District Administration - July 2007 - (Page 37)

the principal’s responsibilities. In 1987, the New York Supreme Court rejected the Rochester principals’ argument, declaring that the assessment of teachers is a proprietary right of the school boards, not administrators, and the board can delegate the task to whomever it sees ﬁt. Although the program may initially meet with resistance, once districts implement it, the results go a long way toward allaying the principals’ fears. Before the peer review teacher evaluation system was created in Rochester, less than 1 percent of ﬁrst-year teachers were asked not to return for a second year. After the program was implemented in 1987, that number jumped to about 12 percent, which strengthened the quality of teaching in the district. The Cincinnati union noticed a similar pattern in its district. In fact, the evaluation system is so eﬀective that the same principals who fought the teacher peer review program in court have now negotiated a similar provision into their own contracts. Principals and supervisors used to be reluctant to ﬁre a teacher due to unsatisfactory job performance because it threatened the livelihood of the person, says Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Association (RTA). “All too often, teachers would just automatically get satisfactory evaluations,” he says. “Now with teachers involved in the process, we have learned that they are proving to be very faithful guardians of their own profession and their own standards.” Though the details of peer review teacher evaluation and assistance programs vary from district to district, they typically share several common traits: The teachers establish and use a rigorous rubric to evaluate their peers’ mastery of several domains, often based on a model that Charlotte Danielson details in her book Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching. Experienced teachers undergo periodic reviews throughout their careers, while colleagues who know and understand the intricacies of their www.DistrictAdministration.com subject matter must evaluate new teachers several times over their ﬁrst year. To help ensure that new hires succeed in the classroom, lead teachers assume a mentoring role with their ﬁrst-year colleagues, oﬀering both subject area and rather, they negotiate language into the contract that gives teachers a voice in ﬁnding and selecting the professional development courses that best match the needs of their individual school or district. “It’s all about having our voice … in the room when we’re talking about issues that impact the quality of teaching and learning.” —William Raabe, director of collective bargaining and member advocacy, National Education Association classroom management support. If the teacher evaluators determine that a colleague has an instructional deﬁciency, they will create an intervention plan with steps ranging from giving the struggling teacher the option of watching a colleague in action to see eﬀective teaching, to having him or her take a targeted classroom management course to improve the situation. If a teacher repeatedly shows a lack of instructional proﬁciency over the course of the school year despite the interventions, then evaluators will recommend this colleague for dismissal, a move that is rarely contested by the unions since teachers had a voice in the decision. “Now principals in buildings are very glad that we have the peer assistance and evaluation program,” Taylor says. “We take a lot of diﬃcult work oﬀ their shoulders. They still have the right to come into the classroom. They do a smaller number of observations, but their observations count into the process. It’s a very collaborative process.” Professional Development Just as peer assistance and review programs have led to a more authentic assessment of teacher performance, union representatives believe that broadening the scope of bargaining to include professional development will have a similar eﬀect in making courses meaningful for teachers. But the teachers’ unions don’t bargain for a speciﬁc course; “Many teachers would say that the professional development that they’re being asked to participate in a lot of times isn’t relevant or is very faddish,” says Rob Weil, deputy director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). “It’s not just about having a program that meets a need. It’s about having programs that are a certain level of quality that help teachers work and work with their kids. Every teacher in this country wants to help their kids learn, and if there’s a program out there that they would want to have access to that would help them improve student learning in the classroom, let’s do it. If it takes collective bargaining to get it, let’s use it.” To ensure that teachers have access to top-notch professional development programs, educator associations like the NEA and the AFT oﬀer both well-researched and relevant courses. For instance, when educators take a course through AFT’s Educational Research and Dissemination (ER&D) professional development program, they know that the instructional method has proved eﬀective with students representing a wide range of socioeconomic and demographic groups. Plus, ER&D instructors don’t simply share the research with teachers and let them ﬁgure out how to apply that in the classroom; rather, they build modeling into the course to show teachers the instructional method in action. But access is only part of the equaJuly 2007 37 http://www.DistrictAdministration.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - July 2007

Contents
Editor’s Letter
Letters
News Update
Facilities/Construction Update
Curriculum Update
Inside the Law
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Cover Story: Rethinking School Bus Safety
Broadening Collective Bargaining
Searching for Subs
Jersey City’s Broad Appeal
Improving Nutrition in Schools
New Products
Computer Literature
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
Research Corner
Problem Solution
Online Edge
Speaking Out
Supervisor’s Opinion
Calendar of Events
Understanding the Times

District Administration - July 2007