation and indicator practices for all school divisions in the Commonwealth of Virginia as mandated by the Code of Virginia, and the Virginia Board of Education. This policy is enforced through the law and gives specific rules to each school board. The policy also gives examples of different data collections tools that school systems may want to use such as student surveys, formal observation tools, portfolios and informal walkthrough data. These examples are not mandated though implementation of an evaluation system and indicators that align with the seven standards are mandated.

The Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria of Teachers could also be an example of a distributive policy in some hypothetical scenarios. If teacher evaluation indicators were eventually tied to merit pay, the policy would also take on a distributive label as money was being appropriated to a worker based on output and evaluation.

Section 2: Legal Issues relevant to Policy

Constitutional Law

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States which is also part of the Bill of Rights may come into question when reviewing the Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers. The Tenth Amendment stipulates that the powers not delegates to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or the people. Public education in the United States has always been a state sovereignty under the idea of local control. The guidelines approved by the Virginia Board of Education would still fall under the Tenth Amendment’s description of federalism, however; during data collection it was found that the Commonwealth of Virginia acted out of pressure from the Federal Government and Federal Law.

Federal and State Statutory Law

Article 2, §22.1-295 of the Code of Virginia requires all instructional personnel including principals, assistant principals, are to be evaluated based on students’ academic growth. The Code of Virginia goes on to state that principals must receive training in evaluating and documenting employee performance. The Code also stipulates school boards will develop procedures for school leaders to evaluate instructional personnel that include student academic progress in addition to other best practices. The Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers is the Virginia Department of Education’s policy to meet the Code of Virginia.

Board of Education Regulations

Following the Virginia Department of Education’s drafting of the Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers to meet the Code of Virginia, the Virginia Board of Education approved the document as regulatory guidelines to be used for each school board to implement an evaluation policy. The regulations specific the guidelines are standards 1 through 7 (Firgure1) and are the use of common indicators used to denote teacher effectiveness.

Case Law

In Fairfax County School Board v. Michelle M. Faber a Circuit Court case dealing with Faber’s allegations that a school board failed to comply with its policy when it denied her the opportunity to challenge the substance of a negative evaluation. The evaluation report had not been given to Faber. Faber was conditionally reappointed and denied a salary step as a result of the report. Faber tried to appeal the substance of the evaluation however; the school board found that teachers were only able to file a grievance over the process and not the substance of an evaluation. The court found that in the Fairfax County School Boards policy language, that Faber could appeal the substance of the evaluation. This court case is an example of how uniform guidelines for an evaluation process could help protect school boards from litigation in that the work force would have clear understanding of the evaluation parameters and the courts would have a better understanding of the universal themes and guidelines set forth by the Virginia Department of Education when dealing with issues in court that derived from the teacher evaluation and indicator process.

In Austin v Board of Education of Howard County the plaintiff was a special education teacher at Mount View school in Howard County, MD during three consecutive school years. The teacher was a non-tenured teacher. In Howard County the School Board evaluates teacher performance through 4 indicators. The indicators are interpersonal skills, planning and preparation, the classroom environment, delivery of instruction, and professional development. The tools used to evaluate teachers are observations, portfolios, peer coaching, cooperative program review, and alternate year evaluation.

The plaintiff, Dr. Austin, received an unsatisfactory review in three of the five categories including planning and preparation, delivery of instruction, and professional responsibilities. The School Board implemented a structured growth plan that was to be aligned with the categories that Dr. Austin was deemed unsatisfactory. The teacher was renewed but the following year the teacher again was found to be unsatisfactory in the previous categories and was put on a second structured growth plan. The principal of the school retired that year and a new principal took over and found Dr. Austin to again be unsatisfactory in all categories and put her on a third structured growth plan. Dr. Austin filed an internal complaint of discrimination. After an investigation, Howard County found there to be no discrimination or harassment. Dr. Austin then filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. At the same time Dr. Austin was told that she would not be renewed for the next school year. Dr. Austin soon resigned and the principal submitted all documentation to the School Board per their policy. The main function of this case is not to have the judge determine the credibility of the evidence but to merely find if there is an issue for trial. This case, while in Maryland, still illustrates that uniform policy will mitigate some litigation as the policy will be uniform and up for less interpretation over time. This case also shows that while the school documented the issue well, the plaintiff, Dr. Austin, did not. Therefore the case was transferred to the U.S. Circuit Court to determine if there was an issue that merited trial at all.

In Sammarco v. Board of Education of Prince George’s County the plaintiff, Sammarco alleges that she was working in a hostile work environment, retaliation, and discriminatory treatment as the result of her new principal in the school. Mrs. Sammarco alleges that once her new principal arrived, Sammarco began receiving negative performance evaluations. Mrs. Sammarco says that the principal and assistant principals were kinder and gave better evaluations to younger teachers and African American teachers. Sammarco also claimed that her evaluators used false statements in her evaluations. The principal eventually requested Sammarco be terminated with documentation of negative performance evaluations and reprimands from the principal, assistant principals, and the department chair. Ms. Sammarco’s case was dismissed at the request of the School Board in court. This case shows the importance of a process that gives teachers feedback with areas of growth and sets up plans to help pinpoint proper staff development. It is also shows that data collection using tools that are reliable and relevant should be used by multiple supervisory teams. In this case Sammarco was given additional professional development and a teacher mentor who also gave negative performance evaluations. The strength of having a detailed performance standard and evaluation helps school systems identify specific staff development for teachers in need and helps mitigate litigation by using a fair and reliable evaluation tool with fidelity (Darling-Hammond, 2012). Using VAMs to evaluate a teacher

Section 3: Research Issues

Theories

The reliability of Value added models, or VAMs, are a theory wherein an evaluation system is designed to evaluate student test score gains from one year to the next to reflect teacher performance. Using VAMs for individual teacher evaluation is based on the belief that measured achievement gains for a specific teacher’s students reflect that teacher’s effectiveness (Darling-Hammond, 2012). VAMs rely on statistical controls from past achievement to show student gains of current students. The Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers utilizes the theory of VAMs in Standard 7 which states that.” the work of the teacher results in acceptable, measurable, and appropriate student academic progress” (VDOE, 2012).

Another theory in implementing a new teacher evaluations system is having a sophisticated political understanding of how to structure the development and implementation of the process to optimize the support of various stakeholders (Stronge, 1999). This approach is called co-agency, which means that power in the school system when developing a new process is delegated and distributed throughout the organization so that the decision making is a bargaining process to arrive a solutions that satisfy and number of constituencies (Stronge, 1999). The idea behind co-agency development of evaluation policy is that stakeholder participation enhances the ultimate product because it allows the political process to take place before implementation and before people must live and work with the policy design (Stronge, 1999). While this process may not always resolve all opposing arguments, it does give stakeholders and time to present their ideas and promote healthy conflict in creating the policy. Ultimately through this development process, stakeholders may feel that they participated and will have greater buy in regardless if all their needs have not been met. In the case of the Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers, the panel was made up of many different stakeholders.

The theory of action behind supervision and evaluation is that it will improve teacher’s effectiveness and therefore boost student achievement (Marshall, 2005). In this theory the administrator, supervisor, or colleague observe the teacher giving a lesson. After the teacher gives the lesson there is a post observation conference where the teacher is given commendations and recommendations. The teachers signs off on the document after the meeting. Because the teacher is only seen for a short amount of time, multiple observations from other administrators, department chairs, and colleagues will paint a clearer picture of the teacher’s strengths and weaknesses through common themes (Marshall, 2005). This is the most commonly used theory for teacher evaluation and is one of the reasons the Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers and the Virginia law that preceded it were established. Part of the Guidelines purpose was to emphasize valid and reliable evaluation through data and a way in which exemplary teachers could be noted separately from proficient teachers.

Scholarly Research

In “Evaluating Teacher evaluation”, the authors discuss Value-added models and discuss that while comparing student achievement data year over year is valid for research, it is not a reliable way to evaluate teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2012). The research cites that class sizes, curriculum materials, instructional time, availability of specialists, and resources for learning can all skew student achievement data (Darling-Hammond, 2012). The authors go on to point out that home and community supports and challenges, student needs, abilities, student health, and attendance can also affect student achievement data (Darling-Hammond, 2012). In addition the authors show data that shows that teacher effectiveness based solely on scores varies widely from year to year and that when researchers used a different assessment model to generate scores, they found that 40% to 55% of them would get noticeably different scores (Darling-Hammond, 2012). The authors conclude that new evaluation approaches should take advantage of research on teacher effectiveness. The authors believe that their research indicates that value-added measures of student achievement tied to individual teachers should not be used for high stakes, individual level decisions, or comparisons across highly dissimilar schools or student populations (Darling-Hammond, 2012). Standards-based evaluations processes similar to that given to teachers by the National Board certification and performance assessments for beginning teachers would translate better to evaluating teachers. These processes could include evidence of student work and learning as well as evidence of teacher practices derived from observations, video tapes, artifacts and student surveys (Darling-Hammond, 2012).